Insurance Companies Deep Dive, Wanted Fugitives, Run On Mahogany, Yearling Lot 1007

Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, why are you wearing a mask?

You know, Taylor Lorenz might say my culture is not a costume. But to that I would say I'm wearing this mask to draw attention to the very real fact that the air in la, even though the AQI is at a decent spot, is still deeply toxic. A lot of the buildings have burned this last week were created at a time when we had very different building codes. And so a lot of the materials that were used and in some group chats locally that I was in, people were, I'm actually dying. No. So people were basically saying that a lot of this stuff is, you know, if you're breathing in these toxins, health issues can oftentimes show up like years and years, decades down the line. So dude, you know what blew my mind? Got these masks for us to record. I think I'll take it off. We do have inside ventilation here, but everybody should be wearing masks. It's annoying. It was cringe. And when the experts told us to wear a mask last time, maybe it wasn't based purely on I probably shouldn't. If we say experts, YouTube algorithm will probably flag us.

Who knows?

But I think we're already flagged anyways. Wear a mask if you're around.

You know what really, really makes me like kind of like terrified is you see these tours of the burned down houses and you'll see like the chimney is still there in most of these houses because the chimney's made out of bricks, but there's nothing else standing. And I'm like, where did the refrigerators go? Like the refrigerators are made of metal and plastic and they literally just melted and that went up in the air. So you're just breathing a refrigerator if you're breathing the air, it's crazy.

Did you see that? There were cars that had, I think aluminum that melted, wheels that just melted. Crazy patterns. But anyways, wild. So, I mean, if you want to.

Hear some crazy stuff, we should start with this first. We're going to do a couple deep dives, give you a little history on the insurance industry. We're going to, you know, move on. We're going to still be talking about tech this week, but we thought this was an interesting opportunity to kind of break down some, you know, founders, investors, entrepreneurs who have had a major impact in insurance, construction, home development, real estate. So we're going to be taking you on a little bit tour of, you know, we always like to ask the question, even in a disaster, like, who's making money, who's losing money. And you heard it on a previous episode. We did a whole deep dive on Rick Caruso, learned about his career. But there are a lot of other people that, you know, their innovations will be important to getting LA back to where it was before the disaster. And there'll be a lot of people that come in with new businesses. And so we want to, we want to deep dive all that and use that as kind of like the theme for the week. More or less.

Yeah, for, I guess, for some context, because, you know, we're here in la, so we've been sort of pretty fixated on everything going on. But as of right now, they're projecting that these fires will have cost somewhere in the range of $150 billion is the official number. As of now, everybody expects that to tick up over 200 at some point. I believe that Hurricane Katrina was somewhere around 200. So this will be more damaging than Hurricane Katrina. And then even to put it further into context, the previous most costly wildfire in US history was a campfire which happened near Chico up in Northern California. And prior to that, and another more recent event was the Lahaina fire, which was $6 billion. And then under that is the Woolsey fire, which actually burned down. The house that I bought last year had to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. So just to put this into perspective, Lahaina fire was devastating, but it will be a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction in comparison to the damage caused by the LA fires or the Newsom fires, as I think we're calling them, or the Bass fires. Simon was putting the word out to ask, you know, what we should call them. But without further ado, why don't we, we want to kind of get.

I got to read about a historical fire first because it's, I mean, this like the, the real definitive story of the Palisades fire has not been told yet. But two years ago there was a massive fire wildfire in Australia. And the Economist wrote a really, really eloquent and interesting deep dive on what happened and how they're changing things going forward. And I think there's a lot that you can learn about it. So say Australia is the most, is the world's most fire prone continent. When temp, when temperatures rise and the hot winds blow, a lightning strike or cigarette butt tossed thoughtlessly out of a car window can spark a flame that rapidly burgeons into a panorama of hell. I love this writer is so good. Temperatures at the heart of the blaze rise to 1,600 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt steel. These hurl dry lightning and bursts of hot air earthward stoking the conflagration further. Hundreds of these fires burned across Australia in the antipodean summer of late 2019 and early 2020. There were a bunch of volunteer firefighters described being caught inside fire tornadoes. Their engines overturned by vortexes of scalding wind as residents.

Engines overturned is insane.

Yeah. As. As residents made their escape, they saw the aluminum wheels of parked cars melt and run down the gutter like water. By the end of summer, Australia lost 34 people and approximately 1 billion animals. Isn't that an insane stat? It's crazy. And then they go on to talk about how the smoke was so large it reached the North Pole possibly for the first time. And the question is, how do we survive this age of fire? The pyro scene. And they go into talking about some of the. The original people who settled Australia have a whole bunch of firefighting techniques. And it all starts with just being able to under look at a mountain and understand is it ready for a controlled burn? Is the ground wet enough so you're supposed to burn when the ground is wet so just the top burns and it doesn't get as hot. Yeah. And he has a bunch of. This dude they interview is like such a badass. Okay. Tall, broad shouldered, 48 year old Australian Victor Stefanson believes the solution to Australia. Yeah. Victory. Yeah. Believes the solution to Australia's blazes lies in his people's ancient understandings of their lands. Australia's native flora evolved to thrive in fire. Banksia is a type of evergreen bush. Holds their seeds in woody capsules and these open like cooked muscles when they're scorched by flames. And the seeds are released onto the cleared ash flora.

That's, that's a big issue. That was a big issue. Issue this last week is eucalyptus trees, which we imported. Apparently when they burn they have this sort of toxic oil that gets released that's super flammable.

Yep.

And so it's been very clear that the landscaping that you use, vegetation. It's a good argument to say we should just eliminate all eucalyptus trees.

Yeah. I mean here it says some eucalyptus species require burning to make new shoots sprout. Like you're supposed to burn them regularly. And so they're not. If they're in an area where, where there's enough fire prevention to not have regular fires, they're just gonna build up and then it's just a tinderbox.

Yeah.

Really, really bad. Um, so yeah, it's so.

It's so wild too because all this stuff was super top of mind. Cause I just went through the process of getting home insurance and I almost had to use the California Fair plan and I ended up finding another provider. But the California Fair. California Fair plan, which we'll get into at the end of this episode, is probably bankrupt. I mean, it's definitely. It's kind of this weird public private group, but it's probably do doa.

Yeah. But anyways, this guy is such a chad. He says if you can't burn barefoot, you're probably doing it wrong. Just like, yeah, I'll go out and do a controlled burn barefoot because I'm so confident in the way that I can burn that the ground's not going to heat up and I'm going to be able to get out no problem. Just like really in tune.

He's almost like. It's like he's farming.

Yep.

You know?

Yep. Reading the country this involves. He says there's a central principle of fire management. Read the country. This involves examining the distribution of trees, bushes and natural fire breaks, the thickness of undergrowth and the amount of moisture in the ground to ascertain whether a fire will remain cool and under control. Every landscape is different. Each burn requires a fresh analysis. So this dude just goes out there and, and, and burns and burns stuff. It's pretty, pretty wild. But we should move on to the insurance industry, which is, as you mentioned, likely bankrupt in the sense of the state backed one. And there's a bunch of interesting versions of that. I think we should do the history of State Farm and some, some of the, some of the insurance agencies as well as talk about.

Yeah, we'll start with some of the history. Yeah, let's start with the history. And then we'll go into kind of what's happening on the ground now.

So I found this short transcript from Warren Buffett at the Camry driver. Yeah, Camry driver at a shareholders meeting. And he says the history of insurance is quite interesting. It's not studied at business schools, but it should be because the great insurance companies of the early 1900s, Aetna, Hartford, Travelers, they had agency forces nationwide and primarily wrote businesses back then. Property business back then. So property insurance, they wrote a lot of fire insurance. Of course, the automobile emerged in the early 1900s. So their focus was on property insurance. They had huge agency forces throughout the United States. Property insurance agents represented these big companies across the country and they had plenty of capital. If you look at the business in 1997, well over 20%, probably close to 25% of personal auto and homeowners insurance was written by State Farm. It began, I believe, in the 1920s with a fellow in Bloomington, Illinois, who will discuss. George McCurl. Yeah. Bloomington, Illinois. It had no agency force initially and started as a mutual company with no stock options or capital that could make someone a billionaire if they built the business. So this company began without the usual capitalist incentives that were taught that we are taught are essential for growth. And in a huge industry, it became a dominant player. So it's questions like, how did this happen?

We'll talk about this later. But there's an emerging, emerging company in the home insurance space called KIN that has this structure set up where the premiums are paid into this sort of nonprofit group and like, structure, to put it sort of plainly. And then that nonprofit pays a licensing fee to the technology company. But, like, really they're. So it's trying to align incentives. So history of insurance is like finding the. It's. It's a finance. It's finance. So it's finding these, like, weird creative structures in order to deliver the end thing, which is protection against, you know, catastrophic risk.

I mean, he'll go into more of this, but it's a great question. It's like, how did this company get so big and dominant without the usual capitalist incentives? But what's funny is, like, you already know this is just going to like, tie socialists in knots because they like, there's already so much misinformation about like, oh, like Fidelity owns every company. It's the most powerful company in the world. And it's like blackrock. Same thing. And, and, and this is one of those things where it's like, well, you know, are like. Like State Farm is owned by the policyholders.

Yeah.

Like, it's a mutual company. So, like, it's going to be much. It should be much harder to make the, like, evil capitalist argument. But they're definitely not going to like, look that deep into this. But we will. We'll put it. We'll keep in the truth zone as much as we can. So State Farm has more than twice the market share of Allstate, the second player. It became the dominant company against deeply entrenched competitors with strong distribution systems and ample capital. Incidentally, on the Fortune 500 list, State Farm has the third largest net worth of any company in the United States. This was a couple of years ago, all from Bloomington, Illinois, started by someone who had no money in it. How does that happen? That's A subject worth studying in business schools. Darwin once said he wrote down any evidence that conflict, that conflicted with his convictions within 30 minutes. Because the mind quickly rejects contrary evidence to cherished beliefs. Isn't that cool? I think that's great. I think that's a great like just thing to do. Like when you find evidence that violates your, your, your strongly held beliefs, you just have to write it down because otherwise you're, you'll just be. I can't even deal with that data point because it violates my, my current worldview. I love that one. And so he says this is Warren Buffett going on. There are some long held beliefs in business schools that could be challenged by studying how a company becomes the third largest in net worth with no apparent advantage at the start. Another company in Texas, usaa, the United Services Automobile association has by net worth, do they mean. He means market cap?

Market cap? Yeah, he means market cap.

He's just using net worth, which is also kind of badass. Be like they're, they're the same. Like corporations are people.

Corporations are people. Great people.

