TBPN - The LA Fires Continue, Rebuilding Market Map, PMF or DIE, Unpacking the "R" word, The End of Censorship

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

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John, who was a doctor that you were going to for calf implants? Oh, yeah. Oh, we're alive. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We're still loosely on the topic of the fires, but today we're flipping to a little bit more of an optimistic frame. We're going to take you through the rebuilding process. Who's going to make money off of this disaster? There's always a lot of money changing hands, whether it's through insurance, private companies, rebuilding, all sorts of different things that are going to happen. So we're going to take you through a market map of what companies are going to be built. Yeah, we're going to try to get into, there's people that, there's people that are taking advantage of the situation, but there's also a bunch of good people. Yeah.

And there's also a lot of chaos. So yeah, excited to dive in here. But we'll kick it off with some coverage by our boy. Mike Salana. Mike Salana. Yeah, journalist of the year. Journalists of the year. 2024 journalists of the year.

So Mike Salonra writes in Pirate Wires, a piece called Wildfire. He does a very interesting thing in this piece. He kind of connects the wildfires to the Mark Zuckerberg announcement about the removal of fact checkers and the institution of community notes. It was pretty interesting, but it's a great overview of kind of where the chaos stands. Culturally, Mike always does a great job of blending technology and politics together in a really cool way. So I'll just read through some of this.

Last Wednesday, America woke up to footage of Los Angeles. Los Angeles' once idyllic Pacific palisades in black and smoldering ruins as the city began to grapple with the worst fire in its history. Almost immediately, the remaining vestiges of our de facto state press lifted their hands to the sky in despair and blamed global warming. It's also not just the worst fire in L.A. history. It's the worst fire in American history from the lens of economic damage. Yeah. I wonder if it's going to be the worst fire in human history. if you measure it that way. It's up there.

It's massive. We are recording in a different city because of this. We've both been loosely displaced. A fire could rip through two or three Western European countries would not cause the same amount of economic damage as one neighborhood of L.A. Yeah, that's true. And so the Democratic politicians echoed the charge

and demanded action, decarbonizing our entire planet, from Donald Trump, who would not be president for another two weeks. But on X, there was no hiding from the truth, and there will be no forgetting what we saw. L.A. was a portrait of madness as hundreds of thousands of people evacuated the city, while suspected arsonists shuffled through the haunted hills and empty streets, spreading fire and roving gangs of looters picked apart abandoned homes. From the first deadly blaze questions from the front lines, quickly rocketed back to social

media and spread. And he lists out all of these great questions that people were asking, some, you know, theories and some things that were proven true. And it's very, very interesting because it happened so fast. I didn't remember all these. We talked about a few of these. But why were the fire hydrants running dry, something that's been really hotly debated? Why did the L.A. water chief, Janice Quinonez, empty the Santianez Reservoir,

and why was she making $750,000 a year? Yeah, I saw an interview with her where she repeatedly said that equity was her primary motive in taking the job, like over and over and over. That was like the most important thing to her. Yeah. Which, you know, it's fine for her to have that belief, but you would imagine that you'd want the person running our water infrastructure to just make sure that it was a well-run, you know, well-run, you know, sort of system.

Yeah, the priority should be like your job parts. Yeah, yeah. Other stuff comes after. Also, also unbelievable comp for public service. you know. I mean, we love big comp packages here. Should we ring the size gong for her? Yeah.

I'm not going to really give it too much, you know, just. But not bad. It's not bad for a day's work doing apparently nothing. Yeah. The next question is, why was L.A. mayor Karen Bass at a presidential inauguration in Ghana? And then actually, why was the mayor of L.A. Yeah. I think I talked to, the Ghana thing's interesting.

I think so. A lot of, this got kind of blown over a little bit, but Malibu had bad fires less than a month ago. Yeah. And the town was really damaged. There was, if you drive through Malibu today, you, you would think that the fires had really gotten into the sort of central area of Malibu, but it was actually the last fire, which was in December. And same exact thing, high wind warning, fires started up almost immediately.

in that situation, the fire fighting teams were just able to be a lot more effective and save a lot of structures. So it wasn't, like 15 structures were taken out or damaged. And so Malibu and sort of Santa Monica Mountain residents are basically trained at this point where if there's a high wind warning, there will be fires, right? And so that's why this week, everybody's still on super high alert because there's high winds today. they shut off power again and all the stuff. So Bass was getting briefed on the high wind warning while she was on her trip, knowing that this was like the most significant fire risk and still decided I'm going to stay on this trip that at this point, nobody even knows what the purpose of the trip is, but it seems like one of those kind of like relationship building,

sort of more like photo opportunity. It does. I mean, I was thinking about this because like at the first read, it's like very bizarre. Like why is a mayor going to a country so far away? Like you think about the mayor like their business is in the city. They should always be in the city. Yeah. Governor should be always be in the state. And then the federal employees and, you know, the president should be traveling doing like the geopolitics stuff. Yeah. And there was an early story about like Bernie Sanders being one of the first congressmen or governors to do like foreign policy as a local politician. It was very odd. It was criticized. But I was trying to steal, man it. Like, is there a reason why I would want my mayor to be in a foreign country? And, I mean, we could use, like, the Swiss watch industry as a joke.

But there are reasons why if there's a country that's doing a lot of business in your city, it might actually make sense to go visit that and say, hey, you know, you are a constituent in some way. You are selling a lot of products in our city or you are, you know. So I'm going there. there to make sure that our business relationship with my city is great. And I might want my mayor to go and do that. Again, it's a little odd with Ghana because I don't think we have a really amazing business relationship with that.

Karen has a history of, you know, foreign policy missions. She in the 70s, her favorite trip was to Cuba where she would go and she would coordinate. I'm forgetting the exact name of the group, the extremist group that she was a part of, but she would coordinate with the Cuban government to sort of strategize on bringing communism back to Southern California. And it sounds like a joke,

but look it up, it's factually true. Yeah. And so, yeah, maybe she just likes to travel. Maybe that's just part of her thing. But regardless, she had posts like a few years ago saying,

calling out other politicians in disaster scenarios being like, why aren't you? You know, it's embarrassing that you're not at home with your. So the whole thing is, you know, she has been completely melting down. But let's get back to the...

More questions. Why in a city constantly on fire? Did the mayor cut the fire department's budget? It's a very good question. And if you look at the breakdown of the budgets, it's not like the budget of everything was cut and the fire department was just cut less than everything else. It's like the fire department was uniquely cut,

one of the hardest hit departments, and then a lot of other things increased in budget. So it's kind of odd why we were allocating away from that. fire, so the fire chief who's been getting just, you know, meamed and in kind of unnecessary ways in many ways, it seems. But she had put together a report telling the mayor's office, we need, we don't need our budgets cuts. We need 50 more fire stations in L.A. County.

So she was asking for the right thing. Bang and the size gong asking for more budget. Yep. Guys gun. Everyone needs a size gong. Yeah. Just like, look, I need my budget increased. I need to ring the size gong.

We didn't, we couldn't bring much. from the studio, but we brought the flag. We brought the flag and the size gong. And some money. And why, the last question is, and why had the state prohibited insurers from increasing rates as the risk of wildfire increased, which catalyzed a dropping coverage

just before one of the worst fires in its history? California is a one-party state, so failure in California is perceived as an indictment of democratic governance. This means wildfire discourse is pretty much toxic at the national level. Republicans are incentivized to highlight disaster in the state, Democrats are incentivized to obscure it, and nobody is incentivized

to chart a course toward safety for the people of California. While inevitable, the discourse stalemate has nonetheless been frustrating. This is something that I covered in that solo episode, was like, I wasn't even trying to take like a political stance. I was more just trying to, like, lay down like, what will the narrative be? And what, where is, where are the battle lines being drawn right now? And it's the question of like, you know, was this man-made, fire was this, can you pin this on the, a lot of times these fires get pinned on like the electrical companies for not doing maintenance on their transformers. That's why now every time there's any fire risk, they shut off the power completely. It's crazy. Which makes sense to them.

Because there were landmark court cases where they were proven to be at fault and there's a billion dollar payouts or whatever. So they're like, well, startup idea. How about a transformer that just doesn't fucking explode? Yeah. I cannot believe how many. transformers just explode when something goes wrong. Like that just seems like an engineering flaw, right? Transform into a more structurally sound. It's crazy. No, but the real solution is to bury,

the real solution is to bury the lines. Of course, of course. And I don't think the utility companies want to pay for that. So now they're hoping for bailout. There is an interesting question. I don't know if we talked about this before, but there's this massive move in LA. Everyone's saying like, oh, look at the houses that survived.

they use like steel and brick or whatever and you see the burn down homes and the chimney is always still there because it's made out of brick and so it's like oh maybe just rebuild with brick but you forget that like earthquakes are huge here and like if you just focus for fire prevention well then when an earthquake comes you're going to get screwed and and and like it's easy in this in these kinds of like immediate disasters to just refocus on like the current issue and be like fire prevention is the number one thing but it's like maybe the time is to also think about earthquake prevention and fire prevention and all the different things. I think the, you know, in some ways focusing on making, you know,

built, developing houses so inexpensive through stuff like cover. Yep. And my buddy Alex, a company has a company that Packyback that's focused on building, you know, building homes in a much more inexpensive way. Part of it's like if you could build a home 10 times faster for 10 times less money, then there wouldn't even be. the same issues around insurance because you could lose your home and just rebuild it fairly quickly. Yeah.

Which is sort of dark, but maybe that's part of the solution here. Yeah. So Solana takes a little bit of a victory lap for having called a lot of this. He says he first wrote about California's wildfires in the fall of 2020, and then again in 2021 in a piece called Global Warming, Ate My Homework. Great catchphrase. He quote tweeted Bernie Sanders with that and got a lot of attention. because it's it's a great way to you know focus on the key issue of like you can't just always blame

global warming when like if you had done the wildfire prevention I've ever told you this my dad my dad my dad during his teaching career his his website where you would go to get the homework yeah was dogate my homework dot com oh really that's amazing good domain runs in the blood he let it expire I was like dad like come on it's a great but uh but yeah again the whole like at a certain point the excuse is just stop working. And when Bernie was tweeting, blaming this all on climate change, I was,

I don't get triggered. Yeah. But I was generally like, I was like, okay, like, come on, dude. Like this is, like, this is not the time. And also you're in Vermont. So why don't you focus on Vermont, which is a disaster in many ways too.

Yeah. So Solana breaks down like a little bit of what's going on here. Wildfires, including megafires, have burned through California for thousands of years, but about 100 years ago, gold rush times, the population of California exploded, which led to the prevention of natural, wider scale burns

as humans fought back against the regional phenomenon. Fuel has built up for decades because of this, and today's the state's at constant risk of burning. There's no easy solution to this problem, the problem, let's call it, of living in a place that tends to be on fire. I don't know any thrills in these jokes. Although there are many strategies we should consider

from housing policy that encourages greater, urban density. I talked about that, away from the winds to better, or from the wilds, to better resource management, to reservoirs, to new equipment. We are also living in the future, I'm told, and I wonder what new strategies and technology might be possible from tracking to fighting fire. Probably someone literally paid to pursue such things should do a little digging. But decarbonizing our entire planet is not a serious suggestion, not only because it's never going to happen, but because if it does happen, California will still be at constant risk of massive deadly wildfire. We need a plan, I argued, this for years. And so goes a little bit into

how the discourse is shifted on X because there's much less fact-checking. This is a really interesting anecdote. Now, there really is an art to good fact-checking, one of the most popular and useful weapons in our sprawling information war. Generally, what you want to focus on is something categorically wrong, which by relation seems to disprove an entire class of thing you find uncomfortable. CNN produced a great example of the tactic early Monday morning. Meta fact checkers, they reported debunked a post on looting. And from what I can tell, they were correct.

The narrow example they fact checked was indeed wrong. But was looting a problem barely discussed in the early days of the fire while widely while widely discussed online, a problem or not. And then he says, as at the time of my writing, 29 looters have been arrested with hundreds of looters reported. Generally speaking, it was and remains a huge obvious problem. And they had to create a 24-hour curfew effectively where you were not in Malibu specifically.

You were not allowed to move around, walk around, et cetera. We were, my neighborhood was looking at beefing up. our security and the only place the security was going to be able to sit was at the guard tower or in in the community. So it was effectively not going to be worthwhile because we already had security there. And so they weren't even letting private security come into the area. So imagine the number of people that would have been arrested and that were arrested. Just as a media strategy, I find this section so fascinating because it's like, you know,

you're running some like SaaS company. and people are complaining about your website being slow or something. But instead of addressing like the median complainer, you find like the most extreme person who has some like insane avatar and you're like, I'm being targeted by the far left or the far right. And then it's like, oh, well like, you know, he debunked that person. So, you know, he debunked the entire class of complaint. I feel like this has been used all over the place to great effect.

this idea of just like honing it on well that's what newsom has been doing to and he's hyper fixated on maintaining his image right now and so anything that anyone says he's he's a master manipulator and and media personality um and so yeah it's a good strategy to just focus in on the one thing but in my you know going through this the last couple you know last week or so it's been eye opening to me because so much of the information that I was getting from people that they were speaking factually. Like Nobu burned down. It did not burn down. It was saved.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, apparently two. So Larry Ellison has seven homes on PCH. Two out of the seven burned down. And apparently the firefighters just decided to make a final stand at Ellison's houses. I wouldn't be surprised if he was like carrying like. This is a Bitcoin, you know, hardware wallet.

Like, don't let it go any farther. But, yeah, there was just a lot of, a lot of people were saying the Palisades Village burned down. In fact, it was the only area of the Palisades, basically, that didn't burn down. So there was a lot of stuff that ended up, wasn't intentionally misinformation. How bad do you think the, the Palisades Village is going to be in for it post-fire?

Because Caruso had private firefighters there and water tanks and was very set up to defend it. He defended it successfully. You know, people are criticizing him. Oh, like he prioritized his buildings over people's homes. But clearly the guy was prepared and planned effectively and was effective in like protecting this thing. I think it'll ultimately be.

But the question is just like, who's going to go to these businesses when it's all just construction. Here's what I think happens, just my opinion. I think it was actually very positive that one small area was untouched. Because that is going to be the community center for people to rebuild. I think a lot of. these stores you know the stores there buttega veneta st. Laurent

you know like these stores like not really useless they should be like construction you know hardware stores gas stations you know restaurants for food because like there's going to need the homeowners will be spending and the residents will not be spending much time no but there's going to be for every home let's say the average

home has a crew of 10 people working on it you know that that's tens of thousands of people that need to eat and you know buy supplies and get gas and stuff like that So I think it will ultimately be a beacon of hope and some it's not going to be normalcy. Yeah. But hopefully Caruso can kind of blend the losses across the time. It'll be interesting. Like does it make sense for Airwant to still be there when it should probably be a smart and final now?

