Chris Sacca — How to Succeed by Living on Your Own Terms

Chris Sacca 0:00 I need to memorialize these things for the benefit of humanity before we're all obviated. Like, 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 f**k-ups, the things that make us banged up, the things where we make bad decisions-

Tim Ferriss 0:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 0:24 ... where we're self-indulgent. I've had to teach our team the number one thing you can be in this business is unpredictable. I am known as mercurial. I burn bridges. Like, I will not hesitate to f**king fight you. I wear the stupid shirts. I don't give a shit about much. Like, I've been known to just light it on fire. And guess what? People take me seriously as a result, right? I haven't backed down from all those f**king character flaws I have that are very self-destructive, but, like, I am all gas, no f**king brakes, as you know.

Tim Ferriss 0:53 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 0:54 Although in our line, we call it [laughs] no gas, no brakes. We need to cultivate more of that-

Tim Ferriss 0:58 Mm

Chris Sacca 0:58 ... if we have any hope as a f**king species. We just need to. I'm sorry. [upbeat music]

Chris Sacca 1:17 You know my host today as the human guinea pig, the sample size of one, and the only clinical trial on two feet. A New York Times best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body, The 4-Hour Chef, and the 4-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 in 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 podbros who think dropping references to stoicism makes them philosophical sages as they read undies ads from mom'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 f**ked 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 bathed 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," in 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&M's, 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.

Tim Ferriss 5:13 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 as the scion of a wealthy family. Did I get that wrong?

Chris Sacca 5:32 [laughs] Yeah, yeah. But 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, you know, company town factory shuts down and the jobs ship off to Mexico and the pensions bankrupted. My buddy's dads who were retired 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. And I know we're not really gonna talk about politics, but 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 in everything I did, and I had these incredibly bright and supportive parents who went way out of their way to create opportunities for us, 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. You know, I lived in the Valley for a while, in Silicon Valley. But as you know, Tim, 'cause you've visited me in various places, I've spent more of my time outside. I live in the Rockies now. I lived in Montana. Before that, Wyoming. Before that, Truckee. I really try to stay in places where real people live and work, and, you know, our kids go to public school. And, you know, I would never claim to be fully in touch 'cause 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, you know, the kind of people, Tim, you and I know, and the kind of-

Tim Ferriss 8:30 Mm-hmm

Chris Sacca 8:30 ... people we work with aren't those people anymore, you know?

Tim Ferriss 8:34 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 8:35 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 onto a-

Tim Ferriss 8:42 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 8:42 Like, did we-

Tim Ferriss 8:43 Yeah, I was gonna do some knock-knock jokes, but I'm not sure that's an appropriate segue. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 8:47 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'd poke holes in and call air fresheners, or rocks that I had found in a parking lot. I was literally going door to door.

Tim Ferriss 9:13 What was your JT Marlin & Associates?

Chris Sacca 9:15 100%.

Tim Ferriss 9:16 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 9:16 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.

Tim Ferriss 9:29 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 9:29 And I was trading live hogs. I just always had a business, mowing lawns, washing cars, detailing, a paper route.

Tim Ferriss 9:36 I'm not sure we talked about the live hogs.

Chris Sacca 9:38 Somehow we skipped that.

Tim Ferriss 9:39 [laughs] How did you even get into commodities? [laughs]

Chris Sacca 9:42 I'll tell you, my dad's best friend ran basically a construction and equipment rental business that I have talked to you about.

Tim Ferriss 9:48 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 9:48 Where it was a gritty-ass job. You know, my mom and dad believed in the sweet and sour.

Tim Ferriss 9:53 This is the sweet and sour.

Chris Sacca 9:54 Yeah, exactly. So it was just grind it out, work your ass off in a real job job. And my boss there, who was 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, you know, 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." Like, "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, you know, literally frozen orange juice concentrate, like trading places.

Tim Ferriss 10:45 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 10:45 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 like $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. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 11:16 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 11:16 I went all in. I read everything. I studied everything. I looked at these charts. And imagine charts on like a low-res green monitor, right? I mean, old school.

Tim Ferriss 11:25 Yeah, like WarGames style.

Chris Sacca 11:27 Yeah. 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.

Tim Ferriss 11:43 Nice.

Chris Sacca 11:44 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 wanna be the guy who works upstairs.

Tim Ferriss 11:57 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 11:58 I can't tell you how seminal that experience was for me-

Tim Ferriss 12:01 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 12:01 ... the rest of my life. [laughs] Like, there's only so far you can lever a man hour. Bob Haas was that guy's name. I feel incredibly indebted to him for that kind of exposure. You know, in the Rich Dad Poor Dad world, my mom and dad, they didn't own stocks. They weren't really investors like that. They had a rental property once, but, but Bob Haas was kind of like my rich dad, a guy who got me exposed to capital markets.

Tim Ferriss 12:23 Hm. Amazing. Life hacks.

Chris Sacca 12:26 Yeah, I mean, but I also had hustles like in high school I ran a card room, you know? 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. Maine, he was on the rake.

Tim Ferriss 12:37 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 12:38 And so we were always hustling. I was selling Blow Pops with my buddy Hawkeye. We ran a little sportsbook.

Tim Ferriss 12:45 Hawkeye, did he give himself that nickname?

Chris Sacca 12:48 No, no, no, that was given to him at his birth. 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, I turn around and I see my daughters, who are 13, 11, and 9, playing beer pong with my high school buddies.

Tim Ferriss 13:04 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 13:05 And we'd been deep in the tailgate with Pinto Ron, if anyone follows the Bills. The g- girls were 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 h- 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.

Tim Ferriss 13:35 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 13:36 And it was funny, our 13-year-old, when they were like, "Hey CeCe, come jump in the game," she's like, "All right, but I haven't played this in a while."

Tim Ferriss 13:42 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 13:42 And my buddies all piss themselves. Like, "In a while? You're 13. This is amazing." And our kids were talking shit, placing side bets, like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 14:04 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 14:05 And, you know, I had more than one detention. I definitely appeared before the principals on many occasions. You know, just

Chris Sacca 14:12 some light mischief.

Tim Ferriss 14:13 We're gonna come back to that. 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, roughly?

Chris Sacca 14:24 Did anything jump out at you?

Tim Ferriss 14:26 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. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 14:39 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 14:40 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 [laughs] 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 and we're gonna touch on a bunch of them, the lessons that Chris Sacca has learned-

Chris Sacca 15:10 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 15:10 ... right, since last time. And I was leading with the, I suppose, precautionary note of [laughs] avoiding a lot of politics. But what comes up for you, just as a human-

Chris Sacca 15:21 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 15:22 ... as a man, as a parent, as a husband, anything.

Chris Sacca 15:26 Well, 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."

Tim Ferriss 15:35 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 15:37 We used to just roll tape, right?

Tim Ferriss 15:38 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 15:39 Like, you would just hit record. The sound quality on that is abysmal. There's seagulls going in the background.

Tim Ferriss 15:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 15:45 There's people partying down below. You and I are maxing out mics in the red zone. Like, you couldn't hear shit.

Tim Ferriss 15:50 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 15:50 But back then, there wasn't, like, an industry of professional podcast guests.

Tim Ferriss 15:54 Right.

Chris Sacca 15:54 You know, those conversations weren't optimized for, like, what is gonna be the pithy takeaway quote? What's gonna be the title card of this one?

Tim Ferriss 16:02 Right. 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.

Chris Sacca 16:07 I'm good at that shit.

Tim Ferriss 16:08 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 16:09 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? Like, no one's written the Naval Almanac of shit that Chris Sacca says, right?

Tim Ferriss 16:19 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 16:20 That guy's intimidating. Like, he's brilliant and he reduces everything to 80 characters and you're like, "Fuck, that's true."

Tim Ferriss 16:25 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 16:26 Like, I don't know if that guy just sits up in a cave on a mountainside and you gotta hike up to see Naval these days. So I listen to these episodes where I'm like, okay, this is a real conversation where I am happy to bare 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 wanna say. You asked me last time-

Tim Ferriss 16:47 Yeah

Chris Sacca 16:47 ... what changed between 30 and 40, and I talked a lot about reorienting myself around... 'Cause you also asked, like, 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, any time I put somebody on a pedestal, I realize it holds them to a universal purity test across everything. You know, I gave the example of Bill Gates in the last one. I was like, I just had dinner with him and Melinda, and so... Yeah. Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 17:22 [laughs] Just changed my name on Riverside to Chris's Idol and Mentor.

Chris Sacca 17:26 [laughs] Well, I'd already put mine as Tim's Idol.

Tim Ferriss 17:29 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 17:29 And so I left out the mentor part. But, I mean, Bill Gates is amazing in so many regards, and he's also a f**king disaster in so many regards, right?

Tim Ferriss 17:38 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 17:38 And so if I were to say, like, he's an idol and a mentor, et cetera, 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. Yeah, and I am gonna 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 f**k you, you're out. And the Republican Party has been like, "Hey, choose from this menu. You, 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 each other feel bad. And have held each other to these impossible fucking standards that don't allow for growth, that don't allow for imperfection, 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.

Tim Ferriss 18:36 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 18:36 I mean, I will say, like, I really look up to Rich and Sarah Barton. So Rich founded Expedia-

Tim Ferriss 18:41 Yeah

Chris Sacca 18:41 ... and Zillow. Crystal and I look up to them as a family, as parents, as businesspeople and entrepreneurs. They're ahead of us on the kid game, so their kids are in college and, you know, our kids are in middle school. And so I would say I kinda do look at them as the total package a bit.

Tim Ferriss 18:59 I've spent some time with Rich, amazing human being. What about them specifically jumps out to you? Like, what is it that you'd like to emulate or that you think is rare or that you'd like to model? Anything.

Chris Sacca 19:11 I mean, look, I think the biggest danger of raising kids with privilege is that they turn out to be assholes.

Tim Ferriss 19:15 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 19:16 Right? Look, you press the fucking red, you know, mute button, like, the end of the Oscar speech anytime I say it, but Donald Trump is an example of what happens-

Tim Ferriss 19:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 19:24 ... when someone is raised without anyone ever saying no to them.

Tim Ferriss 19:28 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 19:28 No matter how you vote, we can agree no one has ever said fucking no to that guy, and that's what you get.

Tim Ferriss 19:33 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 19:34 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." You know?

Tim Ferriss 19:41 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 19:41 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-

Tim Ferriss 19:58 Hmm

Chris Sacca 19:58 ... 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 6s or ride in the, you know, seating group E on Southwest. And so I love the kids that Rich and Sarah have raised, how collegial, how balanced, how hardworking, while, while also unapologetically bright they are, how different they are from each other, but how driven they still are. I

Chris Sacca 20:28 love Rich and Sarah as a couple. I think they balance working their faces off with also having a good time. And so, you know, 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 Lowercarbon when we were very pleasantly enjoying not working full time. Uh, there are some days when we curse Rich and Sarah as a result.

Tim Ferriss 20:52 Now, 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?

Chris Sacca 21:01 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." And then 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 Rich," like, 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 stood up from this fucking computer today.

Tim Ferriss 21:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 21:25 The Bartons actually wrote out their family creed, I guess I would say.

Tim Ferriss 21:32 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 21:32 Like, I don't- I'm not gonna give any insight into what's in there, but they wrote out, like, what does it mean to be a Barton.

Tim Ferriss 21:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 21:40 And, like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 22:09 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 22:10 I mean, there's, like, 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, right?

Tim Ferriss 22:22 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 22:23 They have no real deep root in their DNA for passing it along, and so we've tried to codify it a little bit.

Tim Ferriss 22:30 What does that look like? Like, how long is it?

Chris Sacca 22:33 Like, 18 pages.

Tim Ferriss 22:35 18 pages. What kind of stuff did you try to cover?

Chris Sacca 22:38 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. Now, her parents are two of the most fascinating people who've ever walked the planet. We'll just say that they spent over 40 years each in the service of the government in various roles, you know, known and unknown, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But... 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. You know, Crystal and I were besties starting at age 18. I asked her out, and she friend zoned me for 14 years.

Tim Ferriss 23:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 23:26 But my grandmother's biography was interesting. My grandmother is 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, of a national organization of Catholics, school teacher. But here was this woman who's an, 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."

Tim Ferriss 24:03 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 24:04 I think she was 92 when she said that. And like that, paying it forward as a, 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 than deal with the breakups, et cetera." Like, 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.

Chris Sacca 24:42 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.

Tim Ferriss 25:00 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 25:01 Like, the shit we own owns us. [laughs] Like, that's all we fucking do.

Tim Ferriss 25:06 I don't know if we talked about this last conversation. Probably not, but you texted me at some point, [laughs] and you were like, "If a raccoon dies in the HVAC, is Eric Schmidt getting these texts?" Like, what the fuck? [laughs]

Chris Sacca 25:17 Right. Dude, Eric Schmidt's team reached out yesterday to update, like, his email address, and I wrote back to them, "Hey, team, like, 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."