So USSA USA has been enormously successful with billions in net worth again and highly satisfied policyholders. It has the highest renewal ratio in the country. Nobody studies that to my knowledge. Geico's founders, Leo Goodwin and his wife left USAA in 1936 and started Geico with almost no capital. Now we have about 2.7% of the auto market and we'll probably write 3.5% billion in voluntary auto insurance this year. Catching State Farm will be very difficult. So I won't predict that. However I do predict we'll gain substantial market share over the next 10 years, including this year. We have a good mousetrap. And then this is the best part of this. He basically goes into an ad read for his company, geico. Listen to this. He says I mentioned.

Where was this again?

This was at the Berkshire meeting. Yeah, the main meeting.

So he's talking people, all the people that are 100. So this is, this is an example. This is a founders. You can never over promote your business and, and investors.

Yep.

You can never over promote your bags.

Never, never.

Like he's literally at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting.

You have to be a shareholder to.

Be in that room there. And he's still. Yeah, I want to take a quick second to talk about Geico.

Basically he says I mentioned in the report that 40% of you would save money by insuring with us. Literally that's what he says. Not 100% or 80%. Because there are certain areas or professions where someone else can offer a lower price. But across the country and for all classes of will often have the lowest price. We can do that because we have low costs, and those costs are getting even lower. We have a virtuous cycle feeding on itself. So GEICO will grow significantly. Still, State Farm is very tough. I'm not gonna predict catching State Farm or Allstate, but we'll catch somebody. Charlie, you wanna add anything? Isn't that hilarious? It's just like 40% of you guys could save money by saying Geico.

When we did a ramp ad during our talk at Hereticon.

Yeah, exactly.

It was a great ad.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, honestly, advertising to the. To the targeted audience is.

Anytime you have a captive audience, it's your duty to promote.

You got to. You got to run an ad. And so Charlie says, I love your example of State Farm. The idea of picking an extreme case and asking what in the world is going on here is the path to wisdom. It's too bad many mutual companies are trying to demutualize, spurred on by consultants instead of looking at State Farm. Of course, not everyone can be State Farm, but that place embedded fundamental values into its operations. The way it selected its personnel, the way it's selected and discarded agents. It requires enormous discipline. Wouldn't you agree? Warren says, yeah, somebody obviously did something very right. Charlie goes back to say, exactly. But I don't see anyone explaining what that something was. Maybe they don't want to because it didn't fit the conventional pattern. When a company like State Farm emerges, you should try to understand it. When a company like GEICO emerges, you should do the same. Back in 1948, I believe 2/3 of Geico was for sale because the original backers who came from USAA had died. So they. They'd put the money in. Because the GEICO founders came from usaa, they put in so much money that they owned two thirds of the company. And they were like, let's sell it this. So they were selling that stock, but nobody wanted it. And. And apparently State Farm had the opportunity to buy 2/3 of Geico for like a million dollars. Crazy. They didn't buy it, and so Ben Graham bought it. Ben Graham, of course, Warren Buffett's mentor or wrote, the father of investing, value investing. He spent six months trying to sell it.

Senra is to podcasting.

Exactly.

Graham is.

Okay, yeah, got it. We're kind of like the Charlie and Warren of podcasting. He's the Ben Graham. Exactly. Let's canonize that immediately. So he spent six months trying to sell it to the major insurance companies. They all passed. Even though they could see Geico offering a much cheaper product on a small scale and making money with it. So they had this like Geico had this early traction, this product market fit. Basically like they were doing something that was cheaper and buying Geico and they scaled up.

I still use Geico for auto and every time I go to agents to get alternative quotes, I'm like, do you have like, did you add a comma here? It's like oftentimes like four, like five times more expensive.

Yeah.

Is this a joke?

So they could have bought the Entire company for 1.2 million. Instead they stuck to their old distribution systems and got beaten up by the, over the years by these new ideas. You have to look hard at what's really happening. And this is a great ending. He says, as Yogi Berra said, you can observe a lot just by looking. I love that. So the question is, who started State Farm and how did he build such a great business and such a massive business without this economic incentive? And I have a theory which I will tell you. So this is a, this is a great one. Maybe we'll start with, we'll go through the Wikipedia and we'll go through some of the, some of the details on George. I gotta pronounce this. McCurl. McCurl. George McCurl. McCurl. I think it's McCurl. We'll work on that. But we'll just call him George. We need a friend.

If somebody wants to build a wrapper that just helps us, helps us pronounce exotic names, we would use it all day long.

Okay, so I'm going to call him George. Founder of State Farm. George was a second generation farmer in central Illinois whose family migrated to the United States from Germany. As an early owner of automobiles, he became concerned with high cost of auto insurance charged by all stock insurance companies at the time. And so this is from an amazing website. It is the Insurance hall of Fame.

Which everyone listening to this should aspire to.

If you're in the insurance business, you gotta go.

Even if you're not. Even if you're not. I mean, I mean you have a better chance of getting into this hall of fame than, than most. Yeah, I would imagine.

And there's a, there's a great thing about like why he started this. So he was upset, he was upset with the high cost of auto insurance. And what he realized was he was, he was a Rural guy, he was out in central Illinois. And what he realized was that the. The insurance rates were being set by companies that were based in urban settings. So it was like a Manhattan company. And they were like, well, in Manhattan you get in car accidents all the time. Yeah. So this is the rate we need to charge. And he was like, you're screwing my boys out in the farmland.

We're subsidizing your.

Exactly, exactly. And so, and I also, I found something else. I don't know where it is, but it was like he. He was obsessed with. Yeah. Okay. So after returning to Illinois, he sold tractors and discovered that he had a skill for selling to farmers. Believing that city insurance companies were rooking farmers by with high premiums based upon city driving accident rates, he became obsessed with the idea of starting his own insurance company. An honest insurance company was the phrase he used. And, and they talk about. It was something I read where he was talking about his time as a. A farmer. And he was just like obsessed over like the yield of like his beans and stuff. And everything about this here it reads, wait, Giga. Autistic. That's my theory.

Every one of our listeners, all the brothers are obsessed with maximizing the yield on their beans.

Exactly.

The beans are just different.

Yes.

Sometimes.

Yes. He was just. He was clearly autistic. Clearly. Clearly. Just grinder. Grinder. And. And it's amazing. So he starts. So he starts this company. In the spring of 1921, Tazewell County Farm Bureau organized a township mutual insurance company which was the idea of George used. He'd been considering a mutual insurance company which is owned by those who are insured through a membership. The Tazewell company was set up to insure property, including automobiles. He attended a meeting of the Federation of Mutual Fire Insurance Companies in the summer of 201921 in St. Louis. He spoke with the president. And those discussions helped crystallize his idea of starting an honest insurance company. Eventually, his idea started to take shape and he opened his first office in late 1921 in Bloomington. In 22, he developed a prospectus and presented it to the Illinois State association of Mutual Insurance Companies. And his plan called for his company to sell automobile insurance. The association enthusiastically endorsed the plan. He proceeded to get the state license he needed to operate. On his 45th birthday, State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company was in business in 1920. 2020 1922. So yeah, deeper into his career, still made a major play, made it work.

Common story.

He attempted to adopt programs that gave financial strength to his growing company while providing Unique benefits to policyholders beyond what was offered at the time. For example, he adopted a strict no drinking and driving provision to reduce accidents because it was legal back then. Isn't that amazing? He's like, this is innovation. If we can just get our members to stop boozing at the wheel.

No, hey, he's giving. He sends a PR news wire. Unfortunately, I have to announce that we will not no longer be allowing, allowing road sodas for our policyholders.

It's so funny because, like, now, you know, there's like those like, chips that you can put in the car. It goes in the ODB2 port and like, it tracks your driving. And if you're like braking really heavily, it'll like raise or like, you know, all sorts of things. Oh, it's a red sports car. You're more likely to get pulled over.

Stuff.

Yeah, yeah, all sorts of stuff. And like, check your phone. There's Metro Mile where if you drive less, you pay less insurance. There's like all these different schemes that like, are trying to squeeze like the last 5% of productivity out of the auto insurance industry. And he's just like, what if we.

Didn'T drink and drive Metro Mile.

Yes. Dave Friedberg and Chamath took it.

Oh, yeah, they're, they're, they're. Warren, he said it was their geico. Yeah, that's cool. Wait, Friedberg was.

Yeah, Friedberg founded it. He co founded the company. Yeah. And Chamath spacked it.

Yeah.

And cool idea. I don't, I, I think the stock's way down, but I don't know, it might have popped. All these spacs are coming back.

Baby spacs are back.

A lot of them, A lot of them have gone up like 5x.

I bet you if Friedberg, Friedberg is the founder, there's probably a nugget, like some fundamental, like good quality.

I remember talking to him.

Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah. So he also.

It's actually interesting. I bet you there will be a bunch, not a bunch, but at least a handful of Chamath spacs where if you buy them now, they'll be like a 50 bagger.

Yeah.

And then Chamath in however long will be like, see like another, like.

Yeah. I mean also a lot of these, like, they became such memes. Like the whole meme of like, oh, everything Chamath spacked is bad. It's like a lot of these got just oversold because, I mean, I had a buddy who spacked his company. I think it's 4 billion is the default stock. It went down to under $100 million. They had $200 million in cash on the balance sheet. Yeah, it's like, okay, at that point like the book value should be higher.

So the, the close friends, business partners Brian and Dhruva had latch which moth sparked and then at one point it was trading for less than their balance sheet, you know, so.

But there was no interest. Everyone. Yes, everyone was doomer on it. He also instituted the first installment payment program for premiums. This allowed farmers to pay their premiums when they received payments for crops. So he's like financializing things, figuring out it's like buy now, pay later.

This guy is the epitome of, of, of excellent capitalism. Built this super massive impactful company but clearly at every point was trying to find these win win wins for totally the company, the team, the policyholders, customers.

Yep.

And ultimately people out on the roads.

Right.

With that auto policy.

There's a, there's a good quote in here. So eventually his company became the largest property and casualty insurer in the United States and one of the 20 largest corporations in the Fortune 500. What a badass. Let me pull this up, George. So he had this great quote. They asked him like, you know, what is your secret to success? And he says, you know, hard work is important. But he put it this way. He says a man has to live and sleep with his business if he wants to make a go of it. You have to take it home with you at night so you can lie there in the darkness and figure out what you can do to improve it.

That's amazing.

Isn't that so true? It's so real.

Imagine having to build companies pre cell phone.

Yeah.

Just think about like after 6pm every night, how many messages we send back and forth.

Yeah.

On a given night it's probably like 100.