Yeah. Because like people should, you know, they don't, we don't need, we don't need $20, you know, grain bowls when when the average person buying will be like, you know, day labor. Yeah, yeah. I mean, maybe he, maybe just does short-term leases and just swaps out the- That's what I'm saying. I think he'll be strategic. I think he'll be strategic with it and then brings in the higher stuff later. Being worth $6 billion, he could have that and he owns his properties, like he could

basically zero it out. But if he goes in and say, we need a hardware tenant, we need, you know, this, this, this. And maybe get a slop, cova bowls in there. Some barnyard barnyard bowls. So in typical Salana fashion, he bridges the two major stories of the year of the week together into one kind of thesis. And he shifts from the wildfires and all the fact checking that's going on on X to Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that he will be removing fact checkers from meta properties and implementing an X like community notes system, which we talked on the show before. But Salana has a bunch of good stuff in here. He says on blue sky, Zuckerberg's changes were, of course, likened to white supremacy

by the sort of mental patients once uncritically cited as experts by our tech press. And sure, we love to throw eggs of the crazy people who held us prisoner over the last few years. It's funny when they claim their lives are in danger because people are shit posting on a platform where they do not themselves post. And it's good to laugh at them. But meta's changes really are significant and they were announced in a manner meant to make that clear. Mark didn't only change course on speech. He denounced fact checkers both specifically in the case of their work at meta and conceptually.

This was returned to the company's founding values, he argued. One more point on that. I do think I have been generally, everybody can say these, I posted yesterday. Have you been testing the limits on Instagram going really, really extreme, seeing if Mark's, you know, really. Well, I posted yesterday. Well, I just posted yesterday just because you can say there was, This Egan Robot says it's morning again in America. And there's a quote from a banker.

I feel liberated. We can say the R word and the P word. Oh, yeah. We got to do a whole thing about this. It's a new dawn. And so my point was just because you can say the R word now, it doesn't mean you should. Yes.

And I think that people are taking this as an opportunity to be mean and hateful. Totally. And it's low class and vulgar. I agree. We joke about this, but it's true. Don't use free speech to be mean. Just, just, just there's no, there's no, more or less, you don't see, you don't see successful people being mean online. Totally.

Even Palmer, when he uses some of these words, is using them in response to Jason, who's a internet bully. Yeah. So he's standing up to an internet bully. Exactly. But even with Palmer, as he said, the third and fourth iteration of the R word, it started to get old. Exactly. But again, Jason is like trying to bully him. which is hilarious to try to bully a billionaire who's 10 times more successful than you.

But that's what's happening. So, but yeah, I would just say to our audience, just try, you know, there's no, there's no there's no long-term ROI in being mean. Yeah. It's sort of these short-term, you know. So I remember literally where I was when I first heard the term the R word. Obviously, I grew up with like, you know, guys calling each other retarded all the time in the pejorative sense, which I don't think you should use. I think it's okay to use it in the descriptive sense

if you're quoting something or using it in like fire retardant essentially, like to slow the process down. But I remember being at South by Southwest at this like Spotify activation and my business partner was on the phone with someone and he used the R word as in a pejorative sense and his buddy was like, hey, we don't use the R word anymore. It was kind of like, you know, like free speech policing him and he was like oh i don't know how i feel about that but like i kind of get it like it is kind of vulgar like maybe i shouldn't use it and then over the following years it became like okay no one ever uses that yeah which like people were already there was there was already i mean it was to be clear it was still being used heavily online totally and in many male circles

totally but but if you just had like a normy job at like a fortune 500 company like you wouldn't use any foul language in the office at all basically your mom was right exactly speak how your mother wanted you to speak when you were 10 years old. But then what happened was it became such an inflated word to the point where if someone caught you using it even descriptively. And the famous example is Ben Horowitz using it in that clubhouse chat and Taylor Lorenz putting it out on Twitter saying Mark and she misattributed it to Mark Andreessen, but Ben Horowitz was quoting some Wall Street bets kind of gambler gen guys who used the R word to describe themselves.

So they weren't being pejorative because they were using it to describe themselves. They were still using the uncensored R word. He was quoting them. And so it was like three degrees of separation away from like actually calling someone the R word pejority. Yeah, I'm just. And so it became like this weapon of like if I caught you using it, if I have evidence of you using it, I can get you fired.

I can get you punished. I can hurt you. And so that's why I do think it was important to cross the Rubicon. for people like Palmer and Delian to use the word and say, hey, we're not afraid anymore. You can't control our speech. But it's funny now coming back, I would not,

I would not be inclined to hire somebody that was freely using the R word. Totally. In any, in any like online, consistent setting. Just because I don't, I don't think it's generally kind.

So I think part of it is having the power and the freedom to do it and having the restraint to say, There's better words, Nimrod, communist, mouth breather, venture capitalists. So next time, repeat this, next time you want to use the R word, call someone a VC. John, you sound like a VC right now. Yeah. Yeah.

And so I think, like, Palmer, at one point he actually broke down his logic and kind of explained why the word shouldn't be removed from the language and censored. And I agree with all of that. I think it's good to say this is something that should not be this weapon. of cancellation. Yeah. But then there's a second aesthetic question. The aesthetic question.

I was debating with someone. Terrible. Exactly. Exactly. There's the, there's like the utilitarian question of the word. Like should you be fired for using this word? Maybe not.

Should you be shamed and should your free speech be impinged? No. But is it an aesthetically beautiful word? No. Yeah. And so that's why it's just to remove from your language. It's this weird thing where I, I do think sound like, you know, again, this is like almost getting into territory that's, this is almost more of like a man like a business like management thing. But if I had an employee who is going around using the R word online. Yep. I would tell them to stop. Yep. And then if they kept doing it, I do feel like that's grounds for termination because you're representing the company in a way and you've been asked to not do something. And if you want to go around using your real identity,

while being employed at a company, it's the same thing to me as somebody going around being racist online. Especially, like, I mean, it's very context dependent. Yeah. It's different. Somebody wants to have an anon profile and go on Reddit and be in Wall Street bets.

There is a very different thing now, especially with the company badges on X. Like everyone with that badge is an extension of the brand. And, I mean, we talk about it. That's why Warf got into a lot of trouble with this because they gave the badge to everyone. It made everyone, it made everyone, a brand ambassador. When you look at the way Ramps done it, it's a lot of people who are on

X and are posting about literally just their job, but it helps build the brand because they're posting about software development or Fax Herbert is posting about corporate finance. And he works in corporate finance at RAMP. And so he is an extension of that brand. They don't want their brand to be represented by vulgar terminology. And so it wouldn't make sense for a ramp employee with the badge to use that word and represent the brand that way. And so it, it, It is this weird, it is this weird dance because obviously I'm extremely pro free speech. I'm extremely anti-cancellation, but aesthetics matter. Free speech is also different in the context when you're representing.

Exactly. It's totally fair. Yes. If a pro sports team, it's one thing, okay, a guy, an athlete should be able to give an interview and thank their religion for, you know, whatever, right? That should, you know, nobody should be able to get in the way of that, right? that's part of their identity. Using specific words that negatively impact the brand that you're participating in

is to me a totally different thing. And you can go to another team and do that. You can go work for yourself and do that. You can be terminally online, unemployed and use it. Also, it's like, I mean, it's like good comedy. Like there are like certain words can be used in very funny and novel ways. And the first few times the R word came out online. It was like, whoa, like, okay.

in this context, this is extra funny. I mean, we were joking about it in that Taylor Lorenz piece, how we said, like, her career had been R word. Yeah, slowed. Because that's, that's actually the non-pejorative definition. So it's like this play on words, and that's kind of, I think it's funny. But if you're just like throwing out the R-word everywhere

because you just don't know any other words and you can't express yourself anyway, it just gets boring. And so it's low-class and vulgar, and what would your mother say? What would your mother say? So that wraps up our R word rant for the day. Well, you'll probably be able to use it on meta. They list out a bunch of examples.

Again, I think you should be able to use it on social media platforms. They're not the arbiter of this. We're the arbiter of it because we decide what is aesthetically correct in terms of taste. And there's going to be teams that decide that that aesthetic aligns with their brand. Sure. And they're free to use that. It's very like monster. energy word.

I had a young member of the party around team that there was a period where me and another person on the team would have post notifications on for said person. We would be like, we'd have like twice a week, we'd have to be like delete this right now. And it became the same. Some people will be able to guess who that was. Okay. So basically, Solana breaks down some of the reaction at Meta. There's been this big story in The Intercept and formerly Gawker and 4-4 Media talking about how

like Zuck's announcement has caused chaos of the company and there was a post on the internal meta platform called Workplace that said this person's like upset about it and they're taking time off. Salana then talked to a couple of meta employees himself and said that there were a couple hundred comments on internal post but not a single person had quit because of it and meta employs 25,000 people. So it does seem like a muted reaction internally. People are just kind of like, yeah, cool, fine. No fact checkers, community notes. Awesome. But there's a great anecdote in here from tech history, which I was not familiar with. And he says that one executive that Salana spoke with reminded him of what Facebook culture used to mean. In 2018, when Justice Kavanaugh was elected

to the Supreme Court, a meta employee, and one of Kavanaugh's good friends went to Washington to support him amid the controversy surrounding his confirmation. This, according to the executive I spoke with, led to a full week of what might more properly be termed chaos as thousands of comments lit up meta's internal message boards, which concluded an employee walkout. That executive's names was Joel Kaplan. Mark just gave him a promotion.

He is now the company's president of global affairs, and nobody at the company seems to care, which is kind of confusing at this point as it's starting to seem like Zuckerberg is actually trying to piss these people off, which I love. and so after a few days after his Instagram post, Meta ended its DEI program, and Mark appeared on Rogan to basically apologize

for all the censorship. Meta in some way benefited from, I think Meta and Sam have benefited from the fires in some ways because they both had somewhat controversial moves that were just completely drowned out. Like last week, people really didn't care too much about technology. This was a story. Yeah.

but it had 10 times less interest because there just was these raging fires. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was hard to post like anything non-fire related just because it's overwhelming the timeline. But this is a very interesting debate point. I mean, you've kind of called the top on Mark's, you know, I called the top. I should have posted about it, but I called the top on Mark's personal, the local top. Yep.

Not bearish forever. As soon as he throws on a suit, it's a new. Yeah, yeah, it's a new market. Yeah, new bull market. No, but about six, about six, yeah, about six months ago, I felt like Mark had been very emboldened by a lot of the positive reactions. He went through the worst negative period. Everybody was called a robot for like four years straight.

He would go in front of Congress and be gone. Yeah. And just he was, he was in a bad spot. Then he started training MMA, working out, got Jack. Meta like started ripping, started doing the wakeboarding with the American flag, positive response, moving all the way to the minivan stuff,

like flaunting as well, like kind of playing into the average meta user and things that they would find interesting. And I felt, I felt like there's this dynamic where if you get too much positive, the more positive attention you get, the more of a target you're putting on your back

front by the end. internet right and uh anyways that seems to have been there now is like a much more there's a bunch of positive people are like yeah prozuck and then now there's starting people being like you don't get credit for this decision yep you're doing it right at the new administration you're very late you're doing it at the most convenient time and there's always been this theory of like the PR firm behind his rebrand is genius and like I never really bought that because I do think he's just going back to you can literally find he's also he's also always just had like anyone

goes through periods with different interests. He got into smoking meats. He did that in a very robotic way. Yep. But then he's now into MMA and like Stana White and like, you know. And he's more confident about it and he's more, he's posting about it. So I'm generally, I'm generally, I'm in the camp where I'm glad. But I've literally talked to like the head of PR meta and like, and like she's always like,

yeah, he had to explain to us what MMA was. Like they didn't know. I'm like I'm very very sure that like Yeah, that like there's no slide deck out there with like get an FP Jorn Zuck like that's what'll work No, he's he's he's he has agency yeah and and you can see it because if you go back and look at like the first interview he did with like the solo cup on the couch It's like that's kind of he's always kind of been a bro and then he like Yeah, if you look at even the language he used in the college era Is it's almost the same is what you would expect a guy that looks like he does now exactly exactly I can't believe

these people trust me with their data LOL. Exactly. Exactly. And so clearly the robot era was the PR firm makeover. It was like, this guy's too much of a crazy bro. We got to wrap him in something really tight and like quiet. So like don't say anything. And now he's kind of unleashed.

But people are definitely saying like, oh, this is the top. And now it's like, oh, this is late. And I'm sick of this schick. I think he needs to switch it up. I've argued that he should throw on a suit. There's other things that he could do. he needs to get into long range rifle shooting. Yeah, yeah.

I wish Tim Cook would follow. Tim Cook can't really afford it. Yep. But if he had the level of wealth that Mark had, he might be able to spice up his personality a bit. Totally. Tim Cook, you think of Tim Cook, you're like, okay, drives a Lexus.

He drives a Lexus? No, I'm assuming so. Where's an Apple Watch? Yeah. Where's Lou Lemon? Okay. Maybe spices his up. I think he wears Nike's?

Some Brunello. Some Brunello now and then. But Tim Cook, I think, could take Apple from a $3 to a $4 trillion market cap just by being a little more personal and being like, yeah, the Photos app is terrible. I'm sorry. The alarm app is terrible. I'm sorry. We're going to make it better. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. He is like the most media trained person in the world. Have you seen his interview with MTV? He doesn't do live stuff, right? No. Well, not anymore. But that's just because like the COVID stuff. And the live stuff's coming back.

He's not like afraid of that. We'll see. We'll be hackling. You bricked my phone. No, he did, he didn't interview with MKBHD about the magic mouse, which is the mouse that you have to plug in

this way. So you can't use the mouse while it's plugged in. Like it would be so obvious just to have the charger in the front so then you can use the mouse while you're plugging it in. But this, you have to flip it over,

plug it into the bottom. It's like one of the worst designs ever. Apple, they have a lot of great designs, but this one was a huge mess. So you know, so my phone. And MKBHD asked him like, like, what do you think of the magic mouse? And he's just like, well, it's one of our best products.

Just zero awareness that, like, people in the Apple community hate that. And he should have easily just been like, yeah, I mean, obviously, like, we kind of messed up the port. I'm excited to revise that. We have all these timelines. We'll work through it. Like, you know, you miss stuff sometimes. So, yes, my phone's about a year old. I might go, I don't think we're going to have time today, but tomorrow I'm definitely going to go upgrade it.

Sorry, I didn't, sorry to Apple, I didn't get it in for Q4. but I'll try to buy some other stuff this quarter and really get my LTV up. But my phone went, so I leave the house. I go on a beach walk. Yeah. I was like listening to something, not even using my phone.

In 15 minutes, my phone went from 20% battery life to 1% and then died. I was like 20 to 1 in 15, like a 15 minute walk. I was like, this is basically like a landline now. Like I actually should be charging it. I, we need the tinfoil hat because I don't believe in this conspiracy,

this conspiracy theory at all. I think it's a skill issue. I think, yeah, my battery is a skill issue. It is. You have some crazy apps running the background. No, it's X. Actually, I think X, when you have like,

if you're posting a bunch, it just, you're getting notifications, boom, exactly, exactly. And you know whatever optimization engineer was like, let's worry about the battery. Elon's like, no, don't care. Fry the battery.

Just get the, just get the engagement out. Right. Keep the people on this thing. We get the test. Elon would launch a phone at some point with a week-long battery life using all of Tesla's battery technology. That would actually, you know,

people would be like, oh, that's pretty cool. The Starlink is like the size of an iPad. You could just have that and then iPad on the front and then it's just like always satellite internet connected. I saw a Starlink battery, like new product that's like built like basically like a week-long battery that you can put your Starlink in. Okay, I need that.

costs like five times as much as the Starlink. Batteries are expensive. They still are. Apple needs to have some sort of like limited allocation like Ferrari does. So, you know, it's like, look, we're going to need you to take a bath on this Applevision Pro. You're going to need to get, because these things are releasing. You can buy an Applevision Pro for 4K and go on eBay and sell it for 2K the next day.

