Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 12 - 3 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Jordy is back in the studio. He made it out alive. Back. Half of the city has burned down.
Speaker 1:Half of my city has burned down, but we are here recording, bringing you the news and the breakdowns. And we're still on the topic of the fire. We're gonna do a breakdown on Rick Caruso, who a lot of people have been talking about. But first, we wanted to do a little unboxing of a Starlink I picked up yesterday from Best Buy.
Speaker 2:Not a lot of people have heard about this device, but it is really wild. You can get Internet almost anywhere in the world. Yeah. And, we should just set ours up Yeah.
Speaker 1:Right here at the table. Bucks. And, yeah, it comes with a big long power cable. I got a power brick too. And, I'm very excited to get this set up.
Speaker 1:I'll definitely be traveling with this because it'll get caught lacking without
Speaker 2:Just gotta stay connected.
Speaker 1:Wi Fi anywhere. But, very, very cool device. I'll have to figure out how to put this together. But But pretty simple, you just kinda aim it at the sky. And as long as you Yep.
Speaker 1:Can see the sky, you have
Speaker 2:So it's interesting. I was actually using satellite messaging on the iPhone. Oh, really? I'm not working well. I've seen that.
Speaker 2:It's interesting. So the way that it works is if So just do that. So during starting, like, 48 hours ago, I completely lost cell service power
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Gas, etcetera. What did they Basically, my neighborhood was totally in the dark, so we were trying to figure out what was going on. Yeah. 2 nights ago, the fire was really starting to pick up. The with this was wind was still picking up.
Speaker 2:And, so, yeah, the I I've had pretty good success with the iPhone satellite imagery. I don't know what the tech is actually based on. But if you've never had this happen, basically, if you lose all cell coverage, it'll pop something up that says you wanna send messages, and you really can't do my you can't send images, but you can send text based messages. And you just have to get outside, and it actually has a pretty interesting
Speaker 1:So I think it's on the older satellite network, not the lower orbit satellites. It's on, like, one web ViaWeb or OneWeb. ViaWeb is the PG thing. OneWeb is the bigger satellites.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So they're big. I think they're geostationary in Yeah. High earth orbit, so the delay
Speaker 2:is crazy. The
Speaker 1:light is crazy.
Speaker 2:Do And they give you this little graphic.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 2:actually have to, like, aim your phone in a certain way to try to get the messages out. But I'm super But good in a pinch.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is great. So, yeah. I've been recommending that everyone get one of these, especially if you're a founder doing important work, doing deals. You never wanna be without Internet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So pick one up. And shockingly, they were still available. And, Elon's giving out a bunch to people that are, in affected disaster areas and hopefully keeping people online and communicating. I mean, it's, you know, funny to joke about doing deals and just reading posts, but, like, having access to the Internet if the grid goes down and the Yeah.
Speaker 2:I actually didn't have one and really
Speaker 1:so I
Speaker 2:didn't have also didn't have power.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You need the battery
Speaker 2:pack because
Speaker 1:this runs on a wall. So you can get a a battery pack that will run this for days.
Speaker 2:So I don't know if you know this, but Yeah. My the house I bought last year was a fire rebuild. It had burned to the ground
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 2:Literally to the dirt in 2018. And so my entire neighborhood's pretty savvy around fires.
Speaker 1:They're sort
Speaker 2:of used to it. And so most people have these gas powered generators that just use natural gas. Yep. And so when all the power is cut off, everybody was like, okay. Their generators flick on in in 30 seconds.
Speaker 2:And then they cut the gas lines for some reason, which everybody is like, why are they cutting the gas lines? They run underground. Yep. But then it turns out that the gas lines for Western Malibu where where I am run through Eastern Malibu. And so we're now looking at potentially multiple SoCal Edison, the, utilities provider for gas, said that they will have to send, somebody individually to your home, every single home in all of in all of Malibu, to get the gas actually turned back on.
Speaker 2:So we're now looking at probably at least 2 weeks, something like that until and and so no no hot water. Nobody has gas right now.
Speaker 1:Bad day to be a minibar at a 5 stop hill in LA.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, yeah, stayed at stayed at a hotel last night, which was which was great until we woke up and their HVAC system was pumping the outside air into the house. So I woke up.
Speaker 2:I have a 6 6 month old and, with, like, some type of respiratory thing, and it smelled like somebody had been smoke like chain smoking heaters in the room, for hours. So, anyways, got out of there. Family is now in in Palos Verdes, which,
Speaker 1:has better Did Augustus de Ricco drop by?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Augustus it smelled like
Speaker 1:when we woke up in the room,
Speaker 2:it smelled like Augustus de Ricco had had ripped through 4 packs in a while. Yeah. Just grinding.
Speaker 1:Just grinding.
Speaker 2:Just grinding.
Speaker 1:But this is not a co working space.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I actually I mean, we we don't need to go into this now, but I I do think that, it it in in a world where Rainmaker can deliver rain Yeah. Anywhere, it's gonna be extremely valuable because you look at we we just lost 100 probably 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars worth of damage. I don't know what the exact number is yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're throwing around 55,000,000,000 right now, but that's early estimate.
Speaker 2:Early, early estimate. And and by the way, last night was wild too. I everybody I mean, everybody was just hyper fixated on the timeline kinda watching this stuff unfold, and then the sunset fire popped up. Yeah. And then all these AI generated images Yep.
Speaker 2:Of the Hollywood sign. People are starting to share that around that that were fake, but there was I mean, that looked really bad and and apparently was was arson. So Yeah. Anyways, dark times, but the show must go on.
Speaker 1:So here
Speaker 2:we are.
Speaker 1:Nikkita is advocating for the the the hero we need, the dark knight, Rick Caruso. He says, if you didn't vote even if you didn't vote for real estate tycoon Rick Caruso in LA's last mayoral election, you're basically a moron if you don't do it this time since we're going to have to rebuild the entire city. 3 k likes. Gabby Goldberg said they were morons the first time too for what it's worth. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, then Nikkita, kinda unrelated, says, I live a block away from Karen Bass, the current mayor of LA. So yesterday's fire in my canyon was put out in 30 minutes, sleeping like a baby tonight, taking shots at the current mayor. But yeah.
Speaker 2:So so I don't know if you remember when the election election night, Rick and Karen Bass were totally head to head Yeah. Election night. Yeah. It seemed like Rick was gonna be able to pull it off. Yep.
Speaker 2:But then, I was at a fundraiser event for, Nathan Hockman, who's a new LADA that Rick, was backing. And they talked a little bit about the ballot harvesting that the left does in LA, which they have this, like, ridiculous ground game where they basically walk around.
Speaker 1:It's called fortifying.
Speaker 2:Yeah. They they walk around with ballots that are prefilled out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:They just you can they walk through homeless encampments and say
Speaker 1:Sign this.
Speaker 2:Hey. Can you please sign this? And that's fully legal. Wow. And so as the the day after the election and the following days, Karen just, like, had turned into almost a landslide.
Speaker 2:So who knows all the details? I won't if I had to talk anymore, I'd throw on the tinfoil hat. But, yeah,
Speaker 1:we gotta
Speaker 2:keep it real simple. Either way, when when Rick lost, it was many people in the community were pretty devastated because if you go to Rick's spaces, you look around. Like, if you went if you go to the Palisades Village, which is one of, you know, one of his developments, you see, like, groups of children running around by themselves, like, having fun. It's it's it's the kind of environment that I grew up in as a kid in a small town where parents would give their kids 5, $10 and say, go go have a nice, like, evening, and then you could just
Speaker 1:be a big driver.
Speaker 2:Go hang out at the mall. But you don't see that you don't see that in LA at all. Not at all. Groups of, like, 1010 year olds running around. It just doesn't happen.
Speaker 2:But it still happens on, rental service properties.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. He said that he his goal for the grove is like, his imagined avatar is a a mother pushing a stroller with a baby should feel safe at all times.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And then and what that requires is inordinate investment in, private security. They have off duty LAPD officers who, actually open carry a sidearm. They used to be discreet kind of undercover, and then they changed this
Speaker 2:to carry.
Speaker 1:To show the gun. And, they also have facial recognition cameras, license plate scanners, a bunch of different technology that's all put together, and it's hilarious to contrast. I was listening to a podcast of him talk about all the technology that they use and how they integrate everything Yeah. At The Grove, to keep it safe. And then meanwhile, Karen Bass is doing a, press, a press junket, press conference, and and says, you can find more information about the fire at url.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's like One
Speaker 2:of the most insane moments. I mean, her her, you know, she coming back from Ghana, she was not gonna have a good time. No. Right? Like, she was briefed on the fires on Monday, decided to stay in Ghana.
Speaker 1:Really? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Oh, no way. She was fully briefed. I mean, we knew so so I knew I knew Sunday night. I'm so trained now that when the Santa Ana winds get really intense, that fires are coming.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:So so we knew our power was gonna get shut off Sunday.
Speaker 1:Really? They
Speaker 2:were already telling us your power
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. You were texting about getting a generator. I remember that on Monday. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so Really dealing with generator. Everybody knew this was pending. She knew this was pending. She decides to stay in Ghana. She comes back.
Speaker 2:Immediately, she's getting off the plane. I don't know if you saw this
Speaker 1:video. Video.
Speaker 2:It's crazy.
Speaker 1:I I I'm PC, man.
Speaker 2:Making a joke about it, but you're fully NPC mode. You know, your your talks, you know, some this reporter's talking to her, and she's
Speaker 1:This is like a legitimate reporter. I'm pretty sure it's
Speaker 2:a DTC or something. Pretending that she's, like, not hearing it or whatever. So, obviously, you know, not a great response there. She could have showed some amount of empathy. Empathy saying, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's terrible. Like I'm rushing back. Happy back. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Lot of ways that she could handle that. And then and then clearly wasn't even processing what she was reading.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:You know, we we we do a bit of writing and do a bit of casting here when we're reading stuff out. I think we would notice if it's if it said go to, you know, go to grok.ai, but it says go to go to URL. Go to URL. Check it out. Let us know what you think.
Speaker 1:It's a true Ron Burgundy Melville.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's Bad. But, anyways, yeah. And everything so so everything that Caruso represents is what a lot of people wanted for LA. Right?
Speaker 2:Security, family environments Yep. Trunk. So his his properties are some of the best performing from retail standpoint Yep. In in the country, like, in the top 5%. So he knows how to to get people places.
Speaker 1:There's the whole, like, post COVID mallpocalypse where there's a lot of empty retail chains, not at Caruso Properties.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And I and I and I, you know, go to the Palisades Village multiple times a week. It's it's fantastic. I bring my family there. It's a it's a really great environment.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people you know, the best evidence that he would have been a great mayor is being at his properties. Yeah. Right? And so when when when Bass was elected, it was devastating in the moment. She quickly had, she quickly had her home robbed by criminals.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You said this.
Speaker 2:And, she had loose guns in her house. So they they they the criminals managed to steal guns that were not in safes.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So right away, that was, like, a sort of not a great omen for for her. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But I mean, that seems kinda cool to just have, like, guns everywhere in your house. Like, you're with that safes. Like
Speaker 2:It's cool to lock up your guns. If, got
Speaker 1:indoor firing range? Is she one of those people where you walk in, there's the wall of just all the guns
Speaker 2:American flags, 2 a.
Speaker 1:That'd be super sick. Just like Yeah. Oh, yeah. I got an FFL, and Apparently,
Speaker 2:she has have a have a dueling.
Speaker 1:Apparently, she has a dueling my AK 47.
Speaker 2:Chess piece that's just dueling AR 15.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. She's getting, like, a military hardware there. You know, you get a fully automatic, m 4.
Speaker 1:It's like, I thought that was military only. It's like, yeah. It was.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Till I was got my my firearms dealer license, and I can get silencers in California now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyways, sad, dark. I I wish that, I wish he was doing a great job, but, unfortunately, Rick was was always my guy. We don't we don't discuss politics on this, but he was my guy because he's a phenomenal businessman. Yes.
Speaker 2:And he has created 1,000,000,000 of dollars of value.
Speaker 1:And he has wonderful watch collection.
Speaker 2:He also has a wonderful watch collection.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go through that.
Speaker 2:Let's get into this. He was born in 1999. And, father, started a small business, was a small business owner, Dollar Rent A Car. Yep. Not not not super small, but, start it would have started relatively small.
Speaker 2:So his father started as a small business owner, was an Italian immigrant, which he credits to his work ethic.
Speaker 1:So he goes to USC, then he, goes to Pepperdine Law School, graduates, becomes a lawyer, works at this law firm called Findlay Kumble. And in 1987, I believe, that that law firm goes bankrupt Yeah. Which I didn't even know was really possible for a law firm because
Speaker 2:Services.
Speaker 1:It's a services business. You'd think you'd just adjust prices and stuff. I don't know how that happened, but, the whole law firm explodes, collapses. His boss
Speaker 2:go on to use debt pretty well, so it's possible that the law firm had levered up in some way, and that was the cause of it. The only thing we skipped over that I think is relevant, his mother was a billboard model
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. That's
Speaker 2:cool. Youth, which is cool because we love ads.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But it's funny to think about there were just mod there were billboard models, like a model that specifically would just model for billboards.
Speaker 1:It's like, I I don't do magazines.
Speaker 2:I I work
Speaker 1:best on a billboard.
Speaker 2:No TV, Billboards only. But it makes sense. The guy is an absolute stud, very handsome. You could see, you know, maybe in another life, he would have skipped being a lawyer and a real estate developer. He could
Speaker 1:have been a billboard. Maybe an Instagram.
Speaker 2:He could have been a
Speaker 1:real guy.
Speaker 2:If he was born in 2005, he would have been a TikTok.
Speaker 1:The broccoli hair and the chilling a g one. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Great.
Speaker 1:So he quit his, so he he trans he he gets out of this law firm that's collapsing. His boss comes in, kinda puts a check on his table and says, hey. The law firm's going bust. This is your last check. You better cash this today because it might not Yeah.
Speaker 1:It might not clear tomorrow. He has always wanted to do real estate. He said he's doing corporate law. Didn't really like it. Saw that it wasn't his, life's work, and so he started a, real estate development company.
Speaker 1:First deal he does is buying parking lots, and he uses his connection with his father at Dollar Rent A Car to act as the anchor tenant of these
Speaker 2:So this
Speaker 1:working lots.
Speaker 2:This is my opinion Yep. On, on the people in life that that have, that that have the potential to benefit from nepotism.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:I believe it is your duty to to maxim to to maximally utilize that that that that advantage relationship, whatever. And so what he did is really smart. Rick wanted to buy buildings, and, in real estate, if if if a bank is is gonna lend against a property, they wanna know that there's some type of income stream, cash flow associated with that property. Right? A business that has no tenant in it is not worth the same as as a business that has a 10 year lease or 20 year lease.
