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

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

Not a lot of people have heard about this device, but. But it is really wild. You can get Internet almost anywhere in the world.

Yeah.

And we should just set ours up right here.

A couple hundred bucks. And yeah, it comes with a big long power cable. I got a power brick too. And I'm very excited to get this set up. I'll definitely be traveling with this because get caught. Lacking without wi fi anywhere, but very, very cool device. I'll have to figure out how to put this together. But pretty simple. You just kind of aim it at the sky and as long as you can see the sky, you have.

So it's interesting, I was actually using satellite messaging on the iPhone.

Oh really? I was working. I've seen it's interesting.

So the way that it works is if. So during starting like 48 hours ago, I completely lost cell service, power, gas, et cetera. Basically my neighborhood was totally in the dark. So we were trying to figure out what was going on. Yeah, two nights ago the fire was really starting to pick up the wit. This was. Wind was still picking up. And so yeah, I've had pretty good success with the iPhone, satellite imagery. I don't know what the tech is actually based on, but if you've never had this happen, basically if you lose all cell coverage, it'll pop something up that says you want to send messages and you really can't do much. You can't send images, but you can send text based messages and you just have to get outside. And it actually has a pretty interesting.

So I think it's on the older satellite network, not the low earth orbit links. It's on like one via web or OneWeb via web is the PG thing. OneWeb is the bigger satellites. So they're big. I think they're geostationary in high earth orbit. So the delay is crazy.

Delay is crazy.

Never do.

And they give you this little graphic. You actually have to aim your phone in a certain way to try to get the messages out.

But I'm super.

But good in A pinch.

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

Yeah, I actually didn't have one and really.

So I didn't have.

Also didn't have power.

Yeah, you need the battery.

So the crazy thing runs on the.

Wall so you can get a battery pack that will run this for days.

So I don't know if you know this, but my house I bought last year was a fire rebuild. It had burned to the ground.

No way.

Literally to the dirt in 2018. And so my entire neighborhood's pretty savvy around fires. They're sort of used to it. And so most people have these gas powered generators that just use natural gas.

Yep.

And so when all the power was cut off, everybody was like, okay, their generators flick on in 30 seconds. And then they cut the gas lines for some reason, which everybody was like, why are they cutting the gas lines? They run underground. But then it turns out that the gas lines for western Malibu, where I am, run through eastern Malibu. And so we're now looking at potentially multiple. SoCal Edison, the utilities provider for gas, said that they will have to send somebody individually to your home, every single home and all of. In all of Malibu to get the gas actually turned back on. So we're now looking at probably at least two weeks something like that until. And so no, no hot water. Nobody has gas right now.

Bad day to be a mini bar at a five star hotel in la.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, stayed at, stayed at a hotel last night, which was, which was great until we woke up and their H vac system was pumping the outside air into the house. So I woke up, I have a sick six month old and with like some type of respiratory thing and it smelled like somebody had been smoking like chain smoking heaters in the room for hours. So anyways, got out of there. Families now in. In palace Veris which has better Augustus Deo drop by. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Augustus. It smelled like when we woke up in the room, it smelled like Augustus Rico had had ripped through four packs.

Wow.

Yeah, just grinding, just grinding, just grinding.

This is not a co Working space.

Yeah, I actually, I mean we, we don't need to go into this now, but I, I do think that it, it in, in a world where Rainmaker can deliver rain anywhere, it's going to be extremely valuable because you look at, we just lost hundred, probably hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage. I don't know what the exact number is yet.

Yeah, they're throwing around 55 billion right now, but that's early estimate.

Early early estimate. And, and by the way, last night was wild too. Everybody, I mean everybody was just hyper fixated on the timeline, kind of watching this stuff unfold. And then the sunset fire popped up and then all these AI generated images of the Hollywood signs. People were starting to share that around that were fake, but there was, I mean that looked really bad and apparently was arson. So. Yeah, anyways, dark times. But the show must go on. So here we are.

Nikita is advocating for the, the, the hero. We need the dark knight, Rick Caruso. He says if you didn't vote, even if you didn't vote for real estate tycoon rick Caruso in LA's last mayoral election, you're basically a moron if you don't do it this time. Since we're going to have to rebuild the entire city. 3k likes and Gabby Goldberg said they were morons the first time too, for what it's worth.

Yeah.

And then Nikita, kind of unrelated, says I live a block away from Karen Bass, the current mayor of la. So yesterday's fire in my canyon was put out in 30 minutes. Sleeping like a bab tonight, taking shots at the current man.

But yeah, so. So I don't know if you remember when the election, election night, Rick and Karen Bass were totally head to head. Yeah, election night. Yeah, it seemed like Rick was going to be able to pull it off. But then I was at a fundraiser event for Nathan Hawkman, who's a new Lada that Rick was backing, and they talked a little bit about the ballot harvesting that the left does in la, which they have this like ridiculous ground game where they basically walk around.

It's called fortifying.

Yeah, they walk around with ballots that are pre filled out and they just, you can. They walk through homeless encampments and say, hey, can you please sign this? And that's fully legal. And so as the, the day after the election and the following days, Karen just like had it turned into almost a landslide. So who knows all the details? I won't. If I had to talk anymore, I'd throw on the tinfoil hat. But either way. Either way, when. When Rick lost, it was. Many people in the community were pretty devastated because if you go to Rick's spaces, you look around, like, if you went. If you go to the Palisades Village, which is one of, you know, one of his developments, you see, like, groups of children running around by themselves, like, having fun. It's, it's. It's the kind of environment that I grew up in as a kid in a small town where parents would give their kids five, ten dollars and say, go, go have a nice, like, evening.

And you could go hang out at the mall.

But you don't see that. You don't see that in LA at all.

Not at all.

Groups of like 10, 10 year olds running around. It just doesn't happen. But it still happens on properties. Properties.

Yeah. Yeah. He said that he. His goal for the Grove is like his imagined avatar is a mother pushing a stroller with a baby. Should feel safe at all times.

Yep.

And then. And what that requires is inordinate investment in private security. They have off duty LAPD officers who actually open, carry a sidearm. They used to be discreet, kind of undercover, and then they changed this to show the gun. And they also have facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, a bunch of different technology that's all put together. And it's hilarious to contrast. I was listening to a podcast of him talk about all the technology that they use and how they integrate everything at the Grove to keep it safe. And then meanwhile, Karen Bass is doing a press, like a press junket press conference. And. And says you can find more information about the fire at URL.

Yeah. And it's like one of the most insane moments. I mean, her, her, you know, she coming back from Ghana, she was not going to have a good time. Right. Like, she was briefed on the fires on Monday, decided to stay in Ghana.

Really?

Yeah. Oh, no, she was fully briefed. I mean, we knew. So. So I knew. I knew Sunday night. I'm so trained now that when the Santa Ana winds get really intense at five, fires are coming. Okay, so. So we knew our power was going to get shut off Sunday.

Really?

They were already telling us your power.

Oh, yeah. You were texting about getting a generator. I remember that. On Monday. Yeah.

And so everybody knew this was pending. She knew this was pending. She decides to stay in Ghana. She comes back immediately. She's getting off the plane. I don't know if you saw this video.

It's crazy.

I was making a joke about it, but it's fully NPC mode. You Know, you're talking, you know, some. This reporter's talking to her, and she's.

Like a legitimate reporter, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah. Pretending that she's, like, not hearing it or whatever. So obviously, you know, not a great response there. She could have showed some amount of empathy, saying, yeah, it's terrible.

Like, I'm rushing back.

You know, a lot of ways that she could have handled that. And then. And then clearly wasn't even processing what she was reading. Yeah, you know, we. We. We do a bit of writing and do a bit of newscasting here. When we're reading stuff out, I think we would notice if it's Go to Grok AI. But it says go to. And go to URL. Go to URL. Check it out. Let us know what you think.

It's a true Ron Burgundy moment.

But anyways. Yeah, everything. So. So everything that Caruso represents is what a lot of people wanted for la, Right. Security, family, environments. Strong. So his. His properties are some of the best performing from retail standpoint in the country, like, in the top 5%. So he knows how to. How to get people places.

Yeah, there's the whole, like, post Covid mall apocalypse where there's a lot of empty retail chains. Not at Caruso properties.

Yeah. And I. And I. And I, you know, go to the Palisades Village multiple times a week. It's. It's fantastic. I bring my family there. It's. It's a really great environment. So a lot of people. You know, the best evidence that he would have been a great mayor is being at his properties.

Yeah.

Right. And so when. When. When Bass was elected, it was devastating in the moment. She quickly had. She quickly had her home robbed by criminals, and she had loose guns in her house. So they. They. The criminals managed to steal guns that were not in safes.

Yeah.

So right away, that was like a sort of not a great omen for her.

Yeah. But I mean, that seems kind of cool to just have, like, guns everywhere in your house. Like, without safe.

It's cool to lock up your guns.

If you have, like, an indoor firing range. Is she one of those people where you walk in, there's the wall of just all the guns.

American flag.

That'd be super sick. Just like.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, I got an ffl.

And apparently she has dueling.

Apparently I got the switch on my.

AK47 chess piece that's just dueling AR15.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She's getting, like, the military hardware there. You know, you get a fully automatic M4. It's like, I thought that was military only. It's like. Yeah, it was.

Yeah.

Until I was. It got my. My firearms dealer license. And I can get silencers in California now.

Yeah. Anyways. Sad, dark. I wish that. I wish he was doing a great job. But unfortunately, Rick was. Was always my guy. We don't. We don't discuss politics on this, but he was my guy because he's a phenomenal businessman.

Yes.

And he has created billions of dollars of value.

And he has wonderful collection.

He also has a wonderful watch collection.

Yeah. Let's go.

But let's get into this. He was born in 1959 and father started a small business. Was a small business owner. Dollar rent a car.

Yep.

Not. Not. Not super small, but start. It would have started relatively small. So his father started as a small business owner, was an Italian immigrant, which he credits to his work ethic.

So he goes to usc, then he goes to Pepperdine Law School, graduates, becomes a lawyer, works at this law firm called Finley cumble. And in 1987, I believe that law firm goes bankrupt, which I didn't even know was really possible for a law firm because services. It's a services business. You'd think you just adjust prices and stuff. I don't know how that happened, but the whole law firm explodes. Collapses.

His boss, well, he does go on to use debt pretty well. So it's possible that the law firm had levered up and somehow. And that was the cause of it. The only thing we skipped over that I think is relevant. His mother was a billboard model in her youth, which is cool because we love ads.

Yeah.

But it's funny to think about. There was just. There were billboard models. Like a model that specifically would just model for billboards.

Yeah. It's like, I don't do magazines. I look best on a billboard.

No tv. Billboards only. But it makes sense. The guy is an absolute stud. Very handsome. You can see. Maybe in another life he would have skipped being a lawyer. Real estate developer. He could have been. If he was born in 2005, he.

Would have been a tick at the broccoli hair. And You've been chilling AG1.

Yeah.

So he quit his. So he transferred. He gets out of this law firm that's collapsing. His boss comes in, kind of puts a check on his table and says, hey, the law firm's going bust. This is your last check. You better cash this today because it might not. Yeah, it might not clear tomorrow. He has always wanted to do real estate. He said he was doing corporate law. Didn't really like it saw that it wasn't his life's work and so he started a real estate development company. First deal he does is buying parking lots. And he uses his connection with his father at $rent a car to act as the anchor tenant of these parking lots.

This is my opinion on people in life that have the potential to benefit from nepotism. I believe it is your duty to maximally utilize that advantage, relationship, whatever. And so what he did is really smart. Rick wanted to buy buildings. And in real estate, if, if, if a bank is going to lend against a property, they want to know that there's some type of income, cash flow, stream cash flow associated with that property rights, a business that has no tenant and it is not worth the same as, as a business that has a 10 year lease or 20 year lease. And so what Rick would do is he would go, he'd find a place he wanted to buy, he would get his dad presumably to write from $rent a car to write an alloy saying if you buy this property, I will lease it for X number of years. And so then he would take that loi to the bank and say, look, I have this great tenant, rent me, rent me this, you know, sell, you know, help me buy this building. And so that little bit of alpha, you know, he was able to Snowball into a $4 billion fortune. So if you have a dad that owns a small rental car business, leverage that into accumulating $4 billion.

