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and you're watching tvpn it is Wednesday March 19th 2025 we are live from the Temple of Technology The Fortress of Finance the capital of capital this show starts now we got a great show for you today folks uh we're talking Nvidia uh
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GTC just happened uh the goat Jensen Wong the leather jacket killer dropped a bunch of impressive news we'll break it all down tell you what the Stock's doing uh also Nvidia is partnering with Taco Bell let's go huge this is a huge development Street have been begging AI
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powered tacos it's coming it's not a joke it's a real story also it's actually pretty interesting uh and then we're going to break down Intel what's going on with their new CEO whether or not Intel is going to split up this has
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been something Ben Thompson's been hammering for over a decade are they going to finally listen to him or is he going to change his tune he's uh breaking it all down in a new Strat update that we're going to take you through and then we have an interesting
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uh Deep dive into a uh defense contractor not a defense Tech founder but a defense contractor uh made s billion doll and became one of America's biggest alleged tax cheats uh very interesting story in the Wall Street Journal hopefully we'll have time to get
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to that but we also have a bunch of great guests so we're going to talk to some folks give you some news give you some updates but we got to start with some amazing news folks the astronauts are back they're back for the astronauts
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for NASA SpaceX every working together we don't typically hit gongs for returns from space but we should hit one for every day that they were in space 300 gong hits folks 300 gong hits you're going to be here all day it was supposed
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to be an 8 Day Tour it was supposed to be an 8 Day Tour they were up there for 300 days uh Clark on the timeline says how it feels to return honestly if you really love space though it's kind of an amazing opportunity I was saying that
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they pretty comfortable I think if I get an extra 292 days for free imagine you're at the on you book eight days and they're like do they get paid overtime by the way when when they're up in space I mean it's kind of a 247 they get frequent flyer miles they can just go
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back forever now it should be it should be something where every extra hour yep you're in space your comp your hourly comp sort of increases by 10% so it just goes parabolic if something goes bad like you just become like that's great
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it's like you Armageddon that movie where they're they're like okay we're going to have to go blow up the asteroid like what what do you guys want to be paid they're like we don't want to pay taxes ever again just these brows going up there to
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drill uh it's a great movie uh and uh Jack has some good commentary on the timeline as well he says if you put quote pod of dolphins greets stranded astronauts on Splashdown at the end of a movie like The Martian people would
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scoff and call it ridiculous and Jake in the comments says life is sometimes More Beautiful Than Fiction it's it's a beautiful thing I'm I'm just so happy they're back you know this turned into a little bit of like a not really like a
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culture War story but it was very much like oh like became a little political uh but I'm just so it's it's an inspiring story you know the astronauts made it through you know SpaceX came to the rescue NASA sorted it out no one got injured it's
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just great as the news we look a little bit silly not doing a sort of postgame press conference being out there in the water if you ever watch if you ever watch WSL which is this yeah not not your kind of thing uh but it's the the surf no no no it's the
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world surfing world surfing League um you uh they they they have a guy in the channel which is the section of the break just outside of where the waves are crashing and he's on a jet ski and he's sort of doing these sort of interviews so next time we have splash
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down we got to be there next time will O'Brien does a lot of work in the ocean he says uh there is something truly Divine about dolphins I believe they and Wales exist exist in a nearly entirely different class of animals to the rest
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they are hyper intelligent and frequently show incredible levels of knowingness I it would not surprise me if they know exactly what's going on in this situation that's cool well here's a little factoid you might uh be fascinated by uh there was a NASA Astron
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uh funded experiment in the 60s with a researcher named Margaret uh lavat and a dolphin named Peter and they did have uh they did have sexual encounters uh and but that's great Jord thanks for bringing that to the show it was Wonder
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it was a part of NASA was trying to have an experiment to see if they could teach the creatures to speak English so I think I've actually heard that story before anyway so anyways doph on something less controversial Donald Trump mentioned that uh that the the
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astronauts were indeed stranded Delian over almost a year ago said crazy that there are two American astronauts stranded in low earth orbit without a clear answer on how or where they're going to get home and no one's talking about he got community noted it was a
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whole backlash like total fight over the definition of stranded are they stranded they could come back any time but there's problems with the with the with one capsule and they're just doing tests and maybe they're just being abundance
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of caution and they actually could go if they needed to anyway uh the White House has issued a a statement and they said they rescued the stranded astronauts they use the word stranded and so that's probably how the history books will
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remember it they were stranded but they made it back thanks to I'm fias anyway imagine I I away from uh I was away in DC obviously on Monday I slept in a hotel on Sunday I can't imagine being away from my a sleep for 300 days that would be excruciating that
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probably the worst part about being stranded in space if you couldn't bring an eight sleep I imagine the eight sleep team would have tried to get eight sleeps up at but um like they did for the Doge team but I I can imagine there the transfer mechanism and and potentially
