Insurance Companies Deep Dive, Wanted Fugitives, Run On Mahogany, Yearling Lot 1007
Welcome to Technology Brothers, the most profitable podcast in the world. Geordie, why are you wearing a mask?
Speaker 2:You know, Taylor Lorenz might say, my culture is not a costume. But to that, I would say, I'm wearing this mask to draw attention to, the very real fact that the air in LA, even though the AQI is at a decent spot, is still deeply toxic. A lot of the buildings have burned. This last week were created at a time when we had very different building codes. Yep.
Speaker 2:So a lot of the materials that were used. And, in some group chats locally that I was in, people were I'm actually Died. No. So people were basically saying that that a lot of this stuff is, you know, if you're breathing in these toxins, health issues can oftentimes show up, like, years years, decades Yeah. Down the line.
Speaker 2:So,
Speaker 1:did you know what pretty in my mind?
Speaker 2:Got these masks for us to to record? I think I'll take it off. Yeah. If you do have
Speaker 1:We are inside.
Speaker 2:Ventilation here, but everybody should be wearing masks. It's annoying. It was cringe. And when the experts told us to wear a mask last time, maybe it wasn't based purely on, I probably shouldn't if we say experts, YouTube algorithm will probably flag us.
Speaker 1:Who knows?
Speaker 2:But, I
Speaker 1:think we're already flying.
Speaker 2:Anyways, wear wear a mask if you're around.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You know what really what really makes me, like, kind of, like, terrified is you see these tours of the burned down houses, and you'll see, like, the chimney is still there in most of these houses because the chimney is made out of bricks. But there's nothing else standing, and I'm like, where did the refrigerators go? Like, the refrigerators are made of metal and plastic, and they literally just melted, and that went up in the air. So you're just breathing a refrigerator if you're breathing the air.
Speaker 1:It's crazy.
Speaker 2:Did you see the there were cars that had, I think, aluminum,
Speaker 1:wheels Yep.
Speaker 2:Just melted. Melted. Yeah. Crazy patterns. But, anyways Wild.
Speaker 2:So, I mean, if
Speaker 1:you wanna hear some crazy stuff, we should start with this first. We're gonna do a couple deep dives, give you a little bit of history on the insurance industry. We're gonna, you know, move on. We're gonna still be talking about tech this week, but, we thought this was an interesting opportunity to kinda break down some, you know, founders, investors, entrepreneurs who have had a major impact in insurance, construction, home development, real estate. So we're gonna be taking you on a little bit tour of, you know, we always like to ask the question even in a disaster, like, who's making money?
Speaker 1:Who's losing money? And you heard it on a previous episode, we did a whole deep dive on Rick Caruso, learned about his career, but there are a lot of other people that, you know, their innovations will be important to getting LA back to, where it was before the the disaster. And there'll be a lot of people that come in with new businesses. And so we wanna we wanna deep dive all that and use that as kinda, like, the theme for the week more or less.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And for, I guess, for some context, because, you know, we're here in LA, so we've been sort of pretty fixated on everything going on. But, as of right now, they're projecting that these fires will have cost somewhere in the range of a $150,000,000,000 is the official number as of now. Everybody expects that to tick up over 200 at some point. I believe that hurricane was somewhere around 200.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So this will be more damaging than hurricane Katrina. And then even to put it further into context, the the previous most costly wildfire in US history was a Camp Fire, which happened near Chico up in Northern California. And prior to that, and and another more recent event was the Lahaina fire, which was $6,000,000,000. And then, under that is the Woolsey fire, which actually burned down the house that I bought last year, had to be completely rebuilt from the ground up. So just to put this into perspective, Lahaina fire was devastating, but it it will be a tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny fraction in comparison to the damage caused by, the LA fires or the Newsom fires as, I think we're calling them or the Bass fires.
Speaker 2:Simon was putting the word out to ask, you know, what we should call them. But, without further ado, why don't we, we wanna kinda
Speaker 1:get it. I I gotta read about a historical fire first, because it's I mean, this like, the the the real definitive story of the Palisades fire has not been told yet, but, 2 years ago, there was a massive fire wildfire in Australia, and the economist wrote a really, really eloquent and interesting deep dive on what happened and how they're changing things going forward. And I think there's a lot that you can learn about it. So Australia is the most is the world's most fire prone continent. When temp when temperatures rise and the hot winds blow, a lightning strike or cigarette butt tossed thoughtlessly out of a car window can spark a flame that rapidly burgeons into a panorama of hell.
Speaker 1:I love this writer. He's he's so good. Temperatures at the heart of the blaze rise to 1,600 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt steel. These hurl dry lightning bur and bursts of hot air earthwards stoking the conflagration further. 100 of these fires burned across Australia in the Antipodean summer of late 2019 and early 2020.
Speaker 1:There were a bunch of volunteer firefighters described being caught inside fire tornadoes, their engines overturned by vortexes of scalding wind. As residents Engine overturned
Speaker 2:is is insane.
Speaker 1:Yeah. As as residents made their escape, they saw the aluminum wheels of parked cars melt and run down the gutter like water. By the end of summer, Australia lost 34 people and approximately 1,000,000,000 animals. Isn't that an insane stat? It's crazy.
Speaker 1:And then, they go on to talk about how the smoke was so large it reached the North Pole, possibly for the first time. And and and the question is, how do we survive this age of fire, the pyrocene? And they go into talking about some of the, the original people who settled Australia have a whole bunch of, firefighting techniques. Yeah. And it all starts with just being able to under look at a mountain and understand, is it ready for a controlled burn?
Speaker 1:Is the ground wet enough? So you're supposed to burn when the ground is wet. So just the top burns, and it doesn't get as hot.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And he has a bunch of this dude they interview is, like, such a badass. A tall, broad shouldered, 48 year old Australian, Victor Yeah. Stephenson believes the solution to Australia yeah. Victory. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Believes the solution to Australia's blazes lies in his people's ancient understandings of their lands. Australia's native flora evolved to thrive in fire. Banksias, a type of evergreen bush, holds their seeds in woody capsules, and these open like cooked mussels when they're scorched by flames and the seeds are released onto the cleared ash
Speaker 2:So that's a big issue that was a big issue this last week is eucalyptus trees, which we imported. Yep. Apparently, when they burn, they have this sort of toxic oil that gets released that's super flammable.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so it's been very clear that the landscaping that you use, the vegetation, it's a good argument to say we should just just eliminate all eucalyptus trees.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, here are a lot in here. Eucalyptus species require burning to make new shoots sprout. Like, you're supposed to burn them regularly. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so they're not if they're in an area where there's enough fire prevention to not have regular fires, they're just gonna build up, and then it's just a tinderbox.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Really, really bad. So yeah.
Speaker 2:It's so it's so wild too because all this stuff was super top of mind because I just went through the process of getting home insurance, and I almost had to use the California Fair Plan. And I ended up finding another, provider, But the California Fair Plan, which we'll get into at the end of this episode, is probably
Speaker 1:Bankrupt.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's bet definitely, it's kind of this weird public private group, but it's probably, d o DOA.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, anyways
Speaker 1:This guy is such a chad. He says, if you can't burn barefoot, you're probably doing it wrong. Just like, yeah, I'll go out and do a controlled burn barefoot because I'm so confident in the way that I can burn that the ground's not gonna heat up, and I'm gonna be able to get out. No problem. Just, like, really in tune.
Speaker 2:He's almost like it's like he's farming. Yep. You know?
Speaker 1:Yep. Reading the country. This involves, he says, there's a central principle of fire management, read the country. This involves examining the distribution of trees, bushes, and natural firebreaks, the thickness of undergrowth, and the amount of moisture in the ground to ascertain whether a fire will remain cool and under control. Every landscape is different.
Speaker 1:Each burn requires a fresh analysis. And so this dude just goes out there and, and and burns and burns stuff. It's pretty pretty wild. But we should move on to the insurance industry, which is, as you mentioned, likely bankrupt in in in the sense of the state backed one. And there's a bunch of interesting, versus that.
Speaker 1:I think we should do the history of, State Farm and some some of the some of the insurance agencies, as well as talk about Yeah.
Speaker 2:We'll start with some of the history and depth in. Yeah. Let's start with the history, and then we'll go into kind of what's happening on the ground now.
Speaker 1:So I found this, short transcript from Warren Buffett at the, Camry driver? Yeah. Camry driver, at a shareholders meeting, and he says, the history of insurance is quite interesting. It's not studied at business schools, but it should be because the great insurance companies of the early 1900, Aetna, Hartford, Travelers, they had agency forces nationwide and primarily wrote businesses back then wrote wrote property business back then, so property insurance. They wrote a lot of fire insurance.
Speaker 1:Of course, the automobile emerged in the early 1900, so their focus was on property insurance. They had huge agency forces throughout the United States. Property insurance agents represented these big companies across the country, and they had plenty of capital. If you look at the business in 1997, well, over 20%, probably close to 25% of personal auto and homeowners insurance was written by State Farm. It began, I believe, in the 19 twenties with a fellow in Bloomington, Illinois who we'll discuss, George, McCurll.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Bloomington, Illinois. It had no agency force initially and started as a mutual company with no stock options or capital that could make someone a billionaire if they built the business. So this company began without the usual capitalist incentives that we're taught that we are taught are essential for growth. And in a huge industry, it became a dominant player.
Speaker 1:So it's questions like, how did this happen?
Speaker 2:We'll talk about this later, but there's an emerging emerging company in the home insurance space called Kin that has this structure set up where the the the premiums are paid into this sort of nonprofit group and, like, structure to to put it sort of plainly. And then that nonprofit pays a licensing fee to the technology company, but, like, really, they're so it's trying to align incentives. So Yeah. History of insurance is, like, finding the it's it's a finance. It's finance.
Speaker 2:So it's finding these, like, weird creative structures in order to deliver the end thing, which is protection against Yeah. You know, catastrophic risk.
Speaker 1:I mean, he he'll go into more of this, but it's a great question. It's like, how did this company get so big and dominant without the usual capitalist incentives? But what's funny is, like, you already know this is just gonna, like, tie socialists in knots Yeah. Because they like, there's already so much misinformation about, like, oh, like, Fidelity owns every company. It's the most powerful company in the world.
Speaker 1:And it's,
Speaker 2:like BlackRock.
Speaker 1:BlackRock, same thing.
Speaker 2:They have Burning Man.
Speaker 1:And and and this is one of those things where it's like, well, you know, or like like state farm is owned by the policy holders. Yeah. Like, it's a mutual company. So, like, it's gonna be much it should be much harder to make the, like, evil capitalist argument, but they're definitely not gonna, like, look that deep into this, but we will. We'll put it we'll keep in the truth zone as much as we can.
Speaker 1:So State Farm has more than twice the market share of Allstate, the 2nd player. It became the dominant company against deeply entrenched competitors with strong distribution sim systems and ample capital. Incidentally, on the Fortune 500 list, State Farm has the 3rd largest net worth of any company in the United States. This was a couple years ago. All from Bloomington, Illinois started by someone who had no money in it.
Speaker 1:How does that happen? That's a subject worth studying in business schools. Darwin once said, he wrote down any evidence that conflict that conflicted with his convictions within 30 minutes because the mind quickly rejects contrary evidence to cherished beliefs. Isn't that cool? I think that's a great I think that's a great, like, just thing to do.
Speaker 1:Like, when you find evidence that violates your your your strongly held beliefs, you just have to write it down because otherwise, you're you'll just be, I I can't even deal with that data point because it it violates my my current worldview. I love that one. And so he says, war war this is Warren Buffett going on. There are some long held beliefs in business schools that could be challenged by studying how a company becomes the 3rd largest in net worth with no apparent advantage at the start. Another company in Texas, USAA, the United Services Automobile Association, has
Speaker 2:a By the way, with net by net worth, do they mean He means market cap. Market cap.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He means market cap. Yeah. Yeah. He's just using net worth, which is also kinda badass.
Speaker 1:Like, they're they're the same. I like, corporations are people.
Speaker 2:Corporations are people. Great people.
Speaker 1:So USSA USAA has been enormously successful with 1,000,000,000 in net worth again and highly satisfied policyholders. It has the highest renewal ratio in the country. Nobody studies that to my knowledge. GEICO's founders, Leo Goodwin and his wife left USAA in 1936 and started GEICO with almost no capital. Now we have about 2.7% of the auto market, and we'll probably write 3.5 1,000,000,000 involuntary auto insurance this year.
