TBPN - LA Fires Continue, Max Long Caruso, Tech Award Show, F40 Modifications

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

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Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy is back in the studio. He made it out alive. Half of his city has burned down. Half of my city has burned down. But we are here recording, bringing you the news and the breakdowns. And we're still on the topic of the fire. We're going to do a breakdown on Rick Caruso, who a lot of people have been talking about.

But first, we wanted to do a little unboxing of a Starlink I picked up yesterday from Best Buy. Not a lot of people have heard about this device. but it is really wild. You can get internet almost anywhere in the world. Yeah. And we should just set ours up right here on the table. Yeah, a couple hundred bucks. And it comes with a big long power cable.

I got a power brick too. And I'm very excited to get this set up. I'll definitely be traveling with this because you want to get caught lacking without just got to stay connected. Wi-Fi anywhere. But very, very cool device. I'll have to figure out how to put this together. But pretty simple.

you just kind of aim it at the sky. And as long as you can see the sky, you have... So it's interesting. I was actually using satellite messaging on the iPhone. Oh, really? I was working. I've seen that.

It's interesting. So the way that it works is if... So during... Starting like 48 hours ago, I completely lost cell service, power, gas, etc. Basically, my neighborhood was totally in the dark. So we were trying to figure out what was going on. So yeah, two nights ago,

the fire was really starting to pick up. The wind was still picking up. And so, yeah, I've had pretty good success with the iPhone satellite imagery. I don't know what the tech is actually based on. But if you've never had this happen, basically, if you lose all cell coverage, it'll pop something up that says you want to send messages. And you really can't do much. You can't send images, but you can send text-based messages.

And you just have to get outside. and it actually has a pretty interesting. So I think it's on the older satellite network, not the low Earth orbit star links. It's on like one web, a bio web or one web. Viyao is the PG thing. One web is the bigger satellites.

So they're big, I think they're geostationary in high earth orbit. So the delay is crazy. Delay is crazy. And they give you this little graphic. You actually have to like aim your phone in a certain way to try to get the messages out. I'm super stiff.

But good in a pinch. Yeah, this is great. So yeah, I've been recommending that everyone get one of these especially if you're a founder doing important work doing deals you never want to be without internet so pick one up and shockingly they were still available and Elon's giving out a bunch to people that are in affected disaster areas and hopefully keeping people online and communicating I mean it's you know a funny to joke about doing deals and just reading posts but like having access to the

internet if the grid goes down and the yeah I actually didn't have one and really I didn't have also I didn't have power. Yeah, you need the battery pack. Because this just runs up a wall, so you can get a battery pack that will run this for days. So I don't know if you know this, but my house I bought last year

was a fire rebuild. It had burned to the ground. No way. Literally to the dirt in 2018. And so my entire neighborhood's pretty savvy around fires. They're sort of used to it. And so most people have these gas power generators

that just use natural gas. Yep. And so when all the power was cut off, everybody was like, okay their generators flick on in 30 seconds and then they cut the gas lines for some reason which everybody was like why are they cutting the gas lines they run underground but then it turns out that the gas lines for western malibu where i am run through eastern malibu and so we're now looking at potentially multiple socal edison the utilities provider for gas said that they will have to send

somebody individually to your home every single home and all of in a all of Malibu to get the gas actually turned back on. So we're now looking at probably at least two weeks, something like that until and and so no no hot water. Nobody has gas right now. Bad day to be a mini bar at a five star hotel in LA. Yeah. Yeah exactly. So yeah, stayed at a hotel last night, which was which was great until we woke up in their HVAC system was pumping the outside air into the house. So I woke up, I have a six, six month old and with like some type of respiratory thing and it smelled like somebody had been smoking, like chain smoking heaters in the room for hours. So anyways, got out of their families now in Palace Verdes, which has better quality.

Did Augustus DeRicrode draw by? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, Augustus. It smelled like when we woke up in the room, it smelled like Augustus Rico had ripped through four packs. Yeah. Just grinding. Just grinding. Just grinding. This is not a co-working space.

Yeah, I actually, I mean, we don't need to go into this now, but I do think that it, it, in a world where Rainmaker can deliver rain anywhere, it's going to be extremely valuable because you look at, we just lost probably hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage. I don't know what the exact number is yet. Yeah, they're thrown around $55 billion right now, but that's early estimate. early early estimate and and by the way last night was wild too everybody i mean everybody was just hyper fixated on the timeline kind of watching this stuff unfold and then the sunset fire popped up and then all these ai generated images yep of the hollywood sign people were starting to share that around that were fake but there was um i mean that looked really bad and and apparently was was arson so yeah anyways dark times

But the show must go on. So here we are. Nikita is advocating for the hero we need, the dark night. Rick Caruso, he says, if you didn't vote, even if you didn't vote for real estate tycoon Rick Caruso in L.A.'s last mayoral election, you're basically a moron if you don't do it this time, since we're going to have to rebuild the entire city, 3K.

Likes. And Gabby Goldberg said they were morons the first time, too, for what it's worth. Yeah. And then Nikita kind of unrelated and says, I live a block away from Karen Bass, the current mayor of L.A. So yesterday's fire in my canyon was put out in 30 minutes, sleeping like a baby tonight,

taking shots at the current man. But yeah. So I don't know if you remember when the election night, Rick and Karen Bass were totally head-to-head election night. Yeah. It seemed like Rick was going to be able to pull it off. Yep. But then I was at a fundraiser event for Nathan Hockman, who's a new L-A-D-A that Rick was backing.

And they talked a little bit about the ballot harvesting that the left does in L.A. Which they have this, like, ridiculous ground game where they basically walk around. I think it's called fortifying. Yeah, they walk around with ballots that are pre-filled out. Yeah, yeah. They walk through homeless encampments and say, sign this. Hey, can you please sign this?

And that's fully legal. And so as the day after the election in the following days, Karen just like had it turned into almost a landslide. So who knows all the details? I won't. If I had to talk anymore, I'd throw on the tinfoil hat. But either way,

either way when Rick lost, it was many people in the community were pretty devastated because if you go to Rick's spaces, you look around. Like if you go to the Palisades Village, which is one of, you know, one of his developments, you see like groups of children running around by themselves, like having fun.

It's it's the kind of environment that I grew up in as a kid in a small town where parents would give their kids $5, $10 and say, go, go have a nice like evening and you could go get to be a big thing. Go hang out at the mall. But you don't see that in LA at all. Not at all. Groups of like 10, 10 year olds running around. It just doesn't happen.

But it still happens on recursive properties. Yeah. Yeah, he said that he, his goal for the Grove is, like his imagined avatar is a mother pushing a stroller with a baby should feel safe at all times. Yep. And what that requires is inordinate investment in private security. They have off-duty LAPD officers who actually open carry a sidearm. They used to be discreet kind of undercover. And then they changed this to show the gun.

and they also have feature recognition cameras, license plate scanners, a bunch of different technology that's all put together. And it's hilarious to contrast. I was listening to a podcast of him talk about all the technology that they use and how they integrate everything at the Grove

to keep it safe. And then meanwhile, Karen Bass is doing a press junket press conference and says, you can find more information about the fire at URL. Yeah. And it's like,

one of the most insane moments. I mean, her, Her, you know, she coming back from Ghana, she was not going to have a good time. No. Like she was briefed on the fires on Monday, decided to stay in Ghana. Really? Yeah. Oh, no.

Yeah. She was fully briefed. I mean, we knew, so, so I knew Sunday night, I'm so trained now that when the Santa Ana winds get really intense that fires are coming. Okay. So, so we knew our power was going to get shut off Sunday. Really? They were already telling us your power. Oh, yeah.

You were texting about getting a generator. I remember that on Monday. Yeah. And so everybody knew this was pending. She knew this was pending. She decides to stay in Ghana. She comes back. Immediately she's getting off the plane.

I don't know if you saw this video. I was making a joke about it. But she's fully NPC mode. You know, your talks, you know, this reporter's talking to her. And she's like a legitimate reporter. I'm pretty seriously like BBC or something. Yeah, pretending that she's like not hearing it or whatever. So obviously, you know, not a great response there.

She could have showed some amount of empathy saying, yeah, it's terrible. Like I'm rushing back. happy to be back, you know. A lot of ways that she could handle that. And then clearly wasn't even processing what she was reading. You know, we do a bit of writing and do a bit of newscasting here when we're reading stuff out. I think we would notice if it's said, go to, you know, go to grok.a.i. But it says go to URL.

Go to URL. Check it out. Let us know what you think. It's a true Ron Burgundy moment. Yeah. It's bad. But anyways. is, uh, yeah. And everything, so, so everything that Caruso represents is what a lot of people wanted for

LA, right? Security, family environments. Yep. Strong. So his, his properties are some of the best performing from retail standpoint. Yep. In, in the country, like in the top 5%. So he knows how to, how to get people places.

Yeah, there's the whole like post-COVID mall apocalypse where there's a lot of empty retail chains, not at Caruso properties. Yeah. And I, and I, and I, you know, go to the Palisades Village multiple times a week. It's fantastic. I bring my family there. It's a really great environment. So a lot of people, you know, the best evidence that he would have been a great mayor is being at his properties.

Yeah. Right. And so when when, when, when, when bass was elected, it was devastating in the moment. She quickly had, she quickly had her home robbed by criminals. Yeah, you said this. And she had loose guns in her house. So they, they, they, the criminals managed to steal guns that were not in safes. Yeah.

So right away, that was like a sort of not a great. omen for her yeah but i mean that seems kind of cool to just have like guns everywhere in your house like that it's cool to lock up your guns if uh she have like an indoor firing range is she one of those people where you walk in there's the wall of just all the guns american flags 2a that'd be super yeah yeah yeah i got an ffell and apparently she has dueling apparently i got the switch on my AK 47 she has a chess piece that's just dueling AR 15 yeah yeah yeah she's getting like the military hardware. You know, you get a fully automatic M4.

It's like, I thought that was military only. He's like, yeah, it was. Until I got my firearms dealer license and I can get silencers in California now. Yeah. Anyways, sad, dark. I wish that, I wish he was doing a great job. But unfortunately, Rick was always my guy.

We don't discuss politics. this but he was my guy because he's a phenomenal businessman yes and he has created billions of dollars of value and he has a wonderful watch collection he also has a wonderful watch collection yeah let's go through but let's get into this he was born in 1959 and uh father uh started a small business was a small business owner dollar rent a car yep not not not not super small um but uh start it would have started yeah relatively small So his father started as a small business owner, was an Italian immigrant,

which he credits to his work ethic. So he goes to USC, then he goes to Pepperdine Law School, graduates, becomes a lawyer, works at this law firm called Finley Cumble, and in 1987, I believe, that law firm goes bankrupt. Yeah.

Which I didn't even know was really possible for a law firm because... Services. It's a services business. You'd think you'd just adjust prices and stuff. I don't know how that happened. But the whole law firm explodes, collapses. His boss walks in.

It does go on to use debt pretty well. So it's possible that the law firm had levered up in some way. And that was the cause of it. The only thing we skipped over that I think is relevant, his mother was a billboard model in her youth, which is cool because we love ads. Yeah. But it's funny to think about there were just model,

there were billboard models, like a model that specifically would just model for billboards. Yeah, it's like I don't do matter. magazines. I work best on a billboard. No TV. Billboards only. But it makes sense. The guy is an absolute stead, very handsome. You can see, you know, maybe in another life he would have skipped being a lawyer and a billboard male estate developer. He could have been a TikToker. Maybe a Instagram. He could have been a little guy. If he was born in 2005, he would have been a ticker. He had the broccoli hair and a shilling AG1. Yeah.

Great. So he quit his, so he transferred. He gets out of this law firm that's collapsing. His boss comes in, kind of puts a check on his table and says, hey, the law firm's going bust. This is your last check. You better cash this today because it might not clear tomorrow. He has always wanted to do real estate. He said he was doing corporate law, didn't really like it,

saw that it wasn't his life's work. And so he started a real estate development company. First deal he does is buying parking lots. And he uses his connection with his father, a dollar rent a car, to act as the anchor tenant of these working lots. This is my opinion on people in life that have the potential to benefit from nepotism. I believe it is your duty to maximally utilize that advantage relationship, whatever.