Tim Ferriss 25:33 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 25:33 Like, I just kinda wanna know. And they're kinda like, "What?"

Tim Ferriss 25:36 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 25:37 And I'm like, "Yeah, no, I... Like, Eric's cool. Give him my best, but I kinda wanna talk to you guys about, like, what flows up to Eric, what doesn't. Like, how does he handle this shit right now?" I'm constantly interviewing people about that-

Tim Ferriss 25:47 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 25:48 ... because there's finite amount of time in this space, and the shit you own does own you. You know, every single object at some point has commanded some of your attention.

Tim Ferriss 25:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 25:57 And, you know, you and I, one of our close friends lost everything this week.

Tim Ferriss 26:01 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 26:02 Shit. It's Kevin Rose, 'cause he's talked about it out loud. But, you know, 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.

Tim Ferriss 26:22 Yep.

Chris Sacca 26:22 It's this weird duality he has, where he is zen as fuck while also loving a good pair of sneakers.

Tim Ferriss 26:29 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 26:29 Like, dude, check out this fucking watch, but his watch is melted into a puddle.

Tim Ferriss 26:34 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 26:34 And he's like, "Whoops." And, you know, and Kevin was like, "You know what I miss? I miss the drawings from my kids, and I miss the box my dad made me," and I'm really hoping I can learn from him here.

Tim Ferriss 26:46 Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Sacca 26:47 It's cataclysmic, and I'm not trying to, to diminish it at all. And, you know, 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, like, just 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.

Tim Ferriss 27:13 Yes.

Chris Sacca 27:13 I coulda bought an ad slot, but there is an incredible ranch for sale-

Tim Ferriss 27:17 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 27:17 ... in Jackson, Wyoming right now in Wilson. It's about two contiguous lots, a main house on some lakes, a ranch house. You'll find it. It's just south of, of Wilson off of Fall Creek Road. Hey, hey.

Tim Ferriss 27:27 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 27:29 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.

Tim Ferriss 27:41 People think that Chris is joking about an ad slot, [laughs] but you actually did text me to ask me how much it would cost. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 27:49 I didn't realize you were gonna invite me on the pod later, but I was very close to buying an ad.

Tim Ferriss 27:53 Goddammit.

Chris Sacca 27:54 I'm like, okay, who is actually doing well in this market and has some gains to shelter? It's the crypto investors, bro. Like, that shit is up.

Tim Ferriss 28:02 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 28:03 So you wanna take a little money off the table, I'm just saying, those California taxes. [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 28:10 [laughs] So coming back to Kevin for a sec, I mean, 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. Like, 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.

Chris Sacca 28:43 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 28:43 Like, they do get attached.

Chris Sacca 28:45 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 28:46 I'm curious for you, right, last time we spoke, you had just appeared as a cover story [laughs] 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, like, what have you simplified? What are ways that you have tried to simplify?

Chris Sacca 29:05 Hold on. I was just gonna say, do you remember that line-

Tim Ferriss 29:07 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 29:08 ... in Steve Martin's The Jerk, where he's walking out of the house, you know, he's losing his money and he- he's been rich, and he's like, "I don't need any of this except this ashtray."

Tim Ferriss 29:19 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 29:19 And he just starts picking up stuff until his arms are bundled as he's walking out of his house.

Tim Ferriss 29:23 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 29:23 Like, "I don't need any of this at all."

Tim Ferriss 29:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 29:25 Like, 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."

Tim Ferriss 29:33 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 29:34 And this watch is really nice, and goddamn, those shoes were, like, limited release.

Tim Ferriss 29:38 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 29:39 And sorry, so I missed the question 'cause I was trying to think

Chris Sacca 29:42 of Steve Martin.

Tim Ferriss 29:43 Since we last spoke-

Chris Sacca 29:44 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 29:44 ... 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, s- meeting a lot of people, getting the toys, and I'm just wondering how you have thought about simplifying or have simplified.

Chris Sacca 30:05 I've never did the toys thing.

Tim Ferriss 30:08 I mean, you like real estate.

Chris Sacca 30:10 I was just gonna say-

Tim Ferriss 30:10 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 30:11 ... Zillow is my not-safe-for-work situation. When that Saturday Night Live skit came out, I was like, like looking over my shoulder, like, "Which writer has been watching me?" I probably put more product suggestions and feedback into Zillow, 'cause Rich is one of my close friends, than anyone who doesn't work there. I notice things about that app that no one else there does. I spend way too much time. By the way, I, 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, like, generated by the community?

Tim Ferriss 30:48 [laughs] I don't even know what that means. What does that mean? It's just, like, real estate porn that flashes for you, in front of you?

Chris Sacca 30:53 So there are blogs that do this, that, like, keep track of the cool houses. I love... Is it Zillow Gone Wild? That Twitter account is amazing-

Tim Ferriss 31:00 I don't know

Chris Sacca 31:00 ... that finds the craziest shit happening on Zillow. But I think, like, it'd be cool to just be like, look, 10 places I would love to live someday, or-

Tim Ferriss 31:08 Mm-hmm

Chris Sacca 31:08 ... you know, 15 best places where you could shoot a scene in a 1970s adult film.

Tim Ferriss 31:12 [laughs] Makes me think that you've thought about this.

Chris Sacca 31:16 Yeah. Favorite locations from, you know, The Big Lebowski, or best examples of mid-century modern architecture or something like that.

Tim Ferriss 31:24 Yeah. Okay. I got it.

Chris Sacca 31:26 I think there's a missed opportunity for influencers to build stuff, feature it.

Chris Sacca 31:30 Anyway.

Tim Ferriss 31:30 Simplification. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 31:32 But real estate is my soft spot.

Tim Ferriss 31:34 Toys, real estate.

Chris Sacca 31:36 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.

Tim Ferriss 31:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 31:46 And I lit up and was like, "I feel seen." You know me, Tim. My ideal social situation is Danish-sized. Like four, six feels huge.

Tim Ferriss 31:58 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 31:59 I love getting four 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, 'cause 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, like, or 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-

Tim Ferriss 32:33 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 32:33 ... and I need that time to recover. So I've loved creating spaces for myself to be alone.

Tim Ferriss 32:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 32:40 And so I think that's an absolute vice.

Tim Ferriss 32:43 Okay. And then have you divested yourself of things, relationships, things you used to prize heavily that you no longer value heavily or highly?

Chris Sacca 32:53 Tim, have you heard of Jackson Hole, Wyoming? Because there's a ranch for sale-

Tim Ferriss 32:57 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 32:57 ... just south of the city that would fit that theme. Dude, there's abundant wildlife. There's moose and elk, and you can see bears. It's really incredible.

Tim Ferriss 33:07 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 33:08 The 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 in Truckee since 2011.

Tim Ferriss 33:23 Mm.

Chris Sacca 33:24 And that was the first thing Crystal and I bought together, and to let go of that was weird and disorienting.

Tim Ferriss 33:30 Mm.

Chris Sacca 33:30 But since then, yeah, I've gotten pretty good at selling and letting go and realizing... And more importantly, not buying.

Tim Ferriss 33:38 It's like having premarital abode before the messy divorce.

Chris Sacca 33:42 Yeah, exactly. That's a really good way of putting it. But you always ask people their favorite books, et cetera. Like, one is Morgan's The Psychology of Money.

Tim Ferriss 33:50 Oh, Morgan Housel. Yeah, great book.

Chris Sacca 33:51 That echoes a lot of refrains, but a lot of that, like 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.

Tim Ferriss 34:09 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 34:09 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 gonna have an opinion.

Tim Ferriss 34:23 [laughs] Shocker.

Chris Sacca 34:25 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?" I'm like, "You assholes. I never would've seen it. But now that I've seen it, I'm gonna sketch it for you, and there's gonna be an eighth inch of tolerance and we're gonna have a holdback." Now I'm tortured by those details, and Crystal is even more of a detail and design and, you know, flow person than I am. And so... But what we start to realize is, like, those projects that we buy and build, they're jobs.

Tim Ferriss 34:55 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 34:55 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. You know-

Tim Ferriss 35:03 Mm

Chris Sacca 35:03 ... we bought a piece of land recently, an incredible setting we've always had on the list. We finally found the place. We started to sketch it out. We were working with the right architects. Our nephew, uh, Mike, is an architect at Bjarke Ingels 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 gonna be a job for the next couple years. Do we really, 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?"

Tim Ferriss 35:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 35:44 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, like, thrilled. And so anyway.

Tim Ferriss 35:53 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 might be a past hobby. And then the real estate question for you, if all of that vanished, right, it burned down or otherwise was just removed- How much of that would you repurchase?

Chris Sacca 36:15 Can I just say our now nine-year-old, when she was eight, she's our hippie kid who's, like, always on mushrooms.

Tim Ferriss 36:22 Not literally.

Chris Sacca 36:23 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 a 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, like, traditional school and tiny classes with some outdoor learning. But we went to Center Skies Preschool kindergarten situation, and we were like, "Hey," to the teacher like, "When do you guys start doing like, I don't know, the math or the writing?" And she's like, "Oh, there'll be no math here." And we're like, "What?" And she's like, "This is, 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 end up watching some videos on these Swedish forest schools, and we're like, "I mean, what do we got to lose," right? And it turns out that kid is so exceptionally resilient and capable of being bored. None of the three kids get bored, but I go for a hike every day. And when she was, like, 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."

Tim Ferriss 37:40 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 37:41 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. Didn't hold her back at all, but I really love that skill set. Anyway, 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."

Tim Ferriss 38:05 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 38:09 We were wrecked. If I can answer your question any way, it's that.

Tim Ferriss 38:15 Okay.

Chris Sacca 38:16 We live in a house now that has a lot of perks and features, and maybe we could do without them.

Tim Ferriss 38:21 Sharks with lasers, downsize.

Chris Sacca 38:24 And then, dude, you got a new project.

Tim Ferriss 38:26 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 38:27 It's about no, but what was the actual title? The working title.

Tim Ferriss 38:30 Yeah, the working title is The Book of No.

Chris Sacca 38:32 Okay.

Tim Ferriss 38:32 And I'm excited about that.

Chris Sacca 38:34 I mean, I say no for a living, and I think one of the challenges is, like, how to stay an optimistic, open-minded person when you say no all day.

Tim Ferriss 38:40 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-

Chris Sacca 38:54 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 38:54 ... 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 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?

Chris Sacca 39:16 Well, first of all, in investing, in anything, I think one of the big traps is being too thematic, like having a thesis ahead of time.

Tim Ferriss 39:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 39:25 I've watched people write, like, the canonical blog post on the shared economy, then people come pitch them shared economy deals, which makes their blog post feel righter and righter, and that confirmation bias causes them to light money on fire.

Tim Ferriss 39:38 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 39:38 And then their fund goes away and they're like, "But my blog post was awesome."

Tim Ferriss 39:41 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 39:43 And so I have this big rule at Lowercarbon 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.

Tim Ferriss 39:58 So Chris, let's pause for a second.

Chris Sacca 40:01 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 40:01 So we have not explained, because it didn't exist at the time-

Chris Sacca 40:04 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 40:04 ... what Lowercarbon Capital is.

Chris Sacca 40:07 Okay, let me go back to just saying no then, 'cause it's important-

Tim Ferriss 40:10 Yes

Chris Sacca 40:10 ... 'cause you're writing a book about it.

Tim Ferriss 40:11 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 40:13 So my point is, is if I have too many rules about saying no, or I have too many, then I'm gonna say it to the wrong shit. I'm gonna turn down the wrong stuff. I'm gonna 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?

Tim Ferriss 40:40 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 40:40 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, right?

Tim Ferriss 40:47 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 40:47 I'd prefer not to blow three hours, like, hanging out with some lame people, but [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 40:55 Ooh. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 40:55 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 40:55 Ooh. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 40:57 But I would prefer not to blow a night, you know?

Tim Ferriss 41:01 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 41:01 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.

Tim Ferriss 41:10 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 41:10 Like, I am not gonna see my kids or, and wife, and I gotta fucking pack some stuff and transport, all that shit, you know? I mean, Paul Graham a long time ago used to talk about the true cost of a cup of coffee.

Tim Ferriss 41:23 Mm.

Chris Sacca 41:23 You know, like what does it actually take to stop your day and go meet somebody and let them pick your brain and all that bullshit. So 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, like, shit breaks all the time that you put into it. And 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, an invitation, I can assess, am I gonna just risk 50 grand here, and, like, that's my total downside? Okay, what's 50 grand worth to me? Oh God, I was almost quoting Jay-Z right there.

Tim Ferriss 42:03 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 42:03 Can you please remind me?

Tim Ferriss 42:04 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 42:05 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?" You know?

Tim Ferriss 42:15 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 42:16 It's easy to say yes to that, but what's the real cost?