It really, I mean it really does like, it's a perfect encapsulation of what it means to be like a deals guy. Because I think too many people think about the deal is like one way, like I just need the, the, the tenant or I just need the bank. And really it's like he is creating almost like an arbitrage like the bank wants to lend to a parking lot that has a relationship with Dollar Rent a Car. He's acting as the intermediary there. And, and I mean we've seen this with, with the work that we've been doing where once you start getting deals going on both sides of the equation and you can even view like a startup as this, where it's like, okay, there's a amazing AI software developer who's going to join the team if you get, you know, a venture fund to lead your seed round and you kind of got to play both sides. And the really good deals guys can get both of those done, match them up and then the value creation starts from there and the guy's just become a beast. I mean, he's amassed this like insane portfolio in Southern California, the Grove at Farmers.

He actually became so interesting enough about the origin. He became. He's very well known for not selling any of his properties. So he's the sole investor in his properties, but then he never sells. He just benefits from the appreciation and the cash flow. But early on, the lots that he would do with his father, he did sell those. So he used that to basically accumulate the seed capital that would allow him to do so.

He doesn't have like a real estate fund where people are trying to get out in a certain timeline. He's not flipping things. He really is in for. In it for the long term. And you see this with other, with other real estate projects where someone comes in and they pass it on to the next person and that next person isn't thinking about the long value creation cycle that's going on. And yeah, he, he has this, he has this interesting framework for thinking about, like, how he creates value at a place like the Grove. So he says that we have customers and then we have guests, and the customers are actually the retailers. The Apple Store, Nordstrom's, and. And for a long time an indoor mall was basically. You have two anchor clients. Yeah. At one end, Macy's at one end, Nordstrom's at the other. And then, and then I think they pay nothing. Like you make essentially no margin off of them, and then everyone else in the middle, you hopefully fill in and make money off of them. Yeah. And he, I think he kind of flipped that around and said, okay, this doesn't make any sense. There's like a much better way to do this. Seeing kind of all the tenants equally as customers and then really focusing on the guest experience and getting them to invest.

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

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

Caruso figured out mixed use.

Seriously? Yeah.

Yeah. So one thing.

So he didn't do residential at the Grove, and everyone was like, we want to live here. And so now he's been doing residential in the new project because.

Yeah, the Palisades Village, I think, has apartments, Apartments around it. So one thing that's interesting too, about, you know, early on, he leveraged his. His father's business in order to create, you know, a meaningful business himself, which was smart. The other thing is that early on when he was doing his first, you know, development, he. He even admitted to himself he didn't have the clout to attract coveted retailers like Bristol Farms and Barnes and Noble. And so what he did is he didn't focus on. On the, the retail side, the retailer side. He went and focused on the public side. He. He did everything he possibly could to make the public love what he was doing, which I think was super important.

Yeah. And we should go through some of his tenets of like designing spaces. This human centered design focuses on the emotional impact of real world details like height of curbs, the crown on streets, feeling of open space. He says, quote, our minds catch what's real. The more real it is, the more organic it is, the more comfortable you are in that space. And you really feel that at the Grove, when you're like not tripping over things, even like the manhole covers are like, you know, flush and stuff. So you're not just like all these little like things that just kind of jar you out of it don't happen. It really does feel like Disneyland Italy. He's very inspired by these places. I love his story about the. The Groves trolley. He it was built from the ground up. People said, why the heck are you putting in a trolley? It doesn't go anywhere. But its purpose was to bring people here to enrich their lives, to give them joy. And so kids will say, I want to go ride the trolley. My son loves trains.

Yeah. He basically was thinking of these as creating these almost misnomers. Mini Disneyland.

Exactly.

Really a destination.

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

Yeah. So. So there's a quote in here that says, rick is extraordinary at reading the market and the consumer in the area that he's building something. So he had started with a property that was called Lake Havenhurst, which was a development that originally went bankrupt that another developer was working on, and he took it over, and one of the things that he notoriously did early on is the residents were so against the development. This was in Encino. He started including them in the process of developing the space. So he at one point took part of the. He took residents to go out and start, like, picking out trees that would go on the property. He said, you know, I understand if you don't, you know, want the development, but why don't you come with me? Let's go look at some. Let's go pick out some trees for the property. We literally, you know, paid to. To. To transport all these people and made them feel included in the design process. So he basically was making the residents, to give you a tech analogy, design partners in the development. And so he started, you know, he. Everywhere he went, he would make these sort of grassroots movements around working with local HOA leaders, working with local residents. Like, he started with the residents, which are his guests, and by making them love what he was doing, he was able to attract the. The customers, which he. He considers the retailers.

Right.

Because he's not directly monetizing. Yeah, The. The guests. Right.

Yeah. There's a bunch of stories about him having to do a bunch of deals and build coalitions. When in 2011, when he's building the Americana brand, he went to Nordstrom, who I think he already had a relationship with, because I listened to him on the Nordstrom podcast, which I didn't even know was a podcast.

Great show.

Check it out or something. That's a funny name. But he wooed Nordstrom away from the rival Glendale Galleria and will bring the department store to his American at Brand shopping center in fall of 2013. And there was this big fight with General Growth, which I think owned the. The Glendale Galleria. And they sued, and they had a ballot measure to block the building of the Americana. Americana brand. He got it all through, and now he says he's excited to be working with them, and they have come through their difficulties, and the past is the past. And there's. There's always been this like, dynamic with the Glendale Galleria and the Americana brand where some companies like Glenn, the Glendale Galleria is a little bit cheaper. It's an indoor mall. And so some businesses, if they don't have the right margins, they'll move over there. And it kind of like flows back and forth. Interestingly, Apple actually maintains stores at both because I guess they can just afford that. It's probably like.

Yeah, it's interesting. His projects all have taken. He. He made, he's made the perfect developments for LA, which has 300 days a year of sunlight.

Yeah.

So why build these fully indoor malls?

Totally, totally.

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

And I see it every place like, I mean, Rodeo Drive is like this where it is cool because it's like the single lane. You see a lot of cool. Hyperc is honestly awesome. But how much cooler would that be if they just shut it, Shut down a couple blocks of that and you could just walk across at any moment. Same thing in Old Town Pasadena. I've been beating the drum of they should shut down that couple blocks in Colorado and make that the same type of Crusoe style open walkability. And a lot of cities were experimenting with that during COVID because they, you know, they need more outdoor dining. So they kind of moved all onto the street. And then people realized like, maybe we didn't need those extra 10 parking spaces. Maybe we should move a little bit further. I think New York just shut down or a couple of years ago shut down Times Square. Right. So you can walk around constantly and just doing a few of those where they're not going to really throw off the flow of traffic is great. Or bury the streets if you have the ability to tunnel and then people can still drive exactly like they would, but you have a bunch of walkable space above.

It's so. It's so him losing the last election is so devastating because his body of work is truly. He's created. What do you want a city to do? You want it to be highly enjoyable, livable, safe, A place where commerce can thrive. And that's what all of his spaces have become. Almost 100% hit rate. And it wasn't enough. It Wasn't enough proof to win the election.

I liked him. On this Onward fundrise podcast, they go into more of like the macro side of the finance of real estate investing. And this is from earlier, earlier this year they were talking about potential recession in 2024 and how much rates had climbed for them from 3% to 6% and for a lot of businesses up in like the 10, 11, 12, 13%. But he goes back to the surviving the SNL the savings and loan crisis in 2008. Crusoe stresses having enough liquidity to take advantage of opportunities when disruption occur, calling it being a bit of a warrior. You've got to get ready for battle, he says. He stresses preparedness over reaction. He points out that where I see companies getting in trouble is they're reactionary, emphasizing early anticipation and cutting costs quickly in uncertain times. I mean we certainly saw that with startups when SBB collapsed and the market and the interest rates went, went wild and a lot of the VCs pulled back on funding the companies that cut their burn. Like the same day that YC issued that letter saying, hey, this is going to be rough. They, they made it through just fine. But I, I got an investor update from a company that was like, we think we're going to have to cut our burn. I was like, it's been a year since the market collapse, like, what are you doing? And then of course they went bankrupt immediately. Disaster. But he takes calculated risks. It's all his own capital. And so there's a hell of a lot more downside than potential upside.

I don't have investors, he said, I get the freedom to make decisions I think are best. And after this many decades of absolutely killing it, he clearly has good decision making ability.

He talked a little bit about like relationship banking, which I thought was pretty interesting. Obviously, although he owns all the equity in his, in his properties, he still needs to work with banks to secure all sorts of different loans. There's construction loans, then there's ongoing mortgages on all of the different properties and the, the buildings as well as, you know, he's going to finance stuff out so he has more capital to work on other things. You know, it's like a private equity deal as, as the, as the business grows, you can take more out and then do the next project. So he, so he stresses like building relationship with bankers. But what he was saying was like, it's kind of frustrating because a lot of the bankers like, like bounce around from bank to bank and so it's very hard to like, like you really have to have strong coverage across like an entire banking sector. And then more recently he mentioned that he was actually, he changed one of his financing strategies and went out to Wall street. Because you can go to a bank for financing or you can do mortgage backed security and take it to Wall Street. And that just has different cost of capital, different process, but obviously opens up a new like liquidity window for the company. Uh, so that was exciting. Um, and, and he was talking about how he's. It was funny somebody was saying like, oh yeah, like, can you explain like some of the more complex like derivatives and instruments that you might use? Because a big question was like, if you locked your interest rate in 2022. Right. 3%, you were great and your business was just fantastic. Um, not every bank was offering fixed rates at the time, but with derivatives you could actually synthetically lock your interest rate. Right. With.

Well, that was, that's been the challenge for the last couple years in the commercial real estate market is most people were using this variable rate debt thinking that interest rates will stay low forever and then all of your profit goes away in months.

But yeah, they were talking about these arcane financial instruments and, and the interviewer was kind of like, oh, can you explain some of these? And he's like, I don't really use them, I don't really understand them. Like, I just focus on the guest experience and I think it's like more of a pure play. He's more conservative and I think that.

Makes not trying to be a financial engineer, financial engineer. Otherwise I'm sure he would have sold a lot of his projects at different points.

And also like, like it's, it's, it's a little less sexy than like, oh, he's like this genius trader who has all these like, crazy plan to make money and pull money out of thin air. But if I think about like, who, how do I want the government run? Like, I don't really want them doing fancy stuff. I want someone conservative. Just, okay, what's the revenue? What are the costs? What's driving value in the city? Let's keep it simple. Let's actually grow this thing. So he talks a little bit about his decision to run for mayor. With a successful real estate empire and fulfilling family life. Many question why he would step into politics. He explains, it's the city that I love. I believe you're given the ability to help others. You go and do it. His top priorities are highlighting homelessness, crime and government corruption as the city's biggest challenges. Homelessness is absolutely Fixable crime is running rampant and public service should be about service for others, not for yourself. His leadership approach, he aims to replicate his track record of collaboration results, saying, I want to be mayor for everybody. Let's make it a little bit nicer, cleaner, better life for everyone.

Yeah, I. One thing I've always been impressed with, every time you hear this guy talk, whether it was talking to reporters on TV the last 48 hours, we're at this fundraiser that I saw him at recently. He. There's not a single word that's out of place. You can go sit in front of a group of hundreds of people and speak totally off the cuff. And it, and it sounds like he had a, had a speechwriter. So this guy is just a true, true, true professional. And if I were to, you know, really one of those types of entrepreneurs that if I'm sure if he went into the venture world and went into tech, he could have been wildly successful, but chose to focus on his local community and play a very specific game and do it at the highest possible level. So next time you're in la, go support a Caruso.