Speaker 2:And so what Rick would do is he would go he'd find a place he wanted to buy. He would get his dad presumably to write from Dollar Rent A Car to write an LOI saying, if you buy this property, I will lease it for x number of years. Yep. And so then he would take that LOI to the bank Yep. And say, look.
Speaker 2:I have this great tenant. Let rent me rent me this, you know, sell Yeah. You know, help me buy this building. And so, that little bit of alpha, you know, he was able to snowball into a Yeah. $4,000,000,000 fortune.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. If you have a dad that owns a small rental car business, leverage that, into accumulating $4,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:It really I mean, it really does like, it's a perfect encapsulation of what it means to be like a deals guy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because I think too many people think about the deal as, like, one way. Like, I just need the the the tenant or I just need the bank. And, really, it's like he is creating almost like an arbitrage. Like, the bank wants to lend to a parking lot that has a relationship with Dollar Rent A Car. He's acting as the intermediary there.
Speaker 1:And, I mean, we've seen this with with the work that we've been doing where, once you start getting deals going on both sides of the equation and you can even view, like, a startup as this where it's like, okay. There's a amazing AI software developer
Speaker 2:who's
Speaker 1:gonna join the team if you get, you know, a venture fund to lead your seed round, and you kinda gotta play both sides. Yeah. And then the really good deals guys can get both of those done, match them up, and then the the value creation starts from there. Yeah. And the guys just become a beast.
Speaker 1:I mean, he's he's amassed this, like, insane portfolio in Southern California, the Grove at
Speaker 2:Farmless Market. Became so interesting enough about the origin. He became he's very well known for not selling any of his properties. Yep. So he's the sole investor in his properties.
Speaker 2:Yep. But then he never sells. Yep. He just he just benefits from the appreciation and and the cash flow. But early on, the lots that he would do with his father, he did sell those.
Speaker 2:So he used that to basically accumulate the seed capital that would allow him to do the the bigger development.
Speaker 1:Have, like, a real estate fund where people are trying to get out in a certain timeline. He's not flipping things. He really is in for in it for the long term. And you see this with other with other, real estate projects where someone comes in and they pass it on to the next person, and that next person isn't thinking about the long Yeah. Value creation cycle that's going on.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, he he has this, he has this interesting framework for thinking about, like, how he creates value at a place like The Grove. So Yep. He says that we have customers and then we have guests. And the customers are actually the retailers. Yep.
Speaker 1:The Apple Store, Nordstrom's. And and, for a long time, an indoor mall was basically you have 2 anchor clients.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:At Macy's at one end, Nordstrom's at the other. Yep. And then and then, I think they pay nothing. Like, you make essentially no margin off of them.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And
Speaker 1:then everyone else in the middle, you hopefully fill in and make money off of them. Yep. And he I think he kind of flipped that around and said, okay. This doesn't make any sense. There there's, like, a much better way to do this, seeing kind of all the tenants equally as customers and then really focusing on the guest experience and getting them to invest.
Speaker 2:He's giving them a phenomenal product, which is places that the one commonality that, you see across his properties is people just really enjoy being at them. Totally. Very simple. Yep. He's creating an environment that's safe, that's fun Yep.
Speaker 2:That's clean.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:It's everything that you want a city to be. Yep. But it's just these sort of micro Yeah. Cities.
Speaker 1:And it's always it's always remarkable when he does it because it's like, how did they close down this street? It's so hard. Like but but once you actually enclose that, it just becomes this, like, wonderful oasis to walk around in. Yeah. And it's the it's the it's, what's that meme?
Speaker 1:It's like the type of mixed use, dynamism that people don't want you
Speaker 2:to have. There's some
Speaker 1:good walkability that people don't want you to have.
Speaker 2:Caruso figured out mixed use, walkability. Yeah. Yeah. So one thing so
Speaker 1:so didn't do a residential at the Grove, and everyone was like, we wanna live here. And so now he's been doing residential in the new projects. Yeah. Because Yeah.
Speaker 2:The Palisade Village, I think, has
Speaker 1:some Apartments.
Speaker 2:Apartments around it. So one thing that's interesting too about, you know, early on, he leveraged his his father's business in order to create, you know, a meaningful business himself, which was smart. The other thing is that early on when he was doing his first, you know, development, he he even admitted to himself he didn't have the clout to attract coveted retailers like Bristol Farms and Barnes and Noble. And so what he did is he didn't focus on on the the retail side, the retailer side. He went and focused on the public side.
Speaker 2:He he he did everything he possibly could to make the public, love what he was doing Yeah. Which I think was super important. Yep. And We should go through
Speaker 1:some of his, tenants of, like, designing spaces. His human centered design focuses on the emotional impact of real world details like height of curbs, the crown on streets, feeling of open space. He says, quote, our minds catch what's real. The more real it is, the more organic it is, the more comfortable you are in that space. And you really feel that at the Grove when you're, like, not tripping over things even, like, the manhole covers are, like, you know, flush and stuff.
Speaker 1:So you're not just like all these little, like, things that just kind of jar you out of it don't happen. It really does feel like Yeah. Disneyland, Italy, he's very inspired by these places. I love his story about the the groves trolley. He, it was built from the ground up.
Speaker 1:People said, why the heck are you putting in a trolley? It doesn't go anywhere, but its purpose was to bring people here to enrich their lives, to give them joy. And so kids will say, I wanna go ride the trolley. Yeah.
Speaker 2:My son loves smart.
Speaker 1:Loves trains.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He basically was thinking of these as creating these almost miss mini Disneyland. Yeah. Exactly. Like, it's really a destination.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And the trolley is a crazy story because that needed even though it just goes one block, it needed to be licensed as a train. Like and so we had to go through all the train regulations to get it approved. And so he's been someone who's pushed through all this red tape, but also can see the other side of, like, okay. Maybe we need a more efficient system on the government side to get things done. And he joked that, on a on a number of passengers per mile, it is the most productive train in the world because it just moves dozens of people back and forth one block, and it does more than, like, the Manhattan's train system or something.
Speaker 1:It's very, very funny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So so, there's a quote in here that says, Rick is extraordinary at reading the market and the consumer in the area that he's building something. So he had started with a property, that was called Lake Havenhurst, which was a which was a development that went, originally went bankrupt, for that another developer was working on, and he took it over. And one of the things that he notoriously did early on is the the residents were so against the development. This was in Encino.
Speaker 2:When he he started including them in the process of developing the space, so he, at one point, took, part of the he took residence to go out and start, like, picking out trees that would go on the property. He said, you know, I I understand if you don't, you know, want the development, but why don't you come with me? Let's go look at some let's go pick out some trees for the property.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:We literally, you know, paid to to to transport all these people and made them feel included in the design process. So he basically was making the residents to give you a technology design partners in the development. And so he started the you know, he he he everywhere he went, he would make these sort of grassroots movements around working with local HOA leaders, working with local residents. Like, he started with the residents, which are his guests. And by making them love what he was doing, he was able to attract the, the customers, which he he considers the retailers.
Speaker 2:Right? Because he's not directly monetizing
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:The the guests. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's a bunch of stories about him having to do a bunch of deals and build coalitions when in 2011, when he's building the Americana brand, he went to Nordstrom, who I think he already had a relationship with because I I had listened to him on the Nordstrom podcast, which I didn't even know it was a podcast.
Speaker 2:Great show. Check it out.
Speaker 1:Porty pod or something. That's some funny name. But, he wooed Nordstrom away from the rival Glendale Galleria and will bring the department store to his Americana at brand shopping center in fall of 2013. And there was this big fight with, General Growth, which I think owned the, the Glendale Galleria. And they sued, and they had a ballot measure to block the building of the Americana Americana brand.
Speaker 1:He got it all through, and now he's says he's excited to be working with them.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:they have come through their difficulties, and the past is the past. And there's there's always been this, like, dynamic with the Glendale Galleria and the Americana brand where some companies like the Glendale Galleria is a little bit cheaper. It's an indoor mall. And so some businesses, if they're don't have the right margins, they'll move over there, and it kind of, like, flows back and forth. Interestingly, Apple actually maintains stores at both because I guess they can just afford that.
Speaker 1:It's probably, like,
Speaker 2:like, a place to His projects all have taken he he made he's made the perfect developments for LA, which has 300 days a year of sunlight. Yep. So why build these
Speaker 1:Why build these indoors?
Speaker 2:Why build these fully indoor malls?
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally.
Speaker 2:That's one of the reasons that Palisades Village is so nice is you have the benefits. You have you have, Saint Laurent. You have Bottega Veneta. You have all these, you know, Lululemon. You have, like, all these nice retailers.
Speaker 2:Yep. But it's set up in a way where you can walk around outdoors and sit on the grass. And
Speaker 1:And and I see it every place, like, I mean, Rodeo Drive is like this where it it is cool because it's like the single lane. You see a lot of cool hypercars, which is honestly awesome. But how how how much cooler would that be if they just shut it shut down a couple blocks of that and you could just walk across at any moment? Same thing in Old Town Pasadena. I've been beating the drum of they should shut down that couple blocks in Colorado and make that the same type of Crusoe style open, walkability.
Speaker 1:And a lot of cities were experimenting with that during COVID, because they, you know, they need more outdoor dining, so they kinda moved all onto the street. And then people realized, like, maybe we didn't need those extra 10 parking spaces. Maybe we should move a little bit further. I think New York just shut down or Yeah. A couple years ago shut down Times Square.
Speaker 1:Right? So you can walk around constantly. Yeah. And just doing a few of those where they're not gonna really throw off the flow of traffic is great. Or bury the streets if you have the ability to tunnel, and then people can still drive exactly like they would, but you have a bunch of walkable space above.
Speaker 2:It's so it's so him losing the the last election is so devastating because his body of work is truly he's created what do you want a city to do? You want it to be highly enjoyable Yep.
Speaker 1:Livable Safe.
Speaker 2:A a place where commerce can thrive, and that's what all of his spaces have become. Yep. Almost a 100% hit rate, and, it wasn't enough it wasn't enough proof, to to to win the election.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I liked him on this, Onward Fundrise podcast. They go into more of, like, the macro side of
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The finance of real estate investing. And this is from, earlier list earlier this year. They were talking about potential recession in 2024 and how much rates had climbed for them from 3% to 6%, and for a lot of businesses up in, like, the 10, 11, 12, 13%. But he goes back to the surviving the SNL, the savings and loan crisis in 2008. Crusoe stresses having enough liquidity to take advantage of opportunities when disruption occur, calling it, being a bit of a warrior.
Speaker 1:You've gotta get ready for battle. He says he stresses preparedness over reaction. He points out that where I see companies getting in trouble is their reactionary, emphasizing early anticipation and cutting costs quickly in uncertain times. And we certainly saw that with startups when, SUV collapsed and the market and the interest rates went went wild and a lot of the VCs pull back on funding. The companies that cut their burn, like, the the same day that YC issued that letter saying, hey.
Speaker 1:This is gonna be rough. They they made it through just fine. But I I got an investor update from a company that was like, we think we're gonna have to cut our burn. I was like, it's been a year since the market collapsed. Like, what
Speaker 2:are you doing? And then,
Speaker 1:of course, they went bankrupt immediately. Disaster. But he takes calculated risks. It's all his own capital. And so there's a hell of a lot more downside than potential upside.
Speaker 2:I don't have investors. He said I get the freedom to make decisions I think are best. Yep. And after this many decades of of absolutely killing it, he clearly has good decision making ability.
Speaker 1:He talked a little bit about, like, relationship banking, which I thought was pretty interesting. Obviously, although he owns all the equity in his in his properties, he still needs to work with banks to secure all sorts of different loans. There's construction loans, then there's ongoing mortgages on all of the different properties and the and and the, the buildings as well as, you know, he's gonna finance stuff out so he has more capital to work on other things. You know, it's like a private equity deal as as the as the business grows, you can take more out and then do the next project. So he he so he stresses, like, building relationship with bankers, but what he was saying was, like, it's kind of frustrating because a lot of the bankers, like, did like, bounce around from bank to bank.
Speaker 1:And so it's very hard to, like, like, you you really have to have strong coverage across, like, an entire banking sector. And then more recently, he mentioned that, he was actually he changed one of his financing strategies and went out to Wall Street because you can go to a bank for financing or you can do, a mortgage backed security
Speaker 2:Oh, okay.
Speaker 1:And and and take it to Wall Street. And and that just has different cost of capital, different process, but obviously opens up a new, like, liquidity window for the company. So that was exciting. And and he was talking about how he's it was funny. Somebody was saying, like, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, can you explain, like, some of the more complex, like, derivatives and instruments that you might use? Because, a big question was, like, if you locked your interest rate in, 2,000 22, right, 3%, you were great and your business was just fantastic. Yeah. Not every bank was offering fixed rates at the time. But with derivatives, you could actually synthetically lock your interest rate, right, with,
Speaker 2:very swaps. That's been the challenge for the last couple years in the commercial real estate market as most people were using this variable rate debt, thinking that interest rates will stay low forever. Yep. And and then all of your profit goes away I see. In months.
Speaker 2:But,
Speaker 1:yeah, they were they were talking about these, like, arcane financial instruments, and and the and the interviewer was kinda like, oh, you're like, can you explain some of these? And he's like, I don't really use them. I don't really understand them. Like, I just focus on the guest experience, and I think it's, like, more of a pure play. He's more conservative, and I I
Speaker 2:I think that makes sense. He's not trying to be
Speaker 1:A financial engineer.
Speaker 2:Financial engineer. Otherwise, I'm sure he would have sold a lot of his projects at different points.
Speaker 1:And also, like, like, it's it's it's a little less sexy than, like, oh, he's like this genius trader who has all these, like, crazy plans to to to make money and and and pull money out of thin air. But if I think about, like, who, how do I want the government run? Like, I don't really want them doing fancy stuff. I want someone conservative. Just okay.
Speaker 1:What's the revenue? What are the costs? What's driving value in the city? Let's keep it simple. Let's actually grow this thing.
Speaker 1:So he talks a little bit about, his decision to run for mayor with a successful real estate empire and fulfilling family life. Many questioned why he would step into politics. He explains, it's the city that I love. I believe you're given the ability to help others. You go and do it.