Tim Ferriss 42:19 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 42:19 And then I think the second part is just getting comfortable with the fact that- This is gonna be uncomfortable for a minute, but I'm just gonna 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?

Tim Ferriss 42:35 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 42:35 And that can be really tough. 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."

Tim Ferriss 42:42 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 42:43 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.

Tim Ferriss 42:52 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 42:53 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, right?

Tim Ferriss 42:59 Yep.

Chris Sacca 43:00 So you're the only one who sees your to-do list. I love all these questions where you ask people, like, "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.

Tim Ferriss 43:10 [laughs] Yeah, there's truth to that. Yeah, for sure.

Chris Sacca 43:14 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 'cause I had stuffed her full of pizza and other bullshit.

Tim Ferriss 43:23 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 43:24 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."

Tim Ferriss 43:29 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 43:31 I love all those. I know somebody who writes out their intentions and then hand-stitches them together at the beginning of the day.

Tim Ferriss 43:36 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 43:38 God bless. God bless. I'm not mocking, I'm just saying, like...

Tim Ferriss 43:42 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 43:44 Anyway, so I think the no is feeling comfortable. And by the way, as we grow up, I mean, you know, one of the things Crystal and I find with employees is I think younger managers are too slow to fire employees.

Tim Ferriss 43:57 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 43:58 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? You know, are they creating more administrative overhead? Somebody else once said, "If we have to talk about an employee three times in bed..." Oh, I know who. It was a local entrepreneur I met here in Bozeman, a guy whose pickleball court doubles as a gun range.

Tim Ferriss 44:29 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 44:32 Just amazing dude. 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. Like, that was the true cost of that person. I think younger people are sometimes afraid to have those uncomfortable moments. It's easier to live with the status quo than to just be like, "Sorry, it's not happening. We gotta go."

Tim Ferriss 44:54 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 44:54 Because they're afraid of the loss, but the real loss is all that fucking time along the way.

Tim Ferriss 44:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 44:59 So all right, that's my diatribe

Chris Sacca 45:01 on nos.

Tim Ferriss 45:01 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, 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?

Chris Sacca 45:22 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 45:22 'Cause 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, right?

Chris Sacca 45:29 Yeah. I'll tell you, I'm the asshole who's like, I would infinitely rather host and control the situation.

Tim Ferriss 45:34 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 45:35 You've been to our events. There's no automatic plus ones unless the other person is independently awesome.

Tim Ferriss 45:40 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 45:40 That's a real thing. We have deeply offended people. Even at our wedding, we're like, "Sorry, no." Like, never met your wife. I bet you she's great, but, like, I need to know.

Tim Ferriss 45:50 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 45:51 No, this is gonna 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-

Tim Ferriss 46:18 Mm-hmm

Chris Sacca 46:18 ... in whatever field. And 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.

Tim Ferriss 46:39 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 46:39 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.

Tim Ferriss 46:49 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 46:50 Like, I don't get nervous about giving speeches, but I feel like I want to bring my A game.

Tim Ferriss 46:54 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 46:55 That's what 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 gonna actually write down? Oh my God, I need-

Tim Ferriss 47:02 Mm-hmm

Chris Sacca 47:02 ... pithier quotes.

Tim Ferriss 47:04 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 47:05 But the reality is I want to make sure I'm delivering something of value.

Tim Ferriss 47:08 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 47:08 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.

Tim Ferriss 47:16 Well, we're all running out of time.

Chris Sacca 47:17 My best friend, Teddy Rheingold, who you knew well, he died-

Tim Ferriss 47:19 Yeah

Chris Sacca 47:19 ... at 46. You know? One of the all-time great people.

Tim Ferriss 47:23 Yeah. Great human.

Chris Sacca 47:25 I feel like I've gotten three years of bonus time past him.

Tim Ferriss 47:28 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 47:29 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-

Tim Ferriss 47:36 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 47:36 ... I just, at the same time, if you asked me, like, what's changed since I was 30 or 40, I am way less patient.

Tim Ferriss 47:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 47:45 It's harder to work for me as a result.

Tim Ferriss 47:47 And for people who don't know Chris well [laughs] , you didn't really start off that patient to begin with. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 47:53 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, you know, somewhere between 5 and 10X. You know those kinds of people where you're like, wait, they're just different.

Tim Ferriss 48:10 I do. Yeah, for sure.

Chris Sacca 48:11 And Chris and I are like, we should promote her, and our partner was like, "Okay, well, her review is coming up," and Chris and I are like, "No, no, no, no, we should promote her by Friday And we're like, "Well, there's..." And I was like, "Do you wanna tell her or are we gonna tell her today?" I'm like, why would we wait? She's f**king 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 f**king great, and that we give her a new title and get her f**king going, 'cause she's just that great. I just have no f**king time for that. That idea I told you about that came up over the weekend where we were talking to our team and I was like, "Okay, I, I appreciate all your input, but we're f**king doing it." And they're like, "Okay, like Q1, Q2?" And I'm like, "No, Q-Friday."

Tim Ferriss 48:52 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 48:55 Write it up. What are we talking about here? And so I'm just like, we are men of action.

Tim Ferriss 49:00 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 49:01 You know, lies do not become us. But I'm just like, I have no f**king time for that. And so I worry. I worry it's way too easy to let this stuff slip away.

Tim Ferriss 49:09 Is that a pending tangible sense of mortality, or is there something else to it? Or is it just getting old and cantankerous?

Chris Sacca 49:17 Tim, does any of the shit you've built happen?

Tim Ferriss 49:20 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 49:20 I mean, you built it yourself, literally. I would say the same for me, right?

Tim Ferriss 49:24 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 49:24 And so no one's ever gonna call me an entrepreneur though, but I built all this from scratch, right? With Crystal.

Tim Ferriss 49:30 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 49:31 But if I don't do it, it doesn't f**king happen. If I don't move it, it doesn't f**king happen.

Tim Ferriss 49:37 Yep.

Chris Sacca 49:37 And I tried resting for a little bit. I was horrible at it.

Tim Ferriss 49:40 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 49:42 And so I regret being 70 hours a week employed again. This sucks.

Tim Ferriss 49:47 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 49:49 But at the same time, like, I was awful at not doing much.

Tim Ferriss 49:52 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 49:53 But if I don't move it, and if I have an idea, if I have a business idea, I gotta do it before anyone else f**king picks up on it, before the fast followers come. I wanna just be out there with whatever my anomalous advantage is. I wanna go press that.

Tim Ferriss 50:05 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 50:06 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 f**king stock."

Tim Ferriss 50:13 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 50:14 I just wasted so much time not buying it all, and then eventually bought it all. But I don't wanna, like, convince people to do something. I wanna go own it all first-

Tim Ferriss 50:22 Yeah

Chris Sacca 50:22 ... and then convince them to buy it from me.

Tim Ferriss 50:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 50:26 We have the world's only dedicated nuclear fusion fund.

Tim Ferriss 50:30 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 50:30 And so we had been dabbling in fusion investment for a while. People poo-poohed

Chris Sacca 50:34 it.

Tim Ferriss 50:34 Do you wanna take a second to explain what Lowercarbon Capital is? And then I'm gonna come back to that kid taking notes, 'cause I have a question for that kid. But do you want to just give a quick background?

Chris Sacca 50:44 I got yelled at for calling people in their 20s kids.

Tim Ferriss 50:47 What? They should be so flattered.

Chris Sacca 50:49 In my 360 review in 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 Harsh Dubey. Amazing name.

Tim Ferriss 51:01 [laughs] If you know, you know. Yeah.

Chris Sacca 51:07 Harsh Dubey is one of the hardest working, most insightful young people I've ever f**king worked with. He worked with us for a couple years, and then he went and joined one of our portfolio companies. You know, the guy is a legend. He is welcome back to Lowercarbon any day. We'll explain Lowercarbon in a second. But I once referred to Harsh Dubey in 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 Dubey, but another employee was like, "Hey, you can't refer to people in their 20s as kids." And I'm like, God f**king damn it, I can't do anything right.

Tim Ferriss 51:39 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 51:40 By the way, that was in the same six months that I was accused of promoting hustle culture.

Tim Ferriss 51:43 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 51:44 And Crystal and I are like, "Wait, what's hustle culture?" I really felt I'd f**ked up. And they're like, "This whole thing about the work never sleeps, and sometimes shit blows up on a Sunday, and so you gotta get your laptop out no matter where you are. And, like, you know, if you're gonna be a partner to an entrepreneur, you gotta 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?"

Tim Ferriss 52:04 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 52:05 We're like, "And... Wait, where's the accusation part? Oh, that was it? Oh, f**k you. Yes, that's exactly what we do."

Tim Ferriss 52:11 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 52:11 This is hustle culture. What the f**k? Like, I don't have Successories posters on the wall, but-

Tim Ferriss 52:16 [laughs] Just hang in there with the kitten. You don't have that?

Chris Sacca 52:19 But at the same time, for f**k'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 f**king life outside of Spadera and Google. Like, 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, like, work yourself to a state of unhealthiness anymore, but I also think you can't f**king phone this in, and I'm sick of apologizing for it.

Tim Ferriss 52:53 All right. No more apologies. You gotta stop your apologizing. And we're gonna come back to the fusion fund and Lowercarbon. But for the kid who's taking notes, I would be very curious to know, because those who may not be familiar with you-

Chris Sacca 53:05 Wait, wait, wait

Tim Ferriss 53:06 ... Hold, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Chris Sacca 53:07 No, this is a good place to insert the commercial break for, like, the self-help therapy app or whatever after Chris goes on a rant about how you have to work yourself to the f**king bone until you're teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

Tim Ferriss 53:19 Put in a meditation app. Throw in a sponsorship ad for The Way.

Chris Sacca 53:22 Hi, this is Tim taking a quick break to let you know that you gotta take care of your

Chris Sacca 53:26 mental health.

Tim Ferriss 53:26 [laughs] 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 f**k, like I can't emulate this guy." If you were to teach a seminar, could be college, high school, doesn't really matter, just like entrepreneurship, what could you teach? What would you teach that is not dependent on the hardwiring of a Sacca specimen?

Chris Sacca 54:01 So I told you what I'm working on next.

Tim Ferriss 54:04 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 54:05 And I hate that I don't have, like, a URL or deliverable to announce, 'cause this podcast came up really quickly.

Tim Ferriss 54:10 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 54:11 But I feel like there is a massive cultural hole I mean, my working title has been No Permanent Record.

Tim Ferriss 54:19 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 54:20 So Tim, you and I are of the same generation where our teachers, our parents would be like, "That's gonna go on your permanent record."

Tim Ferriss 54:26 Yeah. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 54:26 Like, "You f**k up, that's gonna go on your permanent record." Tim, I was 19 years old before I realized that document didn't exist.

Tim Ferriss 54:32 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 54:33 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.

Tim Ferriss 54:40 Like Santa Claus. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 54:41 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."

Tim Ferriss 54:48 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 54:50 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-

Tim Ferriss 55:00 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 55:02 ... the young professionals who work for us, we showed them that PSA that used to play on television that said, "It's 10:00. Do you know where your children are?"

Tim Ferriss 55:10 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 55:10 And people were like, "Where would the children be?"

Tim Ferriss 55:12 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 55:12 And we're like, that was it. We were out. We were just f**king gone. Oftentimes your parents were like, "Get the f**k out of the house and don't come back."

Tim Ferriss 55:20 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 55:20 And what the TV was basically telling your parents was, before you have one more gimlet and get all f**king wasted, maybe do a bed check, see if anyone made it home.

Tim Ferriss 55:29 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 55:29 Like, so [laughs] we would leave the house without water. How the f**k did we survive without water, Tim?

Tim Ferriss 55:35 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 55:36 Like, kids these days can't go anywhere without a f**king water bottle. We would maybe find a garden hose somewhere. We had no f**king snacks. And so we would just go. Like, we had no f**king Band-Aids or Neosporin. We just, like, would f**king rub a little dirt in it when we wiped out. No helmets.

Tim Ferriss 55:52 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 55:53 We were a disaster. At least once each of us was propositioned to get into a van for some candy.

Tim Ferriss 55:58 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 56:00 It was the wild f**king West, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 56:02 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 56:02 But we learned to be resilient and resourceful.

Tim Ferriss 56:04 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 56:05 And I worry about it. And along the way, Tim, we learned how to tell stories.

Tim Ferriss 56:09 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 56:09 We learned how to convince our friends, 'cause 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. And I recently was back at my alma mater, and we were being honored. Crystal and I were back there, you know, being feted and being interviewed in front of the student body. And first thing I covered was, cheers to all you f**king 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 f**king 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 f**king systemic reason for doing that. Yes, I agree." But I was like, "How many of you here have, have ever snuck into something? How many of you have ever committed the mildest crime? Have you vandalized anything?"

Tim Ferriss 57:08 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 57:08 "How many of you have ever actually scammed someone or even been scammed?"