Yeah. The Grove became the region's top attractions with about 20 million visitors in the immediate pre pandemic years. Edging out Disneyland. More foot traffic.

Yeah.

Bigger than Disneyland.

That's, that's insane.

Crazy.

I don't even. That feels like hard to believe. Yeah.

Possible. I don't know.

Yeah.

It's in this LA Times article for him.

It's, it's just that balance of ridiculous charisma.

Yeah.

Long term thinking, playing his own game. Right. Not doing the investor thing. Not hyper financializing what he was doing.

Yeah.

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

So he's also donated a lot of money. He has a family foundation. He's donated to Loyola High School, Brentwood School, law schools, University of Southern California. You know, we don't typically celebrate giving money away here, but I hope it brought him a lot of happiness, I guess.

Yeah.

But he's been recognized by Pepperdine and The Los Angeles Business Journal and Ernst and Young and had a very successful family life with four children and a wife that he's been married to for 37 years or something like that.

You know, the one. One of the critiques during the election was that he was a fake Democrat. That was basically the number one critique is he was historically Republican or was independent at some point. That was during, I guess, you know, whatever. And it's such a good example of how about we don't judge people at all based on their political party affiliation and just judge them purely on their work. And his resume is these incredible developments of people of all political backgrounds love being at.

Yeah, he really is like founder mode person generally. You can tell he owns 100% of his companies. He never sells. He builds these things, manages for a very long time. Clearly runs through walls to get stuff done, does things that people think are impossible, closes streets and like, really changes the landscape, but winds up creating a. Like a great product that he's clearly happy with and so are the. The guests and the customers.

Yeah. You can tell he's creating the product for himself. Yeah. Which is awesome.

Expressing his taste.

Crazy taste.

It's great. So hopefully we'll be tracking that. The election is in 2026.

Aaron Bass is already on the campaign trail.

She is.

Her Instagram shows that she's campaigning already.

I wonder why. Is it that fun being mayor? I don't know.

Yeah, I think maybe, you know, after we'll see.

We'll see how big this story gets and how. How big of a.

She has an opportunity to redeem herself. It's just if you're speaking publicly, get the URL right.

Yeah. And pretty simple, please. Instagram video, YouTube video. We want a tour of your.

She needs to be going direct. Honestly, Karen Bass needs to.

It would be so different if she was just like, yeah, I can't do anything about the fires, but, like, here are my top five guns from 2024. Yeah. I recommend the new Glock. Get a. Get an AR15. Go to Arleigh. They're local.

Yeah.

You know, one of the few gun stores in. In Los Angeles, you know, and then get a sniper rifle, too. Yeah, maybe shotgun, but full loadout. Full loadout.

You should look like a COD lobbyist.

Lobby in the mayors.

She does have an opportunity to win back a lot of voters by doing that.

Yeah. The big two A voters in Los Angeles. Huge block.

Honestly.

It's increasing. It's increasing, but slowly. I mean, Adam Carolla had that whole take that, like, this is going to flip is going to flip. California or la Red.

So I Do you watch? I think it, I think it is, I think it is totally possible.

Yeah, it is a crazy, crazy moment.

We're getting on the edge here. We're getting political business. It's not our forte. We like to focus on business, technology.

Okay.

And capital allocation.

Let's move into a question that we got from a listener. Ozzy says, interesting how much coverage the Palisades fire is getting compared to hurricane Helene. But Helene so far was far more devastating. 124 to 250 billion in damages for Helene versus 55 billion for Palisades. 246 deaths for Helene versus at least 5 for Palisades. 126k damaged homes damaged versus I'm sure a few thousand in LA. What are your thoughts? He asks, so what do you think about that coverage? So Helene versus Yeah. Helene, Palisades fires.

I, I wasn't actually familiar. So he's correct. I, I paid far less attention to that.

Yeah. Oh, you know, like it was, it was like the Democrats like caused it or something or the Republicans.

Yeah. Right around wasn't. I wasn't focused on it because, because this fire has been in, literally in my backyard.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And many, many, many friends and, and you know, business relationships have been affected by it.

Yep.

The other. So yeah, the damage for Helene was devastating. South Carolina and North Carolina both had 50 ish billion dollars worth of damage. Like ridiculous amount of damage. Way more deaths.

Yep.

It's very dark, sad. There's still a bunch of people missing. But anytime you have a, a disaster strike, the epicenter of media and entertainment where it's the highest, you know, this is the highest density of people with huge audiences in the world.

Totally.

So obviously there's going to be a lot of coverage on it. And then for us again, living miles from the epicenter. Yeah, it, it obviously is going to be top of mind.

So I also wonder something to the actual like visual nature of this type of disaster. Like with a fire you can go up in a helicopter and film it. You can't film a hurricane having a. Destroying a single house. It's very, very hard to be out there because you get blown around. It happens every once in a while and then you can look at the satellite, satellite map of it spinning and you're like, okay, that looks bad, but it's very different. When you see a drone shot of the Palisades, it's flattened.

Yeah. The fire, the fires are, fires are growing up in California being Through a number of fires. It was really nasty. In Santa Barbara during the. The Woolsey fire area. There's been really devastating fires in wine country where I grew up. I. I think the unpredictability of fires where it doesn't even. You could be 10 miles from where wildfire is raging and then an amber lands and it starts another one.

Yep.

There's also quite a lot of just like poor behavior that springs up where people start. People just start looting houses because people evacuated and so you can. There's people around the perimeter of these fires.

It also looks crazy power law outcome where it's like either your house burns down and you're destroyed or your house is totally fine.

Yeah, right.

Whereas, like, I feel like with the hurricane, it's like everyone deals with a little bit of flooding, then there's houses that get blown down and destroyed and like. And it's more of like a gradient of like every house, but it's like all over. Whereas this, it was a lot more of like, oh, there's a fire over there. Everyone's got to leave and move and stuff.

And it's. And very. So yesterday I'm in western Malibu. The fire really devastated eastern Malibu and the Palisades, but we were already starting to pack up because we had no power, gas, etc. And then a fire popped up out of nowhere, like half a mile from my house. And so I'm looking at this watch duty app that everybody's using and they're. And it's like, oh, it's two acres and now it's five acres. And then I'm getting videos from my neighbors and I don't know, it's also, it's also. Is one. One thing I would call out is like the, the, you know, Keith, I don't know. Are you buddies?

I've never met him.

Anyways, really, really good guy, sort of tech adjacent because he's done some tech investing, had a real estate tech company, but he mostly is a real estate investor. He posted which. What I thought was a very fair ask, which was, hey, my house is about to burn down. Are there any sort of private firefighting resources that, that I can hire and. And got, you know, went mega viral, got mega canceled and thought it was like a very fair ask. Like, if you look at the way he phrased the message, it wasn't like, hey, any off duty firefighters want to come, you know, save my house instead of abandon your post. It's like private firefighting. Just like private security is an industry, insurance companies leverage private Firefighting brigades all the time. There was this whole drama a few years ago when there was fires in the Hidden Hills area and there was a private fire brigade that descended on Hidden Hills because it's like a billion dollars of property value. They don't want to lose that.

Right.

So anyways, I just think Keith is a. Is a great guy and obviously didn't have any bad intentions with that. And sort of. Sort of unfortunate that people far away from the action decided to have an opinion when I think it was a very fair.

It does seem like he killed.

And it didn't work, by the way. His house burned to the ground. So, like, yeah, insane. Bravo to everybody dunking on him.

Yeah, he did just a little, like, comms advice. He did a pretty good job of mitigating the cancellation, like, the hatred. I think by. I think he locked his account or, like, deactivated his account, and everyone's like, oh, he deleted his account. But really, like, you can turn it on in a few days and it'll be fine. But what that does is it stops the quote tweets. And so anyone who, quote tweeted you if you're getting canceled. This has happened to me when I talked about how I'm going to move to Alaska and take it over and make it a tech mecca, and everyone in Alaska said they would kill me. I'm not kidding. They were like, dming me pictures of their guns being like, bitch, like, you wouldn't last a day up here, you. You Californian Cali boy. Like, okay, respect. Like this. This makes me want to move there more. But then there was the. There was, like, the right wingers were canceled. But, yeah, the right wingers are canceling me for, like, being, like, a pussy, basically. And then the. And then the left wingers were canceling me for, like, you know, colonizing indigenous spaces or something like that. And I was like, this is too much. I just lock the account, and then it shuts down all the quote tweets, and then everyone just moves on because, like, they're not getting that. Like, they don't have anything to go off of. Yeah, yeah, this is very funny. But I think he did that, and I think he'll be able to come back, hopefully, because it's a good poster and there's some good stuff. But okay, that's not important. Let's move on to the timeline. Hopefully there's some fun tweets. We get more on the tech side. Talk about what's going on outside of the fire, which has consumed us for the last two days, but hopefully there's more interesting things going on. We got a big tech alert. This is very exciting. Catherine Boyle at Andreessen Horowitz has started following Echbros. Paul.

Welcome, brother Boyle. She's. She's engaged with some of our stuff before. I think we probably have covered her tweets. But she created American Dynamism, did she not?

And she talked about how there's a need for an Oscar style award show in tech.

Yeah.

And years ago, there was the Crunchies, and there are some hilarious photos from The Crunchies by TechCrunch. Yeah. And they would give you a physical statue and it pulled really big people. I mean, teal. Yeah, There's a picture of teal with a crunchy. And I think it's like a man on the moon type of thing or something. Or maybe it's like an ape. I don't know. It's something crazy. But the Crunchies, they. I remember the moment that they peaked because Paul Graham said on Twitter at the time what? It was an ape. Okay. Yeah. Wow. Oh, yeah, yeah. There you go. That's kind of cool. We gotta. We gotta buy one Ebay or something. But PG said we don't need TechCrunch to award startup of the year. It's a useless award because in tech and in business, you have the market constantly telling you how the company is doing.

Yeah.

And so with the Oscars, it's like the Oscars don't just say which one made the most money. There's an artistic value there. And so I think it's actually good that with our award show, we focus not just on who's the richest person in tech or like the award for.

We focus on size lords like. Like Josh Kushner, who repeatedly made some of the highest conviction biggest bets.

Yeah.

And it's more of a quality, broad spectrum of companies. Yeah. There's some element of.

Yeah.

Editorial element.

Exactly.

You could argue that Gary Tan's a bigger size lord because he just funded more companies.

Exactly. Spraying conversation starter. Yeah. You know. Oh, you know, should moonlight have gotten the award or should Lala gotten the.

Domain acquisition of the year?

Exactly, exactly. Like these things are. Award shows should be more. If you're doing an award show for tech, you should lean towards something that's a little bit more qualitative, a little bit more artistic. But you won't be doing an award show for tech because we already got that locked down. So don't copy us. Okay.

But you can come.

You can come.

See there.

Great.

If you wear tux.

Let's go to Andrew McCallop. Been on the show before with some great. Wait, is this the question? Is this.

So it's less of a lot of a question. So. So basically Andrew has developed this. This Doge themed art piece.

Okay.

Which he's going to sell for. I've seen it in $5 million.

Okay.

It needs to sell for $5 million.

Okay. Yeah.

And so I just wanted to put the word out because it's. Andrew is looking for a home for Doge Fin.

Okay.

Because apparently wherever it's being stored right now, we would house it here. But it's going to be. I think it's a little bit. It's huge.

It's huge.

And we. We're on the 10th floor of a building. Carrying it up the stairs sounds rough. And I don't know. I think the weight limit is probably too high for the elevator.

So he says he's doing a bit of spring cleaning. Two things that need to be moved out. Would anyone be interested in a large vacuum chamber? So if you're in the market, hit them up. It weighs about 1,500 pounds. No pumps, no warranty. Bring a trailer, please. DM me. It's free. You just have to do. You just have to promise to do something incredibly interesting with it. And then two. Dogefin needs to find a new home. If you want the 600 pound magnificence gracing your factory floor, we should talk. I would prefer to keep ownership and do a storage loan thing as I need to sell him at Art Basel to pay for my F40. Shout out to Tech Bros Pod for making the decision. In retrospect, with Carmack and Movie and Muller owning one, it's a no brainer Mueller. And he shows the vacuum chamber and the Doge Fin, which you should go take a look at.