Speaker 1:Catching State Farm will be very difficult, so I won't predict that. However, I do predict we'll gain substantial market share over the next 10 years, including this year. We have a good mousetrap. And then this is the best part of this. He basically goes into an ad read for his company, GEICO.
Speaker 1:Listen to this. He says, I mentioned
Speaker 2:was this again?
Speaker 1:This was at the Berkshire Sherpa. Meeting. Yeah. The main meeting. So he's talking about
Speaker 2:people all the people that are a 100 so this is this is an exam this is a a founders. You can never over promote Yep. And and investors. Yep. You can never over promote your bags.
Speaker 1:Never. Right?
Speaker 2:So, like, he's literally at the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting.
Speaker 1:You have to be a shareholder to be in that room.
Speaker 2:Go there, and he's still Yeah. I wanna take a quick second to talk about GEICO.
Speaker 1:Basically, he says, I mentioned in the report that 40% of you would save money by insuring with us. Literally, that's what he says. Not 100% or 80% because there are certain areas or professions where someone else can offer a lower price. But across the country and for all classes of drivers, we'll often have the lowest price. We can do that because we have low costs, and those costs are getting even lower.
Speaker 1:We have a virtuous cycle feeding on itself, so GEICO will grow significantly. Still, State Farm is very tough. I'm not gonna predict catching State Farm or Allstate, but we'll catch somebody. Charlie, you wanna add anything? Isn't that hilarious?
Speaker 1:It's just like 40% of you guys could save money by state
Speaker 2:when when we did a ramp ad during our talk at Heretic Con. Yeah. Exactly. Great ad.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, honestly, advertising to the to the targeted audience is
Speaker 2:Anytime you have a captive audience, it's your duty to promote.
Speaker 1:You gotta you gotta run an ad. And so Charlie says, I love your example of State Farm. The idea of picking an extreme case and asking, what in the world is going on here is the path to wisdom. It's too bad many mutual companies are trying to demutualize, spurred on by consultants instead of looking at State Farm. Of course, not everyone can be State Farm, but that place embedded fundamental values into its operations, the way it selected its personnel, the way it selected and discarded agents.
Speaker 1:It requires enormous discipline. Wouldn't you agree? Warren says, yeah. Somebody obviously did something very right. Charlie goes back to say, exactly.
Speaker 1:I but I don't see anyone explaining what that something was. Maybe they don't want to because it didn't fit the conventional pattern. When a company like, State Farm emerges, you should try to understand it. When a company like GEICO emerges, you should do the same. Back in 1948, I believe 2 thirds of GEICO was for sale because the original backers who came from USAA had died.
Speaker 1:So they they put the money in, because the GEICO founders came from USAA. They put in so much money that they own 2 thirds of the company. Crazy. And they were like, let's sell it. This, so they were selling that stock, but nobody wanted it.
Speaker 1:And, and apparently, State Farm had the opportunity to buy 2 thirds of GEICO for, like, $1,000,000.
Speaker 2:Crazy.
Speaker 1:They didn't buy it, and so Ben Graham bought it. Ben Graham, of course, Warren Buffett's mentor or Yep. Yeah. Wrote, the father of, investing. Value investing.
Speaker 1:He spent 6 months trying to
Speaker 2:sell it. Senra is to podcasting. Exactly. Ben Graham is okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Got it. We're kind of like the Charlie and Warren of of podcasting. He's the Ben Graham. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Let's canonize that immediately. So, he spent 6 months trying to sell it to the major insurance companies. They all passed even though they could see GEICO offering a much cheaper product on a small scale and making money with it. So they had this, like, GEICO had this early traction, this product market fit, basically.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Like, they were doing something that was cheaper and better, and they scale up.
Speaker 2:I I I still use GEICO for auto. Yeah. And, every time I go to agents to get alternative quotes, I'm like, do you have, like, did you add a comma here? Like, it's, like, oftentimes, like, 4, like, 5 times more expensive. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Is this a joke?
Speaker 1:So They could've bought the entire company for 1,200,000. Instead, they stuck to their old distribution systems and got beaten up by the over the years, by these new ideas. You have to look hard at what's really happening. This is a great ending, he says. As Yogi Berra said, you can observe a lot just by looking.
Speaker 1:I love that. So the question is, who started State Farm, and how did he build such a great business and such a massive business without this economic incentive? And I have a theory, which I will tell you. So, this is a this is a great one. Maybe we'll start we'll go through the Wikipedia, and we'll go through some of the, some of the, the the details on, George.
Speaker 1:I I gotta pronounce this. McCurll? McCurll. George McCurll.
Speaker 2:I'm not sure. McCurll.
Speaker 1:McCurll. I think it's McCurll. We'll we'll work on that, but we'll just call him George.
Speaker 2:We need it.
Speaker 1:He's a friend.
Speaker 2:If somebody wants to build a a rapper that just
Speaker 1:Helps us helps us pronounce
Speaker 2:exotic names, we would use it all day long.
Speaker 1:Okay. So I'm gonna call him George, founder of State Farm. George was a second generation farmer in Central Illinois whose family migrated to the United States from Germany. As an early owner of automobiles, he became concerned with high cost of auto insurance charged by all stock insurance companies at the time. And so, this is from an amazing website.
Speaker 1:It is the insurance hall of fame.
Speaker 2:Which everyone listening to this should aspire to If
Speaker 1:you're in the insurance business, you gotta go
Speaker 2:for it. Even if you're not, I mean I mean, you have a better chance of getting into this hall of fame than than most. Yeah. I would imagine.
Speaker 1:And there's a there's a great thing about, like, why he started this. So he was upset he was upset with the high cost of auto insurance, and what he realized was he was he was a rural guy. He was out in Central Illinois. And what he realized was that the the, insurance rates were being set by companies that were based in urban settings. So it's like a Manhattan company.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. And they were like, well, in Manhattan, you get in car accidents all the time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So this is the rate we need to charge. And he was like, you're screwing my boys out in the farmland.
Speaker 2:We're subsidizing your
Speaker 1:Exactly. Exactly. And so, and I also I found something else. I don't know where it is, but it was like he, he was obsessed with, Yeah. Okay.
Speaker 1:So after returning to Illinois, he sold tractors and discovered that he has skill for selling to farmers, believing that city insurance companies were looking farmers by, with high premiums based upon city driving accident rates. He became obsessed with the idea of starting his own insurance company. An honest insurance company was the phrase he used. Great line. And and they talk about it was something I read where he was talking about his time as a, a farmer, and he was just, like, obsessed over, like, the yield of, like, his beans and stuff.
Speaker 1:And everything about this Here's the weeds. Wait. Giga autist. That's my theory.
Speaker 2:One of our listeners, all the brothers are obsessed with maximizing the yield on their beans. Exactly. The beans are just different
Speaker 1:at different times. Right? He was just he was clearly autistic. Clearly. Clearly.
Speaker 1:Just grinder. Grinder. And and it's amazing. So he starts so he starts this company in the spring of, 1921. Tazewell County Farm Bureau organized a township mutual insurance company, which was the idea, George used.
Speaker 1:He'd been considering a mutual insurance company, which is owned by those who are insured through a membership. Yep. The Tazewell company was set up to insure property, including automobiles. He attended a meeting of the Federation of Mutual Fire Insurance Companies in the summer of 20, 1921 in Saint Louis. He spoke with the president, and those discussions helped crystallize his idea of starting an honest insurance company.
Speaker 1:Eventually, his idea started to take shape, and he opened his first office in late 1921 in Bloomington. In 22, he developed a prospectus and presented it to the Illinois State Association of Mutual Insurance Companies, and his plan called for his company to sell automobile insurance. The association enthusiastically endorsed the plan. He proceeded to get the state license he needed to operate. On his 45th birthday, State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company was in business in 1922 2020, 1922.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, deeper into his career, still made a major play, made it work. Common.
Speaker 2:Massive place. Story.
Speaker 1:He attempted to adopt programs that gave financial strength to his growing company while providing unique benefits to policyholders beyond what was offered at the time. For example, he adopted a strict no drinking and driving provision to reduce accidents because it was legal back then. Holy. Isn't that amazing? He's like, this is innovation.
Speaker 1:If we can just get our members to stop boozing at the wheel.
Speaker 2:No. He's scary. He sends a PR newswire. Unfortunately, I have to announce that we will not no longer be allowing road sodas and not for our policyholders.
Speaker 1:It's so funny because, like, now, you you know, there's, like, those, like, chips that you can put in the car. It goes in the ODB 2 port, and, like, it tracks your driving. And if you're, like, breaking really heavily, it, like, razor blades or, like, or, like, oh, you know, all sorts of thing. Oh, it's a red sports car. You're more likely a turbocharged.
Speaker 2:That stuff.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. All sorts of stuff. And, like, check your phone. There's metro mile where if you drive less, you pay less insurance.
Speaker 1:There's, like, all these different schemes that, like, are trying to squeeze, like, the last 5% of productivity out of the auto insurance industry. And he's just like Metro mile didn't drink and drive?
Speaker 2:Metro mile
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Is, free Dave Friedberg Shamass
Speaker 1:and Shamass took it. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:They're they're they're one. He said it was their GEICO.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's what
Speaker 2:he described as. Yeah. That's cool. Wait. Friedberg was it?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Friedberg found it. He cofounded the company. Yeah. That's And Shamath spacked it.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And cool idea. I don't I I think the stock's way down, but I don't know. It might have popped. All these SPACs are coming back, baby.
Speaker 2:SPACs are back.
Speaker 1:A lot of them a lot of them have gone up, like, 5 x
Speaker 2:since the 4. I I bet you if Friedberg Friedberg is the founder, there's probably a not like, some fundamental, like, good quality I
Speaker 1:remember talking to
Speaker 2:him about it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So that's cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So he
Speaker 2:also It's actually interesting. I bet you there will be a bunch not a bunch, but at least a handful of Chamath's packs where if you buy them now, they'll be, like, a 50 bagger.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And then Chamath in in however long will be, like, see, like, another, like Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, also, a lot of these, like, they became such memes. Like, the whole meme of, like, oh, everything Chamath's back is bad. It's like they a lot of these got just oversold because I mean, I had a buddy who's back this company. I think it was 4,000,000,000 as the default stack. It went down to under a $100,000,000.
Speaker 1:They had $200,000,000 in cash on the balance sheet. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, okay. At that point, like, the book value should be higher
Speaker 2:than that. So so the the, close friends, business partners, Brian and and Druva Yeah.
Speaker 1:Had, at insurance.
Speaker 2:They had Latch, which Smough's backed. And then, at one point, it was trading for less than their balance sheet. Yeah. So
Speaker 1:But there was, like, no interest. Everyone was everyone was doomer on it. He also instituted the 1st installment payment program for premiums. This allowed farmers, to pay their premiums when they received payments for crops. So he's, like, financializing things, figuring out.
Speaker 1:It's like buy now, pay later.
Speaker 2:This guy is the epitome of of of excellent capitalism
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Built at a super massive impactful company, but clearly at every point was trying to find these win win wins for
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:The company, the team, the the policyholders, customers
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And ultimately, people out on the roads, right, with that auto policy.
Speaker 1:There's a there's a good quote in here. So, eventually, his company became the largest property and casualty insurer in the United States and one of the 20 largest corporations in the Fortune 500. What a badass. Let me pull this up, George. So he had this great quote.
Speaker 1:They asked him, like, you know, what is your, what is your secret to success? And he says, you know, hard work is important, but he put it this way. He says, a man has to live and sleep with his business if he wants to make a go of it. You have to take it home with you at night so you can lie there in the darkness and figure out what you can do to improve it.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 1:Isn't that so true?
Speaker 2:So real.
Speaker 1:It's so real. It's so real.
Speaker 2:Imagine imagine having to build companies pre cell phone. Yeah. Just think about, like, after 6 PM every night, how many messages we send back and forth Yeah. On a given night is probably each, like, a 100.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So from year to year, we are learning that service carries with it its own reward. And to the extent and manner in which our service is dispensed, compensation in every form will flow. And so I'm sure he wound up, you know, fabulously wealthy just through a little bit of a different, different path than usual. Also interesting is, he, there's, like, this trend that, Charlie Munger mentioned, which was, like, demutualization.