Like the depreciation is insane on this product. But you do that a couple times. You know, your AD starts liking you. gets you the allocation of the new diamond iced out Apple Watch when it goes on. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So ice it out with a, you know, 72-hour battery light. It would be really funny if they were just like, yeah, we launched the new iPhone has the,

has the best like M4 chip in it. It's super fast. It is interesting, though. And you're going to need to get on this to get it. You can't just buy it. It is fascinating that Apple has seemingly shifted away from this multi-iphone strategy and basically wanting everybody to get, in theory, get the next iPhone. Yep.

When I do believe there's a huge number of people that if they made a $10,000 iPhone that had a just ultra, ridiculous battery life, that they would get it. Totally. I would, if I had a phone that I just never had to really worry about charging, throw it on every now and then, I, the, the sort of my willingness to spend would be. It is crazy because like there's that terrible camera bump on the top, which like, you know, was never on the, Steve Jobs iPhones.

The wobble is wild. And it seems like if you just raise the rest of the phone to the thickness of the camera bump, you would get double the battery life with the extra space. They must have run the numbers and been like people don't care. I think that it's like a standard versus revealed preference thing. I think that for most people, it's like, yeah, just subscribe to the iPhone. I just think there's not.

Every year, it dies at the end of the day, you're good. And then sure, you're a power user on X, so you're going to get screwed. But for most people, their phone lasts the full day, at least for a year, and then they move on to the next one. It would be, if they had any vision,

they would do a landline version of the iPhone that has one of those stretchy cords. We got to get that. Tim, when you listen to this, reach out to us. Printer, too. We got an Apple printer.

We got this incredible market map. So John is, John, future associate. John did this. And if anybody, yeah, if anybody, any venture capital firms out there that need a market map made. John made this in like 10 minutes.

I'm very, very impressed. But yeah, so we... Key question, who's going to make money? Obviously, it's a terrible tragedy, but... Yeah, and who are the players? So, we tried to divide up. What are the categories of industries that will be affected?

And then within those, what are the subcategories, and then give you a couple examples of each company? Yeah, so the categories... Let's take us through some... Maybe list out all. the categories that we'll go through one in time. So we have building materials and supplies, thousands and thousands of homes and structures and stores and all these things burn to the ground, tons of damage that wasn't even necessarily

structural. So that's a big one. Community and government support. So that's everything from FEMA to the Red Cross who are coming in, some activity on the nonprofit side, government side. Neither of those groups are going to be making money, but they're going to be spending a lot of money and so people are going to be making money from those budgets. Construction and infrastructure.

So there's big home builders and, you know, and groups that will build a, you know, uh, not a, not a, yeah, it's kind of unclear if those big home builders like Lanar will come in because they, they do more like track homes and specific developments. We can talk more about that when we go into the deep dive on that company.

Yeah. And the Palisades is not an area where people are going to say, hey, let's just take, you could see that potential. happening where one block is like let's all work with this one builder and just build them all the same time but anyway so construction and infrastructure environmental remediation restoration so that's everything on the cleanup side you know so much there's so much toxic waste all over l.a that needs to be cleaned up and then landscaping and erosion control so one thing that happens post fire is when all the fuel that fueled the fire burns off

then the mud slides become a huge risk. Do you remember those in San Barbara? Yeah, yeah. So Santa Barbara. Yeah. Really, really sad. So I was in college when those were happening. And Montecito had had some fires and then there was heavy rains and there was so much mud coming through the hills of Montecito that entire houses were just taken off.

Like huge boulders like bigger than cars. A house traveling 200 feet. The death toll was like 20. Yeah, yeah, I know I had a family friend who not, not super close or anything, but who decided that they felt they were safe in their home, even though there's a lot of rain and sort of activity. And the home was just taken out and just completely destroyed. So very dark, but that's going to be super important now because all over L.A. and in the hills, people want to rebuild. But there's going to be like huge mud risk. So financial and insurance services.

So there's going to be a lot of a ton of lending. you know, activity for people that need construction loans to rebuild and, um, and huge fights. I was listening to something about this where like, where like there's like the, uh, what do they call it, claims adjustment? Yeah. Big question about like, oh, like your house burned down and you're claiming that we need to like rebuild the foundation, but we think that the foundation was cracked before the fire happened.

And so we're adjusting you down. And yeah. And like if you don't have perfect data on exactly all the materials, everything that went in, like you're just going to get pennies on the dollar. Just huge fights and then lawyers get involved. So it's interesting. So there's going to be, the banks are going to make money on the new activity. Yep.

But they're also going to lose money on mortgages where, you know, maybe somebody didn't have insurance. And so there's bankruptcy. Yeah. And then there's just going to be obviously a bunch of policies shifting around as people realize, oh, I need to get off the fair plan because it was interesting. I think it was Monday's episode. I reached out to kin.com

just as like a market research thing and they called me like six times in the last few days. I finally picked up while we're at the grocery store earlier. And they were like, yeah, we're issuing new policies in California. So kin.com still issuing policies. QED, I think is their biggest investor.

So then next category, security and safety, you have alarm monitoring services. and then there's a bunch of new upstart companies like Soron that are in that space as well. And then physical security providers. So in the Palisades and Malibu area, there's like a specific security company called IPS that everybody uses. And so they've been on overdrive. They're probably really important in the short term. Yeah.

Think about, think about, so LA's had a huge issues forever with squatters. Sure. So if you, I know people who have had a house in L.A. that was empty that would repeatedly get broken into and the police just say, we can't do anything about it. Like there's weird laws around. Like if they just chill out in there for enough time, then like suddenly like they have some rights, which is crazy. So, you want to hear a crazy story. Two weeks ago, a friend of mine was flying back into L.A.X. gets off the plane, goes to baggage claim, luggage has been stolen. There's an air tag in the luggage.

So she can see exactly where the luggage is going. It goes to this house. She takes a screenshot. It's stable. She knows exactly where it is. Calls 911 or calls the police department. Tells them, hey, my bag was stolen. It has an air tag.

I know exactly where it is. Like, can you help me with this? And they were like, no. Just no. Just no? Just no. that's so dark I know that's that's collapse right there

and I was just like I almost like I wanted like tweet about it it felt like very like cultural so yeah that's like that's like it feels like a sci-fi movie where you're like okay I'm hiring in my own private special ops team to basically go break and enter I was saying that I was like

do you need me to go yeah yeah I'm ready to tool up Steinman I'd call Stein the door kicker the door kicker he's got like oh he's ready he's ready to go no but I had I mean, I was just shocked. I was like, you have all the evidence here.

It's like so clear. All you need to do is just have committed in LA County. Just send someone to knock on the door and say, hey, give us that back. Yeah. And instead she just bought all new stuff. Oh, really? Yeah, never got it. Just wrote it off.

Next. Technology and data services. So there's a ton of disaster assessment, planning tech, you know, drones being used, aerial photography, satellite imagery. and then smart building and construction tech. So, you know, there's going to be companies like ProCore, which is actually here in Santa Barbara County. They make a platform for construction management. So like they'll probably see a huge uptick in Southern California sales

as builders sort of descend. And yeah, one thing that, you know, let's get into it. Let's start breaking down each individual category. Sure. So why don't we start at the top? So manufacturers of core materials, So there's to make a house takes a few different parts. So we have semix is the first one. They're multinational that we're highlighting multinational producer of cement, concrete and aggregates. They're

key supplier for roads, bridges, and foundations post-disaster. They are publicly traded $8 to $10 billion market cap and operating in 50 plus countries already. So massive, massive country or or, sorry, massive company already. And the other one that we have listed is Owens Corning. They do roofing, insulation, fiberglass composites. They're already been emphasizing like fire resistant and energy efficient products

also publicly traded, similar range, nine to 10 billion, actually in annual revenue. I wonder what some of these like construction materials companies if this will actually move the needle for the stock. We were talking about maybe looking up some of the market caps on this. Because like although the LA fire is like hugely impactful in this area, Like it is at the end of the day just like 10,000 homes. And some of these home buildings are putting up 100,000 homes in a year.

Well, yeah, but from a construction standpoint, if you think about the demand, so if there was $150 billion worth of damage, and everybody's projecting it to actually be higher than that, and you're the number one producer of cement and concrete. Yeah, that could be. And then that $150 billion of damage is not going to cost $150 billion to replace, right? The replacement cost is actually lower. because you build a house for $2 million and then it's worth $4 million, right?

Because the land didn't get destroyed or whatever. But I think that's calculated in the losses. I think when they say $150 billion of losses. It's the replacement cost? Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're not talking about the land value for sure. No, no, I figured it's more, but the thing, a house that's built is worth more than the raw materials sitting around and the construction.

Yeah, but I mean, I think that like, I mean, we discussed this in that, in that Bloomberg Oddlots interview where it's like, there's the insurance claims and then there's the there's like the other disaster database and so they're not just saying oh a four million dollar house burned down that's four million they're like they're saying the insurance will pay out two million got it and so they're taking the lower exactly exactly yeah yeah because because truthfully like the land was not destroyed like you still own the land and even if you didn't have insurance and you had a four million dollar home in the palisades and it burned to the ground you your net worth if you own that free and clear

is still two million probably, right? Something around that. Maybe it's one million, maybe it's three. I don't know. But yeah, I mean, the losses are truly like the burned losses. It's interesting if you owned lots, if you owned lots around LA

that were in these fire affected areas and then now a bunch of red tape gets removed, your property value actually ticked up in some ways because now it's easier to build and you can build it faster so you're not carrying that construction. I was actually thinking about

this like, there's that funny Newsom announcement where he was like, we're removing the red tape for all the fire victims. Dude, did you see Nat Friedman quote tweeted? And he was like, but we're leaving the red tape for everyone else. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you see the video of him? Everybody was saying he was on a bunch of stimulants

because he has these like weird ticks where he was going. He literally was going like this. Yeah, we're really afraid of these property developers. We're really afraid of these property developers that are going to come in and make lowball offers on these properties. You know, I talked to the Maui guy, you know, the Maui governor, and he was afraid of the

same thing. So we're working on. He's just such a slime. But I wonder, I wonder like, there's going to be like payouts to people that are affected. I wonder where that. $770 from Joe. Yeah, it's like seven. It's like $700. 700 bucks or something. Oh, so, yeah, $7.7. I thought he just said $70. That would be really low. I mean, what's the difference if you just lost your home? But there's also the question about like if the regulations change, like, will it be all of Malibu? Like, will it be easier for you to build? Will it be like Altadena burned?

I'm in Pasadena. My water was affected because I'm on the same water line, which is why I'm here in Santa Barbara now. But my house didn't burn down. But there was ash that fell on my house. Like we have ashes. The thing is, the question is like, do I benefit from this or not? I'm still unclear. Malibu Coastal Commission.

You have local groups, other environmental groups. There's so many different levels of permits. I think it's great that Gavin Newsom can go out and say, we're going to make it easier than ever to build. Yeah, yeah. But it will. What does that actually mean? But okay, you remove red tape, but then you have a thousand times more people

trying to do the thing. So what is the net effect? Are they going to get, you know, 100 times more, you know, employees that are processing sort of these like permitting stuff like that, everything's going to still be permanent. You talked about how you talked about how you were just trying to rebuild the room in your house and they were like, well, if you want to do that, you have to put in a stove. You have to add a kitchen.

You have to add a kitchen. You have to add a kitchen. I already have a kitchen. You just really want me to cook. I get all my food from Kava. I get a barnyard. It really is so insane. It's like, yeah, your house needs two kitchens.

Yeah. No, all of this is exposing that. that every single level is broken. Yeah. And we talked about this on Monday's episode. The, they had just introduced new regulations to solve the insurance crisis that was already unfolding.

And then there was a weak delay between when it went into effect and when the fire hits and no change. And it's so easy to just be like, the branding is we're removing red tape. And then the law is like, we're going to make it sure that your house can never be built unless it's to the most environment. fire code possible.

And it's like, now LA has, I think we're going to want to cover this, but the, the business of Super Bowl prep, the business of Olympic prep. So we have these huge international events coming to LA by 2028.

and that just adds a whole other level to it. But let's keep going. So we have separately, these tend to be the company. So CEMEX and or ChemX, I don't actually know how you say it, Owen's Corning get way less attention because they're they're much more on the industry side, B2B, than Lowe's and Home Depot, which still have a huge B2B component to their business,

but are the more high-profile sort of consumer retail businesses. So Lowe's, I think everybody should know. Second largest hardware building supply retailer in the U.S. provides community support and emergency supplies post-disaster, which is great. They do 90 to 100 billion in revenue. They're based in North Carolina where they just had obviously a big hurricane. and then you have Home Depot, which is the largest U.S. Home Improvement Retailer, critical supplier of rebuilding materials after disasters,

2,300 stores, they have 150 billion of annual revenue. And so, yeah, the average, you know, for every one person that walks into a Home Depot, one of them is a, you know, contractor. For every two people that walk in, one is. It's 50-50 at Home Depot contractors versus DIY prosumers. Yeah. At lows, it's about 70% DIYers. Really?

Yeah, yeah, it's more. It's more of, Lowe's is where you go as a consumer. The contractors lean towards Home Depot. And there's some interesting design choices that they've actually made in the history of Home Depot where one, they were building one of the first stores, I believe. And they, and the, the builder on the actual store had like polished the floors and made it look all nice. And they came in there and they were like, this is not, this is not going to be friendly to a contractor. Like a contractor wants to see like grit. And so like throw some sawdust down on the ground.

That is funny because whenever I'm in Home Depot, you know, I feel like a lost golden retriever. Exactly. I'm over here, golden retriever math. Yeah. Yeah. And the idea is to, you know, put the contractor first. You show up, you go in, you just get your stuff and you go. Whereas Lowe's, there's going to be more people walking around kind of, oh, oh, you want to, you know, like, you know, DIY your own deck or just get some furniture or get a new.

fridge, like we'll walk you through that. You could, in many ways, I would imagine that Home Depot is a bigger beneficiary here because there's been so much destruction. You're not doing the foundation yourself. Exactly. Yeah. That is almost a meme online of like, you know, you can just build a house. Yeah.

People that can, you know, left wing, people will complain about the cost of housing and then these sort of like homestead or right wing people will be like you can just build, you can just go and buy the supplies and build your house. Yeah. So I'm sure we'll see some of that. Home Depot went through some crazy shocks during COVID. Everyone was worried that like, you know, the housing market would collapse because the stock market was down.

The economy was really rough during the early days of COVID. Unemployment was really high. But then once people realized that they were going to be at home for a year, they were like, let's do some home improvement projects. And I think they pulled forward something like five years of growth in one year during COVID. And the stock like mooned and did really well because everyone was doing renovation. and stuff because they're like if I'm going to be here and the interest rates are really low

and I'm getting massive checks from the government and and you know I'm not moving and the stock and the price of my house is going way up I should be renovating I should be and they were just like yeah yeah yeah home Devo a lot of flipping too a lot flipping during that time so again home divo is a national company we're covering Brad Jacobs on Friday but he has a new his new private equity firm yeah yeah private equity roll up firm you're going to try and buy a couple companies that do construction supplies. So they presumably would be to B-to-B. More like Semex or ChemX and O-Ns, but the smaller, smaller mid-market companies.