It's a wild piece. I mean it's a stunning piece.

Chamber has some interest. Y' all better move.

Actually, so. So maybe now that I'm thinking out loud, I should honestly put this in my backyard.

I don't know if he wants to be outdoors. You have to cover it all the time and stuff. I don't know how treated it is. Maybe you could do like some coat or something.

Yeah, Andrew, treat it. I'll put it in my backyard. I'll give it an ocean view.

That would be great.

A great place for Dogeven to pass the time. That's how he sells.

Let's do one more. And then a promoted post signal says Vibe Capital was born out of the realization that traditional diligence is just the polite lie we tell ourselves after making decisions with our gut. No pitch decks, no financials, no fake process, just human connection. We invest in founders with ideas that make us feel alive. We're betting that intuition beats spreadsheets and that founders thrive when they're treated as the connoisseurs of culture, not as risks to be mitigated. If the idea makes us smile, shiver, or swear under our breath, we're in. We believe capital is a commodity, but vibes are scarce, and he's quoting a segment from a book about Andy Bechtelsheim investing in Google. Bechtolsheim ran to his Porsche and returned carrying something we could discuss a number of issues. Why don't I just write you a check? He said ebulliently. I can't pronounce that at all. With that presented log by vocab, he presented Bryn and paige with a $100,000 check payable to Google Inc. Brin Page explained that Google hadn't been incorporated yet and didn't have a bank account to deposit the check into. Well, when you do, stick it in there, bechtel Sy said cheerfully. Then he disappeared in his Porsche without saying what share of Google he imagined he had bought.

This is a real alpha because you can still do this.

Yeah.

If, you know, even if a company has an incorporated, you know, usually. Yeah, usually you want to be investing pre incorporation. You want to be given that handshake before the company's even been formed. So you're going to get the best price and the most clout, which is what angel investing is all about. Low entry prices and clout. More about the clout than. Than the investor. Funny thing is that because by the time you're getting any liquidity, you forgot about the investment. Don't even know what they do anymore. But, but the. But checks are cool because. Because I've been in situations where I'm like, well, I want to invest, but you haven't set up the company yet and just write a check.

Yeah, yeah.

And just carry a check. The C Corp name. Right. And every time I use a check or every time I write a check.

You just make it payable to cash.

Yeah. I'm like, checks are actually a fantastic innovation. I. I've. I've only written probably 700 checks in my life. Just because digital payments were really, by the time I was an adult, they were just so widespread. But every time I write it, I'm like, wait, I can write any number in here and just Give it to you and you just deposited.

Yeah, yeah.

No limits or anything. It's almost as cool as stablecoins.

Yeah, yeah. The checks. The funny thing is that I feel like if you did that today with a founder, depending on the founder, some founders would be like, great, $100,000. I'm going to go out and raise a $100 million post seed round and give you 0.1% of the company.

Yeah. But then if they have to raise again at a lower valuation, you'd convert in at the lower valuation. You got to get that MFN clause in there, otherwise you're an idiot.

You gotta watch out. Let's do a promoted post.

Promoted post. This one from Kyle Body, who is quote, tweeting another post by a guy named Grant.

I put this in there because I wanted to promote those wheels specifically.

So Kyle says this is an ad.

Read for these specific wheels on Amazon.

Yeah. So we're running an ad for some Hasali store on Amazon. And these are rubber office chair wheels that you can take.

You presumably take razor scooter.

Yeah. So these are razor wheels that you can give your office chair. So we don't use.

We should put these.

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

The GT3Rs of office chairs.

Yeah. You know, these things are.

This is the Y sock package.

Yeah. This is the Y sock package on your Herman Miller. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got such a great Herman Miller. It's not that comfortable, but it looks amazing. That's what matters.

I mean, you'd put an exhaust on it if it was a car.

Yeah.

Why not put some wheels and wheels on. Slap some wheels on it. Okay, let's go to a bucket pole. Bucket pole. Okay.

You want to. Do you want to re. Explain the bucket?

Yeah, yeah. Okay. So. So we have. So we have. You know, we react to a lot of. A lot of posts from X on the show. We wanted to create some differentiation here. And so when we see something on the timeline. That's a banger. It's. It's from a friend. It's from a brother. Maybe a pre. Previous brother of the week. Someone really important. It's about a really important topic. We put in this stack. We print it full size. It's A banger. This is from Max Meyer. You know, it's going to be good. It's important. He's setting the discourse. But every once in a while we see posts that are good but from people we don't know. Maybe they're just kind of random, timeless. We could just react to them whenever we want. So we print them on these small 4x6 cards and these are the bucket poles. We put them in the bucket, champagne, shuffle them all around.

Champagne bucket.

We shuffle them all around and we take them out of here randomly.

Use the tongs too.

These are a little. The bangers are a little bit more sorted. We, you know, we know we want to talk about Max's post today, but the bucket pulls are random. And we got this idea from Kill Tony. Tony Hinchcliffe. He, when he runs his comedy show, he brings on his friends every show. They're regulars, they do a minute of stand up. And you know that those friends of his are going to be. The regulars are going to deliver. They're going to deliver high quality. But he also does bucket pulls. He pulls random people from the audience who maybe they've never done stand up. Maybe it's their first time, maybe they're, maybe they're terrible, maybe they bomb, maybe they overperform at the end. He gives them a joke book if they.

Variable reward is exactly, exactly addicting.

Exactly. So on the show going forward, you'll see we do a couple bangers, we do a promoted post and we do a bucket pull. And so this is a good one. Let's do this one from comrade. Cisco says new workout goal is to have a body where if I commit a crime, the media posts my shirtless pics and everyone's like, wow, it's a picture of Luigi Mangione. And my goal for this year is to make Luigi Mangione look like the Trump shooter. Do you see that really, really skinny dude? I'm trying to get so big that everyone's like, Luigi's skinny.

Yeah. It is crazy because a lot of people say, oh, like all your problems will be solved if you just get super healthy. And clearly if you're messing with 60 Mesoamerican demons. Yes, it doesn't matter.

Well, I think that's a pre one shot photo.

Yeah.

First, because if you look at him now, it's not like he's a week out from the bulk, he's months out. And also he, there's a big question about. People are like, oh, he's so hot. He has tons of fans. People are Looking at this, they're really upset about healthcare. They're on his side, the public's on his side. Well, that might not matter at all in the courtroom. And there was this whole, like, how much does the sort of.

The way he looks should not matter in the courtroom?

It shouldn't at all. But people are kind of acting like it will matter. And they did the same thing with sbf. People would be like, why is SBF on X right now, in a space, talking about how he's innocent? And it was like, he's trying to win over the public, but, like, that didn't matter at all. And so I don't know that I think, like, this is obviously just some joke posts, but I don't know that it actually works. Like, I don't actually think there's any way to, you know, sway the public. I think the jurors are going to get in there, they're not going to care. They're not going to be extremely online. The lawyers will filter for that and void here. They'll be like, are you a communist? And are you doing ayahuasca all the time? And are you. Do you have the phrase is high risk to feel you. Have you heard of this? Now, hybristophilia is.

You could just make sex like this. I'd be like, no.

But hybristophilia is sexual attraction to criminals, and it's fairly popular. Yeah. So when you hear about, oh, there's some serial killer that's getting, you know, 20 letters a week from women across the country who have, like, fallen in love with him, you're like, why? And. And there's actually, like, a paraphilia where people are like, that's hot. I guess it's crazy.

There's the same thing with podcasters. There's a very famous podcaster who gets one letter every single day.

Yeah.

That. He hasn't talked about this publicly, obviously, but he gets one letter every single day from the same woman in Europe who just hand writes a letter and puts it in the mail every single day. Like a love letter to this guy, and it just goes to the P.O. box and just, like, rocks.

Two letters a day. We're coming for you. You know who you are. You're listening. The other thing is that Luigi is short, so fuck him. Anyway, Max Meyer, as we said, banger, he says we must put a 100,000, 100,000% tariff on Ozempic and Legos in order to force the Kingdom of Denmark to give Greenland to the United States. Ozempic and legos are like 45% of the Danish economy. It would be over for them in 15 seconds. That's hilarious.

I mean, Max is a media mogul.

Yep.

And he has studied the art of the deal. Clearly.

Yep.

And is just trying to feed ideas because he knows that big dogs watching Trump. Trump administration is very online. They're going to see this stuff and they're going to be like, that's a good idea.

Yeah.

But. But yeah, I. I think Lego and Novo Nordisk are both fantastic companies.

Did you see the flag I posted? I posted the 54 stage flag.

Who did the Photoshop?

I just did that on my phone. I just copied one of the rows that has four stars over and just. It looked pretty good, right?

It looked great.

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

Looks great.

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

No way. Yeah. The. Anybody complaining about symmetry issues is not a good reason. Reason not to. To expand the empire.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Constantly. And. And the comments on that post were great. People were saying, let's add Mars.

I think that's a promoted post.

This is a promoted post from our friends at the Ridge and our friends at Maddow. Promotion friends.

Unless you've been living under a rock, you know that Sean Frank Run is the number one wallet salesman in the world and he's able to do that by running on ramp. I thought this was cool. Deal Toy Ridge spent $100 million on their ramp cards. They spent a lot of money on meta ads and inventory and things like that. Size Lords and absolute Size Lords and hit it. Nice. And Ramp sent him this. This deal toy. Fantastic. It's crazy to think that there will soon be a $1 billion club and Ridge will eventually get to that.

That's amazing.

They are highly profitable. So, you know, they're not even spending as much as they could.

Yeah.

But if. If Ramp really ramps up the deal toys, Sean might be like, I'm going to spend a little bit more this month. I'm going to spend a little more this month. So they've got the whole, like, savings focus the average company on ramp saves 5% a year. But when you have dealtoys like this, it's going to tempt some CEOs to say you want to jack it up, you know, jack up that spend a little bit.

So that's great.

Anyways, we love some of the new.

Clients we're hearing about. Ramp Sign will be they're going to be in the billion dollar club on week one.

If we keep hiring creative agents agencies like we've been doing, we're going to be in $100 million ramp club soon for sure.

For sure. Should we go to Promoted post or.

Was that what that was?

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

I don't know actually.

Yeah, I don't know. But be very funny.

Chad though. Yeah, I would say if, if not this is going to kind of not really land, but with the right audience. But anybody that's unemployed right now, that's American, just go to Greenland. Just literally fly there.

Yeah.

And just post up. I bet there's hotels, hostels, Airbnbs, that kind of things and just post up like, hopefully this happens and you know, you have the opportunity to be on the ground and really kind of, you know, lead the charge. So D Day mode.

Okay, this is a great one. Buck in SF says is Stratecherie still relevant? And Ben Thompson, the founder of Techery, drops a nuclear bomb on him in the form of an entire Stratacheri article explaining that yes, to be clear, the.

Whole thing is very cordial.

It was, it was because Buck has been. Has been a. Like a fan and kind of, I guess asked Ben a lot of questions over the years and so they, he, he said, I decided to give you a very earnest answer. And he says it depends. First off, I'm pretty proud of SRI T's record over the last couple of years when it comes to the big companies I traditionally cover, I think I've been pretty sharp, including sketching out their relative risks and strengths and AI calling out Apple strategy pre Apple Intelligence made comprehensive case that Meta was actually the best positioned and of course was basically the only person to strongly Defend Meta when they were at their nadir. And he has sources for all of these. I've also been on the Nvidia case for a long time, explaining what their moat is and why it's relevant long before they became the juggernaut they are today. I guess I do regret not forcefully making the case that they were going to go to the moon, but I generally think that if you read Strathecary regularly, you're pretty well positioned to capitalize on moments like that because I laid the groundwork and he goes on and on and on. And it's amazing because I think strategic is extremely relevant and I still love reading.

