Founder @Galleon | Building AI-based tools for real estate investors. Fan of freedom, self-reliance, and old books.
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Joined December 2008
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Bring back wrought iron gates
once owned by an Abraham Lincoln descendant, this thing is called the Sword Gate House postandcourier.com/business/…
It's good practice to assume all your Zoom and Google Meets are already being recorded, whether you know it or not.
The implications are myriad, but at the most basic level, we'll become more withholding about what we share, and more careful about who we share it with.
The alpha in attending conferences used to be hanging out at the bar in the evenings. That's where you'd pick up the best bits that made the conference educationally valuable. In a post-Meta Glasses / AI wearable world, this behavior will shift, too.
We behave predictably when we know we're being recorded or tested. (It's no coincidence looksmaxxing took off post-lockdown, as the world moved to video meetings and people spent hours a day staring at themselves and being seen.)
As we're increasingly recorded everywhere, online and in person, we'll become more guarded.
And as a second-order consequence, our relationships will probably become more superficial, too.
Fairly soon we’ll likely be recording (almost) all conversations by default. Listening devices everywhere makes it happen passively, and then we’ll want the benefits of automated note taking and follow up by our AI assistants.
How does this change life and society? I think it will be pretty dramatic. Consider arguments (both personal and professional) in the context of an instantly searchable history of every prior convo.
Related - we’ll likely get an extensive bio of someone upon first meeting them (whether via smart glasses or something else.) And this bio isn’t just a resume, it could include their spiciest social media posts if you wanted. How does that change social gatherings? You bump into someone at a rave or sporting event and can see…anything relevant from their public history.
Will happen, and it'll require banks to evolve from monetizing inertia.
How I think it'll go
- Agents make instant-access deposits more price-sensitive.
- Balances that can leave instantly no longer profitable
- Banks offer better terms for more predictable funding (more CD like)
- Customers will have to choose between immediate access at a lower yield or higher yield in exchange for notice / lock up
But I wouldn't bet against banks, because the house always wins. They'll just find their margin somewhere else.
Amanda Orson retweeted
Control of real estate is the hidden business model beneath many of the world's greatest businesses.
- McDonald's: Looks like a fast food business, but famously a real estate and franchise-rent business.
- Data centers: Looks like computing infra, but its a race to secure a combination of land, water, power, and operating permits.
- Railroads: Looks like transportation. But its rapid 19th century expansion (and current stagnation) hinges on rights-of-way, land grants, and control of critical corridors.
- Billboards: Looks like advertising but it's really control of scarce, highly visible locations. Have you ever read $LAMR quarterly earnings reports? They explicitly say permitting restrictions are barriers to competitor entry. They own 11,200 parcels and lease another 71,500.
- Cell towers: Looks like telecom, but it's really control of strategically located sites. The towers can accommodate multiple tenants, on land they either own or control through a long-term lease, and then sublease to carriers.
- Oil & gas: This one is obvious, but the whole industry hinges on the control of mineral rights and resource-rich land.
- Timber: Looks like a commodity, but its a real estate & optionality play. Ex: $WY finds and buys timberland first, but will leverage it for "higher and better use" incl mineral rights, nat gas, wind, and solar.
- Warehouses: Looks like distribution, but it's really the purchase of proximity to customers and transportation networks.
Heck, even space and satellites. It's not "real estate" right? But it's still control of a usable position in a shared and finite physical environment, coupled with permission to operate there.
If you look under the hood of every major* company you'll see the same pattern...control of:
Location
Scarcity
Access
Entitlements
Rights
These are durable moats competitors can't easily replicate.
And in many cases, the physical asset / rights attached to it will outlast the business operating on top of them.
Spend less time studying what companies sell, and more time thinking about what they control.
--
*one exception: fully remote software companies
Control of real estate is the hidden business model beneath many of the world's greatest businesses.
- McDonald's: Looks like a fast food business, but famously a real estate and franchise-rent business.
- Data centers: Looks like computing infra, but its a race to secure a combination of land, water, power, and operating permits.
- Railroads: Looks like transportation. But its rapid 19th century expansion (and current stagnation) hinges on rights-of-way, land grants, and control of critical corridors.
- Billboards: Looks like advertising but it's really control of scarce, highly visible locations. Have you ever read $LAMR quarterly earnings reports? They explicitly say permitting restrictions are barriers to competitor entry. They own 11,200 parcels and lease another 71,500.
- Cell towers: Looks like telecom, but it's really control of strategically located sites. The towers can accommodate multiple tenants, on land they either own or control through a long-term lease, and then sublease to carriers.
- Oil & gas: This one is obvious, but the whole industry hinges on the control of mineral rights and resource-rich land.
