In the last decade, Stanford University has produced fraudsters that have destroyed AT LEAST 15-20x more capital than Bernie Madoff ever did.

What the hell is going on there?

If you want to understand how Silicon Valley VC fundraising actually works, then you MUST read or listen to this book.

It’s a very quick read. Perhaps an hour or so. But it is incredibly illuminating.

The author raised more than $972M in total.

Breslow raised a Series D round of $393M at an $11B valuation and then abruptly shut down the company just seven months later.

If you’ve never seen the AMC show Rubicon (2011), you should.

It starts off very slow, but it’s worth it.

Imagine being the so-called professional investor who sent this guy a wire for $300M+, only to see the investment go to zero within 7 months.

It might be even worse than FTX.

I’m still thinking about that tweet where someone listed all the remaining (comically hysterical and gross) DeSantis holdouts on Twitter and pointed out that they are all childless older men. Imagine being told that your ride or die praetorian guard is nine sad old gays. Two of them are probably child molesters. Those are your true believers. You’d have to quit politics. How could you go on after that?

Why do rich people still give hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the obviously failed DeSantis campaign?

Because rich people still give hundreds of thousands of dollars to support the obviously failed DeSantis campaign.

The campaign now exists only to serve as an apparatus to get an eclectic group of multi-decamillionaires and billionaires in the same room with one another.

It’s a networking circuit for rich people who fancy politics as one of their main hobbies. Non-controversial, inconsequential presidential campaigns are great for this.

Nikki Haley’s fundraising events are fantastic places to meet billionaire Indian businessmen, for example.

Getting this much quality time with people of this caliber would otherwise take many months, or even years, of coordinating dates for rounds of golf at Augusta.

So spending $20K or so to be in the same room with this cohort of people for 3 or 4 hours is an absolute bargain.

Unless you’ve spent time in that world, you wouldn’t understand. You couldn’t possibly grasp the concept. Just take my word for it.

Why does the Republican Party recruit busty escorts to serve in Congress?

Because when the busty escorts show up to fundraisers, the donors (most of whom are elderly and obese men) contribute significantly more money.

When Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace show up at the Capitol Hill Club, the check sizes instantly go up by at least 20%. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

Republican mega-donors are generally not sophisticates.

It’s a very blue collar crowd. The guy who stumbled into a concrete business that he somehow managed to sell for $104M before deciding that politics would be a fun hobby.

Once you understand this, it will make a lot more sense why the Republican Party increasingly looks indistinguishable from a Hooters restaurant.

Dems do the same, btw.

Oliver Stone’s documentary Nuclear Now (2022) is very good.

They call it a bike crash.

Just like they called the Waukesha Rampage a “car crash.”

How could you be 56 years old and not know what dry ice is?

Western women, on average, want men to accept total responsibility for their safety, well-being and financial misadventures (most come with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan debt). And yet they want these same men to have zero authority over them—“girls trips” to Miami, constant drunkenness, inappropriate online behavior, shopping addictions, etc.

Being responsible for something or someone, without having any authority as to them, is wrong.