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

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(00:00) - LA Fires Update (12:55) - Rick Caruso Deep Dive (37:37) - Q/A (44:24) - The Timeline

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy is back in the studio. He made it out alive. Half of his city has burned down. Half of my city has burned down. But we are here recording, bringing you the news and the breakdowns. And we're still on the topic of the fire. We're going to do a breakdown on Rick Caruso, who a lot of people have been talking about. But first, we wanted to do a little unboxing of a Starlink I picked up yesterday from Best Buy not a lot of people have heard about this device, but it is really wild

You can get internet almost anywhere in the world. Yeah, and We should just set ours up. Yeah, right hundred bucks and It comes with a big long power cable I got a power brick, too, and I'm very excited to get this set up. I'll definitely be traveling with this because I don't want to get caught lacking without Wi-Fi anywhere. But a very, very cool device.

I'll have to figure out how to put this together, but pretty simple. You just kind of aim it at the sky, and as long as you can see the sky, you have super fast data. So it's interesting. I was actually using satellite messaging on the iPhonehone oh really i was working um i've seen it's interesting so the way that it works is if you just do that so during starting like 48 hours ago i completely

lost cell service power gas etc basically my neighborhood was totally in the dark, so we were trying to figure out what was going on. So, yeah, two nights ago, the fire was really starting to pick up. The wind was still picking up. And so, yeah, I've had pretty good success with the iPhone satellite imagery. I don't know what the tech is actually based on. But if you've never had this happen, basically if you lose all cell coverage,

it'll pop something up that says you want to send messages and you really can't do much. You can't send images, but you can send text-based messages and you just have to get outside and it actually has a pretty interesting... So I think it's on the older satellite network, not the low Earth orbit Starlinks. It's on like OneWeb or OneWeb. OneWeb is the PG thing.

OneWeb is the bigger satellites. So they're big. I think they're geostationary in high Earth orbit. So the delay is crazy. Delay is crazy. So you can never do bandwidth as low. And they give you this little graphic. You actually have to aim your phone in a certain way to try to get the messages out.

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

having access to the internet, if the grid goes down and the, yeah, I actually didn't have one and really, I didn't have, also didn't have power. Yeah. You need the battery. So the current, this just runs off the wall. So you can get a battery pack that will run this for days. So I don't know if you know this, but my house I bought last year was a fire rebuild. It had burned to the ground. No way. Literally to the dirt in 2018. And so my entire neighborhood's pretty savvy around fires. They're sort of used to it.

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

every single home in all of in all of malibu uh to get the gas actually turned back on so we're now looking at probably at least two weeks something like that until and and so no no hot water nobody has gas right now bad day to be a mini bar at a five-star hotel in la yeah yeah exactly um so yeah stayed at stayed at a hotel last night which was which was great until we woke up and their hvac system was pumping the outside air into the house. So I woke up. I have a six, six-month-old with some type of respiratory thing, and it smelled like somebody had been chain-smoking heaters in the room for hours. So anyways, got out of there.

Family's now in Palos Verdes, which has better air quality. Did Augustus Dorico drop by? Yeah. Yeah, yeah augustus it smelled like when we woke up in the room it smelled like augustus rico had had ripped through four packs wow yeah just grinding just grinding just grinding this is not a co-working space but yeah i actually i mean we don't need to go into this now, but I do think that, um, uh, it, it, in, in a world where Rainmaker can deliver rain anywhere, it's going to be extremely valuable. Cause you look at, we just lost a hundred, probably hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage. I don't know what the exact number is yet. Yeah. They're throwing around 55 billion right now, but that's

early estimate, early, early estimate. And by the way, last night was wild too. Everybody was just hyper fixated on the timeline, kind of watching this stuff unfold. And then the sunset fire popped up. And then all these AI generated images of the Hollywood sign. People were starting to share that around that were fake. But there was, I mean, that around that were fake, but there was, um,

I mean, that looked really bad and, and apparently it was, was arson. So anyways, dark times, uh, but the show must go on.

Well, here we are. Nikita is advocating for the, the, the hero. We need the dark night, Rick Caruso. He says,

uh, if you didn't vote, even if you didn't vote for real estate tycoon rick caruso in la's last mayoral election you're basically a moron if you don't do it this time since we're going to have to rebuild the entire city 3k likes and gabby goldberg said they were morons the first time too for what it's worth yeah and then nikita kind of unrelated says i live a block away from karen bass the current mayor of la so yesterday's fire in my canyon was put out in 30 minutes sleeping like a

baby tonight taking shots at the current man but yeah so so i don't know if you remember when the election election night rick and karen bass were totally head-to-head yeah election night yeah it seemed like rick was going to be able to pull it off but then um i was at a fundraiser event for uh nathan hawkman who's the new lada that rick uh was backing and they talked a little bit about the ballot harvesting that the left does in l.a which they have this like ridiculous ground game where they basically walk around. I think it's called fortifying. Yeah, they walk around with ballots that are pre-filled out.

They walk through homeless encampments and say, hey, can you please sign this? And that's fully legal. And so as the day after the election and the following days, Karen just had turned into almost a landslide. So who knows all the details? won't if i had to talk anymore i'd throw on the tinfoil hat but um either way either way when when rick lost it was many people in the community were pretty

devastated because if you go to rick's spaces you look around like if you went if you go to the palisades Village, which is one of his developments, you see groups of children running around by themselves having fun. It's the kind of environment that I grew up in as a kid

in a small town where parents would give their kids five, ten dollars and say, go have a nice evening. It was just a big thing. Go hang out at the mall. But you don't see that in LA at all.

Not at all. Groups of 10-year-olds running around. It just doesn't happen. But it still happens on Rick Caruso properties. Yeah. Yeah, he said that his goal for the Grove is like his imagined avatar is a mother pushing a stroller with a baby should feel

safe at all times yep and the and what that requires is inordinate investment in uh private security they have off-duty LAPD officers who uh actually open carry a sidearm they used to be discreet kind of undercover and Then they changed this to show the gun. They also have facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, a bunch of different technology that's all put together. It's hilarious to contrast.

I was listening to a podcast of him talk about all the technology that they use and how they integrate everything at the Grove to keep it safe. Then, meanwhile, Karen Bass is doing a press junk like a press junket press conference and, and says, you can find more information about the fire at URL. Yeah. And it's like one of the most insane moments. I mean, her, her, you know, she coming back from Ghana, she was not going to have a good time, right? Like she was briefed on the fires on

Monday, decided to stay in Ghana. Really? Yeah. Oh no. Yeah. She was fully briefed on the fires on monday decided to stay in ghana really yeah oh no yeah she was fully briefed i mean we knew so so i knew i knew sunday night i'm so trained now that when the santa ana winds get really intense that fires are coming okay so so we knew our power was going to get shut off sunday they were already telling us your power oh yeah you were texting about getting a generator i remember remember that on Monday. And so everybody knew this was pending. She knew this was pending. She decides to stay in Ghana.

She comes back. Immediately, she's getting off the plane. I don't know if you saw this video. Yeah, I saw this video. It was crazy. I was making a joke about it. But it's fully NPC mode. You know, this reporter's talking to her.

It's like a legitimate reporter. I'm pretty sure it's BBC or something. Yeah, pretending that she's not hearing it or whatever so obviously you know not a great response there she could have showed some amount of empathy saying yeah it's terrible like i'm rushing back happy to be back you know a lot of ways that she could handle that and then and then clearly wasn't even processing what she was reading uh you know we we we do a bit of writing and do a bit of newscasting here when we're reading stuff out i think we would notice if it's if it's at you know go to grok.ai but it says go to and go to url go to url check it out let us know what you think

it's a true ron burgundy moment yeah It's bad. But anyways, yeah. We need a deep dive into Caruso. So everything that Caruso represents is what a lot of people wanted for LA, right? Security, family environments. Yep. Strong. So his properties are some of the best performing from a retail standpoint. Yep.

In the country, like in the top 5%. So he knows how to get people places. Yeah, there's the whole post-COVID mall apocalypse where there's a lot of empty retail chains not at caruso properties yeah and i and i and i you know go to the palisades village multiple times a week it's it's fantastic i bring my family there it's it's a really great environment so a lot of people you know the best evidence that he would have been a great mayor is being at his properties yeah right and so when when when bass was elected it was devastating in the moment she quickly had um she quickly had her home robbed by criminals yeah you said this and uh she had loose guns in her house so they they they the criminals managed to steal guns that were not in safes yeah um so right away that was like a sort

of not a great omen for for her yeah um but i mean that seems kind of cool to just have like guns everywhere in your house like with that safe it's cool to lock up your guns if uh does she have like an indoor firing range is she one of those people where you walk in there's the wall of just all the guns american flags 2a that'd be super yeah just like yeah oh yeah i got an ffl and apparently she has dueling apparently i got the switch on my ak-47 chess piece that's just dueling ar-15 yeah yeah yeah she's getting like the military hardware there you know you get a fully automatic uh m4 it's like i thought that was military only it's like yeah it was yeah till i was it got my my

firearms dealer license and i can get silencers in california now yeah anyways sad dark um i i wish that uh i wish he was doing uh a great job um but uh unfortunately rick was was always my guy um we don't we don't discuss politics on this but he was my guy because he's a phenomenal businessman yes and he has created billions of dollars of value and he has a wonderful watch collection he also has a wonderful watch collection uh yeah let's go but let's get into this he was born in 1959 and uh father uh started a small business was a small business, was a small business owner,

dollar rent-a-car. Yep. Not super small, but it would have started relatively small. So his father started as a small business owner, was an Italian immigrant, which he credits to his work ethic. So he goes to USC,

then he goes to Pepperdine Law uh goes to pepperdine law school graduates becomes a lawyer works at this law firm called finley cumble and in 1987 i believe that that law firm goes bankrupt yeah which i didn't even know was really possible for a law firm because services it's a services business you think you just adjust prices and stuff i don't know how that happened but uh the whole law firm explodes collapses his boss it does go on to use debt pretty well so it's possible that the law firm had levered up in some way and that was the cause of it the only thing we skipped over that i think is relevant his mother was a billboard model in her youth which is cool because we love ads yeah um but it's funny to think about there was just there were billboard models like a model that specifically

would just model for billboards it's like i don't do magazines yeah i work best on a billboard no tv billboards only uh but it makes sense the guy is an absolute stud very handsome you can see um maybe in another life he would have skipped being a lawyer and a billboard real estate developer maybe an instagram guy if he was born in 2005 he would have been a ticker had the broccoli hair and big shilling ag1 yeah um so he quit his uh so he transferred he gets out of this law firm that's collapsing. His boss comes in, kind of puts a check on his table and says, hey, the law firm's going bust.

This is your last check. You better cash this today because it might not clear tomorrow. He has always wanted to do real estate. He said he was doing corporate law, didn't really like it, saw that it wasn't his life's work, and so he started a real real estate development company first deal he does is buying parking lots and he uses his connection with his father at dollar rent-a-car to act as the anchor tenant of these parking lots this is my opinion on uh on the people in life

that that have uh that that have the potential to benefit from nepotism. Yep. I believe it is your duty to to maximum to to maximally utilize that that that advantage relationship, whatever. And so what he did is really smart. Rick wanted to buy buildings. And in real estate, if if if a bank is going to lend against a property, they want to know that there's some type of income stream cash flow associated with that property, right? A business that has no tenant in it is not worth the same as a business that has a 10 year lease or 20 year lease. And so what Rick would do is he would go, he'd find a place he wanted to buy. He would get his dad presumably to write from dollar rent-a-car,

to write an LOI saying, if you buy this property, I will lease it for X number of years. And so then he would take that LOI to the bank and say, look, I have this great tenant, rent me this, help me buy this building. And so that little bit of alpha, he was able to snowball into a $4 billion fortune. So if you have a dad that owns a small rental car business, leverage that into accumulating $4 billion. It really, I mean, it really does like, it's a perfect encapsulation

of what it means to be like a deals guy. Yeah. Because I think too many people think about the deal is like one way. Like I just need the, the, the tenant or I just need the bank. And really it's like, he is creating almost like an arbitrage. Like the bank wants to lend to a parking lot that has a relationship with dollar rent a car.