Speaker 1:Like, a lot of these mutual companies are are demutualized demutualarizing or demutular demutualizing, like, breaking and just becoming, like, default for profits. And, it's interesting because, everyone's looking at the OpenAI, for profit transition is like Yeah. Never been done. It's so crazy. It's like, I don't know.
Speaker 1:Like, there's a lot of companies that have been through this. It's not that it's not that unprecedented. You start a company one way, and they're
Speaker 2:just show guy with the biggest megaphone in the world. He
Speaker 1:doesn't want
Speaker 2:you to he doesn't want you to do it. It's a
Speaker 1:little rough when you're getting the, the the crying emoji under every time you pose. It's gotta be a little a little rough. Mocked. Mocked. But yeah.
Speaker 1:And there's a bunch of other stuff about about, about, State Farm in here. You know, now they employ 70,000 employees. They have 19,000 agents, offices all
Speaker 2:I'll get into it later why the agent model ends up being makes makes insurance pretty hard.
Speaker 1:But so 80,000,000,000 in revenue, 6,000,000,000 in net income, total assets, 300,000,000,000 and, total equity, a 100,000,000,000. But that that total assets is is is important because when something like the Palisades fire happens,
Speaker 2:State Farm absorb that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, there was a lot of news about State Farm, like, stopping to like like, canceling policies basically in the lead up to this. But, you know, I I think, what what did Warren Buffett say? They have, like, 40% of the market or something like that at State Farm, maybe maybe a little bit less. And so
Speaker 2:State Farm was especially I mean, the the challenge was that they had 1600 policyholders in the palaces.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's a lot of concentration there.
Speaker 2:So huge concentration there. I mean, I doubt it was even concentrated for them. It's more so that that 1600 homes is 1,000,000,000 of dollars of value.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And so I, I I I wonder, like, you know, how that
Speaker 2:Even I I wonder who I really so the the succession the house in succession that Kendall Roy has posted up in when he's going through his Yeah. Summer arc at one point. And
Speaker 1:I haven't seen that season. I just watched the first season, I think.
Speaker 2:Weird, but, okay.
Speaker 1:I will.
Speaker 2:But, anyways, a 100
Speaker 1:familiar with the house because there's a 25,000,000 about it.
Speaker 2:$125,000,000 home. Wow. Obviously, takes a special insurance relationship to insure something like that, but burned to the ground. Wow. From a guy who teal fellow who specced
Speaker 1:his company. Luminar. Austin Russell. Anyway, is there more stuff that we should move on to there? Should we talk about how insurance underwriting works and how these natural disasters are categorized?
Speaker 2:Start there. Yep. And then I'll I'll get into some of the more
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I, I've been doing more of a deep dive on this. I I listened to an Odd Lots episode where they talk to the, someone who works who maintains a database of catastrophes and hazards, for the government. So this is Melanie Gull. She's, codirector of the Center For Emergency Management and Homeland Security at Arizona State University.
Speaker 1:And I don't think about, like, wildfires as homeland security, but it makes so much sense. And she manages a, a database called ShellDIST, the special the the spatial hazard events and losses database. So she's a, she's not economist or a policymaker. She's a geographer, and she wants to just collect as much field data with GPS after a massive flood event, put it all into these databases, and then that is used, for underwriting and and actually calculating, like, what what is the right level of investment. And so, Tracy Alloway on Odd Lots says, I read that the National Climactic Data Center estimates hurricane Katrina losses at around a 125,000,000,000 while Scheldis says around 80,000,000,000.
Speaker 1:How do we end up with such big discrepancies? And I'm sure we're gonna see this with the Palisades fire. We already are. Yeah. People with somebody who say 50.
Speaker 2:Numbers out there for Katrina that are around 200. Yeah. So who knows?
Speaker 1:And so, Melanie says it can matter when a community needs to justify a mitigation investment and must do a cost benefit analysis. Different entities measure losses differently, whether it's direct versus indirect or insured versus uninsured. Noah's $1,000,000,000 events estimates often exceed ours because they rely heavily on insured losses.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right. So
Speaker 1:direct losses.
Speaker 2:In the Palisades, I think there's 20,000,000,000 of insured losses Yep. And then there's a bunch of other losses that just weren't covered
Speaker 1:Yep. For one reason or another. Particular database shell shell this, is a more conservative approach. If we see competing estimates, we use the lower one to avoid overestimation, which can further understate the real burden, and that's just kind of, like, by design of this particular database. Obviously, all the sure insurers know about the different databases and can adjust accordingly.
Speaker 1:And so Joe Weisenthal asks, like, the big question is, are natural disaster costs going up? Is it really getting worse, or is there just more media attention? Yeah. And Melanie says, yes. It is getting worse.
Speaker 1:The risk is going up. We see more frequent and more severe events, but it's complicated. Our loss is higher because there are more events or because more people and property are concentrated in risky areas. Maybe society doesn't invest enough in mitigation or our infrastructure isn't resilient enough. It could also be that we have more socially vulnerable populations who struggle to recover.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, if you go and build, like, the most insane $1,000,000,000 mansion out of, you know, Birchwood in the most fire prone area, like, that's kind of a choice on us, and it's not necessarily, like, climate change that's causing that higher loss. It's the choice that we made to build into the wildfire area. Yeah.
Speaker 2:This is
Speaker 1:a lot of what we're hap what what's happening as Los Angeles expands is that people move deeper and deeper into the woods and into the mountains. Yep. And all of that is much more
Speaker 2:Well, to be clear, some of the nicest areas of LA are in these canyons
Speaker 1:and on hills.
Speaker 2:And it's, the places that are some of the most desirable places are, you know, DHHs like Malibu, Lookout.
Speaker 1:Right? Yeah. Yeah. So, Tracy asks, if a hurricane hits Florida, how does a typical homeowner expect to be reimbursed? My understanding is that there are mayor many layers, private insurers, federal support, and reinsurers behind them.
Speaker 1:And Melanie says it's complex and varies by state. In Florida, you'd usually have homeowners insurance, flood insurance from the state from the federal government, though purchased through local agents. So you actually go to your local agent, and they act like a normal insurance agent, but they're just selling you a federally backed policy. And sometimes, you might have separate wind insurance in Florida. Different policies might kick in depending on whether, damage is classified as wind or flood.
Speaker 1:After Katrina after Katrina, some neighbors saw their wind policies pay out, while others were told it was flood damage, which wasn't covered. It's not straightforward. And so the big question is why are insurance rates skyrocketing now? Homeowners Florida homeowners insurance premiums rose 42%. Why are companies leaving instead of just charging more?
Speaker 1:So insurance companies explain that they face higher risk, wildfires in California, hurricanes in Florida, plus higher building costs and higher premiums for their reinsurance. Yeah. So there's basically 2 big reinsurance companies, Swiss Re and, I forget the other one, but they they wind up insuring
Speaker 2:And to and to and to to to define it, reinsurance is insurance that insurance companies have to get. Yeah. So you got insurance, what's that, exhibit, you know, meme that that's, like, a 20 year old meme at this point. It's, like, I got insurance for my insurance Yeah. For my insurance.
Speaker 1:Basically.
Speaker 2:And so what's what's interesting about California is that, legally, the insurance companies were never allowed to pass on the reassurance reinsurance costs Yeah. To the end customer.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so they and and, again, like, you know, nobody really likes their insurance company. Every time they have to interact with an insurance company, the NPS score actually goes down because you always are gonna be, like, somewhat disappoint you just had this loss. Yep.
Speaker 1:And
Speaker 2:then you're dealing with this company that that's trying to there's sort of this misaligned incentive and that the insurance company basically wants to give you the lowest amount of money possible to not really piss you off as a customer. Right?
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:But the more money they give you as a payout Yep. The the less profits that they have. Right? So it's this delicate balance, and that means that pricing is is the number one thing in insurance. Yep.
Speaker 2:And if you misprice these things, it ends up, But the thing in California that is, fascinating is everybody's like, oh, all the insurance are pulling out of California because of the wildfire risk. The reason that they're they were actually pulling out is that there was structurally a number of laws in place. 1 couldn't pass on reinsurance costs. There was there was, measures to prevent, like, the rate at which you could increase the cost. And so if inflation over the last few years has been insane, so if you can't accelerate insurance to to keep up for that to keep up with that, like, you're gonna have a tough time.
Speaker 2:One thing that was interesting as of last year, I got this on Odd Lots as well. Policies in California were only $30 higher than the national average home insurance policies. In Florida, they're $2,000 higher.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So Florida Florida market's, like, really much more efficient and sort of caught up and said, this is a high risk area.
Speaker 1:We need
Speaker 2:to price this this higher. But, statistically, the the the insurance providers in California have and and analysts have said that insurance providers are are 6 they they basically need to catch up, like, they're 60% behind on pricing. Mhmm. So everyone knew that California home insurance rates, even though they're already expensive, were too cheap. And the regulators had introduced something called prop 23 a long, long time ago that that that, did not allow the insurance providers to use catastrophe modeling
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And climate science to set premiums.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's basically so our California lawmakers were saying, hey, we just don't want you to charge a lot for insurance. So what we're gonna do is say you can only set your insurance premiums based on how much you paid out over the last 20 years. Yeah. And that works when the future looks exactly like the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But in a scenario where maybe the government is under investing in wildfire mitigation, maybe we have we've had more wind the last, you know, 20 year, you know, 10 years than we've had for the past 50 years on average. Right?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And so these insurance companies pulled out because the government literally was not allowing them to raise rates to a level that they were comfortable with. Right? And going back to an earlier point, insurance is all about, you know, accurately pricing risk.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Right? And finding that middle ground so the insurance company can make money so that they deserve to exist.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And the consumer can, and the consumer can, you know, get get sort of, payouts as needed.
Speaker 1:Yeah. They've been kept getting squeezed on both sides because it's not just that the risk of the houses getting destroyed or burned down is going up, but also because of inflation in both raw materials and labor,
Speaker 2:the
Speaker 1:actual cost to rebuild is increasing. Yep. And so if you just see the price of wood double, you need a like, you it's more expensive. Your insurance should be more expensive.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so one of the other interesting things is there's this dynamic in the insurance market where, the the the there's a first mover disadvantage. So if you're the first, home insurance provider to increase your rates, well, I don't care who insures my home as long as I believe they'll be able to pay out in a in a disaster or some type of adverse situation. And so if I'm with Allstate and then State Farm, you know, if I'm if I'm with Allstate and and at whenever my term is coming up, I think they're annually typically, and they go, okay. We're raising, you know, 20%.
Speaker 2:And then State Farm is saying, well, like, we'll give you this rate. You'll just switch because it doesn't you don't really it's not like top it's not even like like picking furniture in your house. Furniture, you have to live with every single day. Insurance, you don't have to think about unless there's an issue. And be so because the the contracts are not, you know, very long, switching costs is low, and everybody works with agents.
Speaker 2:The agents will just be like, oh, you don't you're not happy with this new price. I'll give you this new price. And so there's this weird dynamic where nobody really wants to raise rates, but you have to. And so what that led to is saying, hey. If we raise rates the way that we need to, we're gonna lose we won legally.
Speaker 2:Can't if we could, we'd lose a lot of our customers, so we're just gonna pull out entirely. And for State Farm, it was obviously the right decision. And now we're we're in the situation. Part of the crisis is that there's just this, there's not a there's not enough people insuring homes in this area of Southern California. Right?
Speaker 2:When I ran this process last year, I was only able to get to the fair plan, which was a state provide state, California state program that's a insurer of last resort and some random other, you know, group that I ended up going with.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, and so I think it was 20% of the, the worst areas affected by the fires in the last week, 20% of those homes were on the fair plan. And so that now needs to be figured out, and it's, again, it's state sponsored and and Yeah. Theoretically state backstopped. Yeah. But then it's sort of provided by these private companies.
Speaker 2:But so we're gonna see how that plays out.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's an interesting, discussion in here about how can like, once the insurers actually pull out and say it's just not economical for us to participate in this market, how can states get insurers back? And there's this interesting example, because you don't think of, you know, California falling behind Louisiana, but Louisiana gets cited often for good policy choices. Here's the example. The state helps cover cover certain levels of risk, and they have a insurer of last resort resort of last resort called citizens.
Speaker 1:Unlike Florida, you Louisiana citizens must offer premium slightly higher than the than the private market. So it doesn't undercut private insurance.