So. So here's, here's the thing, though. So the reason that ads are the best business model for media is because you get the widest possible reach, right?

Sure.

A lot of people don't subscribe to Shri, so they miss all of this really, really, really high quality content. And he has less influence because he's reliant on his readers and he makes his readers fork over their hard earned dollars, which works really well for him. I think he likes the predictability of just knowing, as long as I write good stuff, there's revenue there. He doesn't have to focus on selling to advertisers. But the same thing happened to Joe Rogan with Spotify. You remember Joe Rogan's influence fell off a cliff for a few years when he was off YouTube and you basically didn't hear about him.

Yeah.

Unless. So it went.

The Trump interview on YouTube got 50 million views.

Yeah, it's like, so you know that, you know that. So, so the Joe Rogan deal, I was talking to Rob Mower at Human about this, co founder of Human Lab, and he was saying, like, the Spotify Rogan deal, like, was very good for everybody involved. Like, it just made a lot of sense. But, you know, Rogan's happier now that he can just be out freely sharing content generally everywhere. So, yeah, I'd like to see. I don't know, it'd be interesting. I'd like to see more people like Ben follow the model of I'm going to release stuff, it's going to be paywall, paywalled for a week.

And then he does, he does do that.

He does eventually release the main.

The main articles are free to read. You can subscribe just to those, get those. And then he has podcast clips and segments of the show. So he has a number of podcasts that do one free, one paid, but when you're paid, you get the full Subscription.

It also has to be great. It has to be like links being killed on totally X.

Also he was huge on LinkedIn early on. He would post link and on Twitter as well. And now that Twitter doesn't have those like viral, like he hasn't figured out how to put his content into like an X native format.

We need Brainrot slop tiktoks of.

Yeah. With the subway surfers and then Ben Thompson talking. Yeah. The problem is that he just doesn't care about like.

Yeah.

Reaching that audience.

Yeah. And I think you could argue that his influences. There's a bunch of really large capital allocators that read his coverage and use that to make size lord investments.

And also executives at big tech companies for sure. Like which he is reading with constantly. But everyone he talks with is definitely reading it.

And that's why again, the reason to subscribe to him, not only because the writing's very high quality and he's been, he's like David Senra and the way that he has so much depth with these companies in the history of them that he can just talk forever about them. But now they all text him and call him and give him actual scoops and insights that no other writer has.

Yeah. Let's do another Greenland post and Canada Post and then we'll go to a promoted post. J5 killer says post a screenshot from 4chan where someone's thinking about why Trump is talking about Canada. The question is why? Why does Trump keep joking about Canada? Why does he keep joking about Greenland and the Panama Canal? The answer, for those of you who are not familiar with geopolitics, is shipping. Canada and Greenland and by extension Denmark control the Northwest Passage, which due to ice melting is set to become one of the largest shipping routes on earth. Canada can't defend it against the other claimant, Russia, without US Support. America is also going down the path of wanting to further control shipping routes to maintain their hegemony. While these come off as jokes now, make no mistake, these are long term US strategic objectives. Whether through conquest, economic partnership or some means, the US will eventually control these routes. Whether the Trump, whether under Trump or someone down the line. He is just putting one idea into the atmosphere.

Yeah.

Pretty interesting take. I hadn't heard that. I thought I was definitely in like that. It's just a joke camp. And when I thought Greenland, I thought skiing or something, you know? Yeah, just like.

Well, there is, there is a rift in the Trump admin. Right. There's some parts that want to absorb Canada and then there's other part that says, we already got the best Canadian. We got Jeremy Gafon and company. We got him already. Why do we need the rest of the country? Right. We have, you know, a future billionaire. He could have gone on to, you know, be the richest man in Canada. Now he's going to be one of the richest men in the U.S. do we need to go through the trouble of integrating this entirely new country into his state and all this stuff? But. So we'll see how that plays out. Jeremy's laughing to the bank.

Yeah.

Either way, he wins as he does promote a post. We got a promoted post from the founder of Lava. Lava is the only way to borrow against your bitcoin. All other loan solutions require you to give up custody. So you end up borrowing against bank coin and lose your bitcoin. These custodial solutions have lost $100 billion in customer funds in just the last few years. So what are these companies again? There was. What was the one? There was two. There was Celsius. Not the energy drink company that offered amazing WiFi. Went under BlockFi, FTX. There were lots of non custodial. Way to get some leverage. We love leverage on the show. We love betting on yourself and we love holding Bitcoin. And that is not financial advice. But lever up.

Yeah. Let's go to a bucket poll. This one's from Alex Kerr. He says, today I learned that Evan Spiegel has a private 737. Let's go. Action. For that, he's got the Boeing business jet. Fantastic. It turns out that N3E, an airliner 737 configured as a private jet, is owned by Snapchat. And Evan Spiegel, the operator, is listed as SE Logistics, short for Spiegel Evan. Snapchat owns the largest private hangar at Van Nuys Airport. Wow.

Yeah. My only critique here is that it should be wrapped in yellow. I agree, because I don't think yellow. There's some issue. If you want to make your plane.

Black, yellow is probably fine.

Yeah. It seems there's even a whole.

Isn't spirits color yellow? And they have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You get confused with spirit. It's rough.

Evan would not want to get.

You don't want to be thought of as like the spirit of social network. That would be rough.

Evan kind of came about too early. Right. Because he would always get so much for driving supercars around Venice.

Fantastic supercars.

Are you going to get mad at a young billionaire for enjoying.

Yeah.

Supercars.

Enjoy the fruits.

Ten years from now, it's Going to be completely normal for the average product manager in SF to drive a supercar to work.

Yeah. Street park.

Street park it. And so Evan was just too early.

But he, I mean it's still early.

But he's still here.

Go in his own arc and be his own person. And there's just so many ways Spiegel's.

Actually somebody I would like to see step away from Snapchat. It's never going to make any money. There's a sort of an enrichment scheme for employees. Right. And a strong public markets bet for some very online ex people.

Yes.

But I'd like to see him leave Snap, start a new foundation model consumer hardware company, go compete with. Try to compete with Avi from friend.com.

Sure, sure.

Yeah, let's just see him go big. I want a 2 on 2 billion on 10 billion. Like.

Sure.

That would just be good entertainment.

So, yeah, I mean if I'm going entertainment with Spiegel, I want him just to lean into the personality, the lifestyle. Let's, let's see your watch collection. Maybe he can just take it in a different direction. Doesn't need to compete on price, but if he's got little. Oh, he went a little bit crazier at West. West coast customs. Oh, you got the Cayenne Minivan.

I got 40.

Cayenne six by six.

Yeah.

What about that?

He's got the Sterrato build on an F40.

You know, you know the F40. You think about that car. Everyone loves it only has a V8. Swap a V12 in there.

Yeah, V12 quad turbo F40 with the roof racks.

F40 Serato. There. Now we're talking some knobby tires on that thing. It doesn't. It has a manual. Everyone says the most engaging drive. Throw an automatic in there, get some paddles going, it'll be faster. Yeah, let's, let's really class it up in there. Paddle shifting in your F40. Just dig it all out.

Throw a 2009 Porsche transmission in there.

Exactly, yeah.

PDK everything on it.

Yep. This is the way to do it. Just really.

He's like, oh, nice, nice minivan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Turn the F40 into a minivan. F40 minivan.

The perfect car to get to the snow.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you can't, you can't really afford an F40 if you can't afford to take it to west coast customs and drop another million. Converting it to a V12 with off tires. And you also, you know that if you do that, Ferrari will sue you. Right?

Yeah.

So. And you can't really afford an F40 unless you can fight the lawsuit.

The crazy Ferrari is the only company that sues their customers for just doing non harmless.

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

Yeah, yeah.

If you paint this thing. Yeah, you put the wrong phone case on your iPhone. Lawsuit. We want this thing clean. No cases.

Yeah, we should test out. It's every, every, every man should get sued by Ferrari at one point in their life.

Yes. And I think, I think if you listen to this show and you haven't left us a five star review, expect a lawsuit.

I father, father in law got an A nasty lawsuit.

Really?

Ferrari wants. Sorry for another time.

Okay, let's move on.

Let's move on.

Oh, this is a. This is an interesting personal story. So disgraced propagandist says staying at a formerly world class hotel in Pasadena and thinking about how horrible the consultant class that that's taken over is everything. Here's a shell of its former self. Small things replaced with plastic food boiled down to lowest bidder. Deep fried items. Prices jacked up. Staff lazy and confused. Best encompassed by the image of the at the famous tea service squinting at an iPad scratching out an appalling 60 second harp version not of concertos but of pop slash rap hits. The worst part is brain reservation. Brain rod harp. Brain rod harp just playing like. What are those brain rod songs? Like the, the Sigma. Sigma male theme song like, like the funk. You know funk music. It's like those stuff like, like Russian kids in Russia will be drifting to in like those VHS edits. It's actually sick music. I like it. I like that. Yeah. The Sigma male theme song on a harp that would go hard. The worst part is booking a reservation now impossible without calling centralized booking agency which barely speaks English and has no answers because we're not connected with the property. Customer service staffs are the worst enemy of the consulting class. The massive cost keep them up at night. It occurred to me that their next trick will be to turn the lowest on the totem pole. The migrant worker gardening and cleaning into dual employees. The leaf blower slash customer service role. A futuristic sort of slave wielding both cleaning implements and a bluetooth headset at the same time. That they'll call something like core team member or full service coordinator perhaps. Then I'll stop coming. Do you know this hotel?

I tried to stay there. The last fire.

Yeah, it's the Langham now. It was formerly the Ritz Carlton. Everyone loved it when it was the Ritz and everyone was very upset. My mom is like, oh, it was so much better when it was the Ritz. I didn't understand the context at all because when I went as a kid, a kid, it was the Ritz and when I went as Langham, it all looked the same. It didn't really matter. But on Tuesday when we got evacuated, I booked a room there.

Oh, really?

And yeah, because I was like, oh. Emily was like, we want to get out of the house so we got to go somewhere. We're not sure where we're going to go. I was like, I'll just book a hotel. There's seems great. Booked it on Expedia. It was pretty cheap. They were starting to jack up their prices on the price gouging.

Nice. Yeah, fire back.

Exactly. And so I'm sure the. I don't want to put too much blame on them for the price gouging. I'm sure whatever, like e commerce software they're using to set prices just detects like there's a lot of views on the website. Let's put it up. And 99.9% of the time if Pasadena is booking a lot of hotels, it's like there's a conference in town or it's the Rose bowl or the Rose Parade or there's something else going on. Not a natural disaster, but they should have a fail safe that says like, hey, like maybe it's a bad look to be prosecuting. Anyway, I book on expedia. It's only 300 bucks or something. And. But then, but then I'm like, this is a weird thing. I bet a lot of people are thinking about doing this. Let me call them and verify that they have my reservation. I actually got stuck in the central booking thing and they're like, we don't know if you have a reservation.

I did that this morning. I was calling a bunch of hotels. The hotel stayed at last night. Like H vac system wasn't working so we told them we were leaving. I started calling hotels and trying to get through to somebody that's actually at the hotel is very hard.

Oh, it's really, really hard.

Super annoying. So anyways, but my going back to the original. So I have. I feel like I'm qualified to have strong opinions on hotel like service and just the general experience because I worked at a Ritz Carlton.

Yep.

In college. And like I would work 40 hours a week at this hotel while I was in school. And so anyways, I've seen the inside working at a Ritz Carlton, delivering the actual service. And I think there's a number of issues with hotels today. The thing you can count on legacy hotel brands for is service. Like, if you're having an issue on the property, they will typically go above and beyond to try to resolve it. The challenge is the actual interiors are for the most part falling apart, so they're no longer that nice. The menus and all the food items are just like Cisco slop. Like, it's like, no, the food's no longer enjoyable to eat at many of these properties, which is just tragic because you have these incredible properties and then terrible food.