He wants to bring in technology and automation to all the stuff that he's done at XPO and the other logistics companies that he's run, but focused on on construction supply chain. Yeah. All right, let's jump into, we're going to cover more of that industry stuff. Kind of like McMaster car, if you're familiar with that. He wants to be, you know, McMaster Car level. A McMaster Margarita. For construction supplies.

Who is posting about the McMaster Margarita? Oh, yeah. The It's great. The ITERGatorade. The Itar Gatorade. Yeah. It's great. So next category, community and government support. Subcategory, we have emergency management and coordination.

So first up, we have Cal OES. They oversee the emergency response specifically for the state of California. They coordinate the wildfire evacuations and statewide resource deployment. It's interesting because I don't know anybody that was using Cal OES for this. Everybody was using watch duty, but I'm sure Cal OES data feeds into that somehow. Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. But watchduty.

Watchers a nonprofit, but it's like a company, so it's like startup almost. And I'm all, it wasn't perfect. A nonprofit now might be for profit conversion if they want to start printing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Take private. Get those units. Stack those units if you're at watch duty. Gaffon and company.

Take private at watch studio. Watch duty just jacks it up to $100. $100. Yeah, getting the key to in there. Yeah, yeah. Get some dark patterns. Get some dark patterns. Dark.

And start printing. Dark. In app purchases. Yeah. So Cal OES coordinates with local like city, L.A. and FEMA for disaster strategies. And yeah, it was wild. I think Wednesday night, Watch duty just stopped updating. The fire didn't spread all night.

So I remember everybody's watching it being like, what's going on because that's like the only way to get anything close to information. FEMA is a more interesting one to me here. So FEMA's everybody knows kind of a controversial agency because they deal with a lot of the immigration stuff. But federal agency coordinating major disaster response across the U.S., they provide grants, temporary housing and public infrastructure repair funding. So they're funding, you know, if a freeway gets damaged, they're going to help fund that.

they oversee $20 billion annually in disaster relief. So what's interesting about this is people, yeah, and I'm sure that that's more of like an average, and I'm sure it massively ticks up. Yeah, like Katrina, I'm sure it was higher. But what's interesting about this is there's a whole subcategory of contractors that are already looped in, you know, that do work with FEMA because there's always stuff happening, right?

So it's, think of it as like a FEMA, S&B type, you know, operator where FEMA is now going to be funding a lot of the cleanup from the fire where everything from, okay, there's, we have these 20 cars on the street that burned out. Bring a bulldozer. And so there's a- Probably DOD contracting, but just- Yeah, so there's a subcategory of contractors right now that are buying, that are buying or renting every available bulldozer in the surrounding area or shipping them in just to operate them to basically take on these like individual you know FEMA contracts and you could probably do a whole

deep dive there but it's a lot of like people that have good intentions a lot of people that are just trying to make a quick buck a lot of that money gets spent pretty poorly because there's like this crisis situation and if you need to clean up you know hundreds of square you know miles or thousands and thousands of acres of just like chaos and like you just need to spend money it's like a startup, right? Where if you need to do something super, super fast, sometimes the best way to do it is just to like overspend. The local agencies and nonprofits, American Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, everybody knows the Red Cross. Not many injuries or blood donations going on right now. He's the death toll so low, but I'm sure they come out with like, you know, just general relief.

Yeah. So the Red Cross works at local agencies. They're trying to, you know, provide support for displaced residents. They operate on $2 to $3 billion annually from donations and grants. So, you know, big organization, but maybe not even as big as some might think. Habitat for Humanity, they build and repair affordable homes with volunteer labor, and they offer zero interest mortgages for disaster affected families. So that's cool. They're active globally, but they're based in Atlanta. I built a house with Habitat for Humanity in high school, and it was like the slowest. process in the world. It took like months for them to do like anything. Oh yeah because it's like now we're going to do the because it's like American. And it's a rotating rotating team just takes

forever. And then I had and then I did one where I went to Mexico and did it, built the house in the day. It was the most satisfying thing in the world. That's crazy. I had the foundation before, but you get there and it's just like, okay, frame this out, put this up. It's like very minimal, but you finish the house in a single day. That's so sick. That's how it should be. Hopefully, I mean, that's not going to happen here, but hopefully even 100 days, right? I have a friend. Bring it the homage. Bring the homage to L.A.

Just throw up barns. I have a buddy in Malibu who did an internal remodel. Structure didn't change at all. It took him over three years. And it was the kind of thing that could have been done in four months. Yeah, but just massive delaying and the delays. All right, next construction and infrastructure. commercial and infrastructure construction.

So there's AECOM, AECOM, AECOM, AECOM, AECOM, yeah. ACOM, yeah. ACOM. Global engineering construction firm for handling civil and commercial projects. Yeah, that's more for, like, if the water plant or power plant, like, burn down, like, they're going to come in and build, like, a bespoke, like, you know, massive power plant or some, like, piece of huge infrastructure, like the water main and stuff like that. Yeah, you have to imagine a lot of that stuff didn't burn to the ground because it's, like, concrete buildings, but the machinery inside and right now we have a water crisis in L.A.

just because, you know, when you think about, like, who builds the reservoir, like, that type of thing, like, do we need an extra reservoir after this? Is that the resolution? Well, then you're going to call in one of the massive engineering firms. Going forward, their comp should be structured based on making sure the reservoir actually has water, you know, like it should be like a, you know, we need some accountability. Yeah, you don't get paid unless it's cool. And then there's Bechtel with one of the largest privately held engineering companies renowned for massive infrastructure projects worldwide 17 to 20 billion in annual revenue international operations so very similar companies uh halberton famous for dick cheney uh halberton very old company but does these huge infrastructure projects

the famous story is in Iraq like you need to put in oil well they would engineer that and build that and then and then are you familiar with parsons in Pasadena oh the design school, right? There is a design school. I think the design school was endowed by the founder of the engineering firm. Oh, crazy. I think his name's Bill Parsons, and he, uh, he, uh, he designed, like all these weapons. He was like a, a DOD contractor during like, maybe World War II, maybe a little bit after,

but built like a whole bunch of like tanks and stuff. And then eventually did more and more engineering projects bigger. And now it's like this big, big engineering firm. Crazy. Um, okay, on the residential side, we have KB Home and Lanar. KB Home, customizable, energy efficient homes, and major U.S. markets. Built to order model simplifies adaptation to local codes based in L.A. So I'm sure they're going to, you know, I actually talk to a guy who does a bunch of...

Can I have the other three pages, by the way? Yeah. Did we get the printer working? Sorry, I haven't said it. We can trade back at some point. I talked to a guy in Santa Barbara the other day. I was like, are you going to go try to do any development work in Santa Barbara, or sorry, in L.A. And he's like, I'm good.

You know, I don't want to go basically get involved in someone's backyard. So I think a lot of this stuff will go to local builders. And that's who I'd want. You know, if my house burned down, I'd want somebody local that's not just like coming in for a few years to like make a quick buck and get out. Yeah. And then Linar, one of the largest U.S. home builders, they focus on. scalability. And they do have post-disaster rebuilding sort of products based in Miami,

$35 billion market cap. Also an investor in cover. Really? Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. So covers a friend's company who builds modular homes, mostly of backyard homes right now. Covers revenue will 10x.

You would imagine if people are doing stuff, their core market has been ADUs in backyard homes. a very quick build. No, but here's one angle, and this is what people have done, even historically, is if you need to remodel or rebuild your primary home, throw an ADU in the backyard. Start with the ADU, live there, and then you can build the full house. Because there's people that don't, you know, if your house didn't burn down, but it was badly damaged, and then, okay, so you're not, you're going to get paid to get it remodeled.

Yep. But insurance payouts kind of work where they're like, well, we'll fund it for two years, but then it takes three, four years to rebuild. and then you have to then carry the cost of two properties just for your primary residence. Yeah, I mean, I certainly hope that they can step up and help. They have this whole modular, like, you know, they basically manufacture panels.

There's a lot of manufactured homes where they build a whole home in a huge warehouse. And they put it on the back of a truck. You've probably seen these driving down like the five. It's crazy. And then they sometimes they split the home in half and then they just piece it together, bolt it to the foundation.

And the home is built. feel really bad when you're in them. Yeah, yeah. And they're built using traditional manufacturing techniques. Like it's a guy with hammer and nails, like nailing like two by fours together to make the home and then putting up drywall. The cover model is like make these modular panels that then can click together and they're perfectly engineered so that even like the, you know, the power outlets are like built

into the whole system. Yeah. But they long term, they want to have all those panels click together so you could make a three story house out of them. but they just aren't quite there yet. And there's always a question of when these big events happen, like the Ukraine war, like there's a lot of drone companies

where it's like, yeah, they'd want to jump into that business, but they don't have a manufacturing plant. They have like a demo product, and they're just not really going to move the needle. But it can be a catalyst for a next funding round or a next product or something like that. There's this interesting deep dive on D.R. Horton from business breakdowns. They're very similar to Linar in the sense that they're a massive home

builder. I think they build a hundred thousand, yeah, 90,000 homes annually now. The founder started with $3,000 in 1978 and a $30,000 loan from the bank, built one home, and then five homes, and then 10 homes, and then 100 homes. And then in 1992, he built 1,200 homes, and now he's building 90,000 annually. And, yeah, so one, one thing, one thing, one thing to know, if, if, um, there if you're somebody who is obsessed with construction and home building which there are many people and this and you want to go and build a major construction company uh or home building company there's nothing wrong with coming to l.A and setting up shop and trying to rebuild a bunch of homes here and that can be your the catalyst to building a big business it's not you're not taking advantage of

anyone you're providing a service nobody's going to give you money unless you're providing them value in exchange. So I would imagine that there will be some, there will be many people that make an incredible, you know, catalyze their career and go from a $2 million revenue business to it, you know, 20 plus. Yeah. One of the interesting things about these, these large home builders that came out of this deep dive that I listened to was a lot of them have transitioned to being asset light, meaning that they don't typically own the land and they're less in the real estate business and they've said the business is transformed from being a real estate business to being a manufacturing business. So they really just focus on making the homes. 75% of the land is

optioned versus 25% a decade ago and that has increased the return on equity for this business from 10% to 22% and much more asset light. And it's really just about getting those homes out as fast as possible. Now, I don't think any of those prefab manufactured homes are going into the Palisades. There's a question about Altadena. You know, the average home price there was probably a third to a fifth as much as the palisades. Yeah, like an 800K to a million. Something like that, yeah, but there's a big question about like, what will that, what will that community want in terms of style and design?

I think that what, what, what there's a pending gentrification crisis almost in Altadino where so many of the people there had owned their homes for so long that, If you own your home free and clear, you do not have to have insurance, I don't believe. You can just, you can just raw dog it basically. But what's going to happen is Altadina's in close proximity to L.A., people will look at that very opportunistically and say we can create $3 million homes here. And $3 million gated communities by going out. Or more mixed use. could mix in. So Pasadena has been going through a little bit of a transition where

in the downtown core there's been more apartment buildings going up. Still not 10 stories. You're talking about like four story buildings. And Altonina historically really had none of those. So maybe you put in some of those. There's these zero lot line homes that are very popular in L.A. right now, especially in kind of the Echo Park area. It's a full house. You own the house, but there's no lot. Like your house bumps up against your neighbor's house and it's basically just like

this ultimate optimized like check the box for what a house is. Bad place to be golden retriever maxing. Yeah, it's rough. There's no place to sun your... Well, the roof deck usually.

So they're designed to be like hyper optimized. I know a guy who moved into one and he has a golf simulator. Perennium sunning on the... You better hope you're the highest rooftop. So it'll be like a two car garage but they're like stacked. and then you go upstairs and there's like a kitchen open floor plan living room then you go upstairs

there's some bedrooms and there's a roof deck and it kind of like checks the boxes for like you have one of everything and they look nice but they're just like really really condensed to be able to fit them all in so you can you can wind up building like a 3,000 square foot four bedroom home on like a 6,000 square foot plot of land or something instead of like a quarter acre or whatever I probably have those numbers wrong but it's a small plot of land because it's just stacked up and so I could see some of those going in I could see some of the I wonder how many people will say hey we want we want Eltonina to look like it did before so it's build in kind of there's the Spanish style there was a lot of like tiled roofs and stuff and there was just a lot I mean it was a very slow growth community like it grew for a hundred years

without a real resetically there was a large community of like African American yeah and Latinos. Yeah. And so there's a question about like, yeah, what will what will the style demands of that community be going forward? How much displacement that will there be from wealthier people moving there? It's going to be, I mean, it's an interesting experiment to see what the palisades look like. Yeah. Just because I can see the palisades rebuilding like exactly like it looked. Yeah, similar. I mean, they were still in the palisades. There were still homes from the six. Sure. Yeah. A lot of stuff like that. Yeah. But let's keep it rolling because there's a lot of here. So environmental remediation and restoration, cleanup and remediation is a big one.

We covered some of this in the emergency management section, but you have Belfour, global property restoration firm for fire, water, and storm damage. They offer complete services. They do cleanup and reconstruction. Also privately held clean harbors, specializes in hazardous waste management. and industrial services. They remove toxic debris and manage environmental risk post-disaster, publicly traded four to five billion annual revenue.

The one interesting thing here is like, okay, you have a gas station that just burned to the ground and was on fire. Okay, now is that what happened to the tanks? Is it leaking oil everywhere? A lot of the gas would have been siphoned out just by nature of the demand and the exit to the fire. but yeah there's there's just so many levels to the crisis that's not just the homes right there's it's like simple stuff like oh this hardware store had 200 batteries in this back room that just

burned right so now that's all just leaking all the refrigerators all the stoves yeah stuff just melted. Landscaping and erosion control. So Bartlett tree experts is one. They have 150 offices. So that goes to show you can get, you can build a big company pretty much in any niche. Family owned still. They do like basically just any work around these sort of, I mean, for as many homes as

LA has, it has as many trees. The trees, weirdly, a lot of them are left standing, which is just a proof point for, I think, going forward, a lot of these homes are going to add these complex sprinkler systems. There's this guy who runs an S&B and does a lot of stuff with the homes in Malibu called, I think it's like brush fire battle systems, like kind of a cool name. But he creates these, I actually meant to when I was originally looking into that idea around doing a drone, fire response business, I was meant to talk to him, but then we had a bunch of fires and the meeting never happened. But he builds these sprinkler systems to just make homes

damp when fires are breaking out. And the trees, it was interesting, a lot of conspiracy theorists were saying, like, how did all the homes burn down and not the trees in this car? But trees are very moist. They have filled with water. They're like humans. They're like, what, 70% water. Whereas the, so it's much harder to burn.

If you've ever tried to burn down it, you know, burn, you know, start a fire with like wet wood. It just doesn't work. That's why you have to like kill the tree. then you burn it out. And it's an interesting thing where homes in California and, you know, buildings everywhere have fire sprinklers because it's a way to protect. But it's like why don't we have systems that just completely irrigate every home

as these fires are starting because if not, the firefighters are going to have to come put them out. So that to me seems like a startup opportunity that's maybe not a venture back business, but just create these sprinkler systems for homes that are set up where, when somebody evacuates, they turn it on, and it just like sprays water everywhere and makes place damp. So Davey Tree, employee-owned company, very cool, much better than being a nonprofit. For tree care and environmental consulting, stabilizes landscapes post-fire by removing hazardous trees, one and a half to two billion of annual revenue. They're based in Ohio.