Yeah. So from year to year we are learning that service carries with it its own reward. And to the extent and manner in which our service is dispensed, compensation in every form will flow. And so I'm sure he wound up, you know, fabulously wealthy just through a little bit of a different, different path than usual. Also interesting is he there's like this trend that Charlie Munger mentioned which was like demutualization. Like a lot of these mutual companies are demutualized. Demutual rising or demeter demutualizing, like breaking and just becoming like default for profits. And it's interesting because everyone's looking at the open air for profit transition is like never been done. It's so Crazy. It's like I don't know, like there's a lot of companies that have been through this. Not that it's not that unprecedented. You start a company one way or.

To do it with a guy with the biggest megaphone in the world.

World doesn't want you to.

Doesn't want you to do it.

Little rough when you're getting the, the crying emoji under every time you post. It's got to be a little rough. But yeah. And there's a bunch of other stuff about, about. About State Farm in here. You know now they employ 70,000 employees. They have 19,000 agents offices.

I'll get into it later. Why the agent model ends up being. Makes. Makes insurance pretty hard.

Yeah. So 80 billion in revenue, 6 billion in net income, total assets 300 billion and total equity 100 billion. But that, that total assets is. Is. Is important because when something like the Palisades fire happens to absorb that. Yeah. I mean there was a lot of news about State Farm like stopping to like canceling policies basically in the lead up to this. But you know I think what did Warren Buffett say? They have like 40% of the market or something like that. State Farm maybe. Maybe a little bit less.

And so State Farm was especially. I mean the challenge was that they had 1600 policyholders in the palace.

Oh it's a lot of concentration, so huge concentration there.

I mean I doubt it was even concentrated for them. It's more so that. That 1600 homes is billions of dollars value.

And so I, I wonder like you.

Know how even I wonder who I really. So the succession, the house in succession that Kendall Roy is posted up in when he's going through his summer arc at one point.

I haven't seen that season. I just watched the first season I.

Think weird but okay. But anyways. But I'm familiar with the house because $125 million home.

Wow.

Obviously takes a special insurance relationship to ensure something like that. But burned to the ground.

Wow.

From a guy who teal fellow who.

Spec'D his company Luminar Austin Russell. Anyway, is there more stuff that we should move on to there? Should we talk about how insurance underwriting works and how these natural disasters are categorized?

Start there and then I'll get into some of the more.

Yeah. So I. I've been doing more of a deep dive on this. I listened to an Odd Lots episode where they talk to the someone who works who maintains a database of catastrophes and hazards for the government. So this is Melanie Gaul. She's co Director of the center for Emergency Management and Homeland Security at Arizona State University. And I don't think about like wildfires is homeland security, but it makes so much sense. And she manages a database called Shell Disk, the special, the Spatial Hazard Events and Losses database. So she's a, she's not an economist or a policymaker, she's a geographer. And she wants to just collect as much field data with GPS after a massive flood event, put it all into these databases and then that is used for underwriting and actually calculating like what, what is the right level of investment. And so Tracy Alloway on odd lots says, I read that the National Climactic Data center estimates hurricane, Hurricane Katrina losses at around 125 billion, while Sheldis says around 80 billion. How do we end up with such big discrepancies? And I'm sure we're going to see this with the Palisades fire. We already are. Somebody say 50?

There's numbers out there for Katrina that are around 200.

Yeah.

So who knows?

And so Melanie says it can matter when a community needs to justify a mitigation investment and must do a cost benefit analysis. Different entities measure losses differently, whether it's direct versus indirect or insured versus uninsured. Noah's billion dollar events estimates often exceed ours because they rely heavily on insured losses.

That's right. So direct losses in the Palisades, I think there's 20 billion of insured losses and then there's a bunch of other losses that just weren't covered.

Yep, for one reason. Or this particular database. Sheldis is a more conservative approach. If we see competing estimates, we use the lower one to avoid overestimation, which can further understate the real burden. And that's just kind of like by design of this particular database, obviously all the insurers know about the different databases and can adjust accordingly. And so Joe Weisenthal asks, like the big question is, are natural disaster costs going up? Is it really getting worse or is there just more media attention? And Melanie says, yes, it is getting worse. The risk is going up. We see more frequent and more severe events. But it's complicated. Our loss is higher because there are more events or because more people and property are concentrated in risky areas. Maybe society doesn't invest enough in mitigation or our infrastructure isn't resilient enough. It could also be that we have more socially vulnerable populations who struggle to recover. So yeah, if you go and build like the most insane billion dollar mansion out of, you know, birch wood in the most fire prone area, like that's kind of a choice on us. And it's not necessarily like climate change that's causing that higher loss. It's the choice that we made to build into the wildfire area. This is a lot of what we're hap. What's happening as Los Angeles expands is that people move deeper and deeper into the woods and into the mountains. And all of that is much more.

Well, to be clear, some of the nicest areas of L A are in these canyons on hills. And it's the places that are. Some of the most desirable places are, you know, dhh is like Malibu Lookout, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So Tracy asks, if a hurricane hits Florida, how does a typical homeowner expect to be reimbursed? My understanding is that there are mayor, many layers, private insurers, federal support and reinsurers behind them. And Melanie says it's complex and varies by state. In Florida, you'd usually have homeowners insurance, flood insurance from the state, from the federal government though purchased through local agents. So you actually go to your local agent and they act like a normal insurance agent, but they're just selling you a federally backed policy. And sometimes you might have separate wind insurance. In Florida, different policies might kick in depending on whether damage is classified as wind or flood. After Katrina, After Katrina, some neighbors saw their wind policies pay out while others were told it was flood damage which wasn't covered. It's not straightforward. And so the big question is why are insurance rates skyrocketing now homeowners, Florida homeowners insurance premiums rose 42%. Why are companies leaving instead of just charging more? So insurance companies explain that they face higher risk wildfires in California, hurricanes in Florida, plus higher building costs and higher premiums for their reinsurance.

Yeah.

So there's basically two big reinsurance company, Swiss Re, and I forget the other one, but they, they wind up insuring and to.

And to. To define it, reinsurance is insurance that insurance companies have to get.

Yeah.

So you got insurance. What's that exhibit, you know, meme that that's like a 20 year old meme at this point. It's like I got insurance for my insurance for my insurance basically. And so what's, what's interesting about California is that legally the insurance companies were never allowed to pass on the reinsurance costs to the end customer. And so they, and again, like, you know, nobody really likes their insurance company. Every time they have to interact with an insurance company, the NPS score actually goes down because you always are going to be like somewhat disappoint. You just had this loss and then you're dealing with this company that's trying to. There's sort of this misaligned incentive and that the insurance company basically wants to give you the lowest amount of money possible to not really piss you off as a customer. Right. But the more money they give you as a payout, the less profits that they have. Right. So it's this delicate balance. And that means that pricing is the number one thing in insurance. And if you misprice these things, it ends up. But the thing in California that is fascinating is everybody's like, oh, all the insurance are pulling out of California because of the wildfire risk. The reason that they were actually pulling out is that there was structurally a number of laws in place. One couldn't pass on reinsurance costs. There was measures to prevent the rate at which you could increase the cost. And so if inflation over the last few years has been insane, so if you can't accelerate insurance to keep up for that, to keep up with that, you're going to have a tough time. One thing that was interesting, as of last year, I got this on odd lots as well. Policies in California were only $30 higher than the national average. Home insurance policies In Florida, they're $2,000 higher. So Florida, the Florida market's like really much more efficient and sort of caught up and said, this is a high risk area. We need to price this, this higher. But statistically, the insurance providers in California have, and analysts have said that insurance providers, they basically need to catch up, like they're 60% behind on pricing. So everyone knew that California home insurance rates, even though they're already expensive, were too cheap. And the regulators had introduced something called Prop 23A long, long time ago that did not allow the insurance providers to use catastrophe modeling and climate science to set premiums. So it's basically so our California lawmakers were saying, hey, we just don't want you to charge a lot for insurance. So what we're going to do is say you can only set your insurance premiums based on how much you paid out over the last 20 years. And that works when the future looks exactly like the past. But in a scenario where maybe the government is underinvesting in wildfire mitigation, maybe we have. We've had more wind the last 20 year, you know, 10 years than we've had for the past 50 years on average. Right?

Yeah.

And so these insurance companies pulled out because the government literally was not allowing them to raise Rates to a level that they were comfortable with. Right. And going back to an earlier point, insurance is all about, you know, accurately pricing risk. Right. And finding that middle ground so the insurance company can make money so that they deserve to exist. And the consumer can. And the consumer can, you know, get. Get sort of payouts as needed.

Yeah. They've been getting squeezed on both sides because it's not just that the risk of the houses getting destroyed or burned down is going up, but also because of inflation in both raw materials and labor, the actual cost to rebuild is increasing. And so if you just see the price of wood double, you need a. Like you. It's more expensive. Your insurance should be more expensive.

Yeah. And so one of the other interesting things is there's this dynamic in the insurance market where the, the, the. There's a first mover disadvantage. So if you're the first home insurance provider to increase your rates. Well, I don't care who insures my home, as long as I believe they'll be able to pay out in a disaster or some type of adverse situation. And so if I'm with Allstate and then State Farm, you know, if I'm with Allstate and whenever my term is coming up, I think they're annually, typically, and they go, okay, we're raising, you know, 20%. And then state Farm is saying, well, like, we'll give you this rate. You'll just switch. Because it doesn't. You don't really. It's not like top. It's not even like picking furniture in your house. Furniture you have to live with every single day. Insurance you don't have to think about unless there's an issue. And so because the contracts are not very long, switching costs is low, and everybody works with agents. The agents will just be like, oh, you're not happy with this new price? I'll give you this new price. And so there's this weird dynamic where nobody really wants to raise rates, but you have to. And so what that led to is saying, hey, if we raise rates the way that we need to, we're going to lose. We won legally. Can't. If we could, we'd lose a lot of our customers. So we're just going to pull out entirely. And for State Farm, it was obviously the right decision, and now we're in the situation. Part of the crisis is that there's just this. There's not a. There's not enough people insuring homes in this area of Southern California. Right. When I ran this process last year, I was Only able to get to the Fair Plan, which was a state provide state, California state program that's a insurer of last resort and some random other, you know, group that I ended up going with.

Yep.

And, and so I think it was 20% of the, the worst areas affected by the fires in the last week. 20% of those homes were on the Fair Plan. And so that now needs to be figured out. And it's again, it's state sponsored and theoretically state backstopped.

Yeah.

But then it's sort of provided by these private companies. But so we're going to see how that plays out.