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the cost right and a sleep is you know very inexpensive compared to sending a capsule space so the delivery cost could have been a um well hopefully the team's on it uh eight sleep are nights that get that fuel your best days turn any bed
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into the ultimate sleeping experience we can't recommend an eight sleep enough let see how you did I am back you're back uh not at my best I got an 84 last night but I did sleep for oh I smoked you 93 let's go wow I IES I got a little bit cocky about two
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weeks ago remember I was dragging you averaging 80s I was in the 90s and then uh I let it get to my head we're back we're refocused and eight sleep is having a president day sale but our code uh for $150 off our code gets you $350
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off use and uh let's get back to the show uh well we have some breaking news here at the everything app is now worth $44 billion the valuation is a rebound for Elon Musk and its investors after the social media site was valued at less
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than 10 billion in September let's hear it for the X team folks this is great and Tyler the whole crew I got to just hand it to them like I think the X algorithm has never been in a better place yeah it's gone through eras there's been the slop era there was the
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maybe racist era where there's just like crazy politics all over the timeline and I feel like it's perfectly dialed where I'm seeing entertaining stuff I'm not missing any Tech news I'm seeing every all the high signal people you know the
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David holes from mid Journey WE Post like once every few days it's always really we did miss some news yesterday we a little bit but like I feel like if I'm on X I'm seeing everything that's uh everything that's relative to me and
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then also some fun stuff and it's the right balance so I I got to just give a round of applause to the X team they've just done fantastic they had to go they had to go to a dark place to get to their adjusted eida of 1.4 billion um and uh we're very proud
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of them and they're they're going to be launching payments soon so if you've ever if you've ever wanted to uh pay your mutuals you're going to get the chance to do that a whole lot more we covered this this sort of repricing I
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think like a month ago at this point it was rumored and now it's confirmed it's great to see um but congrats to everyone at at at um fantastic work I mean the platforms get better and I actually went and and did a did a little tour of the other
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platforms to see just like could we even multistream our show over on threads blue sky and the functionality just is not there like I think Blue Sky limits videos to like three minutes long it's like can't upload a thre hour show if it's limits three minutes it's
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ridiculous are they trying to fry the attention of their users they must be yeah could be a dark it was funny when we talked to Joe Wi and all about that and he was like sheepish like no no I actually really like X like I I just
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post there every once in a while like you know it's kind of dodgy I was like I genuinely wasn't trying to like call him out on that like I was like should we be doing that because like I want as much reach as possible like I you see this as
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a business this is about money more than anything else as we've said multiple times uh anyway speaking of money and guys who make a lot of it Jensen Wong uh hosted a uh massive conference for NVIDIA he called it the super bowl of AI which we love we love sports analogies
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in Tech uh they announced the new Reuben AI chips and some corporate Partnerships so uh I love the title of this Nvidia CEO says AI Computing needs to Surge 100 fold uh which is like imagine I mean it's pretty great that he can go out and
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say this and everybody get gets fired up if a if a pharmaceutical CEO came out and said you know uh usage of ssris needs surge 100 fold everybody would get pretty angry but uh we love the chips we love the chips I don't even think the
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Celsius CEO could say that about Celsius usage of Celsius needs to Surge 100f fold the GDP demands it we get 10% GDP growth SAA called it but he called it for the wrong reason yeah it's Celsius I mean unironically usage of our sponsors needs to Surge 100 fold yeah
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like there should be hundreds of more custo hundred this is why we we want to see companies doing large scale m&a using watches go acquire you know two million daytonas and go you know always the Daytona it's Common Ground common ground
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it's just it's just a store of value it's the Bitcoin of the watch world I suppose it the gold uh anyway the Wall Street Journal is breaking it down here chief executive Jensen Wong tried to quell investor concerns about the artificial intelligence boom Tuesday at
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an event he dubbed the Super Bowl of AI the world will need a 100 times more computing power for advance AI than it considered necessary a year ago he said at the conference that has grown from a sleepy chip developer gathering in
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Silicon Valley to a rock concert like event that filled a hockey arena I love it AI expansion into models that can reason and act as agents to carry out tasks for humans who require far greater computational Firepower which comes from the kind of chips that Nvidia
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manufactures uh Jensen Wong said this year this last year this is where almost the entire world got it wrong and shares have been volatile since the release of deep seek but there's also been a lot of other things going on in the market
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since January obviously tariffs and just general Trump you know what's going on there there's been other competition other other entrance Nvidia Intel's retooling as we'll go into but there's a lot going on so uh and then the Market's
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just been selling off as a whole um a model uh so deep seek was released basically wants to put the word out that we're back up yes that's exactly it we're back up uh a model released by a Chinese startup that said it had built sophisticated AI
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models that required fewer of nvidia's chips uh that led some investors to question whether future AI systems will need fewer Nvidia chips for training and day-to-day operations some jevans Paradox disrespects right there oh bad