My business partner at his wedding, the day after the night of his wedding, he stayed at the Langham and walked into his room, there was a shattered glass, like champagne glass on the ground, wine glass. And he stepped and cut his foot like super bad and was like, can we do something about this? And I don't even think they comped him. The room is like very.

That's crazy bad. But yeah.

And then.

So you have like the, the. The. Most of our listeners are already a mon. Pill.

Yeah, I was going to say we need an aman in la.

Yeah. We got residence in center of la.

But will that be a hotel too?

I don't know if they're going to have a hotel, but it's got to be to live there. That's the best part. But, but, but yeah, I mean, maybe.

Just you have this, you have the.

Ritz Carlton, you have the Four Seasons, you have what St. Regis, you have all these hotels which are beautiful properties, very expensive properties, but actually mid experience.

Yep.

And then you have the new hotel brands that are.

The Caruso there.

Yeah. Would do it. But yeah, the Rosewood Miramar is pretty nice. But again, the food's still, I think, slopped. And then you have like one hotel, the proper hotel. These hotels where the interiors like they pay, they paid for cool, contemporary interior designers, but then they're just not actually, they don't have like the service culture typically that you get at these legacy hotels. And so the, the solution is to basically stay at these like very like boutique hotels, like 20, 30 rooms that are still nice.

Yep.

Or you spend $5,000 a night at the amount.

Yeah.

And that's like, like that's the state of hotels.

Have you seen this hotel booking scam?

No. Where you like fake booking websites.

So basically the way it works is you Go you Google. This happened to me when I was booking a room at the Four Seasons. I Google like Four Seasons San Francisco staying up there and the first result is like a sponsored post because every post on Google's every result is sponsored now. And it says like Four Seasons official booking. And the website is Four Seasons guestreservations.com and so you're just like, oh, this must be like the SAS tool that they're using. They got a custom domain on it. Sure, I'll click there. It's not the Four Seasons, dude.

I was on guestreservations.com today thinking it was legit.

Yeah, no, no, no, no. It's fake. And so what happens is that they, they, they get you through the flow and it's a really clean ui. Like it all makes sense. So you're like, oh, this is great. This is easy. They quote you a price that feels about right. And then at the last second they add like 200 bucks on and, and it will be like $400 if you just went to actually the Four Seasons website, 700 on their website. And then they book it and it's non refundable. And if you call them, they'll be like, sorry, we can't do anything. And literally all they're doing is they just have someone there who books through Expedia at an even lower rate on your behalf. And so when you show up to the Four Seasons, they're like, yeah, we have you, but we don't have your information for some reason. Like, we just have your name down here. We didn't get your email because they didn't put that in because they put in like, you know, some hash, like 6k427@guestreservation.com and then they'll forward that to you, clean it all up. So it feels like you booked.

And I was on. So I was on guestreservations.com today looking at the hotel that I, the second hotel that I booked, family. And I was like, why is this hotel like letting this other company own their customer?

It's so weird.

And I ended up just calling them because I didn't see the room that I wanted to get or whatever. And. But yeah, that makes sense. Where I thought you were saying scam where they just like take your money.

But no, no, no, they do book it. They just mark it up and then they don't let you refund. And it's this weird thing where again, I called the Four Seasons.

They try to make it look like it's Exactly.

Like, exactly. And I called the Four Seasons because I was like, I, like, like, okay, like, I'm getting screwed for like 300 bucks. But at the very least, like, I. And, and the reviews, if you search like guest reservations, read it, it's all just like, scam. They didn't even book me. I got screwed, like, because of course, like, the service is terrible, but if you. So, so I called and I'm like, hey, I messed up and I booked through this scam website. Like, I just want to make sure that I actually have a room when I show up and I'm not just like hunting around for a different hotel. And, and if you call within the first, like three hours, they'll say, no, we don't have you yet. And so, but then I showed up and I called later and they were like, we actually do have you now, because they finally put it through. Yeah, it's just, it's such a mess. It's such a mess. And yeah, I mean, a bunch of different problems.

Class action against.

Yeah, I mean, I, I do think the Four Seasons, like, I, I would, I, I talked to like the, you know, front desk person, but I was like seven layers from the CEO.

But what, what can you even do as Four Seasons? Because it's just showing up on Eagle to be a trap. They're basically a travel agency from a.

Legal framework and they're just arbitraging the Google Ad cost of winning that auction and the fees that they can add. So they think, okay, it cost us $20 to acquire this customer. We'll add $100 of fees.

I bet the CEO has an extravagant explanation for why this is real high value market service. You know which CEO?

The Force Reservation.

Oh, yeah, Yeah. I mean, actually, like, we're creating efficiency.

No, no, it's a total scam and they know it. They, they, they understand what they're doing. I've seen the inside of these scams before. This is an interesting one. This is not a post. This is not a public post. It's actually from a private group chat I'm in, but I thought it was interesting based on the fire stuff from a friend saying, I'm going to insist that everyone start picking up tangible skills like lock picking. I'm so sad by what I'm hearing with regards to, of the fire. But in the event of serious emergencies, you need to know how to commandeer boats, hotwire cars, start motorcycles. These aren't jokes. I learned how to do this a long time ago. You never know. And with kids to take care of being able to get out matters. Back in the day, we used to hold weekend sessions and teach each other skills all the time. You can download MIT's lock picking guide and get a set of tools and starters from Amazon. From Amazon and have a Amazon and have a fun weekend together.

Always pronounce Amazon like Amazon Amazon.

But. But I thought that was really cool. And you know, as bad as these disasters are, they are great. You know, it's like, it's like, is starting a workout plan on January 1 kind of ridiculous and cringe like, sure. But still do it better than not having a workout plan and not using that as the start. And I'm sure there's plenty of people that are in great shape now who are like, yeah, actually I did start working out on January 1, five years ago and now I'm jacked. And it's the same thing for this. It's like, yeah, maybe the fire was like the thing that made you go buy a gun or buy a Starlink or you know, learn how to lock pick or learn how to hotwire car. But you know, best time to start is now. So just go do it.

Yeah, I bought a gun for the first time during COVID There you go. It was just like there's riots out of my. Outside of my house. A lot of crime.

You got the meteorite 1911.

Yeah, yeah.

Great choice.

Shark tooth trigger.

Let's skip.

I can jump in with a. Promoted. Promoted.

Promised.

John. John's got that official X badge and we just wanted to call attention to John. He says at 300 followers. Invest now. You'll never be this early. And this X badge does numbers on engagement. This guy, this got 2.3 thousand likes.

No way.

Oh, he must be way above three, probably way over. But even if he's at a few thousand.

Future brother of the week. Future reply. Potentially.

Yeah. So John, great work.

Give him a follow.

And if you're, you know, if you're struggling on the follower side, go get a random job at X. Become. Become like the maintenance guy at X.

That's great.

Get the X badge and run it up to 50k. Then quit and suddenly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Also just that, that meme template of like buy now, invest now. We're still small. Like people want to get in on things early and so I think that works generally. That's great.

And the anime profile picture.

Yeah, you know there's going to be something there. Great. Oh, let's do a bucket poll. What should we do? Zeked up. Oh, I like this one Zeke, been on the show before, but this time he's in the bucket polls. He says whoever makes this autonomous first has my vote at Waymo at Zooks. And it's a 1840s horse and carriage. Looks very opulent, very loud. Opulence.

Yep.

This would be a great daily.

There was a bunch of horse and buggy setups in the Alps last week.

Oh, cool.

It's good. Good to see. I'm gonna.

That's great. Next year, you have to, like, box out all the tech journalists to get access to horses.

I mean, the lines. Wait times are crazy.

It's terrible. I'm sure. I'm sure.

But. But yeah, I think. I think, you know, I'm hearing reports from my neighbors that none of the gas stations around our neighborhood have gas. And what the great thing about a horse is, if the horse gets tired, runs out of gas, you. You let them feast on your lawn, and they're back in action.

Back in action.

You don't have to worry about. All you need is a little water, sunlight, and you got fuel. So one of the. This is another reason that equestrianism is. Is coming back in such a big way.

Is just rational.

Is. It's just rational.

Yeah. I do think that there is a. Although this is obviously a joke and a meme, I do think that there's an interesting insight here, which is that design of these autonomous vehicles is going to matter. And we saw this with the difference between the Waymo and the Tesla Cyber Cab, how they look wildly different. I mean, people were joking that, like, one looks left wing and one looks right wing. And. And you could imagine that people want to express themselves. People want different brands. Not everything needs to be perfectly monopolistic. And so you could see someone coming out with some sort of, like, opulent robo taxi that's cleaned every single time and very high. Like, what is the black or the Cadillac Escalade. Escalade V, hopefully.

I just want to call a Waymo. That has a humanoid robot in the driver's seat.

Yes.

That has the one AR15s for arms.

Yeah. Defend you. Yeah, it's great. This is a great throwback post from technology. Sista says this is one of the first Rune tweets I ever saw. All time Banger. And It's Rune in 2021 saying, you can either work for a liberal tech company that lifted its name off of a random concept in Hinduism, or you can work for a conservative tech company that lifted its name off a random concept in Tolkien. Those are your choices. And It's Samsara and Asana versus Anduril and Palantir. And everyone knows about the LOTR references, but I didn't know about the Hinduism trend on the left wing tech companies. But it really is true because Dustin at Asana is a big, big Democratic donor and obviously Palantir. I mean, Karp's actually a Democrat, but Andrew Palmer, kind of same thing. And I don't know, he's. Yeah, the analogy breaks down after four companies, but it look makes for a good screenshot.

Open AI being the least open AI company is just great naming.

Yeah.

Can't even have planned that.

Yeah, there was something about the Anderil name where it was like. I think Peter is a riff on the best with like Uber where it was like, it was like Uber was too aggressive of a name. Whereas Lyft was like this very like nice name. And so that's why the Lyft needed to counter assassination.

Yeah, they had to counter positioning with the mustache.

I'm just getting a list. Ubermensch is like super aggressive. And so that led to like some easy character assassination. Like we got to go after this hardcore black company. Like they're like black and white. They're super serious.

Travis was just too cool.

Yeah.

Good name in the Tolkien side of things. Home security from Kevin.

I mean, this almost seemed like a subtweet of Sauron a little bit. But this all started with Lulu saying if you, if you, if your startup hasn't launched yet, it's not too late to make sure it doesn't have yet another Tolkien name. That name won't make you the next Anderle. But I guess Sauron has launched. But yeah, I mean there's, there's, there's going to be a little bit of like distance where it used to be like Peter is a co founder if it has a Tolkien name. And then it was like a founder's fund partner is involved and therefore it has Tolkien name. And then it became like you went to Peter's Christmas party and so you get to use.

Okay, if anybody wants some alpha, find every possible name in the Tolkien ecosystem and go buy the dot com. Start bidding. Lowballing because, because Anderil would have been a pretty. Probably. It's like A. Yeah. Anderil.com was $10, not $10, but probably like five grand.

Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. Well, let's stay on the topic of people who have founded Tolkien based startups. And Delian says it's crazy that the Boeing astronauts are still stranded in Space and no one is talking about it. And they're going to end up being up there for almost a full nine months longer than I originally intended. Bums in seats. The world has prepared a number of crude flights in the coming year. NASA's SpaceX Crew 10 mission on the ISS, which will finally bring Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home after a 10 month stay in space, has been delayed to net March.

Glad they brought enough food. They're probably having like Capri suns at this point rationing them. But like NASA Capri suns, which are probably like way worse I would say. Here, here's the, here's the interesting thing. So Varda's first mission, they took him a little bit extra time to get the proper licenses to come back. Yeah, and everybody, like all the, you know, Dallian's like haters were trying to dunk on him for that. Yet there was no humans on board the craft. It was literally just. Yeah, so where are those same haters now? Hating on NASA, being like, yo, your crew is stuck in space.

It is funny how much of a culture war issue when it first happened because on like day two of them being stuck, everyone was like, this is embarrassing for Boeing. Like we're hating on Boeing. And, and a lot of people were like, we're like, oh, they're not technically stuck. They're just doing extra things like it's going to be fine. And like nope, it wasn't fine. Actually like all of the crazy, like irrational, like jumping to conclusions in this case was correct. Yeah, 100%.