He's acting as the intermediary there. And I mean, we've seen this with, with the work that we've been doing where once you start getting deals going on both sides of the equation, and you can even view like a startup as this, where it's like, okay, there's a amazing AI software developer who's going to join the team. If you get, you know, a venture fund to lead your seed round and you kind of got to play both sides and then the really good deals guys can get both of those done, match them up. And then the value creation starts from there. And the guy guys just become a beast i mean he's he's amassed

this like insane portfolio in southern california the grove at farmer's market became so interesting enough about the origin he became he's very well known for not selling any of his properties so he's the sole investor in his properties but then then he never sells. He just benefits from the appreciation and the cashflow. But early on, the lots that he would do with his father, he did sell those. So he used that to basically accumulate the seed capital that would allow him to do the bigger development. So he doesn't have like a real estate fund where people are trying to get out in a certain timeline. He's not flipping things. He really is for in it for the long term and you see this with other retail with other uh real estate projects where someone comes in and they pass it on to the

next person and that next person isn't thinking about the long value creation cycle that's going on um and uh yeah he he has this, he has this interesting framework for thinking about like how he creates value at a place like the Grove. So he says that we have customers and then we have guests and the customers are actually the retailers, the Apple store Nordstrom's. And, and, uh, for a long time, an indoor mall was basically, you have two anchor clients, uh, at end, Macy's at one end, Nordstrom's at the other. And then, and then I think they pay nothing. Like you make essentially no margin off of them. And then everyone else in the middle, you hopefully fill in and make money off of them. And he, I think he kind of flipped that around and said, okay, this doesn't make any sense. There's like a much better way to do this. Seeing kind of all the tenants equally as customers, and then really focusing on the guest experience and getting them to invest he's giving them a phenomenal product which is places that the one commonality that uh you see

across his properties is people just really enjoy being at them it's very simple he's creating an environment that's safe that's fun yep that's clean yep it's everything that you want a city to be yep but it's just these sort of micro cities and it's always it's always remarkable when he does it because it's like how did they close down this street it's so hard like but but once you actually enclose that it just becomes this like wonderful oasis to walk around in yeah and it's the it's the it's uh what's that name It's like the type of mixed use dynamism that people don't want you to have. Walkability.

Walkability that people don't want you to have. Caruso figured out mixed use walkability. Yeah, so one thing. He didn't do residential at the Grove and everyone was like, we want to live here. And so now he's been doing residential in the new projects. Yeah, the Palisades Village, I think,

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

he didn't have the clout to attract coveted retailers like bristol farms and barnes and noble and so what he did is he didn't focus on on the the retail side uh the retailer side he went and focused on the public side he he he did everything he possibly could to make the public uh love what he was doing which i think was super important yeah um and we should go through some of his uh tenets of like designing spaces this human centered design focuses on the emotional impact of real world details like height of curbs the crown on streets feeling of open space he says quote our minds catch what's real the more real it is the more organic it is the more comfortable you are in that space. And you really feel that at the Grove when you're

like not tripping over things, even like the manhole covers are like, you know, flush and stuff. So you're not just like all these little like things that just kind of jar you out of it don't happen. It really does feel like Disneyland, Italy. He's very inspired by these places. i love his story about the the groves trolley he uh it was built from the ground up people said why the heck are you putting in a trolley it doesn't go anywhere but its purpose was to bring people here to enrich their lives to give them joy and so kids will say i want to go ride the trolley yeah my son loves smart loves trains yeah he basically was thinking of these as creating

these almost mini Disneyland. Yeah, exactly. Like really a destination. Yeah. And the trolley is a crazy story because that needed, even though it just goes one block, it needed to be licensed as a train. So we had to go through all the train regulations to get it approved. And so he's been someone who's pushed through all this red tape but also can see the other side of like okay maybe we need a more efficient system on the government side to get things done and he joked that uh on a on a number of passengers per mile it is the most productive train in the world

because it just moves dozens of people back and forth one block and it does more than like the manhattan train system it's very very funny yeah so so uh there's a quote in here that says rick is extraordinary at reading the market and the consumer in the area that he's building something so he had started with a property uh that was called lake havenhurst which was a which was a development that went um originally went bankrupt uh for that another developer was working on and he took it over and one of the things that he notoriously did early on is the the residents were so against the development this was an encino one he he started including them in the process of developing the space so he at one point took uh part of the

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

and by making them love what he was doing, he was able to attract the customers, which he considers the retailers, because he's not directly monetizing the guests. Yeah, there's a bunch of stories about him having to do a bunch of deals and build coalitions. In 2011, when he's building the americana at brand he went to nordstrom who i think he already had a relationship with because i i listened to him on the nordstrom podcast which i didn't even know it was a podcast

great show check it out nordy pod or something that's some funny name um but uh he wooed nordstrom away from the rival glendale galleria and will bring the department store to his Americana at Brand shopping center in fall of 2013. And there was this big fight with General Growth, which I think owned the Glendale Galleria. And they sued and they had a ballot measure to block the building of the Americana at Brand. He got it all through. And now he says he's excited to be working with them. And they have come through their difficulties. And the past is the past.

And there's always been this dynamic with the Glendale Galleria and the Americana brand where some companies like the Glendale Galleria is a little bit cheaper. It's an indoor mall. And so some businesses, if they don't have the right margins,'ll move over there and it kind of like flows back and forth interestingly apple actually maintains stores at both because i guess they can just afford that um it's probably like yeah it's interesting his projects all have taken he he made he's made the perfect developments for la which has 300 days a year of sunlight. So why build these fully indoor malls?

Totally. Totally. That's one of the reasons that Palisades Village is so nice is you have the benefits. You have St. Laurent. You have Bottega Veneta. You have all these Lululemon. You have all these nice retailers. But it's set up in a way where you can walk around outdoors and sit on the grass.

And I see it every place. Like, uh, I mean, Rodeo drive is like this, where it is cool. Cause it's like the single lane and you see a lot of cool hypercars, which is honestly awesome. But how, how much cooler would that be if they just shut it, shut down a couple blocks of that and you can just walk across at any moment. Uh, same thing in old town Pasadena. I've been beating the drum of they should shut down

that couple blocks in Colorado and make that the same type of Crusoe-style open walkability. And a lot of cities were experimenting with that during COVID because they need more outdoor dining, so they kind of moved all onto the street and then people realized, maybe we didn't need those extra 10 parking spaces. Maybe we should move a little bit further I think New

York just shut down or a couple years ago shut down Times Square right so you can walk around constantly and just doing a few of those where they're not gonna really throw off the flow of traffic is great or bury the streets if you have the ability to tunnel and then people can still drive exactly like they would but you have a bunch of walkable space above it's so it's so him losing the the last election is so devastating because his body of work is truly he's created what do you want a city to do you want it to be highly enjoyable livable safe a place where commerce can thrive.

And that's what all of his spaces have become. Almost 100% hit rate. And it wasn't enough proof to win the election. I liked him on this Onward Fundrise podcast. They go into more of like the macro side of finance of real estate investing uh and this is from uh earlier list earlier this year they were talking about potential recession in 2024 and how much rates had climbed for them from three percent to six percent and for a lot of businesses up in like the 10, 11, 12, 13%. But he goes back to the surviving the S&L, the savings and loan crisis in 2008.

Crusoe stresses having enough liquidity to take advantage of opportunities when disruption occur, calling it being a bit of a warrior. You've got to get ready for battle. He says he stresses preparedness over reaction. He points out that where I see companies getting in trouble is their reactionary, emphasizing early anticipation and cutting costs quickly in uncertain times. I mean, we certainly saw that with startups when SVV collapsed and the market and the interest rates went wild

and a lot of the VCs pulled back on funding. The companies that cut their burn, like the same day that Yc issued that letter saying hey this is going to be rough they they made it through just fine but i i got an investor update from a company that was like we think we're gonna have to cut our burn i was like it's been a year since the market collapsed like what are you doing and then of course they went bankrupt immediately um disaster uh but he takes calculated risks it's all his own capital uh and so there's a hell of a lot more downside than potential upside.

I don't have investors, he said. I get the freedom to make decisions I think are best. And after this many decades of absolutely killing it, he clearly has good decision-making ability. He talked a little bit about relationship banking, which I thought was pretty interesting. Obviously, although he owns all the equity in his properties, he still needs to work with banks to secure all sorts of different loans. There's construction loans.

Then there's ongoing mortgages on all of the different properties and the buildings as well as, you know, he's going to finance stuff out. So he has more capital to work on other things. You know, it's like a private equity deal. As the business grows, you can take more out and then do the next project. So he stresses building relationship with bankers, but what he was saying was it's kind of frustrating because a lot of the bankers bounce around

from bank to bank, and so it's very hard to, you really have to have strong coverage across an entire banking sector. And then more recently, he mentioned that he was actually, he changed one of his financing strategies and went out to wall street because you can go to a bank for financing or you can do a mortgage

backed security and, and, and take it to wall street. Uh, and, and that just has different cost of capital, different process, but obviously opens up a new like liquidity window for the company.

Uh, so that was exciting. Um, and, and he was talking about. Uh, so that was exciting. Um, and, and he was talking about how he's, it's funny. Somebody was saying like, oh yeah, like, can you explain like, uh, some of the more complex like derivatives and instruments that you might use? Because, um, a big question was like, if you locked your interest rate in, uh, 2022, right. 3%, you were great. and your business was just fantastic um not every bank was offering fixed rates at the time but with derivatives you could actually synthetically lock your interest rate right with uh well that was that's been the challenge for the last couple

years commercial real estate market is most people were using this variable rate debt thinking that interest rates will stay low forever and and then all of your profit goes away in months but yeah they were they were talking about these like arcane financial instruments and and the interviewer was kind of like oh like can you explain some of these and he's like i don't really use them i don't really understand them like i just focus on the guest experience and i think it's like more of a pure play he's more conservative and i i think that makes sense yeah and he's not trying to be a financial engineer financial I'm like, I just focus on the guest experience. And I think it's like more of a pure play. He's more conservative. And I think that makes sense. Yeah, and he's not trying to be a financial engineer. Financial engineer.

Otherwise, I'm sure he would have sold a lot of his projects at different points. And also, it's a little less sexy than like, oh, he's like this genius trader who has all these crazy plans to make money and pull money out of thin air. But if I think about like, how do I want the government run? Like, I don't really want them doing fancy stuff. I want someone conservative. Just, okay, what's the revenue? What are the costs? What's driving value in the city? Let's keep it simple. Let's actually grow this thing. So he talks a little bit about his decision to run for mayor with a successful real estate empire and fulfilling family life. Many questioned why he would step into politics. He explains, it's the city that I love. I believe you're given the ability to help others. You go and do it. His top priorities are

highlighting homelessness, crime, and government corruption as the city's biggest challenges. Homelessness is absolutely fixable. Crime is running rampant, and public service should be about service for others, not for yourself. His leadership approach, he aims to replicate his track record of collaboration results, saying, I want to be a mayor for everybody.

Let's make it a little bit nicer, cleaner, better life for everyone. Yeah, one thing I've always been impressed with, every time you hear this guy talk, whether it was talking to reporters on TV the last 48 hours or at this fundraiser that I saw him at recently. He there's not a single word that's out of place. You can go sit in front of a group of hundreds of people and speak totally off the cuff. And it sounds like he had a had a speechwriter.