Tim Ferriss 57:13 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 57:14 "Have you ever been on the wrong side of a flimflam? How many of you have placed a bet on sports? How many of you have played cards? How many of you have been blackout drunk? How many of you have had a regrettable hookup?"

Tim Ferriss 57:25 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 57:25 I just kept going down. "How many of you have worked a tipping job? How many of you have had a f**king horrible boss who was 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 all so f**king useless to us."

Tim Ferriss 57:42 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 57:43 You've done none of the things that actually inform the kind of work we do.

Tim Ferriss 57:48 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 57:48 So you know what I'm seeing right now? 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 f**king hard workers, you know? And so it's easy to always like, "Get off my lawn" to the next generation, and like, "These kids don't wanna work." There are definitely some f**king lifestyle kids, and bless them, but we have some really f**king hard workers. I've just started noticing things like, well, they can't tell when somebody's lying to them.

Tim Ferriss 58:19 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 58:20 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 f**king... 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 cards.

Tim Ferriss 58:42 How do you fix that other than sending them to Stranger Things Reality Camp 1980s theme park?

Chris Sacca 58:48 You know what's crazy? My way in on the H-1B visa, just to get political again, beep, like push that-

Tim Ferriss 58:53 [laughs] Just gonna play elevator music as soon as... [laughs]

Chris Sacca 58:56 The people who know this shit are either the American kids who grew up broke as f**k or the kids from India and China-

Tim Ferriss 59:02 Yeah

Chris Sacca 59:02 ... who grew up hustling, scrapping, basically not only f- 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.

Tim Ferriss 59:26 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 59:27 You know, whereas Crystal, my wife, who grew up in India, it's a f**king sport for her. It's almost uncomfortable. I'm like, we once had a big fight in Morocco 'cause I'm like, "You are arguing with this man over seven cents right now," and she's like, "Yeah, but if I don't, he's gonna be disrespected and I'm gonna be disrespected, so f**k this."

Tim Ferriss 59:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 59:44 "And like, I'm gonna walk away again." I'm like, "It's one dirham. We gotta go." And she's like, "F**k that. We're in this shit. Like, if you don't have the f**king stones to stay in this conversation, get the f**k out of here."

Tim Ferriss 59:54 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 59:55 But like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:02 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:00:02 And they're f**king 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:13 No, I get it. So is there anything to be done? Like is there-

Chris Sacca 1:00:16 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:00:16 ... anything to counteract this nefarious slippage into impotence and oversensitivity

Chris Sacca 1:00:24 Yeah. Take your f***ing phone and throw it in the bin. I'm a Jonathan Haidt f***ing disciple, but, like, 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 f***ing FOMO. My life feels so inadequate. I'm like, "Jesus, look at that guy. Oh, f***. Where are they? They're having so much fun. Shit, that guy's so much fitter than me right now. F***!" And it makes me unhappy. And so maybe, maybe me and 13-year-old girls have a lot in common.

Tim Ferriss 1:00:58 You left out technologists too, right? As you put it, I, I think in your text to me, your fingerprints are on the weapon. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:01:04 It's like, if the gloves do fit, you cannot acquit.

Tim Ferriss 1:01:07 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:01:08 We reinvented cigarettes, you know, fentanyl-laced cigarettes when we started social media with all the best intentions. But it's a f***ing 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. Like 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:01:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:01:44 And you can't tell the difference anymore. The Russians are so good at imitating the, you know, liberal elite college shitheads that it was just a wave of hate no matter what. "F*** you, parting your hair on the right side." The Nazis used to part their hair on the right side, you piece of shit.

Tim Ferriss 1:01:59 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:02:01 Once I went off Twitter and went off Instagram, oh my God, did I feel lightness in my life. So here's what I would do. My seminar-

Tim Ferriss 1:02:08 Yeah

Chris Sacca 1:02:08 ... 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 I'd 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 f***ing story. Let's see if you can show any empathy and put yourself in the shoes of the other person." You know, one of the things that made Clay, our partner who runs Lowercarbon 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:02:57 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:02:58 ... and convince people to vote for the guy. The same shit I did in Elko, Nevada, where I am going to a place 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've pulled it out and told me to get off their f***ing 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

Chris Sacca 1:03:28 shit. You know, 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?" And, like, they had to negotiate a deal. It's one batch of cookies per year. But I was like, "You gotta go figure that shit out, 'cause otherwise it's a long f***ing bike ride for you."

Tim Ferriss 1:03:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:03:45 "And so you gotta go out there and convince them that you are not gonna damage their lawn, but if they let you cross that lawn, it'd be a very patriotic thing to do." [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:03:55 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:03:55 But, you know, like, I feel lucky. You come to Bozeman and, you know, there's 150 bikes out in front of the, 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. You know, friends come up from LA and they marvel at, like, we'll be hanging out in 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 f*** was that?" And I'm like, "Well, they're going to the bookstore." Six months ago we were in LA and we were all getting our hair cut and the kids, 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 was cutting our hair was like, "Well, no, no, no. No, they can't go." I'm like, "What do you mean?" We're like, "The bookstore is literally on the same street we're on, like five blocks away." And she's like, "No, you're gonna get ticketed." I'm like, "What?" "Well, yeah, the cops will ticket you as the parents for letting your kids go down there." And we're like, "What in the actual f***?" And they're like, "Well, the then 12-year-old is fine and probably the 10-year-old, but definitely not the eight-year-old. You can't have an eight-year-old walking around." And so, and I was just like, "F*** everything."

Tim Ferriss 1:05:05 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:05:06 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, 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. You know, we have everyone on our team, a bunch of f***ing hippie climate investors, come to a ranch, a cattle ranch, and hang out with people who raise methane for a living, right? I mean, they raise cattle that we eat. But our team sees them as methane burpers. 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, you know? And so, but they are absolute stewards of the land. But nobody f***ing 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, "The important part about Class C 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. You know, like, what is it? 73% of restaurant food is delivered now? And by the way, my fingerprints are on that one too.

Tim Ferriss 1:06:32 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:06:32 We f***ed it all up, dude. I'm definitely going to hell.

Tim Ferriss 1:06:35 You mentioned something in passing that your kids don't have any phones. How did you manage that? Because I would suspect that a lot of their friends have phones.

Chris Sacca 1:06:43 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:06:53 So is it fair to say they're opt-in because a lot of their friends do not have phones?

Chris Sacca 1:06:57 I think they're opt-in because they see how f***ed up a lot of their friends who have phones are, how f***ing sad they are, how at 10, 11, 12, 13 they don't eat right, how obsessed with f***ing makeup they are, and just how they stay up late, they don't sleep right, they don't do well in school. They're f***ing panicked at all times. And our kids have a peace that I think they're very self-aware that they don't want that shit in their life.

Tim Ferriss 1:07:22 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:07:22 We have, like, a family computer that's in a public space where the screen faces out, and, like, 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. Like, we were the last who had to be conscious about what we were actually taking a picture of, you know, thought about it, and then waited and had some patience for

Chris Sacca 1:07:52 it to develop. We were the last generation that had to raw dog.

Tim Ferriss 1:07:55 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:07:56 [laughs] Have you heard this?

Tim Ferriss 1:07:57 Wait, what? [laughs] Not sure what context you're using that in.

Chris Sacca 1:08:01 There's an American dialect society that chose that or something. I, I forget their name, but they chose that as the word of the year, raw dogging. Have you heard of this trend?

Tim Ferriss 1:08:09 No.

Chris Sacca 1:08:09 Like raw dogging an airplane flight?

Tim Ferriss 1:08:11 I mean, [laughs] you and I may have different use cases for this. What does this mean?

Chris Sacca 1:08:15 This is your follower base, man. I know what you're referring to, but-

Tim Ferriss 1:08:18 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:08:18 ... raw dogging an airplane flight is when you just sit there in the seat and you just look straight ahead. No headphones-

Tim Ferriss 1:08:27 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:08:27 ... no in-flight movie, no book, no phone. You just stare straight ahead for the flight. That is raw dogging the flight, man.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:33 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:08:34 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:41 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:08:41 He can just raw dog the woods, man.

Tim Ferriss 1:08:43 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:08:44 Can you do that? Could you do that now? You meditate a lot. Could you just f***ing stare at the woods, not on any shrooms or anything?

Tim Ferriss 1:08:51 You know, with the woods, 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, I would need some enhancement, enhancement for that.

Chris Sacca 1:09:03 Right? I invite your listeners to leave in the comments their actual authentic raw dog experiences, the safer work ones. What setting and how long have you been able to sit phone-free, book-free, art-free, pencil-free? You might even say I'm holding a pencil, like, we've lost touch with the analog arts, man.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:21 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:09:22 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 f***ing rock dust recently.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:34 Wait, string art? What do your string art pieces look like?

Chris Sacca 1:09:37 I weave twine and cotton, and then I integrate that into rocks and wood.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:42 Cool.

Chris Sacca 1:09:43 But

Chris Sacca 1:09:44 we don't make analog shit anymore, man.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:45 Have you seen, side note, Andy Goldsworthy?

Chris Sacca 1:09:48 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:09:56 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:12 I'm gonna 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.

Chris Sacca 1:10:28 Oh my God, Tim, Tim, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:30 Hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on.

Chris Sacca 1:10:31 Tim, pull the f***ing knife out.

Tim Ferriss 1:10:33 I said that just to f*** with you [laughs] 'cause, what?

Chris Sacca 1:10:37 Hold on. I don't have an air sickness bag near my... [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:10:42 [laughs] So if you had a curriculum for reading, like a syllabus for reading, what would be mandatory reading for that class? Entrepreneurship, broadly speaking.

Chris Sacca 1:10:53 Oh, man. 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 f***ing ne'er-do-wells and losers, and guess what? We are, but that's what makes us great.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:07 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:11:08 And so I am convinced that we were the last of the f***ups, and all these other kids, like, actually do have a permanent record now.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:17 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:11:17 There actually is this thing that follows them forever. I love reading Chuck Klosterman.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:22 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:11:22 And so just diving into how messy the '90s were. I love talking to ChatGPT.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:29 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:11:30 My wife finds it weird.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:31 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:11:32 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 Chat. Chad, by the way. And Chad has different names. If I'm talking about medical shit, it's Dr. Chadius, MD.

Tim Ferriss 1:11:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:11:44 If it's, like, my accountant, it's Chad Geppeto, CFA. What else do we have? But there's a few, but I will... I'll tell it, "Hey, you're this person," and I'll have it remind me. Like, 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, Buckminster Fuller's still a huge influence on me. You and I permanently ruined the market for his book, I Seem to Be a Verb.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:09 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:12:10 When we mentioned it on your podcast, it immediately started pricing at $1,000.

Tim Ferriss 1:12:14 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:12:15 And I don't think that price has ever really recovered. I think it's still a few hundred dollars to pick up 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." And that was f**king illuminating. And so I think we don't do that enough. What else would I read?

Tim Ferriss 1:12:50 Or assign-

Chris Sacca 1:12:51 Or assign

Tim Ferriss 1:12:51 ... to the class. Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:12:52 Yeah. I probably read more poetry than most people, but particularly Billy Collins. I listen to stories of Garrison Keillor, like old ones. I think we've all lost touch with storytelling. I am a big fan of The Moth Podcast. I really like the author Kelly Corrigan.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:08 Don't know the name.

Chris Sacca 1:13:08 I've gotten to know her recently, but Kelly, you're not in her demographic. She writes like, you know, middle-aged woman dealing with reality kind of stuff. I cry. It's out of my realm, and so it's like 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? Like, American Night Wolf or something like that. He was like a lyricist for the Grateful Dead from Wyoming, total f**king maniac. And I met him a couple times at TED, had no idea, but that guy was a crazy person. And so I, I just...

Chris Sacca 1:13:45 Tim, I really do think that a lot of the magic of life is in our unpredictability.

Tim Ferriss 1:13:51 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:13:53 There was this guy who, he's 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, "F**k, wait, you weren't representing the 2-7." And he smoked everyone. By the way, he had a big ass beard, so they called him Gambledore.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:20 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:14:21 So good. But I think he cleared like 8 million bucks and then disappeared. Nobody f**king knows where he is.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:27 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:14:28 But like the thing we haven't talked about yet is AI.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:31 Yep.

Chris Sacca 1:14:32 And I have strong feelings about it.

Tim Ferriss 1:14:34 Let's get into it.

Chris Sacca 1:14:35 And I think the last bastion of humanity is going to be in the random, unpredictable messiness of humans, the rough f**king 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 f**king left. I mean, look, I don't know what our kids are supposed to go to school for right now. I genuinely don't. I saw our daughter, Circa Luna, who's a f**king 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 sh*t.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:31 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:15:32 And so God bless sixth grade, but what the f**k? Like, you're not gonna interview for a job with this sh*t.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:37 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:15:38 So what are we teaching the kids? Like, I love our kids are in advanced math. They're smart and they're good at math, but I mean, come on. I literally-

Tim Ferriss 1:15:45 Is that so they know how to get the crossbow trajectories right later? [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:15:49 Pretty much, yeah. They can shoot manual and firearms. They can also whittle, start fires, make arrowheads.