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day for those for those investors potentially we'll see never never disrespect a paradox because it'll come back to bite you it will so-called reasoning model spend more time thinking those the internal reasoning tokens that I'm sure you're familiar with about a
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problem before delivering an answer they break each prompt down into steps a process that is best used for complex problems according to companies building those models they might generate so much data that computing speeds will need to
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increase to process that data quickly for users we've all seen this users won't want to wait 10 times longer to get an answer that relies on 10 times more data he said the Deep research is kind of the canonical example it's fine to go fire off a query and then come
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back 10 minutes later but it'd be better if it came back back immediately yep and that's what we want from Nvidia baby uh Wong also spent time hyping up AI agents which are designed to complete complete tasks such as booking flights or making
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dinner reservations for humans agents often rely on reasoning models required funny this is the simple use case that we're all just begging one person to build yeah yeah it's like to book a flight I do think this is one of those things that it's one of those things
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that's so deeply obvious but if you just built a really good version of open ai's operator but for booking flights and hotels you could probably get to some ridiculous run rate and yeah you're going to get cloned and wrecked by Fang
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eventually but you're going to have a glorious you know few years where you can just run glorious secondary sales maybe some dividends in there you're it's going to be a good run yeah um the amount of computation needed is easily a
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hundred times more than we thought we needed this time last year reiterating the point let's go he's like analysts I am the analyst now oh ections we were we were off by 100x actually and it's and it's bullish it's bullish it's great uh but this is the
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real story he unveiled a new line of chips called Reuben that are expected to be available in the second half of 2026 and so uh Nvidia has uh chip series but then also they they they package those chips so they do chip iterations based
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on the different um the different uh manufacturing technology and then they package those into the gaming versions which are like the the 2080 the 39 the 490 the 90 and then they also do the a100 h100 ETC and uh just a little insight here because we were talking
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about name popularity yesterday Reuben is the 200 2,924 most popular name in the United States I expect this to Surge Bay in 2026 as Reuben rolls out people just kind of get it in their head little baby r Reuben comes into the world do you
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think Reuben sandwiches will become more popular that's true you know what's the reuben sandwich trade yeah got to get on public andate it's a little bit of we've seen Jimmy John's dominate the App Store charts where you go to get a reuben and
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then you get on open Ai and you inference some reasoning models using Reuben chips yeah it's just Reuben all the way down yep the Reuben yes yes the Reuben underpins Ruben theory of AI adoption uh the AI super chip named after the astronomer who discovered Dark
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Matter that's a cool name is set to have more than three times the Computing capabilities of the ult ra chips an ultra version of the reuin will offer 14 times the performance of the Blackwell he said uh the reuin will need to be a
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monster hit to meet Skyhigh investor expectations for the chipmaker analysts expect this series of Nvidia chips to generate nearly 40 billion in Revenue in their first year of sales and more than 95 billion in their second year according to consensus estimates uh
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Nvidia shares were down though by more than 3% after the presentation concluded slightly more than the tech heavy NASDAQ composite where there was a Broad tech selloff along with declines in the S&P 500 so we are reaching bare Market
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territory not sure if we're fully in it yet but it's been rough couple if you put 100K into Nvidia when they went public I'm going to run the numbers here you would have oh I it just needs to be adjusted for the stock PL but yeah yeah anyway
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you'd have a lot of money folks it'd be good you have a lot of money but you'd also be very old and uh nothing is more valuable than your youth yeah um and just being in the game uh the company also announced Partnerships with General Motors to help
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provide underlying technology for its autonomous driving Fleet as well as a partnership with Disney Google deep mine called Newton that can simulate physical systems the time has come for robots W said noting that there is growing shortage of human labor true uh this is
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an area where Nvidia can build on its Legacy as a gaming company which demanded it create virtual worlds in which objects and people behaved as they would in the real world with a slow thinking capability idious physical AI can help robots
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perceive and reason about their environment and fast Long's focus is actually amazing oh yeah if you think about if most CEOs that had gone on this run yeah would start to let it get to their head they'd start cell phone comp you know they'd start mobile device
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companies he'd be buying humanoid robotics companies like he would just be doing a lot of stuff they have such a big balance sheet yeah and you just don't see him doing that he's just like focused on the next the next chip hasn't
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gone into fabrication it's strong partner of tsmc no word that he's trying to get into that market and then also you know even the gaming chips like they never they they never even did like an Alienware style like oh we make a gaming
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computer I think they do actually make a a computer that you can buy now that you plug into a monitor and keyboard and you can inference AI on it um but that's it's like a very very small extension very small adjacency um I was I was looking at like a summary of AI of
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Nvidia history and the the the the the AI summary that came up with it was like Nvidia pivoted to Ai and it's like it's so funny because I guess they did in the sense that they were originally um uh like the whole story of Nvidia is they
