Melissa | theceoffice

The newer generations are unemployable, so I shut down a business yesterday. I have many small businesses I got involved in, one is a Saltwater fish store. It sells fish, corals, aquariums etc. The most profitable part of one of these stores is outside Maintenance. Going to peoples houses, changing the fish tanks water, cleaning glass etc. This is a very simple job, you run a hose in from the truck, suck water out, pump water in (nothing manual), and use a magnetic razor blade to clean the glass. Take a water sample and leave. We had 4 trucks and 6 guys doing this... then 5, 4, 3... each person that quit put more work on the ones left. We tried to hire, it's a very low skill job. Most maintenance guys make $15-18 an hour. We went upto $35 an hour to try and get people. Beyond that we cannot be profitable. The job is easy, you have to have a license (actually hard as hell apparently), and pass a background check (youre in peoples homes, also hard as hell). Pass a drug test. At $35 an hour we got the following. Someone that caused almost 8k of damage when they started pumping in water, went out "for a smoke" and the tank overflowed. At least 5 hires that went through background tests, drug tests etc then didn't show for work the 1st day and never called us again. Someone that intentionally pulled the guard off the water pumping hose, and sucked someones fish into the pump. Someone that scratched the District Attourney of las vegas, Steve Wolfson's tank by deciding to not use the magnetic razor, and "do it by hand"... fo no fucking reason. (4k bill) A wrecked van Someone who stole our water tester (1500 dollar machine). I have no empathy, at least in Las Vegas, for people complaining about no work, no jobs blah blah blah. $6000 a month to put hoses in and out of a tank and look at pretty fish.

Leadership is lonely. Ambition is lonely. Building is lonely. Even if you have a great company or great spouse, a lot of the journey is internal & you're on your own. It's really hard to bear, and most people will drop out over time. You have to want it in your core.

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance – it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ, and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.

Charlie Kirk was assassinated by the left. Yet people still voted for it. Says a lot. Shaun Maguire wrote that last night. And he's right about something essential: a vote like that can't be explained by logic. It can only be explained by culture. I talk a lot about institutional capture. And I think a lot of people in business still haven't understood what it actually means. Institutional capture is what allows a political camp to lose every debate on the facts and still keep winning elections. Because people don't vote with spreadsheets. They vote with the stories they've been told. In school, in college, in movies, in TV shows, in the media. And for fifty years, those stories have been written by one side. So I want to speak directly to every billionaire and millionaire reading this. You know the world is going off the rails. You see it. You talk about it in private, at dinners, in group chats. But you tell yourself: this doesn't concern me. I build my company, I pay my taxes, I stay out of politics. I'll be blunt: if you keep doing that, you will be dispossessed within the next 10 to 20 years. Here's what you need to do. Play the same game. Everywhere the left runs its propaganda, we need to be there. Fund films. Produce TV series. Build media. Create a counterculture. Tell different stories: stories of builders, of responsibility, of merit, of freedom, of progress. The left understood a century ago that culture comes before politics. It invested generations in storytelling. We invested in products and left the narrative to others. That's the mistake we have to fix. Why is it urgent? Because if you don't, here's what will happen. The globalist project will come back. And the left will bring in its wealth taxes. Make no mistake: these taxes are a Trojan horse. It starts with billionaires, at a rate sold as "symbolic" and "one-time." Then the threshold drops. Then the rate rises. Then the exception becomes the rule. The end goal isn't to fund hospitals. It's to dispossess owners. And this isn't theory. Last night, California voted on a one-time 5% tax on billionaires' net worth, with a residency date set retroactively to January 1, 2026. For now, it looks headed for defeat. But only because builders decided to fight and put more than $300 million on the table. That proves two things. The threat is real. And when we play, we can win. But we can't win every battle with last-minute checks. If we don't change the culture, there will be another tax, then another, then another. And one day, we'll lose. Wake up. We have two horizons in front of us. The first: a 1984-style techno-communism. All-powerful technology controlled by a state that decides what you own, what you say and what you think. The second: a technological future where we finally apply common sense. Where abundance liberates instead of enslaves. Where those who build get to keep what they built. The choice between these two futures won't be made at the ballot box. It will be made long before that, in people's minds. And right now, they're the ones writing the stories. It's time we picked up the pen.