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

John, who, who was the doctor that you were going to for calf implants?

Oh, yeah. Oh, we're alive. Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. We're still loosely on the topic of the fires, but today we're flipping to a little bit more of an optimistic frame. We're going to take you through the rebuilding process. Who's going to make money off of this disaster? There's always a lot of money changing hands, whether it's through insurance, private companies rebuilding, all sorts of different things that are going to happen. So we're going to take you through a market map of what companies are going to be built, but yeah, we're.

Going to try to get into there. There's people that, there's people that are taking advantage of the situation, but there's also a bunch of good people and there's also a lot of chaos. So, yeah, excited to dive in here, but we'll kick it off with some coverage by Mike Solana.

Yeah. Journalist of the year 2024.

Journalist of the year.

So Mike Solano writes in Pirate Wires a piece called Wildfire. He does a very interesting thing in this piece. He kind of connects the wildfires to the Mark Zuckerberg announcement about the removal of fact checkers and the institution of community notes. It was pretty interesting, but it's a great overview of kind of where the chaos stands culturally. Mike always does a great job of blending technology and politics together in a really cool way. So I'll just read through some of this. Last Wednesday, America woke up to footage of Los Angeles. Once Los Angeles's once idyllic Pacific Palisades and black and smoldering ruins as the city began to grapple with the worst fire in its history. Almost immediately, the remaining vestiges of our de facto state press lifted their hands to the sky in despair and blamed.

Global warming as also not just the worst fire in LA history, it's the worst fire in American history from the lens of economic damage.

Yeah, I wonder if it's going to be the worst fire in human history. If you measure it that way. It's, it's, it's up there. It's massive. We are recording in a different city because of this. We've both been loosely displaced.

A fire could rip through two or three Western European countries, not cause the same amount of economic damage as one neighborhood of la.

Yeah, that's true. And so the, the Democratic politicians echoed the charge and demanded action, decarbonizing our entire planet from Donald Trump, who would not be president for Another two weeks. But on X, there was no hiding from the truth, and there will be no forgetting. What we saw, LA was a portrait of madness as hundreds of thousands of people evacuated the city while suspected arsonists shuffled through the haunted hills and empty streets, spreading fire. And roving gangs of looters picked apart abandoned homes from the first deadly blaze. Questions from the front lines quickly rocketed back to social media and spread. And. And he lists out all of these great questions that people were asking. Some, you know, conspiracy theories and some things that were proven true. And it's very, very interesting to. Because it happened so fast, I didn't remember all these. We talked about a few of these. But why were the fire hydrants running dry? Something that's been really hotly debated. Why did the LA water chief, Janice Quinones, empty the Santiones reservoir? And why was she making $750,000 a year?

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

Yeah. The priority should be like, your job.

Yeah.

Other stuff also.

Also unbelievable comp for a public servant.

You know, I mean, we love big comp packages here. Should we ring the size gong for her? 750k?

I'm not going to really give it too much, you know, just not bad.

It's not bad for a day's work doing apparently nothing.

Yeah.

The next question is, why was L A Mayor Karen Bass at a presidential inauguration in Ghana? And then actually, why was the mayor of L. A?

Yeah, I think I talked. The Ghana thing is interesting. I think. So a lot of this got kind of blown over a little bit, But Malibu had bad fires less than a month ago.

Yeah.

And the town was really damaged. There was. If you drive through Malibu today, you would think that the fires had really gotten into the sort of central area of Malibu. But it was actually the last fire, which was in December, and same exact thing. High wind warning fires started up almost immediately. In that situation, the firefighting teams were just able to be a lot more effective and save a lot of structures. So it wasn't like 15 structures were taken out or damaged. And so Malibu and sort of Santa Monica mountain residents are basically trained at this point where if there's a high wind warning. There will be fires. Right. And so that's why this week everybody's still on super high alert because there's high winds today. They shut off power again and all this stuff. So Bass was getting briefed on the high wind warning while she was on her trip, knowing that this was like, the most significant fire risk and still decided, I'm gonna stay on this trip, that at this point, nobody even knows what the purpose of the trip is. But it seems like one of those kind of like relationship building, sort of more like photo opportunity.

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

Yeah.

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

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

Yeah.

And so, yeah, maybe she just likes to travel. Maybe that's just part of her thing. But regardless, she had posts like a few years ago saying calling out other politicians in disaster scenarios, being like, why aren't you? You know, it's embarrassing that you're not at home with your. So the whole thing is, you know, she has been completely melting down.

But let's get back to the more questions. Why, in a city constantly on fire, did the mayor cut the fire department's budget? It's a very good question. And if you look at the breakdown of the budgets, it's not like the budget of everything was cut and the fire department was just cut less than everything else. It's like the fire department was uniquely cut, one of them, one of the hardest to hit departments and then a lot of other things increased in budget. So it's kind of odd why we were allocating the way to start.

So the fire chief who's been getting just, you know, memed and kind of unnecessary ways in many ways it seems, but she had put together a report telling the mayor's office, we need, we don't need our budgets cuts, we need 50 more fire stations in LA County.

So she was asking for the right.

Thing in the size gong. Asking for more budget. Yep, getting.

Everyone needs a size gong. Just like, look, I need my budget increased, I need to bring the size gong.

We couldn't bring much from the CEO, the size gong. We brought the flag and the size gong and some money.

And why? The last question is and why had the state prohibited insurers from increasing rates as the risk of wildfire increased, which catalyzed a drop in coverage just before one of the worst fires in its history. California is a one party state, so failure in California is perceived as an indictment of Democratic governance. This means wildfire discourse is pretty much toxic at the national level. Republicans are incentivized to highlight disaster in the state. Democrats are incentivized to obscure it. And nobody is incentivized to chart a course toward safety for the people of California. While inevitable, the discourse stalemate has nonetheless been frustrating. This is something that I covered in that solo episode was like I, I wasn't even trying to take a political stance. I was more just trying to lay down what will the narrative be and where are the battle lines being drawn right now? And it's the question of was this a man made fire? Can you pin this on? A lot of times these fires get pinned on the electrical companies for not doing maintenance on their transformers.

That's why now every time there's any fire risk, they shut off the power completely.

It's crazy.

Which makes sense to them there because there were landmark court cases where they were proven to be at fault and there's billion dollar Payouts or whatever.

So they're like, well, startup idea. How about a transformer that just doesn't explode?

Yeah.

How many transformers just explode when something goes wrong? Like that just seems like an engineering flaw. Right.

Transform into a more truck. Structurally sound.

It's crazy.

No, but the real solution is to bury. The real solution is to bury the line.

Of course. Of course.

And I don't think the utility companies want to pay for that. So now they're hoping for a bailout.

There is a, there is an interesting question. I don't know if we talked about this before, but there's this massive move in la. Everyone's saying like, oh, look at the houses that survived. They use like steel and brick or whatever. And you see the burned down homes and the chimney is always still there because it's made out of brick. And so it's like, oh, maybe just rebuild with brick. But you forget that like earthquakes are huge here. And like, if you just focus for fire prevention, well then when an earthquake comes, you're going to get screwed. And like, it's easy in these kinds of like immediate disasters to just refocus on like the current issue and be like, fire prevention is the number one thing. But it's like, maybe the time is to also think about earthquake prevention and fire prevention. All these different things.

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

Yeah. So Solana takes a little bit of a victory lap for having called a lot of this. He says he first wrote about California's wildfires in the fall of 2020 and then again in 2021 in a piece called Global Warming Ate my homework. Great catchphrase. He quote, tweeted Bernie Sanders with that and got a lot of attention because it's, it's a great way to, you know, focus on the key issue of like, you can't just always blame global warming when, like, if you had done the.

My dad, my dad during his teaching career, his, his website where you would go to get the homework.

Yeah.

Was dog@myhomework.com.

Oh, really? That's amazing. Good domain runs in the blood.

He let it expire. I was like, dad, like, on. It's a great. But. But yeah, again, the whole like, at a certain point the excuses just stop working. And. And when Bernie was tweeting, blaming this all on climate change, I was, I don't get triggered. Yeah, but I was upset generally. Like, I was like, okay, like, come on, dude. Like, this is, like, this is not the time. And also, you're in Vermont, so why don't you focus on Vermont, which is a disaster in many ways too.

Yeah. So Solana breaks down like a little bit of what's going on here. Wildfires, including mega fires, have burned through California for thousands of years. But about 100 years ago, gold rush times, the population of California exploded, which led to the prevention of natural wider scale burns as humans fought back against the regional phenomenon. Fuel has built up for decades because of this, and today the state's at constant risk of burning. There's no easy solution to this problem. The problem, let's call it, of living in a place that tends to be on fire. Yeah, these jokes. Although there are many strategies we should consider, from housing policy that encourages greater urban density. I talked about that. Away from the winds to better. Or from the wilds, to better resource management, to reservoirs, to new equipment. We are also living in the future, I'm told. And I wonder what new tech, what new strategies and technology might be possible, from tracking to fighting fire. Probably someone literally paid to pursue such things should do a little digging. But decarbonizing our entire planet is not a serious suggestion. Not only because it's never going to happen, but because if it does happen, California will still be at constant risk of massive deadly wildfire. We need a plan. I argued this for years and so goes a little bit into, you know, liberal, like how the discourse has shifted on X because there's much less fact checking. This is a really interesting anecdote. Now there really is an art to good fact checking, one of the most popular and useful weapons in our sprawling information war. Generally, what you want to focus on is something categorically wrong, which by relation seems to disprove an entire class of thing you find uncomfortable. Yeah, CNN produced a great example of the tactic early morning. Early Monday morning. Meta Fact checkers. They reported debunked a post on looting. And for what I'm. And from what I can tell, they were correct. The narrow example they fact checked was indeed wrong. But was looting a problem barely discussed in the early days of the fire? While widely, while widely discussed online a problem or not. And then he says, as at the time of my writing, 29 looters have been arrested with hundreds of looters reported. Generally speaking, it was and remains a huge obvious problem.

And they had to create a 24 hour curfew. Effectively where you were not in Malibu specifically, you were not allowed to move around, walk around, etc. We were, my neighborhood was looking at beefing up our security and the only place the security was going to be able to sit was at the guard tower or in, in the community. So it was effectively not going to be worthwhile because we already had security there.

Yeah.

And so they weren't even letting private security come in to the area. So imagine the number of people, people that would have been arrested if. And that were arrested just as a media strategy.

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

Well, that's what Newsom has been doing too. And he's hyper fixated on maintaining his image right now. And so anything that anyone says he's a master manipulator and media personality. And so yeah, it's a good strategy to just focus in on the one thing. But in my, you know, going through this the last couple, you know, last week or so, it's been eye opening to me because so much of the information that I was getting from people that, that they were speaking factually like Nobu burned down. It did not burn down. It was saved. Um, yeah, apparently two. So Larry Ellison has seven homes on pch. Two out of the seven burned down. And apparently the firefighters just decided to make a final stand at Ellison's houses. I wouldn't be surprised if he was like carrying like this is a bitcoin, you know, hard hardware wallet. Like don't let it go any farther. But, but yeah, there, there was just a lot of, a lot of people were saying the Palisades village burned down. And in fact it was the only Area of the Palisades basically that didn't burn down. So there was a lot of stuff that ended up wasn't intentionally misinformation.

How bad do you think the. The Palisades village is gonna be in for it post fire? Because Caruso had private firefighters there and water tanks and was very set up to defend it. He defended it successfully. You know, people are criticizing him. Oh like he prioritized his buildings over people's homes. But clearly the guy was prepared and planned effectively and was effective in like protecting.

I think it'll.

Ultimately the question is just like who's going to go to these businesses when it's all just construction.

Here's. Here's what I think happens. Just my opinion. I think it was actually very positive that one small area was untouched because that is going to be the community center for sure to rebuild. I think a lot of these stores, you know, the stores there, Bottega Veneta, Saint Laurent, you know, like these stores, like not really useful. They should be like construction, you know, hardware stores, gas stations, you know, restaurants for food. Because like there's gonna need. The homeowners will be spending and the residents will not be spending much time. But there's gonna be. For every home, let's say the average home has a crew of 10 people working on it. You know, that. That's tens of thousands of people that need to eat and you know, buy supplies and get gas and stuff like that. So I think it will ultimately be a beacon of hope and some. It's not gonna be normalcy, but hopefully it'll be interesting. Like does it. Is it makes sense for Erewhon to still be there when it should probably be a smart and final now because like people should, you know, they don't. We don't need. We don't need $20, you know, grain bowls when. When the average person buying will be like, you know, day labor.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean maybe he maybe just does short term leases and just swaps out the.

That's what I'm saying. I think he'll be strategic. I think he'll be strategic with it.

Then brings in the stuff later.

Being worth $6 billion, he could have that and he owns his properties. Like he could basically zero it out. But if he goes in and say we need a hardware tenant, we need this, this, this and maybe get a slop kava bowls in there, some barnyard bowls.

So in typical Solana fashion, he bridges the two major stories of the week together into one kind of thesis. And he shifts from the wildfires and all the fact checking that's going on on X to Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that he will be removing fact checkers from meta properties and implementing an X like Community notes system, which we talked on the show before. But Solana has a bunch of good stuff in here, he says on Blue Sky. Zuckerberg's changes were of course likened to white supremacy by the sort of mental patients once uncritically cited as experts by our tech press. And sure, we love to throw eggs at the crazy people who held us prisoner over the last few years. It's funny when they claim their lives are in danger because people are shitposting on a platform where they do not themselves post and it's good to laugh at them. But Meta's changes really are significant and they were announced in a meta in a manner meant to make that clear. Mark didn't only change course on speech, he denounced fact checkers, both specifically in the case of their work at Meta. And conceptually, this was returned to the company's founding founding values, he argued.

One more point on that. I do think I have been generally, everybody can say these. I posted yesterday, have you been testing.

The limits on Instagram? Going really, really extreme. Seeing, seeing if Mark's, you know, really.

Well, I posted yesterday about this. Well, I just posted yesterday, just because you can say there was this Egan robot says it's morning again in America and there's a quote from a banker. I feel liberated. We can say the R word and the P word are fear of getting canceled. It's a new dawn. And so my point was, just because you can say the R word now doesn't mean you should.

Yes.

And I think that people are taking this as an opportunity to be mean and hateful and it's low class and vulgar. We joke about this, but it's true. Don't use free speech to be mean.

Yep.

Just, just, just. There's no, there's no more or less. You don't see, you don't see successful people being mean online.

Totally.

Even Palmer, when he uses some of these words, is using them in response to Jason, who's a Internet bully.

Yeah.

So he's standing up to an Internet bully.

Exactly.

But even with Palmer, as he said, the third and fourth iteration of the R word, it started to get old.

Exactly.

But again, Jason is like trying to bully him, which is hilarious to try to bully a billionaire who's 10 times more successful than you. But that's what's happening. So. But yeah, I would Just say to our audience, just try. You know, there's no. There's no roi. There's no long term ROI and being mean. Yeah, it's sort of these short term, you know.