So this guy is just a true true true professional um and if i were to you know really one of those uh types of entrepreneurs that if i'm sure if he went into the venture world and went into tech he could have been wildly successful yep um but uh chose to focus on his local community and and play a very specific game and do it at the highest possible level. So next time you're in LA, go support a Caruso property. The Grove became one of the region's top attractions

with about 20 million visitors in the immediate pre-pandemic years, edging out Disneyland. More foot traffic. Yeah, bigger than Disneyland. That's crazy. That's insane. I don't even... It's hard Disneyland that's that's insane easy I don't even it feels like it's hard to believe yeah possible I don't know yeah it's in this LA Times

article for him it's it's just that balance of ridiculous charisma yeah long-term thinking playing his own game right not doing the investor thing not hyper financializing what he was doing yeah and then using early on in his career using the advantages that he had which was which was which was um you know a relationship with his with his father's business so a combination of those all those things this is an incredible man and yeah i remember after the last election it was the the word on the street was that he wasn't interested in running again but i do think there's going to be so much pressure on him now, not pressure,

but just people saying like, please do this. Right. Um, cause I would love to see Los Angeles run by our, our guy, Rick Caruso. So he's also donated a lot of money.

Uh, he has a family foundation. He's donated to loyal high school, Brentwood school, law schools, university of Southern California. You know, we don't typically celebrate giving money away here, but I hope it brought him a lot of happiness, I guess. But he's been recognized by Pepperdine and the Los Angeles Business Journal and Ernst & Young and had a very successful family life with

four children and a wife that he's been married to for 37 years or something. You know, one of the critiques during the election was that he was a fake Democrat. That was basically the number one critique is he was historically a Republican or was independent at some point. And then was during, I guess, you know, whatever. And it's such a good example of how about we don't judge

people at all based on their political party affiliation and just judge them purely on their work and his resume is these incredible developments that people of all political backgrounds love being at yeah he really is like founder mode person generally you can tell he owns 100 of his companies. He never sells. He builds these things, manages them for a very long time, clearly runs through walls to get stuff done.

Yeah. Those things that people think are impossible, closes streets and like really changes the landscape, but winds up creating a, like a great product that he's clearly happy with. And so are the guests and the customers. Yeah. You can tell he's creating the product for himself.

Yeah. Which is awesome. Expressing his taste. Crazy taste. It's great. So hopefully we'll be tracking that. The election is in 2026. Karen Bass is already on the campaign trail.

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

and how big of a deal this is. She has an opportunity to redeem herself. It's just if you're speaking publicly, get the URL right. Yeah. Pretty simple. Please, Instagram video, YouTube video. We want to tour your vendor your case she needs to be going

direct honestly karen bass needs it would be so different if she was just like yeah i can't do anything about the fires but like here are my top five guns from 2024 yeah i recommend the new glock get a get an ar-15 go to arlie they Yeah. You know, one of the few gun stores in Los Angeles. You know, and then get a sniper rifle, too. Yeah. Maybe a shotgun. Get a full loadout. Full loadout.

It should look like a cod lobby. It should look like a cod lobby in the mayor's office. She does have an opportunity to win back a lot of voters by doing that. Yeah. The big 2A voters in Los Angeles. Huge block. It's increasing. It's increasing. But slowly.

I mean, Adam Carolla had that whole take that this is going to flip LA red. Do you watch that video? I think it is totally possible. Yeah, it is a crazy, crazy moment. But we're getting on the edge here. We're getting on the political edge. Stick with business. And it's not our forte.

We like to focus on business, technology, and capital allocation. Let's move into a question that we got from a listener. Ozzy says, Interesting how much coverage the Palisades fire is getting compared to Hurricane Helene. Helene so far was far more devastating. 124 to 250 billion in damages for Helene versus 55 billion for Palisades. 246 deaths for Helene versus at least five for Palisades. 126K homes damaged versus, I'm sure, a few thousand in la uh what are your thoughts he asks

so what do you think about that coverage so helene versus yeah palisades fires i i wasn't actually familiar so he's correct i i i paid far less attention to that yeah oh you don't remember the conspiracy like it was it was like the democrats like caused it or something the republicans yeah i remember I remember the coverage. I just wasn't I wasn't focused on it because because this fire has been in literally in my backyard. Yeah. And many, many, many friends and, you know, business relationships have been affected by it. Yep. The other. So, yeah yeah the damage for helene was devastating south carolina and north carolina both had 50 ish billion dollars worth of damage like ridiculous

amount of damage way more deaths yep it's very dark sad there's still a bunch of people missing um but anytime you have a a disaster strike the epicenter of media and entertainment where it's the highest you know it's the highest density of people with huge audiences in the world totally so obviously there's going to be a lot of coverage on it and then for us again living miles from the epicenter yeah it it obviously is going to be top of mind so i also wonder if there's something to the actual visual nature of this type of disaster. Like with a fire, you can go up in a helicopter and film it. You can't film a hurricane destroying a single house.

It's very, very hard to be out there because you get blown around. It happens every once in a while. And then you can look at the satellite map of it spinning and you're like okay that looks bad but it's very different when you see a drone shot of the palaces it's flattened yeah the fire the fires are fires are growing up in california being through a number of fires it was really nasty in santa barbara during the the wolsey fire. There's been really devastating fires in wine country where I grew up. I think the unpredictability of fires where it doesn't even you could be 10 miles from where wildfires raging and then an ember lands and it starts another one yep there's also quite a lot of um just like poor behavior that springs up where people start um people just start looting houses because people evacuated and and so you can there's

people around the perimeter of these fires it also has this like crazy power law outcome where it's like either your house burns down and you're destroyed or your house is totally fine yeah right whereas like i feel like with the hurricane it's like everyone deals with a little bit of flooding then there's houses that get blown down and destroyed and like and it's more of like a gradient of like yeah every house but it's like all over whereas this it was a lot more of like oh there's a fire over there everyone's got to leave and move and stuff. And it's just like very dramatic. So yesterday, I'm in Western Malibu. The fire really devastated Eastern Malibu and the Palisades. But we were already starting to pack up because we had no power, gas, et cetera.

And then a fire popped up out of nowhere, like half a mile from my house. And so I'm looking at this watch duty app that everybody's using and they're, and it's like, Oh, it's two acres. And now it's five acres. And then I'm getting videos from my neighbors. And I don't know. It's also, it's also, it was one, one thing I would call out is like the, the, you know, Keith, uh, I don't know. Are you buddies with Keith? I've never met him. really really good guy um sort of tech adjacent because he's done some tech investing had a real estate tech company but he mostly is a real estate investor he posted which what i thought was a very fair ask which was hey my house is

about to burn down are there any sort of private firefighting resources that that i can hire um and uh and got you know went mega viral got mega canceled um and uh thought it was like a very fair ask like if you look at the way he phrased the message it wasn't like hey any off-duty firefighters want to come you know so my house instead of someone else's abandon your post it's like private firefighting just like private security is an industry insurance companies leverage private firefighting brigades all the time there was this whole drama a few years ago when there was fires in the hidden hills area and there was a private fire brigade that descended on hidden hills because it's like a billion dollars of property value. They don't want to lose that. Right. So anyways, I just think Keith is a great guy and obviously didn't have any bad

intentions with that and sort of sort of unfortunate that people far away from the action decided to have an opinion when it was a very fair request. It does seem like he killed. And it didn't work, by the way, his house burned to the ground. So, like, yeah. Insane. Bravo to everybody dunking on him. Yeah, he did, just a little, like, comms advice, he did a pretty good job of mitigating the cancellation,

like, the hatred, I think, by... I think he locked his account or, like, deactivated his account. And everyone's like, oh, he deleted his account. But really, like, you can turn it on in a few days and it'll be fine. But what that does is it stops the quote tweets and so anyone who quote tweeted you if you're getting canceled this has happened to me when i talked about how i'm gonna move to alaska and take it over and make it a tech mecca and everyone in alaska said uh they would kill me um i'm not kidding they were they were like dming me pictures

of their guns being like bitch like you wouldn't last a day up here you you californian cali boy like okay respect like this this makes me want to move there more but then there was there was like the right wingers were canceling me accepted but yeah the right wingers were canceling me for like being like a pussy basically and then the and then the left wingers were canceling me for like you know uh colonizing indigenous spaces or something like that and i was like this is too much i just lock the account and then it shuts down all the quote tweets and then everyone just moves on because like they're not getting that like they don't have anything to go off of um material yeah yeah this is very funny but i i think he did that and i think he'll be able to come back hopefully because good poster and there's some good stuff um but okay that's

not important um let's move on to to the timeline hopefully there's some fun tweets we get more on the tech side talk about what's going on outside of the fire which has consumed us for the last two days but hopefully there's more interesting things going on we got a big tech alert this is very exciting Catherine Boyle and Andreessen Horowitz has started following at tech bros welcome brother Boyle she's she'sowitz has started following at Tech Bros Pod. Welcome, brother Boyle. She's engaged with some of our stuff before. I think we probably have covered her tweets, but she created American Dynamism, did she not?

And she talked about how there's a need for an Oscar-style award show in tech. Yeah. And years ago, there was the Crunchies, and there are some hilarious photos from the crunchies put on by tech crunch yeah and they would give you a physical statue and it pulled really big people i mean teal yeah there's a picture of teal with the crunchy and i think it's like a man on the moon type of thing or something or maybe it's like an ape i don't know it's something crazy that's crazy but uh the crunchies they i i remember the moment that they peaked because uh paul graham said on twitter at the time what it was an ape okay yeah wow oh yeah yeah there you go that's kind of cool um we gotta we to buy one of those on eBay or something.

But PG said, we don't need TechCrunch to award startup of the year. It's a useless award because in tech and in business, you have the market constantly telling you how the company is doing. And so with the Oscars, it's like the Oscars don't just say which one made the most money. There's an artistic value there. And so I think it's actually good that with our award show, we focus not just on who's the richest person in tech or like the award for. We focus on size like Josh Kushner, who repeatedly made some of the highest conviction, biggest bets. Yeah. And it's more of a qualitative spectrum of companies yeah there's some element of yeah editorial element exactly you could argue

that gary tan's a bigger size lord because he just funded more companies exactly spring conversation starter yeah you know oh uh you know should moonlight have gotten the award or should have gotten the domain acquisition of La La Land have gotten the domain acquisition of the year? Exactly. Exactly. Like these things are, are a award shows should be more,

if you're doing an award show for tech, you should lean towards something that's a little bit more qualitative, a little bit more artistic, but you won't be doing an award show for tech because we already got that locked down. So don't copy us. Okay. But you can come,

you can come see there. Great. If you wear a tux. Let's go to Andrew McCallop. Been on the show before with some great... Wait, is this the question? Is this... So it's less of a question.

So basically, Andrew has developed this Doge-themed art piece. Okay. Which he's going to sell for... I've seen it in person. $5 million. Okay. It needs to sell for $5 million because andrew needs an f40 okay yeah yeah and so i just wanted to put the word out because andrew is looking for a home for doge finn okay uh because apparently wherever

it's being stored right now uh we would house it here but it's gonna be i think it's a little bit it's huge it's huge and we were on the 10th floor of a building and carrying it up the stairs sounds rough. And I don't know, I think the weight limit is probably too high for the elevator. So he says he's doing a bit of spring cleaning, two things that need to be moved out. Would anyone be interested in a large vacuum chamber? So if you're in the market, hit them up. It weighs about 1,500 pounds, no pumps, no warranty, bring a trailer, please DM me. It's free. Uh, you just have to do. You just have to promise to do something incredibly interesting with it. And then two, Doge Finn needs to find a new home.