And so what he did is really smart. Rick wanted to buy buildings and in real estate, if a bank is going to lend against a property, they want to know that there's some type of income stream, cash flow associated with that property, right? A business that has no tenant in it is not worth the same as a business that has a 10-year lease or 20-year lease. And so what Rick would do is he would go, he'd find a place he wanted to buy. He would get his dad presumably to write from Dollar Rent a card to write an LOI,

saying, if you buy this property, I will lease it for X number of years. And so then he would take that LOI to the bank and say, look, I have this great tenant, rent me, rent me this, you know, help me buy this building. And so that little bit of alpha, you know, he was able to snowball into a $4 billion fortune. So if you have a dad that owns a small rental car business, leverage that into accumulating $4 billion. It really, I mean, it really does, like, it's a perfect encapsulation of what it means to be like a deals guy. Yeah. Because I think too many people think about the deal is like one way.

Like, I just need the tenant or I just need the bank. And really it's like he is creating almost like an arbitrage. Like the bank wants to lend to a parking lot that has a relationship with dollar rent a car. He's acting as the intermediary there. And I mean, we've seen this with the work that we've been doing where once you start getting deals going on, both sides of the equation. And you can even view like a startup as this where it's like, okay, there's an amazing AI software developer who's going to join the team if you get, you know, a venture fund

to lead your seed round. And you kind of got to play both sides. And then the really good deals guys can get both of those done, match them up. And then the value creation starts from there. Yeah. And the guys just become a beast. I mean, he's, he's amassed this like insane portfolio in Southern California, the Grove at Farmer's Market. And he actually became so interesting enough about.

about the origin, he became, he's very well known for not selling any of his properties. So he's the sole investor in his properties. But then he never sells. He just benefits from the appreciation and the cash flow. But early on, the lots that he would do with his father, he did sell those. So he used that to basically accumulate the seed capital that would allow him to do the bigger development. So he doesn't have like a real estate fund where people are trying to get out in a certain timeline. He's not flipping things.

He really is in it for the long term. And you see this with other real estate projects where someone comes in and they pass it off to the next person. And that next person isn't thinking about the long value creation cycle that's going on. And yeah, he has this interesting framework for thinking about like how he creates value at a place like the Grove. So he says that we have customers and then we have guests. And the customers are actually the retailers. The Apple store, Nordstroms. And for a long time, an indoor mall was basically you have two anchor clients.

Yeah. At one end, Macy's at one end, Nordstrom's or the other. And then I think they pay nothing. Like you make essentially no margin off of them. And then everyone else in the middle, you hopefully fill in and make money off of them. And he, I think he kind of flipped that around and said, okay, this doesn't make any sense. There's like a much better way to do this, seeing kind of all the tenants equally as customers, and then really focusing on the guest experience and getting them to invest. He's giving them a phenomenal product,

which is places that the one commonality that you see across his properties is people just really enjoy being at them. It's very simple. He's creating an environment that's safe, that's fun, that's clean. It's everything that you want a city to be, but it's just these sort of micro cities.

And it's always remarkable when he does it because it's like, how did they close down this street? It's so hard. like, but once you actually enclose that, it just becomes this like wonderful oasis to walk around in. Yeah. And it's the, it's, uh, what's that meme? It's like the type of mixed use, uh, dynamism that people don't want you to have or something.

Walkability. Yeah. Caruso figured out mixed use, uh, walkability. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing. So he didn't do, uh, uh, residential at the Grove and everyone was like, we want to live here. And so now he's been doing residential in the new projects.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Palisades village, I think, has some apartments around it. So one thing that's interesting too about early on he leveraged his father's business in order to create a meaningful business himself, which was smart. The other thing is that early on when he was doing his first development, he even admitted

to himself he didn't have the clout to attract coveted retailers like Bristol Farms and Barnes and Noble. And so what he did is he didn't focus on the. the retailer side, he went and focused on the public side. He did everything he possibly could to make the public love what he was doing, which I think was super important. We should go through some of his tenants of like designing spaces. This human centered design focuses on the emotional impact of real world details like height of

curbs, the crown on streets, feeling of open space. He says, quote, our minds catch what's real. The more real it is, the more organic it is, the more comfortable you are in that space. And you really feel that at the Grove when you're like not tripping over things, even like the manhole covers are like, you know, flush and stuff. So you're not just like all these little like things that just kind of jar you out of it don't happen. It really does feel like Disneyland, Italy. He's very inspired by these places. I love his story about the grove's trolley.

It was built from the ground up. People said, why the heck are you putting in a trolley? It doesn't go anywhere, but its purpose was to bring people here to enrich their lives to give them joy. And so kids will say, I want to go ride the trolley. My son loves trains. Yeah, he basically was thinking of these as creating these almost mini Disney lands. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like really a destination.

Yeah. And the trolley is a crazy story because that needed, even though it just goes one block, it needed to be licensed as a train. So we had to go through all the train regulations to get it approved. And so he's been someone who's pushed through all the. this red tape, but also can see the other side of like, okay, maybe we need a more efficient system on the government side to get things done. And he joked that on a number of passengers per mile, it is the most productive train in the world because it just moves dozens of people back and forth one block. And it does more than like the Manhattan train system. It's very, very funny.

Yeah. So there's a quote in here that says, Rick is extraordinary at reading the and the consumer in the area that he's building something. So he had started with a property that was called Lake Havonhurst, which was a which was a development that went, originally went bankrupt that another developer was working on. And he took it over. And one of the things that he notoriously did early on is the residents were so against the development. This was in Encino.

He started including them in the, process of developing the space so he at one point took part of the he took residents to go out and start like picking out trees that would go on the property he said you know i understand if you don't you know want the development but why don't you come with me let's go look at some true let's go pick out some trees for the property that's we literally you know paid to to transport all these people and made them feel included in the design process so he basically was making the residents to give you a technology design partners in the development and so he started that you know he he he everywhere he went he would make these sort of grassroots movements around working with local

h-o-a leaders working with local residents like he started with the residents which are his guests and by making them love what he was doing he was able to attract the uh the customers which he he considers the retailers right because he's not directly monetizing yeah the the guests right yeah There's a bunch of stories about him having to do a bunch of deals and build coalitions. In 2011, when he was building the Americana at Brand, he went to Nordstrom, who I think he already had a relationship with because I listened to him on the Nordstrom podcast, which I didn't even know it was a podcast. Great show. Check it out. Nordy pod or something. That's some funny name. But he wooed Nordstrom away from the rival Glendale Galleria and will bring the department store to his Americana at Brand Shopping Center in fall of 2013.

and there was this big fight with general growth, which I think owned the Glendale Galleria, and they sued, and they had a ballot measure to block the building of the Americana brand. He got it all through, and now he says he's excited to be working with them, and they have come through their difficulties, and the past is the past.

And there's always been this dynamic with the Glendale Galleria and the Americana ad brand where some companies, like, The Glendale Gallery is a little bit cheaper. It's an indoor mall. And so some businesses, if they don't have the right margins, they'll move over there. And it kind of flows back and forth. Interestingly, Apple actually maintains stores at both because I guess they can just afford that.

It's probably like, it's interesting. His projects all have taken, he made, he's made the perfect developments for L.A., which has 300 days a year of sunlight. So why build these, why build these fully indoor malls? Moles. Totally. Totally. That's one of the reasons of Palisades Village is so nice is you have the benefits you have you have, you have Saint Laurent, you have Buttega Veneta, you have all these Lulu Lemon, you have like all these nice retailers. But it's set up in a way where you can walk around outdoors and sit on the grass. And I see it every place like, I mean, Rodeo Drive is like

this where it is cool because it's like this single lane and you see a lot of cool hypercars, which is honestly awesome. But how much cooler would that be if they just shut it, shut down? a couple blocks of that and you can just walk across at any moment. Same thing in Old Town Pasadena. I've been beating the drum of they should shut down that couple blocks in Colorado and make that the same type of Crusoe style open walkability. And a lot of cities were experimenting with that during COVID because they need more outdoor dining. So they kind of moved all onto the street.

And then people realize like maybe we didn't need those extra 10 parking spaces. Maybe we should move a little bit further. I think New York just shut down or a couple of things. years ago shut down time square right so you can walk around constantly yeah and just doing a few of those where they're not going to really throw off the flow of traffic is great or bury the streets if you have the ability to tunnel and then people can still drive exactly like they would but you have a bunch of walkable space above it's so it's so him losing the the last election is so devastating because his body of work is truly he's created

what do you want a city to do you want it to be highly enjoyable livable safe a place where commerce can thrive and that's what all of his spaces have become almost a hundred percent hit rate and it wasn't enough it wasn't enough proof to to win the election yeah i liked him on this uh onward fund rise podcast uh they go into more of like the macro side of yeah finance of real estate investing uh And this is from earlier this year. They were talking about potential recession in 2024 and how much rates had climbed for them from 3% to 6%. And for a lot of businesses up in like the 10, 11, 12, 13%.

But he goes back to the surviving the S&L, the savings and loan crisis in 2008. Crusoe stresses having enough liquidity to take advantage of opportunities when disruption occur, calling it being a bit of a warrior. You've got to get ready for battle. He says he stresses preparedness over reaction. He points out that where I see companies getting in trouble is their reactionary, emphasizing early anticipation and cutting costs quickly in uncertain times. I mean, we certainly saw that with startups when SUV collapsed and the market and the interest rates went wild and a lot of the VCs pulled back on funding.

The companies that cut their burn, like the same day that YC issued that letter saying, hey, this is going to be rough. They made it through just fine. But I got an investor update from a company that was like, we think we're going to have to cut our burn. And I was like, it's been a year since the market collapse. Like, what are you doing? And then, of course, they went bankrupt immediately.

Disaster. But he takes calculated risks. It's all his own capital. And so there's a hell of a lot more downside than potential upside. I don't have investors, he said. I get the freedom to make decisions, I think, are best. And after this many decades of absolutely killing it, he clearly has good decision-making ability.

He talked a little bit about like relationship banking, which I thought was pretty interesting. Obviously, although he owns all the equity in his properties, he still needs to work with banks to secure all sorts of different loans. There's construction loans. Then there's ongoing mortgages on all of the different properties and the buildings as well as, you know, he's going to finance stuff out so he has more capital to work on other things.

You know, it's like a private equity deal. As the business grows, you can take more out and then do the next project. So he stresses like building relationship with bankers, but what he was saying was like, it's kind of frustrating because a lot of the bankers like bounce around from bank to bank. And so it's very hard to like, like,

you really have to have strong coverage across like an entire banking sector. And then more recently he mentioned that he was actually, he changed one of his financing strategies and went out to Wall Street because you can go to a bank for financing or you can do mortgage back security and take it to Wall Street. And that just has different cost of capital, different process, but obviously opens up a new like liquidity window for the company. So that was exciting. And he was talking about how he's funny.

Somebody was saying like, oh yeah, like can you explain like some of the more complex like derivatives and instruments that you might use? Because a big question was like if you locked your interest rate in 2002, right, 3%, you were great and your business was just fantastic. Not every bank was offering fixed rates at the time, but with derivatives, you could actually synthetically lock your interest rate, right? Well, that's been the challenge for the last couple of years in the commercial real estate market is most people were using this variable rate debt, thinking that interest rates will stay low forever, and then all of your profit goes away in months. But yeah, they were talking about these like arcane financial instruments, and the interviewer was

kind of like, oh, can you explain some of these? And he's like, I don't really use them. I don't really understand them. Like, I just focus on the guest experience. And I think it's like more of a pure play. He's more conservative. And I think that makes sense. Yeah. And he's not trying to be a financial engineer. Otherwise, I'm sure he would have sold a lot of his projects at different points. And also like, like, it's, it's a little less sexy than like, oh, he's like this genius trader who has all these like crazy plans to make money and pull money out of thin air. But if I think about like who how do I want the government run like I don't really want them doing fancy stuff I want someone conservative just okay what's the revenue what are the cost what's driving value

in the city let's keep it simple let's actually grow this thing so he talks a little bit about his decision to run for mayor with a successful real estate empire and fulfilling family life many question why he would step into politics he explains it's the city that I love I believe you're given the ability to help others you go and do it his top priorities are highlighting homelessness, crime, and government corruption as the city's biggest challenges. Homelessness is absolutely fixable. Crime is running rampant and public service should be about service for others, not for

yourself. His leadership approach, he aims to replicate his track record of collaboration results saying, I want to be mayor for everybody. Let's make it a little bit nicer, cleaner, better life for everyone. Yeah, one thing I've always been impressed with, every time you hear this guy talk, whether it was talking to reporters on TV, the last 48 hours. We're at this fundraiser that I saw him at recently. He, there's not a single word that's out of place.