Yeah, there's an interesting discussion in here about how can like once the insurers actually pull out and say it's just not economical for us to participate in this market, how can states get, get insurers back? And there's this interesting example because you don't think of, you know, California falling behind Louisiana, but Louisiana gets cited often for good policy choices. Here's the example. The state helps cover, cover certain levels of risk and they have a insurer of last resort, of last resort called citizens. Unlike Florida, Louisiana Citizens must offer premiums slightly higher than the premium than the private market. So it doesn't undercut private insurance.

Yeah. Because it's this weird dynamic where you're like, wait, is the state competing with us?

Exactly.

It doesn't want to compete because they don't want to really be in insurance.

Yep.

And so here's the crazy thing. So the California insurance commissioner is this guy Ricardo Lara. And his task, his primary task has been how do we win back home insurance? You know, how do we providers to California? And so he actually released a new regulation in December of 2024. You can find all of these wires that were going out in mid December and literally on December 31, about a week before the fire started. And he was creating, you know, this new regulation would allow insurance providers to use catastrophe modeling and climate science to set premium prices. And the timing of this is just devastating because you know, he, he basically, you know, he probably, that probably would have needed to happen like a year ago for the changes to go into effect for people to get proper insurance. But there was basically a weak gap between that new regulation and the fires hitting. So just not enough time to respond. I have a bit more on how. So you know, one thing, the other pressure on insurance providers over the last, over the last few years and, and basically they were talking about this on odd lots. But, but basically insurance is finance, but it's like the least Sexy part of finance, right? Like, nobody's like, I want to go into finance.

Yeah.

Everybody's like, I want to be a.

No, thanks, Goldman Sachs investment size lord.

I'd rather sell, you know, insurance. Or I'd rather, rather work for one of these big insurance brokers or providers. And one of the challenges from the last few years is as there's been two factors. So there's been a capital supply shock, which is interest rates have gone up. And so these mutuals and insurance providers, they hold a lot of bonds on their balance sheet. And so as interest rates have gone up, the value of those bonds have gone down. Second is anybody that is financing these insurance companies is effectively getting paid for taking on climate risk, which is appealing when rates are near 0 or 2% or whatever. But then because climate risk is not associated with. It's disconnected from the Fed. But as rates have shot up, everybody's like, well, if my risk free rate is five and a half percent, why do I want to take on all this climate risk in a time when climate catastrophes have been accelerating, when it just starts to not make sense and so people will just look for other places to park their cash?

Yeah, I thought this other piece in New Yorker, breaking down Hurricane Milton was pretty instructive in terms of what we could see going forward. So for those who don't remember, Milton came in the, in the wake of Helene. This was back in October of 2024. We saw some crazy Wi Fi money kids setting up Starlinks to continue sports betting.

No, not even just sports betting. Selling courses on how to sports bet, courses on using the hurricane to sell courses on sports betting.

He's like, I don't have power, I don't have Internet.

I'm just playing a hustler, but I'm.

Committed to the hustle. But after this, the disaster in Florida, Joe Biden toured the damage and the unofficial death toll rose to more than 20. And more than a million Floridians were reported to be without power impacted by the storm. Although major was less severe than some forecasters had feared. But with Milton coming in the wake of Hurricane Helene, which had devastated parts of Florida, North Carolina and other states, the 2024 hurricane season represents a threshold crossing of sorts. It became this massive political issue. Trump said Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars on housing for illegal immigrants.

And yeah, that's another crazy stat. By the way, I've been asking people. So. So we spent $3 billion on wildfire prevention last year. How much in California? How much do you think we spent on benefits for illegal immigrants?

Oh, yeah, it's like 50, right?

30.

30.

So we spent. We spent 10 times as much on benefits for illegal immigrants as we spent on protecting, you know, citizens from. And taxpayers from wildfire. So, yeah, seems like that, that could shift.

And hilariously, in the New Yorker, they reference Marjorie Taylor Greene saying, yes, they can control the weather. And this became. I think she was, quote, tweeting Augustus. I think this was like a whole Augustus, because there was. There was a whole. Like this.

It's pretty, it's pretty cool that anytime somebody talks about the weather, they have to, quote, tweet Augustus. Now he basically runs the weather.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anytime it rains or doesn't rain, you have to talk to Augustus. But it became a massive culture war issue. A lot of Republicans were saying, like, the Democrats planned the hurricane, but then afterwards, it was all about the disaster relief fund and the. Although, you know, there's like a question about, like, the FEMA money technically is a different account than the housing for illegal immigrants money, but the disaster fund was empty. And so Congress needed to replenish, punish it. And, and the, the. The government was like, out of session. And so House Speaker Mike Johnson had to bring the Congress back into session. And, and that was kind of like slowing down the topping up of that fund. But again, it's just like, there's just more and more pots of money that just go in. And once they go in, how much of it actually goes to helping people in the degraded political environment? Making sure that FEMA was added, has adequate funding, and that effective policies are in place is far from a trivial matter. Definitely agree with that. And there's some interesting context on what's happening in the insurance market broadly as major insurers pull back from areas of high risk of any climate disaster. In states like Florida, California and Colorado, finding affordable home insurance policies is becoming more difficult in many other areas, too. According to the Consumer Federation of America, from 2017 to 2022, just five years, average premiums rose about 40% faster than inflation. Not even inflation. Inflation adjusted, still 40%. And government figures show they've continued to rise rapidly since then. With effects of climate change intensifying, the risks and insurance problems associated with them are no longer just coastal. They affect everyone.

Yeah, part of it there was. I saw something about how in Tampa, insurance rates were steadily going up like 10% a year. And everybody's freaking out, right, because they're like, what are these insurance companies are gouging us simultaneously property values were also doing almost exactly the same thing. So yeah, it's not like the whole as I, my, you know, as a, as an entrepreneur, when I, anytime I get to know insurance businesses, obviously Warren Buffett and people have done very well in insurance, but when you study these businesses, you're not thinking to yourself, I'd like to get into the insurance business. Right. Because like there's been periods where an insurance company has done billions of dollars in profit and then, you know, over a decade and then had it all nuked in. You know, in one event.

There's some good quotes here from CEOs of big insurance companies. John Neal, the CEO of Lloyd's of London, says, you'll never find an insurer saying, I don't believe in climate change. The frequency and severity of weather related losses are exponential. And then Eric Anderson, the president of Aon, the world's largest reinsurance intermediary, said, just as the US economy was overexposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is overexposed to climate risk.

Wow.

And so it's one of those things where it's like when, when you can.

Debate when that was this, this was.

Last year, so 2023.

Crazy.

Yeah. Before this. And it's, yeah, it's interesting because like there's a lot of debate over like, you know, is climate change real? How bad is it, where to come from and then what do we do about it?

And a lot of, and a lot of smart people will tell you, oh, it's real, but it's not. It's slower.

Yeah.

Than everybody talks about because we have been told over decades, oh like the sea level is gonna take, it's been.

Very like AI doomer, like fast takeoff like, you know, like Greta Thunberg. But yeah, we're all dead in 20, in 2018.

Slow and then all at once.

Yeah.

You know the L A.

Exactly. And so, yeah, very, very, very interesting that like, like it kind of doesn't matter what you think about climate change or the. It's like you can see it in the market. You can just look at the reinsurance market and understand that like clearly the market is pricing significant climate change disasters. And so we have to do something about that. Whether that's.

Yeah, it's interesting that the difference of. You look at fires.

Yeah.

Fires and hurricanes get the most attention.

Yep.

Earthquakes are very damaging, but seem to be, you know, we've built buildings in a way now that seemingly are, you know, they're sturdier. There's less.

Yeah.

Whatever. We're seemingly better prepared for them. Yeah, knock on mahogany. But. But hurricanes are not very preventable. Right. They sort of emerge and they have a path and you hope you're not in the path and batten down the hatches, but it's going to be nasty kind of thing. And then fires are sort of different dynamic. And why this has become so politicized, which we won't cover any of the political elements of the fires because we don't discuss politics. Even though I did think it was funny that Crooked Newsom went on crooked media during he went on Pod Save America, like, during the fires to, like, try to set his record straight. But we don't discuss politics. But it is, it is. The reason that there's so much anger in LA right now is there's, there's a bunch of evidence that we could have done more, we could have spent more, we could have, you know, the $17 million budget cut that turned into $200 billion of damages seems a bit silly in hindsight. The fire chief had been on record saying, we need 50 more stations in LA County. Like, all this stuff that's just super damning. Like, we, you know, our, you know, government did not take this seriously enough. And there's again, these communist policies around price controls that people in Sacramento telling insurance companies, you can't, you can't use climate. Like, the same people that are saying, like, you know, don't use water because of climate change or telling the insurance companies, you can't use climate science to set pricing for your insurance.

Yeah, it's become this classic battle of, like, if you say, if two people are talking about what to do about climate change, like, the left wing might say we need to curb consumption and the right wing might say we need to do nuclear and more forest fire prevention and fortify our homes against hurricanes and be proactive. And then that gets shouted down as, like, you don't believe in it. It. Yeah, and that's very problematic because it's like, there are plenty of things that we can do that actually result in more energy production and consumption, but still alleviate climate.

One thing's for sure, living in these areas is just going to continue to get more expensive. And one interesting anecdotal bit, a family friend's house burned down in the woolsey fires in 2018, which. The Woolsey fires was the same fire that took, took out my house before I owned it. So they did $5 billion worth of damages. And when after the dust settled, he went to rebuild his house and he couldn't get even though he had this insurance payout, he couldn't get a construction loan to build a place because it was all the quotes he was getting were for 60k a year. And this is for like a tiny like three bedroom home in the mountains of Santa Monica. And he's like, well I'm not gonna pay 60 grand. He's you know, in his 60s. He's like I'm not gonna pay 60 grand a year for the rest of my life to live in like a three bedroom house. Not including property taxes, not including any other like it just financially wasn't. And so what he ended up doing is he has like basically like nice RVs set up on the property that he still like uses but he cannot build structures because he can't get the insurance to. And maybe that will change with some of this just because again if we were doing, you know, it's, it's interesting. I have, I pitched brother Justin Mares on this idea back in Q4 saying how can we apply drone technology for wildfire detection and you know, real time mitigation and then also around home defense. Right. Because one of the challenges is when people one already insurance providers will give you a lower rate if you have like fire sprinklers, they'll give you a lower rate if you have like a newer roof that has is more fire protected. They'll give you a lower rate if you're like house is constructed in a specific way and but one of the challenges is when everybody evacuates and then an ember falls like in your backyard, like let's say it lands in the wrong spot and it starts this little fire and you're not there. And so I was thinking you could apply have a drone basically stationed on your roof that would just use, would patrol your, you know, effectively your house while you were away. And so I think, I do think there's a mix of high level.

