Founder and CEO of Viahart, a consumer products company. Founder and former CEO of Edison, a legal tech company. Doer of many things.
- Tweets 153,026
- Following 2,497
- Followers 88,183
- Likes 226,174
Batam is the most interesting place you've never heard of.
- 1.3 million people
- Free trade zone with salaries MUCH lower than China
- Indonesian island <1 hour by boat from Singapore
- Where your Apple Airtags are made
- Roaring economy
- Great and improving infrastructure
- Streamlined govt approvals
I see it as VERY significant in America's effort to reassert control of its supply chains of critical manufactured goods.
Bullish on Batam.
ALT business times
43
65
667
47,563
Which countries in Subsarahan Africa have the best developed human capital?
For total human capital, the answer is Nigeria then Ethiopia then a huge dropoff.
But which country's median citizen has the most developed human capital in Subsaharan Africa?
IME it's Zimbabwe.
29
13
109
21,246
The next up countries:
Major low-to-middle income countries that can become high income in next 10-20 years
🇹🇷 Turkey
🇻🇳 Vietnam
🇺🇿 Uzbekistan
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan
🇮🇳 India
🇮🇷 [Xitter changed their flag]
🇰🇵 [censored]
Very simple rubric for this:
Chess, math, and education levels.
61
38
457
85,571
Bald men are slowly going extinct.
Drugs like minoxidil and finasteride and medical tourism hair transplants have become so popular amongst Millenials and Zoomers, that bald men or even balding men are becoming increasingly rare.
Sexual markers are dynamic and balding may become a powerful counter signal to women with the sense to recognize it as such.
ALT Christian Vierig copyright
47
2
119
32,918
Love is like a drug but I’ve never regretted taking it.
It feels really good.
You know you’re under the influence of something.
And maybe there is a hangover but it’s not too bad.
And you get better at managing those hangovers with practice.
Go out there and fall in love!
5
3
56
4,671
Wow, not only did this British guy end up founding his own country in Borneo (which his family held for over 70 years), but he was gay.
1
11
6,228
“Indonesia and Vietnam will never be first world. Looks the infrastructure. They can’t build shit. China…”
First of all, there will never be another China.
Second of all, if you think Indonesia and Vietnam suck at infrastructure let me tell you about the country that did this.
33
11
450
75,094
Unbelievable articles from the bowels of Wikipedia.
There was a 3 generation white monarchy on the island of Borneo from 1841 to 1946 which took power independent of any nation until losing it to the Japanese invasion.
45
150
2,314
104,643
Raising your testosterone isn’t just about working out and having big muscles.
It’s psychological.
Every day there are cool things, big and small, that you want to do that you are not doing because…
Because…
?
You’ve fallen into the habit of avoiding the slight discomfort that comes from being different.
This video is step 1 towards unlocking the superpower of becoming invincible to the nothing that happens when you do something different.
14
8
122
10,651
Chinese in Indonesia factory boss just told me that the salaries are 40% of China.
Just one problem though:
1 Chinese does the work of 3 Indonesians.
They just opened their factory and they say they need more time to increase worker efficiency.
39
53
1,125
188,755
Our government is so bad, you have to laugh.
Like wtf are we doing here?
You can’t give people shit education and then let them buy whatever they want.
It just destroys the whole country.
Paroxetine (Paxil) is harder to come off of than nearly every opioid. Significantly harder than Fentanyl.
Right now, $HIMS is selling it as a male sexual enhancement drug (which is the tip of the iceberg of the effects it has).
6
1
52
14,838
An underdiscussed aspect of AI is how easy it makes it to ask questions about religion and get answers of a quality and objectivity that was impossible pre-AI.
12
1
28
4,549
Most wars can be explained as
An ethnosupremacist country
Vs
An ideosupramacist country
Ethnosupremacy = our people are better than your people
Ideosupremacy = our ideas are better than your ideas
Let’s look at some examples starting with ww2:
Nazi Germany = German people are superior
Imperial Japan = same
Both ethnosupremacists
Soviet Union = communism is the best
USA = capitalist American melting pot is the best
Vietnam war:
Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh = people think communist but actually nationalist!
USA = didn’t care about the people. Cared about stopping communism! Ideas!!
Iraq war:
Saddam was an Arab nationalist!
Iran - Iraq war:
Iran was an ideological Islamic caliphate, not a Persian nationalist superstate.
Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
And countries are not fixed.
Russia went from being a Russian nationalist state to an ideas based one in the 1917 revolution.
China under Mao was about ideas. It still is. But in 20 years I think it will be about the claimed superiority of the people.
America used to be about ideas but today it feels like there is a war over its soul.
Will be an ethnosupremacist or an ideosupremacist?
19
4
38
5,850
Practical advice for everyone with a business:
Skate to where the puck is going to algo.
In other words, ignore the algorithm, focus on where the algorithm wants to go.
I care minimally about the current X algorithm.
“Quote post this. Reply like that. Mention Tesla positively.”
Fuck that.
Take all the energy that you’re allocating to ephemeral optimizations and just put it into better content.
Because that is actually what the algorithm is looking for.
So when it changes, your competition gets wiped out, but you keep moving in the right direction.
Same thing works for us on Amazon.
“Add the product to carts. Do Amazon posts. Do this insanely complicated advertising thing.”
No.
Instead make your products better and build your brand.
Amazon constantly changes its algorithms illogically but in the long run they have to surface good well reviewed products.
So we just focus on that.
And it works.