Wow. So, like, there's a lot of trees. I have no idea if those companies have presences in L.A., but it gives you a shape of but they should be being like okay we have 200 employees we're sending them to LA because even around my neighborhood just from the wind alone walking around my neighborhood there's all these trees that have fallen down and so anyways they'll they'll be making some money out of this banks and mortgage lenders you know I don't think we have to explain Bank of America or Wells Fargo to our highly sophisticated

audience of wealthy technologists but so maybe we skip over that property and Casualty insurance, all state, state farm. Yeah, we already talked about insurance. I say we like skip over this. I mean, all state, uh, but I'm sure there were policies. They're saying they're, they, they, all states focus on like rapid claims. And, uh, but you can imagine so much of the stuff is just going to be slogged.

And, you know, it's like any, any time you experience a business experience is a hundred X, like, comm around something that's going to be slow. Alarm and in a lot of areas right now, people still can't get to their homes. Like they're just literally blocked by National Guard. And even if you own a home, you can't get through. Security and Safety, alarm and monitoring services.

It's kind of interesting because some of these businesses just lost a bunch of customers because people are not going to like pay to secure, pay ADT in the long run to secure a lot. Yep. And they're not going to pay for, whatever, what's the camera ring or whatever. Nobody's paying for ring if their cameras don't exist anymore.

That'll be a quick unsubscribe. And then the physical security providers, I think, will be bigger because people have very little trust in the government right now. And even though there's a National Guard presence, the one thing that is positive on the security side in L.A. is Nathan Hockman, who is a new DA for L.A., who, just started, and he was Caruso's pick. I saw Caruso talk and endorse

Hawkman at a fundraiser in the Palisades back in Q4. He's already like throwing the book at looters and people, criminals that are, you know, have been taking advantage of the situation. Support services and ancillary industries. You have architecture and engineering, a lot of these design firms, engineering firms

that are just figuring out how do we rebuild this home. There was the home in succession, the $125 million home in the palisades that burned to the ground. That rebuilding $125 million home on a slope is like a very complex engineering undertaking. So that by itself is probably like just imagine the architecture and engineering bill for rebuilding a home like that has to be in the millions of dollars. So like there's going to be some big beneficiaries there. professional services Deloitte McKinsey these companies that are doing like consulting audits tax all this advisory work there's just any time you have massive amounts of money changing hands these companies benefit McKinsey always finds a way to make money in a crisis

yeah we got to get the we got to get the McKinsey sponsorship and then get like pre-seed companies working with McKinsey and they're like look like you've got 100k of annualized revenue Like, you're paying yourself 100K a year. Like, their only person to cut is you. Just fire yourself. McKinsey's going to be like cut yourself. They're like, but sir, like, who will run the company? And they're like, well, we have our AI agent practice for a million dollars.

We can create a program for you to run your business with AI agents. And they're like, well, spend the money on us. Don't spend it on yourself. Everybody will win in the long run. It's great. Disaster assessment and planning tech. So we talked about this a little bit before, but the drone deploy,

they deploy drones and they have software for aerial mapping and inspection. I was recommending to somebody the other day. They were like, I couldn't get to their house. And I was like, go find, buy satellite imagery. You can buy it now. You can actually pay Planet Labs to task a satellite. I'm sure a bunch of satellites were tasked over L.A. this last week.

I think that's the other company that's mentioned. Yeah. So drone deploy. has raised $140 million. You can hit the size gong for that. They do quick damage assessments over large fire areas. So, like, they'll, I'm sure, make, you know, this is the kind of thing where insurance companies are now, like,

probably, like, sitting around the table being like, oh, my God, you know. And, you know, publicly, they're, like, we're very, you know, devastated. But then internally, you can imagine they're just, like, freaking out. And so I'm sure they're tasking drone deploy. with various projects and then smart building and construction tech this is just more like

SaaS auto desk creators of AutoCad and a bunch of other design engineering tools what's interesting is like you know that when whenever something like crazy national news story happens like there are startups that are pivoting and looking for their next idea and some of them might pivot into something related to fire prevention I think the fear, and I've seen this play out before, I knew a guy who, after the San Francisco fires, remember the ones that turned the sky orange. Yeah.

He decided to start a fire, wildlife prevention. What wildfire prevention. He said he decided to start a fire. Yeah, he said a fire prevention company, right? And he was using all this data and pulling all this stuff together. But selling into the government, it was so hard that he pivoted. And I was telling him, like, like, okay, you have all these, like, vanity metrics. like contracts that you're working on, but like really like the catalyst for your company

being huge will be like what happened with the watchfire app. Like when you save watch duty, when you save your first home, like that should be your main KPI that you have on the wall of your company. It's just like, that guy brush fire battle systems literally saved a home. Saved a home. And so he's like, here's the proof. Exactly. Now he's going to get millions of dollars.

You just need to raise zero on the wall. Zero home saved. You need to just work backwards from saving. a home and as soon as you save a home there will be a national news story about your company. You'll raise more money. You'll sign all the conflection points. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But he pivoted it out before the

next fire and so there was never a moment when it was like the tech could demonstrate like what it was powerful for. I think there's probably a flock safety style business that makes consumer apps for cities and state and local governments to manage disasters because right

now like when the disaster broke out everybody's on WhatsApp. I'm message, you know, coordinating using watch duty, but watch duty wasn't working. And I don't really want to be reliant on a nonprofit during, you know, a fire, like, fire realistically because it's like, okay, they went down for 12 hours. Yeah. And was that because like they hit their cloud bill? I think they basically like, who knows, right? We probably will never know. But I think there's a consumer business to be like city, states, get every one of your citizens like on this app. Yeah. It's less.

line on the press release. I think of Flux Safety is like the hardware company like Anderol for. Yeah, sure. More like citizen. Citizen app is I guess this, but it's more like a frontier for local government. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. More around communications because the government being like I was getting my information from group chats, my HOA. Yeah. And then the city was, the HOA was getting going and like tuning into the live events broadcasts that the city was doing.

There's always this question about like, oh, like, can the technology save us in the situation? And I always worry that it's not a matter of technology. It's a matter of like willpower or like to even desire. Like is there even a desire to solve some of these problems? Like it's very unclear. Yeah. And you kind of need to rely on people. Yeah.

My neighbors were great. I got, um, tricky. Well, should we move on to the timeline? We need to jump into the timeline. That's great. I got a break. Welcome back to technology brothers. Still the most profitable podcast in the world.

Jordy, you have an exciting announcement to make. Let's hear about PMF or Die, the latest project from the Technology Brothers. Okay, so yesterday I sent out a... Inspiration struck. I wasn't exactly yesterday morning, but the inspiration for some of this, for some of the language that I used in the post

definitely struck in the morning. So a while back, John and I were always and give new formats and concepts and stuff like that. Our goal is to entertain and elevate technology brother voices and movements. And so we were thinking about, well, what if we found a founder, gave him 25K and just basically locked them in a studio apartment for 90 days and then use. Was that the word you used? Studio apartment. What did you refer to it as a cage?

A cage. Well, it's now called the cage. Okay. Break down the tweet. Read your post. No, I'm just giving some of the history of it. So the idea was like, well, if we have a founder, we'll talk about them on the show, we'll support them, we'll get them a bunch of attention. And if they can't hit a million dollars of ARR in that 90 days with all of the attention of us telling people go buy this product today, then they're never going to succeed.

And we do some type of deal where they literally have to quit startups if they can't make it work. You got to go work in big tech if you can't make it in the cage. but I posted yesterday so we're working on a new show called PMF or die we will lock a small founding team in a studio, aka the cage with 25K in funding and only enough food, caffeine and nicotine to last

for 90 days. The team will only be released if when they achieve a million in ARR and the whole process will be documented and shared daily while in the cage you will get millions of eyeballs and be coached by some of the most accomplished founders in the world so if you can't find PMF in the cage you just won't find it anywhere

please reach out if you're interested in being locked up. Locked up. And I will share the application. And it's so funny. You got like 2,000 likes, right? Yeah, 2,300. 2,300.

2300 likes still climbing. Lots of, yeah, and I had to quickly follow it up and say, like, no, this is not a joke. Here's the application. So, yeah, and I'll say it again now. Like, I want as many of our listeners to be a part of this as possible. You'll all be in the ride as viewers. And it was a, it was.

Mr. Beast meets Paul Graham. Yeah, I said if Mr. Beast and Paul Graham were to make sweet love and have a nice and give birth to a baby accelerator, it would look a lot like PMF or die. And it's so funny because I've maybe watched five minutes of Mr. Beast content. I just never got into it. I didn't watch Squid Games. I just was never big into that whole world. I've never watched Survivor or anything, any of these other shows.

But this is in that vein. I think it's going to be extremely entertaining. And it's one of the issues. So we've talked a lot about different concepts and shows. And one of the issues with Shark Tank is because they're putting this out on TV, which is not a tech startup audience generally. They need to only basically, they only can work with founders that are creating sort of gimmicky CPG products. Like I made this cooler that also has a grill built into it.

So you can like cool your steaks and then cook. One of the greatest shark tank companies ever. It's a wristband that shocks you when you do something that you're trying to quit. So if you're trying to quit smoking, it will shock you when you smoke. It's the Pavlovian response. It's like total meme tech. And so there's a bunch of meme tech. And I think it's great.

And if you're building a product that, you know, and founders go on that because they don't go on that to get the money because the terms aren't generally good. They go on to get the attention and these reruns and stuff like that. So it's really a customer acquisition. Do you know the whole gimmick on Shark Tank? Let's go. Yeah, yeah, go for it. Oh, this is such a good story. So they film you for like an hour.

The actual segment on TV will be like 15 minutes max. And so what happens is they wind up, am I good? Okay. What happens is that there's during that there's a bunch of really good quotes from you. And there's also a bunch of really bad quotes of things you stumble. Yeah, they beat you into stuff. Yeah, yeah. And they ask you hard questions.

They ask you easy questions. And then depending on. if you take the deal, they will edit it to make you look great. And if you don't take the deal, they will make you look bad. And so I had a friend who went on and just tied them up in legal negotiation for so long that they had to run it. And they were like, we're doing the deal, make us look good. We're doing the deal, make us look good. And then as soon as we went live, it was like, I'm not doing that deal.

No way. It's the worst deal I ever see. Exactly, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It's locked. Yeah. I just have to run up.

But I mean, that just gives you an idea of like the problem with Shark Tank. Yeah. It's purely entertainment. So, so it's cut out a lot of founders that don't care to get in front of that audience. They don't want that funding. And so one thing that's really interesting, we've seen this recently is so many companies can, can get to that one million of error mark faster than ever. Yep. You're seeing it in YC.

The best YC companies are getting out with like millions of error. Yep. And you're seeing teenagers on X go from nothing to doing hundreds of thousands a month. And part of that is like these new AI, this new like these LLMs that are enabling new experiences, but part of it's just faster to build. It's just faster to program. And so we want to create the, you know, basically the cage, which is like the best place to build a software company. And so like specifically for this kind of corner of the internet, one of my favorite responses was Schrelli responded and said,

hits too close to home and shared that and got a good response. We got to get him as one of the coaches. He would, yeah, so I actually messaged him to become a coach already. And I think it's funny because if he was actually a player, he would get out in a day. Oh, yeah, a hundred percent. I'd figure out a way to get out in a day. And so there's so many fun ways that you can gamify this. The point is not to create the next, you know, I hope that people create world-changing startups out of it.

But it's totally cool to come in the cage and just have fun. Yeah, it's a sprint and have fun, right? I was telling, I think something that people could do is make the next, like, I am rich app, and call it the jailbreak app. I am stuck in a prison right now. I can only get out if I get a million of error. Subscribe to my app. I will donate all the profits to fire relief.

And somebody would get out in a day, if they know how to work, TikTok. And so the players will have access to the TV audience and the X audience. I posted a follow up to just make sure that people understand that this is real. I'm very happy to see the incredible response to PMF or die.

We are clearly making something people want. the show is guaranteed to be life-changing for the players. They will either leave the cage with a million-dollar air our business as a niche internet micro-celebrity, or they will die. Either way, it's a big change. We have received 10x more applications than we anticipated, and we will be processing them as fast as we can. The demand has been insane. Like, there's so many talented builders reaching out. It's kind of the perfect opportunity if you're just like in the middle of something or you want to start something new, you want to quit.

What information did you put on the form? just email name just name email profile you got to put mailing address because like it's always good to be able to send people stuff yeah yeah that'd be good that'd be good so yeah that we're just trying to process the applications at this point we already have you know people that we've accepted we're going to be sharing a lot more information location dates and there's tons of opportunities for people to get involved you can be a player you can be a coach you can be an antagonist you can be a trainer right we're going to have weightlifting equipment there we're going to have treadmill you're not going to be getting sloppy in the cage.

And so if you want to sponsor the show, there's going to be a bunch of opportunities. We're going to have to get a bunch of these in there. And it's just going to be super fun. The response was really incredible. I saw that DM you got from someone who said, put me in the cage. I yearned for the cage.

I yearn for the cage. There's something primal about being in the cage and just wanting to break out. It's a cure for real willingness. It's great. We're going to figure out how to structure the 25K. it'll be an investment. Yeah.

Maybe it'll be like, you know, debt. Lots of debt covenants. Lots of debt. Lots of debt. We're going to wind up owning 100% of the business. The debt covenants are the real like, you know. Maybe it's more like venture debt. Yeah, exactly.

But now we don't want to scare anyone off. Like the point is not to really own a lot of these businesses. The point is to just like create some really great entertainment and create some great companies out of it. So go apply. Yeah. Is it a website yet? So you can just go to X.

And go to PMF at PMF or die or PMF. The application link is in the bio. It's apply. dot PMF or die.com slash S1. And it's going to be a lot of fun. As I like to say, if you can't find PMF in the cage, you won't find it anywhere. War is peace, freedom is slavery, PMF is strength.

There you go. Fantastic. I'm excited. We will talk a lot more about the show coming up. Yeah, you'll be hearing about it. relentlessly and some of the locations we're looking at are pretty insane we're looking all over the country for the right spot and uh you know we're going to be you know assuming season one goes well we'll be going more and more exotic we're going to do Epstein island season two season two

we take back yeah yeah green we could have we'd have read hoffman come come back to the island Like, where you judge? Back to the island, we. But, but yeah, it's going to be, it's going to be a lot of fun. And everybody will be able to be involved. We're going to have, I'm sure there'll be some, like, betting markets on Polly Market. For sure. That's great.

That's a cool one. And I just, it's going to be a really great time. So without further ado, let's talk protein. Oh, yeah, protein. Okay. So you have mentioned. This founder many times in the show. Founder of our X-Barr.

Does he go by Pete or Peter? Peter Rahal. Yeah. Founded R-X-Barr. Did not raise a lot of venture capital. I don't know if he raised any. He sold the business for hundreds of millions of dollars, became very wealthy,

and then decided to run it all back and build another protein bar company. And I have been surviving off of these exclusively for the last 30 days, and it's been fantastic. You've been doing like roughly 10 a day? 10 a day. So it has 28 grams of protein, 150 calories. So 10 a day, I get, I get one and a half grams of protein per pound of body weight roughly.