So I remember literally where I was when I first heard the term, the R word. Obviously, I grew up with like, you know, guys calling each other retarded all the time in the pejorative sense, which I don't think you should use. I think it's okay to use it in the descriptive sense if you're quoting something or using it in like, fire retardant, essentially, like to slow the process down. But I remember being at south by Southwest at this, like, Spotify activation, and my business partner was on the phone with someone and he used the R word as in a pejorative sense. And his buddy was like, hey, we don't use the R word anymore. It was kind of like, you know, like, like free speech policing him. And he was like, oh, I don't know how I feel about that. But, like, I kind of get it. Like, it is kind of vulgar. Like, maybe I shouldn't use it. And then over the following years, it became like, okay, no one ever uses that.

Yeah.

Which, like, people were already. There was.

There was already a system, to be clear, was still being used heavily online.

Totally.

In many male circles.

Totally. But, but. But if you just had like a normie job at like a Fortune 500 company, like, you wouldn't use any foul language in the office at all.

Basically. Your mom was right.

Exactly.

Speak how your mother wanted you to speak when you were 10 years old.

But then what happened was it became such an inflated word to the point where if someone caught you using it even descriptively. And the famous example is Ben Horowitz using it in that clubhouse chat and Taylor Lorenz putting it out on Twitter saying, Mark. And she misattributed it to Mark Andreessen. But Ben Horowitz was quoting some Wall street bets kind of gambler, Degen guys who used the R word to describe themselves. So they were. They were. They weren't being pejorative because they were using it to describe themselves. They were still using the uncensored R word. He was quoting them. And so it was like three degrees of separation away from like, actually calling someone the R word pejoratively.

Yeah, I'm just.

And so that. And so it became like this weapon of like, if I caught you using it, if I have evidence of you using it, I can get you fired, I can get you punished, I can hurt You. And, and so that's why I do think it was important to cross the Rubicon for people like Palmer and Delian to use the word and say, hey, we're not afraid anymore. You can't control our speech.

But it's funny. Now coming back, I would not, I, I would not be inclined to hire somebody that was freely using the R word totally in any, in any like online consistent setting just because I don't, I don't think it's generally kind. So I think I agree. Part of it is having the power and the freedom to do it and having the restraint to say there's better words. Nimrod, communist, mouth breather, venture capitalist. So next time. Yeah, repeat this. Next time you want to use the R word, call someone a vc. John, you sound like a VC right now.

Yeah, yeah. And so, and so I think like Palmer at one point he actually broke down his logic and kind of explained why the, why the word shouldn't be removed from the language and censored. And, and I agree with all of that. I think it's, I think it's good to, to, to say this is something that should not be this weapon of cancellation. But then there's a second aesthetic question and question I was debating with someone terrible. Exactly. Exactly. Uh, there's, there's the, there's like the utilitarian question of the word. Like, should you be fired for using this word? Maybe not. Should you be shamed? And should your free speech be impinged? No. But is it an aesthetically beautiful word? No.

Yeah.

And so that's why it's this weird.

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

Yep.

Especially like, I mean, it's very context dependent, but it's different if somebody wants to have an anon profile and go be in Wall street bets.

There is a very different thing now, especially with the, with the company badges on X. Like, yeah, everyone with that badge is an extension of the brand. And, and I mean, we talk about Warhammer got into a lot of trouble with this because they gave the badge to everyone. It made everyone a brand ambassador. When you look at the way Ramp's done it, it's a lot of people who are on X and are posting about literally just their job, but it helps build the brand because they're posting about software development or fax. Herbert is posting about corporate finance, and he works in corporate finance at Ramp, and so he is an extension of that brand. They don't want their brand to be represented by vulgar terminology. And so it wouldn't make sense for a Ramp employee with the badge to use that word and represent the brand that way. And so it is this weird. It is this weird dance because. Because obviously I'm extremely pro free speech. I'm extremely anti cancellation.

But free speech is also different in the context when you're representing. If a pro, it's totally fair.

Yes.

If a pro sports team, it's one thing. Okay. A guy, an athlete should be able to give an interview and thank you. Their religion for what, you know, whatever.

Right?

That should, you know, nobody should be able to get in the way of that. Right? Like that's their part of their identity. Using specific words that negatively impact the brand that you're participating in is to me a totally different thing. And you can go to another team and do that. You can go work for yourself and do that. You can be, you know, terminally online unemployed and use it.

You know, also it's like, I mean, it's like good comedy. Like there are like, certain words can be used in very funny and novel ways. And the first few times the R word came out online, it was like, whoa. Like, okay, in this context, this is extra funny. I mean, we were joking about in that Taylor Lorenz piece how, how he said like her career had been our word. Yeah, because it slowed. Because that's, that's actually the, the, the non pejorative definition. So it's like this play on words and that's kind of. I think it's funny. But, but if you're just like throwing out the R word everywhere because you just don't, you just don't know any other words and you can't express yourself anyway. It just gets boring. And so it's low class and vulgar and. What would your mother say?

What would your mother say?

So that, that wraps up our R word rant for the day. Well, you'll probably be able to use it on meta. They list out a bunch of examples.

I think you should be able to use it on social media platform.

They're not the arbiter of this. We are the arbiter of it because we decide what is aesthetically correct in terms of taste.

And there's going to be teams that decide that that aesthetic aligns with their brand.

Sure.

And they're free to use that, but.

It'S very like monster energy. Word.

I had, I had a young member of the Party around team that there was a period where me and another person on the team would have post notifications on for said person. Like, we would have, like twice a week. We'd have to be like, delete this right now. Some people will be able to guess who that was.

But okay, so basically, Solana breaks down some of the reaction at Meta like the there's been this big story in the Intercept and formerly Gawker and 404 Media talking about how like, Zuck's announcement has caused chaos at the company. And there was a post on the internal Meta platform called Workplace that said this person's like, upset about it and they're taking time off. Solana then talked to a couple Meta employees himself and and said that there were a couple hundred comments on internal post, but not a single person had quit because of it. And Meta employs 25,000 people, so it does seem like a muted reaction internally. People are just kind of like, yeah, cool, fine. No fact checkers, community notes. Awesome. But there's a great anecdote in here from tech history, which I was not familiar with, and he says that one executive that Solana spoke with reminded him of what Facebook culture used to mean. In 2018, when Justice Kavanaugh was elected to the Supreme Court, a Meta employee and one of Kavanaugh's good friends went to Washington to support him amid the controversy surrounding his confirmation. This, according to the executive I spoke with, led to a full week of what might more be more properly be termed chaos, as thousands of comments lit up Meta's internal message boards, which concluded in an employee walkout. That executive's name was Joel Kaplan. Mark just gave him a promotion. He is now the company's president of global affairs, and nobody at the company seems to care, which is kind of confusing at this point as it's starting to seem like Zuckerberg is actually trying to piss these people off, which I love. And so after a few. A few days after his Instagram post, Meta ended its DEI program and Mark appeared on Rogan to basically apologize for.

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

Yeah.

But it had 10 times less interest because there just was these raging fires.

Yeah. It was hard to post like anything non fire related just because it's overwhelming the timeline. But this is a very interesting debate point. I mean, you've kind of called the top on Mark's.

You know, I called the top. I should have posted about it, but I called the top on Mark's personal. The local top.

Yep.

Not bearish forever.

As soon as he throws on a suit, it's a new.

Yeah, it's a new market. Yeah. New bull market. No, but, but about six. Yeah, yeah, about six months ago, I felt like Mark had been very emboldened by a lot of the positive reactions. He went through the worst negative period.

Everybody he's called a robot for like, he was called the four years straight.

He would go in front of Congress and be gone.

Yeah.

Just. He was. He was in a bad spot. Then he started training mma, working out, got jacked. Meta, like started ripping. Started doing the wakeboarding with the American flag. Positive response. Moving all the way to the minivan. Stuff like flaunting his wealth, like kind of playing into the average meta user and things that they would find interesting. And I felt like there's this dynamic where if you get too much positive. The more positive attention you get, the more of a target you're putting on your back front by the Internet. Right. And anyways, that seems to have been there now is like a much more. There's a bunch of positive. People are like, yeah, pro Zuck. And then now they're starting people being like, you don't get credit for this decision. You're doing it right at the new administration. You're very late. You're doing it at the most convenient time.

And there's always been this theory of like, the PR firm behind his rebrand is genius. And like, I never really bought that because I do think he's just going back to. You can literally.

I think he's also. He's also always just hat like anyone goes through periods with different interests. He got into smoking meats. He did that in a very robotic way.

Yep.

But then he's now into MMA and likes Dana White and like.

Yeah. You know, and he's more confident about it and he's more. He's posting about it.

So I'm generally, I'm generally, I'M in the camp where I'm, I'm glad, but.

I've literally talked to like the head of PR Meta and like, and like, she's always like, yeah, he had to explain to us what MMA was. Like. They didn't know. Like, I'm like, I'm very, very sure that, yeah, that, like, there's no slide deck out there with like, get an FP journey Zuck. Like, that's what'll work.

Like, no, he's, he's, he's, he has agency.

Yeah. And you can see it because if you go back and look at like the first interview he did with like the solo cup on the couch, it's like, that's kind of. He's always kind of been a bro and then he like, yeah, if you.

Look at the language he used in the college era is almost the same. Is what you would expect a guy that looks like he does now.

Exactly, Exactly.

I can't believe these people trust me with their data. Lol.

Exactly.

He looks kind of.

Clearly, the robot era was the PR firm makeover. It was like, this guy's too much of a crazy bro. We got to wrap him in something really tight and like, quiet. So, like, don't say anything. And now he's kind of unleashed. But, but people are definitely saying, like, oh, this is the top. And now it's like, oh, this is late. And I'm, I'm sick of this shtick. I think he needs to switch it up. I've argued that he should throw on a suit. There's other things that he could do. He needs to get into longer range.

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

He drives a Lexus.

No, I'm assuming, wears an Apple watch. Wears Lululemon, maybe spices it up. I think he wears Nike, some Brunello now and then. But Tim Cook, I think could take Apple from a 3 to a 4 trillion dollar market cap just by being a little more personable and being like, yeah, the photos app is terrible. I'm sorry. The alarm app is terrible. I'm sorry. Battery life is terrible. I'm sorry. We're gonna make it better.

Oh, yeah, yeah. He is like the most media trained person in the world. Have you seen his interview with mtv?

He doesn't do live stuff, right?

No, well, not anymore. But that's just because of, like, the COVID stuff and the live stuff's coming back in. He's not like, afraid of that.

We'll be heckling.

Yeah.

You bricked my phone.

No, he did. He did an interview with MKBHD about the magic mouse, which is the mouse that you have to plug in this way. So you can't use the mouse while it's plugged in. Like, it would be so obvious just to have the charger in the front. So then you can use the mouse while you're plugging it in. But this, you have to flip it over, plug it into the bottom. It's like one of the worst designs ever. Apple, they have a lot of great.

Designs, but this one was so, you know, so my. My phone.

MKBHD asked him, like, like, what do you think of the magic mouse? And he's just like, well, it's one of our best products. Just zero awareness that, like, people in the Apple community hate that. And he should have easily just been like, yeah, I mean, obviously, like, we kind of messed up the port. I'm excited to revise that. We have all these timelines. We'll work through it. Like, you know, you know, my. You miss stuff sometimes.

So, yes, my phone's about a year old. I might go, I don't think we're going to have time today, but tomorrow I'm definitely going to go upgrade it. Sorry. To Apple. I didn't get it in for Q4, but I'll try to buy some other stuff this quarter and really get my LTV up. But Apple should start. I leave the house, I go on a beach walk. I was listening to something, not even using my phone. In 15 minutes, my phone went from 20% battery life to 1% and then died. Yeah, I was like 20 to one, like a 15 minute walk. I was like, this is basically like a landline now. Like, I actually should be charging it.

I. We need the tinfoil hat. Because I don't believe in this conspiracy, this conspiracy theory at all. I think it's a skill issue. I think.

Yeah, my battery is a skill issue.

It is. You have crazy apps running in the background.

No, it's X actually. I think X when you have, like, if you're posting.

Yep, exactly. Because you're getting notifications. Exactly, exactly. And, you know, whatever optimization engineer was like, let's worry about the battery. Elon's like, no, don't care. Fry the battery. Just get the. Just get the engagement up right. Keep the people.

Get the test. Elon would launch a Phone at some point.

Yeah.

With a week long battery life using all of Tesla's like battery technology. Like that would actually, you know, people would be like, oh that's pretty cool.

The, the Starlink is like the size of an iPad. You could just have that and then iPad on the front and then it's just like always satellite Internet connected.

I saw a saddle, I saw a Starlink battery like new product that's like built like basically like a week long battery that you can put your Starlink in.

Okay, I need that.

But it costs like five times as.

Much as the Starlink batteries are expensive. Yeah, they still are. Apple needs to have some sort of like limited allocation like the like Ferrari does. So you know, it's like look, we're gonna need you to take a bath on this Apple Vision Pro. You're gonna need to get. Because these things are losing. You can buy an Apple vision Pro for 4K and go on eBay and sell it for 2K the next day. Like the depreciation is insane on this product. But you do that a couple times. Your, your, you know, your ad starts liking you. Gets you the allocation of the new diamond iced out Apple watch when it goes live.

Ice it out with, with a, you know, 72 hour battery life.

It would be, it would be really funny if they were just like yeah, we launched the new iPhone. Has the, has the best like M4 chip in it. It's super.

It is interesting though.

And, and you're, you're going to need to get on this to get it. It is just buy it.

It. It is fascinating that Apple has seemingly shifted away from this multi iPhone strategy and basically wanting everybody to get in theory get the next iPhone.

Yeah.

When I do believe there's a huge number of people that if they made a $10,000 iPhone that had a just ultra ridiculous battery life, that they would get it. If I had a phone that I just never had to really worry about charging, throw it on every now and then sort of my willingness to spend.

Would be, it is crazy because like there's that terrible camera bump on the top which was never on the Steve Jobs iPhones. Uh, the wobble is wild. And it seems like if you just raise the rest of the phone to the thickness of the camera bump, you would get double the battery life. With the extra space they must have run the numbers and been like people don't care. I, I think that it's like a standard versus revealed preference thing. I think that for most people it's like, yeah, just subscribe I just think there's one every year it dies. At the end of the day, you're good. And then, sure, you're a power user on X, so you're gonna get screwed. But for most people, their phone lasts the full day, at least for a year, and then they move on to the next one.

It would be. If they had any vision, they would do a landline version of the iPhone that has one of those stretchy cords that would actually.

We got to get that app.

Tim, when you listen to this.

Yeah.

Reach out to us.

Printer too. We want.

We got to get on. We got this incredible market map. So John. John is. John. John did this. And if anybody. Yeah, if anybody, any. Any venture capital firms out there that need a market map made. John made this in like 10 minutes. Yeah, I'm very, very impressed. But yeah. So we.

Key question, who's going to make money? Obviously it's a terrible tragedy, but yeah. And who are the business ramifications? So we tried to divide up what are the categories of industries that will be affected and then within those, what are the subcategories, and then give you a couple examples of each company.

Yeah. So the categories.

Take us through some. Maybe list out all the categories and.