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came out of like scientific Computing needing to run more calculations in Labs then Graphics kind of came up and people realized you could uh with parallel Computing you could render individual pixels all simultaneously as opposed to
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a CPU so you get this massive speed up then and then they took off during the gaming boom um and then ultimately the and you were a big driver of of a lot of that yeah momentum and growth because you were gaming super hard to i' I've
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built multiple computers with many Nvidia gpus they're fantastic they're the best um but uh but then yeah obviously AI came up and that was kind of I feel like it was like ground up in the sense that like the AI researchers really said hey we can run our
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algorithms faster on Nvidia gpus and then the Cuda ecosystem kind of blossomed from there um but it was it doesn't feel like it was like a a deliberate pivot from Nvidia but they still were a massive beneficiary and that's what has added what like two
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trillion dollars to their market cap in the last couple years it's great Jensen is doing a lot of heavy lifting for all the robotics compan companies because he says everyone pay attention this could very well be the largest industry of all
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yep I love it I mean it makes sense if you look at the labor market it's pretty big this is crazy uh hotel rates in uh San Jose were up to $2,500 a night as the city was festooned in Invidia colors restaurants and coffee shops will earn
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their entire month's rent over the course of a few days San Jose mayor Matt Mahan said in an interview hosting the event will be a test for how the area handles the Super Bowl and the World Cup next year so really was the Super Bowl of AI it's great but you know what
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Jensen Wong's Achilles heel is or his Achilles wrist uh doesn't wear a watch that is true and yet his cousin Lisa Sue over AMD does has got some hitters hitters and so Jensen you got to go to bezel you got to get a luxury watch bezel has 23,500
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luxury watches fully authenticated inhouse by bez's team of experts go pick something up pick up a hitter make a statement we'd love to see it make a statement and you can bet that we will be doing wrist checks it's fascinating
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that he's a jacket guy but not a watch Guy usually they go they go hand in hand sometimes one is a gateway drug he probably has something he just hasn't really one of my favorite jacket guys is also just like it's you know two sides
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yeah of the same coin you know okay well moving on to more Nvidia news we got tacos folks AI is will soon take your order at Taco Bell and Pizza Hut Nvidia is partnering with yum brands that owns Taco Bell uh and it's an interesting story uh basically when you go to the
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drive-thru instead of talking to a human over a very scratchy voice line where they can barely hear what you're saying uh you'll just talk to an AI agent essentially and it's kind of the most constrained conversation you can possibly have you're just ordering from
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a list of like 20 items so you can you can very easily use an open source technology like whisper or any sort of you know speech to text to get that in there and then map that to oh they were saying cheeseburger they probably meant
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this they probably meant Big Mac we can clarify that so so the thing here that's interesting maybe we'll get into it in a bit but this feels like sass yes it feels like Enterprise SAS yes is this potentially a marketing oriented partner
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ship but why is NVIDIA trying to deliver voice AI at the applica you know the Enterprise so that's what's interesting is that is that the actual IP of the SAS lives with yum brands and so so they're developing it in house yes so yum brands
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and they're buying their has a CTO a chief digital officer and Technology officer Joe Park and he said they're using nvidia's tools to build but they're building it inh house rather than relying on third party vendors with prepackaged apps so what what's the
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thing that people always steal out of cars the catalytic converter sure so the new catalytic converter is just stealing the gpus from Taco Bell you know they have like onsite gpus people just ripping them out they're like they got
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Ru they got Ru black wells in there you just got to go it's 100K you know quick uh and that and that becomes the new hot scam yeah no I I think it'll be cloudbased hopefully well that's the whole thing like why do they need to why
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do they need to actually if they're partnering Nvidia and they're actually buying I mean have you ever read those articles about like Chick-fil-A's uh like devops team they're like one of the most like high perform yeah they're cracked and they're just like really
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good because they have to deliver the software like distributed on the edge because it can't always go back to the headquarters because it needs to be like quick you can't have delays every time you push a button so they host it all Lo
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and they deploy all this and there's all the security stuff and they're actually like really really good do you think recruiters are just on LinkedIn reaching out to to these super senior it's like Jane streak guys the recruit just they don't ask hey
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would you be open a new rols saying what do you think about Chick-fil-A and the person comes back they're like I love Chick-fil-A bro I eat it every day for sure uh and so uh he said we want to own the dig the intellectual property this is the head of Yum's uh
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Yum Yum brands technology division uh they operate 61,000 restaurants and uh Park Joe Park says we want to own the intellectual property we want to own the technology that's a shift in our strategy as we think about AI uh and they and they
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recently announced bite by yum a proprietary platform that will house the new apps uh and park is the president of the they want that Tech multiple so bad yeah they're up two% on uh in the in the last uh few days are they uh yeah you're
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on public okay yeah yeah uh third party vendors however will have a role in certain areas the company said uh Andrew Sun nvidia's director of AI business development for retail say said the partnership was unique for NVIDIA partly
