My Most Viral Tweet Ever

Tings Newsletter #5

Every month, I send out a newsletter of my random thoughts on random tings. Who am I? I'm an ex-founder figuring out what to do with my time. I write about life, money, and everything in-between. Subscribe here.

I wrote my most viral tweet ever with over 25,000 likes and over 3M impressions. It was about Airbnb cleaning fees.
The points I was trying to make: a) the requests from hosts are getting ridiculous (he asked us to clean up the crumbs and rinse/sort the recycling), and b) hosts are now setting a low nightly rate and charging an insane cleaning fee. In our case, it was $400 followed by sending us a long to-do list of cleaning tasks *after* we booked the Airbnb.
I like this trend around Personal Holding Companies. One entrepreneur. Multiple businesses. Mix between cashflow and equity. From startups to laundromats to Youtube channels. I think more entrepreneurs, creators, and operators will go down this path instead of trying to hit the $1B unicorn milestone.
FIRE is a popular concept which stands for Financially Independent, Retire Early. But most of us are not hardwired to do *nothing*. I came across a version of this called FIWOOT, which stands for Financially Independent, Work on our Terms. We want to keep working but on what we want, how we want, when we want, and with whom we want.
I was thinking about WOOT after reading this New York Times article on Happiness. What makes people unhappy? "Many of us work far too hard at jobs with people we don’t like." This along with long commutes to work are two main sources of unhappiness.
So, what makes us happy? "The activities that make people happiest include sex, exercise and gardening. The data-driven answer to life is as follows: Be with your love, on an 80-degree and sunny day, overlooking a beautiful body of water, having sex." The best things in life are free.
My parenting goal is to raise our daughter where she won't need therapy due to my parenting 😂. Jokes aside, I shared some lessons as a first-time parent.
I'm pretty bullish on ETH. This is a good read on the upcoming merge. Ethereum will be able to to process 100,000 transactions per second following the completion of 5 key phases.
The tax benefits for real estate are extremely favorable. You could theoretically never pay taxes if you invest/own real estate with the trifecta of a) 1031 exchange when you sell; b) accelerated depreciation to offset any passive income and c) cash-out refinance to take our your initial investment.
If one were to FIRE and have no W2 job, they could pay 0% in taxes, legally.
Some personal updates: I bleached my hair blond. I bought a new Land Rover Defender. I'm considering a tattoo. Why not?
I'm considering a *temporary* tattoo. This new company Ephemeral Tattoo will ink you up with a real tattoo that will fade in 9-15 months.
Just finished my first podcast interview in over 5+ years. We talked about happiness, balance, and boredom. I'm doing a lot of research into happiness. If you have read or consumed anything novel on the subject, please send.
As part of that process, I finally got my initial audio setup. I went with the Rode Procaster, Wave XLR, and Rode PSA1+ Boom Arm.
Here's some excellent TV content: The Bear, Players (if you play League of Legends) and Rap Sh!t. If I were 13 years old today, I would totally be training to become a professional e-sports gamer.
Our Bosch fridge broke so I started to shop around for a new fridge. This bespoke fridge from Samsung is 🔥. Two types of ice! Lemon water! What?! (Side note: get a surge protector for your appliances.)
Some cool shit is popping up in Brooklyn: Padel Haus, Brooklyn Greens, and Bathhouse.
I am still using TickTick as my task manager. It's a little buggy but gets the job done. But I saw this app called Akiflow, which allows you to manage your time and tasks in one place. I'm not going to switch yet but feel this is the closest to what I would want in an app.
If you are tired of getting spam snail mail, sign up for Paper Karma.
Good reminder: creative people need time to sit around and do nothing.