- Timber: Looks like a commodity, but its a real estate & optionality play. Ex: $WY finds and buys timberland first, but will leverage it for "higher and better use" incl mineral rights, nat gas, wind, and solar.
- Warehouses: Looks like distribution, but it's really the purchase of proximity to customers and transportation networks.
Heck, even space and satellites. It's not "real estate" right? But it's still control of a usable position in a shared and finite physical environment, coupled with permission to operate there.
If you look under the hood of every major* company you'll see the same pattern...control of:
Location
Scarcity
Access
Entitlements
Rights
These are durable moats competitors can't easily replicate.
And in many cases, the physical asset / rights attached to it will outlast the business operating on top of them.
Spend less time studying what companies sell, and more time thinking about what they control.
--
*one exception: fully remote software companies
Amanda Orson retweeted
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5.
I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38.
He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations.
0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders.
55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
Going to share a secret
If you need a loan, the first place to go shopping is not the internet. Or Chase, Wells, BoA, et al
1. Go to iBankNet ibanknet.com/bankmap/index.s…
2. Select the state you want to buy the asset in - real estate, business, or where you live personally.
This will display the list of banks (or credit unions) in descending order of AUM
3. Start calling banks from this list.
Some local banks are shockingly large - ex there's one in...WV? you've probably never heard of with 27B AUM.
Your local banks have plenty of money to lend, and your loan matters WAY more to them than, say, JPMC (who banks 1 in 3 Americans) where you're a drop in the bucket.
Which usually means a real person will work with you on terms.
This works whether you need a mortgage, a DSCR loan, a construction or bridge loan, or money to buy a business.
Never doom.
AI is a tool like any other. A paintbrush in Rembrandt's hands is quite different from a paintbrush in yours.
Work to be the Rembrandt of your field.
Worried about AI / agents breaking your business model?
The faster technology moves, the more I think about Bezos' question
What won't change in the next 10 years?
Things I've been writing down over time:
- Humans will always need shelter, food, energy, and healthcare.
- The desire for ownership and the accumulation of wealth.
- The physical world will move more slowly than the digital one.
- Every increase in technological capability, especially AI, will require more energy.
- People and businesses will continue to need access to capital.
- Capital will continue to seek returns that exceed inflation.
- Underwriting methods evolve, but demand for credit (loans) is persistent.
- Trust remains scarce and becomes increasingly valuable as content, code, and fraud become cheaper.
- Verified identities and reputation becomes more important as information becomes abundant and synthetic.
- Long-term wealth creation and dynastic (multi-generational) thinking predate modern technology, and will persist.
- Coordination and transaction costs never fully disappear; market friction will continue to justify the existence of firms and intermediaries.
- People will continue to compete for status.
- Consumers will pay a premium for products and services that confer status.
- Time remains fixed at 24 hours per day.
- But attention is a finite resource and an enduring constraint.
- Products that credibly save time (or enable delegation) have a perpetual market.
- Inaccessible, proprietary data will be a persistent moat. The more inaccessible and difficult to aggregate, the deeper the moat.
- People want accountability, recourse, and clearly identifiable responsibility when things go wrong.
- Regulation consistently lags technological innovation.
- Compliance requirements, licensing, and regulatory moats persist even when machines can perform the underlying task.
- Local knowledge remains valuable and difficult to replicate.
- Heterogeneous markets (like real estate) continue to reward people with deep contextual understanding.
- Incumbent organizations tend to underinvest in disrupting their own businesses, which always creates opportunities for challengers.
Bezos' insight on what wouldn't change in 10 years was "Customers will always want lower prices and faster delivery."
It's boring/ true, but I think that's the point.
Everything we build today can and will be rebuilt more cheaply, faster by someone else.
Build on the invariants, not the trends.
What have I missed?
Seems like a wildly underserved, growing real estate and business niche.
Some interesting data on senior housing. Occupancy hit 89.9% in Q2, the highest level since 2015.
Meanwhile, new inventory grew just 0.4% year over year, with fewer than 16,000 units under construction across the 31 largest U.S. markets.
Demand continues to grow, and almost nothing new is being built.
"Build relationships with lenders before you need them."
But how do you figure out who that is?
You can approach it from a few ways, but I like to reverse engineer backward from who
1. lends in my category (CRE, business, etc), and
2. has the largest AUM in the state of my target
Practical way to figure out #2 - ibanknet.com/bankmap/index.s…
Starting from the top, confirm that that bank offers loans or has loans on the books in the categories you're targeting. Then, cold email or call, introduce yourself, form a relationship with somebody, and let them know what you're interested in.
It would shock people, I think, if they knew how many of the tiny banks with strip mall storefronts they drive by without a second thought...have huge AUM.
And talking to a real human being (to form a relationship with) is incredibly easy.