My contractor showed me a house that he built where it's just, it's just a sprinkler on the roof. That's it. It just spits out a ton of water everywhere if you turn it on.

Yeah, yeah.

It's like low tech. So showing images from Japan, there's like some crazy automated turret that comes out if they have. Yeah. And it goes back to like there are two ways to deal with climate change. One is don't build the house in the first place. Live in the cave and live in squalor. And the other way is build the firefighting technology and clear the fields and build robots to clear fields and send up the goats and do the controlled burns and do all this stuff. And that's the more techno optimist pro acceleration like path that I want to take and the the New Yorker and the insurance reinsurance brokers in Switzerland and Germany agree with me. They say one thing that virtually those.

Guys always, they just, they just like that you're six, eight.

Yeah. One thing that virtually all sides agree on from the senior brass at Swiss Re and Munich Re on down is the importance of investing more resources towards adapting our natural and human environments, including homes and other structures to make them more resilient to climate change. That's easy to say. Affecting real change would involve making big decisions at different levels of government about contentious issues including public spending, zoning, building codes and taxation. Heller conceded that getting consensus for reform is a is a formidable task and noted that the economic fallout from climate change is affecting districts regardless of their political affiliation. And that's like super true here because you have the Palisades and Altadena probably very different political alignments and kind of just average net worth. But there should be both aligned. The hope is that they all get aligned around. Let's be more proactive, let's do more positive stuff. Let's build as opposed to let's cut back and let's restrict which is rough anyway. I think that wraps up our deep dive for today. A lot of rough stuff out there, but tragic. Pretty interesting to dig into. Hopefully we're learning some things. Let's go to some dms. I got a good DM from Frank. He said he recommends a new segment on the show called Forward Deployed Technology Brother of the Week. He's recommending pick submissions picture submissions from brothers in the field, test sites on the road, offshore, etc. Scenery aesthetics, grit and grind, sunsets, sunrise coffee and nicotine. Not group photos would be a gold mine for the Gundo guys. More American terrain on the timeline, not less. More redacted desert locations, not less Segments sponsored by Ramp for enabling travel and logistics or Palantir who is popularized. Who has popularized the forward deployed phraseology. Creative liberties, loose interpretations of forward deployed could basically mean anything off site like Zuck Venturing into Texas or for jre. I love this.

I love this great idea. Frank.

Recommendations if you want to be featured as a Forward Deployed Technology Brother of the Week and we'll just put it.

Out there right now either until further notice. Every, every time you tag, you know, say I'm forward deployed and tag us. Yep, we will feature it on the show Yep.

We have a request for. From Brandon Jacoby, who's been featured on the show under Personalities.

Brandon Jacoby. Hopefully Jacoby. Hopefully I can share this. Apparently he's now the only designer employed at X. One designer at X. You have any issues with X at all? Dm Brandon?

He's the only one.

The technology brothers said he was just texting me like two minutes ago. So that's good. Yeah, just flood his DMs like hundreds of messages. If we flood his DMs enough, the DMs product will get better.

You know, I think I actually. I don't know if it was him or Yaxin, but I actually DM someone that there was this weird feature when you. When you press and hold on a video, it speeds it up to 2x. It's a great feature, but for a while it would put this big 2x icon, like right in the middle of the video. And I was like, I don't need to know that. A and B. Like, just throw that in the corner up at the top. And I sent it in and then I was like. And one of the guys was like, yeah, I'll fix it today. And I was like, cool. You move so fast. And then a couple of days later, it's still up. And I was like, yeah, they were probably just like messing with me. But then it did get fixed and so I love it. So, yeah, you can, you can, you can affect real change. But the reason Brandon Jacoby is asking us to react to this picture that Sarah Hess posted is that she posted a picture of a. Of a watch and says when the second. When the SpaceX secondary finally hits. And it's a Audemars Piguet royal oak chronograph. Beautiful piece.

I can't really tell. It's black.

I don't know. Beautiful likes already.

Sarah just mogs the entire deep tech defense tech community. The other day she was posting a.

What was that?

The other day she was posting her. And I think a G Wagon six by six. Oh, yeah. The six by six being like, this is a good daily sex. So all you guys out there need to get on Sarah's level.

That caused a little bit of a stir. A lot of. A lot of defense tech bros were like, no, it's the highlights.

The Raptor.

The Raptor, yeah. But, you know, you can't go wrong with six by six.

I think. I think the cool thing is if you're in defense tech manufacturing or whatever and you're just on the road, you're a forward Deployed technology brother.

Yeah.

It's just so there's. You find yourself in such fantastical situations that it doesn't matter what you're driving and it's still cool. You could have Warren Buffett's old Camry and you have. It's just covered in dust.

Yep.

And. And you know, it's got like bunch of Lucy cans in the back. It just looks cool. If you're in a 6x6. Great.

The real question is, would Augustus Dorico have gotten stuck in the mud if he Was driving the 6x6?

No. Absolutely.

I don't think so.

I don't think so. And also it's six wheel drive. Rainmaker should have. Rainmaker should have a tank. Like they've raised enough capital at this point. They should have a tank that launches drones out of it and has the treads.

Amazing.

But anyways, all you technology brothers out there, stop getting mogged by Sarah.

Step it up.

She's posting the proof daily on the timeline.

Let's go to Civilization Enjoyer. Another question for us says, I love you, tech bros. Pod. Thank you. We love you too. Civilization. Civilization. Can you recommend a timepiece for me in my budget range? And there's some sort of like foreign symbol here. I don't know what that means, but says 56.34. Is this European money? I think it's European. And so in European, the Europeans, they use periods instead of commas. Right.

Anytime I go to Europe, I just use dollars the whole time. They're just so liquid. I just deal with it.

So is this $56,340?

Yeah.

Because at that, I mean, you could get the royal oak chronograph probably. That's about right.

Yeah. Let me check.

You're not going to be in Nautilus territory.

I mean, you're.

You could get a Vacheron overseas. You can. A Daytona probably. Yeah, easily a Daytona.

The other option, Paul Newman. The other option here with a, with a budget like that is, is you could have, you know, your father, grandfather, you know, some family member give, give you a watch, you know, as like a family heirloom and then use your budget on getting it tuned up a little bit, taking it to somebody to get it serviced, and then buy like half a bitcoin with the other. That'd be good, 50 grand. So.

Yeah. But on the off chance that he's saying $56.34. What, what, what would you recommend that? I think you got to go used Casio or G Shock something on ebay. Something that's respectable to the watch guys. Maybe something you know a Navy seal an operator has used and is all.

Banged something like that.

Buy Jocko Willinks old cracked G shock. That's something you could get for 50 bucks. He might just send it to you for free. I mean you're in territory where you might just want to do a little bit of e begging and just. And just beg for someone to send you an old watch at this point. But something with a story.

I'm sure anybody any. So anybody, anybody out there that's listening. If you have an old cool watch gathering dust please give it to civilization enjoyer. We're happy to help intermediate it. Yeah, we'd love to get him a watch.

Yeah.

First of many.

Yeah, get him started. I mean it's already a bad sign that he's dealing with the foreign money. It's rough. Anyway, let's go to my to be.

Saying you enjoy civilization from Europe.

Yeah.

Considering that they've been sliding backwards.

Miles Snyder asks us I feel like these $4,500 Rick Rubin approved headphones are the perfect podcasting accessory for a self respecting technology brother. It's the LCD 5 flagship headphones. Highly recommend going and picking these up. I think they're open back. Have you seen that? So they're actually loud to other people. You know about this? That's open back headphones. Yeah, they, they, they play the music. It creates this real sound stage so you can hear the music all over the place but they, they don't isolate it to the outside world. So other you're just mogging everyone else with noisy headphones.

Last night I was with Sarah and I I usually will listen to like an audiobook or video whatever going to bed without the screen off and I took my headphones and I just threw them over my like towards her side of the bed and I just started putting on like this like educational like kids, kids song. She just like took her like 10 seconds. She's like what the are you watching? I was watching like I'd watched a video with Roman on. On how oil rigs work.

Nice.

I didn't know this but a lot of them are actually pontoon boats.

Oh yeah.

They're floating where they are sunken underneath the water. Should do deep dive. Deep dive on oil rigs.

Hyundai Heavy Industries I believe is one of them that makes it. They make the electric cars and oil rigs. Grant says getting bucket pulled on tech Bros Pod is the teapot equivalent of getting bucket pulled on kill Tony Salute. That's correct. We were inspired By Kill Tony, we'd been doing a lot of post reactions and we wanted to mix it up, make sure that we got to the real bangers from the brothers from the friends of the show, the really key stories. But we wanted to mix in some random stuff. So we printed a bunch more posts, threw them in this bucket. We're really building up a thing. And these are random.

We have such a backlog. We might have to move to two episodes a day.

We have to if we want to get through these. And so we'll do some bucket pulls later in the show. A little bit more random, some friends, some randoms in here. A lot of timeless stuff and a little bit more focused just on good text posts. Not something that we need to necessarily make sure we're hitting a timely fashion, but it's more of just a random way to make sure anyone has a chance to get on the show. Let's go to a question that I got from a friend says POD is crushing by the way. Also question, do you think it's a good idea to work for Doge? Hmm, well, what do you want? And I, and I answered and we went, we chatted for a little bit. I said, well, what do you want out of life? What's your long term goal? And so question is like this guy has been working in tech. He's been, you know, an associated adventure capital firm, worked at a kind of series a, series B startup that was kind of pre product market fit, done some stuff, product manager style. And he's now thinking about joining Doge. What do you think?

Think so there's a range of ways that you can work on Doge. I don't know how much of it's public or private yet, but at a high level you can go and actually have a long term role within a job. A job like a long term job. And then there's also these sort of rotating groups that are rotating in for 90 day sprints to work on specifically.

That's what Vinay Higher Math did.

Yeah. And so it's hard to know. I think, I think he's thinking full.

Time like this the next couple of years.

Yeah, I think Doge is an incredible opportunity if you don't have your thing yet.

Yeah, right.

Or if you're working a job that you just don't care about that much, which I doubt any of the brothers do because they are corporate athletes and they'll find a way to care about anything. But yeah, just I think it's honestly the 90 day route and taking a sabbatical from your job and doing that is cool. The, like long term, you know, in.

It, there's actually a study on our audience and they found that we have the highest percentage of listeners who are doing their life's work of any podcast in the world. I thought it was exciting. So. Yeah, yeah, the, the. I. My thought for him was like, you should think about what your life's goal is, because if you're going into the government, that can be a great track for the right type of person. But if you stay in finance, that can be the right track for a different type of person. Starting a company and building it up.