You can go sit in front of a group of hundreds of people and speak totally off the cuff. And it sounds like he had a speechwriter. So this guy is just a true, true, true professional. And if I were to, you know, really one of those. types of entrepreneurs that I'm sure if he went into the venture world and went into tech, he could have been wildly successful. Yep. But chose to focus on his local community and play a very specific game and do it at the highest

possible level. So next time you're in L.A., go support a Caruso property. The Grove became one of the region's top attractions with about 20 million visitors in the immediate pre-pandemic years, edging out Disneyland. More, but yeah, bigger than Disneyland. That's crazy. I don't even. It feels like hard to believe.

Yeah. Possible. I don't know. Yeah. It's in this LA Times article. For him, it's, it's just that balance of ridiculous charisma. Yeah. Long-term thinking, playing his own game, right?

Not doing the investor thing. Not hyper-financializing what he was doing. Yeah. And then using early on in his career, using the advantages that he had, which was, which was, which was, you know, a relationship with his father's business. So a combination of those, all of those things, this is an incredible man. And I remember after the last election, it was the word on the street was that he wasn't interested in running again. But I do think there's going to be so much pressure on him now, not pressure, but just people saying like, please do this, right? Because I would love to see Los Angeles run by our guy, Rick Caruso.

He's also donated a lot of money. He has a family foundation. He's donated to Loyal High School, Brentwood School, Law Schools, University of Southern California. You know, we don't typically celebrate giving money away here, but I hope it brought him a lot of happiness, I guess. Yeah. But he's been recognized by Pepperdine and the Los Angeles Business Journal and Ernst & Young and had a very successful family life with four children and a wife that he's been married to for 37 years or something like that. You know, one of the critiques during the election was that he was a fake Democrat. That was basically the number one critique is he was historically Republican.

It was independent at some point. And it was during, I guess, you know, whatever. And it's such a good example of how about we don't judge people at all based on their political party affiliation and just judge them purely on their work. And his resume is these incredible developments of people of all political. backgrounds love being out. Yeah, he really is like founder mode person generally. You can tell he owns 100% of his companies. He never sells. He builds these things. Manages for a very long time. Clearly runs through walls to get stuff done. Those things that people think are impossible, closes streets and like really changes the landscape that winds up creating a like a great product that

he's clearly happy with and so are the guests and the customers. Yeah, you can tell he's creating the product for himself. Yeah. Which is awesome. expressing his taste. Crazy taste. It's great. So hopefully we'll be tracking that. The election is in 2026. Karen Bass is already on the campaign trail.

She is. Her Instagram shows that she's campaigning already. I wonder why. Is it that fun being there? I don't know. Yeah, I think maybe, you know, after. We'll see. We'll see how big this story gets and how big of the deal is.

She has an opportunity to redeem herself. It's just if you're speaking publicly, get the, URL right. Yeah. And pretty simple. Please Instagram video, YouTube video. We want to tour your Ben case. She needs to be going direct. Honestly, Karen Bass needs to, it would be so different if she was just like, yeah, I can't do anything about the fires, but like here are my top five guns from 24. Yeah. I recommend the new Glock. Get an AR-15. Go to Arley. They're local. Yeah. You know, one of the few gun stores in Los Angeles. You know, and then get a sniper rifle, too.

Yeah. Maybe a shotgun. A full load out. Full load out. You would look like a cod lobby in the mayors. Yeah. She does have an opportunity to win back a lot of voters. Yeah.

Yeah. The big 2A voters in Los Angeles. Huge block. Honestly. It's increasing. It's increasing. But slowly. I mean, Adam Carolla had that whole take that like this is going to

to flip, is going to flip California, or LA Red. So I, do you watch that video? I, I think it, I think it is, I think it is totally possible. Yeah, it is a crazy, crazy moment. We're getting on the edge here. We're getting on the political edge. Stick it with, stick with business. It's not our forte.

We like to focus on business, technology, and capital allocation. Let's move into a question that we got from a listener. Ozzy says, interesting how much coverage the Palisades fire is getting compared to Hurricane Helene. Helene so far was far more devastating. 124 to 250 billion in damages for Helene versus 55 billion for Palisades, 246 deaths for Helene versus at least five for Palisades, 126K damaged, homes damaged versus I'm sure a few thousand in L.A. What are your thoughts, he asks? So what do you think about that? Cover it. So, Helene versus the Palisades fires? I wasn't actually familiar. So he was. I wasn't actually familiar. So he's,

he's correct. I paid far less attention to that. Oh, you don't remember the conspiracy. It was it was like the Democrats like caused it or something. The Republicans caused it. I remember I remember the coverage right around. I wasn't. I wasn't focused on it because because this fire has been in literally in my backyard. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And many, many, many friends and, and you know, business relationships have been affected by it. Yep. The other. So yeah, the damage for Helene was devastating. South Carolina and North Carolina both had $50-ish billion worth of damage. Like, ridiculous amount of damage, way more deaths.

Yep. It's very dark, sad. There's still a bunch of people missing. But any time you have a disaster strike, the epicenter of media and entertainment, where it's the highest, you know, this is the highest density of people with huge audiences in the world. Totally. So obviously there's going to be a lot of coverage on it. And then for us, again, living miles from the epicenter, it obviously is going to be top of mind.

I also wonder if there's something to the actual visual nature of this type of disaster. Like with a fire, you can go up in a helicopter and film it. You can't film a hurricane, having a destroying a single house. It's very, very hard to be out there because you get blown around. It happens everyone. once a while. And then you can look at the satellite map of its spinning and you're like, okay,

that looks bad. But it's very different when you see a drone shot of the palaces is flattened. Yeah, the fires are, fires are growing up in California being through a number of fires. It was really nasty in Santa Barbara. During the, the Wolsey fire area, there's been really devastating fires in wine country where I grew up.

I think the unpredictability of fire. where it doesn't even, you could be 10 miles from where wildfires raging and then an ember lands and it starts another one. Yep. There's also quite a lot of just like poor behavior that springs up where people start, people just start looting houses because people evacuated. And so you can, there's people around the perimeter of these fires. It also has this like crazy power law outcome where it's like either your house burns down and you're destroyed. or your house is totally fine. Yeah.

Right? Whereas like I feel like with the hurricane, it's like everyone deals with a little bit of flooding. Then there's houses that get blown down and destroyed. And it's more of like a gradient of like every house, but it's like all over. Whereas this, it was a lot more of like, oh, there's a fire over there. Everyone's got to leave and move and stuff. And it's very dramatic. So yesterday, I'm in Western Malibu.

The fire really devastated Eastern Malibu and the Palisades. but we were already starting to pack up because we had no power, gas, et cetera. And then a fire popped up out of nowhere, like half a mile from my house. And so I'm looking at this watch duty app that everybody's using. And it's like, oh, it's two acres. And now it's five acres. And then I'm getting videos for my neighbors. And I don't know.

It's also one thing I would call out is like the, you know, Keith, I don't know. Are you buddies with Keith? I've never met him. Anyways, really, really good guy, sort of tech adjacent, because he's done some tech investing, had a real estate tech company, but he mostly is a real estate investor. He posted, which what I thought was a very fair ask,

which was, hey, my house is about to burn down. Are there any sort of private firefighting resources that I can hire? And got, you know, went mega viral, got mega canceled. And I thought it was like a very fair ass. ask, like, if you look at the way he phrased a message, it wasn't like, hey, any off-duty firefighters want to come, you know, fight my house instead of someone else's. Abandon your post. It's like private firefighting, just like private security is an industry. Insurance companies leverage private firefighting brigades all the time. There was this whole

drama a few years ago when there was fires in the Hidden Hills area and there was a private fire brigade that descended on Hidden Hills because. It's like a billion dollars of property value. They don't want to lose that, right? So anyways, I just think Keith is a great guy and obviously didn't have any bad intentions with that. And sort of unfortunate that people far away from the action decided to have an opinion when it was a very fair request.

It does seem like he killed. And it didn't work, by the way. His house burned to the ground. Yeah. So like, yeah. In same. Bravo to everybody dunking on it. Yeah.

He did, just a little like comm's advice, he did a pretty good job of mitigating the cancellation, like the hatred, I think, by, I think he locked his account or like deactivated his account. And everyone's like, oh, he deleted his account. But really, like, you can turn it on in a few days and it would be fine. But what that does is it stops the quote tweets. And so anyone who quote tweeted you, if you're getting canceled, this has happened to me when I talked about how I'm going to move to Alaska and take it over and make it a TechMaca. And everyone in Alaska said they would kill me.

I'm not kidding. They were like DMing me pictures of their guns being like, bitch, like you wouldn't last a day up here, you, you Californian. Cali boy. Like, okay, respect. Like this makes me want to move there more. But then there was like the right wingers were canceling me. Yeah, the right wingers were canceling me for like being like a pussy basically.

And then the and then the left wingers were canceling me for like, you know, colonizing indigenous spaces or something like that. And I was like, this is too much. I just lock the account and then it shuts down all the quote tweets. and then everyone just moves on because they're not getting that. They don't have anything to go off of. Material.

Yeah, yeah. This is very funny. But I think he did that and I think he'll be able to come back hopefully because it's a good poster and there's some good stuff. But, okay, that's not important. Let's move on to the timeline.

Hopefully there's some fun tweets. We get more on the tech side. Talk about what's going on outside of the fire, which has consumed us for the last two days, but hopefully there's more interesting things going on. We got it's a big tech alert. is very exciting.

Catherine Boyle and Andreessen Horowitz has started following at Tech Bros. Pod. Welcome, brother, Boyle. She's engaged with some of our stuff before. I think we probably have covered her tweets, but she created American Dynamism. Did she not? And she talked about how there's a need for an Oscar style award show in tech. Yeah.

And years ago, there was the Crunchies, and there were some hilarious photos from the I never knew about that. I never knew about that. Yeah. And they would give you a physical statue. And it pulled really big people. I mean, Teal. Yeah.

There's a picture of Teal with the Crunchy. That's cool. And I think it's like a man on the moon type of thing or something. Or maybe it's like an ape. I don't know. It's something crazy. That's wild. But the crunchies, they, I remember the moment that they peaked because Paul Graham said on Twitter at the time,

it was an ape? Okay. Yeah, wow. Oh yeah, yeah, there you go. That's kind of cool. We got to, we got to buy one of those on eBay or something. But PG said, we don't need TechCrunch to award startup of the year. It's a useless award because in tech and in business, you have the market constantly telling you how the company is doing. Yeah. And so with the Oscars, it's like the Oscars don't just say which one made the most money. There's an artistic value there. And so I think it's, actually good that with our award show we focus not just on who's the richest person in tech or like the award for we focus on size lords like like Josh Kushner who yeah repeatedly made some of the highest conviction biggest bets yeah and it's more of a quality spectrum of companies yeah there's some element of yeah editorial element exactly you could argue that Gary tan's a bigger size lord because he's exactly exactly spring conversation starter yeah yeah it you know you know you

know, oh, you know, should Moonlight have gotten the award or should La La Land have gotten the domain acquisition of the year? Exactly, exactly. Like these things are, award shows should be more. If you're doing an award show for tech, you should lean towards something that's a little bit more qualitative, a little bit more artistic. But you won't be doing an award show for tech because we already got that locked down. So don't copy us, okay?