Speaker 1:His top priorities are highlighting, homelessness, crime, and government corruption as the city's biggest challenges. Homelessness is absolutely fixable. Crime is running rampant, and public service should be about service for others, not for yourself. His leadership approach, he aims to replicate his track record of collaboration results saying, I wanna be mayor for everybody. Let's make it a little bit nicer, cleaner, better life for everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I one thing I've always been impressed with, every time you hear this guy talk whether it was talking to reporters on TV, the last 48 hours, we're at this fundraiser that I saw him at recently. He there's not a single word that's out of place. Yep. You can go sit in front of a group of 100 of people and speak totally off the cuff, and it and it sounds like he had a had a speechwriter.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this guy is just a true true true professional. And if I were to, you know, really one of those, types of entrepreneurs that if I'm sure if he went into the venture world and went into tech, he could have been wildly successful.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But, chose to focus on his local community and and play a very specific game and do it at the highest possible level. So, next time you're in LA, go support a Caruso.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The growth
Speaker 2:became one of the
Speaker 1:region's topics attractions with about 20,000,000 visitors in the immediate pre pandemic years edging out Disneyland. More foot traffic. Yeah. Bigger than Disneyland.
Speaker 2:That's That's insane.
Speaker 1:Crazy. I don't even It feels like Hard
Speaker 2:to believe. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Impossible. I don't know. Yeah. It's in this LA Times article.
Speaker 2:For him, it's it's just that balance of ridiculous charisma Yeah. Long term thinking, playing his own game. Right? Not doing the investor thing, not hyper financializing what he was doing.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then using early on in his career, using the advantages that he had, which was which was which was, you know, a relationship with his with his father's business. So combination of those all those things, he's an incredible man. And Yeah. I I remember after the last election, it was the the word on the street was that he wasn't interested in running again. But I do think there's gonna be so much pressure Totally.
Speaker 2:On him now. Not pressure, but just people saying, like, please do this. Right? Because I would love to see Los Angeles run by our our guy, Rick Caruso. So
Speaker 1:He's also donated a lot of money. He has a, family foundation. He's donated to Loyola High School, Brentwood School, Law Schools, University of Southern California. You know, we don't typically, celebrate giving money away here, but I hope it brought him a lot of happiness, I guess.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:But he's been recognized by, Pepperdine and the Los Angeles Business Journal and Ernst and Young and, had a very successful family life with, 4 children and a wife that he's been married to for 37 years or something like that.
Speaker 2:You know, the one one of the critiques during the election was that he was a fake democrat. Oh, yeah. That was basically the number one critique is he was historically republican Yep. Or was independent at some point, and then was re during, I guess, you know, what whatever. And it's such a good example of how about we don't judge people at all based on their political party affiliation Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just judge them purely on their their work. Yep. And his resume is these incredible developments that people of all political backgrounds love being in.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He really is, like, founder mode person, generally. You can tell he owns a 100% of his companies. He never sells. He builds these things, manages for a very long time, clearly runs through walls to get stuff done.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Does things that people think are impossible, close the streets, and, like, really changes the landscape, but winds up creating a, like, a great product that he's clearly happy with and so are the the guests Yes. And the customers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can tell he's creating the product for himself Yeah.
Speaker 1:Which is awesome. Expressing his taste.
Speaker 2:Crazy taste.
Speaker 1:It's great. So, hopefully, we'll be, tracking that. The election is in 2026.
Speaker 2:The Erin Bass is already on the campaign trail. She is. Her Instagram shows that
Speaker 1:She's campaigning already. I wonder why. Is it that fun being there? I don't know.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think maybe, you know, after
Speaker 1:We'll see we'll see how big this story gets and how how big it is.
Speaker 2:An opportunity to redeem herself. It's just if you're speaking publicly, get the URL right.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And Pretty simple. Please, Instagram video, YouTube video. We wanna tour your She needs
Speaker 2:to be going direct. She needs to be going direct. Honestly, Karen Bass needs to
Speaker 1:It would be so different if she was just like, yeah. I can't do anything about the fires, but, like, here are my top 5 guns from 2024. Yeah. I recommend the new Glock. Get a get an AR 15.
Speaker 1:Go to Arly. They're local.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You
Speaker 1:know, one of the few gun stores in in Los Angeles. You know, and then get a sniper rifle too.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Maybe shotgun.
Speaker 2:But load out.
Speaker 1:Full load out.
Speaker 2:You would need to like a cod lobby.
Speaker 1:It should look like a cod lobby in the mayor's
Speaker 2:in the mayor's office.
Speaker 1:She does have an opportunity
Speaker 2:to win back a lot of voters by Yeah. By doing that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The the big two way voters in Los Angeles. Huge block.
Speaker 2:Honestly
Speaker 1:It's increasing. It's increasing. Increasing. But slowly. I mean, Adam Carolla had that whole take that, like, this is gonna flip this is gonna flip California or LA red.
Speaker 2:So I
Speaker 1:Do you do you watch
Speaker 2:it? I think it I think it is I think it is totally possible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It is a crazy crazy moment.
Speaker 2:We're getting on the edge here.
Speaker 1:We're getting talking politics.
Speaker 2:Edge. Stick with stick with business. It's not our forte. We like to focus on business, technology Okay. And capital allocation.
Speaker 1:Let's move into a question that we got from a listener. Ozzy says, interesting how much coverage the Palisades fire is getting compared to hurricane Helene. Helene so far was far more devastating. A 124 to 250,000,000,000 in damages for Helene versus 55,000,000,000 for Palisades. 246 deaths for Helene versus at least 5 for Palisades.
Speaker 1:126 k damaged homes damaged versus, I'm sure, a few thousand in LA. What are your thoughts? He asks. So what do you think about that? Coverage
Speaker 2:So Helene versus
Speaker 1:Yeah. Helene. The Palisades fires.
Speaker 2:I I wasn't actually familiar, so he's correct. I I there I I I paid far less attention to that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Oh, you don't want to be conspiracy. Like, it was it was, like, the Democrats, like, caused it or something. The Republicans caused it.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's true. I remember it. I just wasn't I wasn't focused on it because because this fire has been in literally in my backyard. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And, many, many, many friends and and, you know, business Yep. Relationships have been affected by it. Yep. The other, so, yeah, the damage for Helene was devastating.
Speaker 2:South Carolina and North Carolina both had 50 ish $1,000,000,000 worth of damage. Like, ridiculous amount of damage, way more deaths. Yep. It's very dark, sad. There's still a bunch of people missing.
Speaker 2:But anytime you have a a disaster strike, the epicenter of media and entertainment where it's the highest, you know, it this is the highest density of people with huge audiences in the world. Totally. So, obviously, there's gonna be a lot of coverage on it.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then for us, again, living miles from the epicenter
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It it obviously is gonna be top of mind. So
Speaker 1:I also wonder if there's something to the actual, like, visual nature of this type of disaster. Like, with a fire, you can go up in a helicopter and film it. You can't film a hurricane having a destroying a single house. Yeah. It's very, very hard to be out there because you get blown around.
Speaker 1:It happens every once in a while. And then you can look
Speaker 2:at the satellite map.
Speaker 1:Satellite map of it spinning, and you're like, oh, okay. That looks bad. But it's very different when you see a drone shot of the Palisades. It's flattened.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The fire the fires are fires are growing up in California being through a number of fires. It was really nasty in Santa Barbara Yep. During the the Woolsey fire area. There's been really devastating fires in wine country where I grew up.
Speaker 2:I I think the unpredictability of fires where it doesn't even you could be 10 miles from where wildfires raging, and then an ember lands, and it starts another one. Yep. There's also quite a lot of, just like poor behavior that springs up where people start, people just start looting houses Yeah. Because people evacuated and and Yeah. So you can there's people around the perimeter of these fires.
Speaker 1:It also has this crazy power law outcome where it's like either your house burns down and you're destroyed or your house is totally fine. Yeah. Right? Whereas, like, I feel like with the hurricane, it's like everyone deals with a little bit of flooding, then there's houses that get blown down and destroyed and, like and it's more of, like, a gradient of, like Yeah. Every house, but it's, like, all over.
Speaker 1:Whereas this, it was a lot more of, like, oh, there's a fire over there. Everyone's gotta leave and move and stuff. And it's Yeah.
Speaker 2:And and Very dramatic. So yesterday, my I'm I'm in western Malibu. The fire really devastated eastern Malibu and the Palisades, but we were already starting to pack up because we had no power Yep. Gas, etcetera. And then a fire popped up out of nowhere, like, half a mile from my house, and so I'm looking at this watch duty app that everybody's using.
Speaker 2:Yep. And they're and it's like, oh, it's 2 acres, and now it's 5 acres, and then I'm getting videos from my neighbors. And I don't know. It's also it's also is one one thing I would call out is, like, the the, you know, Keith, I don't know. Are you buddies to Keith?
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 1:I I've never met him.
Speaker 2:Anyways, really, really good guy, sort of tech adjacent because he's done some tech investing Yep. At a at a real
Speaker 1:estate
Speaker 2:tech company, but he mostly is a real estate investor. He posted, which what I thought was a very fair ask, which was, hey. My house is about to burn down. Are there any sort of private firefighting resources that that I can hire?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, and and got you know, went mega viral, got mega canceled, and, thought it was, like, a very fair ask. Like, if you look at the way he phrased the message, it wasn't like, hey. Any off duty firefighters wanna Yeah. Come, you know Save my house instead of someone else's. Demand in your post.
Speaker 2:It's like private firefighting just like private security is a is an industry. Yep. Insurance companies leverage private firefighting brigades all the time. There was this whole drama a few years ago when there was fires in the Hidden Hills area, and there was a private fire brigade that descended on Hidden Hills because it's like a $1,000,000,000 of property value. Yep.
Speaker 2:They don't wanna lose that. Right? So, anyways, I I just think, Keith is a is a great guy and and obviously didn't have any bad intentions with that and sort of sort of unfortunate that people far away from the action decided to have an opinion when it was a very fair It
Speaker 1:does seem like he killed
Speaker 2:And it didn't work, by the way. His house burned to the ground. Yeah. So he's like yeah. Insane.
Speaker 2:Bravo to everybody dunking on him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He did, just a little, like, comms advice. He did a pretty good job of mitigating the cancellation, like, the the the hatred, I think, by I think he locked his account or, like, deactivated his account. And everyone's like, oh, he deleted his account, but really, like, you can turn it on in in a few days, and it'll be fine. But what that does is it stops the quote tweets.
Speaker 1:And so anyone who quote tweeted you, if you're getting canceled, this has happened to me when I talked about how I'm gonna move to Alaska and take it over and make it a tech mecca, and everyone in Alaska said, they would kill me. I'm not kidding. They were they were, like, DM ing me pictures of their guns being like, bitch, like, you wouldn't last a day up here, you you Californian.
Speaker 2:Cali boy.
Speaker 1:I was like, okay. Respect. Like, this this makes me wanna move move there more. But then there was the there was, like, the right wingers were canceling me.
Speaker 2:Accepted.
Speaker 1:But, yeah, the right wingers are canceling me for, like, being like a pussy, basically. And then the and then the left wingers were canceling me for, like, you know, colonizing indigenous spaces or something like that. And I was like, this is too much. I just locked the account, and then it shuts down all the quote tweets, and then everyone just moves on because, like, they're not getting that. Like, they don't have anything to go off of.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Material. Yeah. Yeah. It is very funny.
Speaker 1:But I I I think he did that, and I think he'll be able to come back hopefully because it's a good poster, and there's some good stuff. But okay. That's not important. Let's move on to, the timeline. Hopefully, there's some fun tweets.
Speaker 1:We get more on the tech side, talk about what's going on outside of the fire, which has consumed us for the last 2 days, but hopefully, there's more interesting things going on. We got some big tech alert. This is very exciting. Catherine Boyle and Andreessen Horowitz has started following at tech bros pod.
Speaker 2:Brother Boyle. She's she's engaged with some of our stuff before. I I think we probably have covered, her tweets, but, she created American dynamism. Yeah. Did she not?
Speaker 1:And she talked about how there's a need for an Oscar style award show in tech.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And years ago, there was the Crunchies, and there are some hilarious photos from the Crunchies. I never I never heard about that. TechCrunch. Yeah. And they would give you a physical statue, and it pulled really big people.
Speaker 1:I mean, teal. Yeah. There's a picture of teal with a Crunchy.
Speaker 2:That's cool. And I
Speaker 1:think it's like a man on the moon type of thing or something, or maybe it's like an ape. I don't I don't know.
Speaker 2:It's
Speaker 1:it's something crazy. That's wild. But, the Crunchies, they I I remember the moment that they peaked because, Paul Graham said on Twitter at the time, it was an ape? Okay. 2001.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Wow. Oh, yeah. Yeah. There you go.
Speaker 1:That's kinda cool. We gotta we gotta buy one
Speaker 2:of those
Speaker 1:on Ebay or something. But, PG said we don't need TechCrunch to award startup of the year. It's a useless award because in tech and in business, you have the market Yeah. Constantly telling you how the company is doing.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so with the Oscars, it's like, the Oscars don't just say which one made the most money. There's an artistic value there. Yeah. And so I think it's actually good that with our award show, we focus not just on who's the richest person in tech or, like, or the award for
Speaker 2:We focus on size lords like like Josh Kushner who repeatedly made some of the highest conviction biggest bets Yeah.
Speaker 1:In And it's more of a quality
Speaker 2:spectrum of companies. Yeah. Yeah. There's some element of
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Editorial element where
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:You could argue that Gary Tan's a bigger size lord because he just bought it
Speaker 1:more company Exactly. Spring. Conversation starter. Yep. You know?
Speaker 1:Oh, you know, should moonlight have gotten the award or should La la
Speaker 2:Land have gotten the award? The domain acquisition of
Speaker 1:the year. Exactly. Exactly. Like, these things are are award shows should be more Yeah. If you're doing an award show for tech, you should lean towards, something that's a little bit more qualitative, a little bit more artistic.
Speaker 2:But
Speaker 1:you won't be doing an award show for tech because we already got that locked down, so don't copy us. Okay?
Speaker 2:But you can come. You can come. See you there.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 2:If you wear tux.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Andrew McCallop. Been on the show before with some great wait. Is this the question? Is this
Speaker 2:And so it's it's less of a it's less of a question. So so, basically, Andrew has developed this this Doge themed art piece
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Which he's gonna sell for
Speaker 1:I've seen it in
Speaker 2:$5,000,000. Okay. It needs to sell for $5,000,000. This
Speaker 1:is gonna
Speaker 2:be Andrew for 40. Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so I just wanted to put the word out because Andrew is looking for a home for Dogefin.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Because, apparently, wherever it's being stored right now, we would house it here, but it's gonna be I think it's a little bit it's huge.
Speaker 1:It's huge. And
Speaker 2:we we're on the 10th floor of a building, and carrying it up the stairs sounds rough. And I don't know. I think the weight limit is probably too high for the elevator.