Despite being in a viciously competitive space where our competition cheats continuously and where the buyer pool is going extinct (yes fewer children in USA today than in 2006), we survive and thrive.
Because we are nor wasting precious cognitive energy on trends and capricious algorithm optimization.
Skate to where the puck is going to algo.
You’ll save a lot of energy and make much more money in the long run.
9
1
78
5,777
I noticed something fascinating recently.
People who live long lives tend to be frank!
I used to think it was when they got old, they’d stop giving a shit what people thought about them so they’d let it fly, but I’ve now realized they were always like this.
It also seems to be a cross racial phenomenon.
Let that shit out. Don’t keep it all inside.
You’ll feel better for it.
And on that note, yall should really be nicer to me.
I am constantly out here putting out innovative never repeat content while doing good things for the people.
Cmon now, have a little respect for the poor old daddy
ALT Instagram
ALT Brittanica
21
7
156
8,328
I am no fan of the Trizzler but I don’t think we should give him a final judgement until his political career ends.
Do I like what he’s doing and done?
No, but he may have different information from what we have and in that context, his actions may be better justified.
Further, while many of his policies appear to be failures, he does at least seem to be trying things, aggressively trying things in fact.
Wrong or not, trying things, when those before you didn’t, has a value.
Trump always reminds me of Mao Zedong.
The impression I get from many Chinese, while they may not say so, is their view of Mao is as follows:
“He was horrible, and I’m not sure he knew what was doing, but we kind of needed it in order to get where we are today.”
And somehow that’s what I think Trump’s legacy will be.
He will be respected, but beneath that veneer of respect will be an understanding that he was destructive, yet necessary.
I don’t know though 🤷♂️ this is just a feeling.
We will see!
51
3
136
40,024
1 year ago we leased a warehouse with the rent tied to the local price of a Big Mac hamburger.
It increased 4.8% in one year so that is how much our renter's rent will rise.
I thought it'd go up more, but we'll be lucky if the renter finishes the lease term.
We got the Big Mac 🍔 lease signed 🙏
We spent more time discussing whether or not it was fair to tie the rent increases to the price of a Big Mac than the rent itself.
I am feeling grateful that this got done so I will pass some value onto y’all:
1. Personally guaranteeing real estate loans, especially if it requires tenants, construction, government approvals, or variable interest rates, is insane. Do not do it. If we had had debt on this property I would have been at best miserable, for years, and it would’ve made me bad at my job, so I couldn’t make more money, from lost sleep and stress.
2. I have regretted every single exclusivity deal I have ever done in my life. Every single one. Exclusive distributor in country X. Regret. Exclusive distributor in country Y. Regret. Exclusive buyers broker. Regret. This property was under a sellers broker for a year. With the exception of one pickle ball tenant who managed to negotiate himself out of the deal, no interest. In 3.5 months, we got it rented without a broker. Thank you to @michaelpatron0 for noticing that the building was in flex real estate category, not industrial on Loopnet. Changing the category greatly increased our leads.
3. My thesis on why this investment was going to work out in the end was contrarian but right. It was simple but I’ve never heard anyone else say it. A. Elon is the greatest entrepreneur of all time. B. Tesla is in Austin C. People in America do not understand manufacturing. When a big manufacturer comes to town it doesn’t just create jobs directly. It creates jobs and economic activity for the company’s suppliers which must be local because manufacturing is physical stuff not digital. Those suppliers sometimes even need local suppliers. So I decided to build a building that could do Ecommerce distribution (still hot at the time) and manufacturing. Ultimately the tenant was a supplier of a supplier to Tesla.
4. Location. Location. Location. But also build the right product. We are right on a highway. The location seems far but it’s actually close time wise. It’s high visibility and if necessary the buildings can switch to retail because of the volume of cars on the road. Here’s the key point. Austin is completely overbuilt with industrial real estate now and some of it is in good or even better locations. We got ours rented because A. we built for ecom and manufacturing B. Very important, we built steel and not tilt wall concrete. Our building cost was lower and even more importantly, our property taxes are lower. This meant we could undercut the entire market on rent. Actually the entire market.
Final thoughts:
I got into real estate and construction because I’m arrogant and hotheaded (that exclusive buyers broker insulted me and I literally bought land to prove him wrong 🤦♂️). It has been a distraction to my main business, but I’ve learned a lot and wouldn’t feel like a complete human until I had built something (obviously, I didn’t hand build it but I did design it with a team). The other reason I did it is my wife. I knew that if I were to die she could never run our main business but she could be an industrial landlord, which afaict is much easier than residential landlord because industrial tenants can fix their own stuff and are more responsible.
I want to thank (in no particular order) Pizza P @michaelpatron0, Elon for signing that Samsung chip deal recently, my team which managed the construction, my builder, my guy who reduces our property taxes on contingency (Zach Fleming from @girdley), our tenant, the fire marshall, and everyone who replied to my posts about this “journey” 🤦♂️ over the years (yes we built first building for ourselves starting in march 2021 for ourselves, then second now rented in early 2024).
While this is a happy post, we have construction to do to welcome the tenant and something bad will definitely happen which kills the financial returns.
But that’s life! It’s good to build something REAL.
11
2
82
38,597
I’m sorry but there is zero chance the USA did better than Vietnam at math without cheating.
Having two kids at school in China (although in international schools most of the classmates are Chinese) I can confirm that maths is the most important subject
Obviously not all are geniuses but with the quantity of graduates you can understand why China is at the top in hard skills (AI, robotics etc)
9
1
25
9,930