Speaker 2:Because it's this weird dynamic where you're, like, wait, is the state competing with us? Exactly. Doesn't wanna compete because they don't wanna really be an insurance.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so here's the crazy thing. So, the California insurance commissioner is this guy, Ricardo Lara. And his task his primary task has been how do we win back home insurance, you know, how do we, providers to California. And so he actually released a new regulation in December of 2024. You can find all of these, wires that were going out in in mid December and literally on December 31st, about a week before the fire started.
Speaker 2:And he was creating, you know, this new regulation would allow insurance providers to use, catastrophe modeling and climate science to set premium prices. And the timing of this is just devastating because, you know, he he basically you know, he probably that that probably would have needed to happen, like, a year ago for the changes to go into effect for people to get proper insurance, but there was basically a weak gap between that new regulation and the fire sitting. So just not enough time to respond.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:I have a bit more on, how Yeah. Keep going. So, you know, one thing, the other pressure on insurance providers over the last, over the last few years and and, basically, they were talking about this on Odd Lots, but but, basically, insurance is finance, but it's, like, the least sexy part of finance. Right? Like, no nobody's like, I wanna go into
Speaker 1:finance. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I everybody's like, I wanna be No.
Speaker 1:Thanks. Goldman Sachs. Investing in.
Speaker 2:I'd rather sell, you know, insurance, or I'd rather work for one of these big, insurance brokers or or, you know, providers. And, one of the challenges from the last few years is, as we there's been two factors. So, there's been a capital supply shock, which is interest rates have gone up. And so these mutuals and, insurance providers, they they carry they hold a lot of bonds on their balance sheet.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And so as interest rates have gone up, the value of those bonds have gone down. 2nd is, anybody that is financing these insurance companies is effectively getting paid for taking on climate risk
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Which is appealing when rates are near 0 or 2% or whatever. But then, because because climate risk is not associated with, you know, it's it's disconnected from the Fed. But as rates have shot up, everybody's like, well, if my risk free rate is 5 a half percent, why do I wanna take on all this climate risk in a time when climate catastrophes have been accelerating when, it it just starts to not, make sense? And so people will just look for other places to park their cash.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I thought this other piece in New Yorker breaking down hurricane Milton was pretty instructive in terms of what we could see going forward. So for those who don't remember, Milton came in the in the wake of Helene. This was back in October of 2024. We saw some crazy Wi Fi money kids setting up Starlinks to continue sports betting.
Speaker 2:No. Not even just sports betting, selling courses on how to sports bet
Speaker 1:Courses on
Speaker 2:using the hurricane to sell courses on sports betting.
Speaker 1:So He's like, I don't have power.
Speaker 2:I don't have Internet. A hustler.
Speaker 1:But I'm I'm committed to the hustle. But, after this, the disaster in Florida, Joe Biden toured the damage, and the unofficial death toll rose to more than 20 and more than a 1000000 Floridians were reported to be without power impacted by the storm, although major was less severe than some forecasters had feared. But with Milton coming in the wake of hurricane Helene, which had devastated parts of Florida, North Carolina, and other states, the 2024 hurricane season represents a threshold crossing of sorts. It became this massive political issue. Trump said, Kamala spent all her FEMA money, 1,000,000,000 of dollars on housing for illegal immigrants.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. That's another crazy stat, by the way. Yeah. I I've been asking people. So so we spent $3,000,000,000 on wildfire prevention last year.
Speaker 2:Yep. How much in California? How much do you think we spend on benefits for illegal immigrants?
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. It's, like, 50. Right? 30.
Speaker 2:30. So we spent we spent 10 times as much on benefits for illegal immigrants as we spent on protecting, you know, citizens from and taxpayers from wildfires. So Yeah. Seems like that that could, shift.
Speaker 1:And, hilariously, in the New Yorker, they reference Marjorie Taylor Greene saying, yes. They can control the weather. And this became I think she was quote tweeting Augustus. I think this is, like, a whole Augustus arc, because there was a there was a whole, like, this It's
Speaker 2:pretty it's pretty cool that anytime somebody talks about the weather, they have to quote tweet Augustus now. He basically runs the weather.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anytime it rains or it doesn't rain, you have to talk to Augustus. But it became a massive culture war issue.
Speaker 1:A lot of Republicans were saying, like, the Democrats planned the hurricane, but then afterwards, it was all about, the disaster relief fund. And, the although, you know, there's, like, a question about, like, the FEMA money technically is a different account than the housing for illegal immigrants money, but the disaster fund was empty. And so congress needed to replenish it, and, and the the the government was, like, out of session. And so, house speaker Mike Johnson had to bring the congress back into session, and, and that was kinda like slowing down the topping up of that fund. But, again, it's just like there's just more and more pots of money that just go in.
Speaker 1:And once they go in, how much of it actually goes to helping people?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:In the degraded political environment, making sure that FEMA was add has adequate funding and that effective policies are in place is far from a trivial man matter. Definitely agree with that. And, there's some interesting context on, what's happening in the insurance market. Broadly, as major insurers pull back from areas of high risk of any climate disaster in states like Florida, California, and Colorado, finding affordable home insurance policies is becoming more difficult in many other areas. 2, according to the Consumer Federation of America, from 2017 to 2022, just 5 years, average premiums rose about 40% faster than inflation.
Speaker 1:Not even inflate like, inflation adjusted, still 40%. Right. And government figures show they've continued to rise rapidly since then with effects of climate change intensifying, the risks have been and insurance problems associated with them are no longer just coastal. They affect everyone.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Part of it, there was I saw something about how in Tampa, insurance rates were steadily going up, like, 10% a year, and everybody's freaking out. Right? Because they're like, what are the these insurance companies are gouging us. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Simultaneously, property values were also doing almost exactly the
Speaker 1:same thing.
Speaker 2:So Yeah. Makes sense. Not, like, the whole, as I my you know, as a as an entrepreneur, when I anytime I get to know insurance businesses, obviously, Warren Buffett and, people have done very well in insurance. But when you study these businesses, you're not thinking to yourself, I'd like to get into the insurance business. Right?
Speaker 2:Because, like, there's sit there's been his there's been periods where an insurance company has done 1,000,000,000 of dollars in profit and then, you know, over a decade and then had it all nuked in, you know, in one event.
Speaker 1:There's some good quotes in here from, CEOs of big insurance companies. John Neal, the CEO of Lloyd's of London says, you'll never find an insurer saying, I don't believe in climate change. The frequency and severity of weather related losses are exponential. And then Eric Anderson, the president of Aon, the world's largest reinsurance intermediary said, just as the US economy was overexposed to mortgage risk in 2008, the economy today is overexposed to climate risk.
Speaker 2:Wow. And so it's
Speaker 1:one of those things where it's like
Speaker 2:When when you can debate know when that was?
Speaker 1:This, this was, last year, so 2023.
Speaker 2:Crazy.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Before this. And, it's, yeah, it's interesting because, like, there's a lot of debate over, like, you know, is climate change real? How bad is it? Where did it come from?
Speaker 1:And then what do we do about it?
Speaker 2:And a lot of and a lot of smart people will tell you, oh, it's real, but it's not. It's slower Yeah. Than everybody talks about Yeah. Because we have been told over decades, oh, like, the sea level is gonna
Speaker 1:take off. Been very, like, AI doomer, like, fast takeoff. Like, you know, you like Greta Thunberg.
Speaker 2:But, yeah,
Speaker 1:it's it's We're all dead in
Speaker 2:20 slow.
Speaker 1:In 2018.
Speaker 2:Slow and then all at once. Yeah. Yeah. This l you know, the LA fire.
Speaker 1:Exactly. And so, yeah. Very, very, very interesting that, like like, it kind of doesn't matter what you think about climate change or the re it's like, you can see it in the market. You can just look at the reinsurance market and understand that, like, clearly, the market is pricing significant climate change disasters. And so we have to do something about that, whether that's Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's interesting that the difference of you look at fires. Yeah. Fires and hurricanes get the most attention.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Earthquakes are very damaging Yep. But seem to be you know, we've built buildings in a way now that seemingly are you know, they're sturdier. There's less Yep. Whatever. We're seemingly better prepared for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Knock on Mahogany. But, but hurricanes are not very preventable. Right? They sort of emerge, and they have a path, and you hope you're not in the path and batten down the hatches, but it's gonna be nasty kind of thing. Yep.
Speaker 2:And then fires are sort of different dynamic and why this has become so politicized. We won't cover any of the political elements of the fires because we don't discuss politics, even though I did think it was funny that that Crooked Newsom went on Crooked Media during, he went on Pod Save America, like, during the fires to, like, try to set his record straight. But, we don't discuss politics, But, it is it is the the reason that there's so much anger in LA right now is there's there's a bunch of evidence that we could have done more. We could have spent more. Yeah.
Speaker 2:We could have, you know, the $17,000,000 budget cut that turned into $200,000,000,000 of damages seems a bit silly in hindsight. The fire chief had been on record saying we need 50 more stations in LA County. Yeah. Yeah. Like, all the stuff that's just super damning.
Speaker 2:Like, we, you know, our, you know, government did not take this seriously enough. And there's, again, these communist policies around price controls, like, people in Sacramento telling insurance companies, you can't you can't use climate like, the the same people that are saying, like, you know, don't use water because of climate change or telling the insurance companies you can't use climate science Yeah. To set Yeah. Pricing for your insurance.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's become this classic battle of, like like, if if you say if 2 people are talking about what to do about climate change, like, the the left wing might say, we need to curb consumption, and the right wing might say, we need to do nuclear and more forest fire prevention and Yeah. Fortify our homes against hurricanes and be proactive. And and then that gets shouted down. It's like, you don't believe in it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And that's very problematic because it's like, there are plenty of things that we can do that actually result in more energy production and consumption, but still alleviate climate
Speaker 2:related impacts. For sure, living in these areas is just gonna continue to get more expensive. Yep. And one interesting anecdotal that, a family friend's house burned down in the Woolsey Fires in 2018, which the Woolsey Fires, was the same fire that took took out my house before I owned it. So they did $5,000,000,000 worth of damages.
Speaker 2:And when after the dust settled, he went to to rebuild his house Yeah. And he couldn't get even though he had this insurance payout, he couldn't get a construction loan to build a place because it was all the quotes he was getting were for 60 k a year, and this is for, like, a tiny, like, 3 bedroom home Yeah. In the mountains of Santa Monica. And he's like, well, I'm not gonna pay 60 grand. He's, you know, in his sixties.
Speaker 2:He's like, I'm not gonna pay 60 grand a year for the rest of my life to live in, like, a 3 bedroom house, not including property taxes, not including any other like, it just financially wasn't. And so what he ended up doing is he has, like, basically, like, nice RVs set up on the property that he still, like, uses, but he cannot build structures because he can't get the insurance too. Yep. And maybe that will change with some of this just because, again, if we are doing you know, it's it's interesting. I have I pitched, brother Justin Mears on this idea back in q 4 saying, how can we apply drone technology for wildfire detection and, you know, real time mitigation and then also around home defense.
Speaker 2:Right? Because one of the challenges is when people, one already insurance providers will give you a lower rate. If you have, like, fire sprinklers, they'll give you a lower rate. If you have, like, a newer roof that has is more fire protected, they'll give you a lower rate. If if you're, like, the house is constructed in a specific way.
Speaker 2:And but one of the challenges is when everybody evacuates and then an ember falls, like, in your backyard.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Like, let's say it lands in the wrong spot and it starts this little fire and you're not there. And so I was thinking you could apply have a drone basically station on your roof that would just use would patrol Yeah. Your you know, effectively your house while you were away. And so I think I do think there's a mix of high level
Speaker 1:My my contractor showed me a house that he built where It just it just a sprinkler on the roof. That's it. It just spits out a ton of water everywhere if you turn it on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's, like, low tech,
Speaker 2:but, like So And there's there's a guy
Speaker 1:showing, images from Japan. There's, like, some crazy automated turret that comes out if they have
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it goes back to, like, there are 2 ways to deal with climate change. 1 is don't build the house in the 1st place. Live in the cave and live in squalor. And the other way is build the firefighting technology and and Yeah.
Speaker 1:Clear the fields and build robots to clear fields and send up the goats Yeah. And do the controlled burns and do all this stuff. And that's the more
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Techno optimist pro acceleration, like Yeah. Path that I wanna take. And, the, the New Yorker and the insurance reinsurance brokers in, Switzerland and Germany agree with me. They say one thing that virtually all
Speaker 2:guys always they they just they just like that you're 68
Speaker 1:Yeah. Chads. Oh, is it good? I think that virtually all sides agree on from the senior brass at Swiss Re and Munich Re on down is the importance of investing more resources towards adapting our natural and human environments, including homes and other structures to make them more resilient to climate change. That's easy to say.