Speaker 1:So he says he's doing a bit of spring cleaning. 2 things that need to be moved out. Would anyone be interested in a large vacuum chamber? So if you're in the market, hit them up. It weighs about ยฃ1,500.
Speaker 1:No pumps. No warranty. Bring a trailer. Please DM me. It's free.
Speaker 1:You just have to do you just have to promise to do something incredibly interesting with it. And then 2, Dogefin needs to find a new home. If you want, the 600 pound magnificence gracing your factory floor, we should talk. I would prefer to keep ownership and do a storage slash loan thing as I need to sell him at Art Basel to pay for my f 40. Shout out to Tech Bros Pod for making the decision.
Speaker 1:In retrospect with Carmack and and Mueller owning 1, it's a no brainer, Mueller. And he shows, the vacuum chamber and the Doge fan, which you should go take a look at it. It's a wild piece.
Speaker 2:Stunning piece.
Speaker 1:Chamber has some interest. Y'all better move
Speaker 2:fast. So so maybe now that I'm thinking out loud, I should honestly put this in my backyard.
Speaker 1:I don't know if he wants to be outdoors. You have to cover it all the time and stuff. I I I don't know how treated it is. Maybe he could do, like, some coat or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Andrew, treat it. I'll put it in my backyard. I'll give it an ocean view. It'd be great.
Speaker 2:Great place for Dogepin to, to pass the time until he sells.
Speaker 1:Let's do one more than a promoted post. Signal says, Vibe Capital was born out the realization that traditional diligence is just the polite lie we tell ourselves after making decisions with our gut. No pitch decks, no financials, no fake process, just human connection. We invest in founders with ideas that make us feel alive. We're betting that intuition beats spreadsheets, and that founders thrive when they're treated as the connoisseurs of culture, not as risks to be mitigated.
Speaker 1:If the idea makes us smile, shiver, or swear under our breath, we're in. We believe capital is a commodity, but vibes are scarce. And, he's quote he's quoting a a segment from a book about Andy Bechtelsheim investing in Google. Bechtelsheim ran to his Porsche and returned carrying something. We could discuss a number of issues.
Speaker 1:Why don't I just write you a check? He said, e ebulliently. I can't talk to you about that. By Voci. He presented Brynn and Page with a $100,000 check payable to Google Inc.
Speaker 1:Brin and Page explained that Google hadn't been incorporated yet and didn't have a bank account to deposit the check into. Well, when you do, stick it in there, Bechtel Saimes said cheerfully. Then he disappeared in his Porsche without saying what share of Google he imagined he had bought.
Speaker 2:This is a real alpha because you can still do this. Yeah. If you know even if a company hasn't incorporated you know, usually Yeah. Usually, you wanna be investing pre incorporation. You wanna be given that handshake before the company's even been formed.
Speaker 2:Yep. So you're gonna get the best price and the most clout, which is what angel investing is all about. Low entry prices and clout Yep. More about the clout than the than the investment.
Speaker 1:Funny thing is that
Speaker 2:because by the time you're getting any liquidity, you forgot about the investment. Yeah. You don't even know what they do anymore. But but the but checks are cool because because I've been in situations where I'm, like, well, I wanna invest, but you haven't set up the company yet. And just write a check.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. And just get the get the c corp name right. Yeah. And every time I use a check or every time I write a check
Speaker 1:You just make a payment of cash.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm, like, checks are actually a fantastic innovation. I I've I I I've only written probably sub a 100 checks in my life just because digital payments were really the time I was an adult. They were just so widespread. But every time I write it, I'm like, wait.
Speaker 2:I can write any number in here and just give it to you, and you
Speaker 1:just does.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Deposit it. That's great.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No limits or anything.
Speaker 2:That's great. It's almost as cool as stable coins.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. The, the the checks the funny thing is that I feel like if you did that today with a founder, depending on the founder, some founders would be like, great. $100,000. I'm gonna go out and raise a $100,000,000 post seed round and give you 0.1% of the company.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But then if they have to raise again at a lower valuation, you'd convert in at the lower valuation. You gotta get that MFN clause Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. In
Speaker 2:there. Otherwise, you're an
Speaker 1:idiot. You gotta watch out. Let's do a promoted post.
Speaker 2:Promoted post, this one from Kyle Bodhi Bodhi, who is quote tweeting a another post by a guy named Grant.
Speaker 1:I put this in there because I wanted to promote those wheels
Speaker 2:Yeah. Specifically. So Kyle says
Speaker 1:This is an ad read for these specific wheels on Amazon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we're running an ad for some Hasali store on Amazon, and these are rubber office, chair wheels that you can take you presumably take So you see
Speaker 1:it like a razor scooter.
Speaker 2:Yes. So these are razor wheels that you can give your office chair. So we don't use We should put these on. We don't use chairs with wheels on this podcast, but I do have an office chair at home that I know I can see this attachment. I know they'll snap in, so I need to get some of these.
Speaker 2:But $20, you turn your office chair into a Razor scooter. Kyle got nerd sniped by them.
Speaker 1:The g t r s of office chairs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know? Says these things are This is the
Speaker 1:Wysock package.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is the Wysock
Speaker 1:package. Herman Miller.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:The ones
Speaker 2:I've got such a great Herman Miller. It's not that comfortable, but it looks amazing. Well That's what that's what matters.
Speaker 1:I mean, you'd put an exhaust on it if it was a car. Yeah. Why not put some wheels on it?
Speaker 2:Some wheels on it.
Speaker 1:Let me get some phone calls. Okay. Let's go to a bucket pull. Bucket pull.
Speaker 2:Okay. Do you wanna do you wanna ex reexplain the bucket Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. So so so we have so so we have you know, we react to a lot of a lot of posts from acts on the show. We wanted to create some differentiation here. And so, when we see something on the timeline that's a banger, it's it's from a friend, it's from a brother, maybe a pre previous brother of the week, someone really important, it's about a really important topic, we put it in this stack.
Speaker 1:We print it full size. It's a banger. This is from Max Meyer. You know it's gonna be good. It's important.
Speaker 1:He's setting the discourse. But every once in a while, we see posts that are good, but from people we don't know. Maybe they're just kind of random, timeless. We could just react to them whenever we want. So we print them on these small 4 by 6 cards, and these are the bucket poles.
Speaker 1:We put them in the bucket. Champagne. Shuffle them all around.
Speaker 2:Champagne bucket.
Speaker 1:We shuffle them all around, and we take them out of here randomly.
Speaker 2:Use the tongs too.
Speaker 1:These are a little the bangers are a little more sorted. We we, you know, we know we wanna talk about Max's post today, but the bucket pulls are random. And, we we got this idea from, kill Tony, Tony Hinchcliffe. He when he runs his comedy show, he brings on his friends every show. They're regulars.
Speaker 1:They do a minute of stand up, and you know that those friends of his are going to be the regulars, are gonna deliver. They're gonna deliver high quality. But he also does bucket pulls. He pulls random people from the audience who maybe they've never done stand up. Maybe it's their first time.
Speaker 1:Maybe they're maybe they're terrible. Maybe they bump. Maybe they over perform.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:At the end, he gives them a
Speaker 2:joke book. If they
Speaker 1:It's a variable reward is Exactly. Exactly. Addicting. Exactly. So so on the show going forward, you'll see we do a couple bangers.
Speaker 1:We do a promoted post, and we do a bucket pull. And so this is a good one. Let's do this one. From Comrade Cisco, says new workout goal is to have a body where if I commit a crime, the media posts my shirtless pics, and everyone's like, wow. It's a picture of Luigi Mangione.
Speaker 1:And my goal for this year is to make Luigi Mangione look like the Trump shooter. Do you see that that kid that really, really skinny dude?
Speaker 2:Frail.
Speaker 1:I'm trying to get so big that everyone's like, Luigi's, you know, skinny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it is crazy because a lot of people say, oh, like, all your problems will be solved if you just get super healthy. And, clearly, if you're messing with 60 Mesoamerican demons Yes. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 1:Well, I think that's a pre one shot photo Yeah. First. Yeah. Because if you look at him now, it's not like he's a week out from the bulk. He's months out.
Speaker 1:Yep. And, also, he there's a big question about people are like, oh, he's so hot. He has tons of fans. People are looking at this. They're really upset about health care.
Speaker 1:They're on his side. The public's on his side. Well, that might not matter at all in the courtroom. And there was this whole, like,
Speaker 2:how much
Speaker 1:is the court of
Speaker 2:The way he looks should not matter in the courtroom.
Speaker 1:It shouldn't at all. And but people are kind of acting like it will matter. And they did the same thing with SBF. People would be like, why is SBF on x right now in a space talking about how he's innocent? And it was like, he's trying to win over the public, but, like, that didn't matter at all.
Speaker 1:And so I don't know that I I I I think, like, the this is obviously just some joke post, but I don't know that it actually works. Like, I I I I don't actually think there's any way to, you know, sway the public. I think the jurors are gonna get in there. They're not gonna care. They're not gonna be extremely online.
Speaker 1:The the lawyers will filter for that in voir dire. They'll be like, are you a communist, and are you doing Ayahuasca all the time, and are you you have the the the phrase is hybristophilia. Have you heard of this? No. Hybristophilia is
Speaker 2:You could just make sex like this up. No. I'd be like, no. But
Speaker 1:Highbristophilia is sexual attraction to criminals, and it's fairly popular. Yeah. So when you hear about, oh, there's some serial killer that's getting, you know, 20 letters a week from women across the country who have, like, fallen in love with him. You're like, why? And and there's actually, like, a paraphilia where
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:People are like, that's hot, I guess. It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Anyway Same thing with podcasters. There's a very, famous podcaster who gets one letter every single day
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:That he hasn't talked about this publicly, obviously, but he gets one letter every single day from the same woman in Europe who just handwrites a letter and puts it in the mail every single day like a a love letter to this guy. And it just goes to the PO box and and and just, like, rocks there
Speaker 1:and gets letters a day.
Speaker 2:Two letters a day.
Speaker 1:We're coming for you. You know who you are. You're listening. The other thing is that, Luigi is short, so fuck him. Anyway, Max Meyer, as we said, banger.
Speaker 1:He says, we must put a 100,000 a 100,000 percent tariff on Ozempic and Legos in order to force the kingdom of Denmark to give Greenland to the United States. Ozempic and Lagos are, like, 45% of the Danish economy. It would be over for them in 15 seconds. That's hilarious.
Speaker 2:I mean, Max is a media mogul Yep. And he has studied the art of the deal clearly Yep. And he's just trying to feed ideas because he knows that They dodged a lot of Trump Trump administration is very online. Yep. They're gonna see this stuff, and they're gonna be, like, that's a good idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, but, yeah, I I think, Lego Yeah. And Novo Nordisk are both fantastic companies. Did you
Speaker 1:see the flag I posted? I posted the 54 state flag.
Speaker 2:Who did the Photoshop on?
Speaker 1:I just did that on my phone. I just copied one of the rows that has four stars over and just it look pretty good. Right?
Speaker 2:It look great.
Speaker 1:And then so the 54 star flag, it's still pretty balanced because a lot of people do the one extra star, which is hilarious, moon or whatever, and you just say the place. But I was like, we're talking about 4 places. Let's just see what that looks like. Looks great. It looks great.
Speaker 1:Downstairs, there's a 45 star flag that was, prior to Alaska, Hawaii, but then a a few other states looks great
Speaker 2:as well.
Speaker 1:Very balanced. And what's hilarious is that someone pretty high up in the Trump administration texted me. I was like, this looks great. No way. It's wild.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The the anybody complaining about symmetry issues is not a good reason not to to Yeah. Expand the empire.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Constantly.
Speaker 1:And and the comments on that post were great. People were saying, let's add Mars.
Speaker 2:I think that's a promoted post.
Speaker 1:This is a promoted post from our friends at the Ridge and our friends at
Speaker 2:Matt at You will
Speaker 1:promote it. Friends at
Speaker 2:So unless you've been living, under a rock, you know that Sean Frank run is the number one wallet salesman in the world, and he's able to do that by running on Ramp. I thought this was cool.
Speaker 1:Deal toy.
Speaker 2:Ridge spent a $100,000,000 on their Ramp cards. They spent a lot of money on meta ads and inventory and things like that. Sizelords. And absolute sizelords and, hit it nice. And, Ramp sent him this this deal toy.
Speaker 2:Fantastic. It's crazy to think that there will soon be a $1,000,000,000 club, and Ridge will eventually get to that.
Speaker 1:That's amazing.
Speaker 2:They are highly profitable. So, you know, they they they they're not even spending as much as they could. Yeah. But if if ramp really ramps up the deal toys, Sean might be like, I'm gonna spend a
Speaker 1:little bit more this month.
Speaker 2:I'm gonna spend a little more this month. So they've got the whole, like, savings focus. I love it. The average company on ramps is 5% a year. But when you have deal toys like this, it's gonna tempt some CEOs to say, you wanna jack it up, you know, jack up that spend a little bit.
Speaker 1:So That's great.
Speaker 2:Anyways, we'd love to see it.
Speaker 1:New clients we're hearing about ramp signing Will be They're gonna be in the $1,000,000,000 club on day 1.
Speaker 2:If we keep hiring creative agencies like we've been doing, we're gonna be in a $100,000,000 ramp club soon. For sure. For sure.
Speaker 1:Should we go to promote a post or was that That
Speaker 2:was that was Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's do one from Vittorio. You know, he's been on the show before. Says this new wave of imperialism is oddly refreshing. It's like I can feel my ancestral blood stirring again. It's time for war, spiritual war.
Speaker 1:Very pumped up about the Greenland and Canada jokes and all this stuff. Hard to say what actually happens here, but, certainly a lot of fun. Also, isn't he, like, living in Italy or something like that? I thought he wasn't even in America.
Speaker 2:I don't know, actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I don't know. But I, be very funny.
Speaker 2:To Chad, though. Yeah. I I would say if if, not this is gonna kind of not really land, because it but, with the right audience. But anybody that's unemployed right now that's American, just go to Greenland. Just literally fly there Yeah.
Speaker 2:And just post up. I bet there's Water sites. Hotels, hostels, Airbnb's, that kind of things. And just post up, like, hopefully, this happens. And, you know, you have the opportunity to be on the ground and, really kind of, you know, lead the charge.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. D day mode.
Speaker 1:K. This is a great one. Buck in SF says, is Stratechery still relevant? And Ben Thompson, the founder of Stratechery, drops a nuclear bomb on him in the form of an entire Stratechery article explaining that, yes, it's
Speaker 2:fact To be clear, the whole thing is very cordial. Is
Speaker 1:there any cordial? It was. It was because Buck has been, has been a, like, a fan and kind of, I guess, asked Ben a lot of questions over the years. And so they he he said, I decided to give you a very earnest answer. And he says, it depends.