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because Yum's Advanced in-house Tech Talent the Yum team was primed to take advantage of Nvidia tools and application Frameworks like its Nim microservices which is designed to Aid AI development uh Yum's 2000 technologists they have 2000 programmers
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and tech people basically they will use invidious software to build apps that leverage open source models and take full advantage of the computing power of nvidia's gpus Nvidia will also provide guidance and advice building in-house
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with Nvidia helped bring the cost down Park said since the AI chip giant helped yum maximize every bit of compute on Nvidia gpus I love it as a result the app scale better and and seamlessly fit into Yum's Tech stack he added I mean you know you're talking about SAS and
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like the tech multiple there isn't there is an argument where this is much more aligned economically with Yum brands because yes they have to Fork over the money to buy Nvidia chips but then they kind of get the Nvidia software probably
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Loosely for free CU I think lot of these are like open source projects that are maintained by Nvidia and uh I I know someone who works at Disney on like the ride development and when they build a new ride they use the most cuttingedge
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technology so they go and they they they'll actually build something that looks like an Nvidia gaming computer and when you walk into like the Star Wars Star Tours like whatever's driving that simulation is the best at the time but
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then once they build the once they build it they lock it in and it stays there for like 40 years and so they're am izing that R&D cost as well as the capex of whatever chips are running there over a long time and then it's good and it's
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it's loved and people don't really expect it to change and so for young Brands it kind of makes sense that it's like okay yeah we're going to figure out exactly what what Hardware do we need to actually take someone's order effectively Y what software do we need
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and then yeah we don't really want to pay a SAS license forever to some company that's like shipping a lot of a lot of the SAS companies are trying to they would they would set the pricing for young brands cool uh we have this Tool uh you know there there's no uh you
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know minimum commit but you've got to pay you know 10 cents in order and look how much money you're saving because you don't have to use um you know a human to take the order but then but then eventually they they say well we're
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doing millions of orders a day and this gets very expensive very quickly and you know you're just sort of at some point replacing the cost totally yeah I mean the the the rise of online ordering and like I guess digital channels is
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remarkable uh Yum brands took 19% of orders through online channels basically their app uh in 2019 uh it's up to 50% already prei just just the app being popular a lot of people when they show up to McDonald's they order on the app and then they just pick it up because
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they're like I'm going or it's faster than waiting in the line and young Brands wants to get to 100% uh through digital channels rather than humans and this is kind of the last step you already walk into some McDonald's and there's like kiosks you just push and in
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a lot of in a lot of airports is the same thing and so consumers end up spending more when they buy via digital channels Park maintains because the restaurant can upsell personalize and entice eaters through notifications and
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that is critical as the fast food industry faces a pullback amid inflation concerns and churning Economic Policy we love everything about digital sales Park said The more we can create channels whether it's voice ordering whether it's
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going to be tied to our kiosks whether it's going to be tied to AI Investments to help a customer go to our mobile app I think all of these things add up to helping these in these economic environments it is wild to think that these major food operators
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are trying to replace human labor at the customer interaction level and in the kitchens Y and there's going to be this sort of squeezing effect where eventually it's easy to imagine and not even too distant and not even the twoo
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distant future that there's one employee one human employee per location who's just walking around sort of monitoring making sure everything's you know getting served properly and then eventually it's just one human for every five locations and they just sort of
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drive around uh and then eventually uh we're all paper clips this was this was actually mapped out in this sci-fi book I think it's book called The the automat I think that's what it's called it's basically a cafeteria that you walk into
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and I mean it's the it's the vision of what you see at like an Amazon store where there's no checkout basically there's just these uh I think this is actually a real place in New York in like the 50s or 60s and they'd put the food in these like little Cubbies and
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then you could just say like okay I want cheeseburger you open it up you take it and you pay for it and uh Dave fredberg actually started a company that was kind of in the same vein called eza that was the same idea where you would when you
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walked into the store you didn't see any human beings you would just see okay I you know tap some buttons or swipe my credit card or or tap on the mobile app and then my order is just there and behind the scenes there were still people making the food but his vision at
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the time was to make uh to automate everything on the back end as well and so yeah you kind of attack it from both sides and then eventually you just get to yeah like you know the truck shows up and fills up the slop of fire and the
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meat goes in this way and the carbs go in that way and you slop it all together and everyone just takes the H cows walking in cows walking in one side it's great humans coming in to just grab the food on the the other they don't even see each other
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yep um speaking ofk be speaking of cows on the 101 right now there's a billboard that that says by Peta right around all the people whose homes burned down that says meat brought the Heat and basically blaming all the fires on um all the