If you want the 600-pound magnificence gracing your factory floor, we should talk. I would prefer to keep ownership and do a storage-slash-loan thing, as I need to sell him at Art Basel to pay for my F40. Shout-out to bros pod for making the decision in retrospect with karmack and and muller owning one it's a no-brainer mueller um and he shows uh the vacuum chamber and the doge fin which you should go take a look at it's a wild i mean it's stunning piece chamber has some interest y'all better move i actually so so maybe now that i'm thinking out loud i should honestly put this in my backyard i don't

know if he wants to be outdoors uh you have to cover it all the time and stuff i i don't know how treated it is maybe you could do like some coat or something yeah andrew treat it i'll put it in my backyard i'll give it an ocean view it'd be a great place for doge finn to uh pass the time that's how he sells uh let's do one more than the promoted post. Uh, signal says vibe capital was born out of the realization that traditional diligence is just the polite lie. We tell ourselves after making decisions with our gut,

no pitch decks, no financials, no fake process, just human connection. We invest in founders with ideas that make us feel alive. We're betting that intuition beats spreadsheets and that founders thrive when they're treated as the connoisseurs of culture, not as risks to be mitigated. If the idea makes us smile, shiver, or swear under our breath, we're in. We believe capital is a commodity, but vibes are scarce. And he's quoting a segment from

a book about Andy Bechtolsheim investing in Google. Bechtolsheim ran to his Porsche and returned carrying something. We could discuss a number of issues. Why don't I just write you a check? He said, ebulliently. I can't pronounce that at all. With that, he presented.

Mogged by a word. Mogged by a word. He presented Bryn and Paige with a $100,000 check payable to Google Inc. Bryn and Paige explained that Google hadn't been incorporated yet and didn't have a bank account to deposit the check into. Well, when you do, stick it in there, Bechtel said cheerfully. Then he disappeared in his Porsche without saying what share of Google he imagined he had bought. This is a real alpha because you can still do this. Yeah.

If you know, even if a company hasn't incorporated, usually you want to be investing pre-incorporation. You want to be given that handshake before the company's even been formed. Yep. So you're going to get the best price and the most clout, which is what angel investing is all about. Low entry prices and clout. Yep.

More about the clout than the investment. The funny thing is that... Because by the time you're getting any liquidity, you forgot about the investment. You don't even know what they do anymore. But but but checks are cool because because I've been in situations where I'm like, well, I want to invest. But you haven't set up the company yet. And just write a check.

Yeah. And just get the C Corp name right. And every time I use a check or every time I write a check, you just make it payable to cash. Yeah. I'm like checks are actually a fantastic innovation. every time I use a check or every time I write a check, you can just make it payable to cash. Yeah. I'm like, checks are actually a fantastic innovation. I, I've,

I, I've only written probably sub a hundred checks in my life just because digital payments were really, by the time I was an adult, they were just so widespread. But every time I write it, I'm like, wait,

I can write any number in here and just give it to you and you can just deposit it. That's great. Yeah. No limits or anything. It's great. It's almost as cool as stable coins. Yeah, yeah.

The checks. The funny thing is that I feel like if you did that today with a founder, depending on the founder, some founders would be like, great, $100,000. I'm going to go out and raise a $100 million post seed round and give you 0.1% of the company. Yeah, but then if they have to raise again at a lower valuation, you'd convert in at the lower valuation.

You've got to get that MFN clause in there. Otherwise, you're an idiot. You've got to watch out. Let's do a promoted post. Promoted post. This one from Kyle Boddy, who is quote tweeting another post by a guy named Grant. I put this in there because I wanted to promote those wheels specifically. So Kyle says... This is an ad read kyle says these specific wheels on amazon yeah so we're running

an ad for some hasali store on amazon and these are rubber office uh chair wheels that you can take you presumably take on like a razor scooter yeah so these are razor wheels that you can give your office chair so we don't use we should. So we don't use chairs with wheels on this podcast, but I do have an office chair at home that I know I can see this attachment. I know they'll snap in, so I need to get some of these. But $20, you turn your office chair into a razor scooter. Kyle got nerd sniped by them. The GT3 RS of office chairs.

Yeah. These things are gas. This is the Wysock package. Yeah, this is the y sock on your on your herman miller yeah yeah yeah yeah i've got such a great herman miller it's not that comfortable but it looks amazing well that's what that's what matters i mean you'd put an exhaust on it if it was a car yeah why not put some wheels on some wheels on it slap some wheels on it um um okay let's go to a bucket poll bucket poll um okay you want to do you want to re-explain the bucket yeah yeah okay so so we have so we have you know we react to a lot of a lot of posts from

x on this show we wanted to create some differentiation here and so uh when we see something on the timeline that's a banger it's's from a friend, it's from a brother, maybe a previous brother of the week, someone really important. It's about a really important topic. We put it in this stack. We print it full size. It's a banger. This is from Max Meyer. You know it's going to be good.

It's important. He's setting the discourse. But every once in a while we see posts that are good but from people we don't know. Maybe they're just kind of random timeless we could just react to them whenever we want so we print them on these small four by six cards and these are the bucket pulls we put them in the bucket champagne shuffle them all around champagne bucket we shuffle them all around and we take them out of here randomly use the tongs too these are a little the bangers are a little bit more sorted we you know we know we want to

talk about max's post today, but the bucket pulls are random. And we got this idea from Kill Tony, Tony Hinchcliffe. He, when he runs his comedy show, he brings on his friends every show. They're regulars. They do a minute of standup. And you know that those friends of his are going to be, the regulars are going to deliver. They're going to deliver high quality.

But he also does bucket pulls. He pulls random people from the audience who maybe they've never done start stand up. Maybe it's their first time. Maybe they're, maybe they're terrible. Maybe they bump, maybe they overperform.

Yeah. At the end, he gives them a joke book. If they do variable reward is exactly, exactly. Exactly. So, so on the show going forward,

you'll see, we do a couple bangers. We do a promoted post and we do a bucket pool. And so this is a good one. Let's do this one from Comrade Cisco. It says, new workout goal is to have a body where if I commit a crime, the media posts my shirtless pics and everyone's like, wow. It's a picture of Luigi Mangione. And my goal for this year is to make Luigi Mangione look like the Trump shooter.

Do you see that kid? The really, really skinny dude? Very frail. I'm trying to get so big that everyone's like, Luigi's skinny. Yeah, it is crazy because a lot of people say, oh, all your problems will be solved if you just get super healthy. And clearly, if you're messing with 60 mesoamerican demons yes it doesn't matter well i think that's a pre one shot photo yeah first because if you

look at him now it's not like he's a week out from the bulk he's months out yeah um and also he there's a big question about people are like oh he, he's so hot. He has tons of fans. People are looking at this. They're really upset about healthcare. They're on his side. The public's on his side. Well, that might not matter at all in the courtroom. And there was this whole, like, how much does the court of the way he looks should not matter in the courtroom. It shouldn't at all. And, but people are kind of acting like it will matter. And they did the same thing with SBF. People would be like, why is SBF on X right now in a space talking about how he's innocent?

And it was like, he's trying to win over the public. But like, that didn't matter at all. And so I don't know that, I think like this is obviously just some joke post, but I don't know that it actually works. Like I don't actually think there's any way to sway the public. I think the jurors are going to get in there.

They're not going to care. They're not going to be extremely online. The lawyers will filter for that and voir dire. They'll be like, are you a communist? And are you doing ayahuasca all the time? And are you, do you have, the phrase is hybristophilia. Have you heard of this? No.

Hybristophilia is. You could just make stuff like this up. I'd be like, no. Hybristophilia is sexual attraction to criminals and it's fairly popular yeah so when you hear about oh there's some serial killer that's getting you know 20 letters a week from women across the country who have like fallen in love with him you're like why and and there's actually like a paraphilia where people are like, that's hot, I guess. It's crazy.

There's the same thing with podcasters. There's a very famous podcaster who gets one letter every single day. He hasn't talked about this publicly, obviously, but he gets one letter every single day from the same woman in Europe who just hand writes a letter and puts it in the mail every single day, like a love letter to this guy. And it just goes to the PO box and, and just like two letters a day. We're coming for you. You know who you are. You're listening.

The other thing is that Luigi is short, so fuck him. Anyway, Max Meyer, as we said, banger, he says, we must put a 100,000% tariff on Ozempic and Legos

in order to force the Kingdom of Denmark to give Greenland to the United States. Ozempic and Legos are like 45% of the Danish economy. It would be over for them in 15 seconds. That's hilarious. I mean, Max is a media mogul yep and he has studied the art of the deal clearly yep and it's just trying to feed ideas because he knows that a lot of trump trump administration is very online they're gonna see this stuff and they're gonna be like that's a good idea yeah but um but yeah i i think uh lego and nova nordisk are both fantastic companies did you see

the flag i posted i posted the 54 state who did the photoshop i just did that on my phone i just copied one of the rows that has four stars over and just it looked pretty good right it looked great uh and so the 54 star flag it's still pretty balanced because a lot of people do the one extra star which is hilarious, moon or whatever. And you just say a place. But I was like, we're talking about four places. Let's just see what that looks like. Looks great.

Looks great. Downstairs, there's a 45 star flag that was prior to Alaska, Hawaii, but then a few other states. Looks great as well. Very balanced. And what's hilarious is that someone pretty high up in the trump administration texted me and was like this looks great no way it's wild yeah the the anybody complaining about symmetry issues is not a good reason not to to yeah expand the empire yeah yeah yeah constantly and and the comments on that post were great people were saying let's add mars i think that's

a promoted post this is a promoted post from our friends at the ridge and our friends at meta and the friends at ramp so unless you've been living uh under a rock you know that sean frank run is the number one wallet salesman in the world and he's able to do that by running on ramp uh i thought this was cool deal to ridge spent 100 million dollars on their ramp cards they spent a lot of money on meta ads and inventory and things like that size lords and absolute size lords and um hit it nice um and uh ramp sent him this this deal toy fantastic uh it's crazy to think that there will soon be a one billion dollar club and ridge will eventually get to that that's amazing um they are highly

profitable so you know they're they're not even spending as much as they could yeah but if if ramp really ramps up the deal toys sean might be like i'm gonna spend a little bit more this month i'm gonna spend a little more this month. So they've got the whole savings focus. The average company on ramp saves 5% a year. But when you have deal toys like this, it's going to tempt some CEOs to say, you want to jack it up? Jack up that spend a little bit. That's great.

Some of the new clients we're hearing about ramp signing, they're going to be in the Billion Dollar Club on day one. If we keep hiring creative agencies like we've been doing, we're going to be in the $100 million ramp club soon. For sure. For sure. Should we go to Promoted Post or was that it? That was it.

Okay, let's do one from Vittorio. You know he's been on the show before. He says, this new wave of imperialism is oddly refreshing. It's like I can feel my ancestral blood stirring again. It's time for war, spiritual war. Very pumped up about the Greenland and Canada jokes and all this stuff. Hard to say what actually happens here, but certainly a lot of fun. Also, isn't he like living in Italy or something like that?