But you can come. You can come. I'll see you there. Great. If you wear a tucks. Let's go to Andrew McAulip, been on the show. before with some great um wait is this the question is this so it's it's less of a question so basically Andrew has developed this this this doge themed art piece okay which he's going to sell for

i've seen it in five million dollars okay it needs to sell for five million dollars he's going to get at 40 okay yeah yeah and so i just wanted to put the word out because Andrew is looking for a home for doge fin okay uh because apparently wherever it's being stored right now uh we would house it here, but it's going to be, I think it's a little bit, it's huge. It's huge. And we're on the 10th floor of a building and carrying it up the stairs. Sounds rough and I don't know. I think the weight limit is probably too high for the elevator. So he says he's doing a bit of spring cleaning. Two things that need to be moved out. Would anyone be interested in a large vacuum chamber? So if you're in the market, hit them up. It weighs about 1,500 pounds. No pumps, no warranty. Bring a trailer. Please

DM me. It's free. You just have to do, you just have to promise to do something incredibly interesting with it. And then two, Doge fin needs to find a new home. If you want the 600-pound magnificence gracing your factory floor, we should talk. I would prefer to keep ownership and do a storage slash loan thing is I need to sell him at Art Basel to pay for my F-40. Shout out to TechBrow's Pod for making the decision. In retrospect, with Carmack and Muller owning one, it's a no-brainer, Mueller. And he shows the vacuum chamber and the Doge Finn, which you should go take a look at it. It's a wild piece. I mean, a stunning piece. Chamber has some interest.

Y'all better move fast. I actually, so maybe now that I'm thinking out loud, I should honestly put this in my backyard. I don't know if he wants it to be outdoors. You have to cover it all the time and stuff. I don't know how treated it is. Maybe he could do like some coat or something. Yeah, Andrew treat it.

I'll put it in my backyard. I'll give it an ocean view. It'll be a great place for Dogevin to pass the time. That's funny. Let's do one more and then the promoted post. signal says vibe capital was born out of the realization that traditional diligence is just the polite lie we tell ourselves after making decisions with our gut. No pitch decks, no financials, no fake process, just human connection. We invest in founders with ideas that make us feel alive.

We're betting that intuition beats spreadsheets and that founders thrive when they're treated as the connoisseurs of culture, not as risks to be mitigated. If the idea makes a smile, shiver or swear under our breath, we're in. We believe capital is a commodity, but vibes are scarce and he's quote he's quoting a segment from a book about Andy Bechtel Schime investing in Google. Bechtel Schim ran to his Porsche and returned carrying something. We could discuss a number of issues. Why don't I just write you a check? He said, I can't pronounce that at all. With that, he presented, Mug by Bocapped. He presented Brin and Page with a $100,000 check payable to Google Inc. Brennan Page explained that Google hadn't been incorporated yet and didn't have a bank account to deposit the check into.

Well, when you do, stick it in there. Beckdell-Syme said cheerfully. Then he disappeared in his Porsche without saying what share of Google he imagined he had bought. This is a real alpha because you can still do this. Yeah. If you know, even if a company hasn't incorporated, you know, usually you want to be investing pre-incorporation. You want to be given that handshake before the company has even been formed. Yep.

So you're going to get the best price in the most clout, which is what, investing is all about low entry prices and clout. More about the clout than the investment. The funny thing is that because by the time you're getting any liquidity, you forgot about the investment. You don't even know what they do anymore. But checks are cool because I've been in situations where I'm like, well, I want to invest, but you haven't set up the company yet and just write a check. Yeah, yeah. And just get the C-Corp name right.

Yeah. Every time I use a check or every time I write a check, you can just make it payable to cash. Yeah, I'm like, checks are actually a fantastic innovation. I've only written probably sub-100 checks in my life just because digital payments were really, at the time I was an adult, they were just so widespread. But every time I write it, I'm like, wait, I can write any number in here and just give it to you

and you can just deposit it. Yeah, yeah, no limits or anything. It's great. It's almost as cool as stable coins. Yeah, yeah. The checks, the funny thing is that I feel like if you did that today with a founder, depending on the founder, some founders would be like, great, $100,000.

I'm going to go out and raise a $100 million post seed round and give you 0.1% of the company. Yeah, but then if they have to raise again at a lower valuation, you'd convert in at the lower valuation. You've got to get that MFN clause in there. Otherwise, you're an idiot. You got to watch out. Let's do a promoted post. Promoted post. This one from Kyle Bodie, who is quote tweeting another post by a guy named Grant.

I put this in there because I wanted to promote those wheels specifically. So Kyle says, this is an ad read for these specific wheels on Amazon. Yeah, so we're running an ad for some Hussali store on Amazon. And these are rubber office chair wheels that you can take, presumably take any. Something you'd see on like a razor scooter. Yeah, so these are razor wheels that you can give your office chair.

So we don't use. We should put these on. We don't use chairs with wheels on this podcast, but I do have an office chair at home that I know I can see this attachment. I know they'll snap in, so I need to get some of these. But $20, you turn your office chair into a razor scooter. Kyle got nerd snifed by them. The GT3RS of office chairs.

Yeah. You know, these things are gas. This is the YSoc package. Yeah, this is the YSsock package. On your Herman Miller. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got such a great Herman Miller. It's not that comfortable, but it looks amazing.

That's what matters. I mean, you'd put an exhaust on it if it was a car. Yeah. Why not put some wheels on it? Slaps some wheels on it. Okay, let's go to a bucket pole, bucket pull. Do you want to re-explain the bucket-pillar? Yeah, yeah, okay.

So we have, you know, we react to a lot of posts from X on this show. We wanted to create some differentiation here. And so when we see something on the timeline that's a banger, it's from a friend, it's from a brother, maybe a previous brother of the week, someone really important. It's about a really important topic. We put it in this stack. We print it full size. It's a banger. This is from Max Meyer.

You know it's gonna be good. It's important. He's setting the discourse. But every once in a while we see posts that are good, but from people we don't know, maybe they're just kind of random, timeless. We could just react to them whenever we want. So we print them on these small four by six cards and these are the bucket pulls. We put them in the bucket.

Champagne. Chuffle them all around. Champagne. We shuffle them all around and we take them out of here randomly. Use the tongs too. These are a little, the bangers are a little bit more sorted. We know we want to talk about Max's post today, but the bucket pulls are random. And we got this idea from Kill Tony, Tony Hinchcliff.

He, when he runs his comedy show, he brings on his friends every show. They're regulars. They do a minute of stand-up. And you know that those friends of his are going to be the regulars are going to deliver. They're going to deliver high quality. But he also does bucket pulls. He pulls random people from the audience who maybe they've never done stuff. stand up. Maybe it's their first time. Maybe they're, maybe they're terrible. Maybe they bump.

Maybe they overperform. And at the end, he gives them a joke book. It's a variable reward is addicting. Exactly. So on the show going forward, you'll see we do a couple bangers. We do a promoted post and we do a bucket pull. And so this is a good one. Let's do this one from Comrade Cisco. He says, new workout goal is to have a body where if I commit a crime, the media posts my shirtless picks and everyone's like wow it's a picture of luigi mangione and my goal for this year is to make luigi mangioni look like the trump shooter you see that you get that really really skinny dude i'm trying to get so big that everyone's like uh luigi's you know skinny yeah it it is it is crazy because a lot of people say oh like all your problems will be solved if you just get super healthy and clearly

if you're messing with 60 mesoamerican demons yes it doesn't matter well i think that's a free one shot photo first. Because if you look at him now, it's not like he's a week out from the bulk. He's months out. And also, there's a big question about people are like, oh, he's so hot. He has tons of fans.

People are looking at this. They're really upset about health care. They're on his side. The public's on his side. Well, that might not matter at all in the courtroom. And there was this whole, like, how much is the court of... The way he looks should not matter in the courtroom. It shouldn't. at all. But people are kind of acting like it will matter. And they did the same thing with SBF. People would be like, why is SBF on X right now in a space talking about how he's innocent?

And it was like, he's trying to win over the public. But like that didn't matter at all. And so I don't know that I think like this is obviously just some joke post, but I don't know that it actually works. Like I don't actually think there's any way to, you know, sway the public. I think the jurors are going to get in there. They're not going to care. They're not going to be extremely online. The lawyers will filter for that in voir dire. They'll be like, are you a communist and are you doing ayahuasca all the time? And are you, you have, the phrase is hybristophilia. Have you heard of this? No. Hybristophilia is sexual. You could just make sex like this up. I'd be like, no, but. Hybristophilia is sexual attraction to criminals. And it's fairly popular. Yeah. So when you hear

about, oh, there's some serial killer that's getting, you know, 20 letters a week. from women across the country who have like fallen in love with him you're like why and and there's actually like a parapheria where people are like that's hot i guess it's crazy there's the same thing with podcasters there's a very uh uh famous podcaster who gets one letter every single day that he hasn't talked about this publicly obviously but he gets one letter every single day from the same woman in europe who just hand writes a letter and puts it in the mail every single day like a love letter to this guy and it just goes to the PO box

and just like rocks there and get two letters a day two letters a day. We're coming for you. You know who you are. You're listening. The other thing is that Luigi is short, so fuck him. Anyway, Max Meyer, as we said, banger, he says, we must put a 100,000 percent tariff on Ozempic and Legos in order to force the kingdom of Denmark

to give Greenland to the United States. Ozympic and Legos are like 45% of the Danish economy. It would be over for them in 15 seconds. That's hilarious. I mean, Max is a media mogul. Yep. And he has studied the art of the deal clearly.

Yep. And it's just trying to feed ideas because he knows that a lot of Trump. Trump administration is very online. They're going to see this stuff and they're going to be like, that's a good idea. Yeah. But, but yeah, I think Lego. and Nova Nordisk are both fantastic companies.

Did you see the flag I posted? I posted the 54 state flag. Who did the Photoshop? I just did that on my phone. I just copied one of the rows that has four stars over and just it looked pretty good, right? It looked great.

And so the 54 star flag, it's still pretty balanced because a lot of people do the one extra star, which is hilarious, moon or whatever, and you just say the place. But I was like, we're talking about four places. Let's just see what that looks like. Looks great.

Looks great. Downstairs, there's a 45 star flag. that was prior to Alaska, Hawaii, but then a few other states looks great as well, very balanced. And what's hilarious is that someone pretty high up in the Trump administration texted me and was like, this looks great.

No way. It's wild. Yeah, anybody complaining about symmetry issues is not a good reason not to expand the empire. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the comments on that post were great and people were saying, let's add Mars. I think that's a promoter post.

This is a promoted post from our friends at the Ridge and our friends at Meta and the Friends at Ramp. Unless you've been living under Iraq, you know that Sean Frank run is the number one wallet salesman in the world. And he's able to do that by running on ramp. I thought this was cool. Dill to a way. Ridge spent $100 million on their ramp cards. They spent a lot of money on meta ads and inventory and things like that. Size lords.

and absolute size lords and hit it nice and ramp sent him this this deal toy fantastic uh it's crazy to think that there will soon be a one billion dollar club and ridge will eventually get to that that's amazing they are highly profitable so you know they're they're not even spending as much as they could yeah but if if ramp really ramps of the deal toys Sean might be like I'm going to spend a little bit more of this month. I've just spent a little more of this month. So they've got the whole like savings focus. The average company on ramp saves 5% a year. But when you have deal toys like this, it's going to tempt some CEOs to say, you want to jack it up, you know, jack up that spend a little bit. That's great. Anyways, we love to see it. Some of the new clients were hearing about ramp signing.

They're going to be in the billion dollar club on day one. If we keep hiring creative agencies like we've been doing, we're going to be in the $100 million ramp club soon. For sure. For sure. Should we go to promoted post or was that? Okay, let's do one from Vitoria. You know he's been on the show before. It says this new wave of imperialism is oddly refreshing. It's like I can feel my ancestral blood stirring again. It's time for war, spiritual war. Very pumped up about the Greenland and Canada jokes and all this stuff.

Hard to say what actually happens here. But certainly a lot of fun. Also, isn't he like living in Italy or something like that? I thought he wasn't even in America. I don't know, actually. Yeah, I don't know. But it would be very funny. Chad, though.

Yeah. I would say if not, this is going to kind of not really land, but with the right audience. But anybody that's unemployed right now that's American, just go to Greenland. Just literally fly there and just post up. I bet there's cheap hotels, hostels, Airbn vs, that kind of things. And just post up, like, hopefully this happens. And, you know, you have the opportunity to be on the ground and, uh, really kind of, you know, lead the charge.