Tim Ferriss 1:15:57 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:15:58 They can handle themselves. CeCe is 13 now, CeCe 11, and she asked me for some help with her math. And I looked at it and I was like, "Oh God, I haven't done this in 20 plus years. Holy sh*t." 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 f**k 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."

Tim Ferriss 1:16:27 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:16:27 And then like, "Oh yeah, your answer's right." And I saved the day and I didn't look like a total f**king idiot yet.

Tim Ferriss 1:16:32 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:16:33 But would you send your kid right now to coding class?

Tim Ferriss 1:16:38 I don't think so, no.

Chris Sacca 1:16:40 I think other than most computer science, like the highest level of computer science, almost all of the rest of coding is f**king useless now, right? I mean, you and I can go to ChatGPT and be like, "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, right? Like an agent's gonna do all that for you. You just don't need to f**king do it anymore. And so would you send your kid to law school right now?

Tim Ferriss 1:17:17 No, definitely not. No.

Chris Sacca 1:17:19 Oh, dude, we have fewer lawyers at our firm now than we did a year ago. Like, it's just f**king great. And I can tell it, "Hey, you know what? Great job. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again. 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 f**king good. Would you teach your kid accounting, accounts receivable, accounts payable, like bookkeeping right now?

Tim Ferriss 1:17:49 [laughs] So what would you teach your kids?

Chris Sacca 1:17:52 Would you have your kids write marketing copy? Would you train them to write any news other than writing for the very top newspapers?

Tim Ferriss 1:17:59 No, probably not.

Chris Sacca 1:18:01 Dude, go down the list of f**king skills, man.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:04 So what's left?

Chris Sacca 1:18:05 Here's my grand theory. We are super f**ked.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:08 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:18:10 That's your title card, Chris Sacca colon, we are super f**ked.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:13 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:18:13 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:27 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:18:27 Like, it's kind of funny, like 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, you know? And about what happens when, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:18:50 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:18:50 So same guys who are working on how to preserve brains in boxes for infinity. I mean, a smart guy I 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 wanna get hurt between now and then. Like, there's some wild shit happening.

Tim Ferriss 1:19:10 He knows. Hmm. That's a strong statement.

Chris Sacca 1:19:13 And 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, 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 antivenom that's shelf-stable, that can be distributed around the fucking world, and the AI came up with it. It's crazy. Like, they've already tested it on rodents, and it works. Like, the stuff that's gonna 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

Chris Sacca 1:20:04 by AI.

Tim Ferriss 1:20:05 So you're saying, though, the ivory tower stuff, where do they miss the mark?

Chris Sacca 1:20:08 The challenge is this, is that what most people do for a living is going away. So let's look historically. We f-ed 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. Like, 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 know, 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," right? Or you take the GI Bill, you can go to college, and you can, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:21:37 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:21:38 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 '08, '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 f- 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," but the reality of this is f- true. When you take away agency from somebody, you back them into a corner. So now do that for all the f- white collar employees. Do that for everyone who stayed in and did their f- homework and went to college and took out all those f- 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 f- fast and costs $20 a month. You know, 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."

Tim Ferriss 1:23:18 So Chris, let me jump in for a second.

Chris Sacca 1:23:19 You know?

Tim Ferriss 1:23:19 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've spent 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, right? 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.

Chris Sacca 1:24:04 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:05 So they're shilling their bags, not to get too technical.

Chris Sacca 1:24:08 No, you get canceled if you say this shit out loud. You literally get canceled by the technorati.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:12 Or they don't actually run businesses where you and I realize, and a lot of people are realizing this, 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.

Chris Sacca 1:24:33 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:34 So I'm already seeing the job displacement in the concrete.

Chris Sacca 1:24:38 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:24:38 But a lot of these folks in tech might say, "Well- If you look back historically, there are all these different technological developments and, you know, TV killed the radio star and on and on and on. And look at the, look at the car, like, did it eliminate horses? No. And blah, blah, blah. All these people found other jobs. We've seen it 100 times before. Why is this time any different? So I'd love to- for you just to speak to that.

Chris Sacca 1:25:01 Mm-hmm. 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?" Like, that, that just doesn't fucking work.

Tim Ferriss 1:25:27 What does he even mean by that?

Chris Sacca 1:25:28 I don't know. It's just easy to think when you own OpenAI.

Tim Ferriss 1:25:31 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:25:33 I actually think Sam Altman cares. Like, 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. In the meantime, the arms race is such that, you know, I, I sympathize, like we can't slow down or somebody else builds it and we are all super fucked.

Tim Ferriss 1:26:05 Yeah. Why is it different this time around?

Chris Sacca 1:26:07 Because it's so much faster. What humans suck at is understanding the slope of an exponential curve.

Tim Ferriss 1:26:15 Yep.

Chris Sacca 1:26:16 Tim Urban told this story better than anybody else. He has the perfect fucking cartoon, you know, one of his classic cartoon charts.

Tim Ferriss 1:26:24 Yeah. Wait But Why.

Chris Sacca 1:26:26 We literally put it in our investor update like 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:26:49 Hmm

Chris Sacca 1:26:49 ... 'cause it's going vertical.

Tim Ferriss 1:26:50 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:26:51 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, like, 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 gonna 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 one 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:45 Thank you.

Chris Sacca 1:27:46 Yeah, [laughs] exactly.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:46 [laughs] Tim Urban, everybody.

Chris Sacca 1:27:49 It runs in the name.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:50 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:27:50 But what's happening now is that cars... You know, when cars originally came out, in some places they were required to have someone walk in front of them.

Tim Ferriss 1:27:59 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:27:59 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:06 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:28:06 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:29 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:28:30 Like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:44 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:28:45 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. And so in the credit world, we're the story by and he's the writer.

Tim Ferriss 1:28:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:28:59 Right? And so... But we went to, you know, shopped it around, and a well-known dude wants to buy it and star in 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, you know, this guy comes down and, and he sees her on his phone, and then the monk comes out and, like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:29:41 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:29:41 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." Like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:09 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:30:09 And I sent it to my collaborators, and like, "Oh, dude, yes, that, bang."

Tim Ferriss 1:30:13 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:30:15 And I'm like, "Fuck, man." I consider myself a writer, right? You read my writing. My writing doesn't go public, but-

Tim Ferriss 1:30:21 Yeah, you're a very skilled writer. You're a very good writer

Chris Sacca 1:30:23 ... but that's what I do. I, 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, 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. Like, I'm gonna be extinct soon.

Tim Ferriss 1:30:50 Okay. So what do you think things look like five years, three or five years from now? Could be a year from now. I mean, things are moving so quickly, that's, uh, too far away.

Chris Sacca 1:30:58 By the way, thank you. Thank you. You're the only person who talks about it like I do in single-digit years. It's single-digit years.

Tim Ferriss 1:31:05 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:31:06 I love when people come to us and like, "2050." I'm like, "Fuck you, 2050."

Tim Ferriss 1:31:09 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:31:10 You're embarrassing yourself if you're talking about 2050 right now. Like, are you shitting me? Let's not even talk about geo instability and all the fucking weirdness and what's gonna happen when our country is run by some non-serious people, you know, like, just like, shit is fucking chaotic right now. But, like, 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."

Tim Ferriss 1:31:40 Yep.

Chris Sacca 1:31:41 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, like, your value add, your expertise, and not waste your time on the other bullshit. You kicked off a wave, you know? Sometimes I blame you for it, right?

Tim Ferriss 1:31:58 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:31:59 I'm like, "I can't get some kids to work more than six hours a week."

Tim Ferriss 1:32:02 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:32:02 No, I'm just kidding. But you have always been a systems thinker about, like, 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 like right now, I can sniff out which ones are written by them, but the next generation I won't.

Tim Ferriss 1:32:26 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:32:27 Right? And they're solving problems and if... Like, if you read Tyler Cowen, who I read every day-

Tim Ferriss 1:32:31 Yeah

Chris Sacca 1:32:31 ... he's having debates with o1, right? And I consider Tyler Cowen 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 D.K. 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... E- Ethan Mollick. Like, if you're really paying attention... I don't know what we're particularly good at. Like, I just don't know anymore. I mean, our daughter, our middle daughter, Circa, is a really talented singer and theater person, you know? And she, at age 11, is aware of this and is like, "Hey, Mom, Dad, will Broadway still exist?" And I'm like, "I think so. I think humans will crave being around people."

Tim Ferriss 1:33:14 I think Broadway will exist.

Chris Sacca 1:33:16 Yeah. I think people wanna be in the presence of other people.

Tim Ferriss 1:33:19 I think being a film actress or actor is gonna be a much dicier proposition.

Chris Sacca 1:33:24 My brother, who you know has been really successful in Hollywood, is currently rolling up residential real estate in climate havens because, you know, he's just like, "Okay, I'm a writer. That's kind of getting all fucked up. I'm an actor. You know, 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?"

Tim Ferriss 1:33:47 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:33:47 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. Like, I would love for my kids to know how to use tools.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:13 Massage therapists. They could be massage therapists.

Chris Sacca 1:34:16 Dude, have you seen the massage robots yet? They don't get carpal tunnel, man.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:19 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:34:20 A good massage therapist can only do so many in a day. It's just unhealthy to do more.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:34:24 And so they don't get carpal tunnel.

Tim Ferriss 1:34:26 The warm, soothing hands of my iRobot. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:34:29 Have you seen that o1 robot that, like... I mean, if you just see a- any of these things, even like, 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. Like, Tim, you get overwhelmed. Like, if you're paying attention-

Tim Ferriss 1:34:44 Yeah

Chris Sacca 1:34:45 ... it's overwhelming. And you know what's inevitable now. We're in a really bad spot, man, and I just don't think, like, 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:35:02 Mm-hmm

Chris Sacca 1:35:02 ... 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?" I've yet to have one say by a human being.

Tim Ferriss 1:35:22 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:35:22 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. Like, 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," 'cause it's existential to what this guy does.

Tim Ferriss 1:35:38 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:35:38 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?

Tim Ferriss 1:35:50 Yeah. 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 gonna be easy ended up being hard, right? So for instance, drafting legal documents turns out lickety-split, piece of cake.

Chris Sacca 1:36:24 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 1:36:24 Maybe throwing a baseball and, like, playing catch with someone, very, very difficult.

Chris Sacca 1:36:29 Have you seen when 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?

Tim Ferriss 1:36:38 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:36:39 So you throw a dart, and he built a machine learning- ... dartboard that automatically moves so you hit a bullseye every

Chris Sacca 1:36:46 time.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:46 [laughs] Okay. Just play along with me for a second. There are things people assumed would take forever that were done very quickly and, and the opposite, right? So I'm wondering if you had to place bets, like you're a bettor, you're a investor-

Chris Sacca 1:36:57 I've been known to dabble.

Tim Ferriss 1:36:58 You've been known to dabble. So if you had to place bets on sectors or things that are going to either be slow to change or that 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 free trade, ethically sourced stamp of human-made on things that will, for certain things, develop some type of premium, right, connotation. That seems inevitable, those types of watermarking and things like that, even for digital products, which then we've already seen.

Chris Sacca 1:37:36 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 1:37:37 So you had to bet. You're like, all right, sorry, buddy, we're taking this, this Lowercarbon Capital thing off your hands. We've heard you complaining about the 70-hour workweeks. 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 gonna bet on stuff that's gonna last or that's gonna increase in value because it will be slow to be affected by AI, or it will be largely immune. What would you bet on?

Chris Sacca 1:38:03 First of all, I'm betting on the Bills on the money line to beat the Ravens this weekend.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:07 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:38:08 And so I love that they're playing at home, but going in as underdogs, night game, that stadium's gonna be nuts. The Ravens won't be able to hear anything. Lamar Jackson wears a turtleneck in Miami. He's gonna freeze his ass off. We got this game. So sorry. Go Bills.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:21 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:38:22 I would be betting on sports. I swear to God. I hate the head injuries in football. I really do. On the other hand, there is just something so primal about the gladiator shit that goes on in football.

Tim Ferriss 1:38:32 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:38:32 And when I see it bring entire communities together, particularly a beat-up community like Buffalo that's taken some lumps, I adore it. It's funny. 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 I do think sports, not the all drug Olympics, but just human sports [laughs] 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 Ferriss 1:39:14 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:39:14 You know, Tim, I spend a lot of time in Japan like you do, and there is 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:39:39 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:39:39 ... where there's one piece of fruit. Like, I'm absolutely addicted to that culture.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:39:44 But it's that same craving for analog.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:46 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:39:47 You know? And it's funny 'cause growing up, that was a place I thought of as, like, where all the coolest new cameras came from.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:52 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:39:53 But it's a craving for that analog again.