Speaker 1:Affecting real change would involve making big decisions at different levels of government about contentious issues, including public spending, zoning, building codes, and taxation. Heller conceded that getting consensus for reform is a is a formidable task and, noted that the economic fallout from climate change is affecting districts regardless of their political affiliation. And that's, like, super true here because you have the Palisades in Altadena, probably very different political alignments and and kind of just average net worth, but, there there should be both aligned. The hope is that they all get aligned around, let's be more proactive. Let's do more positive stuff.
Speaker 1:Let's build as opposed to let's cut back and let's restrict,
Speaker 2:which is rough.
Speaker 1:Anyway, I think that wraps up our deep dive for today. Lot of rough stuff out there, but
Speaker 2:Tragic.
Speaker 1:Pretty interesting to dig into. Hopefully, we're learning some things. Let's go to some DMs. I got a good DM from Frank. He said he recommends a new segment, on the show called forward deployed technology brother of the week.
Speaker 1:He's recommending pics submissions, picture submissions from brothers in the field, test sites, on the road, offshore, etcetera. Scenery aesthetics, grit and grind, sunsets, sunrise, coffee and nicotine, not group photos, would be a gold mine for the Gundo guys. More American terrain on the timeline, not less. More redacted desert locations, not less. Segments sponsored by ramp for enabling travel and logistics or Palantir That's a
Speaker 2:great brand.
Speaker 1:Who has popularized who has popularized the forward deployed phraseology, creative liberties, loose interpretations of forward deployed could basically mean anything off-site like Zuck venturing into Texas for JRE. I love this.
Speaker 2:I love this.
Speaker 1:Great idea, Frank. Recommendations if you wanna be featured as a forward deployed technology brother of the week.
Speaker 2:And we'll just put it out there right now. Either Until further notice, every every time you tag, you know, say, I'm forward deployed and tag us
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:We will feature it on the show.
Speaker 1:Yep. We have a, request for from Brandon Jacoby, who's been featured on the show under,
Speaker 2:some personalities. Brandon,
Speaker 1:hopefully Jacoby.
Speaker 2:Hopefully, I Jacoby. Hopefully, I can share this. Apparently, he's now the only designer employed at x. One designer at x. If you have any issues with x at all, DM Brandon.
Speaker 1:He's the only one.
Speaker 2:The technology brother sent you. He was just texting me, like, 2 minutes ago. So,
Speaker 1:That's great.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just flood his DMs, like, hundreds of mess if we flood his DMs enough, the DM's product will get better.
Speaker 1:You know, I I think I actually I don't know if it was him or Yacine, but I actually DM someone that there was this weird feature when you when you press and hold on a video, it speeds it up to 2 x. It's a great feature. But for a while, it would put this big 2 x icon, like, right in the middle of the video. And I was like, I don't need to know that a and b, like, just throw them in the corner up at the top. And I sent it in, and then I was like, ah, there's a and one of the guys was like, yeah.
Speaker 1:I'll fix it today. And I was like, cool. You moved so fast. And then a couple days later, it's still up. And I was like, nah.
Speaker 1:They were probably just, like, messing with me. But then it did get fixed. And so I love it. So yeah. You can you can you can affect a real change.
Speaker 1:But the reason Brandon Jacoby is asking us to react to this picture that Sarah Hess pro posted is that, she posted a picture of a of a watch and says when the second when the SpaceX secondary finally hits, and it's a Great post. Audemars Piguet
Speaker 2:Chronograph.
Speaker 1:Royal Oak chronograph. Beautiful piece.
Speaker 2:Calendar? I can't really tell. It's black.
Speaker 1:I don't
Speaker 2:know. Beautiful watch.
Speaker 1:Likes already. I think the thing
Speaker 2:Sarah just mogs the entire deep tech tech community. The other day, she was posting a,
Speaker 1:What was that?
Speaker 2:The other day, she was posting her and a I think a G Wagon 6 by 6.
Speaker 1:6 by 6.
Speaker 2:Being like, this is a good daily for defense tech. So all all you guys out there need to get on Sarah's level.
Speaker 1:That caused a little bit of a stir. Lot of lot of defense tech bros were like, no.
Speaker 2:It's the Hilux. The Hilux. The Hilux. Yeah. The Raptor.
Speaker 1:The Raptor. Yeah. But, you know, you can't go wrong with the 6 by 6.
Speaker 2:I think I think the cool thing is if you're in defense tech manufacturing or whatever and you're just on the road, you're forward deployed technology brother. Yeah. It's just so there's you're you find yourself in such fantastical situations that it doesn't matter what you're driving, and it's still cool.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:You could have Warren Buffett's old Camry, and you have it's just covered in dust Yep. Yep. Sand. And, you know, it's got, like, bunch of, Lucy cans at the back. It just looks cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah. If you're in a 6 by 6, great.
Speaker 1:The real question is would Augustus Dorico have gotten stuck in the mud if he was driving the 6 by 6?
Speaker 2:No. Absolutely. I
Speaker 1:don't think so.
Speaker 2:I don't think so. And also
Speaker 1:It's 6 wheel drive.
Speaker 2:Makers should have a rain makers should have a tank. Like, they've raised enough capital at this point. They should have a tank that just launches drones out of it and has the treads. Amazing. But, anyways, all you technology brothers out there, stop getting mugged by Sarah.
Speaker 2:Step it up. She's posting the proof daily on the timeline.
Speaker 1:Let's go to civilization enjoy or another question for us. Says, I love you, tech bros pod. Thank you. We love you too. Civilization civilization.
Speaker 1:Civilization. Can you recommend a timepiece for me in my budget range? And there's some sort of, like, foreign symbol here. I don't know what that means, but, so it's 56.34. Is this European money?
Speaker 1:I think it's European money. And so in European the Europeans, they use periods instead of commas. Right?
Speaker 2:Anytime I go to Europe, I just use dollars the whole time. They're just so Deal with it. Liquid. I just
Speaker 1:Deal with it? Deal with it? It's it's So is this $56,340?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Because at that I mean, you could get the Royal Oak Chronograph probably. That's around $30. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Let me check first.
Speaker 1:You're not gonna be in Nautilus territory.
Speaker 2:I mean, you're close.
Speaker 1:You could get a you could get a Vacheron overseas. You can That's great. A Daytona, probably. Yeah. Easily a Daytona.
Speaker 2:The other option here Not
Speaker 1:Paul Newman.
Speaker 2:Other option here with a with a budget like that is is you could have, you know, your father, grandfather, you know, some family member give give you a watch, you know, as like a family heirloom and then use your budget on getting it tuned up a little bit, taking it to somebody to get it serviced, and then buy, like, half a Bitcoin with other
Speaker 1:That'd be good.
Speaker 2:$50. So
Speaker 1:Yeah. But on the off chance that he's saying $56.34, what what what would you recommend there? I think you gotta go used Casio or G Shock, something on eBay, something that's, respectable to the watch guys, maybe something, you know, a a navy seal, an operator has used, and it's all bang
Speaker 2:shocks, something like that.
Speaker 1:Buy Jocko Willink's old cracked G Shock. That's something you can get for $50. He might just send it to you for free. I mean, you're in territory where you might just wanna do so a little bit of e begging and just and just beg for someone to send you an old watch Yeah. At this point.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But something with a story.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's Anybody so anybody anybody out there that's listening, if you have an old cool watch He's a real desk, please give it to civilization and joy. We're happy to help intermediate it. Yeah. We'd love to get him a watch. Yeah.
Speaker 2:First of many.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get him started. I mean, I it's already a bad sign that he's dealing with the foreign money. That's rough. Anyway, let's go to Miles.
Speaker 2:To be saying you enjoy civilization from Europe Yeah. Considering that they've been sliding backwards.
Speaker 1:Miles Snyder asks us, I feel like these $4,500 Rick Rubin approved headphones are the perfect podcasting accessory for a self respecting technology brother. It's the LCD 5 flagship headphones. Highly recommend going and picking these up. I think they're open back. Have you seen that?
Speaker 1:So they're actually loud to other people. You you know about this? That's great. Back headphones. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They they they play the music. It creates this real sound stage so you can hear the music all over the place, but they they don't isolate it to the out to the outside world. So other you're just mocking everyone else with
Speaker 2:I I
Speaker 1:noisy headphones.
Speaker 2:Last night, I was fucking with Sarah, and I, I usually will listen to, like, an audiobook or video or whatever going to bed without the screen off. And I took my headphones, and I just threw them over my like, towards her side of the bed, and I just started putting on, like, this, like, educational, like, kids kids song. She just, like, took her, like, 10 seconds. She's like, what
Speaker 1:the fuck are you doing?
Speaker 2:I was watching, like, I've watched the video with Roman on on how oil rigs work. Nice. I didn't know this, but a lot of them are actually pontoon boats
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah. They're fun.
Speaker 2:Where they are sunken Yeah. Underneath the water. Yeah. Should do deep dive on oil rigs.
Speaker 1:Hyundai Heavy Industries, I believe, is one of them that makes it, They make the the electric cars and oil rigs. Grant says getting bucket pulled on Tech Bros Pod is the teapot equivalent of getting bucket pulled on Kill Tony. Salute. That's correct. We were inspired by kill Tony.
Speaker 1:We'd we'd been doing a lot of, post reactions, and we wanted to mix it up, make sure that we got to the real bangers from the brothers, from the friends of the show, the really key stories, but we wanted to mix in some random stuff. So we printed a bunch more posts, threw them in this bucket. We're really building up a thing, and these are random.
Speaker 2:They're We we have such
Speaker 1:a backlog.
Speaker 2:We might have to move to 2 episodes to 10.
Speaker 1:I think we have to if we wanna get through these. And so we'll do some bucket pulls later in the show. Little bit more random. Some friends, some randoms in here. A lot of timeless stuff, and and a little bit more focused just on good text posts.
Speaker 1:Not something that we need to necessarily make sure we're hitting in timely fashion, but it's more of just a random way to make sure anyone has a chance to get on the show. Let's go to a question that I got from a friend. Says, pod is crushing, by the way. Also, question, do you think it's a good idea to work for Doge? Well, what do you want?
Speaker 1:And I and I answered, and we went we we chatted for a little bit. I said, well, what do you want out of life? What's your long term goal? And so question is, like, this guy has been working in tech. He's been, you know, an associate venture capital firm, worked at a kinda series a, series b startup that was kinda preproduct market fit, done some stuff, product manager style, and he's now thinking about joining Doge.
Speaker 1:What do you think?
Speaker 2:So there's a range of ways that you can work on Doge. Mhmm. I don't know how much of it's public
Speaker 1:or
Speaker 2:private yet, but, at a high level, you can go and actually have a long term, like, role within
Speaker 1:A job.
Speaker 2:A job, like, a long term job. And then there's also these sort of rotating groups that are rotating in for Yep. 90 day sprints to work on
Speaker 1:specific product. Higher math did.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so so I I it's hard to know. I think,
Speaker 1:I think he's thinking full time. Like, this will be the next couple years.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I I think Doge is an incredible opportunity if you don't have your thing yet. Yeah. Right? Or if you're working a job that you just don't care about that much, which I doubt any of the brothers do because they are corporate athletes, and they'll find a way to care about anything.
Speaker 2:But, yeah. I just I I think it's honestly the 90 day route and taking a sabbatical Yeah. From your job and doing that at school. The, like, long term, you know, in a There was
Speaker 1:actually a recent study in our audience, and they found that we have the highest percentage of listeners who are doing their life's work of any podcast in the world. I thought it was exciting. So Cool. But, the the I my thought for him was, like, you should think about what your life's goal is, because if you're going into the government, that can be a great track for the right type of person. And but if you stay in finance, that can be the right track for a different type of person.
Speaker 1:Starting a company and and building that I almost like that Doge,
Speaker 2:as as great as as it is, that there's all these technology entrepreneurs Yeah. That and and people within tech, that are going and joining Doge. We also need people from that have histories in Washington to join Yeah. Because they actually understand how people how Washington works and how government works. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Complicated stuff. You know?