We'Ll go through one category. So we have building materials and supplies, thousands and thousands of homes and structures and stores and all these things burned to the ground. Tons of damage that wasn't even necessarily structural. So that's a big one. Community and government support. So that's everything from FEMA to the Red Cross who are coming in, some, you know, some activity on the nonprofit side, government side. Neither of those groups are going to be making money, but they're going to be spending a lot of money. And so people are going to be making money from those budgets, construction and infrastructure. So there's big home builders and, you know, and groups that will build a, you know, not a. Yeah.

It's kind of unclear if those big home builders like Lennar will come in because they, they do more like track homes and specific developments. We can talk more about that when we go into the deep dive on that company.

But yeah, and the Palisades is not an area where people are going to say, hey, let's just take. You could see that potentially happening where one block is like, let's all work with this one builder and just build them out. But anyway, so construction and infrastructure, environmental remediation, restoration. So that's everything. On the cleanup side, there's so much toxic waste all over LA that needs to be Cleaned up and then landscaping and erosion control. So one thing that happens post fire is when all the fuel that fueled the fire burns off, then the mudslides become a huge risk.

Do you remember those in Santa Barbara?

Santa Barbara, yeah. Really, really sad. So I was in college when those were happening and Montecito had had some fires and then there was heavy rains and there was so much mud coming through the hills of Montecito that entire houses were just taken off like huge boulders. So imagine a house, a house traveling 200ft.

The death toll was like 20.

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

And huge fights. I was listening to something about this where like, we're like, there's like the. What do they call it? Claims adjustment. Yeah, Big question about, like, oh, like your house burned down and you're claiming that we need to like rebuild the foundation, but we think that the foundation was cracked before the fire happened. And so we're adjusting you down and.

Yeah.

And like, if you don't have perfect data on exactly all the materials, everything that went in, like, you're just going to get pennies on the dollar. Just huge fights. And then lawyers get.

Well, yeah. So it's interesting. So there's going to be. The banks are gonna make money on the new activity, but they're also gonna lose money on mortgages where, you know, maybe somebody didn't have insurance. And so there's bankruptcy. And then there's just gonna be obviously a bunch of policies shifting around as people realize, oh, I need to get off the fair plan. Because it was interesting. I think it was. Was it Monday's episode. I reached out to kin.com just to. Just as like a market research thing. And they called me like six times in the last few days. I finally picked up while we were at the grocery store and they were like, yeah, we're issuing new policies in California. So kin.com still issuing policies. QED, I think, is their biggest investor. So the next category, security and safety. You have Alarm monitoring services. And then there's a bunch of new upstart companies like Sauron that are in that space as well. And then physical security providers. So in the Palisades and Malibu area, there's like a specific security company called IPS that everybody uses. And so they've been on overdrive.

They're probably really important in the short term.

Yeah, think about, think about. So LA's had huge issues forever with squatters. I know people who have had a house in LA that was empty that would repeatedly get broken into, and the police just say, we can't do anything about it. Like there's weird laws around. Like if they just chill out in there for enough time, then like suddenly, like they, they have some rights, which is crazy. So you want to hear a crazy story?

Two weeks ago, a friend of mine was flying back into lax, gets off the plane, goes to baggage claim. Luggage has been stolen. There's an air tag in the luggage so she can see exactly where the luggage is going. It goes to this house. She takes a screenshot, it's stable, she knows exactly where it is, calls 911 or calls the police, police department, tells them, hey, my bag was stolen. It has an airtag. I know exactly where it is. Like, can you help me with this? And they were like, no, just no.

Just no.

Just no.

That's so dark. I know that's, that's collapse right there.

And I was just like, I almost like, I want to like tweet about it, but it felt like very like cultural.

Yeah, like that's like if feel. It feels like a sci fi movie where you're like, okay, I'm hiring in my own private special ops team to basically go break.

I'm saying that I was like, do you need me to go? Yeah, yeah, I'm ready to tool up.

Steinman. I'd call style the door kicker or door kicker. He's got like, oh, he's ready, he's ready to go. No, but I had, I mean, I was just shocked.

I was like, you have all the evidence here. It's like so clear. All you need to do is just.

Have committed in LA County.

Just, just, just send someone to knock on the door and say, hey, give us that back.

Yeah.

And instead she just bought all new stuff.

Oh, really?

Never got it. Just wrote it off.

Next. Technology and data services. So there's a ton of disaster assessment planning tech, you know, drones being used, aerial photography, satellite imagery, and then smart building and construction tech. So, you know there's going to be companies Like Procore, which is actually here in Santa Barbara county. They make a platform for construction management. So like they'll probably see a huge uptick in Southern California sales as builders sort of descend and. Yeah, one thing that, you know, let's, let's get into it, let's start breaking down each individual category.

Sure.

So why don't we start at the top? So manufacturers of core materials. So there's. To make a house takes a few different parts. So we have Cemex is the first one. They're multinational that we're highlighting. Multinational producer of cement, concrete and aggregates. They're a key supplier for roads, bridges and foundations post disaster. They are publicly traded 8 to $10 billion market cap and operating in 50 plus countries already. So massive, Massive country or sorry, massive company already. And the other one that we have listed is Owens Corning. They do roofing, insulation, fiberglass composites. They're already been emphasizing like fire resistant and energy efficient products. Also publicly traded, similar range, 9 to 10 billion actually in annual revenue.

I wonder with some of these like construction materials companies if this will actually move the needle for the stock. We were talking about maybe looking up some of the, some of the market caps on this because like although the LA fire is like hugely impactful in this area, like it is at the end of the day, just like 10,000 homes, but 100,000 homes in a year.

Well, yeah, but, but from a construction standpoint, if you think about the demand. So if there was $150 billion worth of damage and it's, and everybody's projecting it to actually be higher than that and you're the number one producer of cement and concrete.

Yeah, that could be.

And then that 150 billion of damage is not going to cost $150 billion to replace. Right. The replacement cost is actually lower because you build a house for $2 million and then it's worth 4 million. Right. Because the land didn't get destroyed or whatever.

But I think that's calculated in the losses. I think when they say $150 billion losses, replacement cost. Yeah, yeah. They're not talking about the land value for sure.

No, no, I figured it's more. But the thing, a house that's built is worth more than the raw materials sitting around and the construction.

Yeah, but I mean I think that like, I mean we discussed this in that, in that, in that Bloomberg Odd Lots interview where it's like the, there's the insurance claims and then there's the, there's like that other disaster database and so they're not just saying, oh, a $4 million house burned down, that's $4 million loss. They're like, they're saying the insurance will pay out. 2 million.

Got it. And they're taking the lower.

Exactly, exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Because. Because truthfully, like, the land was not destroyed. Like, you still own the land. And even if you didn't have insurance and you had a $4 million home in the Palisades and it burned to the ground, you. Your net worth if you own that free and clear is still 2 million probably, right?

Something around that.

Yeah. Maybe it's 1 million, maybe it's 3. I don't know. But. But yeah, I mean, the, the losses are truly like the, the burned losses.

It's interesting. If you owned these, they should be. If you owned lots around L. A that were in these fire affected areas, and then now a bunch of red tape gets removed. Your property value actually ticked up in some ways because now it's easier to build and you can build it faster so you're not carrying that construction.

I was actually thinking about this. Like, there's that. There's a funny Newsom announcement where he was like, we're removing the red tape for all the fire victims.

And dude, did you see the video?

You see that? Friedman quote tweeted and he's like, but we're leaving the red tape for everyone else.

Yeah, did you see the video of him? Everybody was saying he was on a bunch of stimulants because he has these, like, weird tics where he was going.

Hand motions.

Yeah. So we, he literally was going like this. Yeah, we're really afraid of these property developers. We're really afraid of these property developers that are going to come in and make lowball offers on these properties. You know, I talked to the Maui guy, you know, the Maui governor, and he was afraid of the same thing. So we're working, working on. It's just such a.

But I wonder, I wonder. Like, like, there's going to be like, payouts to people that are affected. I wonder.

$770 from, from Joe.

Yeah, it's like seven. No, it's like 700 bucks or something.

$770.

Oh, so, yeah. Seven. Seven. I thought you just said $70. That would be really.

I mean, what's the difference if you just lost?

But, but, but there's also the question about, like, if the regulations change, like, will it be all of Malibu? Like, will it be easier for you to build? Will it be like Altadena burned, I'm in Pasadena, my Water was affected because I'm on the same water line, which is why I'm here in Santa Barbara now. But my house didn't burn down, but there was ash that fell on my house. Like, we have ashes. The thing is, like, do I benefit from this or not? I'm still unclear.

Malibu Coastal Commission.

Yep.

You have local groups, other environmental groups. There's so many different levels of permits.

Yep.

I. I think it's great that Gavin Newsom can go out and say, we're gonna make it easier than ever to build.

Yeah.

But it will. But. But, okay, you remove red tape, but then you have a thousand times more people trying to do the thing. So what is the net effect? Are they gonna get, you know, a hundred times more, you know, employees that are processing sort of these, like, permitting stuff like that. Everything's gonna still be permitted. You talked about how permitted needs to be. You talked about how you were just trying to rebuild a room in your house, and they were like, well, if you want to do that, you have to put in a stove. You have to add a kitchen. You're like, I already have a kitchen to the studio. I already have a kitchen. I. You just really want me to cook? I get all my food from Cava. I guess I'm barnyard coated.

It really is so insane. It's like, yeah, your house needs two kitchens.

Yeah. All of this is exposing that. Every single level is broken. Right. And we talked about this on Monday's episode. The. They had just introduced new regulations to solve the insurance crisis that was already unfolding. And then there was a weak delay between when it went into effect and when the fires hit, so no change was going on.

It's so easy to just be like, the branding is. We're removing red tape, and then the law is like, we're going to make it sure that your house can never be built unless it's to the most environmental fire code possible.

And it's like, oh, and so now LA has. I think we're going to want to cover this. But the business of super bowl prep, the business of Olympic prep, so we have these huge international events coming to LA by 2028. And that just adds a whole other level to it. But let's keep going. So we have. Separately, these tend to be the company. So CEMEX and. Or Chemex, I don't actually know how you say it, and Owens Corning get way less attention because they're. They're much more on the industry side, B2B than Lowe's and Home Depot, which still have a huge B2B component to their business, but are the more high profile sort of consumer retail businesses. So Lowe's, I think everybody should know, second largest hardware building supply retailer in the US Provides community support and emergency supplies post disaster, which is Great. They do 90 to 100 billion in revenue. They're based in North Carolina, where they just had, obviously, a big hurricane. And then you have Home Depot, which is the largest US home improvement retailer, critical supplier of rebuilding materials after disasters. 2300 stores. They have 150 billion of annual revenue. And so. So, yeah, the average, you know, for every one person that walks into a Home Depot, one of them is a, you know, contractor.

Two people that walk in. One is. It's 5050. At Home Depot. Contractors versus DIY prosumers.

Yeah.

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

That is funny because whenever I'm in Home Depot, you know, you know, I feel like a lost golden retriever.

Exactly.

I'm over here. Golden retriever math.

Yeah, yeah. And the idea is to, you know, put the contractor first. You show up, you go in, you just get your stuff and you go, Whereas Lowe's, there's gonna be more people walking around kind of. Oh, oh, you want to, you know, like, you know, DIY your own deck or just get some furniture, get a new fridge. Like, we'll. We'll walk you through that.

You could. In many ways, I would imagine that Home Depot is a bigger beneficiary here because there's been so much diy. You're not doing the foundation yourself.

Exactly. Yeah.

That is almost a meme online of like, you know, you can just build a house. People that, you know, you know, left wing people will complain about the cost of housing, and then sort of like homesteader, right wing people be like, you can just build. You can just go and buy the supplies and build your house, you know, so I'm sure We'll see some of that.

Home Depot went through some crazy shocks during COVID Everyone was worried that like, you know, the, the housing market would collapse because the stock market was down. The economy was really rough during the early days of COVID Unemployment was really high. But then once people realized that they were going to be at home for a year, they were like, let's do some home improvement projects. And I think they pulled forward something like five years of growth in one year during COVID And the stock like mooned and did really well because everyone was doing renovations and stuff because they're like, if I'm going to be here and the interest rates are really low and I'm getting massive checks from the government and, and you know, I'm not moving and the stock and the price of my house is going way up. I should be renovating. I should be. And they were just like, yeah, everywhere. So yeah, a lot of flipping, a lot of flipping during that time. So again, Home Depot is a company we're going to.

We're covering Brad Jacobs on Friday but he has a new private equity firm.

Yeah, private equity roll up firm. You're going to try and buy a couple of companies that do construction supplies.

So the presumably would B2B more like Cemex or Chem.

Exactly.

Owens. But the smaller. Smaller.

Exactly.

Mid. Mid market.

He wants to bring in technology and automation to all the stuff that he's done at XBO and the other logistics companies that he's run but focused on. On construction supply chain.

Yeah. All right, let's jump into. We're going to cover more of that.

Kind of like McMaster Carr, if you're familiar with that. He wants to be, you know, McMaster margarita for. For construction supplies.

Who is posting about the McMaster Margarita?

Oh yeah, the ITAR Gatorade.

ITAR Gatorade.

That's great.

So next category, community and government support subcategory. We have emergency management and coordination. So first up we have Cal OEs. They oversee the emergency response specifically for the state of California. They coordinate the wildfire evacuations and statewide resource deployment. It's interesting because I don't know anybody that was using Cal OES for this. Everybody was using WatchDuty but I'm sure Cal OES data feeds into that.

Sure, yeah, that makes sense.

But WatchDuty.

Cause WatchDuty is a nonprofit but it's like a company. So it's like startup almost.

And I'm. It wasn't, it wasn't perfect.

Non profit now might be for profit conversion. If they want to start printing.

Yeah. Take private.

Get those units. Stack those units.

If you're watch duty, Gafon and company Take private. A watch studio. Watch duty just jacks it up to a hundred dollars.

Yeah. Get Nikita in there.

Yeah. Get some dark patterns.

Get some dark patterns.

Dark.

And start printing in app purchases.

Yeah. And so Cal. Oh, yes, Coordinates with local, like city, LA and FEMA for disaster strategies. And yeah, it was wild. I think Wednesday night watch duty just stopped updating. The fire didn't spread all night. So I remember everybody's watching it being like, what's going on? Because that's like the only way to get anything close to information. FEMA is a more interesting one to me here. So fema, as everybody knows, kind of a controversial agency because they deal with a lot of the immigration stuff, but federal agency coordinating major disaster response across the US they provide grants, temporary housing and public infrastructure repair funding. So they're funding, you know, if a freeway gets damaged, they're going to help fund that. They oversee $20 billion annually in disaster relief. So what's interesting about this is people. Yeah. And I'm sure that that's more of like an average, and I'm sure it massively takes up.

Katrina, I'm sure, was higher.

But what's interesting about this is there's a whole subcategory of contractors that, that are already looped in, you know, that do work with fema because there's always stuff happening. Right. So it's think of it as like a FEMA SMB type, you know, operator, where FEMA is now going to be funding a lot of the cleanup from the fire, where everything from. Okay, there's. We have these 20 cars on the street that burned out. We need to bring a bulldozer.

