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

Episode Date: January 16, 2025

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John, who was the doctor that you were going to for calf implants? Oh, we're live. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We're still loosely on the topic of the fires, but today we're flipping to a little bit more of an optimistic frame. We're going to take you through the rebuilding process. Who's going to make money off of this disaster? There's always a lot of money changing hands,

whether it's through insurance, private companies rebuilding, all sorts of different things that are going to happen. So we're going to take you through a market map of what companies are going to be built. But yeah, we're going to try to get into there. There's people that there's people that are taking advantage of the situation, but there's also a bunch of good people. Yeah. And there's also a lot of chaos. So yeah, excited to dive in here uh but we'll kick it off uh with some coverage by mike solana mike solana yeah journalist of the year journalist 2024 journalist of the year uh so mike solana writes in pirate wires uh a piece called wildfire uh he's he does a very interesting thing in this piece he he kind of connects the wildfires to the mark z Zuckerberg announcement about the removal of fact checkers and the institution of community notes.

It was pretty interesting, but it's a great overview of kind of where the chaos stands culturally. Mike always does a great job of blending technology and politics together in a really cool way. So I'll just read through some of this. Last Wednesday, America woke up to footage of Los Angeles once Los Angeles is once idyllic Pacific Palisades and black and smoldering ruins. As the city began to grapple with the worst fire in its history, almost immediately,

the remaining vestiges of our de facto state press lifted their hands to the sky in despair and blamed global warming as also not just the worst fire in la history it's the worst fire in american history from the lens of economic damage yeah i wonder if it's going to be the worst fire in human history yeah if you measure it that way yeah it's it's it's up there it's massive um We are recording in a different city because of this. We've both been loosely displaced. A fire could rip through two or three Western European countries and not cause the same amount of economic damage

as one neighborhood of LA. Yeah, that's true. And so the Democratic politicians echoed the charge and demanded action decarbonizing our entire planet from Donald Trump, who would not be president for another two weeks. But on X, there was no hiding from the truth, and there will be no forgetting what we saw. L.A. was a portrait of madness as hundreds of thousands of people evacuated the city while suspected arsonists shuffled through the haunted hills and empty streets, spreading fire and roving

gangs of looters picked apart abandoned homes. From the first deadly blaze, questions from the front lines quickly rocketed back to social media and spread. And he lists out all of these great questions that people were asking, some conspiracy theories and some things that were proven true.

And it's very, very interesting because it happened so fast. I didn't remember all of these. We talked about a few of these, but why were the fire hydrants running dry? Something that's been really hotly debated. Why did the LA Water Chief, Janice Quinonez,

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

well run, you know, well run, you know, sort of system. Yeah. The priority should be like your job. Yeah.

Other stuff. Also, also unbelievable comp for a public servant, you know? Um, I mean, we love big comp packages here. Should we ring the size gong for her?

750K. I'm not going to really give it too much you know just but not bad it's not bad for a day's work doing apparently nothing um yeah the next question is why was la mayor karen bass at a presidential inauguration in ghana um and then actually why was the mayor of la yeah i think on a diplomatic mission to Africa at all? The Ghana thing is interesting. I think so. A lot of this got kind of blown over a little bit. But Malibu had bad fires less than a month ago.

Yeah. And the town was really damaged. There was if you drive through Malibu today, you would think that the fires had really gotten into the sort of central area of Malibu, but it was actually the last fire, which was in December and same exact thing. High wind warning fires started up almost immediately in that situation, the fire fighting teams were just able to be a lot more effective and save a lot of structures. So it wasn't like 15 structures were taken out or damaged.

And so Malibu and and sort of santa monica mountain residents are basically trained at this point where if there's a high wind warning there will be fires right and so that's why this week everybody's still on super high alert because there's high winds today they shut off power again and all this stuff um so so bass was getting briefed on the high wind warning while she was on her trip knowing that this was like the the most significant fire risk uh and still decided i'm gonna stay on this trip that at this point nobody even knows what the purpose of the trip is but it seems like one of those kind of like relationship building, sort of more like photo opportunity.

It does, I mean, I was thinking about this, because at first read, it's like very bizarre. Like why is a mayor going to a country so far away? Like you think about the mayor, like their business is in the city, they should always be in the city. The governor should always be in the state, and then the federal employees and the president should be traveling doing like the geopolitics stuff yeah and there was an early

story about like bernie sanders being one of the first congressmen or governors to do like foreign policy as a local politician it was very odd it was criticized yeah um but but i was trying to steal man like is there a reason why i would want my mayor to be in a foreign country? And I mean, we can use like the Swiss watch industry as a joke, but there are reasons why. If there's a country that's doing a lot of business in your city, it might actually make sense to go visit that and say, hey, you know, you are a constituent in some way. You are selling a lot of products in our city or you are you know so i'm going there to make sure that our business relationship with my city is great and and i might want my mayor to go and do that again it's a little odd because i don't think we

have a really amazing business relationship with karen has a history of of uh you know foreign you know policy missions she in the 70s uh her favorite trip was to cuba where she would go and she would coordinate um i'm forgetting the exact name of the group the extremist group that she was a part of but she would coordinate with the cuban government to sort of strategize on bringing communism back to southern california and it sounds like it sounds like a joke but look it up it's factually true yeah um and so yeah maybe she just likes to travel maybe that's just part of her thing but regardless she had posts like a few years ago saying calling out other politicians in disaster scenarios being like why aren't you you know it's embarrassing that you're not at home with your so the whole thing is you

know she has been completely melting down but let's get back to the uh more questions why in a city constantly on fire did the mayor cut the fire department's budget it's a very good question and if you look at the the breakdown of the budgets it's not like the budget of everything was cut and the fire department was just cut less than everything else. It's like the fire department was uniquely cut. One of the, one of the hardest hit departments and then a lot of other things increased in budget.

So it's kind of odd why we were allocating away from that. So the fire chief who's been getting just, you know, memed and, and kind of unnecessary ways in many ways, it seems, but she had put together a report telling the mayor's office we need we don't need our budgets cuts we need 50 more fire stations in la county so she was

yeah asking for the right thing and the size gong asking for more budget yep getting everyone needs a size gong yeah it's like look i need my budget increased i need to bring the size gong we didn't we couldn't bring much from this We brought the flag and the size gong And why the last question is in why had the state prohibited insurers from increasing rates as the risk of wildfire increased Which catalyzed a drop in coverage just before one of the worst fires in its history California is a one-party state. So failure in California is perceived as an indictment of democratic governance. This means wildfire discourse is pretty much toxic at the national level. Republicans are incentivized to highlight disaster in the state. Democrats are incentivized to obscure it, and

nobody is incentivized to chart a course toward safety for the people of California. While inevitable, the discourse stalemate has nonetheless been frustrating this is something that i covered in that solo episode was like i i wasn't even trying to take like a political stance i was more just trying to like lay down like what will the narrative be and what where where is where are the battle lines being drawn right now and it's the question of like you know was this a man-made fire was this uh can you pin this on the a lot of times these fires get pinned on like the electrical companies for not doing maintenance on their transformers that's why now every time there's any yeah fire risk they

shut off the power completely it's crazy which makes sense to them there because there were landmark court cases where they were proven to be at fault and there's these billion dollar payouts or whatever. So they're like, well. Startup idea. How about a transformer that just doesn't fucking explode? Yeah. I cannot believe how many transformers

just explode when something goes wrong. Like that just seems like an engineering flaw, right? Transform into a more structurally sound. It's crazy. No, but the real solution is to bury the lines. Of course, of course. And I don't think the utility companies want to pay for that.

So now they're hoping for a bailout. There is an interesting question. I don't know if we talked about this before, but there's this massive move in LA. Everyone's saying like, oh, look at the houses that survived. They use like steel and brick or whatever. And you see the burned down homes and the chimney is always still there because it's made out of brick and so it's like oh maybe just rebuild with brick but you forget

that like earthquakes are huge here and like if you just focus for fire prevention well then when an earthquake comes you're gonna get screwed and and and and like it's easy in this in the in these kinds of of immediate disasters to just refocus on the current issue and be like fire prevention's the number one thing, but it's like maybe the time is to also think about earthquake prevention and fire prevention and all the different things.

I think that in some ways focusing on making developing houses so inexpensive through stuff like cover. Yep. And my buddy Alex has a company that Paki back that's focused on building, you know, building homes in a much more inexpensive way. Part of it's like if you could build a home 10 times faster for 10 times less money, then there wouldn't even be the same issues around insurance because you could lose your home and just rebuild it fairly quickly, which is sort of dark. But maybe that's part of the solution here. Yeah. So Solana takes a little bit of a victory lap for having called

a lot of this. He says he first wrote about California's wildfires in the fall of 2020. And then again in 2021 in a piece called Global warming ate my homework great catchphrase he quote tweeted Bernie Sanders with that and got a lot of attention because it's it's a great way to you know focus on the key issue of like you can't just always blame global warming when like if you had done the wildfire prevention my dad my dad during his teaching career his his website where you would go to get the homework yeah was dog ate my homework.com really that's amazing good domain yeah he let it expire i was like dad like come on that's a great um but uh but yeah again the whole like at a certain point the excuses just stop working. And when Bernie was tweeting, blaming this all on climate change, I was, I don't get triggered, but I was generally like, I was like, okay, like, come on, dude.

Like, this is like, this is not the time. And also you're in Vermont. So why don't you focus on Vermont, which is a disaster in many ways. Yeah. So Solana breaks down like a little bit of what's going on here. Wildfires, including mega fires have burned through California for thousands of years, but about a hundred years ago, gold rush times, the population of California exploded, which led to the prevention of natural wider scale burns as humans fought back against the regional phenomenon. Fuel has built up for decades because of this, and today the state's at constant risk of burning.

There's no easy solution to this problem, the problem, let's call it, of living in a place that tends to be on fire. I love when he throws in these jokes. Although there are many strategies we should consider from housing policy that encourages greater urban density, I talked about that, away from the winds to better,

or from the wilds to better resource management, to reservoirs, to new equipment. We are also living in the future, I'm told. And I wonder what new strategies and technology might be possible from tracking to fighting fire. Probably someone literally paid to pursue such things should do a little digging. But decarbonizing our entire planet is not a serious suggestion,

not only because it's never going to happen, but because if it does happen, California will still be at constant risk of massive deadly wildfire. We need a plan. I argued this for years. And so goes a little bit into, you know, how the discourse is shifted on X because there's much less fact-checking. This is a really interesting anecdote.

Now, there really is an art to good fact-checking, one of the most popular and useful weapons in our sprawling information war. Generally, what you want to focus on is something categorically wrong, which by relation seems to disprove an entire class of thing you find uncomfortable. CNN produced a great example of the tactic early morning early monday morning met a fact checkers they reported debunked a post

on looting and for what and from what i can tell they were correct the narrow example they fact checked was indeed wrong but was looting a problem barely discussed in the early days of the fire while widely discussed online a problem or not? And then he says, at the time of my writing, 29 looters have been arrested with hundreds of looters reported. Generally speaking, it was and remains a huge obvious problem. And they had to create a 24-hour curfew effectively where you were not in Malibu specifically. You were not allowed to move around, walk around, et cetera. We were my neighborhood was looking at beefing up our security. And the only place the security was going to be able to sit was at the guard tower or in in the community.

So it was effectively not going to be worthwhile because we already had security there. And so they weren't even letting private security come into the area. So imagine the number of people that would have been arrested and that were arrested. Just as a media strategy, I find this section so fascinating

because it's like you're running some SaaS company and people are complaining about your website being slow or something, but instead of addressing the median complainer, you find the most extreme person who has some insane avatar and you're like, I'm being targeted by the far left or the far right. And then it's like, oh, well, he debunked that person, so he debunked the entire class of complaint.

I feel like this has been used all over the place to great effect, this idea of just honing in on one thing. Well, that's what Newsom has been doing too, and he's hyper fixated on maintaining his image right now. And so anything that anyone says, he's a fixated on maintaining his image right now and so anything that anyone says he's he's a master manipulator and and media personality um and so yeah it's a good strategy to just focus in on the one thing but in my you know going through this the last couple you know last week or so it's been eye-opening to me because so much of the information that i i was

getting from people that that they were speaking factually like nobu burned down yeah it did not burn down it was saved um yeah apparently two so larry ellison has seven homes on pch two out of the seven burned down and apparently the firefighters just decided to make a final stand at allison's houses i wouldn't be surprised if he was like carrying like this is a bitcoin you know hard hardware wallet like don't let it go any farther um but um but yeah there was just a lot of a lot of people were saying the palisades village burned down in fact it was the only area of the Palisades basically that didn't burn down. Um, so there was a lot of stuff that ended up, wasn't intentionally misinformation. How bad do you think the, the Palisades village is going to be in for it post fire?

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

like protecting. I think it'll ultimately be just like, who's going to go to these businesses when it's all just construction. Here's what I think happens. Just my opinion. I think it was actually very positive that one small area was untouched because that is going to be the community center for sure to rebuild i think a lot of these stores you know the stores there are patega

veneta saint laurent you know like these stores like not really useless they should be like construction you know hardware stores gas stations you know restaurants for food because like there's gonna need the homeowners will be spending and and the residents will not be spending much time no but there's going to be for every home let's say the average home has a crew of 10 people working on it you know that that's tens of thousands of people that need to eat and you know buy supplies and get gas and stuff like that. So I think it will ultimately be a beacon of hope and some, it's not gonna be normalcy, but it will be. But hopefully Caruso can kind of blend the losses

across the entire portfolio. It'll be interesting, does it make sense for Erewhon to still be there when it should probably be a smart and final now because people should, we don't need $20 you know grain bowls when when the average person buying will be like you know day labor yeah yeah i mean maybe he uh maybe just does short-term leases and just swaps out the that's what i'm saying i think he'll be strategic i think he'll be strategic with it and brings in the stuff later being worth

six billion dollars he could have that and he owns his properties like he could basically zero it out but if he goes in and say we need a hardware tenant we need you know this this this um and uh maybe get a slop kava bowls in there some barnyard barnyard barnyard bowls so uh in in typical solana fashion he bridges the two major stories of the year of the week together into one kind of thesis uh and he shifts from the wildfires and all the fact checking that's going on on x to mark zuckerberg's announcement that he will be removing fact checkers from meta properties and in implementing X-like community notes system, which we talked on the show before,

but Solana has a bunch of good stuff in here. He says, on Blue Sky, Zuckerberg's changes were, of course, likened to white supremacy by the sort of mental patients once uncritically cited as experts by our tech press. And sure, we love to throw eggs at the crazy people who held us prisoner over the last few years it's funny when they claim their lives are in danger because people are shit posting on a platform where they do not themselves post and it's good to laugh at them but meta's changes

really are significant and they were announced in a meta in a manner meant to make that clear mark didn't only change course on speech he denounced fact checkers both specifically in the case of their work at Meta and conceptually. This was a return to the company's founding values, he argued. One more point on that. I do think I have been generally, everybody can say these, I posted yesterday.