Speaker 1:First off, I'm pretty proud of Stratechery's record over the last couple years. When it comes to the big companies I traditionally cover, I think I've been pretty sharp, including sketching out their relative risks and strengths in AI, calling out Apple strategy pre Apple intelligence, made a comprehensive case that Meta was actually the best positioned, and of course, was basically the only person to strongly defend Meta when they were at their Nadir, and he has sources for all of these. I've also been on the NVIDIA case for a long time explaining what their moat is and why it's relevant long before they became the juggernaut they are today. I guess I re I do regret not forcefully making the case that they were going to go to the moon, but I generally think that if you read Stratechery regularly, you're pretty well positioned to capitalize on moments like that because I laid the groundwork. And he goes on and on and on, and it's amazing because, I think Stratechery is extremely relevant, and I still love reading it.
Speaker 2:So so here's the thing here's the thing though. So the reason that ads are the best business model for media is because you get the widest possible reach. Right?
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 2:A lot of people don't subscribe to Stratechery, so they miss all of this really, really, really high quality content. Yep. And he has less influence because he's reliant on his readers, and he makes his readers fork over their hard earned dollars
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which which works really well for him. I think he likes the predictability of just knowing as long as I write good stuff, there's revenue there. He doesn't have to focus on selling to advertisers. But the same thing happened to Joe Rogan with Spotify. You remember Joe Rogan's influence fell off a cliff for a few years when he was off YouTube, and you basically didn't hear about him
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Unless so it went for the Trump
Speaker 1:interview on YouTube got 50,000,000 views.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's like
Speaker 2:So you know that you know that so so the the Joe Rogan deal I was talking to Rob Mower at Huberman about this, cofounder of of Huberman Lab. And he was saying, like, the the Spotify, Rogan deal, like, was very good for everybody involved, like, it just made a lot of sense. But, you know, Rogen's happier now that he can just be out freely sharing content generally everywhere. So, I'd like to see I don't know. I it'd be interesting.
Speaker 2:I I'd like to see more people like Ben follow the model of I'm gonna release stuff. It's gonna be paywalls paywalled for a week and then open it up.
Speaker 1:He does do that. He does eventually release our content. The main the main articles are free to read. You can subscribe just to the those, get those. And then he has podcast clips and and segments of the show.
Speaker 1:So he has a number of podcasts that do one free, one paid. But when you're paid, you get the full subscription.
Speaker 2:Also has to be great. It has to be, like, links being killed on
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:X also. So he
Speaker 1:had to LinkedIn early on. He would post link and and on Twitter as well. And now that Twitter doesn't have those, like, viral like, he hasn't figured out how to put his content into, like, an x native format.
Speaker 2:We need brain rot slop TikToks of of Yeah.
Speaker 1:With the subway surfers and then Ben Thompson talking. Yeah. The problem is that he just doesn't care about, like, reaching that audience. This is Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I think you could argue that his influence is there's a bunch of really large capital allocators that read his coverage and use that to make size lower investments.
Speaker 1:And also executives at big tech companies Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Like, who
Speaker 2:who Yeah. Which he who talks with constantly.
Speaker 1:But everyone he talks with is definitely reading it.
Speaker 2:And that's why, again, the reason to subscribe to him Yeah. Not only because the writing's very high quality and he's been it's like David Senra in the way that he has so much depth with these companies and the history of them that he can just talk forever about them. But now they all text him and call him and give him actual scoops and insights that no other writer has.
Speaker 1:Yep. Let's do another Greenland post and Canada post, and then we'll go to a promoted post. J5killer says, post a screenshot from 4chan, where someone's thinking about why Trump is talking about Canada. The question is why why does Trump keep joking about Canada? Why does he keep, joking about Greenland and the Panama Canal?
Speaker 1:The answer, for those of you who are not familiar with geopolitics, is shipping. Canada and Greenland, and by extension Denmark, control the Northwest Passage, which due to ice melting is set to become one of the largest shipping routes on earth. Canada can't defend it against the other claimant, Russia, without US support. America is also going down the path of wanting to further control shipping routes to maintain their hegemony. While these come off as jokes now, make no mistake, these are long term US strategic objectives.
Speaker 1:Whether through conquest, economic partnership, or some means, the US will eventually control these routes. Whether the whether under Trump or someone down the line, he is just putting one idea into the atmosphere. Yeah. Pretty interesting take. I haven't heard that.
Speaker 1:I thought, yeah, I was definitely in, like, that's just a joke camp. And when I thought Greenland, I thought skiing or something. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just like that. Well, there is
Speaker 2:there is a rift in the Trump admin. Right? There's some parts that wanna absorb Canada, and then there's other part that says we already got the best Canadian. We got Jeremy Gaffan. Yep.
Speaker 2:Gaffan and Company. Yep. We got him already. Yeah. Why do we need the rest of the country?
Speaker 2:Right? True. True. We have, you know, a future billionaire.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:He he could have gone on to, you know, be the the richest man in Canada. Now he's gonna be one of the richest men in the US. Yep. Do we need to go through the trouble of integrating this entirely new country into state and all this stuff? But so we'll see how that plays out.
Speaker 2:Jeremy's laughing to the bank.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Either way, he wins.
Speaker 2:As he does. Promoted posts. We got a promoted post from the founder of Lava. Lava is the only way to borrow against your Bitcoin. All other loan solutions require you to give up custody, so you end up borrowing against bank coin and lose your Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:These custodial solutions have lost a $100,000,000,000 in customer funds in just the last few years. So what are these companies again? There was, what what was the one, there's 2. There was Celsius, not the energy drink company
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:That offered amazing rates. It went under BlockFi, FTX. Yep. There were a lot of companies non custodial way to, get some leverage. We we love leverage on the show.
Speaker 2:We love betting on yourself.
Speaker 1:And we love holding Bitcoin.
Speaker 2:And that's not not financial advice, but, lever up.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's go to a bucket poll. This one's from Alex Kerr. He says, today I learned that Evan Spiegel has a private 737. Let's go.
Speaker 1:B b c. Action for that. He's got the Boeing Business Jet. Fantastic. It turns out that n three e, an airliner 737 configured as a private jet is owned by Snapchat and Evan Spiegel.
Speaker 1:The operator is listed as SE Logistics, short for Spiegel Evan. Snapchat owns the largest private hangar at Van Nuys Airport. Wow.
Speaker 2:Amazing. Yeah. My only critique here is that it should be wrapped in yellow.
Speaker 1:I agree.
Speaker 2:Because I don't think yellow there's some issue where if you wanna make your plain black, it's way too heavy. Fine. Yeah. It seems
Speaker 1:There's even a whole brand. Isn't spirits color yellow? And they
Speaker 2:have Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1:you get confused with spirit. That's rough.
Speaker 2:You don't Evan would not wanna get
Speaker 1:You don't wanna be thought of as, like, the spirit of social networking. That'd be rough.
Speaker 2:Evan kinda came about too early. Right? Because he would always get so much shit for driving supercars around Venice. Fantastic supercars. Are you gonna get mad at a young billionaire for enjoying Yeah.
Speaker 2:Supercars.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the fruits.
Speaker 2:10 years from now, it's gonna be completely normal for the average product manager in SF to drive a super car to work Yeah.
Speaker 1:Street park it.
Speaker 2:Street park it. Yep. And so Evan was just too early.
Speaker 1:But he I mean, it's still early. But he's still here. In his own arc and be his own person. And, and and there's just so
Speaker 2:many ways Spiegel's actually somebody I would like to see step away from Snapchat. It's never gonna make any money. There's a there's a sort of an enrichment scheme
Speaker 1:for
Speaker 2:the employees. Right? Yeah. And a and a and a strong public markets bet for some some very online x people.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:But I'd like to see him leave Snap, start a new foundation model, consumer hardware company, go compete with try to compete with Avi from friend.com. Sure. Yeah. Well, it doesn't seem, like, go big. Like, I want, like, a 2 on 2,000,000,000 on 10,000,000,000 seat ground.
Speaker 2:Like Sure. That would just be good entertainment. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, if I'm doing entertainment with Spiegel, I I I want him just to lean into the personality, the lifestyle. Let's let's see your watch collection. Maybe he can just take it in a different direction. Doesn't need to compete on price, but if he's got little oh, he went a little bit crazier at west go West Coast Customs. Oh, you got the Cayenne minivan?
Speaker 1:He's got I got 40 minute. Cayenne 6 by 6.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What about that? He's got the Storato build on an f 40.
Speaker 1:You know you know, the f 40, you think about that car, everyone loves it. Only has a v eight. Pathetic. Swap a v twelve in there.
Speaker 2:Yeah. V 12 swap. Turbo. F 40
Speaker 1:with the
Speaker 2:Storado with the the roof racks.
Speaker 1:F 40 Storado. There now we're talking some knobby tires on that thing. It doesn't it it has a manual. Everyone said that was the most engaging drive. Throw an automatic in there.
Speaker 1:Like, get some paddles going. It'll be faster.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's let let let let's really class it up in there. Paddle shifting in your f 40. Just just dig it all out. Throw a 2916
Speaker 2:transmission in there. Exactly. Just
Speaker 1:Yeah. PDK. Yeah. Yeah. PDK
Speaker 2:it. Everything on it.
Speaker 1:Yep. This is the way to do it. Just really
Speaker 2:Oh, nice nice minivan.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Turn the f 40 into a minivan.
Speaker 1:F 40 minivan. Strata. Strata 5.
Speaker 2:The perfect car to get to the snow. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Because you can't you can't really afford an f forty if you can't afford to take it to West Coast Customs and drop another million converting it to a v twelve with off road tires. And you also you know that if you fiber roof rack. If you do that, Ferrari will sue you.
Speaker 1:Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You've heard of that? So and you can't really afford an F40 unless you can fight the lawsuit.
Speaker 2:The crazy Ferrari is the only company that sues their customers for just doing nonharmless things.
Speaker 1:Company yet.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:The only company yet. We need more of this.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:We need more aggressive entrepreneurs who are saying, you know what? Yeah. I do sell an AI wearable. And if you don't like them, they'll sue you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You if you hate this thing yeah. You put the wrong phone case on your iPhone, lawsuit.
Speaker 2:Loss.
Speaker 1:We want this thing clean. No cases.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we should test that. It's every every every man should get sued by Ferrari at one point in their life.
Speaker 1:Yes. And I think I think if you listen to the show and you haven't left us a 5 star review, expect a lawsuit.
Speaker 2:My father father-in-law got in a nasty lawsuit Really? Ferrari once. Sorry for another time. Okay. Let's move on.
Speaker 2:Let's move on.
Speaker 1:Oh, this is a this is an interesting personal story. So disgraced propagandist says, staying at a formerly world class hotel in Pasadena and thinking about how horrible the consulting class that that's taken over is, everything here is a shell of its former self. Small things replaced with plastic, food boiled down to lowest bitter deep fried items, prices jacked up, staff lazy and confused, best encompassed by the image of the harp player at the famous tea service squinting at an iPad, scratching out an appalling 60 second harp version, not of concertos, but of pop slash rap hits. The worst part is playing a reservation. Brainrod harp.
Speaker 1:Brainrod harp. Just playing, like, what are those Brainrod songs? Like, the the the the sigma sigma male theme song? Like like, the the the funk, you know, funk music. It's like those stuff like Russian kids in Russia will be drifting to in, like, those Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. VHS edits. So the this is actually sick music. I like it. I like the sigma male.
Speaker 2:It's like
Speaker 1:the Yeah. The sigma male theme song on a harp, that would go hard. The worst part is booking a reservation now impossible without calling centralized booking agency, which barely speaks English and has no answers because we're not connected with the property. Customer service staffs are the worst enemy of the consult the consulting class. The massive costs, keep them up at night.
Speaker 1:It occurred to me that their next trick will be to turn the lowest on the totem pole, the migrant worker gardening and cleaning, into dual employees. The leaf blower slash customer service role, a futuristic sort of slave wielding both cleaning implements and a Bluetooth headset at the same time. The that they'll call something like core team member or full service coordinator. Okay. Perhaps then it'll stop coming.
Speaker 1:Do you know
Speaker 2:do you
Speaker 1:know this hotel?
Speaker 2:I tried to stay there the last fire.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's the Langham. Yeah. Now it was formerly the Ritz Carlton. Everyone loved it when it was the Ritz, and everyone was very upset.
Speaker 1:My mom is like, oh, it was so much better when it was the Ritz. I didn't understand the context at all because when I went as a kid a kid, it was the Ritz. And when I went as a, it all looked the same. It didn't really matter. But on Tuesday, when we got evacuated, I booked a room there.
Speaker 2:Oh, really?
Speaker 1:And yeah. And because I was like, oh, Emily was like, we wanna get out of the the house. We gotta go somewhere. We're not sure where we're gonna go. I was like, I'll just book a hotel there.
Speaker 1:Seems great. Booked it on Expedia. It was pretty cheap. They were starting to jack up their prices on the on
Speaker 2:the gouging. Nice. Yeah. Fire vac vacuum.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And so I'm sure the I I don't wanna put too much blame on them for the price gouging. I'm sure whatever, like, ecommerce software they're using to set prices just detects, like, there's a lot of views on the website. Let's put it up. And 99.9% of the time, if Pasadena is booking a lot of hotels, it's like, there's a conference in town or it's the Rose Bowl, or Yeah.
Speaker 1:The Rose Parade, or there's something else going on. It's not a natural disaster, but they should have a fail safe that says, like, hey. Like, maybe it's a bad look to be cross scheduling. Anyway, I book on Expedia. It's only $300 or something.
Speaker 1:And, but then but then I'm like, this is a weird thing. I bet a lot of people are thinking about doing this. Let me call them and verify that they have my reservation. I actually got stuck in the central booking thing, and they're like, we don't know if you have a reservation. I
Speaker 2:did that this morning. I was calling a bunch of hotels. The hotel stayed out last night. HVAC, like, HVAC system wasn't working, so we told them we were leaving. I started calling hotels Yep.
Speaker 2:And trying to get through to somebody that's actually at the hotel
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Is very hard.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's really, really hard.
Speaker 2:Super annoying. So, anyway, but my going back to the original post, so I have I feel like I'm qualified to have strong opinions on hotels, like service and just the general experience because I worked at a Ritz Carlton
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:In college. And, like, I I would work 40 hours a week at this hotel while I was in school. And, and so, anyways, I've seen it inside working at a Ritz Carlton delivering the actual service, and I think there's a number of issues with hotels today. The the thing you can count on legacy hotel brands for is service. Like, if you're having an issue on the property Yep.