And so there's probably DOD contracting, but just.

Yeah, so there's a subcategory of contractors right now that are buying, that are buying or renting every available bulldozer in the surrounding area or shipping them in just to operate them to basically take on these, like, individual, you know, FEMA contracts and could probably do a whole deep dive there. But it's a lot of, like, people that have good intentions, a lot of people that are just trying to make a quick buck. A lot of that money gets spent pretty poorly because there's like this crisis situation. And if you need to clean up, you know, hundreds of square, you know, miles or thousands and thousands of acres of just, like chaos and, like, you just need to spend money. It's like a startup, right? Where if you need to do something super, super fast, sometimes the best way to do it is just to like, overspend the local agencies and nonprofits. American Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, Everybody knows the Red Cross. They.

Not many injuries or blood donations going on right now because the death toll is so low. But surely they come out with like, you know, just general relief.

Yeah. So they. The Red Cross works with local agencies. They're trying to, you know, provide support for displaced residents. They operate on two to three billion dollars annually from donations and grants. So, you know, big organization, but maybe not even as big as some might think. Habitat for Humanity, they build and repair affordable homes with volunteer labor and they offer zero interest mortgages for disaster affected families. So that's cool. They're active globally, but they're based in Atlanta.

I built a house with Habitat for Humanity in high school and it was like the slowest process in the world. It took like months for them to do, like, anything.

Oh, yeah, because it's like, now we're gonna do the.

Because it's like, American.

There's all the rotating team.

Just takes forever. And then I had one where I went to Mexico and did it. Built the house in a day. It was the most satisfying thing in the world.

That's crazy.

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

That's how it should be. Hopefully. I mean, that's not gonna happen here, but hopefully even 100 days, right?

Yeah.

I have a friend.

Bring in the Amish. Yeah, bring the Amish to Amish.

They can throw up.

Just throw barns.

I have a buddy in Malibu who did an internal remodel. So structure didn't change at all. Took him over three years. And it wasn't. And it was the kind of thing that could have been done in four months.

Yeah. But just massive delay.

All right, next, construction and infrastructure. Commercial and infrastructure construction. So there's aecom, A E C O M Ecom. Yeah, AECOM Global engineering. Construction firm for handling civil and commercial projects.

Yeah, that's more for like, if the water plant or power plant, like, burned down, like they're going to come in and build like a bespoke, like, you know, massive power plant or some like, piece of huge infrastructure. Like the water main, stuff like that.

Yeah, you have to imagine a lot of that stuff didn't burn to the ground because it's like concrete buildings. But the machinery inside. And, and right now we're, we have a water crisis in la. Just because, you know, when you think.

About like who builds the reservoir, like that type of thing, like, do we need an extra reservoir after this? Is that the resolution? Well, then you're going to call in.

When going forward, their comp should be structured based on making sure the reservoir actually has water. You know, like it should be like a, you know. Yeah, we need some accountability.

You don't get paid unless it's full.

And then there's Bechtel, one of the largest privately held engineering companies renowned for massive infrastructure projects worldwide. 17 to 20 billion in annual revenue, international operations, very similar companies.

Halliburton, famous for Dick Cheney. Halliburton, very old company, but does these huge infrastructure projects. The famous story is in Iraq, like you need to put in oil. Well, they would engineer that and build that and then. Are you familiar with Parsons in Pasadena?

Oh, the design school.

Right there is a design school. I think the design school was endowed by the founder of the engineering firm.

Oh, crazy.

I think his name is Bill Parsons and he, he does, yeah, he designed like all these weapons. He was like a DOD contractor during like maybe World War II, maybe a little bit after. But built like a whole bunch of like tanks and stuff. And then eventually did more and more engineering projects bigger. And now it's like this big, big engineering firm.

Crazy. Okay. On the residential side, we have KB Home and Lennar. KB Home. Customizable energy efficient homes in major US markets. Built to order model, simplifies adaptation to local codes. Based in la. So I'm sure they're gonna. You know, I actually talked to a guy who does a bunch of.

Can I have the other three pages, by the way?

Yeah. Did we get the printer working?

Sorry, I haven't set it up.

We can trade back at some point. I talked to a guy in Santa Barbara the other day. Was like, are you going to go try to do any development work in Santa Barbara? And he. Or, sorry, in la. And he's like, I'm good. You know, I don't want to go basically get involved in someone's backyard. So I think a lot of the stuff will go to local builders and that's who I'd want. You know, if my house burned down, I'd want somebody local that's not just like coming in for a few years to like make a quick buck and get out.

Yeah.

And then Lennar, one of the largest US homebuilders, they focus on scalability and they do have post disaster rebuilding sort of products based in Miami, $35 billion market cap.

Also an investor in cover.

Really?

Yeah.

That's cool.

Yeah. So covers a friend's company who builds modular homes.

And you have to imagine right now covers revenue.

Well, 10x you would imagine if people are doing stuff, their core market has been ADUs and backyard homes very quickly.

No, but here's one angle, and this is what people have done even historically, is if you need to remodel or rebuild your primary home, throw an ADU in the backyard, start with the adu.

Live there, and then you can build the full house.

There's people that, that don't, you know, if your house didn't burn down, but it was badly damaged and then, okay, so you're not, you're going to get paid to get it remodeled. But insurance payouts kind of work where they're like, well, we'll fund it for two years, but then it takes three, four years to rebuild and then you have to then carry the cost of two properties just for your primary residence.

Yeah, I mean I certainly hope that they can step up and help. They have this whole modular like, you know, they basically manufacture panels. There's a lot of manufactured homes where they build the whole home in a huge warehouse and they put it on the back of a truck. You've probably seen these driving down like the five, so it's crazy. And then, and then they, and then they, sometimes they split the home in half and then they just piece it together, bolt it to the foundation.

And those homes feel really bad when you're in them.

Yeah, yeah. And they're built using traditional manufacturing techniques. Like it's a guy with hammer and nails, like nailing like two by fours together to make the home and then putting up drywall. The COVID model is like make these modular panels that then can click together and they're perfectly engineered so that even like the, you know, the power outlets are like built into the whole system. Yeah. But they, long term they want to have all those panels click together so you could make a three story house out of them, but they just aren't quite there yet. And there's always a question of when these, when these big events happen, like the Ukraine war. Like there's a lot of, there's a lot of drone companies where it's like, yeah, they'd want to jump into that business. But they don't have a manufacturing plant. They have like a demo product and they're just not really going to move the needle. But it can be A catalyst for a next funding round or a next product or something like that. There's this interesting deep dive on Dr. Horton from business breakdowns. They're very similar to Lennar in the sense that they're a massive homebuilder. I think they build 100,000, 90,000 homes annually. Now the founder started with $3,000 in 1978 and a $30,000 loan from the bank, built one home and then five homes and then 10 homes and then 100 homes. And then in 1992 he built a thousand 200 homes and now he's building 90,000 annually.

And yeah, so one, one, but these.

Are focused on track homes.

One thing to note if, if they're, if you're somebody who is obsessed with construction and home building, which there are many people and this, and you want to go and build a major construction company or home building company, there's nothing wrong with coming to LA and setting up shop and trying to rebuild a bunch of homes here. And that can be your, the catalyst to building a big business. It's not, you're not taking advantage of anyone, you're providing a service. Nobody's going to give you money unless you're providing them value in exchange. So I would imagine that there will be some, there will be many people that make an incredible, you know, catalyze their career and go from a 2 million dollar revenue business to a totally, you know, 20 plus.

Yeah, one of the interesting things about these, these large home builders that came out of this deep dive that I listened to was a lot of them have transitioned to being asset light, meaning that they don't typically own the land and they're less in the real estate business. And they've said the business has transformed from being a real estate business to being a manufacturing business. So they really just focus on making the homes. 75% of the land is optioned versus 25% a decade ago. And that has increased the return on equity for this business from 10% to 22%. So much more asset light. And, and it's really just about getting those homes out as fast as possible. Now I don't think any of those prefab manufactured homes are going into the Palisades. There's a question about Altadena. You know, the, the average home price there was probably a third to a fifth. As much as the Palisades?

Yeah, like 800k to a million, something like that.

Yeah, but there's a, but there's a big question about like what will that, what will that community want in terms.

Of style and design, I think, I think that. What, what, what? There's a pending gentrification crisis almost in Altadena where so many of the people there had owned their homes for so long that if you own your home free and clear, you do not have to have insurance. I don't believe you can just, you can just raw dog it basically. But, but the, what's gonna happen is Altadena is in close proximity to la. People will look at that very opportunistically and say we can create three million dollar homes here, you know, and $3 million gated communities by going out or.

More or more mixed use, you could mix in. So Pasadena has been going through a little bit of a transition where in the downtown core there's been more apartment buildings going up. Still not 10 stories. You're talking about like four story buildings and you can. And Altadena historically really had none of those. So maybe you put in some of those. There's these zero lot lines homes that are very popular in LA right now, especially in kind of the Echo park area where it's a full house, you own the house, but there's no lot like, like your house bumps up against your neighbor's house and it's basically just like this ultimate optimized, like check the box for what a house is.

Bad place to be. Golden retriever Maxing.

Yeah, it's rough.

There's no place to sun your.

Well the roof deck usually. So they're, they're designed to be like hyper optimized. I know a guy who moved into one, he has golf serenity sunning on you.

Better hope you're the highest rooftop.

So like it'll be like a two car garage, but they're like stacked. And then you go upstairs and there's like a kitchen, open floor plan living room. Then you go upstairs, there's some bedrooms and there's a roof deck and it kind of like checks the boxes for like you have one of everything and they look nice, but they're just like really, really condensed to be able to, to fit them all in. So you can, you can wind up building like a 3,000 square foot, four bedroom home on like a 6,000 square foot plot of land or something instead of like a quarter acre or whatever. I probably have those numbers wrong, but it's a small plot of land because it's just stacked up and so I could see some of those going in, I could see some of the. I wonder how many people will say, hey, we want Altadena. To look like it did before. So let's build in kind of. There's the Spanish style. There was a lot of like tiled roofs stuff and there was just a lot. I mean it was a very slow growth community. Like it grew for 100 years without real.

Historically there was a large community of like African American.

Yeah. And Latinos.

Yeah.

And. And so there's a question about like. Yeah, what. What will. What will the style demands of that community be going forward? How much displacement that will there be from wealthier people moving there?

Well, it's gonna be. I mean it's a interesting experiment to see what the Palisades look like.

Yeah. Just because I could see the Palisades rebuilding like exactly like it looked.

Yeah. Similar. I mean they were still in the Palisades. There were still homes. 60s.

Sure.

A lot of stuff like that.

Yeah.

But let's keep it rolling because there's a lot here. So environmental remediation and restoration, cleanup and remediation is a big one. We covered some of this in the emergency management section. But you have Belfor Global property restoration firm for fire, water and storm damage. They offer complete services. They do cleanup and reconstruction. Also privately held Clean Harbors specializes in hazardous waste management and industrial services. They remove toxic debris and manage environmental risk post disaster. Publicly traded 4 to 5 billion annual revenue. The one interesting thing here is like okay, you have a gas station that just burned to the ground and was on fire. Okay. Now is that what happened to the tanks? Is it leaking oil everywhere? A lot of the gas would have been siphoned out just by nature of the demand and the exit to the fire. But yeah, there's just so many levels to the crisis. That's not just the homes.

Right.

There's, it's like simple stuff like oh, this hardware store had 200 batteries in this back room that just burned. Right. So now that's all just leaking.

All the refrigerators, all the stoves just melted.

Landscaping and erosion control. So Bartlett Tree Experts is one. They have 150 offices. So that goes to show you can get. You can build a big company pretty much in any niche, family owned still. They do like basically just any work around these sort of mat. I mean for as many homes as LA has, it has as many trees. Yeah, the trees, weirdly a lot of them are left standing, which is just a proof point for I think going forward. A lot of these homes are going to add these complex sprinkler systems. There's this guy who runs an SMB and like does a lot of Stuff with the homes in Malibu called. I think it's like brush fire battle systems, like kind of a cool name. But he creates these. I actually meant to. When I was originally looking into that idea around doing a drone fire response business, I was meant to talk to him, but then we had a bunch of fires and the meeting never happened. But he builds these sprinkler systems to just make homes damp when fires are breaking out. And the trees, it was interesting. A lot of conspiracy theorists were saying like, how did all the homes burn down and not the trees and this car. But, but trees are very moist. They have filled with, filled with water. They're like. Humans are like what, 70% water?

Whereas the.

So it's much harder.

If you've ever tried wood. Possible.

Yeah. If you've ever tried to burn down it, you know, burn, you know, start a fire with like wet wood, it just doesn't work.

That's why you have to like kill the tree and then you burn it out.

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

Yeah.

That are set up where when somebody evacuates, they turn it on and it just like sprays water everywhere and makes the place damp. So Davey Tree employee owned company. Very cool. Better than, much better than being a non profit for tree care and environmental consulting. Stabilizes landscapes post fire by removing hazardous trees. One and a half to 2 billion of annual revenue. They're based in Ohio. Wow. So like there's a lot of those.

Companies have presences in la, but it gives you a shape.

No, but they should be being like, okay, we have 200 employees, we're sending them to LA. Because even around my neighborhood, just from the wind alone walking around my neighborhood, there's all these trees that have fallen down. And so anyways, they'll be making some money out of this. Banks and mortgage lenders. You know, I don't think we have to explain bank of America or Wells Fargo to our highly sophisticated audience of wealthy technologists. But. So maybe we skip over that. Property and casualty insurance. Allstate State Farm. Yeah, we already talked, we already talked about insurance. I'D say we like skip over this. I mean Allstate. I'm sure there are policies, they're saying all states focus on like rapid claims and. But you can imagine so much of the stuff is just going to be slogged and yeah, it's like any. Anytime you experience a business experiences 100x like comms around something that's going to be slow alarm. And in a lot of areas right now, people still can't get to their homes. Like they're just literally blocked by National Guard. And even if you own a home, you can't get through security and safety alarm and monitoring services. It's kind of interesting because like some of these businesses just lost a bunch of customers because people are not going to like pay to secure. Secure pay ADT in the long run to secure a lot. And they're not going to pay for whatever, what's the camera ring or whatever. Like nobody's paying for ring. If their cameras don't exist anymore, that'll be a quick unsubscribe and then the physical security providers I think will be bigger because people have very little trust in the government right now. And even though there's a National Guard presence, the one thing that, that is positive on the security side in L A is Nathan Hockman, who was the. Is a new DA for L A who just started and he was Caruso's pick. I saw Caruso talk and endorse Hawkman at a. At a fundraiser in the Palisades back in Q4. He's already like throwing the book at looters and people, criminals that are, you know, have been taking advantage of the situation. Support services and ancillary industries. You have architecture and engineering, a lot of these design firms, engineering firms that are just figuring out how do we rebuild this home. There was the home in succession, the $125 million home in the Palisades that burned to the ground. That rebuilding $125 million home on a slope is like a very complex engineering undertaking. So that by itself is probably like just imagine the architecture and engineering bill for rebuilding a home like that has to be in the millions of dollars. So like there's going to be some big beneficiaries there, professional services, Deloitte, McKinsey, these companies that are doing like consulting, audits, tax, all this advisory work. There's just any time you have massive amounts of money changing hands, these companies benefit. McKinsey always finds a way to make money in a, in a crisis. Yeah, we got to get the. We Got to get the McKinsey sponsorship and then get like, pre seed companies working with McKinsey and they're like, look like you've got 100k of annualized revenue. Like paying. You're paying yourself 100k a year. Like, the only person to cut is you. McKinsey's gonna be like, cut yourself. They're like, but, sir, like, who will run the company? And they're like, well, we have our AI agent practice. For a million dollars, we can create a program for you to. But I only run your business with AI agents. And they're like, well, spend the money on us. Don't spend it on yourself. Everybody will win in the long run. Disaster assessment and planning tax. So we talked about this a little bit before, but the drone deploy, they use. They deploy drones and they have software for aerial mapping and inspection. I was recommending to somebody the other day, they were like, I couldn't get to their house. And I was like, go find. Buy satellite imagery. Because you can buy it now.