I thought he wasn't even in America. I don't know, actually. Yeah, I don't know. But it'd be very funny. Chad, though. Yeah. I would say if, if, uh, not, this is going to kind of not really land, uh, but, um, uh, with the right audience, but anybody that's unemployed right now, that's American, just go to Greenland. It's literally fly there and just post up. I bet there's cheap hotels, hostels, Airbnbs, that kind of things. And just post up like, hopefully this happens. And, you

know, you have the opportunity to be on the ground and really kind of, you know, lead the charge. So D-Day mode. Okay. This is a great one. Buck in SF says, is Stratechery still relevant? And Ben Thompson, the founder of Stratechery, drops a nuclear bomb on him in the form of an entire Stratechery article explaining that, yes, in fact. To be clear, the whole thing is very cordial. It was because Buck has been a fan and kind of, I guess, asked Ben a lot of questions over the years. And so he said, I decided to give you a very earnest answer. And he says, it depends. First off, I'm pretty proud of Stratechery's record over the last over the years. And so he said, I decided to give you a very earnest answer. And he says, it depends. First off, I'm pretty proud of Stratechery's record

over the last couple of years. When it comes to the big companies I traditionally cover, I think I've been pretty sharp, including sketching out their relative risks and strengths in AI, calling out Apple's strategy pre-Apple intelligence, made comprehensive case

that Meta was actually the best positioned. And of course, was basically the only person to strongly defend Meta when they were at their nadir. and he has sources for all of these i've also been on the nvidia case for a long time explaining what their moat is and why it's relevant long before they became the juggernaut they are today i guess i i do regret not forcefully making the case that they were going to go to the moon but i generally think that if you read sir tecari regularly you're pretty well positioned to capitalize on moments like that because I laid the groundwork. And he

goes on and on and on. And it's amazing because I think Stratechery is extremely relevant and I still love reading it. So here's the thing though. So the reason that ads are the best business model for media is because you get the widest possible reach right sure a lot of people don't subscribe to stratechery so they miss all of this really really really high quality content and he has less influence because he's reliant on his readers and he makes his readers fork over their hard-earned dollars yep uh which which works really well for him i think he likes the predictability of just knowing as long as i write good stuff there's revenue there he doesn't have to focus on selling to advertisers um but the same thing happened to joe rogan with spotify you remember joe rogan's

influence fell off a cliff for a few years when he was off youtube and you basically didn't hear about him yeah unless so it went from the trump interview on youtube got 50 million views yeah it's like so you know that you know that so so the the joe rogan deal i was talking to rob mower at huberman about this um co-founder of human lab and he was saying like the the spotify rogan deal like was very good for everybody involved like it just made a lot of sense but you know rogan's happier now that he can just be out freely sharing content generally everywhere so yeah um i'd like to see uh i don't know i it'd be interesting i'd like

to see more people like ben follow the model of i'm gonna release stuff it's gonna be paywall paywalled for a week and then well he does he does do that he does eventually release the main the main articles are free to read. You can subscribe just to those, get those. And then he has podcast clips and segments of the show. So he has a number of podcasts that do one free, one paid. But when you're paid, you get the full subscription. It also has to be like links being killed on X.

He was huge on LinkedIn early on. He would post the link and on twitter as well um and now that twitter doesn't have those like viral like he hasn't figured out how to put his content into like an x native format we need brain rot slop tiktoks of yeah with the subway surfers and then talking yeah the problem is that he just doesn't care about reaching that audience. Yeah, and I think you could argue that his influence is there's a bunch of really large capital allocators that read his coverage and use that to make size Lord investment.

And also executives at big tech companies, for sure. Who knows if Suck is reading everyone, but everyone he talks with is definitely reading it. And that's why, again, the reason to subscribe to him, not only because the writing's very high quality and he's been, he's like David Senra in the way that he has so much depth with these companies and the history of them

that he can just talk forever about them. But now they all text him and call him and give him actual scoops and insights that no other writer has. Yeah. Let's do another Greenland post and Canada post. And then we'll go to a promoted post. J5killer says post a screenshot from 4chan where someone's thinking about why Trump is talking about Canada.

The question is, why does Trump keep joking about Canada? Why does he keep joking about Greenland and the Panama Canal? The answer, for those of you who are not familiar with geopolitics, is shipping. Canada and Greenland, and by extension Denmark, control the Northwest Passage, which due to ice melting is set to become one of the largest shipping routes on Earth. Canada can't defend it against the other claimant, Russia, without U.S. support. America is also going down the path of wanting to further control shipping routes on earth canada can't defend it against the other claimant russia without u.s support america is also going down the path of wanting to further control shipping routes to maintain their hegemony while these come off as jokes now make no mistake these are long-term u.s strategic objectives whether through conquest economic partnership or some means the u.s will

eventually control these routes whether the trump whether under Trump or someone down the line, he is just putting one idea into the atmosphere. Pretty interesting take. I hadn't heard that. I thought I was definitely in like, oh, it's just a joke camp. And when I thought Greenland, I thought skiing or something, you know? Just like, oh, it's cool.

There is a rift in the Trump admin, right? There's some parts that want to absorb Canada. And then there's another part that says, we already got the best Canadian. We got Jeremy Giffon, Giffon and company. We got him already. Why do we need the rest of the country? We have a future billionaire.

He could have gone on to be the richest man in Canada. Now he's going to be one of the richest men in the US. Do we need to go through the trouble of integrating this entirely new country into a state and all this stuff? But so we'll see how that plays out. Jeremy's laughing to the bank.

Yeah. Either way, he wins. As he does. Promoted post. We got a promoted post from the founder of Lava. Lava is the only way to borrow against your Bitcoin. All other loan solutions require you to give up custody. So you end up borrowing against bank coin and lose your bitcoin these custodial solutions have lost 100 billion

dollars in customer funds in just the last few years so what are these companies again there was um what was the one uh there was two there was celsius not the energy drink company yep that offered amazing rates and went under BlockFi, FTX. There were a lot of companies with- Non-custodial way to get some leverage. We love leverage on the show. We love betting on yourself. And we love holding Bitcoin and not selling. And that is not financial advice, but lever up.

Yeah. Let's go to a bucket poll. This one's from Alex Kerr. He says, today I learned that Evan Spiegel has a private 737. Let's go to a bucket poll this one's from alex kerr he says today i learned that evan spiegel has a private 737 let's go action for that he's got the boeing business jet fantastic it turns out that n3e an airliner 737 configured as a private jet is owned by snapchat and evan spiegel the operator is listed as se logistics short for spiegel evan snapchat owns the largest private hangar at van nuys airport wow amazing yeah my only critique

here is that it should be wrapped in yellow i agree because i don't think yellow there's some issue if you want to make your plane black it's way too heavy fine yeah it seems there's even a whole isn't spirits color yellow and they have yeah yeah yeah you your plane black, it's way too heavy. Yellow is probably fine. Yeah, it seems. There's even a whole brand. Isn't spirits color yellow? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You get confused with spirit. It's rough. Evan would not want to get confused with spirit. You don't want to be thought of as the spirit of social networking.

That would be rough. Evan kind of came about too early, right? Because you would always get so much shit for driving supercars around Venice. Fantastic supercars. Are you going to get mad at a young billionaire for enjoying supercars? Enjoy the fruits. Ten years from now, it's going to be completely normal for the average product manager in SF to drive a supercar to work. Yeah, street park it.

Street park it. And so Evan was just too early. I mean, it's still early. But he's still here. He can go in his own arc and be his own person. And there's just so many ways. Spiegel is actually somebody I would like to see step away from Snapchat. It's never going to make any money.

There's a sort of an enrichment scheme for employees, right? And a strong public markets bet for some very online ex-people. Yes. But I'd like to see him leave Snap, start a new foundation model, consumer hardware company, go compete with, try to compete with Avi from friend.com. Sure, sure. Yeah, let's see him like go big. Like I want like a two on two billion on 10 billion seed round. Like that would just be good entertainment.

Yeah. I mean, if I'm going to entertainment with Spiegel, I want him just to lean into the personality, the lifestyle. Let's see your watch collection. Maybe he can just take it in a different direction. Doesn't need to compete on price but if he's got little oh he went a little bit crazier at west west coast customs oh you got the cayenne minivan he's got i got a lifted cayenne six by six yeah what about that he's got the sterato build on an f40 you know you know the f40 you think about that car everyone loves it only has a v8 swap a v12 in there yeah v12 quad

turbo f40 exhaust with the the roof rack f40 sterato there now we're talking some knobby tires on that thing it doesn't it has a manual everyone says the most engaging drive throw an automatic in there get some paddles going it'll be faster yeah let's let's really class it up in there paddle shifting in your f40 just just dig it all out throw a 296 transmission in there exactly just yeah pdk yeah pdk everything on it yep this is the way to do it just really he's like oh nice nice minivan yeah yeah yeah yeah turn the f40 into a minivan f40 minivan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Turn the F40 into a minivan. F40 minivan. Storado. Storado.

The perfect car to get to the snow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you can't really afford an F40 if you can't afford to take it to West Coast Customs, drop another million, converting it to a V12 with off-road tires. And you also, you know that if you do that, Ferrari will sue you, right? Yeah.

And you can't really afford an F40 unless you can fight the lawsuit. The crazy, Ferrari is the only company that sues their customers for just doing non-harmless things. The only company yet. Yeah. The only company yet. We need more of this. We need more aggressive entrepreneurs who are saying, you know what? Yeah, I do sell an AI wearable.

And if you don't like it, I'm going to sue you. If you paint this thing, you put the wrong phone case on your iPhone, lawsuit. We want this thing clean. No cases. Yeah, we should test that. Every man should get sued by Ferrari at one point in their life. Yes. And I think if you listen to this show and you haven't left us a five-star review, expect a lawsuit. My father, father-in-law got in a,

uh, nasty lawsuit with Ferrari once. Sorry for another time. Okay. Let's move on. Um, let's move on. Oh, this is a, this is an interesting personal story. So disgraced propagandist says staying at a formerly world-class hotel in Pasadena and thinking about how horrible the consultant class that that's taken over is everything. Here's a shell of its former self, small things replaced with plastic food, boiled down to lowest bitter,

deep fried items, prices jacked up staff, lazy and confused, best encompassed by the image of the harp player at the famous tea service, squinting at an iPad, scratching out an appalling 60 second harp version not of concertos but of pop slash rap hits the worst part is booking reservation brain rot harp brain rot harp just playing like uh what are those brain rot songs like the the the sigma sigma male theme song like like the the the funk you know funk music it's like those stuff like russian kids in russia will be drifting

to and like those vhs edits it's actually sick music i like it uh i like the sigma yeah the sigma male theme song on a harp that would go hard um the worst part is booking a reservation now impossible without calling centralized booking agency which barely speaks english and has no answers because we're not connected with the property customer service staffs are the worst enemy of the consulting class the massive costs keep them up at night it occurred to me that their next trick will be to turn the lowest on the totem pole the migrant worker gardening and cleaning uh into dual employees, the leaf blower slash customer service role,

a futuristic sort of slave wielding both cleaning implements and a Bluetooth headset at the same time that they'll call something like core team member or full service coordinator. Okay. Perhaps then I'll stop coming. Do you know this hotel? I tried to stay there the last fire. Yeah.

It's the Langham. Yeah. Now it was formerly the Ritz Carlton everyone loved it when it was the Ritz and everyone was very upset my mom was like oh it was so much better when it was the Ritz I didn't understand the context at all because when I went as a kid it was the Ritz

and when I went as a Langham it all looked the same it didn't really matter but on Tuesday when we got evacuated I booked a room there because I was like oh Emily was like we want to get out of the house On Tuesday, when we got evacuated, I booked a room there. Oh, really? Yeah. Because I was like, oh, Emily was like, we want to get out of the house. We got to go somewhere. We're not sure where we're going to go.

I was like, I'll just book a hotel there. Seems great. Booked it on Expedia. It was pretty cheap. They were starting to jack up their prices on the- Price gouging. Nice. Yeah. Fire evac.

Exactly. And so I'm sure the- I don't want to put too much blame on them for the price gouging nice yeah fire back exactly and so i'm sure the i don't want to put too much blame on them for the price gouging i'm sure whatever like e-commerce software they're using to set prices just detects like there's a lot of views on the website let's put it up and 99.9 of the time if pasadena is booking a lot of hotels it's like there's a conference in town or it's the rose bowl or the rose parade or there's something else going on. It's not a natural disaster, but they should have a fail safe that says like, hey, like maybe it's a bad look to be proscribed. Anyway, I book on Expedia. It's only 300 bucks or something. And but then

I'm like, this is a weird thing. I bet a lot of people are thinking about doing this. Let me call them and verify that they have my reservation. I actually got stuck in the central booking thing. And they're like, we don't know if you have a reservation. I did that this morning. I was calling a bunch of hotels. The hotel stayed out last night. H like HVAC system wasn't working. So we told them we were leaving. I started calling hotels and trying to get through to somebody that's actually at the hotel is very hard. Oh, it's really, really hard. Super annoying. So anyways, but my going back to the original post so i have i feel like i'm qualified to have strong opinions on hotel like service and just the general experience because i worked at ritz-carlton yep in college and like i would work 40 hours a week at this hotel while i was in school

and uh and so anyways I've seen the inside working at a Ritz Carlton delivering the actual service. And I think there's a number of issues with hotels today. The thing you can count on legacy hotel brands for is service. Like if you're having an issue on the property, they will typically go above and beyond to try to resolve it. The challenge is the the actual interiors are for the most part falling apart so they're no longer that nice the menus and all the food items are just like cisco slop like it's like no the food's no longer enjoyable to eat at many of these properties which is just tragic because you have these incredible properties and then

terrible food my my business partner at his wedding the day after the night of his wedding he stayed at the langham and walked into his room there was a shattered glass like champagne glass on the ground wine glass and he stepped and cut his foot like super bad and was like can we do something about this and i don't even think they comped him the room it was like very that's crazy uh bad but yeah and then so you have like the, most of our listeners are already Amman-pilled. Yeah, I was going to say we need an Amman in LA. Yeah, yeah.

