LeMaire Lee moved his snakes to Austin in a Chevy Sonic
Pythons, tarantulas and San Pedro cacti, two 14 hour days, and a budget built around the bare minimum.
LeMaire Lee drove his family and his reptile collection from Philadelphia to Austin, and he walked Matt McCusker through all of it on Matt and Shane's Secret Podcast Ep 639, titled The E.C.B.S. (feat. SWIM).
The cargo list is the part that sticks. Snakes, pythons, tarantulas, bearded dragons, leopard geckos and San Pedro cacti, all loaded into a Chevy Sonic. Lee describes the drive as "Two 14 hour days with a squad".
The four grand whiteboard
The move came with a money plan. Lee says he and his wife Dana sat down and stripped the budget to nothing but the essentials, and the question they asked themselves was blunt. What would they need so the kids do not get taken away. The answer was four thousand dollars a month, written on a whiteboard.
His long term version of the system gets more transactional. Lee says the eventual goal is a whiteboard where if you do not have money you have to move out, or they get another roommate. He frames the end state as morphing into college roommates with his wife, smoking weed and ordering Uber Eats, which is a bit, but the budget number is not.
There is a junior partner in the operation too. Lee says his son Max ran a reptile side hustle, watching and selling reptiles, and was pulling in two or three hundred a week at one point before buying himself a three hundred dollar video game system.
Why he left
The episode title does the work. The hosts call it E.C.B.S., East Coast Bullshit, and Lee says he was caught up in it for 24 years. His own example of the problem is spending an hour complaining to a friend about Subarus and wondering why he bothered. He also says that before the East Coast got him, the plan was to grow weed, cash in and move to Brazil.
Austin is the reset. Lee says in Texas everyone says hello and everyone is chilling, where in Philadelphia someone might punch him. He is aiming for the older version of the city, the slacker, Keep Austin Weird version, and says his goal is to become the apex slacker of Austin.
He also lays out the new attitude that goes with it. Instead of actively hating things that do not land for him, he says he now tells himself he loves that it exists and keeps moving. Coming from a man who just hauled a tarantula across the country in a Chevy Sonic, it tracks.
let's look at a budget where we cut out anything extra. Like what would we need to not get our kids taken away? It's four grand a month.
You come down here, everyone says hello, everyone's chilling
I was going to move to Brazil. My goal was to grow weed, cash in, move to Brazil. I got caught up in the E.C.B.S.