Have you been testing the limits on Instagram? Going really, really extreme seeing if Mark's really putting his money where his mouth is? Well, I just posted yesterday, just because you can say there was this Egan robot says it's morning again in America, and there's a quote from a banker. I feel liberated. We can say the R word and the P word

without fear of getting canceled. It's a new dawn. And so my point was, just because you can say the R word now doesn't mean you should. Yes. And I think that the people are taking this as an opportunity to be mean and hateful. Totally. And it's low class and vulgar. I joke about this, but it's true. Don't use free people being mean online.

Totally. Even Palmer, when he uses some of these words, is using them in response to Jason, who's an Internet bully. Yeah. So he's standing up to an Internet bully. Exactly. But even with Palmer, as you said, the third and fourth iteration of the r-word it started to get old exactly but again Jason is like trying to bully him which is hilarious to try to bully yeah a billionaire who's 10 times more successful than you um but that's what's happening so but yeah I would just say to to our audience um just try you know there's no there's no roi there's no long-term roi and being mean yeah it's sort of these short-term yep uh you know, there's no, there's no ROI. There's no long-term ROI in being mean. Yeah. It's sort of these short term, uh, you know. So I remember literally where I was when I first heard the term, the R word, obviously I grew up with like, you know, guys calling each other

retarded all the time. Um, in, in the pejorative sense, which I don't think you should use. I think it's okay to use it in the descriptive sense if you're quoting something or using it in like fire retardant, essentially, like to slow the process down. But I remember being at South by Southwest at this like Spotify activation and my business partner was on the phone with someone and he used the R word as in a pejorative sense

and his buddy was like, hey, we don't use the R word anymore. It was kind of like you know uh like like free speech policing him and he was like oh i don't know how i feel about that but like i kind of get it like it is kind of vulgar like maybe i shouldn't use it and then over the following years it became like okay no one ever uses that yeah which like people were already there was it was already i mean it was to be clear was still being used heavily online totally and in many male circles totally but but but if you just had like a normie job at like a fortune 500 company like you wouldn't use any foul language in the office at all basically your mom

was right exactly speak how your your mother exactly wanted you to speak when you were 10 years old. But then what happened was it became such an inflated word to the point where if someone caught you using it, even descriptively, and the famous example is Ben Horowitz using it in that clubhouse chat and Taylor Lorenz putting it out on Twitter saying, and she misattributed it Marc Andreessen but Ben Horowitz was quoting some Wall Street bets kind of gambler degen guys who used the R word to describe themselves so they were they were they weren't being pejorative because they were using it to describe themselves they were still using the uncensored R word he was quoting them and so it was like three degrees of separation away from like actually calling someone the r-word pejoratively yeah i'm just and so that and so it became like this weapon of like if i

caught you using it if i have evidence of you using it i can get you fired i can get you punished i can hurt you and and so that's why i do think it was important to cross the rubicon for people like palmer and delian to use the word and say, hey, we're not afraid anymore. You can't control our speech. But it's funny now coming back, I would not be inclined to hire somebody that was freely using the R word in any like online consistent setting just because I don't think it's generally kind.

So I think part of it is having the power and the freedom to do it and having the restraint to say, there's better words, nimrod, communist, mouth breather, venture capitalist. So next time, repeat this, next time you want to use the R word, call someone a VC.

John, you sound like a VC right now. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think like Palmer, at one point he actually broke down his logic and kind of explained why the word shouldn't be removed from the language and censored. And I agree with all of that.

I think it's good to say this is something that should not be this weapon of cancellation. Yeah. But then there's a second aesthetic question. The aesthetic question. the aesthetic question i was debating with someone terrible exactly exactly uh there's there's the there's like the utilitarian question of the word like should you be fired for using this word maybe not should you be shamed and should your free speech be impinged no but is it an aesthetically beautiful word no yeah and so that's why it's

weird it's this weird thing where i do think sound like you know again this is like almost getting into territory that's this is almost more of like a man like a business like management thing but if i had an employee who is going around using the r-word online yep i would tell them to stop yep and then if they kept doing it i do feel like that's grounds for termination because you're representing the company in a way and you've been asked to not do something and if you want to go around using your real identity while being employed at a company it's the same thing to me as somebody going around being racist online. Yep. Especially like,

I mean, it's very context dependent, but it's different. If somebody wants to have an anon profile and go on Reddit and be in wall street bets, that's a very different thing now, especially with the, with the company badges on X,

like everyone with that badge is an extension of the brand. And, and I mean, we talk about it all the time. Warp got into a lot of trouble with this because they gave the badge to everyone and made everyone a brand ambassador. When you look at the way Ramp's done it, it's a lot

of people who are on X and are posting about literally just their job, but it helps build the brand because they're posting about software development or Fax Herbert is posting about corporate finance and he works in corporate finance at Ramp. And so he is an extension of the brand. They don't want their brand to be represented by vulgar terminology.

And so it wouldn't make sense for a ramp employee with the badge to use that word and represent the brand that way. And so it is this weird, it is this weird dance because, because obviously I'm extremely pro free speech. I'm extremely anti cancellation, butllation, but aesthetics matter. Free speech is also different in the context when you're representing. Exactly.

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

to me a totally different thing. And you can go to another team and do that. You can go work for yourself and do that. You can be, you know, terminally online, unemployed, you know, and use it, you know. know terminally online unemployed you know and use it you know also it's like i mean it's like good comedy like there are like certain words can be used in very funny and novel ways and the first few times the r word came out online it was like whoa like okay in this context this is extra funny i mean we were joking about in that taylor lorenz piece how how he said like her career had been r-word yeah and because

it slowed because that's that's actually the proper non-pejorative definition so it's like this play on words and that's kind of I think it's funny um but but if you're just like throwing out the r-word everywhere because you just don't you just don't know any other words and you can't express yourself anyway it just gets boring and so it's low class and vulgar and what would your mother say? What would your mother say? So that wraps up our word rant for the day. Well, you'll probably be able to use it on Meta. They list out a bunch of examples.

Again, I think you should be able to use it on social media platforms. They're not the arbiter of this. We're the arbiter of it because we decide what is aesthetically correct in terms of taste and there's going to be teams that decide that that aesthetic aligns with their brand sure and they're free to use that uh but um it's very like monster energy where i had uh i i had a young member of the party round team that that there was a period where me and another person on the team would have post notifications on for said person.

We would have twice a week, we'd have to be like, delete this right now. And it became this thing. That's hilarious. Some people will be able to guess who that was. Okay, so basically Solana breaks down some of the reaction at Meta. There's been this big story in The Intercept and formerly Gawker and 404 Media

talking about how Zuck's announcement has caused chaos at the company, and there was a post on the internal Meta platform called Workplace that said this person's upset about it and they're taking time off. Solana then talked to a couple meta employees himself and said that there were a couple hundred comments on an internal post, but not a single person had quit

because of it and meta employs 25,000 people. So it does seem like a muted reaction internally. People are just kinda like, yeah, cool, fine. No fact checkers, community notes, awesome. But there's a great anecdote in here from tech history which i was not familiar with and he says that one executive that solana spoke with reminded him of what facebook culture used to mean in 2018 when justice kavanaugh was elected to the supreme court a meta employee and one of kavanaugh's good friends went to washington to

support him amid the controversy surrounding his confirmation. This, according to the executive I spoke with, led to a full week of what might more properly be termed chaos, as thousands of comments lit up Meta's internal message boards, which concluded in an employee walkout. That executive's name was Joel Kaplan. Mark just gave him a promotion. He is now the company's president of global affairs and nobody at the company seems to care, which is kind of confusing at this point as it's starting to seem like Zuckerberg

is actually trying to piss these people off, which I love. And so a few days after his Instagram post, Meta ended its DEI program and Mark appeared on Rogan to basically apologize for all the censorship. Meta in some way benefited from, I think Meta and Sam have benefited from the fires in some ways. Because they both had somewhat controversial moves that were just completely drowned out.

Like last week, people really didn't care too much about technology. This was a story. But it had 10 times less interest because totally there just was these raging fires yeah it was hard to post like anything non-fire related uh just because it's overwhelming the timeline um but this is a very interesting uh debate point i mean you you've kind of called the top on mark's, you know, I called the top. I should have posted about it, but I called the top on Mark's personal, the local top.

Yep. Not bearish forever. As soon as he throws on a suit, it's a new, it's a new market. Yeah. New bull market. No, but, but about six,

about six. Yeah. Yeah. About six months ago, I felt like Mark had been very emboldened by a lot of the positive reactions he went through the worst negative period everybody's called robot for like he was called a robot straight he would go in front of congress and be gone yeah just he was he was in a bad spot then he started training mma working out got jacked meta like started ripping started doing the wakeboarding

with the american flag positive response moving all the way to the minivan stuff like flaunting his wealth like kind of playing into the average meta user and things that they would find interesting and i felt i felt like there's this dynamic where if you get too much positive the more positive attention you get the more of a target you're putting on your back front by the internet right and uh anyways that seems to have been there now is like a much more there's a bunch of positive people are like yeah prozac and then now they're starting people being like you don't get credit for this decision yep you're doing it right at the new administration you're very late you're doing it at the most convenient time and there's always been this theory of like the pr firm behind

his rebrand is genius and like i never really bought that because i do think he's just going back to you can literally i think he's also he's just had, like, anyone goes through periods with different interests. He got into smoking meats. He did that in a very robotic way. Yep. But then he's now into MMA and likes Dana White. Yeah. You know.

And he's more confident about it. And he's more, he's posting about it. So I'm generally, I'm generally, I'm in the camp where I'm glad. But I've literally talked to, like like the head of PR at Meta and like she's always like, yeah, he had to explain to us what MMA was. Like they didn't know. Like I'm like, I'm very, very sure that like, that like there's no slide deck out there with like,

get an FP Jornzak, like that's what'll work. No, he's, he's, he has agency. Yeah. And you can see it because if you go back and look at like the first interview he did with like the solo cup on the couch it's like that's kind of he's always kind of been a bro and then he like that yeah if you look at the language he used in the college era is almost the same is what you would expect a guy that looks like he does now exactly exactly i can't believe these people trust me with their data and LOL. Exactly, exactly.

He looks kind of, he looks, he's got the. Clearly the robot era was the PR firm makeover. It was like, this guy's too much of a crazy bro. We got to wrap him in something really tight and like quiet. So like, don't say anything. And now he's kind of unleashed. But, but people are definitely saying like, oh, this is the top. And now it's like, oh, this is late.

And I'm sick of this shtick. I think he needs to switch it up. I've argued that he should throw on a suit. There's other things that he could do. He needs to get into long range rifle shooting. Yeah, I wish Tim Cook would follow. Tim Cook can't really afford it. But if he had the level of wealth that Mark had,

he might be able to spice up his personality a bit. Totally. Tim Cook, you think of Tim Cook, you're like Mark had, he might be able to spice up his personality a bit. Totally. Tim Cook, you think of Tim Cook, you're like, okay, he drives a Lexus. He drives a Lexus? No, I'm assuming so. Wears an Apple watch. Wears Lululemon.

Maybe spices his up. I think he wears Nikes. Some Brunello. Don't they love Nike? Some Brunello now and then. But Tim Cook, I think, could take Apple from a $3 to $4 trillion market cap just by being a little more personable and being like, yeah, the Photos app is terrible. I'm sorry. The Alarm app is terrible.

I'm sorry. Battery life is terrible. I'm sorry. We're going to make it better. Oh, yeah. He is like the most media trained person in the world. Have you seen his interview with MTV HD? He doesn't do live stuff, right?

No, well not anymore, but that's just because of like the COVID stuff. And the live stuff's coming back in and stuff. He's not like afraid of that. We'll see, we'll be heckling. Yeah, heckling, yeah. You bricked my phone. No, he did an interview with MKBHD about the Magic Mouse,

which is the mouse that you have to plug in this way. So you can't use the mouse while it's plugged in. Like it would be so obvious just to have to plug in this way. So you can't use the mouse while it's plugged in. Like it would be so obvious just to have the charger in the front. So then you can use the mouse while you're plugging it in. But this, you have to flip it over, plug it into the bottom. It's like one of the worst designs ever.

Apple, they have a lot of great designs, but this one was a huge mess. And MKBHD asked him like, what do you think of the Magic Mouse? And he's just like, well, it's one of our best products. Just zero awareness that like people in the Apple community hate that. And he should have easily just been like, yeah, I mean, obviously like we kind of messed up the port. I'm excited to revise that. We have all these timelines. We'll work through it. Like, you know, you miss stuff sometimes.

So yes, my phone's about a year old. I might go, I don't think we're going to have time today, but tomorrow I'm definitely going to go upgrade it. Sorry didn't sorry to apple i didn't get it in for q4 but but i'll try to buy some other stuff this quarter and really get my you know uh ltv up but um my phone went yes so i go on i leave uh the house i go on a beach walk yeah i i was like listening to something, not even using my phone. In 15 minutes, my phone went from 20% battery life to 1% and then died. I was like 20 to 1 in like a 15 minute walk.

I was like, this is basically like a landline now. Like I actually should be charging it. We need the tinfoil hat because I don't believe in this conspiracy, this conspiracy theory at all. I think it's a skill issue. I think- Yeah, my battery is a skill issue. It is. You have some crazy apps running in the at all i think it's a skill issue i think yeah my

battery is a skill issue it is you have some crazy apps running in the background no it's x actually i think x when you have like you know if you're posting yep exactly because you're getting notifications exactly exactly and you know whatever optimization engineer was like let's worry about the battery elon's like no don't care't care. Fry the battery. Just get the engagement up. Keep the people on the site. We'll get the test. Elon would launch a phone at some point with a week-long battery life

using all of Tesla's battery technology. That would actually, people would be like, oh, that's pretty cool. The Starlink is like the size of an iPad. You could just have that and then an iPad on the front. And then it's just like always satellite internet connected.

I saw a Starlink battery, like new product. It's like built like basically like a week long battery that you can put your Starlink in. Okay, I need that. But it costs like five times as much as the Starlink. As the Starlink. Batteries are expensive. They still are. Apple needs to have some sort of like limited allocation like the,

like Ferrari does. So, you know, it's like, look, we're going to need you to take a bath on this Apple vision pro. You're going to need to get, cause these things are losing.

You can buy an Apple vision pro for 4k and go on eBay and sell it for 2k the next day. Like the depreciation is insane on the, on this product, but you do that a couple of times. Your, your, your,

you know, your ad starts liking you, gets you the allocation of the new diamond iced out Apple Watch when it goes live. Yeah, yeah. Iced it out. With a 72-hour battery life.

It would be really funny if they were just like, yeah, we launched the new iPhone, has the best M4 chip in it. It's super fast. It is interesting though. And you're going to need to get on this to get it. You can't just buy it.