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's clearly Not for
Speaker 2:the faint of heart. So so I hope that we're pulling in people
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:From Washington to to participate in this because I think they'll be much stronger if they're, like, collaborating.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I imagine the correct formulation is like a blend like what happened with Anduril, where it was, like, 3 Palantir guys, Palmer Lucky, who had no experience in defense, but is, like, this crazy engineer, and then and then Chris Brose joins, who's been McCain's chief of staff and, like, the swampiest dude in the world. I said that lovely. But but but it really is important that they have someone like that who's been on the hill for so long, really really add add to the add to the information. Okay.
Speaker 1:Let's see. Okay. We got all these. We're good.
Speaker 2:I got a Let's do a promo post. So, today, this promoted post is from the Department of State and the and the DEA, actually, the Drug Enforcement Agency Oh, okay. And the, the US Department and the US Department of Justice. So we actually today, we have a promoted post,
Speaker 1:From the Feds.
Speaker 2:From the Narcotics Rewards Program, saying that they've the reward for, information leading to the arrest and or conviction of Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela, has increased up to 25,000,000. So this is, like, you know, typical. This is, like, basically, like, getting a pre seed round for, like, an AI. It's
Speaker 1:kind of like a mango seed.
Speaker 2:It's like a mango seed for your AI company or, like, if you're a good wise if you're a good y c company might come out of demo day, skip the seed round and go straight to the, you know, 25 on a 100.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:And, but, anyways, this would go straight in your pocket. So Nicholas, has, been at Nick has had some issues with narcoterrorism.
Speaker 1:He had a run-in with the feds. He's in a rough go. He's he's accused of narcoterrorism.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Okay. He hasn't innocent until proven guilty. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Allegedly. Allegedly, Nick has done some narcoterrorism.
Speaker 2:No. Narcoterrorism, cocaine importation Oh. Conspiracy to use and carry machine guns and destructive devices devices in furtherance of a drug crime. So, anyways, no coupon code this time, but you can send tips to the Drug Enforcement Agency by email at cartel, s o l e, s tips at d a. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And, and and for the for the folks who might be trying to track him down, can you give me some overview of who Nicolas Maduro is and and what he might look like if I see him on
Speaker 2:the screen? Nicolas Maduro Moroz is a Venezuelan politician who sir has served as president of Venezuela since 2013. He began his working life as a bus driver.
Speaker 1:He's
Speaker 2:clearly, got vision even though he may have had some issues with the law. Maduro rose to become a trade union leader. Ouch. That was his first problem, clearly, before being elected to the National Assembly in 2000. He's got a wife that he married in 2013, Celia Flores.
Speaker 2:If you know Celia, you could ask her. He's 63, Chad. Okay. Like that. And, yeah.
Speaker 2:Basically 63? 62 years old. Normally, I guess he hangs out in Caracas
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Venezuela. So, anyways, just a great opportunity. I I don't I don't think enough passport bro passport bros will often talk about, oh, I have this ecommerce business or I have this course business. I think there's a big opportunity to just, like, start contracting with the DEA, going after some of these bounties. And this 25,000,000 could fund quite a long stint in South America if that's what you want in life.
Speaker 2:So, go get after it. Yeah. And if you're if you're more of, like, a course bro, which I don't think a lot of our listeners are, you could create courses on how to go after DEA bounties, and how how you could track down a narco, terrorist like,
Speaker 1:a lot of great lot lot of opportunity these days.
Speaker 2:So, anyways
Speaker 1:We love
Speaker 2:to see. Out. We'll we'll try to promote as many of these on
Speaker 1:the show Yeah. As possible. And if you do, tell the tell the DEA Technology Brothers sent you. Tell them you heard about the the opportunity on the pod. That's really cute.
Speaker 2:We get Call your friends. Need any of the payout. We just want We
Speaker 1:just want credit. We want the credit. Okay. Alright.
Speaker 2:This is good. Back to the show.
Speaker 1:So back to the show. Max, passion and fury at passion and fury. Go give him a
Speaker 2:go give
Speaker 1:him a follow.
Speaker 2:Thank you to the lone ranger for putting this
Speaker 1:Oh, this is fantastic. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Road map.
Speaker 1:Appreciate it.
Speaker 2:I didn't know that. I didn't know the increase. Yeah. So
Speaker 1:It's a lot of money. Yeah. So Max, listener of the pod, says new technology for the technology brothers. He built a tool to quick quickly grab all clips referencing every mentioned x post on the pod. All you need is a YouTube URL.
Speaker 1:At jordyays@jacougan, it would this be helpful?
Speaker 2:He just said Jock Coogan?
Speaker 1:Jocko Coogan. Jock. That's my that's my goal is to just become the Jocko Willink of tech. And it's amazing. You you you dump in one of our our our show URLs, and it immediately slices it up.
Speaker 1:This is amazing.
Speaker 2:Build this as a live product. Yes. It's tech bros clips.com. Yeah. And you can punch in
Speaker 1:just a product. Goes there, it's gonna blow up the site probably.
Speaker 2:Well, it'll be a good test.
Speaker 1:But, yeah. Get a get a content delivery network up, buddy, because, the traffic's coming. It's been super helpful to us already. Slices everything up. We're working on a slight iteration, but I think this should really speed up the flow of the show so that as soon as we wrap, boom, we put it in there.
Speaker 1:The editors can punch some of this stuff up, and it can go out on x, which has been a huge, huge growth hack for us. And if we catch you stealing our growth hack, you're gonna hear from us. Let's go to Megan Neivold. She says, yeah. I'll be going now and takes a picture of her purse where she has, put a piece of fried chicken in there.
Speaker 1:And what's that? A beautiful tin of Lucy pouches in her purse. I love it.
Speaker 2:Megan also mogs the timeline. Totally. Mogs a lot of the other brothers with, just, like, constantly living that sort of loud opulent
Speaker 1:Loud opulence.
Speaker 2:TB lifestyle.
Speaker 1:The corona, the aqua panna, the French fry,
Speaker 2:bone truffle fries.
Speaker 1:Fantastic lifestyle. It's great. Yep. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:Go, Megan.
Speaker 1:Thanks for supporting my company. Thanks for supporting the pro nicotine pouch community and, helping evangelize
Speaker 2:this stuff. Supporting IQ.
Speaker 1:Yes. Yes. Should we do a bucket pull? We've been we've been talking it up. Maybe we can do a bucket pull.
Speaker 1:Let's see. Okay. This one's gonna be truly random this time because Do
Speaker 2:we have 2 champagne buckets, by the way? Because the next Dom episode, we might have to just throw the Dom in with the bucket.
Speaker 1:I can't believe I pulled this one. Oh my god. Yeah. Okay. Tokyo sunbather says, Karl Marx failed to consider how dripped out I look walking out of the Polo Lau Ralph Lauren store.
Speaker 1:There is a man riding a horse on top of my chest, you communist retard.
Speaker 2:Well, we don't use the r word on the show, but
Speaker 1:Because it's low class and vulgar, but I'm quoting him. So Yeah. That isn't acceptable.
Speaker 2:But Karl Marx
Speaker 1:uses a majority.
Speaker 2:If if if ever we were to use that word, it would be in reference Following
Speaker 1:the commerce. But that is a hilarious post.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I've I've probably read that a few times.
Speaker 1:Really, really enjoyed it. Doubt.
Speaker 2:Yeah. That's that's that's non ironically, why capitalism is so great. Yeah. Because you can get dripped out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is exceedingly so so back in the Soviet Union
Speaker 1:Jeans. If you
Speaker 2:were yeah. Jeans were a big thing. If you traveled through the Soviet Union wearing jeans
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:People would come up to you relentlessly making you offers, and they wouldn't even have anything to offer in the trade. They'd be like, hey. I have this, like, exotic melon that I grew in my backyard. I'll give you 3 of them if you give me your jeans, and you're like, I'll keep my jeans. You're not a canaline.
Speaker 1:Ugh. Wild. Great post.
Speaker 2:Great post.
Speaker 1:Hilarious. Let's go to Jason Liu. He says, do it scared. I believe many people struggle with the insecurity of being intelligent. They often feel the need to prove their intelligence by overthinking, excessively planning, and acquiring knowledge before taking action.
Speaker 1:However, this approach is a waste of time. The more you research, the more you realize how how little you actually know. Instead, you just have to do it even if you're scared. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Yeah.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of that, like, hustle porn. Like, I need more mental models. I need more frameworks before I go and build the thing. And 9 times out of 10, it's just like, just go get the shot. Man, this is like the whole YC thing.
Speaker 1:It's like, you show up. It's like demo days, ticking clock, 90 days. You gotta put something on stage. Gotta grow. Gotta build the business.
Speaker 1:Like, if you go into office hours and you're like, I'm thinking about a frame, it'll be like, shut up. Like, go code.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Or what meeting structure should I use? Yeah. Yeah. All that stuff.
Speaker 2:Doesn't matter. Yeah. The other thing Will Will was posting recently about how if you are gonna read a ton of books instead of doing the actual thing, which at points in your life is worth doing, don't read the same books as everyone else.
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:So don't read the same
Speaker 1:Yep.
Speaker 2:Yeah. 1, don't read founder biographies. Just listen to founders podcast.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:2, don't read the same, like, business y self help books. Go weird go read weird strange stuff, like, from the crazy The
Speaker 1:biggest bull signal is when you're searching someone on the Wikipedia page. You go to the sources. It's some ISBN number. You go to Amazon. $2,000 book won't ship to you in a month because it's out of stock.
Speaker 1:You gotta find some library that has it in stock, not digitized. There's no Kindle version. There's no audiobook version. That's where the alpha is.
Speaker 2:Do you know you know that book there there's no anti memetics
Speaker 1:division? Yeah. It's like trading at, like, 3,000
Speaker 2:I have a I have a copy. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like yeah. They they went out of print
Speaker 1:for a second moon. Moon.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hilarious. Nobody knows what the book's even about.
Speaker 1:But library cards, deeply underrated.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:When when Ben and I were doing, some video essays, I would we would just go over to the library and just pick up, like, every book on whatever topic it was. Like, I was doing something on, GTA and the history of Grand Theft Auto, and there's, like, one really good book that serves as, like, the backbone of the story. But there are, like, 20 other books that, like, have paragraphs mentioning it or talk about the development of the industry. Yeah. You can
Speaker 2:talk to your library.
Speaker 1:Altogether. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And Yeah. They'll help you find all of that.
Speaker 1:I mean, even just walking around in the library, you'll find, like, there's, like, the Trump section. We got 20 books about the history of Donald Trump and 20 books about the history of Joe Biden when we were doing those video essays about those. It was really, really cool. And so, yeah, you wanna learn about insurance. Like, you can go on Twitter and listen to podcasts and but just, like it's called, like, I I I think of it like the shotgun method.
Speaker 1:Like, when I'm trying to learn something new, it's like, I'll find, like, you know, a textbook on it, but then also a biography of someone who built something in there, listen to a podcast on it. What what does Odd Lots say about it? Read a Wiki, go to Hacker News, search Twitter, and then also just stroll the library until you've kind of, like, sprayed and prayed all over the place and just gotten a bunch of different information that you can put together. Because, like, that's probably not baked into the LLMs yet. So you need, like, random sources put together, then you get the alpha.
Speaker 1:Let's go to Hunter. Gronk Wiz, love the name, says just spent $60,000 buying a Stripe car. Women won't leave me alone now. Best investment I've ever made. And Jacob Martin asks us and asks, at TechRose pod, found someone almost as committed to Stripe as you guys are to ramp.
Speaker 1:Do you think this is real? Do you think he actually bought the car? It looks just like a taxi cab. And he's joking.
Speaker 2:He's joking, but I wish he wasn't. Yeah. The stripe the stripe car Dripped. Very drippy. It says, it says a lot about the kind of person you are.
Speaker 2:He says you value Yeah. Literature, independent publishing Yep. Smooth, sass. Irish nationalism. Irish nationalism, easy incorporation tools like Stripe Atlas.
Speaker 2:Says a lot with a little. You know? Says a lot more than, like, a martini racing Porsche, and I'm a huge Porsche fan. So, so
Speaker 1:Delivery. The the Stripe livery goes hard. I would just like to see it on something with a little
Speaker 2:more horsepower.
Speaker 1:Couple more cylinders. Get get get the stripe delivery on a v ten next
Speaker 2:time. Yeah. Yeah. I'd like to see somebody apply the stripe livery
Speaker 1:on something. You know what you know what it should be going on? BMW i8. Most undervalued car right now. Forty k.
Speaker 1:You have doors that go like this.