No, they are putting Amman residences in center of LA. But will that be a hotel too? I don't know if they're going to have a hotel, but I get to live there. That's the best part. But the issues, you have the Ritz-Carlton, you have the Four Seasons, you have St. Regis, you have all these hotels, which are beautiful properties, very expensive properties,

but actually mid-experience. Yep. And then you have the new hotel brands that are... The Caruso in there. Yeah, Caruso would do it but the rosewood yeah the rosewood miramar is pretty nice but again the food still i think slop um and then you have like one hotel the proper hotel these hotels where the interiors like they paid they paid for cool contemporary interior designers but then they're just not actually they don't have like the service culture

typically that you get at these legacy hotels and so the the solution is to basically stay at these like very like boutique hotels like 20 30 rooms that are still nice yep or you spend five thousand dollars a night on them on yeah and that's like that's the state of hotels um have you seen this, uh, hotel booking scam now where you like fake? Yeah. So, so basically the way it works is you go, you Google, this happened to me when I was booking a room at the four seasons. I Google like four seasons, San Francisco, staying up there. And, and um and the first result is like a sponsored post because every post on google's every result is sponsored now and it says like four seasons official booking and the website is fourseasons.guestreservations.com and so you're just like oh this must be like the sass tool that

they're using they got a custom domain on it sure I'll click there. It's not the four seasons. Dude, I was on guestreservations.com today with thinking it was legit. Yeah. No, no, no, no. It's fake. And so what happens is that they get you through the flow and it's a really clean UI. Like it all makes sense. So you're like, oh, this is great. This is easy. They quote you a price that feels about right. And then at the last second, they add like 200 bucks on. And it will be like $400 if you just went to actually the Four Seasons website, 700 on their website. And then they book it and it's non-refundable.

And if you call them, they'll be like, sorry, we can't do anything. And literally all they're doing is they just have someone there who books through Expedia at an even lower rate on your behalf. And so when you show up to the Four Seasons, they're like, yeah, we have you, but we don't have your information for some reason. Like we just have your name down here. We didn't get your email because they didn't put that in because they put in like, you know, some hash like 6k427 at guestreservation.com. And then

they'll forward that to you, clean it all up. So it feels like you booked. And a lot of people don't notice. I was on guestreservations.com today looking at the hotel that I, the second hotel that I booked for family. And I was like, why is this hotel like letting this other company own their customers? It's so weird. And I ended up just calling them because I didn't see the room that I wanted to get or whatever. And, um, but yeah, that makes sense where I thought you were saying scam where they just like take your money, but it's like, no, no, no, no. They do book it. They just mark it up and then they don't let you refund.

And it's this weird thing where, again, I called the four seasons, try to make it look like it's exactly like, exactly. And I called the four seasons because i was like i like like okay like i'm getting screwed for like 300 bucks but at the very least like i and and the reviews if you search like guest reservations reddit it's all just like scam they didn't even book me i got screwed like because of course like the service is terrible um but if you uh so so i called and i'm like, Hey, I, I, I, I messed up and I booked through this scam website. Like, I just want to make sure that I actually have a room when I show up and I'm not just like hunting around for a different hotel. And, and if you call within the first like three hours, they'll say, no, we don't have you yet. And so, but then

I showed up and I called later and they were like, we actually do have you now because they finally put it through. It's just such a mess. It's such a mess. And yeah, I mean, a bunch of different problems. Class action against guest reservations.com. I do think the Four Seasons, I talked to the front desk person, but I was like seven layers from the CEO. It's funny. What can you even do as Four Seasons because it's not illegal to be a travel,

they're basically a travel agency from a legal framework. And they're just arbitraging the Google ad cost of winning that auction and the fees that they can add. So they think, okay, it cost us $20 to acquire this customer. We'll add $100 of fees at the last second. I bet the CEO has a very extravagant explanation for why there's a real high-value market service. Which CEO?

The four-year-old? Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, actually, we're creating efficiency in the market. No, no, no, no. It's a total scam, and they know it. They understand what they're doing. I've seen the inside of these scams before. This is an interesting one. This is not a post. This is not a public post. It's

actually from a private group chat I'm in, but I thought it was interesting based on the fire stuff from a friend saying, I'm going to insist that everyone start picking up tangible skills like lock picking. I'm so sad by what I'm hearing with regards to the fire. But in the event of serious emergencies, you need to know how to commandeer boats, hotwire cars, start motorcycles. These aren't jokes. I learned how to do this a long time ago. You never know. And with kids to take care of, being able to get out matters. Back in the day, we used to hold weekend sessions and teach each other skills all the time. You can download MIT's lockpicking guide and get a set of tools and starters from Amazon, uh, from Amazon and have a Amazon and have a fun weekend together. I always pronounce Amazon like Amazon. Um, but, but I thought that was really cool. And, uh, uh, you know, as bad as these disasters are, they are great. Uh, you know, it's like,

it's like is starting a workout plan on January 1st, kind of ridiculous and cringe, like sure, but better than not having a workout plan and not using that as the start. And I'm sure there's plenty of people that are in great shape now who are like, yeah, actually I did start working out on January 1st, five years ago, and now I'm jacked. And it's the same thing for this. It's like, yeah, maybe the fire was like the thing that made you go buy a gun or buy a star link or you know learn how to lock pick or learn how to hotwire a car but um you know best time to start is now so just go do it yeah i i bought a uh gun for the first time during covid there you go it was just like there's riots out of my outside of my house a lot of crime

you got the meteorite 1911 yeah yeah yeah great choice shark tooth trigger um let's skip i can jump in with a promoted post from john john's got that official x badge and we just wanted to call attention to john he says at 300 followers invest now you'll never be this early and this X badge does numbers on engagement. This guy, this got 2.3 thousand likes. No way. Oh, he must be way above 300 now. So he's probably way over.

But even if he's at a few thousand now. Future brother of the week. Future reply guy potentially. Yeah. So John, great work. Go give him a follow. And if you're, you know, if you're struggling on the follower side go get a random job at x become like the maintenance guy at x that's great get the x badge and run it up to 50k then quit

and suddenly you have an asset now yeah yeah yeah um also just that that meme template of like buy now invest now we're still small like people want to get in on things early and so i i think that works generally that's great and the anime profile picture yeah you know there's gonna be some good content there great uh oh let's do a bucket poll what should we do zeeked up oh i like this one zeek been on the show before but this time he's in the bucket polls uh he says whoever makes this autonomous first has my vote at waymo at zooks and it's a uh 1840s horse and carriage uh looks very opulent very loud opulence yeah this would be a great daily there was a bunch of horse and buggy setups in the alps last week oh cool it's good uh good to see i'm gonna that's great next year

you have to like box out all the tech journalists to get access yeah i mean the lions wait times are crazy it's terrible i'm sure i'm sure um but uh but yeah i think i think you know i'm hearing reports from my neighbors that none of the gas stations around our neighborhood have gas yeah and what the great thing about a horse is if the horse gets tired runs out of gas you you let them feast on your lawn yeah and they're back in action back in action you don't have to worry about all you need is a little water sunlight yeah and you got fuel so one of the this is another reason that equestrianism is is coming back in such a big way it's just rational is it's just rational. Yeah. I do think that there is

a, although this is obviously a joke and a meme, I do think that there's an interesting insight here, which is that design of these autonomous vehicles is going to matter. And we saw this with the difference between the Waymo and the Tesla cyber cab, how they look wildly different. I mean, people were joking that like one looks left wing and one looks right wing. And you could imagine that people want to express themselves. People want different brands. Not everything needs to be perfectly monopolistic.

And so you could see someone coming out with some sort of like opulent robo taxi that's cleaned every single time and very high like what is the black or the cadillac escalade uh escalade v hopefully i just want to call a waymo that has a humanoid robot in the driver's seat yes it has the one ar-15s for arms yeah yeah i got to defend you yeah it's great uh this is a a great throwback post from technology sista says this is one of the first rune tweets i ever saw all-time banger and it's rune in 2021 saying you can either work for a liberal tech company that lifted its name off of a random concept in hinduism or you can work

for a conservative tech company that lifted its name off a random concept in tolkien those are your choices and it's samsara and asana versus Andoril and Palantir. And everyone knows about the LOTR references, but I didn't know about the Hinduism trend on the left-wing tech companies. But it really is true because Dustin at Asana is a big Democratic donor. And obviously Palantir, I mean,

Karp's actually Democrat, but Andoril, Palmer, kind of same thing. And this is actually a... I don't know he's yeah the the analogy breaks down after four companies but it look makes for a good screenshot open ai being the least open ai company is just great naming yeah i couldn't even have planned that yeah there was something about the Anderle name where it was like, I think Peter has a riff on this one. The best one.

It was like Uber was too aggressive of a name, whereas Lyft was like this very nice name. And so that's why the character assassination. Yeah, they had a counter positioning with the pink mustache. Like, oh, I'm just getting a Lyft with a pink mustache. The best name recently is that getting a lift the best name is like super aggressive and so uh that led to like some easy character assassination like we got to go after this hardcore black company like they're

like black and white they're super serious travis was just too cool yeah good name uh in the tolkien uh side of things uh soror sororan sororan yeah home security from yeah i mean this almost seemed like a subtweet of sororan a little bit but this all started with lulu saying if you if you if your startup hasn't launched yet uh it's not too late to make sure it doesn't have yet another tolkien name that name won't make you the next anderil um but i guess uh sarin has launched but um yeah i mean there's there's there's going to be a little bit of like distance where it used to be like Peter is a co-founder if it has a Tolkien name. And then it was like a Founders Fund partner is involved and therefore it has a Tolkien name. And then it became like you went to Peter's Christmas party and so you get to use the Tolkien name. Okay, if anybody wants some alpha, find every possible name in the Tolkien ecosystem

and go buy the.com. The.com. Start bidding, lowballing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because Andoril would have been a pretty, probably, it's like Andoril.com was... $10? Not $10, but probably like five grand.

Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Yeah. It's funny. Well, let's stay on the topic of people who have founded Tolkien based startups. And Delian says, it's crazy that the Boeing astronauts are still stranded in space and no one is talking about it.

And they're going to end up being up there for almost a full nine months longer than I originally intended. Bums in seats. The world has prepared a number of crewed flights in the coming year. NASA's SpaceX Crew 10 mission on the ISS, which will finally bring Butch, Wilmore, and Suni Williams home after a 10-month stay in space, has been delayed to NET March.