It is fascinating that Apple has seemingly shifted away from this multi-iPhone strategy and basically wanting everybody to get, in theory, get the next iPhone. Yep. When I do believe there's a huge number of people that if they made a $10,000 iPhone that had a just ridiculous battery life that they would get it. I would if I had a phone that I just never had to really worry

about charging throw it on every now and then I the the sort of my willingness to spend would be. It is crazy like there's that terrible camera bump on the top which like you know was never on the Steve Jobs iPhones the wobble is wild and it seems like if you just raise

the rest of the phone to the thickness of the camera bump you would get double the battery life with the extra space yeah they must have run

the numbers and been like people don't care I think that it's like a standard versus revealed preference thing I think that for most people it's like yeah

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

that has one of those stretchy cords that would actually we gotta get that app tim when you listen to this yeah reach out to us printer too we want an apple we gotta get on we we got this incredible market map so john john is john future associate john did this and if anybody yeah, if anybody, any venture capital firms out there that need a market map made, John made this in like 10 minutes. I'm very, very impressed. But yeah, so we-

Key question, who's going to make money? Obviously it's a terrible tragedy, but there's a lot of business ramifications. So we tried to divide up what are the categories of industries that will be affected and then within those what are the subcategories and then give you a couple examples of each company. Yeah so the categories. Maybe list out all the categories and we'll go through one at a time. So we have building materials and supplies. Thousands and thousands of homes and structures

and stores and all these things burned to the ground, uh, tons of damage that wasn't even necessarily structural. So that's a big one community and government support. Uh, so that's everything from FEMA to the red cross who are coming in, uh, some, you know, some activity on the nonprofit side, government side, uh, neither of those groups are going to be making money, but they're going to be spending a lot of money. And so people are going to be making money from those budgets. Construction and infrastructure. So there's big home builders and, you know, and groups that will build a, you know, not a. Yeah, it's kind of unclear if those big home builders like Lenar will come in because they do more like track homes and specific developments.

We can talk more about that when we go into the deep dive on that company but yeah and the palisades is not an area where people are going to say hey let's just take you could see that potentially happening where one block is like let's all work with this one builder and just build them all at the same time um but anyway so construction and infrastructure environmental remediation restoration so that's everything on the cleanup side. You know, there's so much toxic waste all over LA that needs to be cleaned up.

And then landscaping and erosion control. So one thing that happens post-fire is when all the fuel that fueled the fire burns off, then the mudsl slides become a huge risk yeah yeah so santa barbara yeah really really sad so i was in college when those were happening and montecito had had some fires and then there was heavy rains and there was so much mud coming through the hills of montecito that entire houses were just taken off like huge boulders so imagine a house a house traveling 200 feet the death toll was like 20 yeah yeah I know I had a family friend

who not not super close or anything but who decided that they felt they were safe in their home even though there's a lot of rain and sort of activity and the home was just taken out and just completely destroyed. So, um, very dark, but that's going to be super important now because all over LA and in the hills, people want to rebuild, but there's going to be like huge mud risks. So financial and insurance services. So there's going to be a lot of, a ton of lending, you know, activity for people that need construction loans to rebuild and

um and huge fights i was listening to something about this where like we're like there's like the uh what do they call it claims adjustment yeah big question about like oh like your house burned down and you're claiming that we need to like rebuild the foundation but we think that the foundation was cracked before the fire happened. And so we're adjusting you down. And like, if you don't have perfect data on exactly all the materials, everything that went in, like you're just going to get pennies on the dollar,

just huge fights and then lawyers get involved. Well, yeah, so it's interesting. So there's going to be, the banks are going to make money on the new activity, but they're also going to lose money on mortgages where you know maybe somebody didn't have insurance and so there's bankruptcy yeah um and then there's just going to be obviously a bunch of policy shifting around as people realize oh i need to get off the fair plan because yep um it was interesting i i think it was month, was it Monday's episode? I reached out

to kin.com just to, just as like a market research thing. And they called me like six times in the last few days. I finally picked up while we were at the grocery store earlier. And, uh, they were like, yeah, we're issuing new policies in California. So, so kin.com still issuing policies. Um, QED I, is their biggest investor. So the next category, security and safety, you have alarm and monitoring services, and then there's a bunch of new upstart companies like Soron that are in that space as well, and then physical security providers.

So in the Palisades and Malibu area, there's a specific security company called IPS that everybody uses. And so they've been on overdrive. They're probably really important in the short term. Yeah, think about, so LA's had huge issues forever with squatters. I know people who have had a house in LA that was empty

that would repeatedly get broken into and the police just say, we can't do anything about it like there's weird laws around like if they just chill out in there for enough time then like suddenly like they're they have some rights which is crazy so you want to hear a crazy story two weeks ago a friend of mine was flying back into LAX, gets off the plane, goes to baggage claim. Luggage has been stolen. There's an air tag in the luggage. So she can see exactly where the luggage is going. It goes to this house.

She takes a screenshot. It's stable. She knows exactly where it is. Calls 911 or calls the police department. Tells them, hey, my bag was stolen. It has an air tag. I know exactly where it is. Can you help me police police department tells them hey my bag was stolen it has an air tag i know exactly where it is like can you help me with this and they were like no just no just no just no that's so dark i know that's that's collapse right there and i was just like i almost like i wanted to tweet about it but it felt like very like cultural so yeah

that's like it feel it feels like a sci-fi movie where you're like okay i'm hiring my own private social ops team to basically go break i was saying that i was like do you need me to go yeah yeah i'm ready to tool up stymond i'd call stymond he's got like oh he's ready he's ready to go no but i had i mean i i was just shocked i was like you have all the evidence here it's like so clear all you need to do is just have committed in la county just just just send someone to knock on the door and say hey give us that back yeah and instead she just bought all new stuff oh really yeah never got it just wrote it off um next uh technology and data services so there's a ton of disaster assessment, planning tech,

you know, drones being used, aerial photography, satellite imagery, and then smart building and construct construction tech. So, you know, there's going to be companies like Procore,

which is actually here in Santa Barbara County. They make a platform for construction management. So like, they'll probably see a huge uptick in southern california sales as builders sort of descend um and uh yeah one thing that you know let's let's get into it let's start breaking down each individual category sure um so why don't we start at the top so manufacturers of core materials so um, um, there's, uh, to make a house takes a few different parts. Um, so we have CEMEX is the first one. They're multinational, uh,

that we're highlighting multinational producer of cement, concrete, and aggregates. They're a key supplier for roads, bridges, and foundations post disaster. They are publicly traded eight to $10 billion market cap and operating in, uh, 50plus countries already. So massive company already. And the other one that we have listed is Owens Corning. They do roofing, insulation, fiberglass composites.

They've already been emphasizing fire-resistant and energy-efficient products, also publicly traded. Similar range, $9 to $10 billion actually in annual revenue. like fire resistant and energy efficient products also publicly traded similar range nine to ten billion actually in annual revenue i wonder what some of these like uh construction materials companies if this will actually move the needle for the stock we were talking about maybe looking up some of the some of the market caps on this but because like although the la fire is like hugely impactful in this area like it is at the end of the day just like 10 000 homes 100 000 homes in a year well yeah but but from a construction standpoint if you think about the demand so if there was 150 billion

dollars worth of damage yeah and it's and everybody's projecting it to actually be higher than that and you're the number one producer of cement and concrete yeah that could be and then that 150 billion of damage is not going to cost $150 billion to replace, right? The replacement cost is actually lower because you build a house for $2 million and then it's worth $4 million, right? Because the land didn't get destroyed or whatever. But I think that's calculated in the losses. I think when they say $150 billion losses. It's the replacement cost?

Yeah, yeah. They're not talking about the land value for sure. No, no. I figured it's more, but the thing, a house that's built is worth more than the raw materials sitting around and the construction. Yeah, but I think that, I mean, we discussed this in that Bloomberg Odd Lots interview

where it's like there's the insurance claims and then there's the other disaster database. And so they're not just saying oh a four million dollar house burned down that's four million dollar loss they're like they're saying the insurance will pay out two million got it so they're taking the lower exactly exactly yeah yeah because because truthfully like the land was not destroyed like you still own the land and even if you didn't have insurance and you had a four million dollar home in the palisades and it burned to the ground you your net worth if you own that have insurance and you had a $4 million home in the Palisades and it burned to the ground, you your net worth,

if you own that free and clear is still 2 million probably. Right. Something around that. Maybe it's 1 million, maybe it's three. I don't know. But, but yeah,

I mean the, the, the losses are truly like the, the, the burned losses. It's interesting if you owned, at least they should be, if you owned lots around LA that were in these fire affected areas.

And then now a bunch of red tape gets removed, your property value actually ticked up in some ways because now it's easier to build and you can build it faster. So you're not carrying that construction. I was actually thinking about this. Like, uh, there's that, there's a funny Newsom announcement where he was like, we're removing the red tape for all the fire victims. And you see Nat Friedman quote tweeted and he was like, but we're leaving the red tape for all the fire victims. Dude, did you see the video? You see Nat Friedman quote tweeted, and he was like, but we're leaving the red tape for everyone else.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did you see the video of him? Everybody was saying he was on a bunch of stimulants because he has these like weird tics where he was going. Hand motions. Yeah, so we, he literally was going like this. Yeah, we're really afraid of these property developers. We're really afraid of these property developers. We're really afraid of these property developers

that are going to come in and make lowball offers on these properties. I talked to the Maui governor, and he was afraid of the same thing. So we're working on it. It's just such a slime ball. I wonder, there's going to be payouts to people that are affected. $770 from Joe. Yeah yeah it's like seven it's like 700 bucks $770 oh yeah seven seven i thought you just said $70 that'd be really i mean what's the difference yeah just lost but um but but there's also the question about like if the regulations change like will it be all of malibu like will it be easier for you to

build will it be like altadena burned i'm in pasadena my water was affected because i'm on the same water line which is why i'm here in santa barbara now um but my house didn't burn down but there was ash that fell on my house like we have ashes the thing is the question is like all this is like do i benefit from this or not i'm'm still unclear. Malibu, Coastal Commission, you have local groups, other environmental groups. There's so many different levels of permits. I think it's great that Gavin Newsom can go out and say, we're going to make it easier than ever to build. Yeah. What does that actually mean?

But, okay, you remove red tape, but then you have a thousand times more people trying to do the thing so what is the net effect are they going to get you know a hundred times more you know employees that are processing sort of these like permitting stuff like that everything is going to still be permitted you talked about how permitted needs to be you talked about how you were just trying to rebuild a room in your house and they were like well if you want to do that you have to put in a stove you have to add a kitchen you have to add a kitchen you're like i already have a kitchen i already have a kitchen i you just really want me to cook i get all my food from kava i guess i'm barnyard it really is so insane it's like, your house needs two kitchens. Yeah. No, all of this is exposing that every single level is broken.

Yeah. Right. And we talked about this on Monday's episode. They had just introduced new regulations to solve the insurance crisis that was already unfolding. And then there was a week delay between when it went into effect and when the fire set. So no changes. And it's so easy to just be like the branding is we're removing red tape and then the law is like we're going to make it sure that your house can never be built unless it's to the most environmental fire code possible and it's like now and so now la now la has i i think we're going to

want to cover this but the the the business of super bowl prep the business of olympic prep so we have these huge international events coming to la by 2028 and um that just adds a whole other level to it but let's keep going so we have separately um these tend to be the companies so semex and or chemex i don't actually know how you say it and owens corning um get way less attention because they're they're much more on the industry side b2b than lowes and home depot which still have a huge b2b component to their business but are the more high profile sort of consumer retail businesses so lowes uh i think everybody should know second largest hardware building supply retailer in the U.S., provides community support and emergency supplies post-disaster,

which is great. They do $90 to $100 billion in revenue. They're based in North Carolina, where they just had, obviously, a big hurricane. And then you have Home Depot, which is the largest U.S. home improvement retailer, critical supplier of rebuilding materials after disasters, 2,300 stores.

They have $150 billion of annual revenue. And so, yeah, for every one person that walks into a Home Depot, one of them is a contractor. For every two people that walk in, one is. It's 50-50 at Home Depot, contractors versus DIY prosumers.

At Lowe's, it's about 70% DIYers. Really? Yeah, it's more of a... It's more of Lowe's is's about 70 percent DIYers it's really yeah yeah it's more of a it's more of Lowe's is where you go as a consumer the contractors lean towards Home Depot and there's some interesting design choices that they've actually made in the history of Home Depot where one they were building one of the first stores I believe and they and the the the builder on the actual store had like polished the floors and made it look all nice and they came in there and they were like this is not this is not going to be friendly to a contractor like a contractor wants to see like grit grit and so like yeah throw

some sawdust that is funny because whenever i'm in home depot yo you know i feel like a lost golden retriever I'm over here golden retriever yeah and the idea is to put the contractor first you show up you go in you just get your stuff and you go whereas Lowe's there's going to be more people walking around kind of oh you want to you know like you know DIY

your own deck or just get some furniture get a new fridge like we'll walk you through that. You could, in many ways, I would imagine that home Depot is a bigger beneficiary here because there's been so much DIY, you're not doing the foundation yourself.

Exactly. Yeah. Um, that is almost a meme online of like, you know, you can just build a house. Yeah. People that can,

you know, you know, left wing people will complain about the cost of housing and then these sort of like homesteader right wing people will be like you can just build you can just go and buy the supplies and build your house yeah um so i'm sure we'll see some of that home depot went through some crazy shocks during covid everyone was worried that like you know the housing market would collapse because the stock market was down the economy was really rough during the early days of COVID,

unemployment was really high. But then once people realized that they were going to be at home for a year, they were like, let's do some home improvement projects. And I think they pulled forward something like five years of growth in one year during COVID.

And the stock like mooned and did really well because everyone was doing renovations and stuff because they were like, if I'm going to be here and the interest rates are really low and i'm getting massive checks from the government and and you know i'm not moving and and the stock and the price of my house is going way up i should be renovating i should be and they were just like yeah yeah stuff everywhere so yeah a lot of flipping a lot of flipping during that time so again home depot is a national company we We're covering Brad Jacobs on Friday,

but he has a new private equity firm. Or is it a roll up? Private equity roll up firm. You're gonna try and buy a couple companies that do construction supplies. So they're presumably would. B to B. More like CEMEX or Chemex.

Exactly. And Owens, but the smaller, smaller mid-market companies. He wants to bring in technology and automation to all the stuff he's done at XPO and the other logistics companies that he's run, but focused on construction supply chain. Yeah. All right, let's jump into, we're going to cover more of that. Kind of like McMaster Car, if you're familiar with that. He wants to be McMaster Car level.

McMaster Margarita. For construction supplies. Who is posting about the McMaster Margarita. For construction supplies. Who is posting about the McMaster Margarita? Oh, yeah. The ITAR Gatorade. The ITAR Gatorade, yeah. It's great. So next category,

community and government support. Subcategory, we have emergency management and coordination. So first up, we have Cal OES. They oversee the emergency response specifically for the state of California. They coordinate the wildfire evacuations and statewide resource deployment.