So, D-Day mode. Okay, this is a great one. Buck in SF says, is Tritechre is still relevant? And Ben Thompson, the founder of Stratory, drops a nuclear bomb on him in the form of an entire strategy article explaining that yes, in fact. To be clear, the whole thing was very cordial. It was. It was because Buck has been like a fan and kind of, I guess, asked Ben a lot of questions over the

years. And so they, he, he said, I decided to give you a very earnest answer. And he says, it depends. First off, I'm pretty proud of Stratory's record over the last couple of years. When it comes to the big companies I traditionally cover, I think I've been pretty sharp, including sketching out their relative risks and strengths and AI, calling out Apple strategy pre-Apple intelligence, made comprehensive case that Mehta was actually the best positioned. And of course, was basically the only person to strongly defend meta when they were at their Nadeer. And he has sources for all of these. I've also been on the NVIDIA case for a long time, explaining what you. their moat is and why it's relevant long before they became the juggernaut they are today.

I guess I do regret not forcefully making the case that they were going to go to the moon, but I generally think that if you read Stretti regularly, you're a pretty well positioned to capitalize on moments like that because I laid the groundwork. And he goes on and on and on, and it's amazing because I think Stratoree is extremely relevant, and I still love reading it. So here's the thing. Here's the thing, though. So the reason that ads are the best business model for media is because you get the widest possible reach, right? Sure. A lot of people don't subscribe to Stratory,

so they miss all of this really, really, really high quality content. And he has less influence because he's reliant on his readers. And he makes his readers fork over their hard-earned dollars. Yep. Which works really well for him. I think he likes the predictability of just knowing as long as I write good stuff. There's revenue there. He doesn't have to focus on selling to advertisers.

but the same thing happened to Joe Rogan with Spotify. You remember Joe Rogan's influence fell off a cliff for a few years when he was off YouTube. And you basically didn't hear about him. Yeah. Unless, so it went from being. And then the Trump interview on YouTube got 50 million views. Yeah. So you know that, you know that.

So the Joe Rogan deal, I was talking to Rob Moher at Herman about this, co-founder of Huberman Lab. And he was saying like the Spotify Rogan deal like was very good for everybody. involved like it just made a lot of sense but you know Rogan's happier now that he can just be out freely sharing content generally everywhere so yeah um i'd like to see uh i don't know i'd be interesting i'd like to see more people like ben follow the model of i'm gonna release stuff it's going to be paywall paywalled for a week and then open it up he does he does do that he does eventually release the archive the main the main articles are free to read you can subscribe just to the those get those

and then he has podcast clips and segments of the show. So he's a number of podcasts that do one free, one paid. But when you're paid, you get the full subscription to everything, which is great. It has to be like links being killed on X also impacted. He was huge on LinkedIn early on. He would post link and on Twitter as well. And now that Twitter doesn't have those like viral, like he hasn't figured out how to put his content into like an X native format. We need brain rot, slop, TikToks of Ben Thompson.

Yeah, with the subway surfers and then Ben Thompson talking. Yeah, the problem is that he just doesn't care about, like, reaching that audience. Yeah, and I think you could argue that his influences, there's a bunch of really large capital allocators that read his coverage and use that to make size Lord investment. And also executives at big tech companies, for sure. Yeah, like who knows if suck is reading everyone? He talks with constantly. But everyone he talks with is definitely reading it. And that's why, again, the reason to subscribe to him,

not only because the writing's very high quality, and he's been, like, David Senra in the way that he has so much depth with these companies in the history of them, that he can just talk forever about them. But now they all text him and call him and give him actual scoops and insights that no other writer has. Yeah. Let's do another Greenland post and Canada post,

and then we'll go to a promoted post. J5 Killer says, post a screenshot from 4chan where someone's thinking about why Trump is talking about Canada. The question is, why does Trump keep joking about Canada? Why does he keep joking about Greenland and the Panama Canal? The answer, for those of you who are not familiar with geopolitics, is shipping. Canada and Greenland, and by extension Denmark, control the Northwest Passage, which due to ice melting is set to become one of the largest shipping routes on Earth. Canada can't defend it against the other claimant, Russia, without U.S. support. America is also going down the path of wanting to further control shipping routes to maintain

their hegemony. While these come off as jokes now, make no mistake, these are long-term U.S. strategic objectives, whether through conquest, economic partnership, or some means the U.S. will eventually control these routes. Whether under Trump or someone down the line, he is just putting one idea into the atmosphere. Yeah. Pretty interesting take. I hadn't heard that.

I thought, I was definitely in like, oh, it's just a joke camp. And when I thought Greenland, I thought skiing or something, you know, just like, oh, it's cool. There is a rift in the Trump admin, right? There's some parts that want to absorb Canada. And then there's other part that says, we already got the best Canadian. We got Jeremy Gaffon, Gaffon and company. We got him already. Why do we need the rest of the country?

It's true, true. We have, you know, a future billionaire. Yep. He could have gone on to, you know, be the richest man in Canada. now he's going to be one of the richest men in the U.S. Do we need to go through the trouble of integrating this entirely new country into state and all the stuff? So we'll see how that plays out. Jeremy's laughing to the bank.

Yeah. Either way, he wins. As he does. Promoted posts. We got a promoted post from the founder of Lava. Lava is the only way to borrow against your Bitcoin. All other loan solutions require you to give up custody. So you end up borrowing against bank coin and lose your Bitcoin.

These custodial solutions have lost $100 billion in customer funds in just the last few years. So what are these companies again? There was what was the one? There was two. There was Celsius, not the energy drink company. Yep. That offered amazing rates and went under BlockFi, FTX. There were a lot of companies with non-custodial way to get some leverage.

We love leverage on the show. We love betting on yourself. And we love holding Bitcoin. And that is not financial advice, but lever up. Yeah. Let's go to a bucket poll. This one's from Alex Kerr. He says, today I learned that Evan Spiegel has a private 737.

Let's go. B. B.J. Action for that. He's got the Boeing business jet. Fantastic. It turns out that N3E, an airliner 737 configured as a private jet, is owned by Snapchat and Evan Spiegel.

The operator is listed as SE logistics, short for Speakel. short for Spiegel Evan. Snapchat owns the largest private hangar at Van Nuys Airport. Wow. Amazing. Yeah, my only critique here is that it should be wrapped in yellow. I agree. Because I don't think yellow, there's some issue if you want to make your plane black, it's way too heavy.

Yeah, it seems. There's even a whole brain. Isn't spirits color yellow? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get confused of spirit. It's rough. Evan would not want to be thought of as the spirit of social networking. That would be rough.

Evan kind of came about. too early right because you would always get so much shit for driving supercars around Venice is like are you going to get mad at a young billionaire for enjoying yeah supercars enjoy the fruits 10 years from now it's going to be completely normal for the average product manager in SF to drive a supercar to work yeah street park street park it and so Evan was just too early but he I mean it's still early but he still go in his own arc and be his own person and and and there's just so many ways Spiegel's actually somebody I would like to see

step away from Snapchat, it's never going to make any money. It was a sort of an enrichment scheme for employees, right? And a strong public markets bet for some very online ex people. Yes. But I'd like to see him leave Snap, start a new foundation model, consumer hardware company, go compete with, try to compete with Avi from friend.com. Sure, sure. Yeah, let's see him like go big.

Like, I want like a two on two billion on 10 billion seed round. Like that would just be good entertainment. Yeah, I mean, if I'm going entertainment with Spiegel, I want him just to lean into the personality, the lifestyle. Let's see your watch collection. Maybe he can just take it in a different direction. Doesn't need to compete on price. But if he's got little, oh, he went a little bit crazier at West Coast Customs. Oh, you got the Cayenne minivan?

He's got the F40 minivan. I got a lifted Cayenne six by six. Yeah. What about that? He's got the Sterado build on an F40. You know, the F40, you think about that car. Everyone loves it. Only has a V8.

Swap a V12 in there. Yeah, V12. Quad turbo. F40 with the Cerrado with the roof racks. F40 Sterado. Now we're talking some knobby tires on that thing. It doesn't, it has a manual. Everyone says that it's the most engaging drive. Throw an automatic in there.

Get some paddles going. It'll be faster. Let's really class it up in there. Paddle shifting in your F40. Just dig it all out. Throw a 2-9-6 in there. Yeah, PDK. Yeah, just slap everything on it.

Yep, this is the way to do it. He's like, oh, nice minivan. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, turn the F40 into a minivan. F40 minivan, F40 minivan. Serrados, Toronto. The perfect car to get to the snow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because you can't, you can't really afford an F40 if you can't afford to take it to West Coast Customs, drop another million, converting it to a V12 with off-road tires. And you also, you know that if you do... If you do that, Ferrari will sue you, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you can't really afford an F40 unless you can fight the lawsuit. The crazy Ferrari is the only company that sues their customers for just doing non-harmless things.

The only company yet. Yeah. The only company yet. We need more of this. We need more aggressive entrepreneurs who are saying, you know what? Yeah, I do sell an AI wearable. And if you don't like him to sue you. Yeah.

If you paint this thing, yeah. You put the wrong phone case on your iPhone, lawsuit. Lawsuit. We want this thing clean. No cases. Yeah, we should test that. Every man should get sued by Ferrari at one point in their life. Yes.

And I think if you listen to this show and you haven't left us a five-star review, expect a lawsuit. My father-in-law got in a nasty lawsuit. Really? Ferrari once. Sorry for another time. Okay, let's move on. Let's move on. Oh, this is an interesting personal story.

So disgraced propagandist says, staying at a formerly world-class hotel in Pasadena and thinking about how horrible the consultant class that's taken over is, everything hears a shell of its former self, small things replaced with plastic, food boiled down to lowest bitter, deep-fried items, prices jacked up, staff lazy and confused,

best encompassed by the image of the harp player at the famous T-service, squinting at an iPad, scratching out an appalling 60-second harp version, not of concertos, but of pop-slash-rap hits. The worst part is both, reservation brain rod harp brain rod harp just playing like uh what are those brain rod songs like the the the sigma sigma male theme song during like like the the the the funk you know funk music it's like those stuff like Russian kids in Russia will be drifting to and like the HS edits it's actually sick music I like it

I like the sigma male it's like yeah the Sigma male theme song on a harp that would go hard The worst part is booking a reservation now impossible without calling centralized booking agency, which barely speaks English and has no answers because we're not connected with the property. Customer service staffs are the worst enemy of the consulting class, the massive costs, keep them up at night. It occurred to me that their next trick will be to turn the lowest on the totem pole, the migrant worker gardening and cleaning into dual employees, the leafblower slash customer service role, a futuristic sort of slave wielding both cleaning implements and a Bluetooth headset

at the same time, that they'll call something like core team member or full service coordinator. Perhaps then I'll stop coming. Do you know this hotel? I tried to stay there. The last fire. Yeah, it's the Langham. Now, it was formerly the Ritz Carlton. Everyone loved it when it was the Ritz. And everyone was very upset. My mom is like, oh, it was so much better when it was the Ritz. I didn't understand the context at all because when I went as a kid, a kid, it was the Ritz. And when I went as Langham, it all looked the same. It didn't really matter. But on Tuesday when we got evacuated, I booked a room there. Oh, really?

Yeah. Because I was like, oh, Emily was like, we want to get out of the house. We've got to go somewhere. We're not sure where we're going to go. I was like, I'll just book a hotel there. Seems great. Booked it on Expedia. It was pretty cheap.

They were starting to jack up their prices on the... Price gouging. Nice. Yeah. Fire evac. Exactly. And so I'm sure the... I don't want to put too much blame on them for the price gouging.

I'm sure whatever like e-commerce software they're using to set prices just detects like there's a lot of views on the website. Let's put it up. And 99.9% of the time if Pasadena is booking a lot of hotels, it's like there's a conference in town or it's the Rose Bowl or the Rose Parade or there's something else going on. It's not a natural disaster. But they should have a fail safe that says like, hey, like maybe it's a bad look to be prosci. Anyway, I book on Expedia. It's only 300 bucks or something. And, um, and, um, um, But then I'm like, this is a weird thing. I bet a lot of people are thinking about doing this. Let me call them and verify that they have my reservation. I actually got stuck in the central booking thing. And they're like, we don't know if you have a reservation. I did that this morning. I was calling a bunch of hotels.