And only 1,500 calories. 1,500 calories. So I'm in a major caloric deficit. Lean, but a mess. And just, yeah, going down to 5% body fat, getting absolutely peeled while maintaining all the muscle mass. Question for the audience. Should John? try to get his IFBVB Pro card.

Yes. Because that's like all... There's going to hit a point this year where the natural next step is to get your card and do a show. Yeah. Because some of the greatest

ever do at Chesky had his run on the amateur bodybuilding circuit. Yeah. But these are fantastic. I've been really enjoying these. Just in really, really insane macros. The rule of thought...

And Ryan, our dear friend, Ryan Harmon at Dayjob did all... Oh, we did the branding. Fantastic. It is great. The David Barr after Michelangelo's David, correct? I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. That is how you need to be thinking about yourself.

Does it say that on here? On the side. That's sick. Oh, that's amazing. These quotes, biblical quotes. Yeah, it's fantastic. The macros really feel too good to be true. The rule of thumb that a buddy of mine gave me was if you're trying to,

to eat healthy and get a lot of protein, you should be looking for one gram of protein for every 10 calories. So you pull out a protein bar that's 200 calories, it should have 20 grams of protein. This has almost twice the ratio. It's uncanned. It ratios the other bars. It ratios the other bars. And I thought it was going to taste absolutely terrible because of the, I thought it was a, you know,

Faustian bargain. But I think they taste great. And I could easily survive off these for years and just walk around. IFBBB Pro status, ready to step on stage at 6% body fat at any moment. Let's go. Yeah. It really is fantastic. I'm a huge fan of these.

We might have different palettes, but I'm into this. And so thank you for sending these. That just tastes like almost like a rice crispy tree. It really, it doesn't taste like you'd think. You'd think it'd be really, really dry, right? And like inedible. And it's just like, it just goes so much better than RX bar. Yeah.

Which is evidence of why. repeat founders oftentimes do really well because they're a better founder than they were with their last company but then with this he didn't just he's still in the bar game so he's like making a 10x better bar

I would eat RX bars quite a lot I just like the fact that it was so simple and it's funny because this is on the other end of the spectrum of simple but but much more of a science project in a way, right, where it's not a. So anyways, shout out to David. Shout out to Peter. Thank you for getting us stocked up. They're fantastic. They will definitely be present in the cage. Definitely present in the cage. You'll be surviving off of those. Yeah, the cage, by the way,

one thing I want to clarify, it's not meant to be, the cage is not meant to be a, enjoyable experience. I predict that many people, I've been talking to some of the applicants, I predict that many people will get to the end of the 90 days and actually have like sort of a Mexican standoff, you know, like, I don't want to leave the cage. Like I'm like, I'm like, you know, like I'm staying. They're calling the sponsors on our we have. Like, let's, season two right now. The chef is too good. The stakes are too good. I'm too diced. My company's ripping. If I have to move, It's going to disrupt my company. Like, let me stay.

I hope they can just speed run everything. I want to see an acquisition of one company into another. Yeah, we're going to see large-scale M&A, mango seed rounds, getting done in the cage. What is private equity guys doing in the cage today? Oh, they're doing a LBO in one of the companies. Yeah, I would like to see a roll. I'd like to see a roll up. I'd like to see somebody come in.

The good strategy is coming with a search fund. Okay. Acquire a business over that 90 days. get to the $1 million mark. Cellar financing, you only have $25K, but that's enough. The meme coin, the meme coin idea is good too, right? Yeah, meme coin's obvious. But I mean, the seller finance buyout of a business that's already doing a million

ARR, that's very doable. That's the beauty of this. There's no rule. You can get out in the day. The only rule, the rules are very simple. 25K, 90 days, one million. Or you die. Somebody, so Nate Eliason, you know him?

He said that the death should be. waterboarding with Dom Perriand? I was like, I don't know. I don't think that's the way to go, but that's rough. I mean, if you were going to go, there'll be lots of Don Perriott regardless. If you had to be tortured to death, slowly, you'd choose Dom Perion.

Yeah, I mean, I've been doing dry January, so only drinking dry champagne basically every day, and it's been fantastic. I mean, your body just changes after a couple weeks of not drinking sweet wines and focusing on the dry ones during dry January so highly recommend doing dry January sticking to Dom I have a fantastic story about cages and Paul Graham first time I heard him speak Silicon Valley 2012 first company went or second crazy that I wasn't even born yet yeah yeah you were in what third grade

first company's going through YC and PG comes to a talk and gives this talk about like what red flags exist for founders of companies these teams. And so PG famously really loves technical teams. He likes, you know, oh, these three guys were at MIT together. They all can program roughly and they all come out. And then over time, you know, the CEO does a lot less programming. Eventually the CTO becomes just a manager, but is very technical still. And this is a common pattern we see where it's like if it's a tech company, like the CEO is still pretty technical, even if they're not coding. And that was with party around, that was a huge. Oh yeah. People were like, I didn't, we didn't, we didn't get into YC

because, because of that. You were not technical founder. And, um, well, not, I can't say it was just because of that, but that was a primary reason they gave. We were already funded by Google. Yeah. Like Google's, um, early stage fund. Um, but, uh, I do feel like it was the biggest detriment to our success because in terms of imagine it's a Friday night and you are CEO and you want to have the most impact on your business and maybe shipping that next feature is the most way to have the best way to have an impact if you're non-technical you're just sitting there yeah and also it's a great way you just simply can't have the impact and if you are technical you can evaluate technical talent very well you can rally the troops inspire

them. And you just know, hey, like this bug that I, that somebody, a customer came to me, I'm the CEO, told me to fix this bug. You can, if you, if you're at least a little bit technical, you can clock, okay, this is a week-long project. I'm not going to try and give this to somebody on Friday night. I'm going to actually set ourselves up for success next week and build this feature properly. Or this should take one, this should take 15 minutes. If I give it to my team and they take a week, there's a problem. Like something weird's going on. And so PG's been super bullish on technical teams, technical founders for a long time. But he comes in and he says like one pattern that he sees is the like the business guy, the MBA guy that comes in and is like I got this business

idea and I have my technical like code monkey who's going to build it for me. And he and he, the term that he used for the programmers who, because he's like usually it's like some shy programmer who's been like lightly bullied into like joining this like startup for this business guy who has no. idea how to build this technology is is cager oh wow because he's like he's like the way it feels in a yC pitch is that they pull out their code monkey in the cage and they're like then this is the guy who's gonna build it yeah look at my quant that type of thing and so we we would always joke about like oh you're you're a cager like yeah we need a cager that type of stuff and so the cage is well established in the yc canon it's so real i mean every every one of those business guys that hasn't built a software

before software is pretty tangible because like everybody's used a bunch of software and they've used I've used Salesforce I can build a CRM yeah I've used Airbnb I can build a sharing economy app and then you just realize that it's building great software it's maybe getting easier to build great software but it is not easy at all and that the toughest thing and the reason that I think I was not accepted to YC and even raised you know didn't stop me from raising, you know, YC has their religion almost, right? Like, it's very firmly, like, they have their criteria and that's what they need to follow in order to accept hundreds of

companies a year. But I feel like their general framework, I've used it for my own angel investing and it's been the best, like it's, it is the best framework for me for evaluating early stage technology companies, because it's just so much data has gone into that. That I now, you know, well, if I talk to a founder that doesn't even look too dissimilar to myself, that I'm like, no, I won't invest in your company unless you have somebody who is, is equal to you. That is as good as you at what you do at engineering and they're as bought into the mission. And they're also like a brother to you. Yeah, yeah, because that's the other thing.

The real risk is having a CTO that you don't know that well is usually a disaster too. because you can't trust them in the same way that you can, somebody you've worked any amount of time with. So you ask those questions and then if it's a no, you ask them, well, what's your bench press? And then that's kind of the final hurdle. Yeah, yeah, that's the final hurdle. As long as they're wrapping two plates or. Thousand pound club. Yeah, a thousand pound club.

Or just benching 800 pounds squad. Or just benching more than Brian Johnson. Yeah, yeah. Most people can do it. Anyway, getting the cage folks, sign up today. Let's go to Brian Graham. He says, Zucks says, meta is putting in cubicles.

It's bringing back scotch at lunch and smoking in the office. Zuck says the company's Amex cards work at the strip clubs again. He says it's back to suit and tie dress code. Zuck says they're reinstalling the asbestos. Zuck says there's no Irish allowed. And then Santiago tags us and says this is a tech bros pod worthy banger right here. 38K likes. Like people really like this.

But it is funny. This is why we're doing PMF or die because 38K likes just shows how. just shows how mainstream this stuff has become. People are into this. Yeah, I, um, yeah, I mean, it's kind of funny. Zuck kind of is at this point where he's basically kind of understands that he's, he always wants to be at the edge of doing what people like and what is acceptable, right? So he's just kind of like crawling to the edge coming up to a new spot being like,

okay, I can go a little farther, I can go a little farther. Yeah, yeah, take the tampons out of the mail of the restrooms. Let's see what happens then. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I haven't gotten canceled. Apparently, Palmer, Palmer said, he posted, he said he had some crazy story about the, it probably was like some crazy company that was charging like $20 a tampon, you know, like, just like abusing it being like, well, you need to buy this. Tampons as a service. I mean, that is hilarious that it's like if you're trying to sell more urinals, logically, you'd be like they need to be in both bathrooms. No, that was the issue.

That was the issue. I remember the plate, the library that I would study at in college. I had my little zone. Yeah. And I remember when the DEI wave hit and they ripped out all the urinals and made our main bathroom for that section. So the walk to go to the bathroom. You know, when you're studying and you're just like grinding for like 10 hours and you're and you just sort of like at your desk walking. You know, my peer group would walk outside, smoke cigarette, walk, you know, back to the desk, go to the bathroom and just like alternate there.

And then it just became like a super long walk to get to a urinal. It's always devastating, but I'm sure they're putting them back now, which is also good for the urinal companies, right? Yeah, for sure. I love the suit and tie dress code, obviously. We love a suit. We don't wear ties yet, but stay tuned. Sucks bringing back martinis in the cafeteria. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He said scotch and smoking in the office, which I support as well. If you combine big tech profits with the power lunch and bring back the power lunch, unstoppable. People, all you can drink. I told you about my buddy who his dad worked at Goldman Sachs on the prop desk and their whole team wore tuxedos every day. Every day. Every day.

That was like the dress code in their office. And I was like, dude, that's so sick. Like the 80s were probably so tight. He was like, oh, no, this was in 2007. Right before the crash. And I was like, 2007, like, people were wearing tuxedos all the time. And like, I have a feeling that like the MD on that. that team just thought it was funny.

It was just like, okay, this is like what our culture will be in this pot. Because like when you're in Goldman, like it's a huge organization, you need to differentiate your team a little bit. Yeah. And I was like, that's an amazing thing. That's great. If you're, if you're, you know, a manager at Meta, make your team wear suit and tie every day. Just lean into that one.

Because that's, that's not offensive. You know, the smoking in the office, that's going to set off the fire alarms. There's a lot of other things here that are a little bit more risky. Don't recommend the asbestos. but you can't go wrong with a nice suit and tie. Let's go to the next one. Forward Thinking Founders says Monday's pod is going to be lit. In this conversation, Matt Sherman interviews Simp4 Satoshi of Truffle.

Topics covered include the discussion of Truffle, a device for local inference tied to humanoid robotics and personal intelligence, insights from a unique upbringing in the Middle East, future of AI agents, criticism of Sam Altman, critique of Y Combinator, Yeah, Simp for Satoshi's been spicy on the timeline for a while. And Forward Thinking Founders says, can you print this one out, please?

This episode is going to be epic. So I guess, I guess it's Forward Thinking Founders. Yeah, he tagged us. Oh, okay. Is Forward Thinking Founders a podcast? I guess. It must be. This must be an interview with.

All right, so we are running, this is officially now a promoted post for Matt Sherman's podcast with Simp for Satoshi. Yeah. So anyway. So go listen. Simfer Satoshi's got a lot going on right now. I saw him posting that he's potentially launching a token. for the truffle.

And there's a thesis around. That's not that crazy because there's a render token. Are you familiar to this? Yeah, yeah. You can render 3D like some 40 files. And he's trying to figure out the right way to do it. Super long lockups, stuff like that. I think, well, let's see how,

I would imagine that Sam Altman would open just like a colossal short position against it. So dangerous game once you're in the public crypto markets. But we'll see how it plays out. Let's go to Wilmanitis, obscure hobbyist of the year last year. He says, everyone in tech 100x underestimates how important official capital formation is for building the future. Inventing the safe and making it so you could sell equity with a one-page agreement, probably created greater than $100 billion in equity value. There's dozens of these unlocks left to discover.

I agree with that. There's a very interesting story where when LLM's first popped off, And all the AI companies were like the hottest thing. And it was like, this is the future technology. And everything else is just like zero sum reshuffling like B2B SaaS, cringe, all that stuff. It was like, go build the real stuff. Build the Tesla, the rockets, the AI.

That was like the real tech. And everything else was just like, you know, busy work basically. And what was interesting was like, I was thinking about it. I was like, is this a legitimate critique? And if you look at how did the LLMs actually get built, efficient capital formation is a huge part of that story. And it's the same thing for rockets. Like, without the financing structures that go into the

SPV into the SPV, into the SPV, into the SPV with this 10% management fee and all this stuff. I mean, it's a joke, but like, even just the credit lines on all the different materials in the supply chain that go into a rocket, that is actually important and that financial innovation does speed up the rate at which we get to Mars, which is crazy to think about. And it's absolutely true for AI where, you know, you have this like, nonprofit that's able to do a whole bunch of

fundamental research and then get super creative with the capital formation later stage with these like all these Nvidia credits that are going into AI startups right now. So oh you need to train or fine tune a model. We will figure out how to do that and a lot of those deals are very

like they face a lot of criticism because during the dot com boom a lot of telecom companies did these crazy deals with dot com web startups where they would basically invest in the company with like in-kind credits for their like the fiber optic cables that they were laying out and it led to a lot of dark fiber but that type of like creative capital formation is actually extremely important

and the safe is like obviously the best possible example because it's sped up how quickly startups could move and it shortened financing timelines from a month of due diligence to a few days yeah What's your take on us? What are you looking up? I'll tell you in a second. But yeah, I mean, people don't really realize because my generation at least never built companies in a world without the safe.

So the safe was just the default method to raise capital. Yeah. And people don't realize that if you wanted to take even a $25,000 investment, however many years ago, it really was like a lot of Silicon Valley was high trust.

So it would be like, I'm just going to give you money and we'll figure it out. but then and here's like literally a napkin kind of thing like you know here's the general terms well it'll take a while to get done but um we've been really blessed to only know that sort of frictionless capital raising and i even with party round was taking it a step further with safe automation where you could come on the app kyc and then generate around generate you know send it and it was like using cash app it was the same amount of time to sign up with party round to raise as it was to like sign up

for cash app do you remember the convertible note era at all? I never even... So the convertible notes... Maybe I invested in... You've invested in one or two. You probably see a few. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty...

It was pretty like a crazy dance because you do this round and there's a cap on the convertible note, but there's no floor. Yeah. Typically, there's a famous example of a company that did one and it was disaster for the, for the investors. But typically it's like, you know, you raise $2 million on a convertible note or if it's a big round, you do like $10 million on a convertible note. And that all sounds great.