It's interesting because I don't know anybody that was using Cal OES for this. Everybody was using WatchDuty, but I'm sure Cal OES data feeds into that somehow. Sure, sure, yeah, that makes sense. But WatchDuty is a non-profit, but it's like a company, so it's startup almost and i'm all it wasn't it wasn't perfect non-profit now might be a for-profit conversion if they want to start printing yeah yeah yeah take private get those units stack those

units if you're in watch duty gaffon and company take private at watch studio watch duty just jacks it up to a hundred hundred dollars yeah get nikita in there yeah yeah get some dark patterns dark patterns dark and uh start start printing dark um in-app purchase yeah so cal oh yes coordinates with local like city la and fema for disaster strategies and yeah it was wild i think wed night, watch duty just stopped updating. The fire didn't spread all night. So I remember everybody's watching it being like, what's going on?

Because that's like the only way to get anything close to information. FEMA is a more interesting one to me here. So FEMA is, everybody knows, kind of a controversial agency because they deal with a lot of the immigration stuff but federal agency coordinating major disaster response across the u.s they provide grants temporary housing and public infrastructure repair funding so they're funding you know if a

freeway gets damaged they're going to help fund that um they oversee 20 billion dollars annually in disaster relief so what's interesting about this is people yeah and i'm sure that that's more of like an average and i'm sure it massively yeah like katrina i'm sure it was higher but um what's interesting about this is there's a whole subcategory of contractors that uh that are already looped in you know that that do work with fema because there's always stuff happening, right? So think of it as like a FEMA SMB type, you know, operator, where FEMA is now going to be funding a lot of the cleanup from the fire,

where everything from, okay, there's, we have these 20 cars on the street that burned out, and we need to bring a bulldozer. And so there's probably dod contracting but just yeah so there's a subcategory of of contractors right now that are buying that are buying or renting every available bulldozer in the surrounding area or shipping them in just to operate them to basically take on these like individual you know fema contracts and could probably do a whole deep dive there.

But it's a lot of like people that have good intentions. A lot of people that are just trying to make a quick buck. A lot of that money gets spent pretty poorly because there's like this crisis situation. And if you need to clean up, you know, hundreds of square, you know, miles or thousands and thousands of acres of just like chaos and like you just need to spend money it's like a startup right where if you need to do something super super fast sometimes the best way to do it is just to like overspend um the local agencies

and non-profits american red cross habitat for humanity uh everybody knows the red cross they not many injuries or blood donations going on right now because the death toll is so low, but I'm sure they come out with just general relief. Yeah. So the Red Cross works with local agencies. They're trying to provide support for displaced residents. They operate on $2 to $3 billion annually from donations and grants.

So big organization, but maybe not even as big as some might think. Habitat for Humanity, they build and repair affordable homes with volunteer labor, and they offer zero interest mortgages for disaster affected families. So that's cool. They're active globally, but they're based in Atlanta. I built a house with Habitat for Humanity in high school, and it was like the slowest process in the world.

It took like months for them to do like anything. Oh yeah, because it's like now we're going to do the... Because it's like American. And it's a rotating team. It just takes forever. And then I did one where I went to Mexico and did it, built the house in a day. It was the most satisfying thing in the world.

That's crazy. I mean, they poured the foundation before, but you get there and it's just like, okay, frame this out, put this up. It's like very minimal, but you finish the house in a single day. That's so sick. That's how it should be.

Hopefully, I mean, that's not going to happen here, but hopefully even 100 days, right? Yeah. I have a friend. Bring in the Amish. Bring the Amish to LA. They can throw up structures. Just throw up barns.

Import the Amish. I have a buddy in malibu who did an internal remodel so structure didn't change at all took him over three years and and it wasn't and it was the kind of thing that could have been done in four months yeah but just massive delay so all right next construction and infrastructure commercial and infrastructure construction so there's aecom aecom aecom global engineering construction firm for handling civil and commercial projects it's more for like if the water plant or power plant like burned down like they're going to come in and build like a bespoke like you know massive power plant or some like piece of huge infrastructure like the

water main stuff like that yeah you have to imagine a lot of that stuff didn't burn to the ground because it's like concrete buildings but the machinery inside and and right now we're we have a water crisis in in la just because you know when you think about like who builds the reservoir like that type of thing like do we need an extra reservoir after this? Is that the resolution? Well, then you're going to call in one of those massive engineering firms. Their comp should be structured based on making sure the reservoir actually has water.

You know, like it should be like a, you know, we need some accountability. You don't get paid unless it's full. And then there's Bechtel, one of the largest privately held engineering companies, renowned for massive infrastructure projects worldwide,

17 to 20 billion in annual revenue, international operations. Very similar companies. Halliburton, famous for Dick Cheney. Halliburton, very old company, but does these huge infrastructure projects. The famous story is in Iraq, like you need to put in oil well,

they would engineer that and build that. And then are you familiar with Parsons in Pasadena oh the design school right there is a design school I think the design school was endowed by the founder of the engineering firm oh crazy I think his name is Bill Parsons and he uh he does yeah he designed uh like all these weapons during he was like a DOD contractor during like maybe World War II maybe a these weapons during he was like a dod contractor during like maybe world war ii maybe a little bit after but built like a whole bunch of like tanks and stuff and then eventually did more and more engineering projects bigger and now it's like this big big engineering firm crazy um okay on the residential side we have kb home and lenar kb home customizable

energy efficient homes in major u. us markets built to order model simplifies adaptation to local codes based in LA. So I'm sure they're going to, you know, I actually talked to a guy who does a bunch of, can I have the other three pages by the way? Yeah. Um, did we get the printer working? Sorry. I haven't said it. Um, we can trade back at some point um i talked to a guy in santa barbara the other day i was like are you gonna go try to do any development work in in santa barbara and he or sorry in la and he's like i'm good you know i don't want to go basically get involved in someone's backyard so i think a lot of this stuff will go to local builders and that's who i'd want you know if i if my house burned down i'd builders. And that's who I'd want.

You know, if my house burned down, I'd want somebody local that's not just like coming in for a few years to like make a quick buck and get out. And then Lenar, one of the largest U.S. home builders, they focus on scalability and they do have post-disaster rebuilding sort of products based in Miami, $35 billion market cap. Also an investor in Cover. Really?

Yeah. That's cool. Yeah. So Cover is a friend's company who builds modular homes, mostly backyard homes right now. And you have to imagine that Cover's revenue will 10x. You would imagine if people are doing stuff uh their core market has been adus and backyard homes a very quick no but here's here's here's one angle and this is what people have done even historically is if you need to remodel or rebuild your primary home throw an

adu in the backyard start with the adu live there and then you can build the full house there's people that don't you know if your house didn't burn down but it was badly damaged and then okay so you're not you're gonna get paid to get it remodeled yep but insurance payouts kind of work where they're like well we'll fund it for two years but then it takes three four years to rebuild and then you have to then carry the cost of two properties just for your primary residence yeah i mean i certainly hope that they can step up and help they they they have this whole modular like you know they they basically manufacture panels there's a lot of manufactured homes where they build the whole home in a huge warehouse and they put it on the back of a truck you've probably seen these driving down like the

five it's always it's crazy and then and then they and then they sometimes they split the home in half and then they just piece it together bolted to the foundation and those homes feel really bad when you're in them yeah yeah and they're built using traditional manufacturing techniques like it's a guy with hammer and nails like nailing like two by fours together to make the home and then putting up drywall the cover model is like make these modular panels that then can click together and they're perfectly engineered so that even like the you know the the power outlets are like built into the whole system yeah um but they long term they want to have all those panels click together so you could make a three-story house out of them uh but they just aren't quite there yet and there's always a

question of when these uh when these big events happen like the ukraine war like there's a lot of there's a lot of drone companies where it's like Yeah, they'd want to jump into that business, but they don't have a manufacturing plant They have like a demo product and yeah They're just not really gonna move the needle but it can be a catalyst for a next funding round or a next product or something Like that. There's this interesting Deep dive on DR Horton from business breakdowns They're very similar to Lennar in the sense that they're a massive home builder. I think they build 100,000, yeah, 90,000 homes annually now.

The founder started with $3,000 in 1978 and a $30,000 loan from the bank, built one home, and then five homes, and then 10 homes, and then 100 homes. And then in in 1992 he built a thousand two hundred homes and now he's building 90 000 annually and yeah so one one but these are focused on the track this one thing to know if if um there if you're somebody who is obsessed with construction and home building which there are many people and, and you want to go and build a major construction company or home building company, there's nothing wrong with coming to LA and setting up shop

and trying to rebuild a bunch of homes here. And that can be the catalyst to building a big business. You're not taking advantage of anyone. You're providing a service. Nobody's going to give you money unless you're providing them value in exchange. i would imagine that there will be some there will be many people that make an incredible you know catalyze their career and go from a two million dollar revenue business to it totally you know 20 plus yeah one of the interesting things about these uh these large

home builders that came out of this deep dive that I listened to was a lot of them have transitioned to being asset light, meaning that they don't typically own the land and they're less in the real estate business and they've said the business is transformed from being a real estate business to being a manufacturing business. So they really just focus on making the homes. 75% of the land is optioned versus 25% a decade ago

and that has increased the return on equity for this business from 10% to 22%. So much more asset light. And it's really just about getting those homes out as fast as possible. Now, I don't think any of those prefab manufactured homes are going into the Palisades. There's a question about Altadena. The average home price there was probably a third to a fifth as much as the Palisades. Yeah, like 800K to a million. Something like that, yeah.

But there's a big question about like, what will that community want in terms of style and design? I think that what, there's a pending gentrification crisis almost in altadena where so many of the people there had owned their homes for so long that if you own your home free and clear you do not have to have insurance i don't believe you can just you can just it's a free country raw raw dog it basically but um um but uh the what's going to happen is altadena is in close proximity to la yeah people will look at that very opportunistically and say we can create

three million dollar homes here you know and three million dollar gated communities by going out or more or more mixed use you could mix in so Pasadena has been going through a little bit of a transition where in the downtown core, there's been more apartment buildings going up. Still not 10 stories. You're talking about like four-story buildings. And Altadena historically really had none of those. So maybe you put in some of those. There's these zero lot line homes that are very popular in LA right now,

especially in kind of the Echo Park area. It's a full house. You own the house, but there's no lot like, like your house bumps up against your neighbor's house. And it's basically just like this ultimate optimized, like check the box for what a house is. Bad place to be golden retriever maxing.

Yeah. It's rough. There's no place to sun your. Well, the roof deck usually. So they're, they're they're designed to be like hyper optimized i know a guy who moved into one he has a golf simulator you better hope you're the highest rooftop so like it'll be like a two-car garage but they're

like stacked and then you go upstairs and there's like a kitchen open floor plan living room then you go upstairs there's some bedrooms and there's roof deck. And it kind of like checks the boxes for like you have one of everything. And they look nice, but they're just like really, really condensed to be able to fit them all in. So you can wind up building like a 3,000 square foot, four bedroom home on like a 6,000 square foot plot of land

or something instead of like a quarter acre or whatever. I probably have those numbers wrong. But it's a small plot of land because it's just stacked up. And so I could see some of those going in. I could see some of the, I wonder how many people will say, hey, we want Altadena to look like it did before.

So let's build in kind of, there's the Spanish style. There was a lot of like tiled roofs and stuff. And there was just a lot, I mean, it was a very slow growth community. Like it grew for 100 years without real reset. And it was historically, there was a large community of like African-American.

Yeah, and Latinos. Yeah. And so there's a question about like, yeah, what will the style demands of that community be going forward? How much displacement will there be from wealthier people moving there? It's going to be, I mean, it's an interesting experiment to see what the Palisades look like.

Yeah. Just because. I can see the Palisades rebuilding exactly like it looked. Yeah, similar. I mean, they were still in the Palisades. They were still homes from the 60s. Sure. lot of stuff like that yeah um but uh let's keep it rolling because a lot here so environmental remediation and restoration uh cleanup and remediation is a big one we we covered some of this in the emergency management section but you

have belfor global property restoration firm for fire water and storm damage they offer complete services they do cleanup and reconstruction also privately held clean harbors specializes in hazardous waste management and industrial services they remove toxic debris and manage environment environmental risk post-disaster publicly traded for four to five billion annual revenue the one interesting thing here is like okay you have a gas station that just burned to the ground it was on fire okay now is that what happened to the tanks like is it is it leaking oil everywhere a lot of the gas would have been siphoned out um just by nature of the the demand in the exit to the fire um but but yeah there's there's just

so many levels to the crisis that's not just the homes right there's um it's like simple stuff like oh this hardware store had 200 batteries in this back room that just burned right and so now that's all just leaking everywhere. All the refrigerators, all the stoves, all the stuff's just melted. Landscaping and erosion control. So Bartlett Tree Experts is one. They have 150 offices.

So that goes to show you can build a big company pretty much in any niche. Family-owned still. They do basically just any work around these sort of i mean for as many homes as la has it has as many trees yeah the trees weirdly a lot of them are left standing which is just a proof point for i think going forward a lot of these homes are going to add these complex sprinkler systems there's this guy who runs an smb and like does a lot of stuff with the homes in malibu called i think it's like brush fire battle systems like kind of a cool name but he creates these um

i actually meant to when i was originally looking into that idea around doing a drone fire response business i i was meant to talk to him but then we had a bunch of fires and the meeting never happened um but but he builds these sprinkler systems to just make homes damp when fires are breaking out and the trees it was interesting a lot of conspiracy theorists were saying like how did all the homes burn down and not the trees and this car but but trees are very moist they have filled with filled with water they're like humans they're like what 70 percent water whereas the so it's much harder to burn if you've ever tried the driest wood possible yeah if you've ever tried to burn down a you know burn you know start a fire with like wet wood it just doesn't work

that's why you have to like kill the tree and then you burn it out and it's an interesting thing where where homes in california and you know buildings everywhere have fire sprinklers because it's a way to protect, but it's like, why don't we have systems that just completely irrigate every home as these fires are starting? Because if not, the firefighters are going to have to come put them out. So that to me seems like a startup opportunity. That's maybe not a venture backed business, but just create these sprinkler systems for homes that are set up where when somebody

evacuates they turn it on and it just like sprays water everywhere and makes the place damp so davy tree employee-owned company very cool better than uh much better than being a non-profit for tree care and environmental consulting stabilizes landscapes post-fire by removing hazardous trees one and a half to two billion of annual revenue they're based in ohio wow um so like there's a lot of trees those companies have presences in la but yeah it gives you a shape no but they should be being like okay we have 200 employees we're sending them to la because even around my neighborhood just from the wind alone yeah walking around my neighborhood there's all these trees that have fallen down um and uh so anyways they'll they'll be making some money out of this

banks and mortgage lenders you know i don't think we have to explain bank of america or wells fargo to our highly sophisticated audience of uh wealthy technologists but um uh so maybe we skip over that property and casualty insurance all Allstate, State Farm. We already talked about insurance. I say we skip over this. Allstate, they're saying Allstate's focused on rapid

claims. But you can imagine so much of this stuff is just going to be slogged and you know, it's like any, anytime you experience a business experiences a hundred X like comms around something that's going to be slow, um, alarm and monitor in a lot of areas right now, people still can't get to their homes. Like they're just literally blocked by national guard. And even if you own a home, you can't get can't get through security and safety alarm and monitoring services um it's kind of interesting because like some of

these businesses just lost a bunch of customers because people are not going to like pay to secure pay adt in the long run to secure a lot yep um and they're not going to pay for whatever, what's the camera? Ring or whatever. Nobody's paying for ring if their cameras don't exist anymore. That'll be a quick unsubscribe. And then the physical security providers I think will be bigger,

because people have very little trust in the government right now. And even though there's a National Guard presence. The one thing that is positive on the security side in L.A. is Nathan Hockman, who is the new D.A. for L.A., who just started, and he was Caruso's pick. I saw Caruso talk and endorse Hockman at a fundraiser in the Palisades back in Q4.