Speaker 2:They will typically go above and beyond to try to resolve it. The challenge is the the actual interiors are, for the most part, falling apart. They're no longer that nice. The menus and all the food items are just, like, Cisco slop. Like, it's, like, no the food's no longer enjoyable to eat at many of these properties, which is just tragic because you have these incredible properties and then terrible food.
Speaker 1:My my business partner at his wedding, the day after the night of his wedding, he stayed at the Langham and walked into his room. There was a shattered glass, like champagne glass on the ground, wine glass. And he stepped and cut his foot, like, super bad. And was like, can we do something about this? And I don't even think they comped him in the room.
Speaker 1:It was, like, very rough.
Speaker 2:That's crazy. Yeah. Bad. But yeah. And then so you have, like, the the the, most of our listeners are already Amon pills.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I I was gonna say we need an Amon in LA.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. We got the Amon putting Amon residents here in center of LA.
Speaker 1:But will that be a hotel too?
Speaker 2:I don't know if they're gonna have a hotel, but It's gotta be a hotel. To live there. That's that's the best part. But, but but Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, maybe just like you're the one You have the you
Speaker 2:have the the Ritz Carlton. You have the, the the Ritz Carlton. You have the, 4 Seasons. You have, what, Saint Regis. You have all these hotels, which are beautiful properties, very expensive properties, but actually mid experience.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And then you have the new hotel brands that are,
Speaker 1:the Caruso in there.
Speaker 2:The Miramar. Would do it, but The Rosewood. Yeah. The Rosewood Miramar is pretty nice, but, again, the food's still, I think, slop. And then you have, like, one hotel, a proper hotel.
Speaker 2:These hotels where the interiors, like, they paid they paid for cool contemporary interior designers, but then they're just not actually they they don't have, like, the service culture typically that you get at these legacy hotels. And so the the solution is to basically stay at these, like, very, like, boutique hotels, like, 20, 30 rooms that are still nice
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Or you spend $5,000 a night
Speaker 1:of the amount. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And that's, like, that's the state of hotels.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Have you seen this hotel booking scam?
Speaker 2:No. Were you, like, fake booking websites?
Speaker 1:So, basically, the way it works is you go you Google this happened to me when I was booking a a Room of the Four Seasons. I Google, like, 4 seasons, San Francisco. I was staying up there. And, and the first result is like a sponsored post because every post on Google's every result is sponsored now. And it says, like, 4 seasons official booking, and the website is 4 seasons dot guest reservations.com.
Speaker 1:And so you're just like, oh, this must be like the SaaS tool that they're using. They got a custom domain on it. Sure. I'll click there.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's not the 4 seasons.
Speaker 2:And Dude, that was on guest reservations.com today with thinking it was legit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. No. No. No. No.
Speaker 1:It's fake. And so what happens is that they they, they get you through the flow, and it's a really clean UI. Like, it all makes sense. So you're like, oh, this is great. This is easy.
Speaker 1:They quote you a price that feels about right. And then at the last second, they add, like, $200 on. And and and and it will be, like, $400 if you just went to actually the 4 seasons website, 700 on their website. And then they book it, and it's nonrefundable. And if you call them, they'll be like, sorry.
Speaker 1:We can't do anything. And literally all they're doing is they just have someone there who books through Expedia at an even lower rate on your behalf. And so when you show up to the 4 seasons, they're like, yeah. We have you, but we don't have your information for some reason. Like, we just have your name down here.
Speaker 1:We didn't get your email. So they didn't put that in because they put in, like, you know, some hash, like, 6k427@guestreservation.com, and then they'll forward that to you, clean it all up. So it feels like you booked,
Speaker 2:and a lot of people don't notice. I was on so I was on guest reservations Yep. Dotcom today looking at the hotel that I the second hotel that I booked Yep. Yep. Family.
Speaker 2:And I was like, why is this hotel, like, letting this other company own their customer?
Speaker 1:It's so weird.
Speaker 2:And I ended up just calling them because I didn't see the room that I
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Wanted to get or whatever. And, but, yeah, that that makes sense where I thought you're saying scam where they just, like, take your money, but it's,
Speaker 1:like, it's just like a scam. It. They just mark it up, and then they don't let you refund. And it's this weird thing where, again, I call the forcing
Speaker 2:try to make it look like it's
Speaker 1:Exactly. Like Exactly. And I called the forcing because I was like, I like like, okay. Like, I'm getting screwed for, like, $300. But at the very least, like, I and and the reviews, if you search, like, guest reservations, Reddit, it's all just, like, scam.
Speaker 1:They didn't even book me. I got screwed. Like because, of course, like, the service is terrible. But if you, so so I called, and I'm like, hey. I I I I messed up, and I booked through this scam website.
Speaker 1:Like, I just wanna make sure that I actually have a room when I show up, and I'm not just, like, hunting around for a different hotel. And and if you call within the first, like, 3 hours, they'll say, no. We don't have you yet. And so but then I showed up, and I called later, and they were like, we actually do have you now because they finally put it through.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is just it's just such a mess. It's such a mess. Mess. And, yeah, I mean, bunch of different problems there.
Speaker 2:Action against Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, I I I do think the 4 seasons, like, I I would I I talked to, like, the, you know, front desk person, but I was, like, 7 layers from the CEO. But What what can
Speaker 2:you even do as 4 seasons?
Speaker 1:Because It's just showing up on a goal.
Speaker 2:Yeah. To to be a they're basically a travel agency from a legal framework.
Speaker 1:And they're just arbitraging the Google Ad cost of winning that auction and the fees that they can add. So they think, okay. It cost us $20 to acquire this customer. We'll add a $100 of fees.
Speaker 2:CEO has a very extravagant explanation for why this is a real high value market serve it. You know?
Speaker 1:That Which CEO?
Speaker 2:The 4
Speaker 1:c Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, what's actually, like, we're creating efficiency in the market.
Speaker 1:No. No. It's a total scam, and they know it. They they they understand what they're doing. I've seen the inside of these scams before.
Speaker 1:This is an interesting one. This is not a post. This is not a public post. It's actually from a private group chat I'm in, but I thought it was interesting based on the fire stuff, from a friend saying, I'm going to insist that everyone start picking up tangible skills like lock picking. I'm so sad by what I'm hearing with regards to the fire.
Speaker 1:But in the event of serious emergencies, you need to know how to commandeer boats, hot wire cars, start motorcycles. These aren't jokes. I learned how to do this a long time ago. You never know. And with kids, to take care of, being able to get out matters.
Speaker 1:Back in the day, we used to hold weekend sessions and teach each other skills all the time. You can download MIT's lock picking guide and get a set of tools and starters from Amazon, from Amazon and have a Amazon? Yeah. And have a fun weekend together.
Speaker 2:Always pronounce Amazon like that. Amazon. Amazon. Amazon.
Speaker 1:But but I thought that was really cool. And, you know, as bad as these disasters are, they are great. You know, it's like it's like, is starting a workout plan on January 1st kind of ridiculous and cringe? Like, sure. But Still
Speaker 2:do it.
Speaker 1:Better than not having a workout plan and not using that as the start. And I'm sure there's plenty of people that are in great shape now who are like, yeah. Actually, I did start working out on January 1st 5 years ago, and now I'm jacked. And it's the same thing for this. It's like, yeah, maybe the fire was, like, the thing that made you go buy a gun or buy a Starlink or, you know, learn how to lockpick or learn how to hotwire a car.
Speaker 1:But, you know, best time to start is now, so just go do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I bought a gun for the first time during COVID.
Speaker 1:There you go.
Speaker 2:It was just like Yep. There's riots out of my outside of my house. Yep. A lot of crime.
Speaker 1:You got the meteorite? 9 19 elevens? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Great choice.
Speaker 2:Shark tooth trigger.
Speaker 1:Let's skip
Speaker 2:I can jump in with a promoted post from John. John's got that official x badge, and we just wanted to call attention to John. He says, at 300 followers, invest now. You'll never be this early. And this x badge says numbers on engagement.
Speaker 2:This guy this got 2.3000
Speaker 1:likes. Way. Oh, he must be way above 300.
Speaker 2:Way over, but even if he's at a few 1,000 now post
Speaker 1:future brother of the week, future reply guy potentially.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, John, great work.
Speaker 1:Go give him a follow.
Speaker 2:And, if you're, you know, if if you're struggling on the follower side, go get a random job at x. Become the become like the maintenance guy at x.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Get the x badge and run it up to 50 k, then quit, and suddenly you have an asset now. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Also just that that meme template of, like, buy now, invest now, we're still small. Like, people wanna get in on things early. And so I I think that works generally. That's great.
Speaker 2:And the anime profile picture.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know there's gonna be
Speaker 2:some big numbers up there.
Speaker 1:Great. Oh, let's do a bucket pull. What should we do? Zeke'd up? Oh, I like this one.
Speaker 1:Zeek, been on the show before, but this time he's in the bucket polls. He says, whoever makes this autonomous first has my vote at Waymo at Zukes, and it's a, 18 forties horse and carriage. Looks very opulent very loud opulence.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:This would be a great daily.
Speaker 2:There was a bunch of horse and buggy setups in in Alps last week.
Speaker 1:Oh, cool.
Speaker 2:It's good, good to see. I'm gonna
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Do it next year.
Speaker 1:You have to, like, box out all the tech journalists to get access to the horses?
Speaker 2:I mean, the lines wait times are crazy.
Speaker 1:It's terrible. Journalists. I'm sure. I'm sure.
Speaker 2:But, but, yeah, I think I think, you know, I'm I'm hearing reports from my neighbors that none of the gas stations around our neighborhood have gas. Yeah. And what the great thing about a horse Yep. Is if the horse gets tired, runs out of gas, you you let them feast on your lawn Yeah. And they're back in action.
Speaker 1:Back in action.
Speaker 2:You don't have to worry about all you need is a little water, sunlight Yeah. And you got fuel. So one of the this is another reason that equestrianism is is coming back in such a big way
Speaker 1:It's just rational.
Speaker 2:Is it's just rational.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I do think that there is a although this is obviously a joke and a meme, I do think that there's an interesting, insight here, which is that, design of these, autonomous vehicles is going to matter. And we saw this with the difference between the Waymo and the Tesla Cybercab, how they look wildly different. I mean, people were joking that, like, one looks left wing and one looks right wing. And, and you could imagine that, people want to express themselves.
Speaker 1:People want different brands. Not everything it needs to be, perfectly monopolistic. And so you could see someone coming out with some sort of, like, opulent robo taxi that's cleaned every single time and very high? Like, what is the Uber Black or the Cadillac Escalade, Escalade V, hopefully?
Speaker 2:I just wanna call a Waymo that has a humanoid robot in the driver's seat
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:That has
Speaker 1:The 1 s.
Speaker 2:AR fifteens for arms.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I got to defend you.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's great. This is a a great throwback post from TechnologySista. Says this is one of the first Rune tweets I ever saw all time banger, and it's Rune in 2021 saying you can either work for a liberal tech company that lifted its name off of a random concept in Hinduism, or you can work for a conservative tech company that lifted its name off a random concept in Tolkien. Those are your choices. And it's Samsara and Asana versus Anduril and Palantir.
Speaker 1:And everyone knows about the LOTR references, but I didn't know about the Hinduism trend on the left wing tech companies.
Speaker 2:Same. Same. But it
Speaker 1:really is true because, Dustin at Asana is a big, big Democratic donor, and, obviously, Ballantier I mean, Carp's actually Democrat, but Andrew, Palmer, kinda same thing. And, is it Okta Sticksley
Speaker 2:in that.
Speaker 1:I don't know. He's
Speaker 2:not. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It only the the the the analogy breaks down after 4 companies, but it look makes for a good screenshot.
Speaker 2:OpenAI being the least open AI company is just great naming. Yeah. Can't even have planned that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There was something about the Anduril name where it was, like, I I think Peter is a
Speaker 2:reference with, like, Uber where
Speaker 1:it was, like, it was, like, Uber was too aggressive of a name, whereas Lyft was, like, this very, like, nice name. And so that's why the
Speaker 2:Well, Lyft needed a counter assassination. Yeah. They had to counter position. Positioning with the pink mustache.
Speaker 1:Like, I'm just getting a a Lyft.
Speaker 2:The best name is
Speaker 1:the Uber mentions, like, super aggressive. And so, that led to, like, some easy character assassination. Like, we gotta go after this hardcore black company. Like, they're, like Yeah. Black and white.
Speaker 1:They're super serious.
Speaker 2:Travis was just too cool. Yeah. Good name, in the Tolkien, side of things, Saur Sauron Sauron. Yes. Security from Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, this all seemed like a subtweet of Sauron a little bit, but this all started with Lulu saying if you if you if your startup hasn't launched yet, it's not too late to make sure it doesn't have yet another token name. That name won't make you the next Anduril. But I guess, Sauron has launched, but, yeah. I mean, there's there's there's gonna be a little bit of, like, distance where it used to be, like, Peter is a cofounder if it has a Tolkien name, and then it was, like, a founders fund partner is involved, and therefore, it has token name. And then it became, like, you went to Peter's Christmas party, and so you get to use the token.
Speaker 2:If if anybody wants some alpha, find every possible name in the token ecosystem Yeah. And go buy the dotcom.
Speaker 1:The dotcom.
Speaker 2:Start bidding, lowballing Yeah. Yeah. Because because Anduril would would have been a pretty probably that it's like a Yeah. Anduril.com was $10? Not $10, but probably, like, $5.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I like that.
Speaker 1:Yep. It's funny. Well, let's stay on the topic of, people who have founded Tolkien based startups. And Delian says it's crazy that the Boeing astronauts are still stranded in space and no one is talking about it, And they're going to end up being up there for almost a full 9 months longer than they originally intended. Bums in seats, the world has prepared a number of crewed flights in the coming year.
Speaker 1:NASA's SpaceX Crew 10 mission on the ISS, which will finally bring Butch, Wilmore, and Suni Williams home after a 10 month stay in space has been delayed to NET March.
Speaker 2:Glad they brought enough food. Yeah. They're probably having, like, Capri Suns at this point and rationing them, but, like, NASA Capri Suns, which are probably, like, way worse. I would say here here's the here's the interesting thing. So Varda's first mission, they they took him a a little bit of extra time to get the proper licenses to come back.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And everybody like, all the, you know, delians, like, haters were trying to dunk on him for that, yet there was no humans onboard the craft. It was literally just
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So where are those same haters now hitting on NASA being like, yo. Your crew is stuck in space.
Speaker 1:It is funny how much of a culture war issue when it first happened because on, like, day 2 of them being stuck, everyone was like, this is embarrassing for Boeing. Like, we're hating on Boeing. And I and a lot of people were like were like, oh, they're not technically stuck. They're just doing extra things. Like, it's gonna be fine.