Yeah.

Let's do a promoter post promoted post.

We haven't talked enough about watches on this episode. So we got a promoted post from the luxury watch guy himself. This is the watch dealer for friends of the Pod like Austin over at Morning Brew. Luxury watch guy has a Patek Philippe 55303R which is a grand complications. Minute repeater, rose gold skeleton coming in at only 1.3 million. Surprised Zuck hasn't picked this up yet, but yeah, Evan, Evan Spiegel, maybe, maybe go for this, try to get some new hardware.

And what was the rule again on watches? 2% of AUM.

2% of AUM.

So you need a $50 million fund to justify that 60 mil, 70 mil.

Yeah.

Okay. We know some people we can recommend there.

So anyways, jump on the list is asking for recommendations. Nicole. Honestly, kind of a perfect watch for Nicole.

Get the grand complication.

Minute repeater, rose gold with the skeleton. It's just, I mean this is such a good looking watch.

It's great.

Nicole, go get this watch. It's a great option for you. And sure to turn heads when you're in that meeting.

And the minute repeater starts chiming. The perfect time to the minute.

So here's the play for Nicole, because that's a powerful. She goes. So she. Let's say she spends 1.3 million on this watch, right? It's a. It's a meaning her last fund is $50 million. It's 10 million in management fees over 10 years. Maybe she pulls a little bit of that forward to acquire this. But then she goes into a meeting with Zuck. She's got a family office. She could probably raise $500 million just off of the conversation. This is a great conversation.

Or, hey, look at what I got in my portfolio. This one company, maybe you want to buy it. That's liquidity. It's all going to come back to her.

Yeah, yeah. So anyways, I don't think she can lose buying this watch.

And I do think the minute repeater is underrated because of the. Of the fact that it makes noise at the end of the meeting. So. Hey, I gotta run. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Drawing attention to your watch. You don't have to show it to someone. They're going to hear it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're going to hear it.

It speaks for itself.

Let's do another bucket poll. Oh, this is a fun one. Prank for exits went mega viral. 7 million views with a video about Juicero. And he says, never forget that this was a Silicon Valley darling with over $120 million raised. And, yeah, the Juicero was destroyed by Ellen Hewitt at Bloomberg. Actually, she just wrote a piece about Zinn that I was featured in.

And we still got to put that one in the true set.

We do, we do. Because there are a lot of things that were taken out of context. A lot of things that were taken out of context. But overall, I mean, she does great reporting and, you know, no one loves tech journalists more than we do. So the downfall of Juicero was quite the Silicon Valley moment in the HBO TV sense. Very entertaining for everyone involved.

I do have a good friend who did an SPV into Juicero.

Did they get out? Did they secondary out in time?

Knowing him, he probably did, but he's gone on to have a very illustrious career. Billions of aum.

That's great.

Doing just fine.

Yeah. So, I mean, like the basic thesis.

If anybody wants to. If anybody invested in Juicero and wants to, we would have a guest on to talk about that.

Be fun.

Let's break down the investment memo.

Yeah.

Why is little these?

I mean, it actually wasn't that crazy. It's like Keurig makes a ton of money. It's this razor blade model subscription. People like juices, so you know we're going to do the same thing.

Juice was also booming. Everybody. Everybody was saying you got to get all you should be getting.

Yeah.

Having multiple juices a day stuff it is. I've gone through juicing arcs. Super annoying. It takes a ridiculous amount of prep. Makes a huge mess in the kitchen. You've got this juicer that's spewing out plant waste. They were solving a real problem. So have I told you and the ip. The IP right now is like, who's. You could easily get, I think 10,000 pre orders for that thing if you just rebooted the Juicero IP maybe and somebody owns it out there.

I mean, they rebooted the Enron ip. Maybe Juicero's next.

Yeah. Maybe Juicera would do better as a meme coin now.

Meme coin or. Yeah, just simplify it and just make it juices. Pre made glass bottles. Have I told you my story about making fresh juice during YC in 2012 is the best? So we had a juicer. We were like, we need to stay healthy. Let's start juicing stuff. We'd go get produce, but it was always really expensive, so we'd always have to drink it all because we were like, can't let it go to waste. This is the highest value nutrition that we're getting. Most of the time it's ramen and just garbage.

This is when you were living on 16k a year with four other guys.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so my business partner and I go over to his uncle's house. They're like, oh, we know you guys are into juicing. And we got some produce from our garden here. Take this stuff and you can make some juice with it. So you bring it home. It's got some good stuff in there.

That meaningfully increased your Runway.

Oh, yeah, yeah. It was meaningful. At the time, we were stoked. So we started throwing it all in and we started juicing everything. And we're like, okay, carrots this. And we're like, what are these red things? We put them in. We're like, okay, I guess those are radishes.

Spicy.

We didn't realize that, like, it completely tainted, like, all of the juice. It was just the spiciest thing. But we were like, we can't let it go to Waste. So we just had to drink this radish juice for like two days. This is miserable. Then we had to clean it all is disgusting.

But yeah. Long juicero.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Shero made a lot of sense. I like this one by Armand Domaluski. He says the. The poly market on Will the Palisades fire be contained by Friday? It's down at like 1%. It's apparently just impossible to do. And so he's suggesting that somebody makes a movie about a team of degenerate gamblers who single handedly contain a massive fire in order to win a huge score on Polymarket. And I mean, the volume is 22K. It's not exactly gonna be a huge score, but it could be funny in a.

Somebody doesn't check the volume, hires the most insane private. They're like, oh, the French guy bet 40 million. If we just spend 5 million on the private fire and ship them in from the East coast, the $22,000 if you pour 20.

If you poured 20K into that market, be 5050. If you poured 100K, you'd be at 90% immediately. You could totally swing that market. The interesting. A friend of mine sent me this. That post just. The polymarket was like, this is so dystopian. And I was like, I don't know. I think it's actually still valuable to know. Okay. I shouldn't expect the fire to be put out. And there's this whole thing about like, okay, well, does this incentivize people to.

I actually got value out of it. I've been planning my week.

Yeah. Based on. Don't go.

I don't plan on going back before Friday. Yeah. I don't want to go home.

It's not gonna be contained. So I, I don't know. It seemed like it was net Good. And in this case, like. Yeah, you could say that there's. You could win 1% of your money by keeping the fire going, which is illegal. Or you could win 100x your money by putting it out. And so it's actually like the good ending here potentially if there was like this generic gamblers.

I only think it's. I only think it's sad for some of that $22,000. People with crazy gambling addictions that are just saying.

Yeah. Should we go to Paul Graham? He posted his office reveal. He says my flight was delayed. So I cleaned up my office. And he's got some wonderful bookshelves. Desk right in the center. The problem, of course, is that he's not in the power position. This is a feng shui disaster. We posted about this.

Yeah, we compared that. Having success in business in this room is the equivalent to making it to the NBA with no legs.

Yeah, it's incredible that he's been able to have the career that he's had.

It just shows like, PG is PG power position.

He really is a one of one fighting with one arm tied behind his back this entire time. And if we really knew the full layout of the house, we could understand more about whether or not this applies the principles of feng shui correctly. But I can tell you right now, feng shui is very important. It's very real. And I've very rarely do I meet really successful people who do not have their desks in the power position. This is kind of like Feng Shui 101. Basically, you want to have your desk facing the door, and so the opportunities can come to you and that energy can come to you and you're kind of ready to receive it. You don't want your back to windows. The feng shui reason is so that monkeys and ninjas can come break in through the windows and just, you know, take you out. But a lot of these, A lot of these ideas, there's other things. Like, you shouldn't have your desk right next to an open bathroom, and it's like the. The negative energy from the bathroom will throw you off. But a lot of these feng shui things, they sound like, kooky, like, you know, astrology, but they actually have, like, very reasonable, scientific, you know, explanations, if you think about it, like, yeah, why do you want your. Why don't. Why don't you want your back to the door where people come in your office? Well, it's because people are going to walk by and see what's on your monitor and you're going to be like. Like, am I, you know, messing around on Twitter? Does that look weird? Like, as opposed to if you're in the flip, flip, flips, you can come.

In, you can have X open on your monitor and your phone.

Yeah.

It looks like you're doing important business.

Yeah. And it's the same. I have, like, the windows.

After I bought my house, I had a. I hired a feng shui consultant. Shui consultant, David Cho. He's based here in la and he taught me a lot about my house and, and how to make it nicer. But you don't even have to believe in feng shui. Just look at how, you know, if you're a skeptic, go around your house. And there'll be areas of your home that you completely ignore that are perfectly good areas, like a living room or something like that that you just never go in because the feng shui is off. So you intuitively don't feel like you just don't feel like spending any time there.

Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean you can abstract it into just like, like you walk into a cluttered house that has a lot of hoarding going on. That's bad vibe. You're not going to be productive there. You're in a really clean, beautiful space where everything's laid out reasonably and you're not bumping into things, you're not stubbing your toes. All these things add up to just a more pleasant and happy life. And you can explain it through ancient Chinese wisdom or just logic and reason and both are equally valid. But the end result is that yes, you should in fact follow the principles of feng shui.

Yep.

Promoted post.

Promoted post caught me off guard here. We got a promoted post from Augustus Derico. He says apply to work as a forward deployed engineer@rainmaker.com careers and he posted a picture of their truck stuck in the mud. So if you didn't see, Augustus had a little episode last week where he and his team got stuck in the mud but they made it out. And yeah, I think this is a super important company. We've been over the last 48 hours, 72 hours we've been at the mercy of mother nature. Augustus is trying to Rainmaker lucky to be an investor there.

Was he the emerging poster of the year as well?

He was award winning poster and and cigarette smoker and runner up for hobby from obscure for obscure hobbyist of the year. But and yeah, I mean the team works really hard. They're doing something important. And yeah, every now and then I'll see a Rainmaker hater online and I'm just like, pick a better hobby. This company is very cool and, and I guess this is very cool and I don't think they'll be doing as many Gundo bonfires anymore. Sort of poor taste to like fire, but cool opportunity to go check it out.

Let's go to a bucket poll. We got $10 Danny here and he says, bro, you're fine. You just need an impossible sequence of events to play out in perfect order against all odds and you'll be fine. 200k likes banger.

That is the mentality that you should be bringing in to the rest of your Thursday. By the time this episode gets up, you may only have a few Hours left.

But the genetic lottery, it's real. Win it. No excuses.

No excuses.

Close out.

I think we're getting there.

Okay, let's do a couple more.

A couple more.

Chris, spare guys.

If you didn't, if you couldn't tell. John is deeply, deeply addicted to podcast. Yeah.

And keep it going.

He's like, oh, I gotta leave it one. I got a lot of going on. One time the guys sit down there scratching his wrist.

This is interesting though. We gotta, we gotta cover this. Chris says Bridger Aerospace owns six super scoopers including the one you saw on your timeline today. These are the, these are the planes that put out the fires. It's a public company. The ticker is B A E R Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings. And just Today they're up 10%. 11.6 to be.

There we go.

That was cool. I love when something where was to.

Tell people to go long Bridger airspace.

It's one of my favorite like autismo hobbies is when something crazy happens, you go and you deep dive like the businesses and the corporations that are buying like, like Caruso. Like when else would I really go and understand his full career? I'm really glad I understand it now because he actually is a fascinating business model. He's not like other real estate developers and it is really interesting and I learned a lot from that founder mode and it's the same thing I would love to know, you know, who's the founder of Bridger Aerospace, what's their stock trading at? How does the business work? How many of these things do they own? Do they make them? Who makes them? I want to know every, everything about this. You know, AI can help with this stuff but you got to know what questions to ask.

Yeah.