He's already, like, throwing the book at looters and people criminals that are you know uh have been taking advantage of the situation uh support services and ancillary industries you have architecture and engineering a lot of these design firms engineering firms that are just figuring out how do we rebuild this home there was the home in succession the 125 million dollar home in the palisades that burned to the ground that rebuilding 125 million dollar home on a slope is like a very complex engineering undertaking so that by itself is probably like just imagine the architecture and engineering bill for rebuilding a home like that has to be in the millions of dollars so like there's going to be some big beneficiaries there um professional services deloitte mckinsey these companies that

are doing like consulting audits tax all this advisory work there's just anytime you have massive amounts of money changing hands these companies benefit mckinsey always finds a way to make money in a um in a crisis here yeah we gotta get the we gotta get the mckinsey sponsorship and then get some like pre-seed companies working with mckinsey and they're like look like you've got 100k of annualized revenue like you're paying you're paying yourself 100k a year like their only person to cut is you because he's gonna be like cut yourself like but sir like who will run the company and they're like well we have our ai agent practice for a million dollars we can create a program for you to run your business with ai agents and they're like well spend the money on us don't spend it on yourself everybody will win in the

long run it That's great. Disaster assessment and planning tech. So we talked about this a little bit before, but the drone deploy, they use, they deploy drones and they have software for aerial mapping and inspection. I was recommending to somebody

the other day, they were like, I couldn't get to their house and I was like, go find, buy satellite imagery because you can buy it now. And I was like, go find, buy satellite imagery because you can buy it now. You can actually pay Planet Labs to task a satellite.

I'm sure a bunch of satellites were tasked over LA this last week. I think that's the other company that's mentioned. Yeah, so Drone Deploy has raised 140 million. You can hit the size gong for that. They do quick damage assessments over uh large fire areas so like they'll they'll i'm sure make you know this is the kind of thing where insurance companies are now like probably like sitting around the table being like oh my god you know and you know publicly

they're like we're very you know devastated but then internally you can imagine they're just like freaking out. And so I'm sure they're tasking drone deploy with various projects. And then smart building and construction tech, this is just more like SaaS, Autodesk, creators of AutoCAD, and a bunch of other design engineering tools. What's interesting is like,

you know that when whenever something like like crazy national news story happens like there are startups that are pivoting and looking for their next idea and some of them might pivot into something related to fire prevention i think the the fear and i've seen this play out before i knew a guy who after the san francisco fires remember the ones that turned the sky orange? He decided to start a fire, wildlife prevention. He said he decided to start a fire. Yeah, he said he did a fire prevention company, right?

And he was using all this data and pulling all this stuff together. But selling into the government was so hard that he pivoted. And I was telling him, like, okay, you have all all these like vanity metrics and like contracts that you're working on but like really like the catalyst for your company being huge will be like what happened with the watch fire app like when you save watch duty when you save your first home like that should be your main kpi that you have on the wall of your company it's just like that guy brush fire battle systems literally saved a home saved a home and so he's like here's the proof exactly now he's so it's like you just need to raise zero on the wall zero home saved you need to just work backwards from saving a home and as soon as you

save a home there will be a national news story about your company like you're really smart you'll sign all of those you'll sign all the points You're really smart about one of those inflection points. Yeah, exactly, exactly. But he pivoted out before the next fire. And so there was never a moment when it was like the tech could demonstrate what it was powerful for. I think there's probably a flock safety style business

that makes consumer apps for cities and state and local governments to manage disasters. Because right now, like when the disaster broke out everybody's on whatsapp i message you know coordinating using watch duty but watch duty wasn't working and i don't really want to be reliant on a non-profit during you know a fight like fire realistically because it's like okay they went down for 12 hours yeah and was that because like they hit they their cloud bill they didn't have like the basically like who knows right well we probably will never know but um i think there's a consumer

business to be like cities states get every one of your citizens like on this app so we're not relying on the press release i think of flux safety is like the hardware company like anderle for yeah sure more like citizen citizen app is i guess this but it like Anderle for local governments? More like Citizen. Citizen app is, I guess, but it's not around coordination. It's more like PowerTier for local governments or something like that. It makes more sense, yeah. Yeah, more around communications

because the government being like, I was getting my information from group chats, my HOA, and then the city was, the HOA was getting going and tuning into the live events broadcast that the city was doing. There's always this question about like, oh, like can the technology save us in this situation? And I always worry that it's not, it's not a matter of technology.

It's a matter of like willpower or like desire. Like, is there even a desire to solve some of these problems? Like, it's very unclear. Yeah. And you kind of need to rely on people. Yeah. My neighbors were great. I got... It's tricky.

Well, should we move on to the timeline? We need to jump into the timeline. That's great. Take a break. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, still the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, you have an exciting announcement to make. Let's hear about PMF or Die,

the latest project from the Technology Brothers. Okay, so yesterday I sent out a... Inspiration struck. I wasn't exactly yesterday morning, but the inspiration for some of this, for some of the language that I used in the post definitely struck in the morning. So a while back john and i

were always thinking of new formats and concepts and stuff like that our goal is to entertain and elevate technology brother voices and movements and so we were thinking about well what if we uh found a founder gave him 25k and just basically locked them in a studio apartment for 90 days and then used... Was that the word you used? Studio apartment? Studio apartment. Or did you refer to it as a cage? A cage. Well, it's now called the cage. Okay, break down the tweet. Read your post.

No, I'm just giving some of the history of it. So the idea was like, well, if we have a founder, we'll talk about them on the show. We'll support them. We'll get them a bunch of attention. And if they can't hit a million dollars of ARR in that 90 days with all of the attention of us telling people go buy this product today then they're never going to succeed and they and and we do some type of deal where they literally have to quit startups if they can't make it work um you got to go work uh in big tech if if you can't make it in the in the cage uh but i i posted

yesterday so we're working on a new show called pmf or die we will lock a small founding team in a studio aka the cage with 25k in funding and only enough food caffeine and nicotine to last for 90 days the team will only be released if when they achieve a million in arr and the whole process will be documented and shared daily while in the cage, you will get millions of eyeballs and be coached by some of the most accomplished founders in the world. So if you can't find PMF in the cage, you just won't find it anywhere.

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

2,300, 2,300 likes, right? Yeah, 2,300. 2,300. 2,300 likes, still climbing. Lots of, yeah. And I had to quickly follow it up and say like, no, this is not a joke. Here's the application. So yeah, and I'll say it again now. I want as many of our listeners

to be a part of this as possible. You'll all be in the ride as viewers. And you described it as Mr. Beast meets Paul Graham. Yeah. I said, if Mr. Beast and Paul Graham were to make sweet love and have a nice and give birth to a baby accelerator, it would look a lot like PMF or die. And it's so funny because I've maybe watched five minutes of Mr. Beast content. I just never got into it. I didn't watch squid games. I've never, I just was never big into that whole world i've never watched survivor or anything any of these other shows um but this is in that vein i think it's going to be extremely entertaining and it's one of the issues so um we've talked a lot about different concepts

and shows and one of the issues with shark tank is because they're putting this out on tv which is not a tech startup audience generally, they need to only basically, they only can work with founders that are creating sort of gimmicky CPG products. Like I made this cooler that also has a grill built into it so you can like cool your steaks and then cook.

Pavlok, one of the greatest Shark Tank companies ever. It's a wristband that shocks you So you can like cool your steaks and then have a clock. Yeah. The greatest shark tank. It's a wristband that shocks you when you do something that you're trying to quit. So if you're trying to quit smoking, it will shock you when you smoke. It's the Pavlovian response. It's like total. Yeah. Yeah.

And so there's a bunch of meme tech and I think it's great. And if you're building a product that, you know, and founders go on that because they don't go on that to get the money because the terms aren't generally good. Uh, they go on to get the attention and these reruns and stuff like that. So it's really a customer acquisition. Do you know the whole gimmick on Shark Tank? Let's go. Let's yeah. Yeah. Go for it. Go for it. Oh, this is such a good story. So, uh, they film you for like an hour. The actual segment on TV will be like 15 minutes max. And so what happens is they wind up, uh, am I good?

Okay. Um, what happens is that, is that there's during that, there's a bunch of really good quotes from you. And there's also a bunch of really bad quotes of things. Yeah. And they ask you hard questions and they ask you easy questions. And then depending on if you take the deal, they will edit it to make you look great. And if you don't take the deal, they will edit it to make you look great. And if you don't take the deal, they will make you look bad. And so I had a friend who went on and just tied them up in legal negotiation for so long that they had to run it. And they were like, we're doing the deal. Make us look good.

We're doing the deal. Make us look good. And then as soon as it went live, it was like, I'm not doing that deal. No way. It's the worst deal I've ever seen. Exactly, exactly. Yeah, and then it's locked. You just have to run for it. But I mean, that just gives you an idea

of like the problem with Shark Tank. It's purely entertainment. So it's cut out a lot of founders that don't care to get in front of that audience, that don't want that funding. And so one thing that's really interesting, we've seen this recently, is so many companies can get to that one million of ARR mark

faster than ever, right? You're seeing it in YC. The best YC companies are getting out with like millions of ARR. And you're seeing teenagers on X go from nothing to doing hundreds of thousands a month. And part of that is like these new AI, this new like these LLMs that are enabling new experiences, but part of it's just faster to build.

It's just faster to program. And so we want to create the, you know, basically the cage, which is like the best place to build a software company. And so like specifically for this kind of corner of the internet, one of my favorite responses was Shkreli responded and said, hits too close to home. And I shared that and got a good response. We got to get him as one of the coaches. Yeah, so I actually messaged him to become a coach already. And I think it's funny because if he was actually a player,

he would get out in a day. I guarantee you he would figure out a way to get out in a day. And so there's so many fun ways that you can gamify this. The point is not to create the next you know i i hope that people create world-changing startups out of it but it's totally cool to come in the cage and just have yeah it's a sprint and have fun right i i was telling i think something that people could do is make the next like i am rich app call it the jailbreak app and be like i am stuck in a in a prison right now i can only get out if i get a million of RRR. Subscribe to my app, I will donate all the profits

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

We are clearly making something people want. the show is guaranteed to be life-changing for the players they will either leave the cage with a million dollar air our business as a niche internet micro celebrity or they will die either way it's a big change we have received 10x more applications than we anticipated and we will be processing them as fast as we can the the demand has been insane like there's so many talented uh builders reaching out it's a kind of the perfect opportunity if you're just like in the middle of something or you want to start something new you want to quit um what information did you put on the form just email name just name email you gotta put mailing address because like it's always good to be able to send people stuff yeah yeah that'd be good um so yeah the we're just trying to process the applications at this point we already have you know people that

we've accepted um we're going to be sharing a lot more information location dates um and there's tons of opportunities for people to get involved you can be a player you can be a coach you can be an antagonist you could be a trainer right we're gonna have weight lifting equipment there we're gonna have treadmills you're not gonna be getting sloppy in the in the cage um and uh so if you want to sponsor the show there's gonna be a bunch of opportunities we're gonna have to get a bunch of these in there um and it's just gonna be super fun the response was really incredible i saw that dm you got from someone who said uh put me in the cage i yearned for the cage for the cage so there's something primal about being in the cage and just wanting to break out it's a cure and um it's great we're gonna figure out how to structure the 25k it'll be an investment

yeah maybe it'll be like uh you know debt lots of debt covenants the debt covenants are the are the real you know, maybe it's more like venture debt. Yeah, exactly. But no, we don't want to scare anyone off. Like the point is not to really own a lot of these businesses. The point is to just like create some really great entertainment and create some great companies out of it. So go apply. Yeah.

Is there a website yet? of it so um so go apply what's the yeah so you can just go to x and go to pmf at pmf or die or pmf uh that the application link is in the bio it's apply.pmfordie.com slash s1 um and uh it's gonna be a lot of fun as i like to say if you can't find pmf in the cage you won't find it anywhere war is peace freedom is slavery pmf is strength there you go fantastic i'm excited um we will talk a lot more about the show coming up you'll be hearing um you'll be you'll be hearing about it relentlessly and uh some of the locations we're looking at are pretty insane uh we're looking all over the country for the right spot um and uh you know we're gonna be you know assuming season one goes well we'll be going more and more exotic we're gonna do epstein island season two season two we take back yeah yeah we could have we'd have reed hoffman

come uh come back to the island back to the island um but uh but yeah it's gonna be it's gonna be a lot of fun and uh everybody will be able to be involved we're gonna have they'll i'm sure there'll be some like betting markets on polymarket for sure that's great yeah that's that's a cool one yeah um and uh i just it's gonna be a really great time. So, um, without further ado, let's talk protein. Oh yeah. Protein. Okay. So you have mentioned this founder many times in the show, founder of our X bar. Does he go by Pete or Peter? Peter, Peter Rahal. Yeah. Founded our X bar did not raise a lot of venture capital. I don't know if he raised any.