Tim Ferriss 1:39:55 And they've been culturally kind of ahead of the curve with that for probably at least, I would say, 15 to 20 years-

Chris Sacca 1:40:03 Yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:40:04 ... in terms of going very retro to things that are considered outdated or analog, which is fascinating.

Chris Sacca 1:40:13 The LP bars and stuff like that?

Tim Ferriss 1:40:14 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:40:15 Yeah. Like, but Tim, let's be honest, they better start having sex real soon-

Tim Ferriss 1:40:19 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:40:19 ... or they're gonna disappear.

Tim Ferriss 1:40:20 Yep.

Chris Sacca 1:40:21 And the Koreans, like the reproductive rate in Korea-

Tim Ferriss 1:40:23 Yep

Chris Sacca 1:40:23 ... like Korea is just gonna close up shop. I'm fucking worried. Like, I don't know what to do about this shit. Everyone needs to start fucking.

Tim Ferriss 1:40:30 The government tried to put, I think it was $250 billion in South Korea towards trying to promote procreating. Didn't work at all. Zero effect. And there are actually a lot of, like, weird reasons for that that are not immediately obvious. Like, I think you have to put up, like, a six 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.

Chris Sacca 1:40:59 We're societally fucked, dude. If people don't start fucking and having more kids... And I'm putting that on you, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:04 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:41:04 Where are the little Tim Timmies?

Tim Ferriss 1:41:06 Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's on the docket.

Chris Sacca 1:41:08 Oh, you're the living distinction of you can't conflate having sex and having children. But let's get on it, okay?

Tim Ferriss 1:41:13 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:41:13 That's your homework. So the schools here in Bozeman aren't the most academically competitive, right? They do a pretty good job.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:20 Mm.

Chris Sacca 1:41:20 The elementary school is actually really special. But it's funny when we talk to our kids about what went on at school today. Orchestra is offered five days a week, and so math and science alternate every other day. English and social studies alternate, but orchestra is every single day. Choir is every single day. And so when we talk to the kids about school, they talk to us about music and PE class and lunch. And so it's interesting. I mean, we'll pry information out of them about the other classes and, you know, again, they're not the most challenging or riveting classes, so maybe that's part of it. But there's something happening in getting back to the arts.

Tim Ferriss 1:41:59 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:41:59 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 eh.

Tim Ferriss 1:42:06 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:42:07 And there was some squeakiness, but I was just like, "Crystal, this is not on Spotify. Like, this is fucking amazing." You know what I mean? [laughs] Like, what's happening here is amazing.

Tim Ferriss 1:42:19 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:42:19 Like, these kids, this is human as fuck, you know?

Tim Ferriss 1:42:22 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:42:23 And, like, two sections of the orchestra 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."

Tim Ferriss 1:42:31 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:42:32 Like, it was beautifully human, you know? And the same way that the awkwardness... I mean, we constantly talk to our kids about, like, middle school is about the awkwardness. It's about the asking someone to the dance or being asked to the dance. It's about all these fucking kids who stink a little bit, and sweat, and are... 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. Like, that's the fucking alpha kid in your class? Like, I worry that he couldn't wrestle his way out of a wet paper bag, but, like, that's the attractive kid? Hilarious.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:04 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:43:05 Like, but back when you're in middle school, you can self-ident- You're like, "Oh my God, that's the fucking kid."

Tim Ferriss 1:43:09 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:43:09 Like, that guy Ray, I mean, Ray's gotta get any girl he wants.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:13 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:43:13 Like... [laughs] But 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 I'm working on.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:24 So not to make it super crass, and we're gonna get to that project, but because I, 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?

Chris Sacca 1:43:40 Like, my financial bet?

Tim Ferriss 1:43:42 Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, outside of sports, I think is very on point. I would agree with that completely.

Chris Sacca 1:43:48 I think most people are still gonna be hermits, but a large number of people are gonna crave the opportunity to be together still.

Tim Ferriss 1:43:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:43:56 You know, Crystal and I have been looking at places-

Tim Ferriss 1:43:59 Ketamine bars? [laughs] No, I'm kidding.

Chris Sacca 1:44:01 Yeah, pretty much.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:02 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:44:03 But no, it's funny, like, we were looking to buy some space recently, like 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:14 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:44:15 And he's like, "Well, what's the business plan?" We're like, "No, no, no, no, like, when we see the space, we'll know."

Tim Ferriss 1:44:19 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:44:19 And he's like, "Well, what are you hoping to do there?" And we're like, "It's kinda office. It's kinda art space. It's kinda like maybe we can make it available to the community. Maybe there's some small performances there. Maybe there's some wine or a cafe there." I was like, "We don't really know. We'll kinda know when we see it, and the community will kinda define the purpose of it." But we're like-

Tim Ferriss 1:44:37 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:44:38 ... we just know that we need more convening places.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:40 He's like, "I'm gonna need a retainer for this." [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:44:43 Yeah. [laughs] Yeah. I'm like, there's no math to pencil out on it.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:48 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:44:48 But we just need more of those places to hang.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:51 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:44:52 By the way, all right, free idea for anyone in your audience.

Tim Ferriss 1:44:54 Yep.

Chris Sacca 1:44:54 You know what needs to exist?

Tim Ferriss 1:44:56 Tell me. Chuck E. Cheese for Gen X?

Chris Sacca 1:44:59 And if somebody starts this in a city that I will travel to, I want a landlocked yacht club.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:05 [laughs] Okay.

Chris Sacca 1:45:07 That is also a mini golf country club. It's yacht rock themed, so you show up, you gotta wear white shoes, maybe a captain's hat.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:14 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:45:14 You know, like, 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. You know, a $10 membership. They have to apply at the door, give some references, answer some yacht rock trivia, whatever. So, but then it's a country club for mini golf. The putt-putts have generally gone away. We need to bring mini golf back.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:41 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:45:42 There'd be, like, mahogany lockers for your putter, you know? And so you go in there and you have a really choice putter. Like, you know, like in Caddyshack, like Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy, Billy.

Tim Ferriss 1:45:52 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:45:52 And so you can talk to your golf club, but, but I really need someone to fucking do this, okay? You can call it Yahtzee's, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:46:07 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:46:08 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 it on the historic register of places to make sure it never changes, because that is the perfect place to convene. Like, 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, like, I would be betting on people wanna 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've told you how the result of this election was gonna 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:47:21 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:47:21 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." And like, 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 is," like, so I think we need to call each other in more than call each other out, right? And so you can just be like, "Grandma," you know, as, as, uh, Walter in The Big Lebowski says, "Chinaman is no longer the preferred nomenclature."

Tim Ferriss 1:48:05 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:48:06 And so honestly, I feel like we could get to a point where as a culture, we wanna hang out in person again.

Tim Ferriss 1:48:11 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:48:12 Like, I know my neighbors where I live, like 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 neighbors, 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 like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:48:40 There was a big New York Times piece about running clubs and, like, chess clubs and these in real life- ... clubs with recurring events beginning to displace dating apps, right? As an example. 'Cause people are just-

Chris Sacca 1:48:56 Fuck yeah

Tim Ferriss 1:48:56 ... tired. People are just exhausted by having yet another inbox and with 99% ghost rate, et cetera.

Chris Sacca 1:49:04 Well, people at those chess clubs need to start f**king-

Tim Ferriss 1:49:06 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:49:06 ... or we're gonna, yeah, go away as humanity. But, 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, and would consider ourselves super fans now. I mean, I wear blue and yellow f**king overalls to the games. It's ridiculous. And by the way, I've sent you these clips before. I'm like-

Tim Ferriss 1:49:26 You sent me the photos, yeah

Chris Sacca 1:49:28 ... 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, America.

Tim Ferriss 1:49:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:49:44 Like, this is what it's all about. But, but like I really enjoy that we have a f**king community here.

Tim Ferriss 1:49:49 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:49:49 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.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:00 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:50:00 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. I mean, the first time I installed TikTok, Tim, was during the pandemic, and I was like, "Oh, this is kind of cool. I'll check out those dance moves."

Tim Ferriss 1:50:16 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:50:17 Next thing I knew, I looked up and the sun had come up. I had been up all f**king night long on this app.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:23 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:50:23 It was like f**king crack cocaine injected into my veins. I realized whatever, like gene some, you know, ethnicities don't have to tolerate alcohol, I don't have that for f**king TikTok.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:33 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:50:34 And so I can only imagine what it's doing to the masses right now, and I hope we come up with a GLP-1 agonist that like blocks the pleasure center for TikTok. But I would be doing anything I can, for-profit or nonprofit, to enhance community and hangouts.

Tim Ferriss 1:50:49 Okay, 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 gonna start a business. [laughs] What type of business might you start? [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:51:14 Tim, what do you want me to say?

Tim Ferriss 1:51:15 I don't know.

Chris Sacca 1:51:16 I genuinely don't know.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:17 CrossFit gyms?

Chris Sacca 1:51:18 CrossFit gyms are community.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:20 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:51:20 They're great. I was standing in one last night. I told you.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:22 [laughs] You did. You did.

Chris Sacca 1:51:23 I texted you last night. I was like, "If you wanna make friends in a CrossFit gym in Montana, just drop that you are pals with Tim Ferriss."

Tim Ferriss 1:51:30 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:51:31 And so, like Shark Tank only goes so far in that gym.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:34 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:51:34 Once you say you're friends with Tim Ferriss, like ho shit.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:37 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:51:38 First of all, I like the ethos of CrossFit. It's how I work out. You can just f**king tell, can't you, Tim?

Tim Ferriss 1:51:43 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:51:44 But those are community. You know, one of the things we've enjoyed doing is going to towns, I can't remember which sites are doing this anymore, and finding somebody who will guide you on a local bar crawl.

Tim Ferriss 1:51:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:51:56 And just like, "Hey, take me to all the f**king dive bars or all the tiki bars," you know? Or, "Take me to three farmers markets."

Tim Ferriss 1:52:03 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:52:04 Or just, "Take me to three things I wanna see." And it's like not the traditional art historian who just recites everything about Titian.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:14 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:52:14 You know? And I said that one just for you.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:16 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:52:16 I coulda said Velazquez, but I said Titian just for you.

Tim Ferriss 1:52:19 Thank you. Know thy audience. [laughs] Know thine audience.

Chris Sacca 1:52:22 People who are like, "Hey, come here and enjoy this analog experience with me." You know? Let's go to these places. You asked why we go to Copenhagen, 'cause Copenhagen is bikes, man. You get on bikes, you make it up, it's freewheeling. We started with Rene, but then we met a lot of other people who had spun off from Rene's world, entrepreneurs in food and, and other stuff, and Riccardo Marcon, who runs Barabba. Barabba 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 Riccardo. But Riccardo is the height of analog experiences. It starts with the hug at the door.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:02 So would you start staging in his restaurant? What would your move be?

Chris Sacca 1:53:05 I mean, the kids have. Our children have. They've made plenty of pasta in that place.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:09 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:53:10 I think Europe is onto something with the art of the slow drink in the plaza.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:14 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:53:15 I really think humans still wanna have a slow drink in a plaza somewhere.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:19 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:53:20 I 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 want to, you know, the 12-ounce curl part.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:31 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:53:32 You know? It's just like, "Today sucked. Give me an athletic." And you're like, "I don't actually wanna get f**ked up right now, but there's just something I need to cap this day. I need to say work is over." Sorry, that was my Limoncello. I guess that's a bad stand-in for athletic.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:53:44 We do have alcohol investments. I wouldn't be betting on alcohol long term, but I think people still wanna just hang out. The ritual of ordering a drink, ordering a light bite, hanging out, people watching.

Tim Ferriss 1:53:56 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:53:56 We need central places to hang. This movement during COVID of shutting down streets, making it bike, but also just cafe and outdoor seating friendly.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:04 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:54:04 Like, 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?" You know? And like, it's really good at it. But you know what else is cool? Is talking to a f**king punk kid in Berlin who's like, "Let me take you to a couple places, and I know this f**king guy, and he'll let you in, and he has a craft cocktail. And do you know what the tradition is here? Here, you put gum on the back of some marks, and you throw them up on the f**king ceiling."

Tim Ferriss 1:54:32 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:54:33 And so I want more of that shit. I think there is going to be a backlash to all this.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:37 To all this meaning machines and AI and so on.

Chris Sacca 1:54:40 The machines.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:41 The Butlerian Jihad?

Chris Sacca 1:54:43 Yes. Before they f**king kill us, like, I think we've got bigger fish to fry.

Tim Ferriss 1:54:48 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 1:54:48 Before AGI. And we might be at AGI right now anyway, by the way. But before the bioweapon disassemblers-

Tim Ferriss 1:54:57 Yeah

Chris Sacca 1:54:57 ... you know, like, I think we've got to worry about the human part.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:00 Being entertained to death by your curated feed.

Chris Sacca 1:55:04 Yeah. Okay, so remember when we talked about Buckminster Fuller and I Seem To Be a Verb?

