What a moment for Norway and their fans as they qualify for the Round of 32 of the 2026 World Cup and celebrate in style with their traditional rowing movement 🇳🇴🚣
🚨 FORMER FERRARI CHAIRMAN WHEN ASKED ABOUT NEW ELECTRIC FERRARI:
“I cannot say what I really think... I would harm Ferrari.
I hope they at least remove the prancing horse."
Hundreds of thousands gather to protest against the government in Belgrade, Serbia.
After getting Orban out, anything is possible! Cheering for you guys until October! 🇭🇺❤️🇷🇸
My net worth peaked at $1.2 million.
None of it was real.
I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off.
I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier."
The frontier closed last week.
It's a mobile app now.
Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me.
I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs.
The avatars didn't have legs.
I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis.
I called myself a "digital land baron."
I put it in my Twitter bio.
I put it in my LinkedIn headline.
I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts.
My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment.
My actual apartment has furniture.
Location, location, location.
My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court.
I held.
Diamond hands.
That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait.
A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users.
He said I didn't understand the technology.
I didn't.
I still bought more.
We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts.
We voted to "acquire strategic parcels."
The vote passed unanimously.
I voted four times.
My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY."
The slide had a rocket emoji.
That was my entire financial model.
In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000.
It's worth $14,000 now.
I don't talk about the Ape.
I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera.
My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was.
I said "digital art on the blockchain."
She asked why it cost more than her car.
I said "you don't understand Web3."
She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment."
She's not in my Discord.
Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million.
It's worth about $90,000 now.
I felt better about mine after I heard that.
That's community.
WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero.
We're all gonna make it.
None of us made it.
But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something.
It doesn't.
But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus.
Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse.
I need to say that again.
$84 billion.
More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines.
They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets.
It lives on as a mobile app.
My beachfront villa is now a mobile app.
Location, location, location.
Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that."
Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025.
That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun.
They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables."
The pivot took four years and $84 billion.
I pivoted too.
I'm an AI real estate investor now.
I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models."
I don't know what that means.
I gave him $40,000.
He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan.
The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank.
Q4 is always blank.
That's where the exit scam goes.
My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes.
I said $1.2 million.
He said "current market value."
I said $6,400.
He stared at me for eleven seconds.
I know because I counted.
He asked if I had any other investments.
I showed him my NFTs.
He stared for longer.
I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance."
He asked if I'd considered a 401k.
I told him a 401k was "legacy finance."
He told me to leave his office.
The metaverse is dead.
I don't accept that.
I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car.
Location, location, location.
The location is nowhere.
But I'm early.
I'm always early.
That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.
Eastern Europe is the most exploitable talent arbitrage on the planet right now and almost nobody in the Western business world is paying attention because they're too busy overpaying for mid work from the Philippines and India…
Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Croatia. Average salaries $500-1,000/month. But the talent coming out of these countries isn't $500/month talent. It's $5,000-8,000/month talent priced at a tenth of what you'd pay in the US because the local economy hasn't caught up to the skill level yet
That gap is the exploit
Every other "hire cheap overseas" conversation defaults to Southeast Asia or South Asia. And sure, the prices are low. But anyone who's actually tried to scale operations in those regions knows the pattern. Language barriers. Cultural disconnect. Equipment issues. Endless training loops. You spend more time managing output than you save in cost. The $4/hour rate sounds nice until you're on revision 14 and the work still isn't usable
Eastern Europe skips all of that
These countries have legitimate university systems. Strong STEM education. English fluency across the entire 18-30 demographic, sometimes better than native speakers in the US (not even joking). They grew up on the same internet, same memes, same cultural references. Zero cultural gap when working with Western businesses. You don't need to explain context. You don't need to translate intent. They just get it
And they have real infrastructure. Laptops. Fast wifi. Proper software. Modern tools. You're not onboarding someone who needs you to walk them through basic setup. You're hiring someone who's already operating at a professional level but happens to live in a country where $1,000/month is a great salary
The applications go way beyond content. Developers in Bucharest building full-stack apps for $1,500/month that would cost you $8-12k from a US agency. Designers in Belgrade producing brand assets at agency quality for $800/month. Sales closers in Sofia running calls in perfect English for $1,000/month plus commission. Media buyers in Warsaw managing $50k+/month ad accounts for $1,200/month. Copywriters, project managers, data analysts, customer support, operations managers. Every single role in your business can be filled from Eastern Europe at 80-90% cost reduction with zero quality drop
The training speed is the real cheat code though. Hand someone in Bucharest a brief on Monday and you get back usable output by Wednesday. Not "needs 6 rounds of feedback" output. Actually usable, deploy-immediately output. The baseline competency is just different when the talent pool is educated, tech-native, and hungry
It's common now for operators running lean businesses to have their entire team in Eastern Europe except themselves. 4-8 people. Total payroll $5-8k/month. Output equivalent to a $40-60k/month US team. The business runs 24/7 because the time zone overlap with the US is actually perfect for async work
(btw it doesn't hurt that Eastern Europe has the baddest bitches on the planet. If you need on-camera talent for any kind of brand content targeting Western audiences, a girl in Sofia or Bucharest is visually indistinguishable from a girl in LA but costs a fraction. The talent pool for that specific use case is bottomless and nobody's tapped it properly yet)
The freelance platforms are the worst place to find these people. The best ones are in local Facebook groups, Telegram channels, and Eastern European Twitter. You DM 50 people, 40 respond within hours because an $800/month retainer is life-changing money and they actually take pride in the work. The talent density is absurd once you know where to look
The race played out exactly as expected. And we really need a fast reaction from the FIA and FOM.
The drivers can’t race in these cars, it’s nothing more than position swaps through battery dumps that then get reversed back to how it was unless a driver does an aggressive barge into the other guy. They’re too energy starved for the drivers to do anything but listen to their battery management engineer on where to lift or brake earlier to try and scour a tad more energy to use the overtake button.
George struggled to get past a 7-8 tenths per lap slower Ferrari, and needed a pit stop sequence. In the best car with the best PU by a mile. That’s where we are at.
I don’t recall a single non-lap-1 true racing move overtake - swapping spots temporarily via battery until the battery also swaps you back is not an “overtake”, and it’s certainly not racing. I’ll have to scour some highlights.
Needless to say, it’s what we thought it would be.