The hotel stayed at last night. Like, HFAC system wasn't working. So we told them we were leaving. I was sort of calling hotels. Yep. And trying to get through to somebody that's actually at the hotel is very hard. Oh, it's really, really hard. Super annoying.

So anyways. But my, going back to the original post, so I have, I feel like I'm qualified to have strong opinions on hotel, like service and just the general experience because I worked at a Ritz Carlton in college. And like I would work 40 hours a week at this hotel while I was in school. And, and so anyways, I've seen it inside working at a Ritz Carlton delivering the actual service. And I think there's a number of issues with hotels today. The thing you can count. on Legacy Hotel Brands for is service. Like if you're having an issue on the property, they will typically go above and beyond to try to resolve it. The challenge is the actual interiors are, for the most part, falling apart. So they're no longer that nice. The menus and all the food items are just like Cisco slop.

The food's no longer enjoyable to eat at many of these properties, which is just tragic because you have these incredible properties and then terrible food. My business partner at his wedding, the day after, the night of his wedding he stayed at the langham and walked in to his room there was a shattered glass like champagne glass on the ground wine glass and he stepped and cut his foot like super bad and was like can we do something about this and i don't even think they comped him the room it's like very that's crazy uh bad but yeah and then so you have like the the the um most of our listeners are already a mon pilled yeah i was gonna say we need them on in la yeah yeah we got they are

They're putting them on residences in center of L.A. But will that be a hotel too? I don't know if they're going to have a hotel, but I get to live there. That's the best part. But, but, but, but, yeah, I mean, maybe just the issue. You have this. You have the, um, the Ritz Carlton. You have the, um, four seasons.

You have, uh, what, St. Regis. You have all these hotels, which are beautiful properties, very expensive properties, but actually mid experience. Yep. And then you have the new hotel brands that are, the Caruso in air. Yeah, Caruso would do it. The Rosewood.

Yeah, the Rosewood Miramar is pretty nice, but again, the food still, I think, slop. And then you have, like, one hotel, the proper hotel, these hotels where the interiors, like, they paid for cool contemporary interior designers. But then they're just not actually, they don't have, like, the service culture, typically that you get at these legacy hotels. And so the solution is to basically stay at these, like, very, like, boutique hotel. hotels like 20, 30 rooms that are still nice. Yep. Or you spend $5,000 a night at the amount. Yeah.

And that's like, that's the state of hotels. Yeah. Have you seen this, uh, hotel booking scam? No. Where are you like fake? Yeah. So basically the way it works is you go, you Google, this happened to me when I was booking a room at the four seasons.

I Google like four seasons, San Francisco, I was staying up there. and the first result is like a sponsored post because every post on Google's, every result is sponsored now. And it says like Four Seasons official booking. And the website is four seasons. Dot guest reservations.com. And so you're just like, oh, this must be like the SaaS tool that they're using. They got a custom domain on it.

Sure. I'll click there. It's not the Four Seasons. Dude, I was on guestreservations.com today. with thinking it was legit. Yeah, no, no, no, no, it's fake. And so what happens is that they, they get you through the flow. And it's a really clean UI.

Like, it all makes sense. So you're like, oh, this is great. This is easy. They quote you a price that feels about right. And then at the last second, they add like $200 on. Oh. And it will be like $400 if you just went to actually the Four Seasons website, $700 on their website.

And then they book it and it's non-refundable. And if you call them, they'll be like, sorry we can't do anything and literally all they're doing is they just have someone there who books through expedia at an even lower rate on your behalf and so when you show up to the four seasons they're like yeah we have you but we don't have your information for some reason like we just have your name down here we didn't get your email so crazy because they put in like you know some hash like 6k 427 at guest reservation dot com and then they'll forward that to you clean it all up so it feels like you booked and a lot of people don't know i was on so i was on so i was

on guest reservations.com today looking at the hotel that I, the second hotel that I booked for family. And I was like, why is this hotel like letting this other company own their customer? It's so weird. And I ended up just calling them because I didn't see the room that I wanted to get or whatever. And, but yeah, that makes sense where I thought you were saying scam where they just like take your money. No, no, no. They do book it. They just mark it up. And then they don't let you refund. And it's this weird. thing where again, I called the four seasons. They try to make it look like it's.

Exactly. Exactly. And I called the four seasons because I was like I like like, like, okay, like I'm getting screwed for like 300 bucks. But at the very least like I and the reviews if you search like guest reservations read it. It's all just like scam. They didn't even book me.

I got screwed like because of course like the service is terrible. But if you. So I called and I'm like, hey, I, I messed up and I booked through this scam website. Like I just want to make sure that I actually have a room when I show up. and I'm not just like hunting around for a different hotel. And if you call within the first like three hours, they'll say, no, we don't have you yet. And so, but then I showed up and I called later and they were like, we actually do have you now because they finally put it through. It's just such a mess.

It's such a mess. And yeah, I mean, a bunch of different problems there. Class action against. Yeah, I mean, I do think the four seasons, like I would, I talked to like the, you know, front desk person. but I was like seven layers from the CEO. What can you even do as Four Seasons because it's just showing up on Expedia. They're basically a travel agency from a legal framework. And they're just arbitraging the Google ad cost of winning that auction and the fees that they can add.

So they think, okay, it costs us $20 to acquire this customer. We'll add $100 of fees at the last second. extravagant explanation for why that says a real high value market service, you know. Which CEO? The first user. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, actually, like we're creating efficiency in the market.

No, no, no. It's a total scam and they know it. They understand what they're doing. I've seen the inside of these scams before. This is an interesting one. This is not a post. This is not a public post. It's actually from a private group chat I'm in, but I thought it was interesting based

on the fire stuff. from a friend saying, I'm going to insist that everyone start picking up tangible skills like lock picking. I'm so sad by what I'm hearing with regards to the fire. But in the event of serious emergencies, you need to know how to commandeer boats, hotwire cars, start motorcycles. These aren't jokes. I learned how to do this a long time ago. You never know. And with kids to take care of being able to get out matters. Back in the day, we used to hold weekend sessions and teach each other skills all the time. You can download MIT's lock picking guide and get a set of tools and starters from Amazon, from Amazon, and have a fun weekend

together. You have to always pronounce Amazon like that. Amazon. But I thought that was really cool. And, you know, as bad as these disasters are, they are great. You know, it's like, it's like, is starting a workout plan on January 1st, kind of ridiculous and cringe? Like, sure, but better than not having a workout plan and not using that as the start.

and I'm sure there's plenty of people that are in great shape now who are like, yeah, actually I did start working out on January 1st five years ago and now I'm jacked. And it's the same thing for this. It's like, yeah, maybe the fire was like the thing that made you go buy a gun or buy a Starlink or, you know, learn how to lock pick or learn how to hot wire car. But, you know, best time to start is now. So just go do it. Yeah, I bought a gun for the first time during COVID. There you go.

It was just like, there's riots outside of my house, a lot of crime. You got the meteor right, 1911s? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great choice. Shark tooth, trigger. Let's skip that one. Let's do a promoted post. John, John's got that official X badge, and we just wanted to call attention to John.

He says, at 300 followers invests now, you'll never be this early. And this X badge does numbers on engagement. This guy, this got 2.3,000 likes. No way. Oh, he must be way above 300 now. So he's probably way over. even if he's at a few thousand now. Promote post.

Future brother of the week, future reply guy potentially. Yeah. So John, great work. Go give him a follow. And if you're, you know,

if you're struggling on the follower side, go get a random job at X. Become, become like the maintenance guy at X. That's great. Get the X badge and run it up to 50K, then quit and suddenly you have an asset now. Yeah,

yeah. Yeah. Also just that, that meme template of like, buy now, invest now. We're still small. Like people,

want to get in on things early. And so I think that works generally. That's great. And the anime profile picture. Yeah, you know there's going to be some good content there. Great. Oh, let's do a bucket pole. What should we do?

Zeked up? Oh, I like this one. Zeke, been on the show before, but this time he's in the bucket polls. He says, whoever makes this autonomous first has my vote at Waymo, at Zooks. And it's a

1840s horse and carriage. looks very opulent, very loud opulence. This would be a great daily. There was a bunch of horse and buggy setups in Alps last week. Oh, cool. It's good to see. I'm going to do it next year. You have to like box out all the tech journalists to get access to the horses.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, the lines wait times are crazy. It is terrible. I'm sure. I'm sure. But yeah, I think, I think, you know, I'm hearing reports from my neighbors at none of the gas stations around our neighborhood have gas. and what the great thing about a horse is if the horse gets tired, runs out of gas, you let them feast on your lawn and they're back in action.

Back in action. You don't have to worry about all you need is a little water, sunlight, and you got fuel. So one of the, this is another reason that equestrianism is coming back in such a big way. It's just rational. It's just rational. Yeah. I do think that there is a, although this is obviously a joke and a meme, I do think that there's an interesting insight. here, which is that design of these autonomous vehicles is going to matter.

And we saw this with the difference between the Waymo and the Tesla cyber cab, how they look wildly different. I mean, people were joking that one looks left wing and one looks right wing. And you could imagine that people want to express themselves. People want different brands. Not everything it needs to be perfectly monopolistic. And so you could see someone coming out with some sort of like opulent. robo taxi that's cleaned every single time and very high like what is the uber black or the catallac

escalade uh escalade v hopefully i just want to call a waymo that has a humanoid robot in the driver's seat yes that has the one a r 15s for arms yeah yeah to defend you yeah it's great uh this is a a great throwback post from technology sister says this is one of the first ruin tweets i ever saw all-time banger and it's ruin in 2021 saying you can either work for a liberal tech company that lifted its name off of a random concept in Hinduism, or you can work for a conservative tech company that lifted its name off a random concept in Tolkien.

Those are your choices. And it's Samsara and Asana versus Anderl and Palantir. And everyone knows about the LOTR references, but I didn't know about the Hinduism trend on the left-wing tech companies. But it really is true because Dustin at Asana is a big Democratic donor. And obviously, Palantir.

I mean, Carps actually. but Anderol, Palmer, kind of the same thing. And, uh, and, oh, this is actually, uh, I don't know. He's not, yeah, it only, the, the, the analogy breaks down after four companies, but it looks for a good screenshot. The open AI being the least open AI company is just great naming. Yeah. Couldn't even have planned that.

Yeah. Yeah. There was something about the Anderl name where it was like, uh, I think Peter has a riff on the best, the best one. where it was like it was like Uber was too aggressive of a name, whereas Lyft was like this very like nice name. And so that's why the lift needed a character assassination. Yeah, they had a counterpositioning with the pink mustache. Like I'm just getting a lift. The best name recently is like super aggressive. And so that led to like some easy character assassination. Like we got to go after this hardcore black company.

Like they're like black and white. They're super serious. Travis was just too cool. Yeah. Good name in the Tolkien side of things. Soron. Soron, yeah. Home security from... I mean, this almost seemed like a sub-tweet of Soron a little bit, but this all started with Lulu, if your startup hasn't launched yet, it's not too late to make sure it doesn't have yet another Tolkien name.

That name won't make you the next Anderol. But I guess Saran has launched, but yeah, I mean, there's going to be a little bit of, like, distance where it used to be like, Peter is a co-founder if it has a... Tolkien name and then it was like a founder's fund partner is involved and therefore it has Tolkien name and then it became like you went to Peter's Christmas party and so you get to use okay if anybody wants some alpha find every possible name in the Tolkien ecosystem and go

buy the dot com start bidding low balling yeah yeah because because anderol would would have been a pretty probably that's like a anderrol.com was $10 not $10.000. Not $10. but probably like five grand. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny. Well, let's stay on the topic of people who have founded Tolkien-based startups. And Delian says it's crazy that the Boeing astronauts are still stranded in space and no one is talking about it.

And they're going to end up being up there for almost a full nine months longer than I originally intended. Bums and seats, the world has prepared a number of crude flights in the coming year. NASA's SpaceX crew 10 mission on the ISS, which will find. finally bring, Boch, Wilmore, and Sunni Williams home after a 10-month stay in space

has been delayed to NET March. I glad they brought enough food. Yeah. They're probably having like Capri Sons at this point

rationing them, but like NASA Capri Sons which are probably like way worse. I would say here's the interesting thing. So Varda's first mission, they took them

a little bit of extra time to get the proper licenses to come back. Yeah. And everybody like all the, you know, Dalians, like, haters were trying to dunk on him for that. Yet there was no humans on board the craft. It was literally just, yeah.