You can actually pay Planet Labs to task a satellite. I'm sure a bunch of satellites were tasked over L. A this last week. I think that's the other. That's the other company that's mentioned.

Yeah. So drone Deploy has raised 140 million. You can hit the size gong for that. They do quick damage assessments over large fire areas. So, like, they'll. They'll, I'm sure, make. You know, this is the kind of thing where insurance companies are now, like, probably like sitting around the table being like, oh, my God. You know, and, you know, publicly, they're like, we're very, you know, devastated. But then internally, you can imagine they're just, like, freaking out. And so I'm sure they're tasking drone deploy with various projects and then smart building and construction tech. This is just more like SaaS, Autodesk, creators of AutoCAD, and a bunch of other design engineering tools.

What's interesting is, you know that whenever something like crazy national news story happens, there are startups that are pivoting and looking for their next idea. And some of them might pivot into something related to fire prevention. I think the fear. And I've seen this play out before. I knew a guy who, after the San Francisco fires, remember the ones that turned the sky orange?

Yeah.

He. He decided to start a fire. Wildlife prevention. What?

Wildfire said he decided to start a fire.

A fire prevention company. Right. And was using all this data and peeling all and pulling all this stuff together. But selling into the government was so hard that he pivoted. And I was telling him like, like, okay, you have all these like vanity metrics and like contracts that you're working on. But like, really like the catalyst for your company being huge will be like, what happened with the Watchfire app? Like when you watch duty, when you save your first home, like, that should be your main KPI that you have on the wall of your company. It's just like that guy brush fire.

Battle system literally saved a home. Saved a home. And so he's like, here's the proof.

Exactly. Now he's like, you just need to write a zero on the wall. Zero home saved. You need to just work backwards from saving a home. And as soon as you save a home, there will be a national news story about your company. Exactly. Exactly.

Another.

But he pivoted out before the next fire. And so there was never a moment when it was like the tech could demonstrate like, what it was.

I think there's probably a flock safety style business that makes consumer apps for cities and state and local governments to manage disasters. Because right now, like when the disaster broke out, everybody's on WhatsApp iMessage, you know, coordinating, using watch duty. But watch duty wasn't working. And I don't really want to be reliant on a nonprofit during, you know, a like fire realistically because it's like, okay, they went down for 12 hours.

Yeah.

And was that because like they hit they. Their cloud bill, like the basic, like, who knows? Right. Well, we probably will never know, but I think there's a consumer business to be like, cities, states. Get every one of your citizens, like on this app. So we're not online on the press release.

I think of Flux Safety as like the hardware company, like Anderil for.

Yeah, sure. More like Citizen. Citizen app is. I guess it's more like not around local government.

Yeah, Something like that makes more sense.

Yeah, yeah. More around communications because the government being like, I was getting my information from group chats. My hoa.

Yeah.

And then the city was. The HOA was getting going and like tuning into the live events broadcast that the city was doing.

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

Yeah. And you kind of need to rely on people. Like, my neighbors were great I got.

It's tricky. Well, should we move on to the timeline?

Jump into the timeline.

That's great. Take a break. Welcome back to Technology Brothers, still the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy, you have an exciting announcement to make. Let's hear about PMF or Die, the latest project from the Technology Brothers.

Okay, so yesterday I sent out Inspiration Struck. I wasn't exactly yesterday morning, but the inspiration for some of this, for some of the language that I used in the post, definitely struck in the morning. So a while back, John and I were always thinking of new formats and concepts and stuff like that. Our goal is to entertain and elevate Technology Brother voices and movements. And so we were thinking about, well, what if we found a founder, gave him 25k and just basically locked them in a studio apartment for 90 days and then.

Was that the word you used? Studio apartment.

Studio apartment.

What did you refer to it as? A cage.

A cage. Well, it's now called a cage.

Okay. Break down the tweet. Read your post.

No, I'm just giving some of the history. So the idea was like, well, if we have a founder, we'll talk about them on the show, we'll support them, we'll get them a bunch of attention. And if they can't hit a million dollars of ARR in that 90 days, with all of the attention of us telling people, go buy this product today, then they're never going to succeed. And we do some type of deal where they literally have to quit startups if they can't make it work. You got to go work in big tech if you can't make it in. In the cage. Uh, but I, I posted yesterday. So we're working on a new show called PMF or Die. We will lock a small founding team in a studio, aka the Cage. With 25k in funding and only enough food, caffeine and nicotine to last for 90 days, the team will only be released if. When they achieve a million in ARR. And the whole process will be documented and shared daily. While in the cage, you will get millions of eyeballs and be coached by some of the most accomplished founders and the the world. So if you can't find PMF in the cage, you just won't find it anywhere. Please reach out if you're interested in being locked up and I will share the application. And. And it's so, so fun.

2000 likes, right?

Yeah. 2300.

2300.

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

Beast meets Paul Graham.

Yeah, I said, if Mr. Beast and Paul Graham were to make sweet love and have a nice and give birth to a baby accelerator, it would look a lot like PMF or die. And it's so funny because I've maybe watched five minutes of Mr. Beast content. I just never got into it. I didn't watch Squid games part of that whole world. I just was never big into that whole world. I've never watched Survivor or anything, any of these other shows. But this is in that vein. I think it's going to be extremely entertaining. And it's one of the issues. So we've talked a lot about different concepts and shows. And one of the issues with Shark Tank is because they're putting this out on tv, which is not a tech startup audience, generally they need to only. Basically they only can work with founders that are. That are creating sort of gimmicky CPG products. Like I make. I made this cooler that also has a grill built into it so you can like, cool your steaks.

And then Pavlok, one of the greatest. Shark Tank.

And so there's a bunch of.

It's a wristband that shocks you when you do something that you're trying to quit. So if you're trying to quit smoking, it will shock you when you smoke. It's the Pavlovian response. It's like total beam tact.

And so there's a bunch of meme tech. And I think it's great. And. And if you're building a product that you know and founders go on that. Because they don't go on that to get the money because the terms aren't generally good. They go on to get the attention. And there's reruns and stuff like that. So it's really a customer acquisition.

Do you know the whole gimmick on Shark Tank?

Let's go, let's. Yeah, yeah, go for it, Go for it.

Oh, this is such a good story. So they film you for like an hour. The actual segment on TV will be like 15 minutes max. And so what happens is they wind up. Am I good? Okay, what happens is that, is that there's. During that there's a bunch of really good quotes from you and there's also a bunch of really bad quotes. Of things stumbling into stuff. Yeah, yeah. And they ask you hard questions and they ask you easy questions. And then depending on if you take the deal, they will edit it to make you look great. And if you don't take the deal, they will make you look bad. And so I had a friend who went on and, and just tied them up in legal negotiation for so long that they had to run it. And they're, and they were like, we're doing the deal. Make us look good. We're doing the deal, make us look good. And then as soon as it went live it was like, I'm not doing that deal. No way.

Worst deal I've ever seen.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. It's locked.

Yeah. But I mean that just gives you an idea of like the problem with Shark Tank. Yeah, it's purely entertainment.

So. So it's cut out a lot of founders that don't care to get in front of that audience, don't want that funding. And so one thing that's really interesting we've seen this recently is so many companies can, can get to that 1 million of ARR mark faster than ever.

Right.

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

It's just faster to program.

And so we want to create basically the cage, which is like the best place to build a software company. And so specifically for this kind of corner of the Internet, one of my favorite responses was Shkreli responded and said hits too close to home and shared that and got a good response to.

Him as one of the coaches he would.

Yeah. So I actually messaged him to become a coach already. And I think it's funny because if he was actually a player, he would get out in a day.

Oh yeah.

Figure out a way to get out in a day. And so there's so many fun ways that you can gamify this. The point is not to create the next. You know, I hope that people create world changing startups out of it. But it's totally cool to come in the cage and just have.

Yeah, Sprint and have fun.

To have fun. Right. I was telling, I think something that people could do is make the next like I am rich app and call it the jailbreak app and be like, I am stuck in a, in a Prison Right now I can only get out if I get a million of error. Subscribe to my app. I will donate all the profits to fire relief. Right. And somebody would get out in a day. Right. If they know how to work TikTok. And so the players will have access to the TV audience and the X audience. I posted a follow up to just make sure that people understand that this is real. I'm very happy to see the incredible response to PMF or die. We are clearly making something people want to. The show is guaranteed to be life changing for the players. They will either leave the cage with a million dollar ARR business as a niche Internet micro celebrity or they will die. Either way, it's a big change. We have received 10x more applications than we anticipated and we will be processing them as fast as we can. The demand has been insane. Like there's so many talented builders reaching out. It's kind of the perfect opportunity if you're just like in the middle of something or you want to start something, something new, you want to quit.

What did you put on the form? Just email. Name.

Just name. Email profile.

You got to put mailing address because like it's always good to be able to send people stuff.

Yeah, that'd be good. So yeah, we're just trying to process the applications at this point. We already have, you know, people that we've accepted. We're going to be sharing a lot more information, location, dates and there's tons of opportunities for people to get involved. You can be a player, you can be a coach, you can be an antagonist, you could be a trainer. Right. We're gonna have weightlifting equipment there, we're gonna have treadmills. You're not gonna be getting sloppy in the cage. And so if you want to sponsor the show, there's gonna be a bunch of opportunities. We're gonna have to get a bunch of these in there and it's just gonna be super fun.

The response was really incredible. I saw that DM you got from someone who said put me in the cage. I yearned for the cage.

I yearned for the cage. So there's something primal about being in the the cage and just wanting to break out. It's secure and it's great. We're going to figure out how to structure the 25K. It'll be an investment. Maybe it'll be like, you know, debt.

Lots of debt covenants. We're going to wind up owning 100% of the business.

The debt covenants are the, are the real. Like maybe it's more like venture debt.

Yeah, exactly.

But now we don't want to scare anyone off. Like, the point is not to. To really own a lot of these businesses. The point is to just like, create some really great entertainment and create some. Some great companies out of it. So.

So go apply.

What's the website?

Yeah, is there a website yet?

So just. You can just go to X and go to PMFMF or die or PMF. The application link is in the bio. It's apply.pmfordie.coms1. And it's gonna be a lot of fun. As I like to say, if you can't find PMF in the cage, you won't find it anywhere. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. PMF is strength.

There you go. Fantastic. I'm excited for that.

We will talk a lot more about the show coming up. You'll be hearing about it relentlessly and some of the locations we're looking at are pretty insane. We're looking all over the country for the right spot. And, you know, we're gonna be, you know, assuming season one goes well, we'll be going more and more exotic. We're gonna do Epstein Island Season 2. Season 2. We take that. Yeah. Yeah.

Greenland.

We could have. We'd have Reid Hoffman come. Come back to the island. Back to the island. But. But yeah, it's gonna be. It's gonna be a lot of fun and everybody will be able to be involved. We're gonna have. Though I'm sure there'll be some, like, betting markets on Poly Market, for sure.

That's great.

Yeah, that's. That's a cool one. And I just. It's going to be a really great time. So without further ado, let's talk protein.

Oh, yeah, protein. Okay. So you have mentioned this founder many times on the show. Founder of our X Bar. Does he go by Pete or Peter?

Peter.

Peter Rahal.

Yeah.

Founded our X Bar. Did not raise a lot of venture capital. I don't know if he raised any. Sold the business for hundreds of millions of dollars, became very wealthy, and then decided to run it all back and build another protein bar company. And I have been surviving off of these exclusively for the last 30 days. And it's been fantastic.

You've been doing, like, roughly 10 a day.

10 a day. So it has 28 grams of protein, 150 calories. So 10 a day. I get. I get one and a half grams of protein per pound of body weight, roughly. And only 1500 calories. 1500 calories. So I'm in A major caloric deficit.

Lean. Lean. But a mass.

And just. Yeah. Going down to 5% body fat. Getting absolutely peeled and while maintaining all.

Question for the audience. Should John try to get his IFBB program?

Yes.

Because that's like. There's gonna hit a point this year where the. The natural next step is to get your card.

Yeah.

And do a show.

Yeah.

Because some of the greatest. Ever do it. Chesky.

Yeah.

You know, had his run on the amateur bodybuilding circuit.

Yeah. But these are fantastic. I've. I've been really enjoying these just in really, really insane macros. The rule of thumb, Ryan.

Our dear friend Ryan Harmon at day job did all.

We did the branding. Fantastic. It is great. The David Bar. After Michelangelo's David.

Yeah.

Correct.

I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free. That is how you need to be thinking about yourself.

Does it say that on the side?

Yeah.

That's sick. Oh, that's amazing. These quotes. Biblical quotes. Yeah. It's fantastic. The. The macros really feel too good to be true. The. The rule of thumb that a buddy of mine gave me was if you're trying to eat healthy and get a lot of protein, you should be looking for one gram of protein for every 10 calories. So you pull out a protein bar, that's 200 calories. It should have 20 grams of protein. This has almost twice the ratio. It's uncanny.

It ratios the other bars.

It ratios the other bars. And I thought it was going to taste absolutely terrible because of the. I thought it was a Faustian bargain, but I think they taste great. And I could easily survive off these for years and just. And just walk around IFBB pro status, ready to step on stage at 6% body fat at any. At any moment.

Let's go.

Yeah. It really is. It really is fantastic. I'm a huge fan of these. We might have different palates, but. But I'm into this and so thank you for sending these.

That just tastes like almost like a Rice Krispies.

It really. It doesn't taste like you think. You'd think it would be really, really dry. Right. And like inedible. And it's just like.

It just gets so much better than our X bar.

Yeah.

Which is evidence of why repeat founders oftentimes do really well.

Yep.

Because they're a better founder than they were with their last company. But then with. With this. He didn't just. He's. It's. He's still in the bar game. So he's like making a 10x better bar.

No.

I would eat RX bars quite a lot. I just like the fact that it was so simple.

Yeah.

And it's funny because this is on the other end of the spectrum of simple but, but much more of a science project in a way.

Right.

Where it's not a. So anyways, shout out to David, shout out to Peter. Thank you for getting us stocked up.

They're fantastic. They will definitely.