Speaker 2:It's not under I just will say it's not undervalued. It's undervalued. It's properly valued.
Speaker 1:Undervalued. I know I know it's not a great driver's car.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying it's properly valued because it's worth 40 k today, and it'll be worth 10 k to 10 k.
Speaker 1:No. No. It is undervalued because once associates at VC firms realize that they can have doors that go like this for the price of a model 3, it's over.
Speaker 2:It's over.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Get that, wrap it in the American flag. Oh, you're on the American dynamism team. Get an I eight, wrap wrap it in the American flag. Oh, you're working at stripe?
Speaker 1:I8, wrap it in the stripe logo.
Speaker 2:That car really
Speaker 1:Half of them have already been wrapped.
Speaker 2:8 years ago. 8 years ago, I guess I hadn't moved to LA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Isn't it isn't it a 3 cylinder?
Speaker 2:It it it was very hot for a second. It was, like, a very cool car.
Speaker 1:It was cool, and it's from a big brand. Yep. It drives like trash, but that doesn't matter. It has doors that go like this, Jordy.
Speaker 2:The doors Doors that go like this.
Speaker 1:Up. The doors go up.
Speaker 2:I do I do wanna go I wanna go to the BMW, Driving Experience Center in in Palm Springs, by the way.
Speaker 1:What would you what would you drive there? I I would What's your what what what's your what's your go to BMW?
Speaker 2:I'm I I actually like the way that BMW drive, generally.
Speaker 1:The modern ones? I would go I would go, manual m 2.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Powder blue.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. That's a great option.
Speaker 1:That's a good one. Still pretty light.
Speaker 2:But I would like to
Speaker 1:Not the m 5, the waist 7,000 pounds.
Speaker 2:Setup, dash cam
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:Starlink headsets Totally. Or just rerecord the pod just while racing around.
Speaker 1:Have you ever gotten into the old BMWs, like, the e 36 m 3? If if you know what the numbers that go in front of the m threes, it's They the the
Speaker 2:my, car Sherpa, Michael Yeah. Lives here in LA, not not far from the studio. He's big into that world, but, but not not me.
Speaker 1:Let's do promoted post. Another bucket pull.
Speaker 2:Promoted post. This this promoted post is from Mahogany. Mahogany is the official wood of business.
Speaker 1:And Fantastic.
Speaker 2:We just wanted to draw some attention to Mahogany. It's a great wood. They've got great grains. You can get it from all over the world, bunch of different sort of varietals. And, I just can't stress enough.
Speaker 2:Every business should run on ramp and every business should run on Mahogany.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Get Mahogany around your office, your home. You know, ideally, it's in your car in certain places. You're buying the right, manufacturers, and you're getting spec'd out properly. But, Yeah.
Speaker 1:The I eight will replace all the gas with behind me. Now we're talking. See?
Speaker 2:I can win you over on this. Side to side panels on
Speaker 1:the car. Swap swap an f 40 engine in there. Get get the turbocharged v 8 and the I 8.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Anyways, fantastic wood. Yeah. Can't recommend it enough. And, thank you, Mahogany, for supporting the show.
Speaker 1:One last one. I8 Storato. That slaps.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You throw some off road tires on there, roof rack. The door still go like this.
Speaker 2:Door still go up.
Speaker 1:You're good.
Speaker 2:You can't charge the car anywhere, so you gotta stay close to home. But, you know, if you live at a ski resort You
Speaker 1:don't need to charge it. It's not electric. It's a hybrid.
Speaker 2:It's not a it's not a plug in?
Speaker 1:It's not it it it might be plug in, but it doesn't matter. You can just put gas in it.
Speaker 2:Cool. Okay. I'm I'm You're
Speaker 1:on board.
Speaker 2:I'm on board.
Speaker 1:We're getting 2.
Speaker 2:We're getting an I Yeah.
Speaker 1:Crashing
Speaker 2:an I eight was, like, kind of the it thing to do.
Speaker 1:Like The supply. There's probably only, like, 40 left. Yeah. They've all been crashed and wrapped by
Speaker 2:That's actually the worst case for i8
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Is that
Speaker 1:so many car. It's the halo car from, like, one of the most iconic brands, BMW.
Speaker 2:K. Put your money put your money where your mouth is.
Speaker 1:You pick one up. This is stupid. We already talked about that. Bucket pull something up.
Speaker 2:Brutal bucket pull.
Speaker 1:Let's do that. Oh, this is good. Nikita Bier, he says the 3 jobs after AGI, actually. 1, AI researcher. 2, influencer.
Speaker 1:3, looter slash prisoner. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Feels pretty pretty real after this last week.
Speaker 1:Yep. Not if you listen to Tyler Cowen on DoorDash. He says it's gonna be very slow for AI to take over some of these more entrenched industries. The nonprofit people will still have jobs, the Yeah. The farmers.
Speaker 1:And if you talk to, Brad Jacobs, he when he set up his new fund, he specifically was looking for AI resistant industries. Where'd he land? He landed in, construction materials. He's rolling up construction materials companies, making it easy to oil order construction materials if you're a builder. Obviously, great timing, and I'm sure there'll be a bunch of interesting stories that come out of that company.
Speaker 1:His second most interesting choice, he he surveyed all the different industries for AI resistance and also just economic opportunity. The one that he wanted to go with was oil and gas, but he couldn't but the ESG thing was too overbearing.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The thesis around it it used to be young people would see the oil and gas industry as the same level of opportunity as technology.
Speaker 1:And Wall Street. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wall Street where it's maybe you're in Texas. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna stay close to home and go into oil and gas. And for a very long time, it just was not even on the radar of Yeah.
Speaker 2:A lot of talented young people of going because it was so demonized.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Then it's like, okay. Well, we need this stuff for Yeah. Everything. So maybe it's not so bad. Yeah.
Speaker 1:You gotta watch that movie.
Speaker 2:The only thing I would add to Nikkita's list is guys that repeatedly launch the same app and repeatedly sell it to large corporations because they want your time and Yeah. Attention.
Speaker 1:Universal employment for Nikkita for sure. And, I mean, I guess he's influencer on, what's that, intro.com? He's Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:He'll he'll be fine. Yeah. People will pay just to hang
Speaker 2:out with him.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. Even if they're not there's nothing left to build. I just wanna talk to Nikkita generally. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Tell
Speaker 1:me some war stories, buddy.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:John Chew at Khosla Ventures says, why a $40,000,000 pre seed? You can prove your research direction with 5,000,000. Founder, Somichintala told me VCs are willing to light dollars on fire for my pretraining, so I'm not going low lower. The spend plan includes his yearly multimillion dollar meta salary in cash. We are deaf not in a bubble.
Speaker 2:I didn't really understand the format of this, but
Speaker 1:I do
Speaker 2:think that, the the what whatever. The high level $40,000,000 pre seed for the AI company was cool. I just my only problem with it is if you you could raise $15,000,000, spend a little bit little bit of money tracking down Nicolas Maduro
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you could get this 25,000,000 nondilutive, basically basically, just, you know, straight cash of the balance sheet, and then use this for all your pre training. You know, use this to buy compute. Yeah. Spend this on an NVIDIA. And so and and, you know, I'd like to see this well transfer from the DEA Yeah.
Speaker 2:To NVIDIA.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I wonder what the what the stories are. Like, what is the biggest reward that's ever actually been paid out by the federal government for a bounty like that? And who got it? What did they do with the money?
Speaker 1:Like, did it go to, like, Blackwater, or did it go to just some random citizen who, like, called it in? I believe that there there was a theory that there was a whistleblower in the Osama bin Laden case that was retconned out and not told in the main story. Have you heard this? The, Seymour Hirsch theory. Seymour Hirsch claims that the that the, 0 dark 30 narrative that it was, like, the CIA figured out where he was and then they're sending the Blackhawks, and they were stealth helicopters, and they got through, like, the, the Iranian defenses, was it?
Speaker 1:Or Pakistani defenses. That that is, like, kind of a a story that we tell to sound, like, a little bit more heroic, which based. I like it. But, the the more the the the Seymour Hersh theory is that there was actually a whistleblower in the Pakistani government who called America and was like, I know where he is. I've I I I ran into Bin Laden's driver.
Speaker 1:This is the location.
Speaker 2:And it could have been Get
Speaker 1:me out. Get me my $10,000,000 for the bounty, and I will give you the direct access. And then, apparently, America went to, went to the Pakistani government, said, we know where he is. We're either sending a missile tonight, or you're gonna turn off your air defenses, and our Blackhawk helicopters are gonna fly in. And they're like, okay.
Speaker 1:Fine. You got us. We've been hiding him. Like, we'll let you go in, so it's not like a national incident. And then the the narrative globally turned into, oh, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, we snuck in. We broke through their defenses, and, like, they weren't complicit in it. So then there's not as much, like, global, like, aggression towards Pakistan because they weren't
Speaker 2:Part of it.
Speaker 1:Caught. Yeah. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Yeah. What
Speaker 1:were you about to say?
Speaker 2:Anyways, back to $40,000,000 pre seed.
Speaker 1:I would be glad I'm glad.
Speaker 2:Podcast your moment right there. But,
Speaker 1:do we wanna do Zuck? This one, I feel like it's kinda played out.
Speaker 2:I mean, we didn't really talk about it yet. I'd I'd I don't have a lot of you know, the old phrase, if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say it. I'm glad he came around, but I'm not.
Speaker 1:I haven't listened to the full episode yet, so I'll I'll withhold my my take. Let's go to Jasmine Sun. She says ins and outs for 2025 predictions are not endorsements. And the top one is lifted straight from our show in ostentatious wealth out quiet luxury. We have been firmly in favor of that, in open water swimming, out run clubs
Speaker 2:in I would say we were in we're we've been in favor of loud opulence, which you can actually enjoy regardless of
Speaker 1:as well.
Speaker 2:Whatever wealth you have. You can doordash all day long, spend that on a bottle of Dom Perignon, and Exactly. Pop it off Yeah. You know? Yeah.
Speaker 2:Celebrate a hard day's work. Yeah. So you can you know, anybody can do it.
Speaker 1:So in our Mob Wives, Nietzsche, the Western canon going to the movies, aperitifs and digestifs, Russia is in, and China is out. I don't know. In 996, out quiet quitting, in email romance, out dating apps, in cocaine, out weed, in secrets, out transparency, in Faye Warner
Speaker 2:That would actually be cool. A a new dating app built around email would be is weird enough that you could probably get a number of of users.
Speaker 1:That's actually how Tinder started. They they would do it all manually. So they would have, it was based on this thing that happened at Harvard where at the end of the year, everyone would submit names of people that they were, like, attracted to, but never actually had a chance to really go on a date with. And then if there was a mutual swipe right, essentially, both people put down the same name, they would make an intro. And that was and then they apify.
Speaker 2:Never knew that. Yeah.
Speaker 1:In manning up and moving on, out is yearning, in ball up top. Like that. Out self reflection.
Speaker 2:Yes. In,
Speaker 1:travel
Speaker 2:Never reflect. Never look in the past.
Speaker 1:In sketch comedy, out stand up sets. Lot of good stuff in there. Thanks for posting that. I I I I think that that's a fun list. Do you wanna do your own post?
Speaker 1:Newsom's reign of terror?
Speaker 2:I'll read it.
Speaker 1:Got it. Yeah. Go go through it.
Speaker 2:I, you know, Jeff Jeff Lewis and and people like, Josh Diamond
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Have talked over the last, basically, last week in saying, hey. Most natural disasters aren't political. Yep. But it's actually important to make this one political because there were a number of failures by the state to address this problem before it started. And it's been interesting to watch Gavin Newsom.
Speaker 2:The vast majority of the communications that he's been putting out are all centered around correcting his image. So So this guy, I think, is one of the most disgusting, despicable, evil, political leaders that I've ever I'd probably rather get a beer with Nicolas Maduro than than Gavin Newsom. But, but, anyway, so I I had to share this. I shared this, I think, on Saturday. I was, pretty frustrated, and it definitely resonated.
Speaker 2:But I said Newsom's reign of terror will finally come to an end in 2026. That's when his term is up. Hopefully, he gets recalled. I I think there's a bunch of, petitions happening now. Years of 0 leadership and degeneracy.