I almost like doge. As great as it is that there's all these technology entrepreneurs and people within tech that are going and joining doge, we also need people from. That have histories in Washington to join because they actually understand how Washington works and how government works. Complicated stuff, you know.

Yeah.

It's clear for the faint of heart. So. So I hope that we're pulling in people.

Yeah.

From Washington to, to participate in this because I think they'll be much stronger if they're like collaborating.

Yeah. I imagine the correct formulation is like a blend. Like what happened with Andrew where it was like three Palantir guys. Palmer Luckey, who had no experience in defense, but is like this crazy. And then. And then Chris Bros joins, who's been McCain's chief of staff and like the swampiest dude in the world. I say that lovely. But, but, but it really is important that they have someone like that who's been on the Hill for so long. Really? Really? Add, Add to the, add to the information. Okay, let's see. Okay, we got all these. We're good.

I got a. Let's do a promotion post. So today this promoted post is from the Department of State and the, and the DEA, actually the Drug Enforcement Agency and the U.S. department, the U.S. department of Justice. So we actually today we have a promoted post from the feds from the narcotics rewards program saying that the reward for information leading to the arrest and or conviction of Nicolas Maduro Venezuela has increased up to 25 million. So this is like, you know, typical. This is basically like getting a pre seed round for like an AI.

It's kind of like a mango seed.

It's like a mango seed for your AI company. Or like if you're a good wise. If you're a good YC company, you might come out of demo day, skip the seed round and go straight to the, you know, 25 on 100.

Yep.

And. But anyways, this would go straight into your pocket. So Nicholas has been. Nick has had some issues with narco terrorism.

He had to run in with the feds. He's had a rough go. He said he's accused of narco terrorism.

Yeah. Okay. He has him innocent until proven guilty.

Yeah, yeah, allegedly. Allegedly. Nick has done some narco terrorism.

Narco terrorism, Cocaine importation, deportation, conspiracy to use and carry machine guns and destructive devices. Devices in furtherance of a drug crime. So anyways, no coupon code this time, but you can send tips to the Drug Enforcement Agency by email at cartelsoles. Tips.

For the folks who might be trying to track him down. Can you give me some overview of who Nicholas Maduro is and what he might look like if I see him on the screen?

Nicholas Maduro Moros is a Venezuelan politician who has served as president of Venezuela since 2013. He began his working life as a bus driver. He's clearly got vision, even though he may have had some issues with the law. Maduro rose to become a trade union leader. Ouch. That was his first problem, clearly, before being elected to the National assembly in 2000. He's got a wife that he married in 2013, Celia Flores. If you know Celia, you could ask her. He's six, three, Chad. Okay, like that. And yeah, basically 63, 62 years old. Normally, I guess he hangs out in Caracas.

Okay.

Venezuela. So anyways, just a great opportunity. I don't think enough passport. Bros will often talk about. Oh, I have this E Commerce business or I have this course business. I think there's a big opportunity to just like start contracting with the DEA. Going after some of these bounties. And this 25 million could fund quite a long stint in South America. If that's what you want. Life. So go get after it. And if you're. If you're more of like a course bro, which I don't think a lot of our listeners are, you could create courses on how to go after DEA bounties and how you could track down a narco terrorist. Like a lot of great.

A lot of opportunity these days.

So anyways, we'd love to check it out. We'll try to promote as many of these on the show as possible.

And if you do tell the. Tell the DEA technology brother sent you. Tell them you heard about the. The opportunity on the pod.

Yes. Really key.

We get.

We don't need any of the payout. We just want.

We just want the credit. Okay. All right.

This is Back to the Show.

So back to the show. Max. Passion and fury. At passion and Fury. Go give him a go.

By the way, thank you to the Lone Ranger for putting this.

Oh, this is fantastic. Thank you.

On a roadmap. I didn't know that. I didn't know the increase.

Yeah.

So it's a lot of money. Yeah.

So Max listener of the pod says, new technology for the technology brothers. He built a tool to quit quickly. Grab all clips referencing every mentioned X post on the pod. All you need is a YouTube URL at JordyHazeHugan. Would this be helpful?

You said jock.

Jocko Coogan. That's my. That's my goal is to just become the Jocko Willink of tech. And it's amazing. You. You dump in one of our. Our show URLs and it slices it up. This is amazing.

This is a live product.

Yeah.

Tech Bros. Clips.com.

Yeah.

And you can punch in.

Okay. Everyone goes there. It's going to blow up the site probably. Well, good test, but yeah, get a. Get a content delivery network up, buddy, because the traffic's coming. It's been super helpful to us already. Slices everything up. We're working on a slight iteration, but I think this should really speed up the flow of the show so that as soon as we wrap, boom, we put it in there, the editors can punch some of this stuff up and it can go out on X, which has been a huge, huge growth hack for us. And if we catch you stealing our growth hack, you're going to hear from us. Let's go to Megan Nyvold. She says, yeah, I'll be going now. And takes a picture of her purse where she has put a piece of fried chicken in there. And what's that? A beautiful tin of Lucy patches in her purse. I love it.

Megan also mogs the timeline. A lot of the other brothers with just, like, constantly living that sort of loud, opulent, loud opulence, TB lifestyle.

The Corona, the aquapona, the French fry boat, truffle fries. Fantastic lifestyle. It's great.

Yep.

Enjoy.

Go, Megan.

Thanks for supporting my company. Thanks for supporting the pro nicotine pouch community and helping evangelize.

Thank you for supporting iq.

Yes. Yes. Should we do a bucket poll? We've been. We've been talking it up.

Maybe we talking about it.

Let's see. Okay, this one's gonna be truly random.

This time because we have two champagne buckets, by the way, because the next Dom episode, we might have to just throw the Dom in with the buckets.

I can't believe I pulled this one. Oh, my God. Okay. Tokyo Sunbather says Karl Marx failed to consider how dripped out. I look walking out of the Polo Ralph Lauren store. There is a man riding horse on top of my chest, you communist.

Well, we don't use the R word.

On the show, but because it's low class and vulgar. But I'm quoting him, so that is an acceptable. Uses pejorative.

If, if, if ever we were to use that word, it would be in.

Reference following the communism. But that is a hilarious post.

Yeah, I probably read that a few times. Really? Really? Yeah. That's. That's, that's non. Even ironically, why capitalism is so great.

Yes.

Because you can get dripped out.

Yeah.

Exceedingly so. So back in the Soviet Union, jeans, you were. Yeah, jeans were a big thing. If you traveled through the Soviet Union wearing jeans, people would come up to you relentlessly making you offers, and they wouldn't even have anything to offer in the trade. They'd be like, hey, I have this, like, exotic melon that I grew in my backyard. I'll give you three, three of them if you give me your jeans. And you're like, I'll keep my jeans.

Melon Wild. Great post.

Great post.

Hilarious. Let's go to Jason Liu. He says do it Scared. I believe many people struggle with the insecurity of being intelligent. They often feel the need to prove their intelligence by overthinking excessively, planning and acquiring knowledge before taking action. However, this approach is a waste of time. The more you research, the more you realize how. How little you actually know. Instead, you just have to do it, even if you're scared. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Yeah, there's a lot of that, like, hustle porn. Like, I need more mental models and you more frameworks before I go and build the thing. And nine times out of 10, it's just like, just go, give a shot. And then this is like the whole YC thing is like, you show up, it's like demo days, ticking clock, 90 days. You got to put something on stage, got to grow, got to build the business. Like, if you go into office hours and you're like, I'm thinking about a frame, it'll be like, shut up. Like, go code.

Yeah. What meeting structure should I use? All that stuff.

Doesn't matter.

Yeah. The other thing Will Will was posting recently about how if you are going to read a ton of books instead of doing the actual thing, which at points in your life is worth doing, don't read the same books as everyone else. So don't read the same. You Know, one, don't read founder biographies. Just listen to founders podcast. Two, don't read the same like businessy self help books. Go weird. Go read weird strange stuff. Like from the crazy.

Biggest bull signal is when you're searching someone on a Wikipedia page, you go to the sources. It's some ISBN number. You go to Amazon, $2,000 book won't ship to you in a month because it's out of stock. You got to find some library that has it in stock, not digitized. There's no Kindle version, there's no audiobook version. That's what the alpha is.

Do you know, you know that book there, there's no anti memetics division.

Yeah. It's like trading at like 3,000.

I have, I have a copy and it's like, yeah, they went out of print. Moon.

Yeah, hilarious.

Nobody knows what the book's even about, but library cards.

Deeply underrated.

Yeah.

When Ben and I were doing some video essays, I would, we would just go over to the library and just pick up like every book on whatever topic it was. Like, I was doing something on GTA and the history of Grand Theft Auto and there's like one really good book that serves as like the backbone of the story, but there are like 20 other books that like have paragraphs mentioning it or talk about the development of the industry.

Talk to a librarian together. Yeah, and they'll help you find all of that.

I mean, even just walking around in the library, you'll find like there's like the Trump section. We got 20 books about the history of Donald Trump and 20 books about the history of Joe Biden. When we were doing those video essays about. This is really, really cool. And so yeah, you want to learn about insurance. Like, you can go on Twitter and listen to podcasts and. But just like it's called, like, I think of it like the shotgun method. Like when I'm trying to learn something new, it's like I'll find like, you know, a textbook on it, but then also a biography of someone who built something in there. Listen to a podcast on it. What is odd lot say about it? Read a wiki, go to Hacker News, search Twitter, and then also just stroll the library until you've kind of like sprayed and prayed all over the place and just gotten a bunch of different information that you can put together because like, that's probably not baked into the yet. So you need like random sources to put together. Then you get the alpha. Let's go to Hunter Gronk Wiz. Love the name says just spent $60,000 buying a stripe car. Women won't leave me alone now. Best investment I've ever made. And Jacob Martin adds us and asks @TechRosePod. Found someone almost as committed to stripe as you guys are to ramp. Do you think this is real? Do you think he actually bought the car? It looks just like a taxi cab. And he's joking.

He's joking, but I wish he wasn't. Yeah, Stripe. The Stripe car dripped very drippy, it says. Says a lot about the kind of person you are. He says you value literature, independent publishing. Smooth, sad Irish nationalism. Irish nationalism, Mafia incorporation. Tools like Stripe Atlas says a lot with a little, you know, it says a lot more than like a Martini racing Porsche. And I'm a huge Porsche fan, so. So delivery.

The Stripe livery goes hard. I would just like to see it on something with a little more horsepower, a couple more cylinders. Get the Stripe Delivery on a V10 next time.