This will take us nicely into the. Into the timeline.

Definitely present in the cage. You'll be surviving off of those.

Yeah, the cage. By the way, one thing I want to clarify. It's not meant to be. The cage is not meant to be a unenjoyable experience. I predict that many people. I've been talking to some of the applicants. I predict that many people will get to the end of the 90 days and actually have like sort of a Mexican standoff, you know, like I don't want to leave the cage. Like I'm like, I'm like, you know, like I'm staying.

They're calling a sponsors on our behalf. Season two right now.

The chef is too good. The stakes are too good. I'm too diced. My company's ripping. If I have to move, it's going to disrupt my.

Throw everything off.

Like, let me stay.

I hope they can just speed run everything. I want to see an acquisition of one company into another.

Yeah, we're going to see large scale M and a mango seed rounds getting done in the cage.

What is private equity guys doing in the cage today? Oh, they're doing a LBO and one of them.

I wanna. Yeah, I would like to see a roll. I'd like to see a roll up, roll up. I'd like to see somebody come in, the, the good strategies come in with a search fund.

Okay.

Acquire a business over that 90 days, get to the 1 million mark.

Seller financing, you only have 25.

The meme coin. The meme Coin idea is good too, right?

Meme coin's obvious. But I mean the, the, the, the seller finance buyout of a business that's already doing a million ARR. That's very doable.

That's no, there's no room.

You get out in a day.

The only rule, the rules are very simple.

Creativity.

25K, 90 days, 1 million or you die. Somebody. So Nate Eliason, you know him, he said that the death should be waterboarding with Dom Perry. I was like, I don't know.

I don't think that's the way to go. But that's rough.

I mean if you were going to go.

There'll be lots of Dom.

If you had to be tortured to death slowly, you'd choose Dom Perry on water.

I mean I've been doing dry January so only drinking dry champagnes basically every day. And it's been fantastic. I mean your body just changes after a couple weeks of, of not drinking sweet wines and focusing on the dry ones during dry January. So highly recommend doing dry January sticking to Dom. I have a fantastic story about Cages and Paul Graham. First time I heard him speak Silicon Valley 202012 first company went or second.

Crazy that I wasn't even born yet.

Yeah, yeah, you were in what, third grade. First company's going through YC and PG comes to talk and gives this talk about like what red flags exist for founders of companies these days. And so PG famously really loves technical teams. He likes, you know, oh, these three guys were at MIT together, they all can program roughly and they all come out and then over time, you know, the CEO does a lot less programming. Eventually the CTO becomes just a manager, but is very technical still. And this is a common pattern we see where it's like if it's a tech company, like the CEO is still pretty technical even if they're not.

And that was with Party around. That was a huge.

Oh yeah people.

That was like I didn't, we didn't, we didn't get into YC because. Yeah, because you were now a technical founder and. Well, not. I can't say it was just because of that, but that was a primary reason they gave. We were already funded by Google.

Yeah.

Like Google's early stage fund. But I do feel like it was the biggest detriment to our success because in terms of imagine it's a Friday night and you are a CEO and you want to have the most impact on your business and maybe shipping that next feature is the most way to. The best way to have an impact. If you're non technical, you're just sitting there.

Yeah. And also it's a great way.

You just simply can't have the impact.

And if you are technical, you can evaluate technical talent very well. You can inspect, rally the troops, inspire them. And you just know, hey, like this bug that I, that somebody, a customer came to me, I'm the CEO, told me to fix this bug. You can, if you, if you're at least a little bit technical, you can clock. Okay, this is a week long project. I'm not going to try and give this to somebody on Friday night. I'm going to actually set ourselves up for success. Next week and build this feature properly. Or this should take one, this should take 15 minutes. If I give it to my team and they take a week, there's a problem, like something weird is going on. And so PG's been super bullish on, on, on technical teams, technical founders, for a long time. But he comes in, he says like one pattern that he sees is the, like the business guy, the MBA guy that comes in and is like, I got this business idea and I have my technical like, code monkey who's going to build it for me. And he, and he. The term that he used for the programmers who, because he's like, usually it's like some shy programmer who's been like lightly bullied into like joining this like startup for this business guy who has no idea how to build this technology is, is Cager. Because he's like, he's like, the way it feels in a YC pitch is that they pull out their code monkey in the cage and they're like, then this is the guy who's gonna build it. Look at my quant, that type of thing. And so we, we would always joke about like, oh, you're, you're a Cager. Like, yeah, we need a Cager, that type of stuff. And so the Cage is well established in the YC canon.

It's so real. I mean every, every one of those business guys that hasn't built a software company before, software is pretty tangible because like everybody's used a bunch of software and they've used, oh, I've used Salesforce, I can build a CRM, I've used Airbnb, I can build a sharing economy app. And then you just realize that it's building great software. It's maybe getting easier to build great software, but it is not easy at all.

It's definitely an art.

And the toughest thing and the reason that I think I was not accepted to YC and even raised, you know, didn't stop me from raising, you know, YC has their religion almost right? Like, it's very firmly like they have their criteria and that's what they need to follow in order to accept hundreds of companies a year. But I feel like their general framework, I've used it for my own angel investing and it's been the best, like it's, it is the best framework for me for evaluating early stage technology companies because it's just so much data has gone into that that I now, you know, well, if I talk to a founder that doesn't even look too dissimilar. To myself that, that I'm like, no, I won't invest in your company unless you have somebody who is. Is equal to you that is as good as you at what you do at engineering. And they're as bought into the mission.

And they're also like a brother to you or like you.

Yeah, yeah. Because that's the other thing the real risk is.

Yeah.

Having a CTO that you don't know that well is usually a disaster. You can't trust them in the same way that you can somebody you've worked any amount of time with.

So that's those questions. And then if it's a no, you ask them, well, what's your bench press? And then that's kind of the final.

Yeah. Yeah, that's the final.

As long as they're repping two plates.

Or thousand more than. It could be £800 or just the.

Brian Johnson club just benching more than Brian Johnson.

That'll pretty far most. Most people.

Yeah.

Can do.

Anyway, get in the cage, folks. Sign up today. Let's go to Brian Graham. He says Zucks. Zuck says Meta is putting in cubicles. It's bringing back scotch at lunch and smoking in the office. Zuck says the company's Amex cards work at the strip clubs again. He says it's back to suit and tie dress code. Zuck says they're reinstalling the asbestos. Zuck says there's no Irish allowed. And then Santiago tags us and says, this is a tech Bros Pod worthy banger right here. 38k likes. Like people really like this. But it is funny.

This, this is why. This is why. This is why we're doing PMF or die. Because 38k likes just shows how mainstream.

Yeah.

Stuff has become into this. Yeah. I. Yeah. I mean it's kind of funny. Zuck kind of is at this point where he's basically kind of understands that he's. He always wants to be at the edge of doing what people like and what is acceptable. Right. So he's just kind of like crawling to the edge, coming up to a new spot, being like, okay, I can go farther. A little farther. I go a little farther.

Take the tampons out of the mail restrooms. Let's see what happens then.

Yeah.

Okay. I haven't gotten canceled.

Apparently. Palmer. Palmer said he posted. He said he had a story about the. It probably was like some crazy company that was charging like $20 a tampon, like abusing it, being like, well, you.

Need to buy this tampons as a service. I mean that is hilarious that it's like, if you're trying to sell more urinals, logically you'd be like, they need to be in both bathrooms.

No, that was. That was the issue. I remember the plate. The library that I would study at in college. I had my little zone. And I remember when the DI wave hit and they ripped out all the urinals and made our main bathroom for that section. So the walk to go to the bathroom, you know, when you're studying and you're just like, grinding for like 10 hours and you're. And you just are like, at your desk, walking. You know, my. My peer group would walk outside, smoke cigarette, walk, you know, back to the desk, go to the bathroom, and just like, alternate there. And then it just became like a super long walk to get to a urinal. So it was devastating. But I'm sure they're putting it back now, which is also good for the urinal companies, right?

Yeah, for sure. I love the suit and tie dress code. Obviously, we love a suit. We don't wear ties yet, but stay tuned.

Sucks bringing back martinis in the cafeteria.

Yeah. He says, scotch and smoking in the office, which I support as well.

If you combine big tech profits with the. With power lunch.

Yeah.

And bring back the power lunch.

Unstoppable people.

All you can drink.

I told you about my. My buddy who. His dad worked at Goldman Sachs and on the prop desk, and their whole team wore tuxedos every day. Every day, Every day. That was like, the dress code in their office. And I was like, dude, that's so sick. Like, the 80s were probably so tight. He was like, oh, no, this was in 2007, right before the crash. And I was like, 2007. Like, people were wearing tuxedos all the time. And, like, I have a feeling that, like, the MD on that team just thought it was funny. It was just like, okay, this is like what our culture will be in this pod. Because, like, when you're in Goldman, like, it's a huge organization. You need to differentiate your team a little bit.

Yeah.

And I was like, that's an amazing thing. So that's great. If you're. If you're, you know, a manager at Meta, make your team wear suit and tie every day. Just lean into that one because that's. That's not offensive. You know, the smoking in the office, that's going to set up the fire alarms. There's a lot of other things here that are a little bit more risky. Don't recommend the asbestos, but you can't go wrong with a nice suit and tie. Let's go to the next one. Forward Thinking Founders says Monday's pod is going to be lit. In this conversation, Matt Sherman interviews Simp for Simp for Satoshi of Truffle. Topics covered include the discussion of truffle, a device for local inference tied to humanoid robotics and personal intelligence, insights from a unique upbringing in the Middle east, future of AI agents, criticism of Sam Altman, critique of Y Combinator. Yeah, Simp for Satoshi's been spicy on the timeline for a while. And Forward Thinking Founders says. Can you print this one out, please? This episode is going to be epic. So I guess it's Forward Thinking Founders. Yeah, he tagged us.

Oh, okay.

Is Forward Thinking Founders a podcast?

I guess it must be.

This must be an interview.

All right, so we are running. This is officially now a promoted post.

For Matt Sherman's podcast with Sim4Satoshi. Yeah, so anyways, so go listen.

Simfor. Satoshi's got a lot going on right now. I saw him posting that he's potentially launching a token for the truffle. There's a thesis around that's not that.

Crazy because there's a render token. Are you familiar with this? Yeah, you can render 3D like.

And he's, he's trying to figure out the right way to do it. Super long lock up, stuff like that, I think. Well, let's see how. I would imagine that, that Sam Altman would, would open just like a colossal short position. So dangerous game once you're in the public, public crypto markets. But, but we'll, we'll see how it plays out.

Let's go to Willmanitis, obscure hobbyist of the year last year. He says everyone in tech 100x underestimates how important official capital formation is for building the future. Inventing the safe and making it so you could sell equity with a one page agreement probably created greater than $100 billion in equity value. There's dozens of these unlocks left to discover. I agree with that. There's a very interesting story where, when, when, when LLMs first popped off and all the AI companies were like the hottest thing and it was like, this is the future technology. And everything else is just like zero sum reshuffling, like B2B, SAS or cringe. All that stuff. It was like, go build the real stuff. Build the Tesla, the rockets, the AI that was like the real tech. Then everything else was just like, you know, busy work basically. And what was interesting was like, I was thinking about it like Is this, is this a legitimate critique? And if you look at how did the LLMs actually get built, efficient capital formation is a huge part of that story. And it's the same thing for rockets, like without the financing structures, without the.

SPV, SPV into the, the SPV with this 10% management fee.

And I mean, it's a joke, but like, like, like the, even just the credit lines on all the different materials in the supply chain that go into a rocket, that is actually important. And that financial innovation does speed up the rate at which we get to Mars, which is crazy to think about. And it's absolutely true for AI where you know, you have this like nonprofit that's able to do a whole bunch of, you know, fundamental research and then get super creative with the fundamentals with the capital formation later stage with these like all these Nvidia credits that are going into AI startups right now. So, oh, you need to train or fine tune a model. We will figure out how to do that. And a lot of those deals are very like, they face a lot of criticism because during the dot com boom a lot of telecom companies did these crazy deals with, with dotcom web startups where they would, where they would basically invest in the company with like in kind credits for their, like the fiber optic cables that they were laying out and it led to a lot of dark fiber. But that type of like creative capital formation is actually extremely important. And the safe is like obviously the, the best possible example because it sped up how quickly startups could move and it shortened financing timelines from a month of due diligence to a few days.

Yeah.

What's your take on this? What are you looking up?

I'll tell you in a second. But yeah, I mean, people don't really realize because, because my generation at least never built companies in a world without the safe. So the safe was just the default method to raise capital. Yeah, and people don't realize that if you wanted to take even a $25,000 investment, however many years ago, it really was like a lot of Silicon Valley was high trust. So it'd be like, I'm just going to give you money and we'll figure it out. But then, and here's like literally a napkin kind of thing. Like, you know, here's the general terms, it'll take a while to get done, but we've been really blessed to only know that sort of frictionless capital raising. And I, even with Party Round was taking it a step further with safe automation where you could come on the app KYC and then generate a round. Generate, you know, send it. And it was like using Cash app. It was the same amount of time to sign up with party round to raise as it was to like sign up for cash app.

Do you remember the convertible note era at all?

I never, I never. Even so the convertible notes, maybe I invested in, I've invested in one or two convertible notes.

I mean it's pretty, it was pretty like crazy dance because you do this round and there's a cap on the convertible note, but there's no floor. Yeah, typically there's a famous example of a company that did one and it was disaster for the, for the investors. But, but typically it's like, you know, you raise $2 million on a convertible note or if it's a big round, you do like $10 million on a convertible note. And that all sounds great but if you wind up raising money at $10 million, they own 100% of your business or 50% of your business or something. And it's kind of like this default recap. Now in practice it doesn't happen that much because if you're a startup and things are going bad, like usually you're acqui. Hiring the company or just shutting down. There aren't that many places where like your crown jewel gets like stolen by some convertible note investor. But it was a little bit more nerve wracking than the, than the safe and certainly the safe is much, much faster. Should we do a bucket poll?

I got, I gotta do a promoted post. So we were meant to get on the phone with Wander, the team at Wander. No, we're late so we had a 2:30 call.

Should they just call into the podcast right now?

Yeah, yeah, no, I think we're, I'm going to try to talk with them. We'll try to set it up for like 30 minutes from now. But yeah, so we, when, when I posted about some issues I was having with Airbnb over the weekend, Kyle Tibbets over at Wander reached out and was like, hey, let us get you set up like so anyways, Wander, if you don't know, Wander is a technology provider and they own, they own some real estate but it's their, they've shifted to I think a more asset light model where they go and get the best homes like in the world, period. Homes that would have maybe been on Airbnb but then they operate them almost like a hotel. So you know, the sheets are going to be good. You know, the wi fi is going to be fast. You know, the soaps are going to be nice. There's like snacks when you arrive. And so it's. And. And you know that you're not gonna, you know, book a place and then 10 minutes before they're like, oh, I can't host you and cancel the amangiri of couchsurfing. It's the aman that's amangiri of vacation rentals. So. So yeah, I've known John for a while and his dad. They're both, they're both fantastic. And the company's great. They have hundreds of properties now and yeah, just really, really cool business. So we are definitely going to be staying in Wanders this year. I think it's a great solution if you're a startup founder that is wanting to book like a retreat for your team and post up somewhere nice for four days and just get a bunch of work done. Much better, I think, solution than just relying on some Airbnb and you show up. And I've had this happen before where you show up, you get your team on the wi fi and everybody's like, it doesn't work. It's devastating. Destroys productivity.