Tim Ferriss 1:55:09 Yes.

Chris Sacca 1:55:09 There's another book designed by the same designer, Quentin Fiore, called The Medium is the Massage. Not the message-

Tim Ferriss 1:55:17 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:55:17 ... the massage.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:18 Okay. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:55:19 The background on that, it was originally a typo.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:22 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:55:22 But they went with it. It's Marshall McLuhan, and that book, holy shit. Sorry if we just broke the market for it.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:31 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:55:31 But that book... Yeah, you should front-run that. Go buy all those copies.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:35 Yeah. I'll front-run it. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:55:38 But that book, again, is one of these old ones. It's beautiful, by the way, 'cause 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. I mean, the book's gotta be 50 years old at least.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:55 Yeah, it's an oldie.

Tim Ferriss 1:55:56 All right, so outside of the Butlerian Jihad, we haven't talked at all about Lowercarbon Capital, or very little. You have invested in a whole plethora of different companies through Lowercarbon Capital. You may not wanna 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, doesn't have to be an individual company, but... 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.

Chris Sacca 1:56:35 Okay, so let's just say what we do at Lowercarbon. Like, 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 unf**k the planet. I think this one even says it.

Tim Ferriss 1:56:55 Yeah, look at that.

Chris Sacca 1:56:55 Unf**k the Planet. Trademarked in a lot of countries. Hard to do, by the way. It's hard to get swears trademarked-

Tim Ferriss 1:57:01 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:57:02 ... in some places. China, not huge fans of F-bombs, turns out.

Tim Ferriss 1:57:06 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:57:07 It was mission driven for me. But we had this thesis that most climate investing and green investing, whatever you wanna 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 in 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 were 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." And so, 'cause 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 cheaper, and that's not a political statement. And what's funny is, like, 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 trophy's behind them. And I have to establish, like, I come in peace. But then we start talking about how are the cattle doing, like, what are yields like, how many you running right now, what do they weigh. You get some size. How's the growing season? How many harvests you getting? You get some size. What's hunting been like? Like, you know, how many tags you get, and you able to fill all those tags? You baggin' 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 shakes? You getting the daily seismic activity? What's water like?" And before you know it, you have just talked all of the reality of a f**ked climate without ever mentioning the word one time.

Tim Ferriss 1:59:27 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 1:59:28 And it doesn't have to be fucking political at all. It's just the reality. You know, the California fires are so f**ked up, but the reality is they're actually gonna 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-

Tim Ferriss 1:59:50 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 1:59:51 ... 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 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. Like, I don't wanna every time I sit down and bite into a delicious burger have to be confronted by the existential crisis I am fueling. I mean, I love when that juice drips down your... And you're like, oh fuck, this is fucking delicious. Medium rare, let's go. Oh, this grass-fed awesomeness. Oh, shit. Like, you left a little of that fat in there. Yeah, let's go. What'd you marinate this in? It's fucking delicious. We were meant to eat that shit, right? And I don't wanna have to constantly, like, be, I'm a horrible person, I'm a horrible person, and, like, eat it through my tears. Like [laughs] the burger of shame It's not who we are. And you know what? The f**king activists made us feel so bad about it for so f**king long, you know? The soup throwers, s- like these people throwing soup on paintings. How the f**k are you helping anything? The people who glue themselves to the f**king floor of the US Open and stop traffic, like how are you helping anything? All you're doing is radicalizing people against the stuff that we're doing that is practically unf**king their businesses, their communities. If you really wanna put some blame on some people about what happened in the LA fires, like 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 f**ked up. So Russia just knows where to f**king pick the scabs with us. But if you wanna blame somebody, it's the f**king environmentalists. It's the f**king 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 f**king communities. It's the f**king NIMBYs who won't let anyone actually use appropriate materials in building a f**king house. Did you see like they are expediting the rebuild of any houses in those areas that burned down, but you can't make any f**king changes to them.

Tim Ferriss 2:02:08 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:02:09 So we just saw a bunch of tinderboxes go up, and it's a great opportunity to be like, "Hey, maybe we should build us 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 f**king 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 f**king thing you just had, otherwise you go back to the end of the line. How f**king 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 f**king target on me. 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 in the

Chris Sacca 2:03:06 short term.

Tim Ferriss 2:03:06 And so if you look at your portfolio, yeah, just not to lose track of that-

Chris Sacca 2:03:10 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 2:03:10 ... 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 kind of moving the needle in ways that you care about, what those technologies or sectors or companies would be.

Chris Sacca 2:03:24 There's things that are gonna transform at scale that like fusion, like just clean, abundant power that is almost free is like single digit years away. So that's f**king great. I don't even bother fighting with the oil and gas people. It doesn't f**king matter. In fact, I actually want them to work with us more on carbon capture and sequester, putting more carbon back into the ground, 'cause 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 going in reverse. So I don't have political battles with those guys. And again, that's something that the activists hate about me. Like, I will f**king sit with these people. Like 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. Like, we can't just f**king pretend, like otherwise we'd be living that primitive life that I know you've got in some of your survivalist books somewhere.

Tim Ferriss 2:04:28 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:04:29 But without oil and gas, we're f**ked. It's my job to give you a better alternative, and I enjoy when the big oil majors come to us. You know, sometimes they'll try to do a business deal or even buy us. We had a, one of the big oil majors try to buy Lowercarbon 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, and so they're 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 f**k it, I'll buy it."

Tim Ferriss 2:05:20 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:05:20 You know, and it's just fun. Like I like to envision that guy with like a dip in and a cowboy hat, you know, like, "Well, f**k it, I'll buy it."

Tim Ferriss 2:05:26 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:05:26 Like, but literally that's my favorite f**king 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 wanna talk about fires. We have a company called Burnbot that is literally an autonomous drone that goes into the wild urban interface, mows shit down, starts a controlled burn, burns a defensible space.

Tim Ferriss 2:05:50 When you say defensible space, you just mean basically a-

Chris Sacca 2:05:54 A fire line.

Tim Ferriss 2:05:54 Right, a fire line.

Chris Sacca 2:05:55 A space where there is a gap where f- it would be hard even in high winds for fire to jump that, where at least firefighters know start here and work backwards.

Tim Ferriss 2:06:04 Yep.

Chris Sacca 2:06:05 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." You can look this up, Burnbot. It's f**king awesome. And, you know, private landowners don't have a problem usually running Burnbot, but where it needs to run is on a lot of public land, and they'll just get sued. And so, you know, like 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 and happen.

Tim Ferriss 2:06:37 And by fuel management you mean actual timber or undergrowth? Is that what you mean by fuel?

Chris Sacca 2:06:42 So before we were all walking around the United States, you know, what is now the United States, there used to be a bunch of fires, right?

Tim Ferriss 2:06:50 Yep.

Chris Sacca 2:06:50 Just naturally caused fires, lightning stuff would happen. The indigenous people who inhabited this land knew about the power of those fires. And, you know, 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 w- 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. Like, 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, right? Those are fun to, like, spend a night in, by the way, if you wanna camp out in an old fire tower. But, so we had all these fire towers. They would see a fire, they would immediately put it out. Well, what happens when that happens is all this fuel grows.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:02 Yeah. Right

Chris Sacca 2:08:02 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, like, cleaning it out and letting some little pine cones kind of drop and, 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:08:51 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 2:08:51 And so managing fuels means in a scrub brush area, it means, like, you just go in, and you chop and burn the fucking grass. You just have to do 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 U.S. Forest Service knows this. All the, those are hardworking, amazing fucking people. But the environmentalists sue to stop them all the fucking time, and that's killing people right now. There's just no doubt about it. I am hopeful, a silver lining, 'cause I'm gonna talk about politics, but a silver lining is I think we're gonna cut through some of that shit right now. I think we are headed into an era of pragmatism, of putting the, literally the forest before the trees and, 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 BurnBot, a company like Gridware. You know, like, Gridware actually is monitoring equipment on every single power line, tower by tower. Do you know right now, if there is a power failure on a PG&E transmission line, do you know how they figure out where that power failure was?

Tim Ferriss 2:10:06 [chuckles] No.

Chris Sacca 2:10:08 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:10:17 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 2:10:18 And, like, at this point, well, it's not my words, somebody else said, "At this point, PG&E is essentially the biggest arsonist in California." 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 an 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. And so, but you know, there hasn't been an incentive for those companies to pay that. Like, PG&E's already bankrupted. They haven't been on the hook for that. But now we've got insurance companies, like multiple insurance companies are gonna go bankrupt right now, and so is California's FAIR Plan, which is the insurer of last resort, does not have the money it needs to pay for what just happened. You know, we have a company called Stand, which is a fire insurance company that actually assesses the real risk of insuring your home. And so 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 you know, the LA, the LA Rams couldn't play their game in LA because of the fires, right?

Tim Ferriss 2:11:24 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 2:11:24 Their playoff game, they moved it to Arizona, and they played in State Farm Arena. 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 pull out of an entire state, a company like Stand looks at house by house by 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. Remember, 100-year storms happen every year now. Like, we can't just model these on historical data anymore. You know? I mean, as Jon Stewart put it the other night, like what just happened in LA is like if a fire fucked a tornado.

Tim Ferriss 2:12:08 [chuckles]

Chris Sacca 2:12:09 You can't just model for that anymore. You have to assume the worst and assume, like, 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 re- 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:12:31 Hmm.

Chris Sacca 2:12:31 And I am hopeful that the silver lining of a tragedy like this is the cause and the effect are so close and finally appeal so much to self-interest. They finally appeal to, like, 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, and I, and I actually think that 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, you know, 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 will be a bunch of f***ing 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:13:40 No Permanent Record. You wanna talk about it? What's the story? What's happening? Why now? [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:13:46 I don't know what to tell a 20-something to do right now, other than to be a f***ing 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 f*** up. They just can't. Did you ever TP a house, Tim?

Tim Ferriss 2:14:08 Uh, no, but I've had my house TP'd. [laughs] I had to, had to deal with it.

Chris Sacca 2:14:11 Okay. [laughs] It's annoying as f***.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:14 I did plenty of other stuff that got me in trouble, but no TP'ing.

Chris Sacca 2:14:19 Nobody gets to do that anymore 'cause they're on a Ring camera, man.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:22 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 2:14:22 Like, nobody gets to egg anything, right? And to go back to Mark Rober, he's the one who built that f***ing glitter fart bomb package.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:30 When my one close friend finally got his license or d- it was probably a driver's permit. We shouldn't have even been out. 'Cause I was a townie, right? On Eastern Long Island.

Chris Sacca 2:14:40 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:14:41 We had a lot of tension with the city people, as we would call it. So we would drive around, and I had a, like, a wrist rocket, a slingshot. We just bought-

Chris Sacca 2:14:49 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 2:14:49 ... a huge bag of grapes and just went around, not shooting at people, but, like, we'd shoot at things next to the people. And-

Chris Sacca 2:14:57 Yes

Tim Ferriss 2:14:58 ... I'm not proud of that. We didn't hurt anybody, but we got in a lot of trouble. We got [laughs] got in a good amount of trouble.

Chris Sacca 2:15:04 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 2:15:05 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:15:06 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:15:10 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 2:15:10 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. Like, did you ever talk somebody into getting you beer?

Tim Ferriss 2:15:21 I talked somebody into getting me, it wasn't for a party, some hard liquor. It wasn't beer. I went straight to the hard stuff. [laughs] But yeah.

Chris Sacca 2:15:28 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?

Tim Ferriss 2:15:37 [laughs] No, I didn't because my parents are hoarders and the house wouldn't have worked, but I saw that done. I did plenty of other stuff, too. [laughs] There's no real victim, right? Like, I remember-

Chris Sacca 2:15:46 Yes

Tim Ferriss 2:15:46 ... for instance, my elementary school, same friend who drove me around with the grapes and the slingshot, he was, he was the tallest kid in the class, also-

Chris Sacca 2:15:56 Mm-hmm

Tim Ferriss 2:15:56 ... 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 racketball, 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 shipped-

Chris Sacca 2:16:29 [laughs]

Tim Ferriss 2:16:29 ... like, completely dangerous grappling hooks and stuff from Philadelphia, I think it was. And so I had some kind of [laughs] ninja tooling, and we figured out a way with rope to get up on the school and then use garbage bags to, like, temporarily steal all of the tennis balls, and-

Chris Sacca 2:16:49 Yes

Tim Ferriss 2:16:49 ... 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 all sins were forgiven, or at least they called off the hounds. But you know, stuff like that.

Chris Sacca 2:17:03 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:17:12 Oh, I remember.

Chris Sacca 2:17:13 Previously referenced Hawkeye had a music store in Park City, Utah, where I was a resident and we were in business together.

Tim Ferriss 2:17:20 What were you in business doing?

Chris Sacca 2:17:22 Well, we had, we had a few fun flams.