Glad they brought enough food. They're probably having Capri Suns at this point and rationing them, but NASAa capri suns which are probably like way worse i would say here's the here's the interesting thing so varda's first mission they took him a little bit of extra time to get the proper licenses to come back yeah and everybody like all the you know dallians like haters were trying to dunk on him for that. Yet there was no humans on board the craft. It was literally just, so where are those same haters now hating on NASA

being like, yo, your crew is stuck in space. It is funny how much of a culture war issue when it first happened, because on like day two of them being stuck, everyone was like, this is embarrassing for Boeing. Like we're hating on Boeing. And a lot of people were like, oh, oh they're not technically stuck they're just doing extra things like it's gonna be fine and like nope it wasn't fine actually like all of the crazy

like irrational like jumping to conclusions in this case was correct yeah 100 yeah uh let's do a promoted post promoted post we haven't talked enough about watches on this episode so we got a promoted post from the luxury watch guy himself this is the watch dealer for uh friends of the pod like uh austin over at morning brew uh he uh uh luxury watch guy has a patek Philippe 5303R, which is a Grand Complications Minute Repeater Rose Gold Skeleton coming in at only $1.3 million. Surprise, Zuck hasn't picked this up yet. But yeah, Evan Spiegel, maybe go for this.

Try to get some new hardware. And what was the rule again on watches? 2% of AUM? 2% of AUM. So you need a $50 million fund to justify that? 60 mil, 70 mil? Yeah. Okay, we know some people we can recommend that to.

Anyways, jump on this quick. And Nicole Wistoff was asking for a recommendation. Nicole, honestly, kind of a perfect watch for Nicole. Get the Grand Complication Minute Repeater. Rose gold with the skeleton. I mean, this is such a good looking watch. It's great. Nicole, go get this watch.

It's a great option for you and sure to turn heads on either coast. And when you're in that meeting and the minute repeater starts chiming the perfect time to the minute. So here's the play for Nicole. That's important. That's a power play. Let's say she spends $1.3 million on this watch, right? Her last one is $50 million. It's $10 million in management fees over 10 years maybe she pulls a little bit of that forward to acquire this but then she goes into a meeting with zuck yeah he's got a family office

yeah you probably raised 500 million dollars just off the conversation this is a great conversation or hey look at what i got in my portfolio this one company maybe you want to buy it that's liquidity yeah it's all going to come back to her yeah Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways, I don't think she can lose buying this watch. And I do think the minute repeater is underrated because of the fact that it makes noise at the end of the meeting. So, Hey, I got to run. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding,

ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, to your watch. You don't have to show it to someone. They're going to hear it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're going to hear it. It speaks for itself. Let's do another bucket poll. Oh, this is a fun one.

Prank for Exits went mega viral, 7 million views, with a video about Juicero. And he says, never forget that this was a Silicon Valley darling with over $120 million raised. And, yeah, the Juicero was destroyed by Ellen Hewitt at Bloomberg, actually. She just wrote a piece about Zinn that I was featured in. And you still got to put that one in the truth. We do. We do. Because there are a lot of things that we're taking out of context. A lot of things that we're taking out of context. But overall, I mean, she does great reporting and, you know, no one loves tech journalists more than we do. So the

downfall of Juicero was quite the Silicon Valley moment in the HBO TV sense. Very entertaining for everyone involved. I do have a good friend who did an SPV into Juicero. Did they get out? Did they secondary out in time?

Knowing him, he probably did, but he's gone on to have a very illustrious career, billions of AUM. That's great. He's doing just fine. Yeah. So. I mean, like the basic thesis.

If anybody wants to, if anybody invested in Juicero and wants to, we would have a guest on to talk about. That'd be fun. Let's break down the investment memo. Yeah. Why is little of these. I mean, it actually wasn't that crazy.

It's like Keurig makes a ton of money. It's this razor blade model subscription. People like juices. So, you know, we're going to do the same thing. Juice was also booming. Everybody was saying you got to get all you should be getting. Yeah. Having multiple juices a day, all this stuff.

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

Maybe. And somebody owns it out there. I mean, they rebooted the Enron IP. Maybe Juicero's next. Yeah, maybe Juicero would do better as a meme coin now. Meme coin or yeah, just simplify it and just make it juices that sell pre-made glass bottles. Have I told you my story about making fresh juice during yc in 2012 is the best

so we had a juicer we were like we need to stay healthy let's start juicing stuff we'd go get produce but it's always really expensive uh so we'd always have to like drink it all because we're like can't let it go to waste this is like the highest value nutrition that we're getting most of the time it's ramen and just like garbage. And so this is when you were living on 16 K a year with four other guys. Yeah, exactly. Uh, and so my business partner and I go over to his uncle's house and they're like, Oh, we know you guys are into juicing and we got some produce from our garden here. Take this stuff and, uh, you can make some juice with it. So you bring it home and it's got some good stuff in there. That meaningfully increased your runway.

Oh yeah. Yeah. It was meaningful at the time. We were stoked. Two days. So we start throwing it all in and we started juicing everything. And we're like, okay,

carrots, this. And we're like, what are these red things? We put them in. We're like, okay, I guess those radishes.

Spicy. And we didn't realize that like it completely tainted like all of the juice. It was just the spiciest thing. But we were like, we can't let it go to waste. So we just had to drink this radish juice for two days. It was miserable.

Then we had to clean it all. It was disgusting. It was a mess. So long, Juicero. Yeah, yeah. I mean, Juicero made a lot of sense. I like this one by Armand Domoluski. He says, the polymarket on Will the Palisades Fire be contained by Friday?

It's down at like 1%. It's apparently just impossible to do. And so he's suggesting that somebody makes a movie about a team of degenerate gamblers who single-handedly contain a massive fire in order to win a huge score on polymarket. And I mean, the volume is 22K. It's not exactly going to be a score but it's it could be funny in a in a uh somebody doesn't check the volume hires the most insane private they're like oh the french guy bet 40 million like if we just spend 5 million on the private fire brigade and

ship them in from the east coast and then the 22 000 if you if you poured 20 if you poured 20k into that market it'd be 50 50 if you poured 20k into that market, it'd be 50 50. If you poured 100k, you'd be at 90 percent immediately. You could totally swing that market. The interesting thing is a friend of mine sent me this that post just the poly market was like, this is so dystopian. And I was like, I don't know. I think it's actually still valuable to know, okay, I shouldn't expect the fire to be put out. And there's this whole thing about like, okay, well, does this incentivize people to light fires? I actually got value out of it. I've been planning my week. Yeah. Based on like, don't go, don't plan on going back before Friday. Yeah. I don't want to go home. It's not going to be contained. Um, so I, I don't know, it seemed like it was a net good. And in this case, like, yeah, you could say that there's, you could win 1% of your money by keeping the fire going, which is illegal.

Or you could win 100x your money by putting it out. And so it's actually like the good ending here, potentially, if there was like this team of degenerate gamblers. I only think it's sad for some of that $22,000 of people with crazy gambling addictions that are just saying. Should we go to Paul Graham? He posted his office reveal. He says, my flight was delayed, so I cleaned up my office. And he's got some wonderful bookshelves, desk right in the center. The problem, of course, is that he's not in the power position.

This is a feng shui disaster. We posted about this. problem of course is that he's not in the power position this is a feng shui disaster we posted about this yeah we compared that having success in business in this room is the equivalent to making it to the nba with no legs yeah it's incredible that he's been able to have the career that he's had it just shows like pg in the power position he really is a one-on-one uh fighting with one arm tied behind his back this entire time. And if we really knew the full layout of the house, we could understand more about whether or not this applies the principles of feng shui correctly. But I can tell you right now, feng shui is very important. It's very real.

And very rarely do I meet really successful people who do not have their desks in the power position. This is kind of like feng shui 101. Basically you want to have your desk facing the door. And so the opportunities can come to you and that energy can come to you and you're kind of ready to receive it. You don't want your back to windows. The feng shui reason is so that monkeys and ninjas can come break in through the windows and just, you know, take you out. But a lot of these, a lot of these ideas, there's other things like you shouldn't have your desk right next to an open bathroom. And it's like the negative energy from the bathroom will throw you off. But a lot of these feng shui things, they sound like kooky, like, you know, astrology, but they actually have like very reasonable scientific, you know, explanations. If you think about it, like, yeah, why do you want your, why don't, why don't you

want your back to the door where people come in your office? Well, it's because people are going to walk by and see what's on your monitor. And you're going to be like, am I messing around on Twitter? Does that look weird? As opposed to if you're in the flip system, someone comes in and you say hi. You can have X open on your monitor and your phone. It looks like you're doing important business. Yeah, and it's the same thing with the windows.

After I bought my house, I hired a Feng shui consultant consultant david cho he's based here in la and he taught me a lot about my house and how to make it nicer but you don't even have to believe in feng shui just look at how you know if you're a skeptic go around your house and there'll be areas of your home that you completely ignore that are perfectly good areas, like a living room or something like that, that you just never go in because they're the feng shui is off. So you intuitively don't feel like you just don't feel like spending any time there. Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, you can abstract it into just like you walk into a cluttered house that has a lot of hoarding going on. That's bad vibe. You're not going to be productive there. You're in a really clean,ing going on that's bad vibe you're not going to be productive there you're

in a really clean beautiful space where everything's laid out reasonably and you're not bumping into things you're not stubbing your toes like all these things add up to just a more pleasant and happy life and you can explain it through ancient chinese wisdom or just like logic and reason and both are equally valid but the end result is that yes you should in fact follow the principles of feng shui yep promoted post promoted posts caught me off guard here uh we got a promoted post from augustus dorico he says apply to work as a forward deployed engineer at rainmaker.com slash careers and he posted a picture of their truck stuck in the mud. So if you didn't see, Augustus had a little episode last week where he and his team got stuck in the mud, but they made it out.

And yeah, I think this is a super important company. We've been over the last 48 hours, 72 hours, we've been at the mercy of Mother Nature. Augustus is trying to rainmaker. I'm lucky to be an investor. Wasn't he the emerging poster of the year as well? He was. Award-winning poster and cigarette smoker. Runner-up for Obscure Hobbyist of the Year.

And, yeah, I mean, the team works really hard. They're doing something important. And yeah, every now and then I'll see a Rainmaker hater online and I'm just like, pick a better hobby. His company is very cool. And I guess this is very cool. And I don't think they'll be doing as many Gundo bonfires anymore. Sort of poor taste to light things on fire.

But cool opportunity. go check it out let's go to a bucket poll we got ten dollar danny here and he says bro you're fine you just need an impossible sequence of events to play out in perfect order against all odds and you'll be fine 200k likesanger. That is the mentality that you should be bringing in to the rest of your Thursday. By the time this episode gets up, you may only have a few hours left. The genetic lottery. It's real. Win it. No excuses.

No excuses. Do we got to close out? I think we're getting there. Okay. Let's do a couple more. Do a couple more. Chris, spare a video. Guys, if you couldn't tell, John is deeply, deeply addicted to podcasting. Oh, yeah.

We got to keep it going. He's like, oh, I got to leave it one. I got a lot of going on at home. It's 110 now. It's 110. The guy's sitting over there scratching his wrist. This is interesting, though. We got to cover this. Chris says, Bridger Aerospace owns six super scoopers,

including the one you saw on your timeline today. These are the planes that put out the fires. It's a public company. The ticker is BAER, Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings. And just today, they're up 10%. 11.6 to be exact. There we go.

That was cool. I love when something crazy- Where was Shkreli to tell people to go long bridge or airspace? It's one of my favorite like autismo hobbies is when something crazy happens, you go and you deep dive like the businesses and the corporations that are behind.

Like Caruso, like when else would I really go and understand his full career? I'm really glad I understand it now because he actually is a fascinating business model. He's not like other real estate developers and it is really interesting. And I learned a lot from the founder man and it's the same thing. I would love to know,

you know, who's the founder of Bridger aerospace. What's their stock trading at? How does the business work? How many of these things that they own, do they make them? Who makes them? I want to know everything about this.