Good for startup retreats. If somebody wanted to do a DIY cage situation, would that make sense?

John. John says a tech Bros pod shout out will make my month. That's the CEO of Wander. Well, John, we did something better. We ran an ad. Go to every Technology Brother listener. Go to wander.com.

Tell them the technology.

Tell them to tell John and Kyle. So, yeah, we're now, we're now talking with them in 30 minutes. So we got to get the pod.

Okay, let's tight, let's wrap up. But yes, if you wind up buying a product from somebody we advertise, just throw a little post on X, a little at. At the CEO. Tell them the Technology Brother sent you. Don't even worry about coupon codes. Coupon codes. I'm sure we'll do them at some point. They're a little gauche. What you want to be doing is sending a DM to the CEO or tagging them in a public X post saying that the Technology Brother sent you. Yeah, this is the real way to get attribution.

All right, so we're going to be talking to them twice tomorrow. Now let's get into the next bucket.

Let's do a bucket poll from Eric. He says when a software engineer says that's not necessarily true, it means someone just said something incredibly stupid. Yeah, that's rough. The software engineers, they're polite but brutal.

They can be cold.

Well, I mean, it's a very, it's a very strict. Right, a very strict discipline. The facts are the facts, everything compiles. And if your logic doesn't compile, you probably just said something very stupid. Not too much to say about that, but I'm sure plenty of software engineers have told you that's not necessarily true since non technical at all.

Yeah, yeah.

Should we move on to daily drivers?

How in the world of dev and AI is everyone technical? If I sic an army of Devon AI agents on somebody and say, yeah.

I think, I mean, the gradient, I.

Would say I'm technically technical.

The gradient. It used to be that if you understood Excel learning Visual Basic, which does a little bit, it's programming language and it can automate Excel and it works in the background, it runs scripts, which is very, very helpful. If you ever open up like a really big investment banking model, there'll be a whole bunch of Visual Basic behind the, behind the scenes that buttons you can actually click that do stuff. You can build. I built a whole CRM in Excel at one point using vba and, and then from there, you know, you could teach yourself like Python in like a weekend or you could do like a coding boot camp. So like the definition of like, what is technical is like a huge gradient from like. Okay, I know like technical.

I was ddosing my father's website.

Yeah. So it's like, that is pretty technical. It's not, it's not super technical. It's just like, it's enough to understand how software works a little bit. You learn a programming language, you write some scripts, but that gradient is just getting so much smoother. Like, like, just last night I needed to pull together some data and I went in, ChatGPT asked it to write a script and then ChatGPT just throw up like, here's the script, press this button to just run it. So it didn't even need to like install Python on this computer, this laptop, and like set up an environment and then you get a cursor and that's more advanced and you get Devin and that's even more advanced and it's just running continuously in your repo and so the gradient. So I think, I think the big question is like, if you're intimidated by the idea of software engineering or code in general, like you should probably spend a weekend just having ChatGPT explain stuff to you and learn how to write like the most basic Python program. Because once you, once you actually solve a problem, even if it's just like, I want to scrape Some website and pull it into a spreadsheet. Yeah, like, I did that with the like. Like, we wanted to see, like every Economist article that's ever been written about technologists. Like, that's just a really easy scraping problem. It's a code that's like pretty easy to write. You can just have an AI help you, but you get to a point where you're like, okay, I achieved the goal. I have used code to do my bidding. Therefore I can understand.

This is the advice I always give. AI is not going to take your job. A technical person using AI while in a cold plunge is going to take.

You in a cage.

In a cage. It's going to take your job.

Let's move on to daily drivers.

Yep.

Good day. Sarah says good daily driver for defense tech founders. And it's beautiful. Mercedes G Wagon 6x6.

They need to make more of those.

They do.

They should. They should just kill the regular 550 G63 and just switch over all production to these.

Yeah.

Because the road presence is just on another level.

I mean, they just launched the, the, the G G580 with EQ technology. Have you seen that one? It's the electric G Wagon that can do a tank turn. You don't like it?

I think those, I think those are gonna depreciate, depreciate incredibly fast. And I think it will only make the gas powered more valuable. That said, is Sarah a partner at point 72 yet? Because if not, she should be. I don't know anyone else at point 72, but you know Steve Cohen, the. Is he like in base? Is he in the baseball world?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, baseball guy. But yeah, I think if I was building a defense tech company right now, I'd be pitching, you know, Sarah.

Well, this is a controversial post because a lot of defense tech founders are, quote, tweeting this and saying, wrong. It's the Toyota Hilux.

Yeah.

Or the Ford Raptor.

We got to be. We should get into the Hilux importation business. We should go into some of these areas and make cash offers, bring them.

In on show and display.

Yeah, I like. Yeah, I think the Hilux.

Hilux six by six.

Toyota. Toyota. What's the meme where Toyota's like, we don't know how all these Hiluxes ended up in the desert in the Middle East. Like, we don't even know where the money, you know, the money came in.

You know, I mean, you know, there are some. There are a lot of G wagons that get lifted and people do a 4x4 squared conversion with Portal axles so they are higher up. And I think there's been a 6x6 conversion that someone did which is insane. Insane. The amount of engineering that went into that is like crazy. But yeah, the Toyota, The Toyota Hilux 6 by 6 beats both of these, I think. Yeah, pull up in that. You're good. Any other, any other recommendations for daily drivers for defense tech founders? What would you go for?

I would just go for. I would go for a. Go get an old nascar.

That's a good one.

It's quite a bit cheaper than the average Tesla right now. You can go pick one up for three, 30, 40 grand and make it, you know, convert it, get it street legal and drive that. Slap all of your venture investors logos on the car because they're your sponsors.

You're giving up too much Alpha. This is gonna be my car.

Yeah, slap the. Slap your, your, your cap table on because those are your sponsors and just hit the roads.

Yeah, we're, I mean we're trying to move on from the fires but there's still so many posts we got to cover one of them. This is real technology. Brother behavior. Tryndamere Mark Merrill, the founder of Riot Games says been off the grid fighting to save my house and neighborhood for days. It burned a house two doors down, two above us on a hill and two on the other side of us. Went all around. We are staying vigilant because we are not out of the woods with embers falling ash and putting out spot fires around and at our neighbors. Got a starlink up and solar powered rechargeable battery which has been a game changer to carry, coordinate and get info. My brother lost his house, our kids lost their school and 90% of the families at their school lost their houses. Wow. And the Palisades. Grateful to all the first responders and everyone working to help support each other and save lives in neighborhoods. Reminder to everyone, be prepared for emergencies. Our water, food supplies, horse hoses and landscape fire hygiene has been critical for us. Sending love to everyone affected. And posted this photo of him just like covered in soot, like just dealing with it and there's like a cyber truck in the background. Fascinating. I mean, yeah, real, real heroic behavior there.

It does seem that a, you know, a significant number of people that stayed behind and fought and basically ignored the evacuation warnings were successful in saving their homes. But you know, obviously, you know, some, some even I'm sure larger amount weren't successful. So it's a miracle. Glad his house made it and I'M sure it'll be like a end up being a community outpost almost for his neighbors that are, as you know, his neighborhood burned to the ground. And I'm sure he'll open it up to people as they rebuild. So bravo.

Here's another good one from Word Grammar. Been on the show before. Word Grammar says in Mario Kart, the racers in place 8 through 12 get really good items. First place gets banana peels and blue shells thrown at them. This is how I expect LLM research to work as time goes on. It will get easier and easier to train new frontier models. A third of this is that more research papers get published as time goes on. A third of this is that more open source models get get released as time goes on. A third of this is that Nvidia chips get faster, better and easier to program as time goes on. Super interesting.

I mean, great analogy.

Yeah. I mean we're seeing everybody's Chinese LLM.

Yeah. Deep, deep sync. I mean deep seek. Deep seek deep Sink it into the ocean. I'm going to put this LLM, tie some weights to it, throw it in the SF bay, Let it sink. Let the sharks feed on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just don't. I think. But yeah, I think people, everybody, everybody letting everybody giving them this like crazy.

Victory lapse model from two years ago got open source. Okay. Yeah, yeah. It's not crazy research.

Don't give them, don't give them. Don't even give them any chats.

Let's do a.

Let's do a Promoted Post. I got a promoted post from Jacob Rint Rintamaki. He says, I'm looking for work. Please reach out. And then he's got this awesome post that I'll cover a little bit. And I would say this is very smart. Instead of throwing up the open to work thing on his LinkedIn, he's actually saying what he wants to work on and what's interesting about his point of view. He says, according to my iPhone, I walked for approximately 12.6 miles yesterday, mostly because I didn't want to pay for non zurb Ubers in the Bay Area. However, all that walking made me do a lot of thinking. So I'm ready to announce that I am looking for work. This piece includes the first two things I would do if hired at each of the three organizations. I'm particularly but not exclusively interested in Doge Renaissance, Philanthropy and Future House. And so he just goes on to share quite a lot about his experience experimenting with AI, what he would do at Doge and some of these other organizations. So anyways, this is just one. This is so smart because you don't have to be at these three organizations to be like, this guy clearly has agency, knows what he's interested in. I should reach out to him. And, you know, this makes me want to talk to him about.

I met him in some random group chat and always liked what he was saying. And I think I referred him to Patrick o' Shaughnessy for like, one of those o' Shaughnessy Venture. Osv. Nice program. And I don't know if that panned out, but then a couple days later, Will Menitis was asking for someone to help him with some project.

Oh, yeah.

And I tagged Jacob and was like, hey, you should. Guys should talk. And Will texted me, like, where are you finding these boys? Like, how did you. How did you find this man?

It's like the brothers.

Yeah, it's the brothers. Will, like, get used to it.

This is the most powerful online fraternity in the world.

It really is. It's great. But yeah, I mean, would be a great pickup for the right organization. So put him to work. Get him in the cage.

Look, doing the personnel news. Jacob, the only other thing I would say, join the cage. You'll find yourself in the cage and you might find product market fit.

Yeah. Or you'll die.

The stakes are high.

Let's do a bucket poll. I love this one. James Hawkins says, oh, this is such a low tam banger. 36 likes. I love when we find a low tam banger. Jordy, you got to pay attention to this, man. This is a good one.

Sorry, sorry.

You got to lock in. James says, your dream life isn't that expensive. San Francisco apartment, $7,500 per month. Rivian R1s, $1,000 per month. Can think of a lot better. Cars, ski, home in Aspen, $49,000 a month. Yacht that's one meter longer than Jeff Bezos's yacht. $30 million a month. 30 million.

30 million a month. No way. No, no, no.

I think it's like a billion dollar yacht, right?

Yeah, but still, you're not paying 360,000. 360 million a year to rent that yacht. I'm sorry.

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

Let's go.

You just need to get one client paying you $30,057,500 and you're there. Ring that gong, baby. Ring that gong. Oh, that's so good. Okay.

See, that's the kind of thing people need. Motivation. Yeah, people need something it's not about. Oh, you need. You just need 10 clients paying you $8,333 a month, you know, to get 1 million. ARR. Just get one that pays you 30.

30.

Simple.

Exactly.

It's not the number like stop making excuses. You don't even need a calculator.

The genetic lottery. It exists. No excuses.

Win it.

Go to another deranged bro. Idea banger from weapon outfitters.com I love this account. I don't know if this is actually true, but hey, if you already own night vision goggles nods. Might as well give it a try. I think my baby is more disturbed by the sensation of temperature shift than light. But I'm going to experiment and it's a post from a guy who says I have like, I have a 13 month old kid, a baby and, and I don't want to turn on the light when I go in and check on him, so I put on my night vision goggles. The dude clearly just has like, you know, a scope for his gun. Night vision goggles with night. I have. When you're, when you're 33m size 13, stay at home. 33 year old male, size 13. I don't know why you saying that. Stay at home dad slash veteran with night vision and a child. You realize by using ICW you can disturb the child less, thus allowing us to sleep more. So he'll go in and change the diaper and he's just pitch black for the baby. I thought it was genius.

That's insane.

That was genius. More tactical gear in, in the, in the bedroom. Yeah, in the baby's room.

I'm inclined. I mean there's so many, so many moments as a parent where it's dark, you want to keep the lights off and you got to do stuff. Diaper change. I do think it'd be, you know, potentially traumatizing for the child to see you fully kitted up.

But you know the sound and when it turns on like in Call of Duty.

But maybe just let your kid watch Zero Dark Thirty so they get more familiar with adults night vision.

There are like tactical baby gear companies for like, they're like kind of joke gag gifts and it's like bulletproof vest, but it like has room for like diapers and stuff. So very, very cute. Yeah, I also think like nurseries sometimes, like if there's flat walls and there's echo. The baby's cry can just be so much louder because it's reverberating. So selling sound panels that are, that, that are, that have like images that are appealing to babies. So like a cute photo that's printed onto wallpaper. Sound panels exactly. Like nice wallpaper. Nursery sound looks like, you know, safari park or like giraffes and elephants.

But it's sound like dampening the maps that are 3D.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean anything. You can throw a tapestry on the wall.

Yeah. How about some fine art?

Fine art.

Fine art actually does the same thing.

Oh yeah, totally. Especially if it's like a nice canvas.

Yeah. So throw tapestry on a priceless work even.

It's just, it's just a failure of like modern home design that like we no longer use tapestries and floor. Like the carpets. Like you should have thick, lush carpets. Tapestries on the wall, like you know, exposed beams in the ceiling and what are those called? Like, you know, it should look like the Sistine Chapel when you look up.

Yeah.

Anyway.

A modern wonder.

You want to do a promoted post?

I'd like to do a promoted post because this 1954 Bentley R type Continental Fastback Sports Saloon by H.J. mulliner is considered one of the most beautiful cars ever produced. Featuring a hand formed aluminum body on a high performance chassis. And this thing is just fantastic. I mean, look at this, John. This screams SF Daily. You could do an engine swap and throw your, you know, if you have a Tesla Model 3 right now, swap that engine into here and you know, it's gonna be a little bit annoying to charge it, but there's more and more of these, you know, supercharger stations. And this thing is just fantastic. I mean I can.

That does look amazing.

Imagine, imagine hearing that, you know, you, you know, picture this. You're driving down the 101 and you, you, you know, you're in bumper to bumper traffic in this car that presumably is, you know, multiple, you know, millions of dollars. And you get this notification, push notification that says, you know, we're in for the deal. Like send over the contract, we'll sign. 5 million ARR. Deal. And you're like, that just paid for this car. So like picture that. Visualize that. Go buy this and tell RM Sotheby's that the technology brothers sent you.