Tim Ferriss 2:17:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:17:25 But one of the things we did was, first of all, we had to build some community. So one of the things we did was, like, we would sell you the Britney Spears album, but you had to sign your name and address posted at the front desk, like, almost like a sex offender registry.

Tim Ferriss 2:17:38 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:17:38 But it was like a Britney buyer registry.

Tim Ferriss 2:17:41 Okay. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:17:41 And so that offends, like, one out of 10 people, but it builds community with 99 out of 100 people.

Tim Ferriss 2:17:46 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:17:47 But one of the things we would do to, to, like, make a little bit extra cash is, well, we had a buddy who was the postman.

Tim Ferriss 2:17:52 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:17:52 And so he would come into the store and, um, and he would say, "Hey, you know, 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 he'd be like, "So I get, I get all these f***ing CDs. Like, are they worth anything?"

Tim Ferriss 2:18:07 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:18:08 And so we, like, scanned the UPC symbols and we're like, "Oh my God, they're the same UPC symbols as the retail ones."

Tim Ferriss 2:18:13 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:18:14 So we would do a little trade, you know, 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:18:26 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:18:26 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 f***ing Limp Bizkit CD."

Tim Ferriss 2:18:40 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:18:41 And then you remember, CDs weren't cheap, right?

Tim Ferriss 2:18:43 Yeah, yeah.

Chris Sacca 2:18:43 So you do these things 20 or 25 at a time and you're like, "I'm rich, motherf***er. Let's go."

Tim Ferriss 2:18:47 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:18:49 We also did a thing where it was around the time that Napster started and, and we realized, like, music stores weren't for long.

Tim Ferriss 2:18:55 Mm-hmm.

Chris Sacca 2:18:55 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 in the privacy of their home, own home.

Tim Ferriss 2:19:09 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:19:09 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:19:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:19:27 But that's what it took to keep a music store afloat in, you know, 2000, 2001 in Park City.

Tim Ferriss 2:19:32 So what is the format of No Permanent Record?

Chris Sacca 2:19:35 I don't know, Tim.

Tim Ferriss 2:19:35 [laughs] Well, like, what are you gonna do? [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:19:38 I'm starting to have conversations with successful people where they talk about the small, like, 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, like the papers that they plagiarized, everything they did, and how that actually built some sense of humanity, resilience. The shit they got themselves into and the shit they got themselves out of.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:08 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:20:09 And, like, if it ends up just being the last archeological record of what it was like when we were human still-

Tim Ferriss 2:20:14 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:20:15 ... 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." And I'm like, we're over, we're past privileged assholes.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:27 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:20:27 We're just like, "Hey, that's kind of fucking amazing. You chalked IDs?" 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, like, 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 and pretend you were McLovin.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:54 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:20:54 We would do all kinds of things when there was room to still cut some corners, take some liberties.

Tim Ferriss 2:20:59 Let me reciprocate for a second. So I thought getting a fake ID would be a great idea. I don't know how old I was. It was, like, 14 or something. And my buddy and I, same guy who [laughs] was part of the other two fiascos, we decided to take a bus from Eastern Long Island, like three hours out, to go into the city. Now, this isn't, like, post-Giuliani, post-Bloomberg, like, friendly New York City with biking lanes through Times Square. This is, like, [laughs] much grittier New York City.

Chris Sacca 2:21:34 Yeah.

Tim Ferriss 2:21:34 So we, we get there to go on this adventure, and literally within hours we are both conned and mugged. [laughs] And like-

Chris Sacca 2:21:43 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 2:21:45 And 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, like, 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, uh, 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, like, asking police for help. I'm like, oh, that didn't work out as I thought it would. And then had to take the buses home, each of us thinking the other was dead, and that was a real growth experience. It was a learning opportunity.

Chris Sacca 2:22:25 Dude, I love it.

Tim Ferriss 2:22:27 I'm not recommending people do, like, the most reckless shit imaginable.

Chris Sacca 2:22:30 No, but maybe.

Tim Ferriss 2:22:31 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:22:31 But maybe, right? But maybe. I m- 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, I ... 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. S- 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, okay?

Tim Ferriss 2:22:58 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:22:59 Rest in peace, Sundowner. By the way, at one point while we were staying in that room, we were two queen beds, four guys, like, and my buddy nudges me and I'm like, "What, dude? What?" Like, we'd been out all night. You know, it's probably 2:00 in the afternoon, and he nudges me. He's like, "Bro, look. Look." I'm like, "What?" And he's like, "Look." And I look down at the foot of the bed, and at the foot of the bed is, like, a 12 to 14-year-old Southeast Asian kid-

Tim Ferriss 2:23:22 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:23:22 ... standing there staring at us.

Tim Ferriss 2:23:24 Gee, what? [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:23:26 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 ... But we were just absolutely frozen, like, "What is happening here?"

Tim Ferriss 2:23:40 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:23:40 And eventually the kid ran out and we called down. Apparently he had a key card that also worked in our door-

Tim Ferriss 2:23:46 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:23:46 ... and went into the wrong room. There was some innocent explanation for it. Yeah, sure. We think, we still think he was maybe there for some organs, but either way, that night we're out and ... God, what was this guy's fucking name? But we find ourself at Harrah's and a buddy says, "Hey, let's go get our shoes shined. What do you say?" So we go over to the shoe shine, and we're there and there's a fucking pimp over there.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:07 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:24:07 I mean, full on, like, player's ball situation.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:11 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:24:11 And he's got suede Hush Puppies on-

Tim Ferriss 2:24:13 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:24:14 ... so there's no reason he should be at the fucking shoe shine.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:17 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:24:17 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 roshambo.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:27 Yeah.

Chris Sacca 2:24:27 Rock, paper, scissors. You know, I consider myself above average.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:30 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:24:31 It's a talent I've honed over time. It is not a game of luck. It is a game of skill. And, and so I challenge this guy to a little roshambo, and I remember the stakes were if I win, we get to hang out with you tonight.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:44 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:24:44 So I beat the guy in rosham- that wasn't even a question. I thought this would be fucking great. We're learning ethnography. We get to go hang out with this fucking pimp.

Tim Ferriss 2:24:52 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:24:54 But we found ourself in some fucking hot water that night. I mean, this is pre The Hangover movie. We were in a couple situations. I [laughs] ... I ... Those were formative experiences. Like- 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, like, bullshitted their way in or out. You know, I feel like no one's gotten a chance to sell anything. Almost everyone I know who's been a successful entrepreneur sold something

Tim Ferriss 2:25:27 Oh, yeah. For sure

Chris Sacca 2:25:28 ... whether it was candy in school or door-to-door, or they sold something, and sometimes that just meant they worked in a Foot Locker and, you know, or they worked in a RadioShack, 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, but a lot of those sales were shady. Like, how do you mark it up? How do you sell those... I mean, I remember we had a cable guy in Washington, DC named Lucky.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:53 [laughs] It's, it's the guy who would trick out your box? The, like, the black box?

Chris Sacca 2:25:57 Yes.

Tim Ferriss 2:25:58 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:25:58 Yes, and then he came back and stole everything at our house.

Tim Ferriss 2:26:01 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:26:01 But, but [laughs] we didn't realize that Lucky's assistant was casing everything.

Tim Ferriss 2:26:06 It was lucky for Lucky, yeah. [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:26:09 Yes. I need more stories like that in my life. If we really are going down in flames, I wanna record for posterity all the banged up shit we did that informed who we were. And, like, after hanging out with high school buddies this weekend, I was just reminded of, like, how important that is, the bonds that come from that. You and I have a mutual buddy, I won't say 'cause I don't know if he's said this out loud, but he and his wife, their 11th grade daughter came home buzzed the other... like a month ago, and she was trying to sneak up, and they kind of were like, "Are... You been drinking?" And she's like, "Uh," and they're... [laughs] And he couldn't help himself, but the words that came out of his mouth were like, "Thank God."

Tim Ferriss 2:26:46 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:26:46 And she's like, "What?" And the mom was like, "Oh, phew, what a relief."

Tim Ferriss 2:26:50 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:26:51 And the girl was so like, "What are you talking about?" And they're like, "We just thought you'd never do it. Like, we thought you'd never fucking try it."

Tim Ferriss 2:26:57 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:26:57 It was such a mindfuck, but I just worry. I mean, Crystal, you know, my wife, whose GPA was 0.02, you know, 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, DC 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, you know, or before the cops show up. But even in high school she used... She lived on a compound. 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. Like, that's fucking rad.

Tim Ferriss 2:27:45 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:27:46 You know? Like, that's part of what makes Crystal so fucking awesome right now.

Tim Ferriss 2:27:50 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:27:50 I need to memorialize these things for the benefit of humanity before we're all obviated. Like, 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:28:15 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:28:16 I'm lucky that I have all daughters, but when they invite boys over to the house, I watch boys make bad decisions repeatedly.

Tim Ferriss 2:28:22 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:28:22 And at first I was like, wait, why is the patriarchy a thing when I watch them be so fucking stupid-

Tim Ferriss 2:28:27 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:28:28 ... 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?

Tim Ferriss 2:28:34 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:28:35 Like, of course that was gonna break. Like... 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. Like, I've had to teach our team the number one thing you can be in this business is unpredictable. I am known as mercurial. I burn bridges. Like, I will not hesitate to fucking fight you.

Tim Ferriss 2:28:56 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:28:57 I wear the stupid shirts. I don't give a shit about much. Like, I've been known to just light it on fire.

Tim Ferriss 2:29:02 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:29:02 And guess what? People take me seriously as a result, right? I haven't backed down from all those fucking character flaws I have that are very self-destructive. But, like, I am all gas, no fucking brakes, as you know.

Tim Ferriss 2:29:15 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:29:15 Although in our line, we call it [laughs] no gas, no brakes. But we need to cultivate more of that-

Tim Ferriss 2:29:20 Mm

Chris Sacca 2:29:20 ... if we have any hope as a fucking species. We just need to. I'm sorry.

Tim Ferriss 2:29:24 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:29:24 That's where I drop the fucking mic.

Tim Ferriss 2:29:26 [laughs] Yeah.

Chris Sacca 2:29:26 So, that's No Permanent Record. Tim Ferriss, you are going to be one of the very first guests.

Tim Ferriss 2:29:31 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:29:31 And we're gonna go deep into all your hijinks, all your fucking skeletons.

Tim Ferriss 2:29:35 Yep.

Chris Sacca 2:29:36 No felonies. The main rule is no felonies.

Tim Ferriss 2:29:39 No felonies. Yeah, no felonies. I'm clear there.

Chris Sacca 2:29:41 If you have murdered-

Tim Ferriss 2:29:42 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:29:43 ... like, I worry-

Tim Ferriss 2:29:44 Oh, that time. [laughs] Mass grave, what a mistake.

Chris Sacca 2:29:48 If it was justifiable homicide.

Tim Ferriss 2:29:50 Should've used more lye.

Chris Sacca 2:29:51 No, hijinks. Hijinks. Flimflams. Like, bamboozling, you know?

Tim Ferriss 2:29:57 Hijinks and flimflams. [laughs] That's gotta be in your intro when you're like, "Welcome to No Permanent Record."

Chris Sacca 2:30:03 A little razzle-dazzle.

Tim Ferriss 2:30:05 Where the flimflams, bamboozling has a home.

Chris Sacca 2:30:07 Yes.

Chris Sacca 2:30:08 Do you know any card tricks?

Tim Ferriss 2:30:10 I used to know quite a few card tricks. I've, I've let that atrophy, so I don't anymore. Yeah.

Chris Sacca 2:30:15 Our kids are good at card tricks. It's important. And we have, I have rigged decks and stuff. I think it's important to know how to do some fucking magic tricks, 'cause magic is storytelling.

Tim Ferriss 2:30:24 Yep.

Chris Sacca 2:30:24 It is deceit. It is understanding to look for the angles. Like, I love that. I love when kids know riddles. I love when they have bar bets that are impossible. Like, you know, I think everyone should be able to tell a good joke. I'm back to-

Tim Ferriss 2:30:37 Yeah

Chris Sacca 2:30:37 ... like, my syllabus of how to fucking survive. It's not just, like, the survival list 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, like you?

Tim Ferriss 2:30:52 Maybe the semester finale for your seminar is people have to get up and do a two to five-minute comedy set [laughs] or something like that. That's the final exam.

Chris Sacca 2:31:04 In front of a bunch of people in MAGA hats.

Tim Ferriss 2:31:06 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:31:08 Yeah. I'm gonna find the worst fucking hecklers.

Tim Ferriss 2:31:10 Or whatever your nightmare audience is. It could be a bunch of ultra left- ... libs or whatever, you know?

Chris Sacca 2:31:15 You model who's actually on stage and like, here we go.

Tim Ferriss 2:31:18 [laughs]

Chris Sacca 2:31:18 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.

Tim Ferriss 2:31:30 Even if you want to hang out with people who are