He sold the business for hundreds of millions of dollars. Became very wealthy. And then decided to run it all back and build another protein bar company. And I have been surviving off of these exclusively for the last 30 days. And it's been fantastic. You've been doing like roughly 10 a day? 10 a day. So it has 28 grams

of protein 150 calories so 10 a day i get i get one and a half grams of protein per pound of body weight roughly and only 1500 calories 1500 calories so i'm in a major caloric deficit lean lean but a mass and just yeah going down to five percent body fat getting absolutely peeled and while maintaining all the question question for the audience should john try to get his ifb pro yes because that's like obvious there's gonna hit a point this year where the the natural next step is to get your card yeah and do a show yeah because some of the greatest ever do at Chesky yeah you know had his run yeah on the amateur bodybuilding circuit yeah but uh these are fantastic I've

I've been really enjoying these uh just in really really insane macros the the rule of thumb Ryan our dear friend Ryan Harmon at day job did all we did the branding. Yeah. Fantastic. It is great. The David bar after Michelangelo's David. Yeah. Correct. I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. That is how you need to be thinking about yourself on the side. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. These quotes, biblical quotes. Uh, yeah, it's fantastic. Um, the, um the the macros really feel too good to be true the the rule of thumb that a buddy of mine uh gave me was uh if you're trying to eat healthy and get a lot of protein you should be looking for one gram of protein for every 10 calories so you pull out a protein bar that's 200 calories it should have 20 grams of protein

yeah this has almost twice the ratio it's it's uncanned it ratios the other bar it ratios the other bars and i thought it was going to taste absolutely terrible because of the i thought it was a you know faustian bargain but uh i think they taste great and i i could easily survive off these for years and just and just walk around ifbb pro status ready to step on stage at 6% body fat at any moment. Let's go. Yeah. It really is.

It really is fantastic. I'm a huge fan of these. Yeah, that's great. We might have different palates, but I'm into this. And so thank you for sending these. That just tastes like

almost like a Rice Krispies treat. It really, it doesn't taste like you think. You'd think it'd be really, really dry, right? And like inedible. And it's just like, it just goes. So much better than RX bar.

Yeah. Which is evidence of why repeat founders oftentimes do really well. Yep. Because they're a better founder than they were with their last company. But then with this, he didn't just, he's still in the bar game. So he's like making a 10X better bar. I would eat RX bars quite a lot. I just liked the fact that it was so simple.

And it's funny because this is on the other end of the spectrum of simple, but much more of a science project in a way. Right, where it's not a... So anyways, shout out to David, shout out to Peter, thank you for getting us stocked up. And this will take us nicely into the timeline. Definitely present in the cage, you'll be surviving off of those.

Yeah, the cage, by the way, one thing I wanna clarify, it's not meant to be um the cage is not meant to be uh a unenjoyable experience i i predict that many people i've been talking to some of the applicants i predict that many people will get to the end of the 90 days and and actually have like sort of a mexican standoff you know uh like i don't want to leave the cage like i'm like i'm like you know like i'm staying they're calling the sponsors are we have season two right now the chef is too good the steaks are too good i'm too diced i'm my company's ripping if i have to move it's going to disrupt my company. It's going to throw everything off. Like, let me stay.

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

The good strategy is come in with a search fund. Okay. Acquire a business over that 90 days. Get to the one million mark. Seller financing. You only have 25K, but that's enough. The meme coin idea is good too, right? Yeah, meme coin's obvious.

But I mean, the seller finance buyout of a business that's already doing a million ARR, that's very doable. That's the beauty of this. There's no rule. You can get out in a day. The only rule, the rules are very simple. 25K, 90 days, 1 million, or you die.

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

Yeah, I mean, I've been doing dry January, so only drinking dry champagnes basically every day, and it's been fantastic. I mean, your body just changes after a couple weeks of not drinking sweet wines and focusing on the dry ones during dry January, so highly recommend doing dry January, sticking to Dom. I have a fantastic story about cages and Paul Graham.

First time I heard him speak, Silicon Valley, 2012. First company went, or second company. Crazy that I wasn't even born yet. Yeah. Yeah, you were in, what, third grade? First company's going through YC, and PG comes to talk and gives this talk about what red flags exist for founders of companies these days.

And so PG famously really loves technical teams. He likes, you know, oh, these three guys were at MIT together. They all can program roughly and they all come out. And then over time, you know, the CEO does a lot less programming. Eventually the CTO becomes just a manager, but is very technical still. And this is a common pattern we see where it's like, if it's a tech company, like the CEO is still pretty technical,

even if they're not coding ideas. And with Party Round, that was a huge... Oh yeah, people were... I didn't, we didn't get into YC because of that. You were not a technical founder. And, well not, I can't say it was just because of that,

but that was a primary reason they gave. We were already funded by Google, like Google's early stage fund. But I do feel like it was the biggest detriment to our success because in terms of, imagine it's a Friday night and you are a CEO. And you want to have the most impact on your business, and maybe shipping that next feature is the best way to have an impact. If you're non-technical, you're just sitting there. And you just simply can't have the impact. And if you are technical,

you can evaluate technical talent very well. You can rally the troops, inspire them. And you just know, hey, like this bug that somebody, a customer came to me, I'm the CEO, told me to fix this bug. If you're at least a little bit technical, you can clock, okay, this is a week-long project. I'm not going to try and give this

to somebody on Friday night. I'm going to actually set ourselves up for success next week and build this feature properly. Or this should take 15 minutes. If I give it to my team and they take a week, there's a problem. Like something weird's going on. And so, PG's been super bullish on technical teams,

technical founders for a long time. But he comes in and he says one pattern that he sees is the business guy, the MBA guy that comes in and is like, I got this business idea and I have my technical code monkey who's gonna build it for me and he and he the term that he used for the programmers who because he's like usually it's like some shy programmer who's been like lightly bullied into like joining this like startup for this business guy who has

no idea how to build this technology is uh is cager cager because he's like he's like the way it feels in a yc pitch is that they pull out their code monkey in the cage and they're like then this is the guy who's gonna build it look at my quant that type of thing and so we we would always joke about like oh you're you're a cager like yeah we need a cager that type of stuff and so the cage is well established in the yc canon it's so real i mean every every one of those business guys that hasn't built a software company before Software is pretty tangible because like everybody's used a bunch of software and they've used I've used Salesforce. I can build a CRM Yeah, I've used Airbnb. I can build a sharing economy app and then you just realize that it's the building great software It's maybe getting easier to build great software

but it is not easy at all there's definitely art and that the toughest thing and the reason that i think i was not accepted to yc and even raise you know didn't stop me from raising you know yc has their religion almost right like it's very firmly like they have their criteria and that's what they need to follow in order to accept hundreds of companies a year but um i feel like their general framework i've used it for my own angel investing and it's been the best like it's it is the best framework for me for evaluating early stage technology companies because it's just so much data has gone into that um that uh i now you know well if i talk to a founder that doesn't even look too dissimilar to myself um that that i'm like

no i won't invest in your company unless you have somebody who is is equal to you that is as good as you at what you do at engineering and they're as bought into the mission and they're also like a brother to you or like yeah because that's the other thing the real risk is having a cto that you don't know that well is usually a disaster too because you can't trust them in the same way that you can somebody you've worked any amount of time with so that's why those questions and then if it's a no, you ask them, well, what's your bench press? And then that's kind of the final hurdle.

Yeah, yeah. That's the final hurdle. As long as they're wrapping two plates or benching more than. Yeah, 1,000 pound club. It could be 800 pound squat. Or just bench the Brian Johnson club. Just benching more than Brian Johnson.

That'll get you pretty far in life. Yeah, yeah. Which most people can do. Anyway, get in the cage, folks. Sign up today. Let's go to Brian Graham. He says, Zuck says Met meta is putting in

cubicles it's bringing back scotch at lunch and smoking in the office zuck says the company's amex cards work at the strip clubs again he says it's back to suit and tie dress code zuck says they're reinstalling the asbestos zuck says there's no irish allowed and then santiago tags us and says this is a tech bros pod worthy banger right here 38k likes like people really like this but it is funny this this is why this is why this is why we're doing pmf or die because 38k likes just shows how mainstream yeah stuff has become into this yeah i um yeah i mean it's kind of funny zuck kind of is at this point where he's basically kind of understands that he's he always wants to be at the edge of doing what people like and what is acceptable right so he's just kind of like crawling to the edge coming up to a new spot

being like okay i can go a little farther i can go a little farther i can go a little farther let's take the tampons out of the male restrooms let's see what happens then yeah okay i haven't gotten canceled apparently palmer palmer said he, he said he had some crazy story about the tampons. It probably was like some crazy company that was charging like $20 a tampon. You know, like just like abusing it, being like, well, you need to buy this. What do you mean tampons as a service? I mean, that is hilarious that it's like, if you're trying to sell more urinals, logically you'd be like, they need to be in both bathrooms no that was the market size that was the issue i remember the plate the library

that i would study at in college i had my little zone yeah and i remember when the dei wave hit and they ripped out all the urinals and and made the our main bathroom for that section so the the walk to go to the bath you know when you're studying and you're just like grinding for like 10 hours and you're and you just are like at your desk walking you know my my peer group would walk outside smoke cigarette walk you know back to the desk go to the bathroom and just like alternate there and then it just became like a super long walk to get to a urinal so it was devastating but i'm sure they're putting it back uh now which is also good for the urinal. So it was devastating, but I'm sure they're putting it back now, which is also good for the urinal companies, right? Yeah, for sure.

I love the suit and tie dress code. Obviously, we love a suit. We don't wear ties yet, but stay tuned. Zach's bringing back martinis in the cafeteria. He said scotch and smoking in the office, which I support as well. If you combine

big tech profits with the power lunch and bring back the power lunch. Unstoppable. People, all you can drink. I told you about my buddy who his dad worked at Goldman Sachs on the prop desk and their whole team wore tuxedos every day. Every day? Every day. That was like the dress code in their office. And I was like, dude, that's so sick. Like the eighties were probably so tight. He was like, oh no,

this was in 2007. Right before the crash. And I was like, 2007, like people were wearing tuxedos all the time. And like, I have a feeling that like the MD on that team just thought it was funny. And it was just like, okay, this is like what our culture will be in this pod. Because like when you're in Goldman, like it's a huge organization, you need to differentiate your team a little bit. And I was like, that's an amazing thing. So if you're a manager at Meta,

make your team wear a suit and tie every day. Just lean into that one. Because that's not offensive. You know, the smoking in the office, that's going to set off the fire alarms. There's a lot of other things here that are a little bit more risky don't recommend the asbestos but you can't go wrong with a nice suit and tie let's go to the next one forward thinking founders says monday's pod is going to be lit in this conversation matt sherman interviews simp for Satoshi of Truffle.

Topics covered include the discussion of Truffle, a device for local inference tied to humanoid robotics and personal intelligence, insights from a unique upbringing in the Middle East, future of AI agents,

criticism of Sam Altman, critique of Y Combinator. Yeah, Simp for Satoshi has been spicy on the timeline for a while. And Forward Thinking Founders says, can you print this one out, please? This episode is going to be epic.

So I guess it's Forward Thinking Founders. Did he tag us? Yeah, he tagged us. Oh, okay. Is Forward Thinking Founders a podcast, I guess? It must be. This must be an interview. All right, so we are running, this is officially now a promoted post for. Matt Sherman's podcast with Simp for Satoshi.

Yeah, so anyways. So go listen. Simp for Satoshi's got a lot going on right now. Yeah, so anyways. So go listen. SimforSatoshi's got a lot going on right now. I saw him posting that he's potentially launching a token for the Truffle. And there's a thesis around it. That's not that crazy because there's a render token. Are you familiar with this?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where you can render 3D, like Sim4D files. And he's trying to figure out the right way to do it. Super long, lockups, stuff like that. I think, well, let's see how, I would imagine that Sam Altman would open just like a colossal short position against it. So dangerous game once you're in the public crypto markets,

but we'll see how it plays out. Let's go to Will Minitis, obscure hobbyist of the year last year. He says, everyone in tech 100x underestimates how important official capital formation is for building the future. Inventing the safe and making it so you could sell equity with a one-page agreement probably created

greater than $100 billion in equity value. There's dozens of these unlocks left to discover. I agree with that. There's a very interesting story where when LLMs first popped off and all the AI companies were like the hottest thing and it was like, this is the future technology and everything else is just like zero sum reshuffling, like B2B, SaaS, cringe, all that stuff. It was like, go build the real stuff, build the Tesla, the rockets, the AI. That was like the build the real stuff build the tesla the rockets the ai that

was like the real tech then everything else was just like you know busy work basically um and what was interesting was like i was thinking about it i was like is this is this a legitimate critique and if you look at how did the llms actually get built efficient capital formation is a huge part of that story and it's the same thing for rockets, like without the financing structures that go into the rockets. Without the SPV into the SPV, the SPV into the SPV with this 10% management fee and all this stuff. I mean, it's a joke, but like, even just the credit lines on all the different materials in the supply chain that go into a rocket, that is actually important. And that financial innovation does speed up the rate at which we get to Mars, which is crazy to think about. And it's absolutely true for AI where, you know, you have this like

nonprofit that's able to do a whole bunch of, you know, fundamental research and then get super creative with the capital formation later stage with these like all these NVIDIA credits that are going into AI startups right now. So, oh, you need to train or fine-tune a model we will figure out how to do that and a lot of those deals are very like they face a lot of criticism because during the dot-com boom a lot of telecom companies did these crazy deals with with dot-com web startups where they would where they would basically invest in the company with uh like in-kind credits for their like the fiber optic cables that they were laying out. And it led to a lot of dark fiber. But that type of like creative capital formation

is actually extremely important. And the safe is like obviously the best possible example because it sped up how quickly startups could move. And it shortened financing timelines from a month of due diligence to a few days. Yeah. What's your take on this? What are you looking up?

I'll tell you in a second. But yeah, I mean, people don't really realize because my generation at least never built companies in a world without the safe. So the safe was just the default method to raise capital. And people don't realize that if you wanted to take even a $25,000 investment, however many years ago, it really was like a lot of Silicon Valley was high trust. So it'd be like, I'm just going to give you money and we'll figure it out. But then, um, and here's like literally a napkin kind of

thing. Like, you know, here's the general terms. It'll take a while to get done. But we've been really blessed to only know that sort of frictionless capital raising. And I even, with Party Round, was taking it a step further with safe automation where you could come on the app, KYC, and then generate a round, generate, you know, send it. And it was like using Cash App.

It was the same amount of time to sign up with Party Round to raise as it was to like sign up for Cash App. Do you remember the convertible note era at all? I never, I never even. So the convertible notes. And maybe I invested in, I've invested in like one or two convertible notes. I mean, it's pretty,

it was pretty like a crazy dance because you do this round and there's a cap on the convertible note, but there's no floor. Yeah. Typically. There's a famous example of a company that did one and it was a cap on the convertible note, but there's no floor. Yeah. Typically. There's a famous example of a company that did one and it was a disaster for the investors.

But typically it's like, you know, you raise $2 million on a convertible note or if it's a big round, you do like $10 million on a convertible note and that all sounds great. But if you wind up raising money at $10 million, they own 100% of your business or 50% of your business or something.

And it's kind of like this default recap. Now in practice, it doesn't happen that much because if you're a startup and things are going bad, like usually you're acquiring a company or just shutting down. There aren't that many places where like your crown jewel gets like stolen by some convertible note investor. But it was a little bit more nerve wracking than the safe. And certainly the safe is much, much faster. Should we do a bucket poll? I got to do a promoted post. So we were meant to get on the phone with Wander, the team at Wander.