Fantastic. Let's go to Grimes. Throw in some shade in the timeline from a 20 VC clip with the founder of Suno. Founder of Suno says it's not really enjoyable. To make music now, it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of time they spend making music. And Grimes comes with some heat, says, this guy is a weak fuckboy and wants all of us to. To be weak too. This POV in the AI community is literal poisoning Cope. People who want to destroy your dopamine receptors and make you intolerant to challenges hate humans. And they are legitimately dangerous. Wow. Nuclear bomb going off on the timeline. You hate to see it. You love to see it happens every day. You got to recover, we got to see.

I see both. I think both points of view are correct in their own ways. I think that it's awesome that a bunch of people are gonna make music now that never made music before. When I think about growing up, you know, I had the benefit of parents that were insistent on piano lessons, guitar lessons. I had to, you know, singing lessons. I had to be making music weekly, daily. I was forced to practice. I went through periods where I didn't like it, went through periods where I loved it. And that was all I wanted to. To do. But, yeah, I don't remember. I remember as a kid being, you know, thinking to myself, I don't want to practice piano right now. But that was more so because I wasn't. I just was like 7 years old and I wanted to, I don't know, like, throw rocks at the house or something like that. So I think that. But. But it's the same thing. I saw other people making the comparison of a marathon runner doesn't go, oh, I'm so annoyed that I have this blister. That's so annoying. I wish that I just never had any, like, adverse situations. They're not thinking in that way. Right. So a musician who's like, I've trained my whole. I had to train for two decades to get this good at violin. That's so annoying. I wish I could have gotten here in a day, right? Nobody. I really don't think that's how people think. But simultaneously, it's great that there's new tools that will make it simple for people to create beautiful art. Right. Even though it's definitely machine oriented. And so this same type of pushback against DJs and electronic music of you don't have a full orchestra, why are you, you know, this isn't real music. So I think there will be this separation a Continuing separation of artisanal, handcrafted music and then music that sounds very similar that was created by machines.

Yeah. There's some DJs that, like, they're EDM, but they have, like, almost a live band when they perform, and everything's like, live drumming. There's kind of like a. The good ending, I think, here looks like there's an. There's an app, I think it's called Synthesia that you can run on your laptop above the piano. And it turns it. It's a real piano that you're playing, but as you're playing, it moves the notes down visually. So instead of reading sheet music, you can just see, like, it's the key to the left. Yeah. And. And that makes piano, like, way easier.

To Guitar Hero.

It's like Guitar Hero.

Yeah.

But you're playing the actual instrument, which is cool. So it's like, kind of cheating. And then a lot of music production in hip hop and rap specifically is just, like, almost just assembling other stems. So there's like, you know, there's like these famous beats from, like, vinyl records that, like, Kanye will sample and then put that. And then it's like he's not really writing that particular melody, he's just kind of rearranging it. And I could see Suno being useful for, like, blocking out tracks. I know people are.

Yeah. Mike's argument would be that Suno is going to be a gateway drug for people to fall in love with making music and get addicted to making music. And then as they get more into it, they will, well, maybe I should learn this instrument, or maybe I should do this live, or maybe I should sing this myself. Right. So presumably if you make it much easier to do something, it will introduce more people to it. But I don't think. I think, Jen, I think Grimes is also right in that saying we should only do things that are easy is.

It's just the most controversial framing possible on this.

But he's clearly trying to piss off traditional music.

We already went through all this with AI art stuff where it's like, yeah, the AI art that actually goes viral is stuff that's, like, inspired. Like the Harry Potter Balenciaga thing where that was. Yeah, it was all AI generated. But the prompt wasn't make something viral. The prompt was clearly from a human thinking about, okay, it's interesting to combine Harry Potter and Balenciaga, these two things, on the opposite ends of the spectrum.

Yeah.

And then I'm going to do all the puppeteering of this and put it all together and have this song in there and like Suno will be up a tool in that toolkit in the same way that Content Aware fill is a tool in the Photoshop toolkit or Generative Fill is. I mean just yesterday I was mapping out that like that like spec ad that we're working on for the next video and I was using a lot of movie B roll and then using some, some, some audio and I was looking for different songs and it was like I was really having to shuffle through all the different songs that we could possibly fit in there. And it would have been. I probably could have prompted something for like I just need generically dramatic music right here. And then I just want higher energy music during this section and I just want to have it paced out a little bit. And some of the, some of the stock music sites allow you to filter for that stuff, but you still have to listen to a lot of it. And clearly, you know, one good end.

Is electronic music has not killed Live music seems in many ways just as loved and enjoyed as ever.

Yeah. Should we go to Sean Frank? He says do you want more domestic manufacturing? Current consensus is to court multinationals with tax breaks, tariffs and tens of billions in funding. I suggest a different plan. What makes China so powerful isn't Foxconn. It's the literal tens of thousands of solo factories making everything from buttons to springs to toys. We should build up, build the small mom and pop factories because they train people, make the parts that make the parts that make the part that make the part things we buy. One giant automated mega factory is awesome, but if you want 100 good factories, you need about 10,000 shitty ones. Barely figuring it out. The chips act is great, but we need a shit act. Seriously. Hire, invent and train, invest and train. S h I t 10 billion in zero interest loans. I love the sound of that. To start new factories at 10 million blocks. Only start paying back when you get to 10 million in revenue.

So Sean, Sean is, is goeded in so many ways. Not just as an operator running the most profitable wallet company in history, but he just is hilarious. And you know, his ability to coin is, is phenomenal. I think he's really leaning into Coogan's law on this one and claiming the SHIT act. But I got a, you know, front row seat to ridges operations in the early days and they developed a really strong relationship with a specific factory that they built up over time and many visits. And I think eventually they just took over all their production capacity and every consumer product and hardware Company today will tell you that everybody goes out and they look at the whole world, where can we make this thing? And they always end up in China because China's half the cost and the products and the outputs better and it's more consistent. And yeah, you have to deal with Chinese New Year and longer shipping times, but it's just so much better and so carried. No interest is also talking about this as well. Like we need massive, if we want to take this seriously, we need massive, massive, massive subsidies. And so both these legendary posters are right. And I do I support the shit act.

Well, we were talking about this with the American Toy Company. Just this idea of like there's a. I mean you buy toys for kids and they're all just made in China and they're all these cheap plastic and they're clearly designed to be used for three months and thrown away. And they're, they're not something that will be passed down. Whereas if you look at like your grandparents, they have toys that were passed down to your parents probably. Right. It's so cool. It's emotional and that emotion can drive consumer behavior. And so if you start a company that their whole brand is like, these toys are made in America. They still do all the cool things. They Entertain, they have LEDs, music and all this stuff.

Four to five times the cost.

Yeah, but they are more expensive. It's a luxury good, it's more expensive. But then when you build. I had this, I was talking to Trey about this like, like, you know, maybe to, you know, we get the missile factory after we get like the Happy Meal factory. And it's like, yeah, let's just, let's just have you know, like Hadrian's obviously doing incredibly important stuff right now with like very key defense companies that need products right now. And that's important. But maybe we also need a Happy Meal startup that's just like, yeah, we do injection molded plastic and we just do it pretty well and we do it as well as we possibly can in America. And maybe the tariffs will help with that, maybe the consumer choices will help with that. But we're dedicated to this for the long term. Over the long term, we think we will be able to get at parity.

Yeah.

With, with robotics.

That's a request. That's a request for startups. By the way, American toy company, please, somebody build it. I think you should sell items that currently go into a toy store. Look at all the stuff that currently is made. $20. Make those items for 50 to $100 here in America. Make them really, really good.

And.

And. And I'll just tell you, this is more of like a request for dinos, because I buy an obscene. An obscene amount of dinosaur toys, and I like buying the ones that are these heavy rubber, because I'm like, well, I'm going to be able to re. I'm going to be able to donate this, and it'll still be in really good condition. I don't want these cheap stuff.

And. And like, nine times in it. Yeah.

Put an LLM in it.

I mean, nine times out of ten, you're so much better off getting a small child, like, one really amazing toy than, like, 20 toys where they just cause a lot of clutter. Like, the clutter builds up no matter what with toys. And so, like, if you came to me and you're like, there's this amazing toy that's really popular and it's three grand or something, I'd be like, hell, yeah. Like, that sounds amazing. Whereas, like, instead of. It's like, oh, like, you go to the toy store, it's like, everything's like 20 bucks. Which is like, great because everyone can have toys. But, like, there's definitely the first time.

In my adult life there was. As an adult, there gets to a point where all the stuff you want costs five grand and up. And. And so it's great walking into a toy store and being, you know, like, I'm gonna buy the whole store, but at the same time, I'd much rather buy. And.

And you want something that's like an Italian suit. Something that.

Yeah, something one of. Yeah, just. I want something that's wooden. Cool material.

Yes. You know, Boston Dynamics, like, that type of stuff. They're making these, like, transformer toys that a couple of them went viral.

I actually do want to. I want to get. I want to get. I want to somebody make a Boston Dynamics kids toy dog. Because I'd like a dog, but I want to be able to turn it off.

Yeah.

I don't want it to poop in the house.

Yeah.

And. But I still want it to be fluffy and loving and conscientious. I think that LLMs can do that. So toy dogs that. Toy dogs for kids, 500 bucks to $1,000. You could probably charge more because, like, a dog is pretty expensive. Don't have to feed it. Just gotta plug it into the wall. It barks. It, you know, develops a relationship with your child, and you never have to take it to the woodshed.

And it has an AR15 inside in case it needs to do some Home defense.

All right, we should just keep going with this.

Let's do a bucket poll. Luxury watch guy, first time on the show, but I've been a follower of his for a while. He says 2025 prediction, Zuck is going to end the Apple Watch. This is not satire. I have had a few big boys from Silicon Valley DM me that they want to start building collections. And so I think this is. This is right. Obviously, we have been big on this, and we're pushing for the. For everyone in Silicon Valley to start building watch collections. But I don't think it'll be the end of the Apple Watch because it's just like they're. They don't make enough FP Jordans to satisfy. It's just impossible.

Yeah, I just recommend if you're obsessed with your Apple Watch, you got two wrists for a reason. God gave you two wrists, put them to use.

You got throw the Apple Watch on your ankle.

Yeah, that's more of like. That's more of like a longhouse technology. So throw it on, throw it on the ankle. That's. You got expo, I got exposed ankles. You're slapping. It's much more of a, you know.

I mean, if Zuck wanted to really kill the Apple Watch, he would need to launch a competitive product. Something I want.

Here's what I want. I want the Meta watch. And it's just the REELS feed.

Yeah.

And you can just watch swipe, constantly, swipe all day.

There's no other functionality, just constantly content. I mean, the new Orion headset does have a watch. It's not an actual watch, it's just a wristband, but it measures what your hands are doing, and then that translates into the augmented reality experience. And so you could imagine if they really want people to wear the glasses all the time and they want people to have the wristband all the time. Well, throwing watch functionality on, making it look like a watch, making this look like sunglasses or eyeglasses, and making this look like an actual watch is going to be much easier than saying, okay, you still have a watch, but then you also have this wristband.

It's actually. I really wonder why Meta hasn't done a smart smartwatch, at least for the international market. That runs on WhatsApp, right?

Yeah.

You know, when somebody messages you in America on WhatsApp, you're like, really, dude, we're both here. We're both here. Let's jump over to the. You know, like, we don't have to do this. Yeah, but you'd think that they Would have done something in that lane, given.

Well, they tried, they tried to do a phone. Chamath was on the project apparently and it didn't go well. Yeah, the Facebook phone.

This was 95% of the.

Chamath's just like sitting there like, what if we spun this out as a spec. No, but yeah, the, the getting into hardware is really hard, especially if it's an existing platform where there's entrenched duopoly getting people switches really hard. Tricky. Yeah. It would be cool to see like if Zuck took like a sabbatical or like a, you know, a trip to his island in Hawaii and was like, let me just think of like a cool consumer device instead of like thinking.

About like, yeah, I like what needs.

To be like the platform and all that stuff.

The thing I've liked about these AI hardware startups is the shots on goal.

Totally.

And people think about software as. It's okay for software to take shots on goal and have misses. Right. Think about how willing people are to experiment with software. Yet with hardware. There, there seems to be this sense of it's super embarrassing if a hardware device flops. Like, we should only do it if. If, like we're going to really make it the core thing. Whereas Meta is like, okay, figure out a way to spend $20 million, which is a rounding error for Meta to.

Make 10 billion on the.

Yeah, yeah. Like they're spending 10 billion on everything. Why, why doesn't Duck.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Set up a Skunk Works team.

Skunk Works, where it's like, you know, Avi from Friend is launching a consumer hardware device for $5 million.

Yeah.

So why don't you do a bunch of stuff. Yeah, exactly. But you can like distribute. Just like think of it as, as, you know, it's okay for it to be ephemeral and it's okay to just put stuff out there. And I want our big, our lovely big American tech companies to just be innovating.

Yeah.

Just like doing cool stuff. Launch a printer. We badly need a better printer that can do 10,000 pages a minute. We should maybe do one more and then wrap it up.

Yeah, let's do.

At this rate, we could hit five hours. We could do our first five hour show. But our children want to.

Yeah. Let's go to Dennis. He says you just got lucky is equivalent to I failed more times than you tried. I like that. A little bit of just an inspirational quote.

Yeah, no, it's great. I mean there's so much. Most of the successful entrepreneurs I know have Failed more times than the entrepreneurs I know have ever tried.

Right.

And the worst thing is when somebody who wants to be an entrepreneur tries really hard and fails and just gives up completely. And that happens so much. So you just gotta take a bunch of shots on goal. And that's one of the, the, honestly, the downsides of venture capital is the stakes become so much higher and now it's become easier for people to raise venture capital. And so I feel like it's getting.

Lower in a sense. No, the stakes are low, but 400k salary on day one.

No, but it's more like, it's more like when you raise venture capital, you're, you're, you're taking people's hard earned money and then you have to like turn that into, you're trying to turn that into multiple.

And you're certainly trying to build business.

Pain, the emotional pain and turmoil. If you don't do that. Yep, yep, is, is so real. And then, okay, if your company sort of works and you're stuck on that idea, if it doesn't work, you know, maybe you operate for a few years and then whatever. And so it eats up way more time. Whereas when you don't raise venture capital, you can just ship, ship, ship, fail, fail. You're not hurt, you're not wasting any resource except your own time and money. And so I think that, I think there would be less capital incineration if more people were just.

I would like to add that luck is a skill issue. And if you feel like you're not lucky, you need to get your feng shui in order. You need to get in the power position. Make sure something in your life is the Chinese number of wealth. 8.

Many things in your life.

Phone, address, everything should add up to eight.

Business partners.

Yes, exactly.

Group chats.

Yeah. So get your feng shui correct. Make sure your desk is in the power position. It's easy to do. Just move the desk.

Follow astrology. Do not incorporate without consulting with the stars.

Yeah, make sure it's the right time to get on Stripe Atlas.

Yeah, Stripe Atlas should have an astrology. It's like, hey, before you hit submit, you're gonna have a better chance if you just wait 12, you know, 12 hours and let it take over the next day. Jeff. Jeff Weinstein over at Stripe Atlas. Please add an astrological incorporation. Functionality.

Is the right time.

It just can be devastating if you do it in the wrong day, month.