Speaker 1:And, like, nope. It wasn't fine, actually. Like, all of the crazy, like, irrational, like, jumping to conclusions, in this case, was correct.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:100%.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Let's do a promoted post.
Speaker 2:Promoted post. We haven't talked enough about watches on this episode, so we got a promoted post from the luxury watch guy himself. This is the watch dealer for, friends of the pod like, Austin over at Morning Brew. He, luxury watch guy has a Patek Philippe 55303 r, which is a Grand Complications minute repeater rose gold skeleton coming in at only 1,300,000. Surprised Zuck hasn't picked this up yet, but, yeah.
Speaker 2:Evan Evan Spiegel, maybe maybe go for this. Try to get some new hardware.
Speaker 1:And what was the rule again on watches? 2% of AUM?
Speaker 2:2% of AUM.
Speaker 1:So you need a $50,000,000 fund to justify that 60 mil, 70 mil?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. We we
Speaker 1:know some people. We can really measure that too. So, anyways, jump on this point. Asking for a recommendation.
Speaker 2:Nicole, honestly, kind of a perfect watch for Nicole.
Speaker 1:I like the rose gold. Minute repeater.
Speaker 2:Rose gold with the skeleton. It's just I mean, this is such a good looking watch.
Speaker 1:It's great.
Speaker 2:Nicole, go get this watch. It's a great option for you and sure to turn heads, on either coast.
Speaker 1:When you're in that meeting and the minute repeater starts chiming the perfect time to the minute.
Speaker 2:So here's the play for Nicole because I get that she goes so she let's say, she spends 1,300,000 on this watch. Right? It's a it's a meaning she her last one was $50,000,000. It's 10,000,000 of management fees over 10 years. Maybe she pulls a little bit of that forward to to acquire this, but then she goes into a meeting with Zuck.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He's got a family office. Yeah. She probably raised $500,000,000 just off of the conversation. This is a great conversation.
Speaker 1:Or, hey. Look at what I got in my portfolio. This one company, maybe you wanna buy it. That's liquidity. It's all gonna come back to her.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So, anyways, I don't think she can lose buying this watch.
Speaker 1:And I do think the the minute repeater is underrated because of the fact that it makes noise at the end of the meeting. So, hey, I gotta run. Ding ding ding ding ding.
Speaker 2:Ding ding ding.
Speaker 1:Attention to your watch. You don't have to show it to someone. They're gonna hear it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They're gonna hear it.
Speaker 2:It speaks for itself.
Speaker 1:Let's do another bucket poll. Oh, this is a fun one. Prank for exits went mega viral, 7,000,000 views with a video about Juicero. And he says, never forget that this was a Silicon Valley darling with over a $120,000,000 raised. And, yeah, the Juicero was destroyed by Ellen Hewitt at Bloomberg, actually.
Speaker 1:She just wrote a piece about ZYN that I was featured in. And
Speaker 2:But you still gotta put that one in the truth, sir.
Speaker 1:We do. We do. Because there's a lot of things that were taken out of context. A lot of things that were taken out of context. But, overall, I mean, she does great reporting, and, you know, no one loves tech journalists more than we do.
Speaker 1:So, the the downfall of Juicero was, quite the Silicon Valley moment in the HBO TV sense. Very entertaining for everyone involved.
Speaker 2:I do have a good friend who did an SPV into Juicero.
Speaker 1:Did they get out? Did they secondary out in time?
Speaker 2:I I knowing him, he probably did, but he's gone on to have a very illustrious career
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Billions of AUM.
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:He's doing just fine. Yeah. So I mean,
Speaker 1:like, the basic thesis
Speaker 2:is wants to if anybody invested in Juicero and wants to, we would have a guest on to talk about
Speaker 1:That'd be fine.
Speaker 2:Let's break down the investment memo. Yeah. Yeah. Why is little of these
Speaker 1:I mean, it it it actually wasn't that crazy. It's like, Keurig makes a ton of money. It's this razor blade model subscription. People like juices. So Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, we're gonna do the same thing.
Speaker 2:Juice was also booming. Everybody Oh, shit. Everybody was saying you gotta get all you should be getting Yeah. Having multiple juices a day and all this stuff. It is I I I've gone through juicing arcs.
Speaker 2:Super annoying. Yeah. Takes a ridiculous amount of prep. Makes a huge mess in the kitchen. You've got this juicer that's spewing out plant waste.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's a they were solving a real problem. So Have they told me the juicer story? Key right now is is is, like, who's buy who's buy you could easily get, I think, 10,000 preorders for that thing if you just rebooted the Juicero IP.
Speaker 1:Maybe.
Speaker 2:And, somebody owns it out there.
Speaker 1:I mean, they rebooted the Enron IP. Maybe Juicero is next.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Maybe Juicero would do better as a meme coin now.
Speaker 1:Meme coin or yeah. Just simplify it and just make it juices that
Speaker 2:you sell
Speaker 1:premade glass bottles. Have I told you my story about, making fresh juice during YC in 2012? It's the best. So we had a juicer. Juice.
Speaker 2:We were
Speaker 1:like, we needed to stay healthy. Let's start juicing stuff. We'd go get produce, but it's always really expensive. So we'd always have to, like, drink it all because we're like, can't let it go to waste. This is, like, the highest value nutrition that we're getting.
Speaker 1:Most of the time, it's ramen and just, like, garbage. And so Is it when
Speaker 2:you were living on 16 k a year with 4 other guys? Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. And so my business partner and I go over to his uncle's house. They're like, oh, we know you guys are into juicing, and we got some produce from our garden. Here, take this stuff, and, you can make some juice with it.
Speaker 1:So you bring it home, and it's got some good stuff in there.
Speaker 2:That meaningfully increased your runway. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It was it was meaningful at the time. We were stoked.
Speaker 2:2 days. So we
Speaker 1:start throwing it all in, and we started juicing everything. We're like, okay. Carrots, this. And we're like, what are these red things? We put them in.
Speaker 1:We're like, okay. I guess those are radishes.
Speaker 2:Oh. Spicy.
Speaker 1:And we didn't realize that, like, it completely tainted, like, all of the juice. It was just the spiciest thing, but we were like, we can't let it go to waste. So we just had to drink this radish juice for, like, 2 days. It was miserable. They made it clean it all.
Speaker 1:It's disgusting. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. It's a mess. Long chisero.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, chisero made a lot of sense. I like this one by Armand Domilewski. He says, the, the poly market on will the Palisades fire be contained by Friday, It's down at, like, 1%.
Speaker 1:It's apparently just impossible to do. And so he's suggesting that somebody makes a movie about a team of degenerate gamblers who single handedly contain a massive fire in order to win a huge score on Poly Market. And, I mean, the volume's 22 k. It's not exactly gonna be a huge score, but it's, it could be funny in a in a,
Speaker 2:Somebody doesn't check the volume, hires the most insane
Speaker 1:Insane too.
Speaker 2:Private. They're like, oh, the French guy bet 40,000,000. Like, you're gonna get if we just spend 5,000,000 on the private fire brigade and ship them in from the East Coast, then the $22,000 payout.
Speaker 1:If you if you poured 20 if you poured 20 k into that market, 100 k, you'd be at 90%, immediately. You could totally swing that market. The the the interesting thing is a friend of mine sent me this, that that post, just the poly market. It was like, this is so dystopian. And I was like, I don't know.
Speaker 1:I think it's actually still valuable to know, okay, I shouldn't expect the fire to be put out. And there's this whole thing about, like, okay. Well, does this incentivize people to
Speaker 2:I actually got value out of it. I've been planning my week.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Based on, like, don't go I don't wanna
Speaker 2:go home. I don't wanna
Speaker 1:go home.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't wanna go home.
Speaker 1:It's not gonna be contained. Yeah. So I I don't know. It seemed like it was not good. And in this case, like, yeah, you could say that there's you could win 1% of your money by keeping the fire going, which is illegal, or you could win a 100 x your money by putting it out.
Speaker 1:And so it's actually, like, the good ending here potentially if there was, like, this team of degenerate gamblers.
Speaker 2:I only think it's I only think it's sad for some of that $22,000 of people with crazy gambling addictions that are just saying Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Should we go to Paul Graham? He posted his, office reveal. He says, my flight was delayed, so I cleaned up my office. And he's got some wonderful bookshelves, desk right in the center.
Speaker 1:The problem, of course, is that he's not in the power position. This is a feng shui disaster. We posted about this.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We we compared that having success in business in this room is equivalent to making it to the NBA with no likes.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's incredible that he's been able to have the career that he's had.
Speaker 2:It just shows, like, PG is PG.
Speaker 1:Power position. He really is a 1 on 1, fighting with one arm tied behind his back this entire time. And if we really knew the full layout of the house, we could understand more about, whether or not this applies the principles of feng shui correctly. But I can tell you right now, Feng Shui is very important. It's very real.
Speaker 1:And I've, very rarely do I meet really successful people who do not have their desks in the power position. This is kind of like Feng Shui 101. Basically, you wanna have your desk facing the door, and so the opportunities can come to you, and that energy can come to you when you're kind of ready to receive it. You don't want your back to windows. The feng shui reason is so that monkeys and ninjas can come break in through the windows and just, you know, take you out.
Speaker 1:But a lot of these a lot of these ideas, there's other things, like, you shouldn't have your desk right next to an open bathroom. And, it's like the the the negative energy from the bathroom will throw you off. But a lot of these feng shui things, they sound like kooky, like, you know, astrology, but they actually have, like, very reasonable scientific, you know, explanations if you think about it. Like Yeah. Why do you want your why don't why don't you want your back to the door where people come in your office?
Speaker 1:Well, it's because people are gonna walk by and see what's on your monitor, and you're gonna be like, like, am I, you know, messing around on Twitter? Does that look weird? Like, as opposed to if you're in the flips flip flip position
Speaker 2:You can have
Speaker 1:somebody comes in.
Speaker 2:X open on your monitor and your phone. Yeah. It looks like you're doing important business.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's the same
Speaker 2:thing, like,
Speaker 1:the windows.
Speaker 2:After I bought
Speaker 1:my Yeah.
Speaker 2:After I bought my house, I had a I hired a a Feng shui consultant. Shui consultant, David Cho. He's based here in LA. Yeah. And he taught me a lot about my house and how to make it nicer.
Speaker 2:But you don't even have to believe in feng shui. Just look at how you know, if you're a skeptic, go around your house, and there'll be areas of your home that you completely ignore that are perfectly good areas, like a living room or something like that that you just never go in because they're the feng shui is off. Yeah. So you intuitively don't feel like you just don't feel like spending any time there.
Speaker 1:Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, you can abstract it into just like you walk into a cluttered house that has a lot of hoarding going on. That's bad vibe.
Speaker 1:You're not gonna be productive there. You're in a really clean, beautiful space where everything's laid out reasonably, and you're not bumping into things. You're not stubbing your toes. Like, all these things add up to just a more pleasant and happy life. And you can explain it through ancient Chinese wisdom or just, like, logic and reason, and both are equally valid.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. The end result is that, yes, you should, in fact, follow the principles of feng shui.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Promoted post.
Speaker 2:Promoted post caught me off guard here. We got a promoted post from Augustus to Rico. He says apply to work as a forward deployed engineer at rainmaker.com/careers, and he posted a picture of their truck stuck in the mud. Mhmm. So if you didn't see, Augustus had a little episode last week, where he and his team got stuck in the mud, but they made it out.
Speaker 2:And, yeah, I think this is a super important company. We've been, over the last 48 hours, 72 hours, we've been at the mercy of mother nature. Augustus is trying to, Rainmaker, lucky to be an investor. They Was he
Speaker 1:the emerging poster of the year as well?
Speaker 2:He was. Award winning poster and, and cigarette smoker and,
Speaker 1:Runner-up for hobby for obscure
Speaker 2:hobbyists. Of the year.
Speaker 1:But
Speaker 2:And, yeah. I mean, the the the the team works really hard. They're doing something important. And, yeah. Every now and then, I'll see a rainmaker hater online, and I'm just like, pick a better hobby.
Speaker 2:Like, his his company is very cool, and, and I guess this is very cool. And I don't think they'll be doing as many gundo bonfires anymore, sort of poor taste to light things on fire. But, cool opportunity to go check it out.
Speaker 1:Let's go to a bucket poll. We got $10 Danny here, and he says, bro, you're fine. You just need an impossible sequence of events to play out in perfect order against all odds, and you'll be fine. 200 k likes. Banger.
Speaker 2:That is the mentality that you should be bringing in to the rest of your Thursday. Yeah. By the time this episode gets up, you may only have a few hours left. But
Speaker 1:The genetic lottery. It's real, win it. No excuses.
Speaker 2:No excuses.
Speaker 1:Do we guys close out?
Speaker 2:I think we're getting there.
Speaker 1:Okay. Let's do a couple more.
Speaker 2:Do a couple more.
Speaker 1:Chris, spare a deal.
Speaker 2:If you didn't if you couldn't tell, John is deeply, deeply addicted to podcasting. Oh, yeah. And Yeah.
Speaker 1:Keep it going. We got He's
Speaker 2:like, oh, I gotta leave it 1. I got a lot going on at home. Now we're getting the guys sitting there scratching his his wrist.
Speaker 1:This is interesting, though. We gotta we gotta cover this. Chris, says, Bridger Aerospace owns 6 super scoopers, including the one you saw on your timeline today. These are the these are the planes that put out the fires. It's a public company.
Speaker 1:Ticker is BAER, Bridger Aerospace Group Holdings. And just today, they're up 10%. 11.6 is to be exact. But it was cool. I love when something Where
Speaker 2:was Shkreli to to tell people to go long Bridger airspace?
Speaker 1:It's one of my favorite, like, Altismo hobbies is when something crazy happens. You go and you deep dive, like, the businesses and the corporations that are buying like like Caruso. Like, when else would I really go and understand his full career? I'm really glad I understand it now because he actually is a fascinating business model. He's not like other real estate developers, and it is really interesting.
Speaker 1:And I learned a lot from
Speaker 2:founder man.
Speaker 1:And it's the same thing. I would love to know, you know, who's the founder of Bridger Aerospace? What's their stock trading at? How does the business work? How many of these things do they own?
Speaker 1:Do they make them? Who makes them? I wanna know everything about this. You know, AI can help with this stuff, but you gotta know what questions to ask. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, Yeah. It's fun. And that's part of why we do the show. Let's go to Palmer Luckey. I love this post.
Speaker 1:He says, after spending a few days at CES 2025, it is clear that this vibe shift is real. Everyone wants to help our military. Everyone wants to build. Nobody is afraid. Fantastic vibe shift.