So where are those same haters now hating on NASA being like, yo, your crew is stuck in space? It is funny how much of a culture war issue when it first happened, because on like day two of them being stuck, everyone was like, this is embarrassing for Boeing. Like, we're hating on Boeing. And a lot of people were like, oh, they're not technically stuck. They're just doing extra things.

like it's going to be fine and like nope it wasn't fine actually like all of the crazy like irrational like jumping to conclusions in this case was correct yeah 100% yeah uh let's do a promoted post promoted post we haven't talked enough about watches on this episode so we got a promoted post from the luxury watch guy himself this is the watch dealer for uh friends of the pod like uh Austin over at Morning Brew. Luxury watch guy has a Patech Philippe 5303R, which is a grand complications minute repeater, Rose Gold Skeleton, coming in at only $1.3 million.

Surprise Zuck hasn't picked this up yet, but yeah, Evan, Evan Spiegel, maybe go for this, try to get some new hardware. And what was the rule again on watches 2% of AUM? 2% of AUM. So you need a $50 million fund to justify that, 60 mil, 70 mil? Yeah. Okay, we know some people.

We can recommend that too. Anyways, jump on this quick. Nicole Wistoff is asking for a recommendation. Nicole, honestly, kind of a perfect watch for Nicole. Get the grand complication minute repeater. Rose gold with the skeleton. It's just, I mean, this is such a good looking watch. It's great.

Nicole, go get this watch. It's a great option for you and sure to turn heads on either coast. When you're in that meeting and the minute repeater starts chiming the perfect time to the minute. So here's the play for Nicole. That's important. That's a powerful. If she goes, so she, let's say she spends 1.3 million on this watch, right? It's a, it's a meeting. Her last one is $50 million. It's 10 million in management fees over 10 years. Maybe she pulls a little bit of that forward to acquire this. But then she goes into a meeting with Zuck. He's got a family office. Yeah. You'll probably raise $500 million just off of the conversation.

This is a great conversation. Or, hey, look at what I got in my portfolio. This one company. Maybe you want to buy it. That's liquidity. It's all going to come back to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So anyways, I don't think she can lose buying this watch. And I do think the minute repeater's underrated because of the fact that it makes noise at the end of the meeting. So, hey, I got to run.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. It's drawing attention to your watch. You don't have to show it to someone. They're going to hear it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're going to hear it. It speaks for itself. Let's do another bucket poll.

Oh, this is a fun one. Prang for exits went mega viral, seven million views with a video about Jucero. And he says, Never forget that this was a Silicon Valley darling with over $120 million raised. And, yeah, the Jucerra was destroyed by Ellen Hewitt at Bloomberg, actually. She just wrote a piece about Zinn that I was featured in. But you still got to put that one in the truth.

We do, we do, because there's a lot of things that we're taking out of context. A lot of things that were taken out of context. But overall, I mean, she does great reporting. And, you know, no one loves tech journalists more than we do. So the downfall of Jucero was quite the Silicon Valley moment in the HBO TV sense. Very entertaining for everyone involved. I do have a good friend who did an SPV into Jucero. Did they get out?

Did they secondary out in time? Knowing him, he probably did, but he's gone on to have a very illustrious career, billions of AUM. That's great. He's doing just fine. Yeah. So. I mean, like the basic thesis. If anybody invested in Jucero and wants to,

we would have a guest on to talk about, let's break down the investment memo. Yeah. Why is little these things? I mean, it actually wasn't that crazy. It's like, Currig makes a ton of money. It's this razor blade model subscription.

People like juices. So, you know, we're going to do the same thing. Juice was also booming. Everybody, everybody was saying you got to get all, you should be getting, having multiple juices a day,

all the stuff. It is, I've gone through juicing arcs. It's super annoying. It takes a ridiculous. amount of prep makes a huge mess in the kitchen you've got this juicer that's spewing out plant waste they were solving a real problem so have I told you the IP right now is is is like who's buying who's you could easily get I think 10,000 pre-orders for that thing if you just rebooted the juicerro

IP maybe and somebody owns it out there I mean they rebut the Enron IP maybe juceros next. Yeah, maybe Jucerra would do better as a meme coin now. Mem coin or yeah, just simplify it and just make it juices that they sell pre-made glass bottles. Have I told you my story about making fresh juice during YC in 2012 is the best? So we had a juicer. We were like, we need to stay healthy. Let's start juicing stuff. We'd go get produce. But it's always really expensive. So we'd always have to like drink it all because we were like, can't let it go to waste. This is like the highest value. nutrition that we're getting.

Most of the time it's ramen and just like garbage. And so... This is when you were living on 16K a year with four other guys. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so my business partner and I go over to his uncle's house. They're like, oh, we know you guys are into juicing and we got some produce from our garden here, take this stuff, and you can make some juice with it.

So you bring it home and it's got some good stuff in there. That meaningfully increased your runway. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was meaningful at the time. We were stoked. Two days. So we start throwing it all in. and we started juicing everything.

We're like, okay, carrot, it's this. And we're like, what are these red things? We put them in. We're like, okay, I guess those radishes. Ooh, spicy. And we didn't realize that, like, it completely tainted, like, all of the juice. It was just the spiciest thing,

but we were like, we can't let it go to waste. So we just had to drink this radish juice for, like, two days. It was miserable. Then we had to clean it all. It was disgusting. Yeah, it was a mess. Long, Jucero. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, Juicero made a lot of sense. I like this one by Armand Domaluski. He says, the polymarket on will the palisades fire be contained by Friday? It's down at like 1%. It's apparently just impossible to do. And so he's suggesting that somebody makes a movie about a team of degenerate gamblers

who single-handedly contain a massive fire in order to win a huge score on polymarket. And I mean, the volume's 22K. It's not exactly going to be a huge score, but it could be funny in a... Somebody doesn't check the volume, hires the most insane private. They're like, oh, the French guy bet 40 million.

If we just spend $5 million on the private fire brigade and ship them in from the East Coast, the $22,000 pay out. If you poured $20K into that market, it would be $50.50. If you poured $100K, you'd be at 90%. Immediately, you could totally swing that market. The interesting, a friend of mine sent me this, that post, just the polymarket was like, this is so dystopian. And I was like, I don't know.

I think it's actually still valuable to know, okay, I shouldn't expect the fire to be put out. And there's this whole thing about like, okay, well, does this incentivize people to like fires? I actually got value out of it. I've been planning my week. Yeah, based on like, don't go. I don't plan to go back before Friday. Yeah, I don't want to go home. It's not going to be contained.

So I don't know. It seemed like it wasn't that good. And in this case, like, yeah, you could say that there's, you could win one percent of your money by keeping the fire going, which is illegal. or you could win 100x your money by putting it out. And so it's actually like the good ending here potentially if there was like this team of genera gamblers. I only think it's sad for some of that $22,000 of people with crazy gambling addiction that are just saying. Yeah. Should we go to Paul Graham?

He posted his office reveal. He says, my flight was delayed so I cleaned up my office. and he's got some wonderful bookshelves, desk right in the center. The problem, of course, is that he's not in the power position. This is a feng shui disaster. We posted about this. Yeah, we compared that having success in business in this room is the equivalent to making it to the NBA with no likes. Yeah, it's incredible that he's been able to have the career that he's had.

It just shows like PG is in the power position. He really is a one-of-one, fighting with one arm tied behind his back this entire time. And if we really knew the full layout of the house, we could have. understand more about whether or not this applies the principles of feng shui correctly. But I can tell you right now, fung shui is very important, it's very real. And very rarely do I meet really successful people who do not have their desks in the power position. This is kind of like feng shui 101.

Basically, you want to have your desk facing the door. And so the opportunities can come to you and that energy can come to you and you're kind of ready to receive it. You don't want your back to windows. The feng shui reason is so that monkeys and ninjas can come break in through the windows and just, you know, take you out. But a lot of these ideas, there's other things like you shouldn't have your desk right next to an open bathroom. And it's like the negative energy from the bathroom will throw you off. But a lot of these feng shui things, they sound like kooky, like, you know, astrology.

But they actually have like very reasonable scientific, you know, explanations if you think about it. Like, why do you want your, why don't why don't you want your back to the door where people come in your office. Well, it's because people are going to walk by and see what's on your monitor and you're going to be like, oh, like, am I, you know, messing around on Twitter? Does that look weird? Like, as opposed to if you're in the flips, flip, flips, somebody comes in and you can have you can have X open on your monitor and your phone. Yeah. It looks like you're doing important business. Yeah. And it's the same thing with like the windows. After I bought my, yeah. After I bought my house, I had a, I hired a, a feng shui consultant.

Frank Choy consultant, David Cho, he's based here in L.A. And he taught me a lot about my house and how to make it nicer. But you don't even have to believe. You don't even have to believe. leave in feng shui, just look at how, you know, if you're a skeptic, go around your house and there'll be areas of your home that you completely ignore that are perfectly good areas, like a living room or something like that, that you just never go in because they're, the feng shui is off. Yeah. So you intuitively don't feel like, you just don't feel like spending any time there. Totally, totally.

Yeah, I mean, you can abstract it into just like you walk into a cluttered house that has a lot of hoarding going on. That's bad vibe. You're not going to be productive there. You're in a really clean, beautiful space where everything's laid out reasonably. And you're not bumping into things. You're not subbing your toes. All these things add up to just a more pleasant and happy life.

And you can explain it through ancient Chinese wisdom or just like logic and reason. And both are equally valid. But the end result is that yes, you should, in fact, follow the principles of feng shui. Yep. Promoted post. Promoted posts caught me off guard here. we got to promote a post from Augustus DeRico. He says apply to work as a forward deployed engineer at Rainmaker.com

slash careers. And he posted a picture of their truck stuck in the mud. So if you didn't see Augustus had a little episode last week where he and his team got stuck in the mud. But they made it out. And yeah, I think this is a super important company. We've been over the last 48 hours, 72 hours. been at the mercy of Mother Nature. Augustus is trying to,

rainmaker, lucky to be an investor. What was he? The emerging poster of the year as well? He was. Award winning poster and cigarette smoker. Runner up for hobbyists

of the year. And yeah, I mean, the team works really hard. They're doing something important. And yeah, every now and then I'll see a rainmaker, hater, online and I'm just like pick a better hobby.

His company's very cool and I guess this is very cool and I don't think they'll be doing as many gondo bonfires anymore sort of poor taste to light things on fire. But a cool opportunity to go check it out. Let's go to a bucket poll. We got $10 Danny here and he says, bro, you're fine.

You just need an impossible sequence of events to play out in perfect order against all odds and you'll be fine. 200k likes banger that is the mentality that you should be bringing in to the rest of your Thursday yeah by the time this episode gets up you may only have a few hours left but the genetic lottery it's real win it no excuses no excuses no excuses do you close out I think we're getting there okay let's do a couple more a couple more Chris Sparadadaius if you didn't if you couldn't tell John is deeply

deeply addicted to podcast Oh, yeah. And he's like, oh, I got to leave it one. I got a lot of going on at home. It's 110. The guys sitting over there scratching his wrists. This is interesting, though. We got to cover this.

Chris says Bridger Aerospace owns six super scoopers, including the one you saw on your timeline today. These are the planes that put out the fires. It's a public company. The ticker is B-A-E-R, Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings. And just today, they're up 10%. 11.6 to be exact. There we go. But it was cool. I love when something where was Shrelly to tell people to go long bridge or airspace? It's one of my favorite like autismo hobbies is when something crazy happens. You go and you deep dive like the businesses and the corporations that are behind like like Caruso like when else would I really go and understand his full career. I'm really glad I understand it now because he actually is a fascinating business model. He's not like other real estate developers and it is really interesting. I learned a lot from that. Founder mode. And it's a It's the same thing.

I would love to know, you know, who's the founder of Bridgeer Aerospace? What's their stock trading at? How does the business work? How many of these things do they own? Do they make them? Who makes them? I want to know everything about this. You know, AI can help with this stuff, but you've got to know what questions to ask.