And yeah, it's fun and that's part of why we do the show. Let's go to Palmer. Lucky, I love this post. He says after spending a few days at CES 2025, it is clear that this vibe shift is real. Everyone wants to help our military. Everyone wants to build. Nobody is afraid. Fantastic vibe shift. And I liked the follow up here because someone was like, oh, like they're Johnny come lately. Like they're just joining now when it's trendy. There's no political risk, there's no career risk to saying yes, I support the military and it's still important. And he says yeah is exactly what Palmer replied. He said we should have an open tent for them. It's fine. Like, let's just forget about that. I'm not going to go and Pull the receipts from. Oh, you weren't on board five years ago, 10 years ago. And I was thinking about it, like, when Andrew launched, I thought the company was cool. I like Palmer. And when Palmer got fired from Facebook, I was like, this is very anti democratic and I'm not into it. But like, I wasn't out there like blogging about it or posting about it. Like, and it's not that I was like, necessarily afraid to espouse that view. It's like I didn't really have a platform back then. But ultimately, like, all that matters is like the end of the road. Like, get everyone on the right team for the right reasons and it doesn't matter if it requires a vibe shift. And you see this all over the place.

You know, credit to Palmer, the Andrew Seed round, obviously they had a ridiculously stacked team and it was, it was a founders fund was involved. But the Andrew Seed round was done at like 97post or something like that. Talk about a mango. Talk about an absolute mango seed round.

I know some people that.

And that was at a time that there was a very, very, very, very small group of people in Silicon Valley that even thought the category was investable at all to be able to pull off a round like that.

I know a big hedge fund that passed because of price mistake.

Yikes.

That'S great. Let's do this one. Maybe another promoted post. Esther Crawford, former ex employee, former Twitter employee, says not enough people know that the person behind Community Notes is Kay Coleman. It launched in January 2021 under the name Birdwatch. His product vision withstood the test of three CEOs, Jack, Parag and Elon, and is expanding to Meta's massive user base. Absolutely legendary product sense. That is crazy. Like, it seems so obvious, the Community Notes feature, but it really is this. You're a note. I am, I am. And I enjoy.

Watch out, watch out, watch out, brothers.

I'll put somebody in the truth Zone. You'll put two seconds.

Anybody in the Truth Zone?

Anyone?

Because the truth for you.

Yeah.

Is paramount.

And it is crazy. Like, there are so many posts that have Community Notes on them constantly. Like, almost every single one of Elon's posts has a Community Note on it. And people are battling it out, but it always surfaces. Extra information, extra context.

Really? Elon. Elon?

Oh, yeah. Elon's not. He's not out of the.

I haven't seen it for sure.

It happens all the time. Yeah, Yeah. A lot of times he'll quote, tweet something that's like a Little edgy or conspiratorial. It'll have a community note. And then Elon's post will have a community note, too. And you just see two of these. But also, as. As someone who's in the program, I see more community notes than the average person because I see them as soon as one person poses it before one wins. In the battle of ideas, the free marketplace, you can see, okay, there's four different people. And then there'll also be people saying, nnn, like, no note needed. And they'll put, like, why they don't think it's a note. Like, it's obvious satire. We don't need a note. Or somebody else will say, actually, we do need a note. We need to link to this Wikipedia article or this Wall Street Journal article. It's a really cool system. And then you can get in there, write stuff, upvote stuff, and see stuff before it goes out. And then interestingly, like, they're really good with the push notifications. Hey, you like to post and. And now it has community note. We're updating you. Just really, really great system. And just like, it's not censorship, it's just adding to the conversation, which I really, really like. So I can still see all the crazy conspiracy theories.

Yeah. Because usually once a post goes viral, people will correct it in the comments that they may not get any attention.

No way.

Yeah.

But you can see, well, this is half a promoted post, but we're going to be tracking this. We're now, I guess, six days out until Varda's second mission. Delian is announcing Vard is going to space again. We're very excited for this, covering it. We'll be live the day it happens, and you'll certainly hear about it here on the show. And this time they're launching from Vandenberg, but they're landing down under in Australia. Very exciting, very cool. Huge progress for that company. Very excited to see it. So congrats to Delian and the team at Varda. Good luck.

Bad week to be a Delian hater.

Bad week to be a deli.

It's been a bad few years.

I mean, some. Some of the dunks are funny. There was this one where he posted a picture of, like, the new factory floor and it was just like, empty because new factory. And somebody was like, a lot of space in the space factory. And I was like, okay, that's kind of funny. But it's like, of course they filled it in. They filled it up so much that Andrew has to move out. Doshfield he doesn't have room for his old vacuum.

But now it's going in my backyard.

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

We're gonna send podcasting equipment.

Oh, yeah.

To the moon so that we're. It's ready for us when we.

When we get there. Just arrived. We're going to put on the watch repeater and it'll just be chiming. Yeah. We need it with a watch winder. With a watch winder. So it's wound the entire time.

Sounds maybe just like a chronograph. Yeah, maybe basic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something good. Got to keep the time. Speaking of keeping the time, what do we got there in that promoted post?

We got the last promoted post of the day. A gorgeous Patek Philippe reference 575270P with a pink dial. Available on windvintage.com Eric Wind is a fantastic collector and dealer. And you can go check out this watch. I mean this thing makes me emotional. Like I'm gonna tear up looking at it. And it's just a very good looking watch.

Chronograph too.

Yeah.

Fantastic. You were just mentioning this could be. It's the daily driver.

That could be your new daily.

I want to keep track of how long the show's been going.

You have basically need a chronograph. You basically run the show without basically have three hours to buy this watch before the brothers are going to be notified about it.

And so it's less now we're getting this thing up in 30 minutes after.

We call your wife.

Yeah, sorry. Canceling the promoted post. We bought it.

Canceling the family event.

Yeah.

Later.

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

Yeah.

Treat yourself a little treat. Yeah. I mean, you should be able to put a lot of your net worth as a percentage on your wrist and get out of Dodge.

Yeah.

And you should also have a car that goes 200 miles an hour you.

Saw people posting, oh, think about how much bitcoin just got taken off the map because everybody in the Palisades had their ledgers. I don't one, I don't buy it at all. I think that people that live in the Palisades that are not like that are crypto like normies. They're keeping their bitcoin in et, like etf.

ETF for sure. Maybe coinbase.

Maybe coinbase.

Maybe self custody wallet for 1% of them.

But even. Yeah, it's. You're like somebody was saying, oh yeah, they have their, their ledgers in the walls. They, they, they used wallpaper and they had their private keys. Absolutely not. Like if anything, if you know, I was packing up in a relative hurry and the handful of things that were small that I could bring, I just brought them. And like watches are not going up in flames. There were for sure supercars that went up in flames. You know, probably if it's a Palisades, it's one of one Porsches and stuff like that. And so those have been erased from the market.

Some kith. M4 comps.

Yeah. A lot of kids M4 comps, but I don't know about ledger wallets. I don't think it was a sailor.

We lost a lot of good G wagons out there. Yeah, rough.

It's funny that the Palisades village, every other car in the parking lot is a G wagon. So if you want to stand out, don't get a G wagon unless it's.

Convertible or six by six.

Yeah. Or four square. Then it wouldn't fit in the parking garage. That's a big issue of la. There still are parking garages that don't fit G wagons.

Yeah. Well, you get the six by six and then you get it lowered.

A lowered six by six.

Yeah.

With a F40 engine.

But yeah, just swap all your engines all throughout your car cars. Take the, take the V8 from that 40, put it in the 6 by.

6 by 6 cars. Swap all the equipments and all the transmissions.

Put exhaust on all of them. Yeah, yeah. Stanced under lighting for sure.

Put your SF90 wheels.

Yeah.

On your.

You already lost 300k on the SF90. You might as well, you might as well stance it and get some under lighting, some LED lighting. We were laughing about that LED. I was at F1 in Miami and we were laughing about like so like all the different brands, like the Mercedes team before the race, they do like a parade and like it'll be like Lewis Hamilton in like some beautiful like Gull Wing. You know, slr. I forget what the car is called, but like, you know, some 60s car and then the Ferraris come out and they're like these, these amazing. Like, what are the GTBs? The really expensive one. They're all riding these like, really heritage things. We were like, well, what's Red Bull gonna do? Like, they don't. They don't have like a heritage car. And we're like up in. In like stance JDM Red Bull Honda engine. Yeah. Wrapped like Tokyo drift mode Wing with the wing.

Fantastic LED underlay.

Just Max Verstappen. Just like S2000. Just drifting.

You should actually get one of those. Just.

Oh, yeah.

And then take it up in the canyons.

Yeah, it'd be great. Fantastic. Well, let's close with this bucket pull. Our last bucket pole. We're out of bucket bucket polls. We gotta print some more for tomorrow. Last bucket pulls from Grant. And Grant says this is a low tam banger. Already follows us. Thank you. Grant, 32, likes, says picture of Rick Rubin and says the way that I speak to the AI has proven profitable to shareholders. And then Timothy Blumberg says, jfc, this is an underrated post. I respect it. Went out on Christmas or two days before. Great post. Love Rick Rubin. I advertise.

I like that. I like that screenshot too.

Yeah.

Wait, Lucy advertises on. So Rick Rubin is a nicotine salesman.

Yeah. Well, he reached out to us. He likes the brand.

Amazing.

It's amazing.

Yeah, that's a cooler cosign to me than Rogan. I love Rogan.

Yeah. But yeah, it was a very cool moment for the company. For sure. It was awesome. Awesome.

He's like, I have no technical abilities. I just consume high volumes of yerba Mate and nicotine.

Yeah, he just kind of fucks with us.

I just talk to the AI.

Yeah. Yeah. And so we were like, yeah, we're happy to sport and run ads and stuff. And yeah, it's always great when he has. I mean, he's become a great podcaster, has great, great guests. Always great conversations. If you're looking for an episode to listen to the of the Rick Rubin podcast, I recommend it's called Tetragrammaton. You can find it on all your podcast players. I recommend the Travis Barker episode. Interesting crazy talks about the dude gotten plane crashes, like all the Blink 182 stuff. The breakup of the band and stuff.

Crazy where everyone went.

It's. It's a fantastic episode. And obviously they, they, they like really, really mind meld because they're both in music and creatives and stuff. And, you know, I. My experience with Blink182 has not been listening to a lot of like highbrow interviews with them. It's like listening to the songs and the songs are kind of just like, you know, high school party mosh pit songs to me. But there's this whole other side of this, like, brilliant drummer who's done so many different things and had this wonderful career. And it's always fun when you go and see the other side. One of the other great music interviews that I listened to was the lead singer of Slipknot. I think his name's Cody something was on Larry King. And it's this fascinating dive into. He's like completely. He's insane when he's on stage, right? Slipknot's like the most hardcore metal band with like the faces and the masks and stuff. Corey Taylor. Yeah. And. And then Larry King is like buttoned up in this suit, this like this like one on one interview. And Corey just has this like very thoughtful, thoughtful analysis of like the politics of his music and the fans. And. Are the fans crazy or deranged? Like, why do they even need this outlet? He's from Iowa. There's been a lot of displacement of jobs and. Yeah, a lot of, A lot of hollowed out communities and like, why this insane music from Slipknot resonates with them. And it's. It's just a fascinating watch. So recommend that one too. Anyway, we gotta go. We gotta check on the houses. They're probably all burned down by now. But we will be podcasting tomorrow. We're.

Regardless, whatever you're doing, go sign up for ramp. Unless you're already signed up for Ramp, which most of our listeners are.

If you're already signed up, smart, pitch ramp to another company. Yeah, friends, company.

Text your group chat. Say, hey, you guys are stupid if you're not on ramp.

Yeah. Next time you go do a dinner.

Text your group chats and say, listen to technology brothers.

Yeah.

Rate them 5 stars. You can always revise the rating after you listen if you disagree with your initial judgment. But start with five and then pair it back.

If you go to a business dinner, when you pay, when you split the check, it should look like the American Psycho scene, but only ramp cards. And if someone doesn't have one, guys, call them out.

Call them out.

Call them out. Hold them.

Embarrassing.

It's called accountability, folks. It's called accountability.

That's the show. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching.

Goodbye.