Oh, right now? No, we're late. So we had a 2.30 call schedule. Should they just call into the podcast right now? Yeah, no. I think I'm going to try to talk with them. We'll try to set it up for like 30 minutes from now. Yeah, so when I posted about some issues I was having with Airbnb over the weekend, Kyle Tibbetts over at Wander reached out and was like, hey, let us get you set up.

So anyways, Wander, if you don't know, Wander is a technology provider and they own some real estate, but they've, they're shifted to, I think a more asset light model where they go and get the best homes like in the world, period. Homes that would have maybe been on Airbnb, but then they operate them almost like a hotel. So you know the sheets are going to be good. You know the wifi is going to be fast. You know, the soaps are going to be nice. There's like snacks when you arrive. And so it's, and, and you know that you're not going to not gonna you know book a place and then 10 minutes before they're like oh

i can't host you and cancel the amangiri of couch surfing it's the aman that's amangiri of the vacation rentals so um so yeah i i've known john for a while uh and and his dad they're both they're both fantastic and um the company's great. They have hundreds of properties now. And yeah, just really, really cool business. So we are definitely going to be staying in Wanderers this year. I think it's a great solution if you're a startup founder that is wanting to book like a retreat for your team and post up somewhere nice for four days and just get a bunch of work done um much better i think solution than just relying on some airbnb and you show up and i've had this happen before where you show up you get your team on the wi-fi and everybody's like uh it doesn't work like it's devastating it just destroys productivity good

for startup retreats if you somebody wanted to do a DIY cage situation, would that make sense? John says, a Tech Bros pod shout out will make my month. That's the CEO of Wander. Well, John, we did something better. We ran an ad. Go to every Technology Brother listener. Go to wander.com. Tell them the Technology Brothers sent you.

Email the CEO. So yeah, we're now talking with them in 30 minutes. So we got to get the pod tight. Okay, let's wrap up. But yes, if you wind up buying a product from somebody we advertise, just throw a little post on X, a little at the CEO.

Tell them the technology brother sent you. Don't even worry about coupon codes. Coupon codes, I'm sure we'll do them at some point. They're a little gauche. What you want to be doing is sending a DM to the CEO or tagging them in a public ex-post saying that the technology brother sent you. Yeah.

This is the real way to get attribution. All right, so we're going to be talking to them tomorrow now. Let's get into the next bucket. Let's do a bucket poll from Eric. He says, when a software engineer says that's not necessarily true, it means someone just said something incredibly stupid. Yeah, that's rough. The software engineers, they're polite, but brutal. They can be cold. Well, I mean, it's a very, it's very strict,

right? A very strict discipline. The facts are the facts. Everything compiles and if your logic doesn't compile, you probably just said something very stupid. Not too much to say about that but I'm sure plenty of software engineers have told you that's not necessarily true since non-technical and all.

Should we move on to daily drivers? How in the world of devon ai is everyone technical if i sick an army of devon ai agents on somebody and say yeah i think uh i mean the gradient i would say i'm technically technical. The gradient. It used to be that if you understood Excel, learning Visual Basic, which does a little bit, it's a programming language,

and it can automate Excel, and it works in the background. It runs scripts, which is very, very helpful. If you ever open up a really big investment banking model, there'll be a whole bunch of Visual Basic behind the scenes,

buttons you can actually click that do stuff. I built a whole CRM in excel at one point uh using vba um and and then from there you know you could teach yourself like python in like a weekend or you could do like a coding boot camp so like the definition of like what is technical is like a huge gradient from like okay i i know like technical i was dding my father's website. Yeah, so it's like, that is pretty technical. It's not super technical. It's just like, it's enough to understand how software works a little bit.

You learn a programming language, you write some scripts. But that grading is just getting so much smoother. Like just last night, I needed to pull together some data and I went in ChatGPT, asked it to write a script and then ChatGPT just throw it up like, here's the script, press this button to just run it. So it didn't even need to install

Python on this laptop and set up an environment. And then you get Cursor and that's more advanced, and then you get Devin and that's even more advanced and it's just running continuously on your repo. And so the gradient, so I think the big question is if you're intimidated by the idea of software

engineering or code in general like you should probably spend a weekend just having chat gpt explain stuff to you and learn how to write like the most basic python program because once you once you actually solve a problem even if it's just like i want to scrape some website and pull it into a spreadsheet yeah like i did that with the, like we wanted to see like every economist article that's ever been written about technologists. Like that's just a really easy scraping problem. It's a code that's kind of like pretty easy to write.

You can just have an AI help you, but you get to a point where you're like, okay, I achieved the goal. I have used code to do my bidding. Therefore, I can understand that. This is the advice I always give. AI is not going to take your job. A technical person using AI while in a cold plunge is going to take your job.

In a cage. In a cage. It's going to take your job. Let's move on to daily drivers. Yep. Sarah says, good daily driver for defense tech founders. And it's a beautiful Mercedes G-Wagon 6x6. They need to make more of those.

They do. They should just kill the regular 550, G63, and just switch over all production to these, because the road presence is just on another level. I mean, they just launched the G580 with EQ technology. Have you seen that one? It's the electric G-W wagon that can do a tank turn. You don't like it?

I think those are going to depreciate incredibly fast. I think it will only make the gas powered more valuable. That said, is Sarah a partner at.72 yet? Because if not, she should be. I don't know

anyone else at.72, but if not she should be i don't know anyone else at 0.72 but you know steve cohen uh the is he like in base is he in the baseball world yeah okay baseball guy um but yeah i think uh if i was building a defense tech company right now uh i'd be pitching you know sarah well this is a controversial post because a lot of defense tech founders are quote tweeting this and saying wrong it's the toyota hylux yeah or the ford raptor we gotta be we should get into the hylux importation business so we should go into some of these areas and make cash offers bring them in on show and display yeah can you imagine uh yeah i like uh yeah i think uh the hylux hylux six by six toyota toyota what's the meme where toyota's like we don't know how all these hyluxes ended

up in the desert in the middle east like we don't even know where the money you know the money came in yeah and uh you know i mean you know there are some uh there are a lot of g wagons that get lifted and people do a four by four squared conversion with portal axles so they are higher up and i think there's been a four by four squared conversion with portal axles, so they are higher up. And I think there's been a six by six conversion that someone did, which is insane. The amount of engineering that went into that

is like crazy. But yeah, the Toyota Hilux six by six beats both of these, I think. Pull up in that, you're good. Any other recommendations for daily drivers for defense tech founders? What would you go for? Pull up in that. You're good. Any other recommendations for daily drivers for defense tech founders? What would you go for?

I would go for a go get an old NASCAR. That's a good one. It's quite a bit cheaper than the average Tesla right now. You can go pick one up for 30, 40 grand. Okay. And make it, you know, convert it, get it street legal. Street legal. And drive that. Slap all of your

venture investors' logos on the car because they're your sponsors. You've given up too much alpha. This is going to be my car. Slap your cap table on because those are your sponsors and just hit the roads. We're trying to move on from the fires, but there's still so many posts. We've got to cover one of them. This is real technology brother behavior.

Tryndamere, Mark Merrill, the founder of Riot Games says, been off the grid fighting to save my house and neighborhood for days. It burned a house two doors down, two above us on a hill, and two on the other side of us went all around. We are staying vigilant because we are not out of the woods with embers, falling ash, and putting out spot fires around and at our neighbors. Got a Starlink up and solar powered rechargeable battery which has been a game changer to coordinate

and get info. My brother lost his house, our kids lost their school and 90% of the families at their school lost their houses. Wow. And the Palisades. Grateful to all the first responders and everyone working to help support each other and save lives and neighborhoods reminder to everyone be prepared for emergencies our water food supplies horse hoses and landscape fire hygiene has been critical for us sending love

to everyone affected and he posted this photo of him just like covered in soot like just dealing with it and uh there's like a cyber truck in the background. Uh, fascinating. Um, I mean, yeah, real, real heroic behavior there. It does seem that a, you know, a significant number of people that stayed behind and fought and basically ignored the evacuation warnings were successful in saving their homes. Um, but you know, obviously, you know, But obviously some even, I'm sure larger amount weren't successful. So it's a miracle. Glad his house made it.

And I'm sure it'll end up being a community outpost almost for his neighbors that are, as his neighborhood burned to the ground. And I'm sure he'll open it up to people as they rebuild. So bravo. Here's another good one from Word Grammar. Been on the show before. Word Grammar says,

in Mario Kart, the racers in place 8 through 12 get really good items. First place gets banana peels and blue shells thrown at them. This is how I expect LLM research to work. As time goes on, it will get easier and easier to train new frontier models. A third of this is that more research papers get published as time goes on.

A third of this is that more open source models get released as time goes on. A third of this is that NVIDIA chips get faster, better, and easier to program as time goes on. Super interesting. Great analogy. Yeah. I mean, we're seeing everybody

everybody's playing mario cards yeah deep deep sink i mean deep seek deep seek uh deep sink it into the ocean i'm gonna put this llm tie some weights to it throw it in the sf bay let it sink let the sharks feed on it yeah um yeah yeah. I just don't. I think everybody letting, everybody giving them this like crazy victory lapse. Model from two years ago. We got open source. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

It's not crazy. Boo. Don't give them, don't give them, don't even give them any chats. Let's do a, let's do a promoted post. I got a promoted post from Jacob Rintamakiam rintamaki jacob rintamaki uh he says i'm looking for work please reach out and then he's got this awesome post uh that i'll cover a little bit and uh i would say this is this is very smart instead of throwing up the open to work thing on his linkedin he's actually saying what he wants to work on and what's interesting about

his point of view. He says, according to my iPhone, I walked for approximately 12.6 miles yesterday, mostly because I didn't want to pay for non-Zerb Ubers in the Bay Area. However, all that walking made me do a lot of thinking. So I'm ready to announce that I'm looking for work. This piece includes the first two things I would do if hired at each of the three organizations I'm particularly, but not exclusively interested in, Doge, Renaissance, Philanthropy and Future House. And so he just goes on to share quite a lot about his experience experimenting with AI, what smart because you don't have to be at these three organizations to be like, this guy clearly has agency, knows what he's interested in. I should reach out to him. And, you know, this makes me want to talk to him about rules.

I met him in some random group chat and always liked what he was saying. And I think I referred him to Patrick O'Shaughnessy for like one of those o'shaughnessy venture osv nice program and i don't know if that panned out but then a couple days later will monitis was asking for someone to help him with some project oh yeah and i tagged jacob and was like hey you guys should talk and will texted me like where are you finding these boys like how did you how did you find this man it It's like the brothers. Yeah. It's just, it's the brothers. Well, like get used to it. This is the most powerful online fraternity in the world.

It really is. It's great. But yeah, I mean, uh, it would be a great pickup for the right organization. So yeah, put them to work.

We look forward to doing it. Look, doing the personnel news, Jacob, the only other thing I would say, join the cage, build something. Uh,

you'll find yourself in the cage and you might find product market fit yeah or you'll die the stakes are high let's do a bucket pull I love this one uh James Hawkins says oh this is such a low tan banger 36 likes I love when we find a low tan banger uh Jordy you gotta pay attention to this man this is a good one sorry you gotta lock in the notifications James says your dream life isn't that expensive san francisco apartment seven thousand five hundred dollars per month rivian r1s one thousand dollars per month i can think of a lot better cars uh ski home in aspen forty nine thousand dollars a month yacht that's one meter longer than je Bezos's yacht. $30 million a month. $30 million. $30 million a month? No way. No way. I think it's like a billion dollar yacht, right? Yeah, but still you're not paying

$360 million a year to rent that yacht. I'm sorry. Okay. Anyway, maybe you're going $10 billion. Who knows? But he says, it's the spirit of the post that matters here with the bucket pool. He says $30,057,500 per month. That's your dream life. You just need to get. Let's go. Let's go. You just need to get one client paying you $30,057,500 and you're there you ring that god baby

oh that's so good okay um see that's the kind of thing people need motivation yeah people need something one client yeah it's not about oh you need you just need 10 clients paying you $8,333 a month to get one millionaire. Just get one that pays you $30. Simple. It's not the number. Stop making excuses. You don't even need a calculator for that. The genetic lottery.

It exists. Win it. No excuses. Win it. Let's go to another deranged bro idea. Banger from weaponoutfitters.com i love this account uh i don't know if this is actually true but hey if you already own night vision goggles nods might as well give it a try i think my baby is more disturbed by the sensation of temperature shift than light but i'm going to experiment and it's a post from a guy who says uh i have uh like i have a 13 month old kid a baby and and i don't want to turn on the light

when i go in and check on him so i put on my night vision goggles the dude clearly just has like you know scope for his gun like night vision goggles um with night i I have, when you're, when you're 33M size 13, stay at home, 33 year old male, size 13, I don't know why he's saying that. Stay at home dad slash veteran with night vision and a child.

You realize by using ICW, you can disturb the child less, thus allowing us to sleep more. So he'll go in and change the diaper and it's just pitch black for the baby. I thought it was genius. That's insane. I thought it was genius. More tactical gear in the bedroom.

Yeah. In the baby's room. I'm inclined. I mean, there's so many moments as a parent where it's dark, you want to keep the lights off and you got to do stuff. Oh, diaper change. Yeah. I do think it'd be, you know, potentially traumatizing for the child to see you fully get it up but you know the sound

and when it turns on like in call of duty but maybe just let your kid watch zero dark 30 so they get more familiar with adults and night vision there are like tactical baby gear companies for like they're like kind of joke gag gifts and it's like a bulletproof vest but it like has room for like diapers and stuff it's very very cute yeah uh i i also think like uh nurseries sometimes like if there's flat walls and there's echo the baby's cry can just be so much louder because it's reverberating so selling sound panels that are that that are that have like images that are appealing to babies so like a cute photo that's printed onto a sound panel exactly like nice wallpapers it looks like a you know safari park or like giraffes and elephants but it's sound more like dampening

the maps that are 3d yeah yeah yeah i mean anything you can throw a tapestry on the wall uh yeah how about some fine art? Fine art. Fine art actually does the same thing. Oh, yeah, totally. Especially if it's like a nice canvas. Yeah, so throw on a priceless work. I mean, it's just a failure of modern home design that we no longer use tapestries and floor carpets.

You should have thick, lush carpets, tapestries on the wall, exposed beams in the ceiling. What are those called? It should look like the Sistine Chapel when you look up. Yeah. Anyway. A modern wonder.

Do you want to do a promoted post? I'd like to do a promoted post because this 1954 Bentley R-type Continental Fastback Sports Saloon by H.J. Mulliner is considered one of the most beautiful cars ever produced, featuring a hand-formed aluminum body on a high-performance chassis. And this thing is just fantastic. I mean, look at this, John. This screams SF daily.