Yeah. And yeah, it's fun. And that's part of why we do the show. It's good, Palmer Lucky. I love this post. He says, after spending a few days at CES 2025, it is clear that this vibe shift is real. Everyone wants to help our military. Everyone wants to build.

Nobody is afraid. fantastic vibe shift. And I liked the follow-up here because someone was like, oh, like they're Johnny Come Lately's. Like they're just joining now when it's trendy. There's no political risk.

There's no career risk to saying, yes, I support the military. And he says, yeah, this is exactly what Palmer replied. He said, we should have an open 10 for them. It's fine. Like, let's just forget about that. I'm not going to go and pull the receipts from,

oh, you weren't on board five years ago, 10 years ago. And I was thinking about it. Like, when Anderrol launched, I thought the company was cool. I like Palmer and when Palmer got fired from Facebook I was like this is very anti-democratic and I'm not into it. But like I wasn't out there like blogging about it or posting about it like and it's not that I was like necessarily afraid to espouse that view. It's like I didn't really have a platform back then.

But ultimately like all that matters is like the end of the road like get everyone on the right team for the right reasons and it doesn't matter if it requires a vibe shift. And you see this all over the place. You know credit to Palmer, the. Anderil seed round, obviously they had a ridiculously stacked team and it was a, you know, Founders Fund was involved. But the Andrewl Seed Round was done at like 97 posts or something like that. Talk about a mango. Talk about an absolute mango seed round. And that was at a time that there was a very, very, very, very small group of people in Silicon Valley that even thought the category was investable at all. Yeah. To be able to pull off around like that. I know a big, a big hedge fund.

past because of price. Mistake. Yikes. That's great. Let's do this one. We'll do another promoted post. Esther Crawford, former ex-employee, former Twitter employee. Says, not enough people know that the person behind community notes is K Coleman.

It launched in January 2021 under the name Birdwatch. His product vision withstood the test of three CEOs, Jack, Parag, and Elon, and is expanding to meta's massive user base, absolutely legendary. product sense. That is crazy. It seems so obvious the community notes feature, but it really is this, it's an interesting out. I am, I am. And I enjoy it. Watch out. Watch out, brothers. I'll put somebody in the truth zone. You'll put two seconds. Anybody in the truth zone. Because the truth for you is paramount. And it is crazy. Like, there are so many posts that have community notes on them. Constantly. Almost every single one of Elon's posts has a community note on it and people are

battling it out. But it always surfaces extra information, extra content. Really, Elon's a hyper-targeted. He's not out of the woods. I haven't seen a community note. It happens all the time. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times he'll quote tweet something that's like a little edgy or conspiratorial.

It'll have a community note. And then Elon's post will have a community note too. And you just see two of these. But also as someone who's in the program, I see more community notes than the average person. Because I see them as soon as one person even proposes it before one wins in the battle of ideas, the free marketplace. You can see.

Okay, there's four different people. And then there'll also be people saying NNN, like no note needed. And they'll put like why they don't think it's a note. Like it's obvious satire. We don't need a note. Or somebody else will say, actually, we do need a note. We need to link to this Wikipedia article or this Wall Street Journal article. It's a really cool system.

And then you can get in there, write stuff, upboat stuff and see stuff before it goes out. And then interestingly, like they're really good with the push notifications. Hey, you like the post and now it has a community note. We're updating you. Just really, really great system. And just like, it's not censorship. It's just adding to the conversation, which I really, really like. So I can still see all the crazy conspiracies.

Yeah, because usually once a post goes viral, people will correct it in the comments. Yep. They may not get any attention. No way. Yeah. But you can just see. This is half a promoted post, but we're going to be tracking this. We're now, I guess, six days out until Varda's second mission, Delian, is announcing

Varda is going to space again. We're very excited for this. We'll be covering it. We'll be live the day it happens. And you'll certainly hear about it here on the show. And this time they're launching from Vandenberg, but they're landing down under in Australia. Very exciting. Very cool.

Huge progress for that company. I'm very excited to see it. So congrats to Delian and the team at Varda. Good luck. Bad week to be a Delian hater. Bad week to be a Delian hater. It's been a bad few years. I mean, some of the dunks are funny.

There was this one where he posted a picture of like the new factory floor and it was just like empty because it's new factory. And so he was like, a lot of space in the space factory. And I was like, okay, that's kind of funny. But it's like, of course they filled it in. They filled it up so much that Andrew has to move out Doshvin. He doesn't have room for his old vacuum chamber. But now it's going in my backyard. Yeah, exactly.

So it's all full cycle. And they've been grown a bunch. They hired a ton of people. I think they, I think Delyan said they hired more people in the last like two weeks than they did in the first eight months of the company. something like that. So exciting. Love getting stuff to space. We'll definitely be sending some watches.

We're sending podcasting equipment. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that we're, it's ready for us when we get there. Just arrive,

put on the watch. We're going to send a minute repeater. It'll just be chiming. Yeah, we need it with a watch winder. With a watch winder. So it's wound the entire time. No sound.

So maybe just like a chronograph. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, yeah. Something good. Got to keep the time. Speaking of keeping the time. the time. What do we got there on that promoted post? We got the last promoted post of the day, a gorgeous Pettekfilippe reference 527P with a pink dial available on windvintage.com. Eric Wind

as a fantastic collector and dealer and you can go check out this watch. I mean, this thing makes me emotional. Like I'm going to tear up looking at it and it's just a very good looking watch. Conograph too. Fantastic. You were just mentioning it. This could be. It's the daily driver. That could be your new daily. I want to keep track of how long the show's been going. You have basically, you have basically, I need a chronograph. I can't run the show without it. You basically have three hours to buy this watch before the brothers are going to be notified about it. And so it's less now. We're getting this thing up in 30 minutes after we call. Call your wife. Yeah. Sorry, canceling the promoted post. We bought it ourselves. Cancel the family event.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you already texted me last night. He was like, you should get on bezel and impulse by protect Philippe and tell your wife that it was an emotional reaction it was an emotional reaction like you're just really stressed out about the fires and like needed an outlet yeah and I encourage anyone who's suffering with a natural disaster to you know treat yourself

yeah treat yourself a little treat yeah I mean you should be able to put a lot of your net worth as a percentage on your wrist and get out of Dodge yeah and you should also have a car that goes 200 miles an hour case the fires travel you saw people posting think about how much Bitcoin just got taken off the map because everybody in the Palisades had their ledgers. One, I don't buy it at all.

I think that people that live in the Palisades that are not like, that are crypto, like normies. Yeah. They're keeping their Bitcoin in ETA, like, ETF for sure. Maybe Coinbase. Maybe coin base. Maybe self-custody wallet for 1% of them. But even those, it's like, yeah, somebody you're saying, oh yeah, they have their, their,

ledgers in the walls. They used wallpaper and they're absolutely not. If anything, if, you know, I was packing up in a relative hurry

and the handful of things that were small that I could bring and just brought them. And like watches are not going up in flames. There were, for sure,

supercars that went up in flames. You know, probably if it's a palisades, it's one-of-one Porsches and stuff like that. And so those have been erased from the market. Some Kith M4 comps. Yeah, a lot of Keth M4 comps.

But I don't know about ledger wallets. I don't think it was a Michael Sailor. We lost a lot of good G-wagons out of there. Yeah. It's rough. It's funny that the Palisades Village, every other car in the parking lot is a G-wagon. If you want to stand out, don't get a G-wagon.

Unless it's a convertible or six by six. Yeah. Then I wouldn't fit in the parking garage. That's a big issue of LA. There's still our parking garages that don't fit G-Wagon. Yeah. Well, you get the six-by-six and then you get it lowered. A lowered six-by-six.

Yeah. With an F-40 engine. All right. Yeah, just swap all your engines all throughout your cars. Take the V-8 from the F-40, put it in the six-by-six. Buy-six cars. Swap all the equipment. All the transmission.

Put exhaust on all of them. Wide in that. Yeah. Yeah. Stanced underlighting for sure. Put your SF90 wheels. Yeah. You already lost 300K on the SF90.

You might as well, you might as well stance it and get some underlighting. Some LAD. We were laughing about that at LED. I was at F1 in Miami and we were laughing about like, so like all the different brands like a Mercedes team before the race, they do like a parade and like it'll be like Lewis Hamilton in like some beautiful like going you know

SLR I forget what the car is called but like you know some 60s car and then the Ferrari's come out and they're like these amazing like what is GTB is the really expensive one they're all riding in these like really heritage things we're like well what's Red Bull

going to do like they don't they don't have like a heritage car we're like they should just show up in in like stance JDMs Red Bull Honda exactly yeah yeah S2000 rap with a wing on it. Tokyo drift mode. With the wing. With the wing.

Yeah, the LED underlating. Just Max Verstaffin, just like in the S-2000, just drifting. We should actually get one of those just and then take it up in the canyons. Yeah, it would be great. Fantastic. Well, let's close with this bucket pole. Our last bucket pool. We're out of bucket polls.

We've got to print some more for tomorrow. Last bucket pulls from Grant. And Grant says, this is a low-tam banger. Already follows us. Thank you, Grant. 32 likes. says a picture of Rick Rubin and says, The way that I speak to the AI has proven profitable to shareholders.

And then Timothy Blumberg says, JFC, this is an underrated post. I respect it. Went out on Christmas or two days before. Great post. I love Rick Rubin. I like that screenshot too. Yeah. Wait, Lucy advertises on.

So Rick Rubin is a nicotine salesman. Yeah. Well, he reached out to us. He likes the brand. amazing it's amazing yeah that's that's a that's a cooler co-signed to me than rogan i love rogan yeah but yeah it was a very cool moment for the company for sure it was awesome he's like i have no technical abilities i just consume high volumes of urbremate and nicotine yeah yeah you just like he just kind of fucks with us just talk to the a i yeah yeah and so we were like yeah we're

like yeah we're having a sport and run ads and uh yeah it's always great when he has i mean he's he's become a great podcaster has great great guests always great conversations If you're looking for an episode to listen to of the Rick Rubin podcast, I recommend, it's called Tetragrammaton. You can find it on all of your podcast players. I recommend the Travis Barker episode. Interesting. It talks about the dude got in plane crashes, like all the Blinkwood A2 stuff, the breakup of the band and stuff. Crazy.

Where everyone went. It's a fantastic episode. And obviously they like really, really mind meld because they're both in music and creatives and stuff. You know, my experience with Blink 22 has not been listening to a lot of like highbrow interviews of them. It's like listening to the songs. And the songs are kind of just like, you know, high school party moshpit songs to me. But there's this whole other side of this like brilliant drummer who's done so many different things and had this wonderful career. And it's always fun when you go and see the other side.

One of the other great music interviews that I listened to was the lead singer of Slipknot. I think his name's Cody something was on Larry King. And it's this fascinating dive into, he's like completely, he's insane when he's on stage, right? Slipknot's like the most hardcore metal band with like the faces and the masks and stuff. Corey Taylor, yeah.

And then Larry King is like buttoned up in this suit, this like one-on-one interview. And Corey just has this like very thoughtful analysis of like the politics of his music and the fans and are the fans crazy or deranged? Like, why do they even need this outlet? He's from Iowa. There's been a lot of displacement of jobs and a lot of hollowed out communities

and why this insane music from Slipknot resonates with them. And it's just a fascinating watch. So I recommend that one too. Anyway, we got to go. We got to check on the houses. They're probably all burned down by now. But we will be podcasting tomorrow regardless. Whatever you're doing, go sign up for ramp.

unless you're already signed up for ramp, which most of our listeners are. If you're already signed up, pitch ramp to another company. Yeah. Friends company. Text your group chat, say, hey,

you guys are stupid if you're not on ramp. Yeah, next time you go do a dinner. Text your group chats and say, listen to technology brothers. Yeah. You can rate them five stars. You can always revise the rating after you listen if you disagree with your initial judgment.

Yeah. But start with five and then pair it back. Yeah. If you go to a business dinner, your when you pay when you split the check it should look like the american psycho scene but only ramp cards and if someone doesn't have one gosh call them out call them out call them out hold them embarrassing it's called the cannibality folks called the cannibility that's the show we'll see you tomorrow thank you for watching goodbye