But if you wind up raising money at $10 million, they own 100% of your business or 50% of your business or something. And it's kind of like this default recap. Now, in practice, it doesn't happen that much because if you're a startup and things are going bad, like usually you're acquiring a company or just shutting down. There aren't that many places where like your crown jewel gets like stolen by some convertible note investor. But it was a little bit more nerve-wracking than the safe. And certainly the safe is much, much faster. Should we do a bucket pole from my post?

I got to do a promoted post. So we were meant to get on the phone with Wander, the team at Wander. Oh, right now? No, we're late. So we had a 2.30 call schedule. Should they just call into the podcast right now? Yeah, yeah. No, I think we're going to, I'm going to try to talk with them.

We'll try to set it up for like 30 minutes from now. But yeah, so we, when I posted about some issues I was having with Airbnb over the weekend, Kyle Tibbitts over at Wander reached out and was like, hey, let us get you set up. That's great. So anyways, Wander, if you don't know, Wander is a technology provider and they own some real estate, but they're shifted to, I think, a more asset light model where they go and get the best homes, like in the world, period. Homes that would have maybe been on Airbnb, but then they operate them almost like a hotel. So you know the sheets are going to be good. You know the Wi-Fi is going to be fast.

You know the soaps are going to be nice. There's like snacks when you arrive. And so it's, and you know that you're not going to, you know, book a place and then 10 minutes before they're like, oh, I can't host you and cancel. It's the Amundiri of couch surfing. It's the Amund Gehry of the vacation rentals. So, so yeah, I've known John for a while and his dad. They're both, they're both fantastic. And the company's great. They have hundreds of properties now. Cool. And yeah, just really, really cool business. So we are definitely going to be staying. and wanders this year. Cool. I think it's a great solution if you're a startup founder

that is wanting to book like a retreat for your team and post up somewhere nice for four days and just get a bunch of work done. Much better, I think, solution than just relying on some Airbnb and you show up

and I've had this happen before where you show up, you get your team on the Wi-Fi and everybody's like, it doesn't work. Like it's devastating. It just destroys productivity. You're good for startup retreats.

If somebody wanted to like do a DIY cage situation? Would that make sense? John, John says a tech bro's pod shoutout will make my month that's the CEO of Wander

well John we did something better we ran an ad go to every technology brother listener go to Wander.com Tell them the technology brother sent you

tell John and Kyle so yeah we're now we're now talking with them in 30 minutes so we got to get the pod tight let's wrap up but yes

if you wind up buying a product from somebody we advertise, just throw a little post on X, a little at the CEO, tell them the Technology Brothers sent you. Don't even worry about coupon codes. Coupon codes, I'm sure we'll do them at some point. They're a little gauche. What you want to be doing is sending a DM to the CEO or tagging them in a public ex post saying

that the technology brother sent you. Yeah. This is the real way to get attribution. All right, so we're going to be talking to them tomorrow now. Let's get into the next bucket pool. Let's do a bucket poll from Eric. He says, when a software engineer, says that's not necessarily true. It means someone just said something incredibly stupid. Yeah,

that's rough. The software engineers, they're polite, but brutal. They can be cold. Well, I mean, it's a very strict discipline, right? A very strict discipline. The facts are the facts. Everything compiles. And if your logic doesn't compile, you probably just said something very stupid. Not too much to say about that, but I'm sure plenty of software engineers have told you that's not necessarily true since non-technical and all. Yeah, yeah. Should you move on to daily drivers?

How in the world of Devon AI, is everyone technical? If I sick an army of Devon AI agents on somebody and say, yeah. I think, I mean, the gradient to be coming up. I would say I'm technically technical. The gradient. It used to be that if you understood Excel learning visual basic, which does a little bit, it's programming language, and it can automate Excel and it works in the background.

It runs scripts, which is very, very helpful. If you ever open up like a really big investment banking model, there'll be a whole bunch of visual basic behind the scenes, buttons you can actually click that do stuff. I built a whole CRM in Excel at one point using BBA. and then from there, you know, you could teach yourself like Python in like a weekend or you could do like a coding boot camp. So like the definition of like what is technical is like a huge gradient from like, okay, I know like. Technical, I was DDoSing my father's website. Yeah.

So it's like that is pretty technical. It's not it's not super technical. It's just like it's enough to understand how software works a little bit. You learn a programming language. You write some scripts. But that gradient is just getting so much smoother. Like like just last night, I needed to pull. together some data and I went in chat chagipti asked it to write a script and then chat chitpt just

throw up like here's the script press this button to just run it so it didn't even need to like install python on this computer on this laptop and like set up an environment and then you get cursor and that's more advanced and then you get devon and that's even more advanced and it's just running continuously in your repo and so the the gradient so I think the big question is like if you're intimidated by the idea of software engineering or code in general like you should probably spend a weekend just having chat GPT explain stuff to you and learn how to write like the most basic Python program because once you once you actually solve a problem even if it's just like I want to scrape some website and pull it into a spreadsheet yeah like I did that with the like like we

wanted to see like every economist article that's ever been written about technologists like that's just a really easy scraping problem it's a code that's kind of like pretty easy to write you can just have an AI help you, but you get to a point where you're like, okay, I achieve the goal. I have used code to do my bidding. Therefore, I can understand that. This is the advice I always give. AI is not going to take your job. A technical person using AI while in a cold blunge is going to take your job.

In a cage. In a cage. It's going to take your job. Let's move on to daily drivers. Yep. Sarah says, good daily driver for defense tech founders. And it's beautiful Mercedes G-Wagon six by six. they need to make more of those

they do they should just they should just kill the regular 550 G63 and just switch over all production to these yeah because the road presence is just on another level I mean they just launched the the G580 with EQ technology have you seen that one it's the electric G wagon they can do a tank turn you don't like it I think those

I think those are going to depreciate incredible rates Incredibly fast and I think it will only make the gas powered more valuable. That said, is Sarah a partner at point 72 yet? Because if not, she should be. I don't know anyone else at point 72, but if I was, is he like in base, is he in the baseball world? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, baseball guy. But yeah, I think if I was building a defense tech company right now, I'd be pitching, you know, Sarah. Well, this is a controversial post. because a lot of defense tech founders were quote tweeting this and saying wrong it's the Toyota highlux yeah or the forward raptor we got to be we should get into the high lux importation business so we should go into some of these areas and make cash offers bring them in on show and display yeah yeah imagine uh yeah i like uh yeah i think uh high luck high luck six by six

Toyota what's the meme where Toyota's like we don't know how all these high luxes ended up in the desert in the Middle East. Like, we don't even know where the money, you know, the money came in in, you know, I mean, you know, there are some, there are a lot of G-wagons that get lifted and people do a four-by-four squared conversion with portal axles. So they are higher up. And I think there's been a six-by-six conversion that someone did, which is insane. The amount of engineering that went into that is like crazy.

But, yeah, the Toyota high-lux six-by-six beats both of these, I think. Yeah. Pull up in that. You're good. Any other recommendations for daily drivers for defense tech founders? What would you go for? I would go for a go get an old NASCAR. That's a good one.

It's quite a bit cheaper than the average Tesla right now. You can go pick one up for 30, 40 grand. Okay. And make it, you know, convert it, get it street legal. And drive that. Slap all of your venture investors logos on the car because they're your sponsors. giving up too much alpha, this is it's going to be my car. Yeah, slap your,

slap your cap table on because those are your sponsors and just hit the roads. Yeah, I mean, we're trying to move on from the fires, but there's still so many posts. We've got to cover one of them. This is real technology,

brother behavior. Trindamir, Mark Merrill, the founder of Riot Games, says, been off the grid for fighting to save my house in neighborhood for days. It burned a house two doors down, two above us on a hill, and two on the other side of us went all around. We are staying vigilant because we are not out of the woods with embers falling ash

and putting out spot fires around and add our neighbors. Got a Starlink up and solar-powered rechargeable battery, which has been a game changer to coordinate and get info. My brother lost his house. Our kids lost their school. And 90% of the families at their school lost their houses. Wow. And the Palisades.

Grateful to all the first responders and everyone working to help support each other and save lives and neighborhoods. reminder to everyone be prepared for emergencies our water food supplies horses and landscape fire hygiene has been critical for us sending love to everyone affected and he posted this photo of him just like covered in soot like just dealing with it and there's like a cyber truck in the background fascinating I mean yeah real real heroic behavior there it does seem that a you know a significant number of people that stayed behind and fought and basically ignored

the evacuation warnings were successful in saving their homes. But, you know, obviously, you know, some even, I'm sure larger amount weren't successful. So it's a miracle. Glad his house made it. And I'm sure it'll be like a end up being a community outpost almost for his neighbors that are as, you know, his neighborhood burned to the ground. And I'm sure he'll open it up to people as they rebuild. So, bravo. Here's another good one from word grammar.

I've been on the show before. Word grammar says in Mario Kart, the racers in place eight through 12 get really good items. First place gets banana peels and blue shells thrown at them. This is how I expect LLM research to work. As time goes on, it will get easier and easier to train new frontier models. A third of this is that more research papers get published as time goes on.

A third of this is that more open source models get released as time goes on. A third of this is that Nvidia chips get faster, better, and easier to program as time goes on. Super interesting. I mean, great analogy. Yeah. I mean, everybody's playing the Chinese LLAR. Yeah, deep, deep sink. I mean, deep seek.

Deep seek. Deep sink it into the ocean. I'm going to put this LLM, tie some weights to it, throw it in the SF Bay, let it sink, let the shark's feet on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't. I think everybody letting them, everybody letting, everybody giving them this, like,

crazy victory laps. Model from two years ago. We got open source. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not crazy. Boo.

Boo. Don't give them. Don't give them. Don't even give them any chats. Let's do, uh, let's do a promote. A post. Uh, I got a promoted post from Jacob Rintamaki. Rintamaki.

Jacob Rintamaki. He says, I'm looking for work. Please reach out. and then he's got this awesome post that I'll cover a little bit. And I would say this is very smart. Instead of throwing up the open-to-work thing on his LinkedIn, he's actually saying what he wants to work on and what's interesting about his point of view. He says, according to my iPhone, I walk for approximately 12.6 miles yesterday,

mostly because I didn't want to pay for non-ZERBs or Ubers in the Bay Area. However, all that walking made me do a lot of thinking. So I'm ready to announce that I am looking for work. this piece includes the first two things I would do have hired at each of the three organizations I'm particularly but not exclusively interested in Doge, Renaissance, Philanthropy, and Future House. And so he just goes on to share quite a lot about his experience experimenting with AI, what he would do at Doge and some of these other organizations. So anyways, this is just one, this is so smart because you don't have to be at these three organizations

to be like this guy clearly has agency, knows what he's interested in. I should reach out to him and, you know, this makes me want to talk to him about rules at technology brothers. I met him in some random group chat and always liked what he was saying. And I think I referred him to Patrick O'Shaughnessy

for like one of those O'SSIV program. And I don't know if that panned out, but then a couple days later, Will Minitis was asking for someone to help him with some project. And I tagged Jacob and was like, hey, you guys should talk. And Will texted me.

Like, where are you finding these boys? Like, how did you find this man? It's like the brothers. Yeah, it's the brothers will. Like, get used to it. This is the most powerful online fraternity in the world. It really is. It's great.

But yeah, I mean, it would be a great pickup for the right organization. So put him to work. Get him in the cage. We look doing the personnel news. Jacob, the only other thing I would say, join the cage, build something. You'll find yourself in the cage and you might find product market fit. Yeah. Or you'll die.

The stakes are high. Let's do a bucket pull. I love this one. James Hawkins says, oh, this is such a low-tam bangor. 36 likes. I love when we find a low-tam banger. Jordan, you've got to pay attention to this, man. This is a good one.

Sorry, sorry, sorry. You got to lock in. The notifications. So, James says, your dream life isn't that expensive. San Francisco apartment, $7,500 per month. Rivian R1S, $1,000 per month. I can think of a lot better cars. Ski home in Aspen, $49,000 a month.

Yacht that's one meter longer than Jeff Bezos's yacht. $30 million a month. 30 million a month? No way. No way. I think it's like a billion dollar yacht, right? Yeah, but still you're not paying $360,000, $360 million a year to rent that yacht. I'm sorry.

Anyway, maybe you're going $10 billion. Who knows? But he says it's the spirit of the post that matters here with the bucket pole. he says 30,057,500 per month. That's your dream life. You just need to get... Let's go. Let's go.

You just need to get one client paying you $30,057,500, and you're there. Ring that gone, baby. Bring that gone. Oh, that's so good. Okay. See, that's the kind of thing. People need motivation. People need something.

Just one client. Yeah, it's not about, oh, you need, you just need 10 clients paying you $8,333 a month, you know, to get one millionaire or just get one that pays you 30. 30. Simple. Exactly. It's not the number, like. Stop making excuses. You don't even need a calculator for that.

The genetic lottery. It exists. Win it. No excuses. Win it. Let's go to another deranged bro idea. Banger from weapon outfitters. I love this account.

I don't know if this is actually true, but hey, if you already own Night Vision goggles, nods, might as well give it a try. I think my baby is more disturbed by the sensation of temperature shift than light, but I'm going to experiment. It's a post from a guy who says,

I have a 13-month-old kid, a baby, and I don't want to turn on the light when I go in and check on him, so I put on my night vision goggles. The dude clearly just says, like, you know, scope for his guy, like night vision goggles.

With night, I have, when you're, when you're 33M size 13, stay at home, 33 year old male, size 13, I don't know why he's saying that. Stay at home dad slash veteran with night vision and a child, you realize by using ICW, you can disturb the child less, thus allowing us to sleep more.

So he'll go in and change the diaper and then it's just pitch black for the baby. baby? I thought that was genius. That's insane. I thought it was genius. More tactical gear in the, in the bedroom. Yeah, I, in the baby's room. I'm inclined. I mean, there's so, so many moments as a parent where it's dark, you want to keep the lights off and you got to do stuff. Oh, diaper change. I do think it'd be, you know, potentially traumatizing for the child to see you fully get it up. But, you know the sound and when it turns out, like in Call it Duty. But maybe just let your kid watch Zero Dark 30 so they get more. familiar with adults and night vision. There are like tactical baby gear companies for like they're like kind of joke gag gifts and it's like a bulletproof vest but it like has room for like diapers and stuff. It's very very cute. Yeah.

I also think like nurseries sometimes like if there's flat walls and there's echo, the babies cry can just be so much louder because it's reverberating. So selling sound panels that are that are that have like images that are appealing to babies. so like a cute photo that's printed onto a sound panel. Exactly. Like nice wallpaper. Nursery sound panels. It looks like a, you know,

a safari park or like drafts and elephants. But it's sound panels so it's dampening the cries. The maps that are 3D. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, anything, you can throw a tapestry on the wall. Yeah, how about some fine art? Fine art. Fine art actually does the same thing.