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fires on uh just humans loving a steak here there um but uh anyways we don't talk about uh politics animal rights on the show this is a business show yeah uh well if you are encouraged by that news or maybe discouraged by that news uh why don't
30:37
you go over to public.com and uh you know place your bet on Nvidia are they going up are they going down we can't tell you but you can figure it out for yourself and remember you can do a lot more than just bet on Nvidia uh with the most extreme High leverage puts and
30:51
calls you can possibly imagine you can also do multi encourage industry leading yields they're trusted by millions folks so go over to public.com and sign up and start investing anyway yeah it would be awesome if somebody did a take private
31:05
of pea and then you could sort of trade against it's almost like a prediction Market on you keep saying take private but you mean take full profit take for profit take for profit you mean take for profit yeah yes yeah yeah exactly take
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for profit I mean we've said this they already know where all the most delicious endangered species live and so they could easily start selling those rights to Hunters and and poachers like overnight they could be printing
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printing money yeah and so I mean it's a it's just a fantastic Economic Opportunity that's insane we've we've spent decades developing a map of like where all the most exotic animal animal are and now it's time to capitalize capture all the value trade it a THX
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multiple and just just go to the Moon Yeah but they could the same framework they do for what are the hunting license like the you've got to get like a tag or whatever so they could they could uh you know do some um proper demand planning
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around those ecosystems and and make sure that there's real longevity in those markets for sure for sure well we got to uh uh we we got a guest joining in three minutes so uh we're going to set this up with some timeline post that
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we saw uh you know we never talk about politics on the show but uh the JFK files broke and there's a tech angle so we wanted to talk about that um so uh Brett Favre I don't think that's the that's must be somebody impersonating the famous quarterback um maybe it's the
32:41
actual quarterback I don't I don't actually know um but uh I doubt Brett says uh I don't have enough life to go through 70,000 JFK files uh anyone know what really happened so I I reading from this I don't actually know Brett Favre
32:58
it is the real Brett Favre okay it's the uh he says he's in his bio he says it's the for gamer one time pig skin thrower C film okay so uh Brett Favre you know Trump released the JFK files there's 70,000 documents out there relating to the JFK assassination JFK's
33:16
presidency um and uh swyx I believe that's swix host of a great podcast on AI says all you chat with PDF MFS you have been prepared ing your entire life for this don't miss your shot and George saula friend of the show who's coming on
33:33
in a few minutes says we've processed all 80 plus K all 80k pages of the JFK files with AI what questions do you want to ask well we're going to ask him a bunch of questions in just a few minutes uh yeah it's almost like they time the
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JFK file release with generative AI so that the Gen companies could get a layup and demonstrate the power of the technology for I think Biden said that he was just like you know I would have released them but llm technology just wasn't there the context Windows just
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weren't big enough I was waiting to be able to do proper rag on these uh anyway uh Devin AI tweeted uh Prime will de Pew would have embedded the entire J JFK files and shipped a rag enabled chat app by now and I was just like what is this
34:22
post cuz I think this is like from the official corporation like this is from cognition yeah yeah and it's a very funny post they're posters and it's like it's so Insider speaking of will he's coming on the show he's coming on the show next week this next post I was I
34:36
was ly I I was laughing at this earlier he says 10 things I learned in YC winter 2025 one never let no one know how much dough you hold two never let them know your next move three never trust nobody four never get high on your own Supply
34:55
five never sell no crack where you rest at six that credit Deb it seven keep your family and business completely separated money and blood don't mix like okay all right uh eight never keep no weight on you nine if you ain't getting
35:12
bagged stay the F from police 10 if you ain't got the clientele say heck no it really hits when you censor it like that it's fantastic Jord you do a great job we need a we need a like a be button so whenever there's a swear word we just hit that instead of saying the
35:31
word yeah very funny uh and yeah long long long history of of rap lyrics in in uh in Venture and I think we have George joining the show right now George how you doing I'm good I'm good is that a is that a white claw or a Celsius on your
35:48
desk this is a Celsius oh very good very fantastic P PG-13 I love it are you are are you a white claw in the middle of the day guy uh no I'm I'm I'm just a third cup of coffee guy okay so yeah uh where do you Max where do you
36:05
max out where do where do you hit your your sort of zone of genius with caffeine is it in the the 300 milligram range higher lower you know I think uh the the unfortunate thing with caffeine is uh I'm probably like half a cup of coffee and then it's just less
36:23
productive I I think I think I think it actually just distracts you slightly you need to be like so you got to go so you go for three because so you're just so good at what you do that you got to make it a little bit harder to have fun is
36:36
that is that it it's when when you're when you're jet lagged or delayed you then you then you've got a kind of discount or or you need to rely on Lucy or or you know all the different John cougan things but um today we're on three cups of coffee okay oh you're on
36:51
three cups of coffee is that because you're diving into the JFK files can you break us down uh what have you found so far take us through the story that is uh that is actually why I I'm am on three cups of cups of coffee I was I
37:03
was up late responding to to different uh you know conspirators on the internet but yeah last night uh as as many folks know there was a dump of 80,000 formerly unreleased pages with no redactions uh to the JFK files uh for the Trump presidency uh and
37:24
obviously no one has time to read through 80k pages of like scribbles and scratch and and and a bunch of of scann documents from the 70s and uh we uploaded them to our system that usually looks at virtual data rooms and a bunch of of Financial
37:39
and legal documents and instead just toss them all in there and like instantaneously had access to an AI that could look over them um a lot of interesting things that that came up some of which I can talk about on this
37:53
on this podcast or or or I guess live live live show um and some of which I'm I'm I'm probably less keen on there's definitely like a variety of different mentions of multiple Shooters um there were a few different mentions that people thought were of
