Common People, Mud Pits, and Subscription Mortality

This one started with San Francisco and ended with immortality through ad reads. The whole conversation was a loop of half-jokes and half-truths—until you realized the truth parts weren’t so small.

San Francisco and the Disintegration of Self

Zach visited SF and said it felt like the most passive-aggressive place he’d ever been. Guest Danilo, founder of Mainstreet, said it’s because the city is the peak of disintegration—information divorced from real life. SF is tech abstraction incarnate. You scroll, you code, you ghost your feelings. People stop being people and start behaving like brittle caricatures.

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Rishabh’s take was simpler: people take themselves too seriously. When your entire identity is tied to building something “great,” you lose the ability to be real. New York’s rude, but it’s honest. Philly’s blunt. SF is polite poison.

Choose Your Hell

Danilo said it plainly: every place is hell. Pick the one that suits you. Life in the jungle or the city, there’s suffering. But there’s also beauty. It’s about choosing your version.

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I brought up something Zach said earlier—if you strip it all back and just put people in a field, how would you settle disputes? The answer: duels.

Bring Back the Duel

Zach argued that lawsuits are fake. They’re gamified suffering through an abstract, weaponized system. He thinks you should be able to challenge someone to a mud pit fight instead. If they say no, case dismissed.

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Is he joking? Yes. Kind of. But the insight is real: if someone’s not willing to get dirty for what they believe, maybe it’s not that deep. There’s something primal, something clarifying, about real conflict. Systems hide that. They reward manipulation, not courage.

Business as Soft Violence

Danilo took it further: all of our careers, all of business, is just violence on an abstract layer. We don’t punch people—we outmaneuver them in systems. Sometimes that’s progress. Sometimes it’s moral laziness.

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He said it depends. Jeremiah pushed back: people build systems for themselves. That means others lose by default. Rishabh reminded us that systems also enable cooperation. Language, agriculture, law—all systems. All trade-offs.

Should You Raise Money?

Eventually, we talked SaaS. Danilo said he made more money with a $200 startup than a $25M one. Zach thinks you should bootstrap your first software company and maybe raise later.

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After some back and forth and uncertainty from Danilo, he caved saying "raise all the money". But the real answer is—it depends. Always.

Ferrari Boy and the One-Time Scam

Zach told the story of a kid who raised millions for a fake startup, bought a Ferrari, and got away with it. Because suing him would’ve looked bad. The lesson? If you’re going to commit fraud, do it once, and do it early.

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(Joking. Mostly.)

Subscriptions and the Will to Live

We spiraled again. Black Mirror episode. Subscriptions. Poverty. Zach said if doing ad reads let him live longer, he’d do it in a heartbeat. Rishabh agreed. Life is good. Ads are fine.

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Subscription hate, they argued, comes from people forgetting how good we have it. You can rent the Adobe suite for $50 now. That used to be $2,000.

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Not all subs are equal though. Reorders for supplements are different than software. And some are scams—like Zach’s $4,000 mattress that needs a subscription just to work. But he referred enough friends to get five years for free. Problem solved.

The World Is Fine (Mostly)

Zach’s take: if you have time to complain about dystopia, you’re probably living a good life. The only thing he misses is going to a bar without phones. No records, no posts, just memories.

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But also, he likes Uber. And DoorDash. And not foraging.

Final Word

Danilo invited us to his waterfall house. Rishabh said TLC warned us not to chase waterfalls. Danilo doesn’t care.

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That’s probably the best summary of the whole conversation: know the warnings. Ignore them if you must. Just be ready to wrestle in the mud.