Yeah, yeah. I'd like to see somebody apply the stripe livery on.

You know what? You know what? It should be going on. BMW i8. Most undervalued car right now. 40K. You have doors that go like this.

It's not under. I just will say it's not undervalued.

It's undervalued.

It's properly.

It's undervalued. I know, I know. It's not a great driver's car.

You're saying it's properly valued because it's worth 40k today and it'll be worth 20.

No, no. It is undervalued because once associates at VC firms realize that they can have doors that go like this for the price of a Model 3. It's over.

It's over.

Get that. Wrap it in the American flag. Oh, you're on the American dynamism team. Get an i8, wrap it in the American flag. Oh, you're working@ stripe.i8. Wrap it in the stripe logo.

That car. Really?

Half of them have already been wrapped.

Eight years ago. Eight years ago. I guess I hadn't moved to la.

Yeah. Isn't it a three cylinder?

It was very hot for a second. It was like a very cool car.

It looks cool and it's from a big brand. Yeah, it drives like trash, but that doesn't matter. It has doors that go like this. Jordy.

The doors that go like this.

The doors go up.

I do, I do. I want to go to the BMW Driving Experience center in Palm Springs. By the way, what would you.

What would you drive there?

I would.

What's your. What's your go to BMW?

I'm. I actually like the way that BMW.

To drive general the modern ones. I would go. I would go manual. M2.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Powder blue.

Yeah, yeah. That's a great option.

That's a good one. Still pretty light.

But I would like not the M5 the way. Remote setup, dash cam, totally starlink headsets. Or just re record the pod just while racing around.

Have you ever gotten into the old BMWs like the E36 M3? If you know the numbers that go in front of the M3S.

It's my car. Sherpa Michael lives here in LA. Not. Not far from the studio. He's big into that world, but not me.

Let's do promoted post. Another bucket.

Promoted post. This. This promoted post is from Mahogany. Mahogany is the official wood of business.

Fantastic.

We just wanted to draw some attention to mahogany. It's a great wood. They've got great grains. You can get it from all over the world. Bunch of different sort of varietals. And I just can't stress enough. Every business should run on ramp and every business should run on mahogany. Get Mahogany around your office, your home. You know, ideally it's in your car in certain places if you're buying the right manufacturers and you're getting them specced out properly.

But get the i8 and replace all the dash with mahogany. Now we're talking. See, I can win you over on.

The side panels on the board.

Swap an F40 engine in there. Get the turbocharged V8 and the i8.

Yeah. Anyways, fantastic wood. Can't recommend it enough. And thank you to Mahogany for supporting the show.

One last one. I ate sto that slaps you. Throw some off road. Tires on there. Roof rack. The door still go like this.

Door still good.

You're good.

You can't charge the car anywhere, so you got to stay close to home. But you know, if you live at a ski resort, you don't need to charge it.

It's not electric. It's a hybrid.

It's not. It's not a plug in.

It's not. It might be plug in, but it doesn't matter. You can just put gas in it.

Cool. Okay, you're on board. I'm on board.

We're getting two.

We're getting an I. Crashing them. Crashing an i8 was like kind of the it thing to do the supply.

There's probably only like 40 left. They've all been crashed and wrapped by crypto.

The case for i8 is that it's an iconic car.

It's the Halo car from like one of the most iconic brands. BMW.

Okay.

Put your money.

Put your money where your mouth is.

Pick one up. This is stupid. We already talked about that. Bucket.

Pull something brutal. Bucket pole.

Let's do that. Oh, this is good. Nikita beer. He says the three jobs after AGI actually 1, AI researcher, 2 influencer, 3 looter slash prisoner. What do you think?

Feels pretty. Pretty real after this last week.

Yeah, not if you listen to Tyler Cowen on dwar Cash. He says it's going to be very slow for AI to take over some of these more entrenched industries. The nonprofit people will still have jobs. The farmers. And if you talk to Brad Jacobs, when he set up his new fund, he specifically was looking for AI Resistant industries. Where'd he land? He landed in construction materials. He's rolling up construction materials companies, making it easy to order construction materials if you're a builder, obviously. Great timing. And I'm sure there'll be a bunch of interesting stories that come out of that company. His second most interesting choice. He surveyed all the different industries for AI resistance and also just economic opportunity. The one that he wanted to go with was oil and gas, but he couldn't. But the ESG thing was too overbearing.

I have a thesis around it. Used to be young people would see the oil and gas industry as the same level of opportunity as technology.

And Wall Street.

Yeah, yeah, Wall street. Where it's. Maybe you're in Texas. It's like, well, I'm gonna stay close to home and go into oil and gas. And for a very long time, it just was not even on the radar of a lot of talented young people of going because it was so demonized. Then it's like, okay, well, we need this stuff for. Yeah, everything. So maybe it's not so bad.

Yeah, you gotta watch that movie.

The only thing I would add to Nikita's list is guys that repeatedly launch the same app and repeatedly sell it to large corporations because they want your time and attention.

Universal employment for Nikita for sure. And I mean, I guess he's influencer on. What's that? Intro.com. yeah, yeah, yeah, he'll be fine. Yeah, People will pay just to hang out with him.

Yeah, yeah.

Even if they're not, there's nothing left to build. I just want to talk to Nikita generally.

Yeah.

Tell me some more stories, buddy.

Yeah.

John Chu at Coastal Ventures says why a $40 million precede. You can prove your research direction with 5 Million founder Somith Chintala told me VCs are willing to light dollars on fire for my pre training. So I'm not going lower. The spend plan includes his yearly multimillion dollar meta salary increase cash. We are deaf, not in a bubble.

I didn't really understand the format of this, but I do think that whatever the high level $40 million pre seed for the AI company was cool. I just, my only problem with it is if you could raise $15 million, spend a little bit of money tracking down Nicholas Maduro.

Yeah.

And you could get this 25 million non dilutive basically. Basically just you know, straight cash of the balance sheet and then use this for all your pre training. Use this to buy, compute, spend this on Nvidia. And so. And you know, I'd like to see this wealth transfer from the DEA to Nvidia.

Yeah, I wonder what the, what the stories are like, what is the biggest reward that's ever actually been paid out by the federal government for a bounty like that? And who got it? What did they do with the money? Like did it go to like Blackwater or did it go to just some random citizen who like called it in? I believe that there was a theory that there was a whistleblower in the Osama bin Laden case that was retconned out and not told in the main story. Have you heard this the Seymour Hirsch theory. Seymour Hersh claims that the, that the Zero Dark Thirty narrative, that it was like the CIA figured out where he was and then they're sending the Blackhawks and they were stealth helicopters and they got through like the Iranian defenses. Was it Or Pakistani defenses. That is like kind of a story that we tell to sound like a little bit more heroic. Which based. I like it. But the more the Seymour Hersh theory is that there was actually a whistleblower in the Pakistani government who called America and was like, I know where he is. I ran into Bin Laden's driver. This is the location.

And it could have been get me.

My $10 million for the bounty and I will give you the direct access. And then apparently America went to, went to the Pakistani government, said, we know where he is. We're either sending a missile tonight or you're going to turn off your air defenses and our Blackhawk helicopters are going to fly in. And they were like, okay, fine, you got us. We've been hiding him. Like we'll let you go in. So it's not like a national incident. And then the narrative globally turned into oh yeah, like we snuck in, we broke through their air defenses. And like they weren't complicit in it. So then there's not as much like global like, aggression towards Pakistan because they weren't part of it. Caught. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

What were you about to say?

Anyways, back to $40 million precede podcaster moment right there.

But do we want to do Zuck this one? I feel like it's kind of played out.

I mean, we didn't really talk about it yet. I, I, I don't have a lot of, you know the old phrase, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it. I'm glad he came around, but I'm.

Not, I haven't listened to the full episode yet, so I'll, I'll withhold my, my take. Let's go to Jasmine Sun. She says ins and outs for 2025 predictions are not endorsements. And the top one is lifted straight from our show. In ostentatious wealth out quiet luxury. We have been firmly in favor of that. In open water swimming out run clubs.

I would say we were in. We've been in favor of loud opulence, which you can actually enjoy regardless of whatever wealth you have. You can doordash all day long, spend that on a bottle of Dom Perignon and pop it off, you know.

Yeah.

Celebrate a hard day's work.

Yeah.

So you can, you know, anybody can do it.

So in our mob wives, Nietzsche, the western canon, going to the movies, aperitifs and digestifs, Russia is in and China is out. I don't know. In996 out quiet quitting in email romance. Out dating apps in cocaine out weed in secrets out transparency in fay.

That would actually be cool. A new dating app built around email would be is weird enough that you could probably get a number of users.

That's actually how Tinder started. They would do it all manually. So they would have. It was based on this thing that happened at Harvard where at the end of the year everyone would submit names of people that they were like, attracted to but never actually had a chance to really go on a date with. And then if there was a mutual swipe right. Essentially both people put down the same name. They would make an intro and then they appify.

Never knew that.

Yeah. In manning up and moving on out is yearning in ball up top. I like that. Out self reflection in travel.

Never reflect, never look in the past.

In sketch comedy out stand up sets a lot of good stuff in there. Thanks for posting that. I, I think that that's a fun list. Do you want to do your own post? Newsom's reign of terror.

I'll read it, guy.

Yeah, go. Go through it.

I, you know, Jeff. Jeff Lewis and, And people like Josh Diamond.

Yeah.

Have talked over the last, basically the last week and saying, hey, most natural disasters aren't political.

Yeah.

But it's actually important to make this one political because there were a number of failures by the state to address this problem before it started. And it's been interesting to watch Gavin Newsom, the vast majority of the communications that he's been putting out are all centered around correcting his image. So this guy, I think, is one of the most disgusting, despicable, evil political leaders that I've ever. I'd probably rather get a beer with Nicolas Maduro than Gavin Newsom. But anyway, so I had to share this. I shared this. I think on Saturday. I was pretty frustrated and it definitely resonated. But I said Newsom's reign of terror will finally come to an end in 2026. That's when his term is up. Hopefully he gets recalled. I think there's a bunch of petitions happening now. Years of zero leadership and degeneracy. I put that in there because he has a history of cheating on his wife. He. With his staff, and he also cheated on his wife with his best friend's wife, among other incidents. We now have dramatic visual evidence of his incredible incompetency, and it's on full display for the nation and the world. Very, very. He couldn't have had a more high profile. The campfire, which was, you know, one of the most damaging fires, was in an area of the state that, frankly, does not have a lot of influential people or attention. This one is the crown jewel of California, Los Angeles. And it's just on full display, very clear that. That the world now knows that he is incompetent. The fires will cost him any hope of winning the presidency, which he so desperately wanted. And you can see with his communication strategy this week, he's entirely fixated on yelling at Elon Musk for spreading lies when he is the biggest liar, the most lying politician that I've ever seen. His track record was always terrible, but his smooth talking kept the dream alive. I will give him credit. He always dresses well and, and he's. And he's good at yapping. Not anymore. As these images will follow the rest of his sad career and be placed next to his name in the history books. And this is one of those things. I literally think if there's going to be a history book On California, on this century, you'll have the Newsom era and the fires. These pictures will be placed next to his name because this is his handiwork. Los Angeles will rebuild, but Newsom won't have anything to do with it. So I don't think this guy. I don't think this guy will be able to walk around Los Angeles for the rest of his life without being yelled at. And he deserves it. I mean, like, absolute scum. And I make a. We make a strong effort on the show to never be negative or put people down because everybody's doing their best. But in Newsom's case, his best is not where it needs to be. So please resign Newsom immediately.