Oh, yeah, totally. Especially if it's like a nice canvas. Yeah, so throw on a priceless work. I mean, even, it's just a failure of like modern home design that like we no longer use tapestries and floor like the carpets like you should have thick lush carpets tapestries on the wall like you know exposed beams in the ceiling and in what are those called like uh you know it should look like the cysteen chapel when you look up yeah anyway a modern wonder do you want to do a promoted post i'd like to do a promoted post because this 1954 bentley r

type continental fastback sports saloon by h j mulliner is considered one of the most beautiful cars ever produced uh featuring a hand formed aluminum body on a high performance chassis and this thing is just fantastic i mean look at this john um this screams sf daily you could do an engine swap and and throw your you know if you have a a tesla model three right now swap that engine into here and um you know It's going to be a little bit annoying to charge it, but there's more and more of these supercharger stations. And this thing is just fantastic. I mean, I can imagine, imagine hearing that, you know, you picture this. You're driving down the 101 and you, you know, you're in bumper to bumper traffic in this car that presumably is, you know, multiple, you know, millions of dollars.

and you get this push notification that says you know, we're in for the deal, like send over the contract, we'll sign five millionaire our deal and you're like, that just paid for this car.

There you go. So like picture that, visualize that, go buy this, and tell RM Sotheby's that the technology brothers sent you. Fantastic. Let's go to Grimes,

throw in some shade in the timeline from a 20VC clip with the founder of Suno. Founder of Sooner says it's not really enjoyed to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people

don't enjoy the majority of time they spend making music. And Grimes comes with some heat. Says, this guy is a weak fuck boy and wants all of us to be weak too. This POV in the AI community is literal poison and cope. People who want to destroy your dopamine receptors and make you intolerant two challenges, hate humans, and they are legitimately dangerous. Wow. Nuclear bomb going off on the timeline. You hate to see it. You love to see it.

It happens every day. We got to recover it. I see both, I think both points of view are correct in their own ways. I think that it's awesome that a bunch of people are going to make music now that never made music before. When I think about growing up, you know, I had the benefit of parents that were insistent on piano lessons, guitar lessons,

I had to, you know, singing lessons, I had to be making music weekly, daily. I was forced to practice. I went through periods where I didn't like it,

went through periods where I loved it, and that was all I wanted to do. But yeah, I don't remember, I remember as a kid being, you know, thinking to myself, I don't want to practice piano right now,

but that was more so because I wasn't, I just was like seven years old and I wanted to, I don't know like throw rocks at the house or something like that so I think that but it's the same thing I saw other people making the comparison of a marathon runner doesn't go oh I'm so annoyed that I have this blister that's so annoying I wish that I just never had any like adverse situations they're not thinking in that way right so a musician who's like I've trained my whole I had to train for two decades to get this good at violin that's so annoying. I wish I could have gotten here in a day. I really don't think that's how people think. But simultaneously, it's great that there's new tools that will make it simple for people to create beautiful art, right, even though it's definitely machine-oriented. And so this same type of pushback

against DJs and electronic music of you don't have a full orchestra. Why are you, you know, this isn't real music. So I think there will be this separation, a continuing separation of artisanal handcrafted music and then music that sounds very similar that was created by machines. Yeah, there's some DJs that, like, they're EDM, but they have like almost a live band when they perform and everything's like live drumming. There's kind of like the good ending, I think, here looks like there's an app, I think it's called Synthesia that you can run on your laptop above the piano. And it turns, it's a real piano that you're playing, but as you're playing, it moves the notes. down visually. So instead of reading sheet music, you can just see like it's the key to the left. Yeah. And and that makes piano like way easier to like guitar hero. It's like guitar hero.

Yeah. But you're playing the actual instrument, which is cool. So it's like kind of cheating. And then a lot of music production in hip hop and rap specifically is just like almost just assembling other stems. So there's like, you know, there's like these famous beats from like vinyl records that like Kanye will sample and then put that and then it's like he's not really writing that particular melody he's just kind of rearranging it and i can see suno being useful for like blocking out tracks i know people are yeah and and mike's argument would be that soono is going to be a gateway drug for people to fall in love with making music and get addicted to making music and then as they get more into it they will well maybe i should learn this instrument or maybe i should do this live or maybe i should

sing this myself right so presumably if you make it much easier to do something it will introduce more people to it but yeah I mean I don't think I think Jen I think Grimes is also right in that saying oh we should only do things that are easy yeah yeah is yeah it's just the most controversial framing possible on this but but he's clearly trying to piss off yeah traditional yeah we already went through all this with the AI art stuff where it's like yeah the the AI art that actually goes viral or is stuff that's like inspired like the Harry Potter Balenciaga thing where that was, yeah, it was all AI generated,

but the prompt wasn't make something viral. The prompt was clearly from a human thinking about, okay, it's interesting to combine Harry Potter and Balenciaga, these two things on the opposite ends of the spectrum. And then I'm going to do all the puppeteering of this and put it all together and have this song in there. And like, Suno will be a tool in that toolkit in the same way that Content Aware fill is a tool in the Photoshop toolkit

or generative Phil is. I mean, just yesterday I was mapping out that like, that like spec ad that we're working on for the next video and I was using a lot of movie B-roll and then using some some some audio and I was looking for different songs and it was like I was really having to shuffle through all the different songs that we could possibly fit in there and it would have been I probably could have prompted something for like I just need generically dramatic music right here and then I just want higher energy music during this section and I just want to have it paste out a little bit and some of the some of the stock music sites allow you to filter for that stuff but you still have to listen to a lot lot of it and clearly, you know, the good ending is that electronic music has not killed live music. It seems in many ways just as loved and enjoyed as ever. Yeah. Should we go to Sean Frank? He says, do you want more domestic manufacturing? Current consensus is to court multinationals with

tax breaks, tariffs, and tens of billions in funding. I suggest a different plan. What makes China so powerful isn't Foxconn? It's the literal tens of thousands of solo factories making everything from buttons to springs to toys. We should build up, build the small mom and pop factories because they train people, make the parts that make the parts that make the things we buy. One giant automated megafactory is awesome. But if you want 100 good factories, you need about 10,000 shitty ones, barely figuring it out. The chips act is great, but we need a shit act.

Seriously, hire, invent, and train, invest and train, S-H-I-T. 10 billion in zero interest loans. I love the sound of that. To start new factories at 10 million blocks only, start paying back when you get to 10 million revenue. So Sean is goaded in so many ways, not just as an operator running the most profitable wallet company in history, but he just is hilarious.

And his ability to coin is phenomenal. I think he's really leaning into Coogan's law on this one and claiming the shit out. But I got a front row seat to Ridge's operations in the early days. And they developed a really strong relationship with a specific factory that they built up over time and many visits. And I think eventually they just took over all their production capacity. And every consumer product and hardware company today will tell you that everybody goes out and they look at the whole world, where can we make this thing? And they always end up in China because China is half the cost.

and the products and the outputs better and it's more consistent. And yeah, you have to deal with Chinese New Year and longer shipping times. But it's just so much better. And so carried no interest. It's also talking about this as well. Like we need massive.

If we want to take this seriously, we need massive, massive, massive subsidies. And so both these legendary posters are right. And I do, I support the shit act. Well, we were talking about this with the American Toy Company. Just this idea of like, there's a I mean you buy toys for kids and they're all just made in China and they're all these

cheap plastic and they're clearly designed to be used for three months and thrown away and they're they're not something that will be passed down whereas if you look at like your grandparents they have toys that were passed down to your parents probably right it's sad it's emotional and that emotion can drive consumer behavior and so if you start a company that their whole brand is like these toys are made in america they still do all the cool things they entertain they have LEDs and music and all this stuff they're four to five times a cost yeah but they are more expensive it's a luxury good it's more expensive but then when you build I had this I was talking to trade about this like like you know maybe to you know we get

the missile factory after we get like the happy meal factory yeah and it's like yeah let's just let's just to have you know like Hadrian's obviously doing incredibly important stuff right now with like very key defense companies that need products right now and that's important but maybe we also need a happy meal startup that's just like yeah we do it injection molded plastic and we just do it pretty well, and we do it as well as we possibly can in America. And maybe the tariffs will help with that. Maybe the consumer choices will help with that.

But we're dedicated to this for the long term. And over the long term, we think we will be able to get at parity with robotics. That's a request. That's a request for starters, by the way. For sure. American toy company, please somebody build it. I think you could sell items that currently go into a toy store. Look at all the stuff that currently is made $20.

Make those items for $50 to $100 here in America. Make them really, really good. And I'll just tell you, this is more like a. request for dynos because I buy an obscene amount of dinosaur toys and I like buying the ones that are these heavy rubber because I'm like well I'm going to be able to re I'm going to be able to donate this and it'll still be in really good condition I don't want this cheap stuff and and like nine times to ten yeah put an LLM in it I mean nine times a 10 you're so much better off getting a small child like one really amazing toy than like 20 toys yeah that just cause a lot of clutter like the clutter

builds up no matter what with the toys and so like if you came to me and you're like there's this amazing toy that's really popular and it's three grand or something I'd be like hell yeah like that sounds amazing um whereas like instead of it's like oh like you go to the toy store it's like everything's like 20 bucks which is like great because everyone can have toys but like there's definitely the first time in my adult life there was as an adult there gets to a point where all the stuff you want costs five grand and up and uh and so it's great walking into a toy store and being, you know, like, I'm going to buy the whole store.

But at the same time, I'd much rather buy. And you want to. Something that's like an Italian suit, something that you need one of. Yeah, just I want something that's wooden, cool materials. Yeah. Boston Dynamics, like that type of stuff. They're making these like transformer toys that a couple of them went viral.

I actually do want to, I want to get a, I want to get a, somebody make a Boston Dynamics kids toy dogs. because I'd like a dog, but I want to be able to turn it off. I don't want it to poop in the house. But I still want it to be fluffy and loving and conscientious. I think that L-L-L-L-Ms can do that. That's great. Toy dogs that toy dogs for kids,

$500 to $1,000. You can probably charge more because like a dog is pretty expensive. Don't have to feed it. Just got to plug it into the wall. It barks. It develops a relationship with your child, and you never have to take it to the woodshed. And it has an AR-15 inside in case it needs.

to do some home defense. All right, we're, we should just keep going with it. Let's do a bucket pole. Luxury watch guy, first time on the show, but I've been a follow up here for a while. He says, 2025 predictions, Zuck is going to end the Apple Watch. This is not satire. I have had a few big boys from Silicon Valley, DM me that they want to start building collections.

And so I think this is, this is right. Obviously, we have been big on this and we're pushing for the, for everyone in Silicon Valley to start building watch collections. But I don't think it'll be the end of the Apple Watch because it's just they don't make enough FPJorns to satisfy the end.

It's just impossible. Yeah, I just recommend if you're obsessed with your Apple Watch, you got two wrists for a reason. God gave you two wrists, put them to use. Throw the Apple Watch on your ankle. Yeah, that's more of like a longhouse technology. So throw it on the ankle.

You got exposed ankles here, slapping, it's much more of a, you know, you're, no, I mean, if Zuck wanted to really kill the Apple Watch, he would need to launch a competitive product, something. I want, here's what I want. I want the meta watch, and it's just the Reels feed. Yeah. And you can just watch.

Swipe constantly. Swipe all day. There's no other functionality, just constantly content. I mean, the new Orion headset does have a watch. It's not an actual watch. It's just a wristband, but it measures what your hands are doing. that translates into the augmented reality experience. And so you could imagine if they really want people

to wear the glasses all the time and they want people to have the wristband all the time, well, throwing watch functionality out and making it look like a watch, making this look like sunglasses or eyeglasses and making this look like an actual watch is going to be much easier than saying, okay, you still have a watch,

but then you also have this wrist band. It's actually, I really wonder why meta hasn't done a smart watch, at least for the international market that runs on WhatsApp, right? Yeah. You know, when somebody messages you in America on WhatsApp, you're like, really, dude? We're both here.

We're both here. We're both here. Let's jump over to the, you know, the eye message. The I message. Like, we don't have to do this. Yeah. But you'd think that they would have done something in that lane given. Well, they tried. They tried to do a phone.

Chomoth was on the project, apparently. And it didn't go well. Yeah, the Facebook phone. This was back in the back. And Chalmast 95% of the. take that. Chimaud's just like sitting there like, what have we spun this out

as a spec? No. But yeah, the, getting into hardware is really hard, especially if it's an existing platform where there's this entrenched duopoly, getting people's switches really hard,

tricky. Yeah, it would be cool to see like if Zuck took like a sabbatical or like a, you know, a trip to his island in Hawaii and was like,

let me just think of like a cool consumer device instead of like thinking about like what needs to be at the platform to lock in and all that stuff. The thing I've liked about these AI hardware startups is the shots on goal. Totally. And people think about software as it's okay for software to take shots on goal and have misses, right? Think about how willing people are to experiment with software. Yet with hardware, there seems to be this sense of it's super embarrassing if a hardware device flop.

ops like we should only do it if like we're going to really make it the core thing whereas meta is like okay figure out a way to spend 20 million dollars which is a rounding error for meta to make a new they've never done that they spend 10 billion on the yeah yeah like they're spending 10 billion on everything why doesn't duck oh yeah yeah set up a skunk works team skunk works where it's like you know ovi from friend is launching a consumer hardware device for five million dollars yeah so why don't you do a bunch of stuff like that and four and half of that's on the domain right Yeah, exactly. But you can, like, distribute just like, think of it as, you know, it's okay for it to be ephemeral and it's okay to just put stuff out there.

And I want our big, our lovely big American tech companies to just be innovating. Yeah. And just like doing cool stuff. Launch a printer. Launch a printer. We badly need a better printer that can do 10,000 pages a minute. We should maybe do one more and then wrap it up. Yeah.

let's do at this rate we could hit five hours we could do our first five hour show but our children want to yeah let's go to Dennis he says you just got lucky is equivalent to I failed more times than you tried I like that a little bit of just an inspirational quote yeah no it's great I mean there's so much most of the successful entrepreneurs I know have failed more times yeah then the entrepreneurs I know have ever tried right and it the most the worst thing is when somebody who wants to be an entrepreneur tries really hard and fails and just gives up completely and that happens so much so um you just got to take a bunch of shots on goal and that's one of the the honestly the downsides of venture capital is the stakes become so much higher and now it's become easier for

people to raise venture capital and so I feel like the stakes get lower in a sense because No, the stakes are low. 10 million dollars. I get $400K salary on day one. No, but it's more like, it's more like when you raise venture capital, you're, you're taking people's hard-earned money. And then you have to like turn that into, you're trying to turn that into multiple. And you're certainly trying to build a business faster.

The emotional pain and turmoil if you don't do that. Yep, yep. That's real. Is so real. And then, okay, if your company sort of works and you're stuck on that idea, if it doesn't work, you know, maybe you operate for a few years and then whatever. And so it eats up way more time, whereas when you don't raise venture capital, you can just ship, ship, ship, fail, fail.

You're not wasting any resource except your own time and money. And so I think that, I think there would be less capital incineration if more people were just. I would like to add that luck is a skill issue. And if you feel like you're not lucky, you need to. to get your feng shui in order. You need to make sure your desk is in the power position. Make sure something in your life is the Chinese number of wealth. Eight.

Many things in your life. Phone, address. Everything should add up to eight. Business partners. Yes. Exactly. Group chats. Yeah.

So get your feng shui correct. Make sure your desk is in the power position. It's easy to do. Just move the desk. Follow astrology. Yes. Do not incorporate without consulting with the stars first. Yeah.

Make sure it's the right time to get on Stripe Atlas. Yeah. Stripe Atlas should have an astrology. It's like, hey, before you hit submit, you're going to have a better chance if you just wait 12 hours and let it tick over the next day. Jeff, Jeff Weinstein over at Stripe Atlas, please add an astrological incorporation functionality. It just can be devastating if you do it at the wrong day, month, you know, year.