38:08
UFOs but in reality it was OCR getting stuff wrong so there's nothing too interesting on on UFOs um but then there's also and I'm trying to pull back into some of the old questions that I was being asked uh a variety of different mentions of folks like uh I
38:27
believe Jay Garrett Underhill who was interestingly enough um you know someone that a lot of conspiracy theorists believe was assassinated uh by the CIA for going in claiming that it was a CIA um inside job uh the a very interesting piece of the
38:46
entire you know uh dump is that you might think like if you were to guess who are the most mentioned people you know you might me you might guess that it's like you know Lee Harvey oswal and and JFK and a VAR of other people but it goes like in if you extract all the
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entities from every document JFK is first John Kennedy is second so you know just double mentions of JFK then Central Intelligence is the third most mentioned you know entity in the documents then Fidel Castro so so there's there's there's I
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believe if you actually pull up 18 documents that are thoroughly about Fidel Castro wow and then the fourth entity is FBI director and FBI agency so as you kind of go down the list you can actually see like lots of mentions of Cuba lots of mentions of the
39:37
CIA and the FBI um but but not as much on the on the the other standard people that you know folks would usually go and look into a lot of documents also mentioned Martin Luther King Jr do you think uh applications of of
39:54
your guys's tech and and more broadly some of these models can help us just get a better understanding of History right for every big story like you know the JFK assassination there's just like this incredible amount of evidence some
40:08
of which is real some of which is not uh they're all from different sources and it's almost uh if you have one human that sort of dedicates their life to the topic they can sort of figure out the truth behind it is it possible that that uh this is obviously not what uh you
40:23
know what what heia you guys are working on right you're sort of uh f focus on the Enterprise but uh do you see a world where we just get a better understanding of these sort of major historical events by kind of hacker historians uh leveraging you know what
40:39
you guys are doing here with with the chat with the JFK files product yeah I think that ultimately uh a lot of history is subjective and the history books are written in a way that like presents always one side of the story um and as
40:55
you see a shift away from from what I would call like syntheses right like history books towards people using first party knowledge and then orchestrating uh effectively an AI over whatever they'd like or whatever question they'd like you'll actually start to see people
41:10
change uh and the way that they work and the way that they understand history the way they understand historical events change and just like social media allows you to basically validate your own beliefs I actually think AI can be used
41:22
as a tool to present like any side of an argument whether good or bad uh and that just means that there's less uh maybe social control that traditional Media news outlets and Publishers of books would have over like the cultural Z and
41:37
how people refer to historical events do you think there's uh I mean now that people are so aware of documents will be embedded in llm systems and this is how these large troves are processed there's some sort of metagaming going on where
41:55
you know if I wanted to implicate you in the JFK files I could have released 80,000 files from JFK and then added another 200,000 files just about George and all of a sudden it's going to look people are gonna oh well why is George
42:10
mentioned so much and you know they don't really realize that these are completely unrelated but by by contextual contextualizing them as like one block all of a sudden I'm kind of like data poisoning it is that do you think that's going to happen in the
42:24
future yeah so so interestingly um if you look at if you look at things like rag models so traditional like retrieval augmented generation uh and you ask questions like who are the people mentioned you can data poison it one of the things that you're seeing with a lot
42:41
of deep research products like heia and so this is just like a differentiator between heia and trategy BT Enterprise or between heia and and even like the perplexity spaces product is that instead of like going in pcking a search
42:54
engine heia goes in reads every single file and tells you whether or not they're related or not so it's not search engine it's more infinite effective context window so the AI can process a lot more information and and using that uh it's
43:08
it's better about you know having slightly less bias or like having the data skewed in like a in a way that um you know a search engine might speaking of context windows I know that there's been like a little bit of an arms race Google I think has like the biggest one
43:23
at like a million tokens uh are you is that important lever to pull when you're building your product in your system like is that a important optimization vector or is it just let's find the smartest model or the cheapest model or
43:38
maybe cost doesn't even matter because of your clients what are you optimizing for um ultimately we're trying to build the product that an AGI with infinite resources and infinite intelligence with use MH we're not trying to build the AGI
43:53
or the model or like the longer context window we're trying to build an agent orchestration platform where you wouldn't judge uh you know a a artificial super intelligence by its ability to use an abacus or to like to do computations in its own context
44:09
window you would judge it by its ability to use a tool like Excel to do structured data processing uh similarly we think that like the best way to do unstructured data processing won't even even be in a larger effective context
44:21
when for one model but rather ways for it to orchestrate sub models to do computation on every file and so if you look at what's going on with the JFK files you're actually having one God model orchestrate a bunch of other smaller models and read with
44:34
full attention over every document but not you know you you know have to jam that all into one infinitely long context window it's an infinite effective context window was there any like pre-processing that you had to do with the files because I imagine a lot
44:48
of these are like screenshots or like photos of like pretty messy scans of documents like it's not exactly like a Json file uh a ton of of different processing one of the the worst parts of like running an AI company like processing old
45:06
documents is that the documents like aren't are messy and like ideally you'd want like a multimodal model that could process pictures of every document and do that more expensive even slower there's you know it's there's a context
45:19
window issue there yeah uh so what we do is we we have probably the highest throughput indexing and like a highest accurate accuracy index ing engine that will actually use multimodal models for really hard documents sometimes use like