Who you got? Because Rick Caruso seems like the obvious pick for LA mayor who should step in as governor.

Man, I. I'm not a. My opinions on Newsom have only been from spending my entire life in California and getting to become an adult as his reign of terror, you know, was going on. And so I'm not a political. I don't have a lot of. I don't follow the sort of people in the stable closely enough. I don't think that Caruso, after the Bass election, wanted. Prior to the fires, I don't think he would have run the next time. He wasn't, like.

Now people are, like, demanding it from him.

Yeah. And I think Caruso's incredible. He has the only structures basically in the Palisades that are touching each other that are still standing. So if that's not proof that he's competent, I don't know what is. But he's getting up there. I don't know if he wants to do it four year term, but he would be a good pick. But I know we just need new leadership across the board. It also. I also had another post. It can't be shared widely enough, but if there's one thing that will publicly, you know, sort of state that we do not support, it is communists. Karen Bass spent the first half of her career literally traveling to Cuba when it was illegal to travel to Cuba. So breaking the law, taking multiple trips, coordinating with the Cuban government to spread communism in the United States. She was praised by the biggest newspaper of the communist movement in the 70s as being the leader of the communists. And the group that she was involved with is like a violent extremist group. And this woman failed upward into Congress. She was a represent. Not. Not. She was in the House of Representatives representing California, came back, decided to become mayor. And even people close to her have said that she had no plan for her, you know, for her rule over Los Angeles. She just was the pick that would win, was the right person. And anyways, so, and, and, and, and Max Meyer posted this video during, in, in a video on Sunday. She was talking about how we're going to rebuild Los Angeles, and she was smiling through the whole thing.

Yeah. It was really weird.

It's like, how do you. And, and Lulu was just ripping her apart because there's a science to addressing.

Yeah.

People in that situation and, and just couldn't. So like, clearly has no business running the city anymore. She needs to be recalled to. Gavin Newsom. Needs to be recalled to my pick.

For governor, Dwayne the Rock Johnson.

See, that's a good option.

We had a great run with.

You don't actually. Yeah, yeah, we had a great run with Put the la. Yeah. And, and Bass had no, no insights or knowledge of how entertainment works. Right. Like she, it's like somebody in Detroit not understanding manufacturing. Put the Rock in. I mean, so he's about heel entrepreneur.

Yeah.

He's an entertainment mogul.

Yeah.

He's the highest, has a huge neck.

He's a mass monster.

Mass monster. Crazy output. Crazy workouts.

Yeah. It's clear that like, he understands the, the WWE wrestling style of politics to, to be able to go up and give a rousing speech when that's needed. Like, if he was called upon, I would say speech after this.

Mel Gibson. Mel Gibson is another front runner for me. I, I, I. You saw his, you saw his son is a buddy. Is a buddy of mine. A neighbor, actually.

You saw, you saw his comment. It was like his house burned down and he was like, I'm free of my material things.

Like just, he's actually stoic. Yeah, I've, you know, had a, I've met him before at birthday party and he's, he's a, I think he's a, I think he's a good dude with good intentions. And anyway, so I, I'm, I'm like very much looking forward to not ever having to talk about politics on this podcast again.

But let's move on to Tyler. He says a wild conversation with a public company CEO. He says they have a $10 billion plus market cap and they say our top of funnel is getting completely crushed because we were so reliant on Google. But a ton of people have switched to AI search and we aren't there yet. One anecdote. But wow, I wonder what industry this is because I feel like for a lot of consumer products, the AI search Hasn't really taken off. And the AI search has mostly been replacing more like informational stuff where you would land on Wikipedia. I go to AI for. But if I'm shopping for like a new suit or something, I'm not going to go to ChatGPT because it's just going to like, tell me about the suits generally and I want to like, be able to click and buy or something like that. So I wonder what.

I don't know.

I wonder what industry that is.

This goes. Ann Skates was talking last week about this sort of AI becoming these recommenders and how much. I think a massive amount of purchasing decisions will be driven by these sort of AI assistants that deeply understand you and your taste and get to dis. Disintermediate, you know, basically Google Ads and random searches. And this is already happening. So you can. There's a. There's something called you can go on Delphi and like, talk to somebody's clone and be like, what magnesium supplement to do you recommend? It'll recommend that based on who that clone is, is made around. There's another company called Dexa that. That does like an AI chatbot just based on podcast. Podcast transcripts. You can be like, what. You know, what is so and so. Think about this. And then it'll recommend the right product.

Seems like, yeah, good. Even more important than ever to switch from SEO to influencer marketing because you want to be baked into the LLM in a conversational way.

That's true.

And just like, oh, keyword search showed up.

That's interesting. I never thought about that. I mean, my first company, Branded Native, runs hundreds of influencers or ads a month for various consumer brands. And that's kind of an interesting thing of like, you're building up this basically base of recommendations from all that will.

Get baked into the LLMs. Much more so than some optimized SEO landing page.

Yeah. So if you want to optimize your results and LLMs, go to brandednative.com, it's a company I started when I was 22, and spend a bunch of money through our ad network.

There we go. Let's do a promoted post.

Promoted post. This is a fantastic post.

I mean, this is our first horse post.

Horse post. And there's been sort of some ideas and thoughts out there that, that we don't, you know, we're always, you know, we, we support horse girls, that we like the idea of horse girls. My daughter will be a horse girl. And we are horse enthusiasts.

Yes. Equestrians.

Equestrians. Yeah, exactly. So this promoted post is from our friend Tom Wilson at Tom Wilson Horses. And he says this is what double A rated 3.2 million yearling, looks like lot 1007. He's got home affairs crossed with Sunlight. And he has an entire video here just breaking down the incredible ergonomics and muscle structure of this fine stallion. He says the dam Nordic Charm. Second page. The dam Nordic Charm is by Charge Forward, a Group 1 winning sprinter and established broadmare sire. Although Nordic Charm herself was unraced, she hails from a distinguished family. She is a half sister to Liberator, the champion stayer in Hong Kong for 2011-2012, and Pink Cyrus, who produced Group 2 winner Aetna. The family traces back to the illustrious Miss Helga, a listed race winner and producer of quality offspring like Alexis, which is a Group 3 winner in freshwater Pearl. And so anyways, he's got a number of. And. And another one in here. Just. Just while we're at a lot 396, I am invincible crossed with Fiery Vista. This is from Tom Magnier. It's only 1.1 million.

Sure.

So just.

You got a couple million bucks burning a hole in your pocket? Maybe you just sold a company to Atlassian. Go pick up one of these horses and tell them the technology brothers sent you.

This might be our favorite colt in the sale. He's just a biomechanic and a geometric score.

Fantastic. And people say it's a lot of money, but I mean, look at it. It's a lot of horse.

They're giving this. They're giving this sire away.

Fantastic.

So thank you to Tom Wilson and.

Get back to the Show Bucket poll. Oh, this is a good one. Paul Buchite, YC Powder, creator of Gmail YC Partner, says X should stop demoting links and instead use Grok to attach a short summary of the linked content. It would achieve the same goal of keeping people on site, but be less annoying. And yeah, the demotion of links is really wild. We had a banger post that was completely silenced. The built different google.com post, one of our greatest of all time. And it was destroyed by the fact that links are the post.

The post was real. Posters post links and still do numbers. Google.com built different and it had some early traction and it just died off completely. And the reason I was inspired by that, to be honest, is that Mark and Mark Andreessen is just not afraid to post links. He'll just rip a link and still do numbers. I think it helps to have millions of followers. You Know, you can still, you know, do numbers off of a big base, even with the algo. But post links. Don't let the algorithm rule your life, rule the algorithm.

Completely disagree. I say it is disrespectful to Elon's culture to post links on X. He's very politely asked through some very clear, subtle messaging that you should not post links. Um, but seriously, if you're a founder and you're trying to promote anything, just don't have the website in mind at all. Like it needs to be fully X native. And that's why. Why do vibe reels go viral? Why do threads and long posts go viral? When Lulu launched her company, what did she do? She posted a long post, the Going Direct manifesto. This won her brother of the year. And, and she understands that, you know, why try and fight with one hand tied your time behind your back with a link down in the comments and all that stuff. Like just tag your company, have your.

Company have in your company's profile, have the link in the profile, or just.

Appeal to smart people who can figure it out. Like just.

I don't, I don't. I think from a pure conversion rate optimization standpoint, one click to your company profile, your project profile or whatever you're trying to promote, link in that bio.

Shut down your company. Your company is now your account. Your monetization is your revenue. Your X check is a million dollars. There's a lot of founders making more money from X monetization than their companies. This is the future. Everyone's an influencer. AI has taken all the other jobs. So you don't need to link out, you just need to post. Yeah, get that check. Engagement bait. And you're good. I do like that idea though. Let's go to Noah Smith. This is some good news. We're winning the war on cancer. US death rates for all cancers from 1975 to 2022 have fallen significantly from a peak for of. For both sexes, around 220. 210 per 100,000 people down to sub 150. What do you think? This is good.

I mean, good news. Hard for me to even think about that. Even though it's great news when Noah is doing absolute numbers on substack. Yeah, absolute subsequent size law.

I mean, at this point, he doesn't even need health care. He can just pay out of pocket if he gets cancer.

That's dark but true. The guy's doing crazy numbers, has a bunch of paid subs, and it's because all the best journalism and journalists in the worlds are growing independent and it's a death sentence for traditional media.

It is, yeah. He's done. He's done well. Should we wrap it up there? Yeah, that's a good place to end the show.

This is a fun show.

Thanks for watching.

Looking forward to tomorrow. Thank you.