You could do an engine swap and throw your, you know, if you have a Tesla Model 3 right now, swap that engine into here. And, you know, it's going a Tesla model three right now, swap that engine into here and you know, it's going to be a little bit annoying to charge it, but there's more and more of these you know, supercharger stations. And this thing is just fantastic. I mean, I can imagine, imagine hearing that you know, you, you know, picture this, you're driving down the one-on-one and you, you, you know, you, you know, picture this, you're driving down the 101 and you, you, you know, you're in bumper to bumper traffic in this car that presumably is, you know, multiple, you know, millions of dollars. And you get this notification, push notification that says, you know, we're in for the deal.

Like send over the contract. We'll sign five million air our deal. And you're like, that just paid for this car there you go so like picture that visualize that go buy this and tell rm sotheby's that the technology brothers sent you fantastic let's go to grimes throw in some shade on the timeline from a 20 vc clip with the founder of suno founder of sooner says it's not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice.

You have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of time they spend making music. And Grimes comes with some heat. Says, this guy is a weak fuck boy and wants all of us to be weak too. This POV in the AI community is literal poison and cope.

People who want to destroy your dopamine receptors and make you intolerant to challenges hate humans and they are legitimately dangerous. Wow. Nuclear bomb going off on the timeline. You hate to see it. You love to see it. It happens every day. We got to see it you love to see it it happens every day i see um i see both i think both points of view are correct in their own ways i think that it's awesome that a bunch of people are going to make music now that never made music before when i think about growing up you know i had the benefit of parents that were insistent on

piano lessons guitar lessons i had to you know singing lessons i had to be making music weekly daily i was forced to practice i went through periods where i didn't like it went through periods where i loved it and that was all i wanted to do but yeah i i don't remember i remember as a kid being you know thinking to myself i don't want to practice piano right now but that was more so because i wasn't i i just was like seven years old and i wanted to i don't know like throw rocks at the house or something like that um so i think that uh but but it's the same thing i saw other people making the comparison of of a marathon runner doesn't go oh I'm so annoyed that I have this blister that's so annoying I wish that I just never had any like adverse situations they're not thinking

in that way right so a musician who's like I've trained my whole I had to train for two decades to get this good at violin that's so annoying I wish I could have gotten here in in a day right nobody I don't really don't think that's how people think wish i could have gotten here in in a day right nobody i don't really don't think that's how people think yeah but simultaneously it's great that there's new tools that will make it simple for people to create beautiful art right even though it's definitely machine oriented and so this same type of pushback against dj djs and electronic music of you don't have a full orchestra why are you you know this isn't real music so I think there will be this separation a continuing separation of artisanal handcrafted

music and then music that sounds very similar that was created by machines yeah there's some DJs that like they're EDM but they have like almost a live band when they perform and everything's like live drumming um there's kind of like a the good ending i think here looks like uh there's an there's an app i think it's called synthesia that you can run on your laptop above the piano and it turns it it's a real piano that you're playing but as you're playing it moves the notes down visually so instead of reading sheet music you can just see like it's the key to the left. And that makes piano like way easier to start.

It's like Guitar Hero. But you're playing the actual instrument, which is cool. So it's like kind of cheating. And then a lot of music production in hip hop and rap specifically is just like almost just assembling other stems. So there's like these famous beats from like vinyl records that like Kanye will sample and then put that.

And then it's like, he's not really writing that particular melody. He's just kind of rearranging it. And I can see Suno being useful for like blocking out tracks. I know people are using it for stems and stuff. Mike's argument would be that Suno is going to be a gateway drug for people to fall in love with making music

and get addicted to making music. And then as they get more into it, they will, well, maybe I should learn this instrument or maybe I should do this live or maybe I should sing this myself. So presumably, if you make it much easier to do something, it will introduce more people to it. But I don't think, I think Grimes is also right

in that saying uh we should only do things that are easy yeah yeah is yeah is yeah it's just the most controversial framing possible on this but but he's clearly trying to piss off traditional music we already went through all this with the ai art stuff where it's like yeah the the ai art that actually goes viral is stuff that's like inspired like the Harry Potter Balenciaga thing where that was, yeah, it was all AI generated, but the prompt wasn't make something viral.

The prompt was clearly from a human thinking about, okay, it's interesting to combine Harry Potter and Balenciaga, these two things on the opposite ends of the spectrum. And then I'm going to do all the puppeteering of this and put it all together and have this song in there. And like,

soon it will be up a tool in that toolkit in the same way that content aware fill is a tool in the Photoshop toolkit or generative fill is, um, I mean, just yesterday I was mapping out that, like that, like spec ad that we're working on for the next video. And I was using a lot of movie B roll and then using some,

some, uh, some audio. And I was using a lot of movie B-roll and then using some audio. And I was looking for different songs. And it was like, I was really having to shuffle through all the different songs that we could possibly fit in there. And it would have been,

I probably could have prompted something for like, I just need generically dramatic music right here. And then I just want higher energy music during this section. And I just want to have it paced out a little bit. And some of the stock music sites allow you to filter for that stuff but you still have to listen to a lot of it and uh clearly you know yeah one thing is that electronic music has not killed live music seems in many ways yeah just as loved and enjoyed as ever yeah uh should we go to Sean Frank? He says, do you want more domestic manufacturing? Current

consensus is to court multinationals with tax breaks, tariffs, and tens of billions in funding. I suggest a different plan. What makes China so powerful isn't Foxconn. It's the literal tens of thousands of solo factories making everything from buttons to springs to toys. We should build up, build the small mom and pop factories because they train people, make the parts that make the parts that make the part that make the things we buy. One giant automated mega factory is awesome, but if you want a hundred good factories,

you need about 10,000 shitty ones, barely figuring it out. The chips act is great, but we need to shit seriously, hire, invent and train invest and train shit 10 billion in zero interest loans i love the sound of that uh to start new factories at 10 million blocks only start paying back when you get to 10 million revenue so sean

sean is is goaded in so many ways not just as an operator running the most profitable wallet company in history, but he just is hilarious. And, you know, his ability to coin is phenomenal. I think he's really leaning into Coogan's law on this one and claiming the shit act. But I got a, you know, front row seat to Ridge's operations in the early days, And they developed a really strong relationship with a specific factory that they built up over time and many visits. And I think eventually they just took over all their production capacity. And every consumer product and hardware company today will tell you that everybody goes out and they look at the whole world. Where can we make this thing?

And they always end up in China because china is half the cost and the products and outputs better and it's more consistent and yeah you have to deal with chinese new year and longer shipping times but it's just so much better and so um carried no interest is also talking about this as well like we need massive if we want to take this seriously we need massive massive massive subsidies and so both these uh legendary posters are right and i do i support the shit act well we were talking about this with the american toy company just this idea of like there's a i mean you buy toys for kids and they're all just made in china and they're all these cheap plastic and they're clearly designed to be used for three months and thrown away and they're they're not

something that will be passed down whereas if you look at like your grandparents they have toys that were passed down to your parents probably right it's so cool it's emotional and that emotion can drive consumer behavior and so if you start a company that their whole brand is like these toys are made in America they still do all the cool things they entertain they have LEDs music and all this stuff four to five times the cost. Yeah, but they are more expensive. It's a luxury good.

It's more expensive. But then when you build, I had this, I was talking to Trey about this, like maybe to, you know, we get the missile factory after we get like the Happy Meal factory. And it's like, yeah, let's just have, you know, like Hadrian's obviously doing incredibly important stuff right now with like very key defense companies that need products right now. And that's important.

But maybe we also need a Happy Meal startup that's just like, yeah, we do injection molded plastic and we just do it pretty well. And we do it as well as we possibly can in America. And maybe the tariffs will help with that. Maybe the consumer choices will help with that. But we're dedicated to this for the long term. And over the long term, we think we will be able to get at parity yeah with with robotics that's a request that's a request for Shardis by the way sure American toy company please somebody build it I think you should

sell items that currently go into a toy store look at all the stuff that currently is made $20 you make those items for 50 to 100 dollars here in America make them really really good and and and i'll just tell you uh this is more like a request for dinos because i buy an obscene an obscene amount of dinosaur toys and i like buying the ones that are these heavy rubber because i'm like well i'm going to be able to read i'm going to be able to donate this and it'll still be in really good condition i don't want this cheap stuff and and like nine times a lemon of ten. And slap an LLM in it. Yeah. Put an LLM in it. I mean, nine times out of ten, you're so much better off getting a small child, like, one

really amazing toy than, like, twenty toys. Yeah. Where they just cause a lot of clutter. Like, the clutter builds up no matter what. The clutter is insane. With the toys. And so, like, if you came to me and you're like, there's this amazing toy that's really popular and it's three grand or something.

Yeah. I'd be like, hell yeah. Like, that sounds amazing. Yeah. Whereas, like, instead of it yeah like that sounds amazing um whereas like instead of it's like oh like you go to the toy store it's like everything's like 20 bucks which is like great because everyone can have toys but like there's definitely the first time in my adult life there was as an adult there gets to a point where all the stuff you want costs five grand and up and uh and so it's great walking into a toy store and being you

know like I'm gonna buy the whole store but at the same time I'd much rather buy and and you want something that's like an Italian suit something that yes something one of yeah just I want something that's wooden cool material yes you know Boston Dynamics like that yeah they're making these like transformer toys that a couple of them went viral I actually do want to

I want to get I want to get I want to somebody make a Boston Dynamics kids toy dog because I'd like a dog but I want to be able

to turn it off and I don't want it to poop in the house and but I still want it to be fluffy and loving and conscientious

and I think that LLM's can do that so toy dogs that toy dogs for kids 500 bucks And, but I still want it to be fluffy and loving and conscientious. And I think that LLMs can do that. So that's great. Toy dogs that toy dogs for kids, 500 bucks to a thousand dollars. You could probably charge more because like a dog is pretty expensive. Don't have to feed it. Just got to plug it into the wall. It barks. It, you know,

develops a relationship with your child and you never have to take it to the woodshed. And it has an AR-15 inside in case it needs to do some home defense. All right. We're, we're, we should just keep going. Let's do a bucket pool, a luxury watch guy. Uh, first time on the show, but I've been a follower of his for a while. Uh, he says 2025 predictions. Zuck is going to end the Apple watch. Uh, this is not satire. I have had a few big boys from Silicon Valley DM me that they want to start building collections.

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

they don't make enough FPJorns to satisfy demand. It's just they're like they're they don't make enough fp jorns to satisfy it's just impossible um yeah i just recommend if you're obsessed with your apple watch you got two wrists for a reason god gave you two wrists put them to use you got throw the apple watch on your ankle yeah that's more of like a that's more of like a longhouse technology so throw it on throw it on the ankle that's you got exposed i got exposed ankles you're slapping it's much more of a you know you're no i mean if zuck wanted to really kill the apple watch he would need to launch a competitive product something i want here's what i want i want the meta watch and it's just the reels feed yeah and you can just watch swipe

constantly swipe all day there's no other functionality just constantly content uh i mean the the the new uh orion headset does have a watch it's not an actual watch it's just a wrist band but it it measures what your hands are doing and then that translates into the augmented reality experience and so you could imagine if they really want people to wear the glasses all the time and they want people to have the wristband all the time well throwing watch functionality out and making it look like a watch making this look like sunglasses or eyeglasses and making this look like an actual watch is gonna be much easier than saying okay I still have a watch but then you also have this wristband. Actually I really wonder why Meta hasn't done a smart smart watch at least for the international market that runs on whatsapp right yeah you

know when somebody messages you in America on whatsapp right yeah you know when somebody messages you in america on whatsapp you're like really dude we're both here we're both here let's jump over to the you know i message like we don't have to do this yeah um but you'd think that they would have done something in that lane given um well they tried they tried to do a phone chamath was on the project apparently and it didn't go well yeah the facebook phone this was 95 percent of the chamath's just like sitting there like what if we spun this out as a spec no uh but yeah the the the getting into hardware is really hard especially if it's an existing

platform where there's this entrenched duopoly, getting people to switch is really hard. Tricky. Yeah, it would be cool to see if Zuck took a sabbatical or a trip to his island in Hawaii and was like, let me just think of a cool consumer device

instead of thinking about what needs to be at the platform to lock in and all that stuff. The thing I've liked about these AI hardware startups is the shots on goal. Totally. And people think about software as it's okay for software to take shots on goal and have misses, right?

Think about how willing people are to experiment with software. Yet with hardware, there seems to be this sense of it's super embarrassing if a hardware device flops, we should only do it if we're going to really make it the core thing. Whereas Meta is like, okay, figure out a way to spend $20 million, which is a rounding error for Meta to make a new- They've never done that. They spend $10 billion on the- Yeah, yeah. a new they spend 10 billion on the yeah yeah like they're spending 10 billion on everything why doesn't doesn't duck oh yeah yeah set up a skunk works team skunk works where it's like you know avi from friend is launching a consumer hardware

device for five million dollars yeah so why don't you do a bunch of stuff like that right yeah exactly but you can like distribute just like think of it as as, you know, it's OK for it to be ephemeral and it's OK to just put stuff out there. And I want our big our lovely big American tech companies to just be innovating and just like doing cool stuff. Launch a printer. Launch a printer. We badly need a better printer that can do 10,000 pages a minute. We should maybe do one more and then wrap it up. Yeah. Let's do. At this rate, we could hit five hours.

We could do our first five hour show, but our children want to hang out. Let's go to Dennis. He says, you just got lucky is equivalent to I failed more times than you tried. I like that a little bit of a, just an inspirational quote. Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, there's so much, most of the successful entrepreneurs I know have failed more times than the entrepreneurs have, I know have ever tried. Right. And it, the, the most, the worst thing is when somebody who wants to be

an entrepreneur tries really hard and fails and just gives up completely and that happens so much so you just gotta take a bunch of shots on goal and that's one of the honestly the downsides of venture capital is the stakes become so much higher and now it's become easier for people to raise venture capital and so i feel like the stakes get lower in a sense because no the stakes are low million dollars i get a 400k salary on day one no but it's more like it's more like uh when you raise venture capital you're you're you're taking people's hard-earned money and then you have to like turn that into you're

trying to turn that into multiple and you're certainly trying to build a business faster. The emotional pain and turmoil, if you don't do that, is so real. And then, okay, if your company sort of works and you're stuck on that idea, if it doesn't work,

you know, maybe you operate for a few years and then whatever. And so it eats up way more time. Whereas when you don't raise venture capital, you can just ship, ship, ship, fail, fail. You're not wasting any resource except your own time and money. And so I think that,

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

Phone, address. Everything should add up to eight. Business partners. Yes, exactly. Group chats. Yeah. So get your feng shui correct make sure your desk is in the power position it's easy to do just move the follow astrology yes do not incorporate without

consulting with the stars yeah make sure it's the right time to get on stripe atlas yeah stripe atlas should have an astrology it's like hey before you hit submit you're gonna have a better chance if you just wait 12 you know 12 hours andff jeff weinstein over at stripe atlas please add an astrological incorporation functionality it just can be devastating if you do it at the wrong in the wrong uh day month exactly