Speaker 1:And I like the follow-up here because someone was like, oh, like, they're Johnny come latelies. Like, they're just joining now when it's trendy. There's no political risk. There's no career risk to saying, yes. I support the military.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:It's so important.
Speaker 1:And he says, yeah. This is exactly what Palmer replied. He said, we should have an open tent for them. It's fine. Like, let's just forget about that.
Speaker 1:I'm not gonna go and pull the receipts from, oh, you weren't on board 5 years ago, 10 years ago. And I was thinking about it, like, when Andrew launched, I thought the company was cool. I like Palmer. And when Palmer got fired from Facebook, I was like, this is very anti democratic, and I'm not into it. But, like, I wasn't out there, like, blogging about it or posting about it.
Speaker 1:Like and it's not that I was, like, necessarily afraid to espouse that view. It's like I didn't really have a platform back then. But, ultimately, like, all that matters is, like, the end of the road. Like, get everyone on the right team for the right reasons, and it doesn't matter if it requires a vibe shift. And you see this all over the place in VibeShift.
Speaker 2:Credit to Palmer, The Anduril seed round, obviously, they had a ridiculously stacked team, and it was a, you know, founders fund was involved. But the the Anduril seed round was done at, like, 97 posts or something like that. Talk about a mango. Talk about an absolute mango seed round.
Speaker 1:I know some people that And
Speaker 2:that was I was those, those at a time that there was a very, very, very, very small group of people in Silicon Valley that that even thought the category was investable at all. Yeah. So we'd be able to pull off a round like that.
Speaker 1:I know a big, a big hedge fund has passed because of price.
Speaker 2:Mistake. Yikes.
Speaker 1:That's great. Let's do this one. Maybe another promoted post. Esther Crawford, former ex employee, former Twitter employee, says not enough people know that the person behind community notes is Kay Coleman. It launched in January 2021 under the name bird watch.
Speaker 1:His product vision withstood the test of 3 CEOs, Jack, Parag, and Elon, and is expanding to Meta's massive user base. Absolutely legendary product sense. That is crazy. Like, the it seems so obvious, the community notes feature, but it really is this is interesting how I am. I am.
Speaker 1:And I enjoy it.
Speaker 2:I love Watch out, brothers.
Speaker 1:I'll put somebody in the true zone.
Speaker 2:You'll put
Speaker 1:2ยข. Anybody
Speaker 2:in the truth zone. Anyone. Because the truth for you Yeah. Is paramount.
Speaker 1:And it is crazy. Like, there are so many posts that have community notes on them constantly. Like, almost every single one of Elon's posts has a community note on it, and people are battling it out. But it always services extra information, extra context.
Speaker 2:Really? Elon Elon's
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. Elon's not he's not out of the woods. Seen it. For sure. Already know.
Speaker 1:He happens all the time. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times, he'll quote tweet something that's, like, a little edgy or conspiratorial. It'll have a community note.
Speaker 1:And then Elon's post will have a community note too, and you just see 2 of these. But also as as someone who's in the program, I see more community notes than the average person because I see them as soon as one person proposes it Yeah. Yeah. Before one wins in the battle of ideas, the free marketplace. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You can see, okay, there's 4 different people, and then there'll also be people saying, NNN, like, no note needed, and they'll put, like, why they don't think it's a note. Like, it's obvious satire. We don't need a note. Or somebody else will say, actually, we do need a note. We need to link to this Wikipedia article or the or this the this Wall Street Journal article.
Speaker 1:It's a really cool system. And then you can get in there, write stuff, upvote stuff, and and see stuff before it goes out. And then, interestingly, like, they're really good with the push notifications. Hey. You like the post, and and now it has community note.
Speaker 1:We're updating you. Just really, really great system. And and just, like it's not censorship. It's just adding to the conversation, which I really, really like. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I can still see all the crazy conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because usually once a post goes viral, people will correct it in the comments. Yep. They they may not get any attention and
Speaker 1:No way. Yeah. I don't think well. This is half a promoted post, but we're gonna be tracking this. We're now, I I guess, 6 days out until Varda's second mission, Delian, is announcing Varda's going to space again.
Speaker 1:We're very excited for this. We'll be covering it. We'll be live the day it happens, and you'll certainly hear about it here on the show. And this time, they're launching from Vandenberg, but they're landing down under in Australia. Very exciting.
Speaker 2:Very cool.
Speaker 1:Huge progress for that company. I'm very excited to see it. So congrats to Delian and the team at Varda. Good luck.
Speaker 2:Bad week to be a Delian hater.
Speaker 1:Bad week to be a Delian hater.
Speaker 2:It's been a bad few years.
Speaker 1:I mean, some some of the dungks are funny. There was this one where, he he posted a picture of, like, the new factory floor, and it was just, like, empty because it's new factory. And somebody was like, lot of space in the space factory. And I was like, okay. That's kinda funny.
Speaker 1:But it's like, of course, they filled it in. They filled it up so much that Andrew has to move out Dogefin. He doesn't have room for his old vacuum
Speaker 2:chamber. My backyard.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Exactly. So it's all full cycle. And they've been they've been growing a bunch. They hired a ton of people.
Speaker 1:I think they I think Dalian said they hired more people in the last, like, 2 weeks than they did in the 1st 8 months of the company, something like that. Great. So exciting. Love getting stuff to space. We'll definitely be sending some
Speaker 2:We're gonna send watching this. Podcasting equipment and the tech Felipe to the moon Yep. So that we're it's ready for us when we When we get there.
Speaker 1:Just arrive. Put on
Speaker 2:the watch. Repeater and
Speaker 1:And then the repeater, it'll just be chiming. Yeah. We need it with a watch winder. Sound. With a watch winder.
Speaker 1:So it's so it's wound the entire time.
Speaker 2:No sound. So maybe maybe just like a chronograph.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Maybe. More basic. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Something good. Gotta keep the time. Speaking of keeping the time, what do we got there in that promoted post?
Speaker 2:We got, the last promoted post of the day, a gorgeous Patek Philippe reference 575270p with a pink dial available on windvintage.com. Eric Wind, is a fantastic collector and dealer, and you can go check out this watch. I mean, this thing makes me emotional. Like, I'm gonna tear up looking at it, and it's just a very good looking watch.
Speaker 1:Chronograph too. Fantastic. You were just mentioning it.
Speaker 2:Could be
Speaker 1:It's the daily driver.
Speaker 2:That could be your new daily.
Speaker 1:I wanna keep track of how long the show's been going.
Speaker 2:You have basically I
Speaker 1:need a chronograph. I can't run the show without it.
Speaker 2:Basically have 3 hours Yeah. To buy this watch before the brothers are gonna be notified about it. And so
Speaker 1:It's less now. We're getting this thing up in 30 minutes after we
Speaker 2:Call. Just call your wife.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sorry. Canceling the promoted post we bought at
Speaker 2:our house. The family event. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Later. Yeah. Well, Jody texted me last night. He was like, you should get on bezel and impulse buy Patek Philippe and tell your wife that,
Speaker 2:It was an emotional reaction.
Speaker 1:Emotional reaction. Like, you're just really stressed out about the fires and, like, you need an outlet. Yeah. And I encourage anyone who's, suffering with a natural disaster to, you know, treat yourself. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Treat yourself.
Speaker 2:Little treat.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, you should be able to put a lot of your net worth, as a percentage On your wrist. Wrist and get out of Dodge.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, you should also have a car that goes 200 miles
Speaker 2:an hour. Theory so that you
Speaker 1:know fires travel.
Speaker 2:Saw people posting, oh, think about how much Bitcoin just got taken off the map because everybody in the Palisades had their ledgers. I don't One, I don't buy it at all. I think that people that live in the Palisades that are not, like, their crypto, like, normies Yeah. They're keeping their Bitcoin in e t like, ETFs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. ETF for sure. Maybe Coinbase.
Speaker 2:Maybe Coinbase.
Speaker 1:Maybe self custody wallet for 1% of them.
Speaker 2:But but even those ledgers. Yeah. It's you you're somebody was saying, oh, yeah. They have their their, Ledgers in the walls. They they they used wallpaper, and they
Speaker 1:have their
Speaker 2:their Private TV. Not. Like, if anything, if if, you know, I I was packing up in a relative hurry, and the handful of things that were small, like, a brand just brought them. And, like, watches are not going up in flames. There were, for sure, supercars that went up in flames.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You know, probably if it's a Palisades, it's one of 1 Porsches and stuff like that. And so those have been erased from the market.
Speaker 1:Some Kith m 4 comps.
Speaker 2:Yeah. A lot of Kith m 4 comps. But, I don't know about Ledger wallets. I don't think it was a,
Speaker 1:a g wagon. Sailor. We lost a lot of good g wagons out there. Yeah. It's rough.
Speaker 2:It's funny that the Palisades Village, every other car in the parking lot is a g wagon. So if you wanna stand out, don't get a G Wagon.
Speaker 1:Unless it's a convertible or a 6 by 6.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or a 4 foot brake. And it wouldn't fit in the parking garage. That's a big issue of LA. There's there's there's still are parking garages that don't fit g Wagon.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, you get the 6 by 6 and then you get it lowered.
Speaker 2:A lowered 6 by 6? Yeah. With a f 40.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Alright. But, yeah, just swap all your engines all throughout your cars. Take the take the v eight from that 40, put it in the 6 by 6.
Speaker 2:By 6 cars. Swap all the equipments and all the transmissions.
Speaker 1:Put exhaust on all of them.
Speaker 2:Why do that? Wheels.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Stanced under lighting for sure.
Speaker 2:S f 90 wheels Yeah.
Speaker 1:On your You already lost 300 k on the s f 90. You might as well you might as well stance it and and get some under lighting. So, like, we were laughing about
Speaker 2:that at LED.
Speaker 1:I was at f one in Miami, and we were laughing about, like so, like, all the different brands, like, Mercedes team before the race, they do, like, a parade. And, like, it'll be, like, Lewis Hamilton in, like, some beautiful, like, gullwing, you know, SLRs. I forget what the car is called. But, like, you know, some sixties car. And then the Ferrari's come out, and they're like, these these amazing like, what are the GTBs, the the the the the really expensive one?
Speaker 1:They're all riding these, like, really heritage things. We're like, well, what's Red Bull gonna do? Like, they don't they don't have, like, a heritage car. We're like, they should just show up in in, like, stance, JDM.
Speaker 2:Red Bull Honda. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Engine. Yeah. The s two thousand wrapped, like, a toy Tokyo Drift Mode wing. With the wing, it'd be fantastic.
Speaker 1:Underlining. Max Verstappen just like the s 2000. Just drifting.
Speaker 2:You should actually get one of those just
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:And then take it up in the canyons.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It'd be great. Fantastic. Well, let's close with this bucket pull, our last bucket pull. We're out of bucket pulls.
Speaker 1:We gotta print some more for tomorrow. Last bucket pulls from Grant, and Grant says, this is a Lotan banger. Already follows us. Thank you, Grant. 32 likes.
Speaker 1:Says, picture of Rick Rubin and says, the way that I speak to the AI has proven profitable to shareholders. And then Timothy Blumberg says, JFC, this is an underrated post. I respect it. Went out on Christmas or 2 days before. Great post.
Speaker 1:Love Rick Rubin. I advertise podcast.
Speaker 2:I like that screenshot too. Yeah. We do. Lucy advertises on On So Rick Rubin is a nicotine salesman.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, he he reached out to us. He, like, likes the brand.
Speaker 2:Amazing. It's amazing. Yeah. That's a that's a cooler cosign to me than Rogan. I love Rogan.
Speaker 2:Yeah. But
Speaker 1:Yeah. It it was a very cool moment for the company for sure. It was awesome.
Speaker 2:He's like, I have no technical abilities. I just consume high volumes of yerba mate and nicotine.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he just, like, he just kinda fucks with us. He just talked
Speaker 2:to the AI.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And so he so so we were like, yeah. We're happy to sport and and run ads and stuff. And, Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's always great when he has I mean, he's he's become a great podcaster. Has great great guests, always great conversations. The if you're looking for an episode to listen to, the of the Rick Rubin podcast, I recommend it's called Tetragrammaton. You can find it on all your podcast players. I recommend the Travis Barker episode.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Crazy. Talks about the dude got in plane crashes, like, all the Blink 182 stuff, the breakup of the band and stuff
Speaker 2:and where
Speaker 1:everyone went. It's a it's a fantastic episode. And obviously, they they they, like, really, really mind meld because they're both in music and creatives and stuff. And, you know, I my experience with Blink 22 has not been listening to a lot of, like, high brow interviews with them. It's like listening to the songs, and the songs are kinda just like, you know, high school party mosh pit songs to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But there's this whole other side of this, like, brilliant drummer who's done so many different things and had this wonderful career. And, it's always fun when you go and, see the other side. One of the other great music interviews that I listened to was, the lead singer of Slipknot. I think his name is Cody something was on Larry King. And it's this fascinating dive into he's, like, completely he's insane when he's on stage.
Speaker 1:Right? Slipknot's like the most hardcore metal band with, like, the faces and the masks and stuff. Corey Taylor. Corey Taylor. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And and then Larry King is, like, buttoned up in the suit. This, like, this, like, one on one interview. And Corey just has this, like, very thoughtful analysis of, like, the politics of his music and the fans, and are the fans crazy or deranged? Like, why do they even need this outlet? He's from Iowa.
Speaker 1:There's been a lot of displacement of jobs and Yeah. A lot of, a lot of hollowed out communities. And, like, why this insane music from Slipknot resonates with them. And it's it's just a fascinating watch. So recommend that one too.
Speaker 1:Anyway, we gotta go. We gotta check on the houses. They're probably all burned down by now, but we will be podcasting tomorrow regardless.
Speaker 2:Whatever you're doing, go sign up for Ramp, unless you're already signed up for Ramp, which most of our listeners are If you're already signed up smart.
Speaker 1:Pitch ramp to another company. Yeah. Friends company.
Speaker 2:Text your group chat. Say, hey. You guys are stupid if you're not on ramp.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Next time you go to a dinner Text
Speaker 2:your group chats and say, listen to Technology Brothers. Yeah. You rate them 5 stars. You can always revise the rating after you listen if if you disagree with your initial, you know, judgment. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But start with 5 Yeah. And then pair it back.
Speaker 1:Yeah. If you go to a business dinner, your when you pay, when you split the check, it should look like the American Psycho scene, but only ramp cards. And if someone doesn't have 1, you gotta call them out.
Speaker 2:Call them out. Call them out. Hold them down. Embarrassing.
Speaker 1:It's called accountability, folks. It's called accountability.
Speaker 2:That's the show. We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching.
Speaker 1:Goodbye.