Uh, you know, AI can help with this stuff, but you got to know what questions to ask. Yeah. And, uh, yeah, it's fun. And that's part of why we do the show. Let's go to Palmer Lucky. I love this post. He says, after spending a few days at CES 2025, it is clear that this vibe shift is real. Everyone wants to help our military. Everyone wants to build. Nobody is afraid. Fantastic vibe shift. And I liked the follow-up here because someone was like,

oh, like they're Johnny come lately. It's like, they're just joining now when it's trendy. There's no political risk. There's no career risk to saying, yes, I support the military. And it's so important. And he says, yeah, this is exactly what Palmer replied. He said, we should have an open tent for them. It's fine. Like, let's just forget about that. I'm not going to go and pull the receipts from, oh, you weren't on board five years ago, 10 years ago. And I was thinking about it. Like when Anderle launched, I thought the company was cool. I liked Palmer. And when Palmer got fired from Facebook, I was like, this is very anti-democratic and I'm not into it, but like, I wasn't out there like blogging about

it or posting about it. Like, and it's not that I was like necessarily afraid to espouse that view. It's like, I didn't really have a platform back then um but uh ultimately like all that matters is like the end of the road like get everyone on the right team for the right reasons and it doesn't matter if it requires a vibe shift and you see this all over the place you know credit to palmer the andral seed round obviously they had a ridiculously stacked team, and it was a – you know, Founders Fund was involved. But the Anderle seed round was done at, like, 97 posts or something like that. Talk about a mango. Talk about an absolute mango seed round.

And that was at a time that there was a very, very, very, very small group of people in Silicon Valley that even thought the category was investable at all yeah to be able to pull off around like that i know a big uh a big hedge fund that passed because of price mistake yikes um that's great let's do this one maybe another promoted post esther crawford former ex-employee, former Twitter employee, says, not enough people know that the person behind Community Notes is Kay Coleman. It launched in January 2021 under the name Bird Watch. His product vision withstood the test of three CEOs, Jack Parag and Elon, and is expanding to Meta's massive user base. Absolutely legendary product sense. That is crazy. Like the, it seems so obvious the community notes feature, but it really is this, it is an interesting, I am, I am, and I enjoy it. I love, watch out brothers.

I'll put somebody in the truth zone. You'll put two seconds, anybody in the truth zone because the truth for you is paramount. And it is crazy. Like there are so many posts that have community notes on them constantly. Like almost every single one of Elon's posts has have community notes on them. Constantly. Almost every single one of Elon's posts has a community note on it and people are battling it out. But it always surfaces extra information, extra context. Really, Elon's hyper-targeted?

Oh yeah, Elon's not, he's not out of the woods. I haven't seen a community note on Elon. For sure, it happens all the time. A lot of times he'll quote tweet something that's a little edgy or conspiratorial. It'll have a community note. And then Elon's post will have a community note too

and you just see two of these. But also, as someone who's in the program program i see more community notes than the average person because i see them as soon as one person for their purposes it before one wins in the battle of ideas the free marketplace um you can see okay there's four different people and then there'll also be people saying nnn like no note needed and they'll put like why they don't think it's a note like it's obvious satire we don't need a note or somebody else will say actually we do need a note we need to link to this wikipedia article or this this wall street journal article um it's a really cool system and then you can get in there write stuff upvote stuff um and and see stuff before it goes out and then um interestingly like they're really good with the push notifications.

Hey, you like the post? And now it has Community Note. We're updating you. Just really, really great system. And it's not censorship. It's just adding to the conversation, which I really, really like. So I can still see all the crazy conspiracy theories.

Yeah, because usually once a post goes viral, people will correct it in the comments. They may not get any attention. No way. Yeah. But you can yeah well um this is half a promoted post but we're going to be tracking this uh we're now i guess six days out until varda's second mission delian is announcing bard is going to space again we're very excited for this we'll be covering it we'll be live the day it happens. And you'll certainly hear about it here on the show.

And this time they're launching from Vandenberg, but they're landing down under in Australia. Very exciting. Very cool. Huge progress for that company. I'm very excited to see it. So congrats to Delian and the team at Varda. Good luck.

Bad week to be a Delian hater. Bad week to be a Delian hater. It's been a bad few years. I mean, some of the dunks are funny. There was this one where he posted a picture of the new factory floor, and it was just empty because it's a new factory. And somebody was like, a lot of space in the space factory. And I was like, okay, that's kind of funny.

But it's like, of course they filled it in. They filled it up so much that Andrew has to move out Dogevin. He doesn't have room for his old vacuum chamber. But now it's going in my course they filled it in. They filled it up so much that Andrew has to move out Dogefin. He doesn't have room for his old vacuum chamber. But now it's going in my backyard. Yeah, exactly. So it's all full cycle. And they've been growing a bunch. They hired a ton of people.

I think Delian said they hired more people in the last two weeks than they did in the first eight months of the company, something like that. So exciting. Love getting stuff to space. We'll definitely be sending some watches. We're going to send podcasting equipment and tech philippes to so that we're it's ready for us when we when we get there just arrive put on the watch repeater and it'll just be chiming yeah we need with a watch winder

sound with a watch winder so it's wound the entire time no sound so maybe maybe just like a chronograph yeah maybe more basic yeah. Yeah, something good. Got to keep the time. Speaking of keeping the time, what do we got there in that promoted post? We got the last promoted post of the day, a gorgeous Patek Philippe reference five seven five two seven zero P with a pink dial available on wind vintage dot com. Eric Wind is a fantastic collector and dealer. And you can go check out this watch i mean this thing makes me emotional like i'm gonna tear up looking at it and it's just a very good looking watch chronograph too yeah fantastic you were just mentioning this could be it's the daily driver that could be your new daily i want to keep track of how long the show's been

going you have basically i think i need a chronograph i can't basically run the show without basically have three hours yeah to buy this watch before the brothers are going to be notified about it and so it's less now we're getting this thing up in 30 minutes after call call your wife yeah sorry canceling the promoted post we bought it canceling the family event yeah later yeah well jordy texted me last night he was like you should get on bezel and impulse by uh patek philippe and tell your wife that uh it was an emotional reaction it was emotional reaction like you're just really stressed out about the fires and like needed an outlet yeah and i encourage anyone who's uh suffering with a natural disaster to you know treat yourself yeah treat yourself a little treat yeah i mean you should be able to put a lot of your net worth

as a percentage on your wrist and get out of Dodge. Yeah. And you should also have a car that goes 200 miles an hour in case the fires are traveling. You saw people posting, oh, think about how much Bitcoin just got taken off the map because everybody in the Palisades had their ledgers. I don't buy it at all.

I think that people that live in the palisades that are not like they're crypto like normies they're keeping their bitcoin in et like etf for sure maybe coinbase maybe coin maybe self-custody wallet for one percent of them but even those ledgers yeah it's your somebody was saying oh yeah they have their their um ledgers in the walls they they they used wallpaper and they're absolutely not like if anything if if you know i i was packing up in a relative hurry and the handful of things that were small i could bring and just brought them and like watches are not going up in flames there were for sure supercars that went up in flames you know probably if it's a palisades it's one of one porsches and stuff like that um and so those have been erased from the market

some kith m4 comps yeah a lot of kith m4 comps um but uh i don't know about ledger wallets i don't think it was a um michael sailor we lost a lot of good g wagons out of there yeah it's rough it's funny that the palisades village every other car in the parking lot is a g wagon so if you want to stand out, don't get a G-Wagon. Unless it's a convertible or a 6x6. Yeah. Or a 4x4. Then it wouldn't fit in the parking garage. That's a big issue of LA. There still are parking garages that don't fit G-Wagons.

Yeah. Well, you get the 6x6 and then you get it lowered. A lowered 6x6. Yeah. With an F40 engine. Yeah. All right. Yeah, just swap all your engines all throughout your cars take the take the v8 from the f40 put it in the six by six by six cars swap all the equipments and all the transmissions put exhaust on all of them why did that yeah yeah stanced under lighting for sure your sf90 wheels yeah on your you already lost 300k on the sf90

you might as well you might as well stance it and get some under lighting some led like we were laughing about that i was at f1 in miami and we were laughing about like so like all the different brands like the mercedes team before the race they do uh like a parade and like it'll be like lewis hamilton in like some beautiful like gullwing you know slr i forget what the car is called but like you know some 60s car and then the ferraris come out and they're like these amazing like one of the gtb is the the the really expensive one they're all riding these like really heritage things we were like well what's red bull gonna do like they don't they don't have like a heritage car we're like they should just show up in in like stance jdms red bull honda

exactly yeah yeah s2000 wrapped like with the wing on tokyo drift mode wing with the wing it'd be fantastic under just max verstappen S2000, just drifting. We should actually get one of those and then take it up in the canyons. Yeah, it'd be great. Fantastic. Well, let's close with this bucket poll, our last bucket poll. We're out of bucket polls. We've got to print some more for tomorrow. Last bucket poll is from Grant.

And Grant says, this is a low-tan banger. Already follows us. Thank you, Grant. 32 likes. Says, picture of rick rubin and says the way that i speak to the ai has proven profitable to shareholders and then timothy blumberg says jfc this is an underrated post i respect it went out on christmas or two days before uh great post i love rick rubin i like i like that i like that screenshot too yeah wait lucy

advertises on on so rick rubin is a nicotine salesman yeah well he he reached out to us he like likes the brand amazing it's amazing yeah that's that's a cooler co-sign to me than rogan i love rogan yeah but yeah it was a very cool moment for the company, for sure. It was awesome. He's like, I have no technical abilities. I just consume high volumes of yerba mate and nicotine. Yeah. Yeah. He just kind of fucks with us. I just talk to the AI.

Yeah. Yeah. And so we were like, yeah, we're having a sport and run ads and stuff. And yeah, it's always great when he has. I mean, he's he's become a great podcaster has great great guests always great conversations the if you're looking for an episode to listen to uh the of the rick rubin podcast i recommend it's called tetragrammaton you can find it on all your podcast players i recommend the travis barker episode interesting crazy talks about the dude got in plane crashes like all the blink-182 stuff the breakup of the band and stuff,

where everyone went. It's a, it's a fantastic episode. And obviously they, they, they like really, really mind meld because they're both in music and creatives and stuff. And,

uh, you know, I, my experience with Blink-182 has not been listening to a lot of like high brow interviews of them. It's like listening to the songs and the songs are kind of just like, you know, high school party mosh pit songs to me.

But there's this whole other side of this like brilliant drummer who's done so many different things and had a wonderful career. And it's always fun when you go and see the other side. One of the other great music interviews that I listened to was the lead singer of Slipknot. I think his name's Cody something was on Larry King. And it's this fascinating dive into, he's like completely, he's insane when he's on stage, right? Slipknot's like the most hardcore metal band with like the faces and the masks and stuff. Corey Taylor. Yeah. And, and then Larry King is like buttoned up in this suit. That's like, this like one-on-one interview. And Corey just has King is like buttoned up in the suit. This like this like one on one interview.

And Corey just has this like very thoughtful analysis of like the politics of his music and the fans. And are the fans crazy or deranged? Like, why do they even need this outlet? He's from Iowa. There's been a lot of displacement of jobs and a lot of a lot of hollowed out communities. And like why this insane music from Slipknot resonates with them. And it's just a fascinating watch. So recommend that one too.

Anyway, we got to go. We got to check on the houses. They're probably all burned down by now, but we will be podcasting tomorrow regardless. Whatever you're doing, go sign up for Ramp unless you're already signed up for Ramp, which most of our listeners are smart. If you're already signed up, pitch R most of our listeners are if you're already

signed up smart pitch ramp to another company yeah friend's company text your group chat say hey you guys are stupid if you're not on ramp yeah next time you go do a dinner text your group chats and say listen to technology brothers yeah rate them five stars you can always revise the rating after you listen if if you disagree with your initial judgment yeah but start with five yeah and then pair it back yeah if you go to a business dinner your when you pay when you split the check it should look like the american psycho scene but only ramp cards and if someone doesn't have one you gotta call them out call them out call them out hold them embarrassing it's called the accountability folks call the accountability that's the show we'll see you tomorrow thank you for watching goodbye