My founder codes while smoking shisha and yells “I’m vibing squared.” I left my stable dev job to follow him. How do you differentiate between genius and lunatic in startups??

This was supposed to be a casual thing.
Old uni friend hits me up: “Just need a hand with some frontend stuff.” I join part-time. Chill vibes.
Fast forward 4 months:

I’ve quit my stable job.
I live in his damp-ass flat.
I sleep next to a whiteboard that just says:

“THEY LAUGHED AT EDISON TOO”

I work 14-hour days on a product I don’t fully understand, led by someone who may or may not be having a full-blown Messiah moment.

To be fair, back in uni he was solid.
But now? His TikTok algorithm feeds him a an unhealthy dose of Naval, AI grindset memes, and Alex Hormozi. He codes while smoking shisha. When Copilot starts typing, he yells:

“I’M VIBING SQUARED.”

His phone lock screen is an AI-generated poster of him as Muhammad Ali, standing over a knocked-out Daniel Ek.

Imagine if Russ Hanneman, Andrew Tate, and Gordon Ramsay got a CS degree and started building apps – that’s who I live with.

He keeps saying this isn’t a product. It’s “the rebirth of how humans experience audio.”
I’ve heard that phrase so many times it haunts my dreams. I still don’t know what it means.

What I miss:

My Herman Miller chair (sold it to “extend runway”)
A structured day
A girlfriend who doesn’t think I’ve joined a pyramid scheme

And yet…
God help me… I think the product might actually be good.
I hear it, I feel it, and something in my gut says:
This might actually be the thing.

So now I’m stuck asking myself:
Is he a visionary? Or a lunatic I’ve mistaken for one?

Anyone ever followed someone like this? How did it end?