Speaker 2:I put that in there because he has a history of cheating on his wife, he, with his staff, and he also cheated on his wife with his best friend's wife, among other incidents. We now have dramatic visual evidence of his incredible incompetency, and it's on full display for the nation and the world. Very, very he couldn't have had a more high profile. The Camp Fire, which was, you know, one of the most damaging fires, was in an area of the state that frankly does not have a lot of influential people or attention. This one is the crown jewel of California, Los Angeles, and, it's just on full display, very clear that that the world now knows that he is incompetent.
Speaker 2:The fires will cost him any hope of winning the presidency, which he so desperately wanted. And you can see with his communication strategy this week, he's entirely fixated on yelling at Elon Musk for spreading lies when he is the the biggest liar, the most lying politician that I've ever seen. His track record was always terrible, but his smooth talking kept the dream alive. I will give him credit. He always dresses well, and he's and he's good at yapping.
Speaker 2:Not anymore as these images will follow the rest of his sad career and be placed next to his name in the history books. And this is one of those things I literally think if there's gonna be a history book on California on, the century, you'll have the Newsom era, and it the the fires these these pictures will be placed next to his name
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Because this is, his handiwork. Los Angeles will rebuild, but Newsom won't have anything to do with it. So I don't think this guy I I don't think this guy will will be able to walk around Los Angeles for the rest of his life without being yelled at, and he deserves it. I mean, like, absolute scum. And I I make a, we make a strong effort on the show to never be negative, or put people down because everybody's doing their best.
Speaker 2:And, but in Newsom's case, his best is not where it needs to be. So, please resign, Newsom.
Speaker 1:So who, who do you who you got? Because Rick Caruso seems like the obvious pick for LA mayor, who should step in as governor.
Speaker 2:Man, I I'm not a, my opinions on Newsom have only been from spending my entire life in California and getting to become an adult as his reign of terror, you know, was going on. And so I'm not a political I I don't have a lot of, I don't follow the the the the sort of people in the stable closely enough. I I don't think that Caruso after the Bass election wanted I I Yeah. Prior to the fires, I don't think he would have run the next time. He wasn't, like
Speaker 1:Now people are, like, demanding it from him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And and I think Caruso's incredible. He has the only structures basically in the Palisades Yeah. That are touching each other, that are still standing. So if that's not proof that he's competent, I don't know what is.
Speaker 2:But he's getting up there. I don't know if he wants to do it for your term. Yeah. But he would be a good pick. But, I know we just need new leadership across the board.
Speaker 2:It also I I also had another post. Karen, I it can't be shared widely enough, but, if there's one thing that will publicly, you know, sort of state that we do not, support, it is communist Karen Bass spent the first half of her career literally traveling to Cuba when it was illegal to travel to Cuba. So breaking the law, taking multiple trips, coordinating with the Cuban government to spread communism in the United States. She was praised by the biggest newspaper of the communist movement in the seventies as being the leader of the communist, and the group that she was involved with is, like, a violent extremist group. And this woman, failed upward into congress.
Speaker 2:She was a represent not not a she was in the House of Representatives representing California, came back, decided to become mayor, and even people close to her have said that she had no plan for her, you know, for her rule over Los Angeles. She just was the pick that would win, was the right person. And, anyways, so, and and and and Max Meyer posted this video. During in in a video on Sunday, she was talking about how we're gonna rebuild Los Angeles, and she was smiling through the whole thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That was really weird.
Speaker 2:It's like, how do you and and and Lulu was just ripping her apart because there's a science to addressing Yeah. People in that situation and and just couldn't so, like, clearly has no business running the city anymore. She needs to be recalled too. Gavin Newsom needs to be recalled too.
Speaker 1:My pick for governor, Dwayne The Rock Johnson.
Speaker 2:See, that's a good option.
Speaker 1:We had a great run with We
Speaker 2:don't actually yeah. Yeah. We had a great run with put the rock in. Yeah. And and Bass had no no insights or knowledge about entertainment works.
Speaker 2:Right? Like Yeah. She it's like somebody in Detroit not understanding manufacturing. Put the rock in. I mean, people talk about it.
Speaker 2:Entrepreneur. Yeah. He's an entertainment mogul.
Speaker 1:Yeah. He's the highest paid
Speaker 2:He has a huge neck.
Speaker 1:Huge neck. He's a mass monster.
Speaker 2:Mass monster. Crazy output. Yeah. Crazy workouts.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It's clear that, like, he understands the the WWE wrestling style of politics to, to be able to go up and give a rousing speech when that's needed. Like, if he was called upon
Speaker 2:to give a
Speaker 1:speech after this,
Speaker 2:he got Mel Gibson is another front runner for me. I I I
Speaker 1:You saw his you saw his
Speaker 2:His son is a buddy is a buddy of mine, a neighbor, actually.
Speaker 1:You saw you saw his comment? It was, like, his house burned down. He was, like, I'm free of my material things.
Speaker 2:Like, just stoic. He's actually stoic. Yeah. That's great. I've, you know, had a I've met him before at, birthday party, and he's he's a, I think he's a I think he's a good dude with good intentions.
Speaker 2:And, anyway, so
Speaker 1:I I'm I'm, like,
Speaker 2:very much looking forward to not ever having to talk about politics on this podcast again. But,
Speaker 1:let's move on to Tyler. He says a wild conversation with a public company CEO. He says they have a $10,000,000,000 plus market cap, And they say, our top of funnel is getting completely crushed because we were so reliant on Google, but a ton of people have switched to AI search, and we aren't there yet. One anecdote, but wow. I wonder what industry this is because I feel like for a lot of consumer products, the AI search hasn't really taken off, and the AI search has mostly been replacing more, like, informational stuff where you would land on Wikipedia, I go to AI for.
Speaker 1:But if I'm shopping for, like, a new suit or something, I'm not gonna go to chat gpt because it's just gonna, like, tell me about the suits generally, and I wanna, like, be able to click and buy or something like that. So I wonder what I don't know. I just think industry that
Speaker 2:is. This goes, Anne Skates was talking, last week about the sort of AI becoming these recommenders and how I I think a massive amount of, purchasing decisions will be driven by these sort of AI assistants that deeply understand you and your taste and get to disintermediate, you know, basically Google Ads and and random searches. Yeah. And this is already happening, so you can there's a there's something called, you can go on Delphi and, like, talk to somebody's clone and be, like, what magnesium supplement do you do you recommend? Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'll recommend that based on who that clone is is made around. There's another company called Dexa that that does, like, an AI chatbot just based on podcast, podcast transcripts. You can be, like, what, you know, what is so and so think about Yeah. This, and then it'll recommend the right product.
Speaker 1:Seems like, yeah, good like, even more important than ever to switch from SEO to influencer marketing because you wanna be baked into the LLM in a conversational way.
Speaker 2:That's true. That's true.
Speaker 1:Just like, oh, keyword search showed up.
Speaker 2:That's interesting. I never thought about that. I mean Yeah. My first company, Branded Native, runs
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hundreds of influencer ads a month for various consumer brands, and that's kind of an interesting thing of, like, you're building up this basically base of recommendations from
Speaker 1:All that will get baked in the LLMs much more so than some optimized SEO landing page.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So if you want to optimize, your results in LLMs, go to brandonnative.com. It's a company I started, when I was 22, and, spend a bunch of money through our ad network.
Speaker 1:There we go. Let's do, promoted post.
Speaker 2:Promoted post. This is a fantastic post. I mean
Speaker 1:This is our first horse post.
Speaker 2:Horse post and, there's been sort of, some ideas and thoughts out there that that we don't, you know, we're always you know, we we support horse girls that we we like the idea of horse girls. My daughter will be a horse girl, and we are horse enthusiasts.
Speaker 1:Yes. Equestrians.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. So this promoted post is from our friend, Tom Wilson at Tom Wilson horses, and he says, this is what double a rated 3,200,000 yearling looks like, lot 1007. He's got home affairs crossed with sunlight, and he has an entire video here just breaking down the incredible, ergonomics and muscle structure of this fine stallion. He says, the damn Nordic charm, second page, the damn Nordic charm is by charge forward, a group one winning sprinter and established broad mare sire.
Speaker 2:Although Nordic charm herself was unraced, she hails from a distinguished family.
Speaker 1:She is
Speaker 2:a half sister to Liberator, the champion stayer in Hong Kong for 2011 to 2012, and Pink Cyrus who produced group 2 winner Aetna. The family traces back to the illustrious miss Helga, a listed race winner and producer of quality offspring like Alexis, which is a group 3 winner for freshwater pearl. And, so, anyways, he's got a number of, and and another one in here just just while we're at it, lot 396. I am invincible across with fiery vista. This, is from, Tom Magner.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's only 1,100,000. Sure. So just
Speaker 1:So if you got a couple $1,000,000 burning a hole in your pocket, maybe you just sold the company to Atlassian, go pick up one of these horses and tell them that the technology brothers sent you.
Speaker 2:This might be our favorite colt in the sale. He's just a biomechanic and a geometric score.
Speaker 1:Fantastic. And people say it's a lot of money, but, I mean, look at it. It's a lot of horse.
Speaker 2:They're given this they're given this, sire away.
Speaker 1:Fantastic.
Speaker 2:So thank you to Tom, Wilson, and Fantastic. Get back to the show.
Speaker 1:Bucket pull. Oh, this is a good one. Paul Bukite, YC powder creator of Gmail, YC partner, says x should stop demoting links and instead use grok to attach a short summary of the linked content. It would achieve the same goal of keeping people on-site, but be less annoying. And, yeah, the demotion of links is really wild.
Speaker 1:We had a banger post that was completely silenced. The built different google.com post. One of our greatest of all time, and it was destroyed by the fact that links are true.
Speaker 2:The post was real posters, post links, and still do numbers.
Speaker 1:Built different.
Speaker 2:Google.com. Google.com. Built different. And It's lost. It had some early traction, and it just died off completely.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And the reason I was inspired by that, to be honest, is that Mark and Marc Andreessen is just not afraid to post links and just rip a link and still do numbers. Yeah.
Speaker 1:I
Speaker 2:think it helps to have millions of followers. You know, you can still, you you know, do numbers off of a big base even with the the algo. But post links don't let the algorithm rule your life, rule the algorithm.
Speaker 1:Completely disagree. I say it is disrespectful to Elon's culture to post links on x. He's very politely asked through some very clear subtle messaging that you should not post links. But, seriously, if you're a founder and you're trying to promote anything, just don't have the website in mind at all. Like, it needs to be fully x native, and that's why why do hide reels go viral?
Speaker 1:Why do threads and long posts go viral? When Lulu launched her company, what did she do? She posted a long post, the going direct manifesto, this won her brother of the year. And and she understands that, you know, why try and fight with one hand tied your time behind your back with a link down in the comments and all that stuff. Like Yeah.
Speaker 1:Just Tag your company. Take it all
Speaker 2:the way. Company have in your company's profile, have the the link in the profile.
Speaker 1:Just appeal to smart people who can figure it out. Like, just
Speaker 2:say I don't I don't I I think you the handhold. From a pure conversion rate optimization standpoint. One click to your company profile, your project profile, or whatever you're trying to promote, Link in that bio.
Speaker 1:Oh, shut down your company. Your company is now your x account. Your monetization is your revenue. Your x check is
Speaker 2:your revenue. $1,000,000.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of founders making more money from x monetization than their companies. This is the future. Everyone's an influencer. AI has taken all the other jobs. The last jobs.
Speaker 1:So you don't need to link out. You just need to post.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Get that check. Post that.
Speaker 1:Bait, and you're good. I do like that idea, though. Let's go to Noah Smith. This is some good news. We're winning the war on cancer.
Speaker 1:US death rates for all cancers from 1975 to 2022 have fallen significantly from a peak for of, for both sexes around 220, 210 per 100000 people down to sub 150. What do you think? I know this is good.
Speaker 2:I mean Good news. Hard for me to even think about that even though it's great news when, Noah is doing absolute numbers on subsect. Yeah. Absolute subsect size lower.
Speaker 1:At this point, he doesn't even need health care. He can just pay out of pocket if he gets cancer.
Speaker 2:That's dark, but, true. The guy is doing crazy numbers, has a bunch of paid subs, and, it's because, all the best journalism and, journalists in the world are growing independent. Yep. And, it's a death sentence for traditional media.
Speaker 1:It is. Yeah. He's done he's done well. Should we wrap it up there?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That's a good place to end the show.
Speaker 2:This is a fun show.
Speaker 1:Thanks for watching.
Speaker 2:Looking forward to tomorrow. Thank you.