45:32
standard OCR do like cable and layout detection and all this other stuff to feed it into something that llms can like process in an easy way can you talk a little bit about the history of the company because you started like before the AI boom and I remember you
45:47
describing the company early on and I was like ah that sounds kind of cool and then like I saw you again like a couple years later I like oh this guy's working on like the hottest thing in the world so uh how did you s like what's the
45:58
prehistory of the company uh prehistory is uh I think I I made an early bet on large language models and and it paid off um I was in a PhD at Stanford uh and I was working on honestly just studying metal learning because I thought it would be a really important piece of
46:14
technology and as kind of like summer of 2020 unfolded uh open AI destroyed all of our research they released a paper on gpt3 which was hey large language models are meta Learners and it took like the academic world that was trying to build
46:31
aan we like okay you're never going to do it it's going to happen uh in a close s way and and open AI will probably be the people that that invented and so I think being close to that shift and being close to the realization that this
46:43
technology was going to be important early on was like okay I should probably leave my PhD and this will be the most important product and technology that I can build and then spent the next two years like in the desert searching for
46:58
customers that would pay for anything but building the best possible Enterprise product that I thought future agents that I thought future people working alongside llms would want uh and that just set us up to strike in a really fast big and Market grabbing way
47:14
when the iron was hot that's awesome I think oh please you're you're focused on the Enterprise but I'm I'm just interested to get your opinion here because we we talked about it uh yesterday with Scott from cognition do you feel like we're close to have you
47:31
have you seen any teams get that you're excited about around like building a truly great consumer AI agent we've sort of been promised for a long time this like workflow of like Hey we're going to book a flight it'll book your hotel
47:44
it'll do this and and we just haven't there's no dominant product that's doing that today I'm curious just to get your opinion there do you feel like we're close to that super super magic moment other than the sort of chat gbt sort of
47:59
conversational chat search people talk more about like super intelligence timelines than they do about just like AI booking me a flight yeah I want to know I want to know your flight booking agent timeline yeah that's what I want
48:12
to know it's definitely more near term than super than paper Cliff yeah yeah um paper Cliffs are are your airplanes I would say um useful agents in consumer almost assuredly will be solved by the big model providers and so it's almost like the
48:33
worst space for a startup to work in honestly there's a million startups now building B2B AI like trying to compete with us and a bunch of our other competitors are trying to build it's like it's already too late like if the whole world's trying to do it like
48:45
you're already way too late like that you have to you have to start way before everyone's trying to build it um but I I think it will be done by open AI this year or sometime in the next year um I don't think it's going to be a startup
48:58
that doesn't and I think it's just not because it requires Partnerships it requires like honestly API handshakes between agents uh and and and apis of external providers like Delta and United and and I think that'll be that'll be a problem that requires uh a large
49:13
language model scale company uh a training Scale company to yeah I think that's a good point we have the antibot industrial complex that's just like pres preventing Bots everywhere and so if you're trying to build a consumer AI agent that's just a a rebranded bot it's
49:28
very hard to do unless you're open Ai and you can go to Door Dash and say look like let's do this deal our users want this we're going to be able to drive you know an a very meaningful amount of traffic so well can you give us an
49:39
update on kind of uh where the company is where people can find you and uh just kind of wrap it up because we got to move on to the next guy absolutely um the company is heia AI you could just search heav on Google and then click on
49:54
one of our paid ads to drive up our custom acquisition cost and it's hea.com now I noticed you got the there was someone squatting on that for like you know uh the longest period of time and I was like they they know exactly who I am they're just going to
50:09
charge me a crazy of money for it um but yeah you can find us on on he AI or he.com and I'm George saula on Twitter at gulka and we should be releasing as as the Trump Administration uh releases more files a variety of other interesting like AI deep Dives so give
50:25
follow and big fan of this uh of this show thanks for thanks for calling in yeah it's F fantastic way to just demonstrate the power of the product and and thank you for your public service appreciate talk soon bye citizen techno
50:39
journalist citizen techno journalist uh my two favorite uh Wild Card JFK conspiracies uh the driver was responsible people think that there's this conspiracy theory you want grab the Hat John yeah yeah the hat so people think that the driver was responsible
50:56
because uh there was like an there's a burst of acceleration right at the wrong time and it shows that like maybe he was in on it like slowing the car down to make the shot easier and then the really crazy conspiracy it was a suicide by JFK
51:10
he wanted to like send a message to someone and so he was like I'm going to die for this so he got Str I mean I guess but there's an unlimited amount of conspiracies about the crazy thing is is I do believe there was there was truly
51:24
many many documentary released all at the same time yeah and it was just intentional like I'm sure the truth was always in there somewhere anyway let's move on to Topher from albo Welcome to the stream wow that is a great background W the command center the
51:39
command center and the command center congratulations thank you thank you excited uh yeah young company uh Incorporated in 2020 right and first satellites in orbit already and breaking news you got to update your Wikipedia page because on albo Space it says the
51:58
company plans to launch its first satellite in 2025 that's old news old news yeah yeah hopefully someone updates that we need to figure out the Wikipedia thing yeah we started uh late 2020 and Y combinator winter 21 batch fantastic for
52:13
got to start wow hard tech in in YC another narrative violation uh but but break it down for me like what does the satellite actually do uh and like where is the path I see on the wiki again plan to have a fleet of 24 spacecraft is that
52:27
accurate are you thinking bigger and what happens when this constellation goes up yeah so so basically what we do or we we build satellites that fly super low in this new orbit called Belo very low earth orbit and so this first one they're pretty big they're like Walkin
52:42
freezer size we just launched this first one on Friday as the cak topper on transporter 13 so like the big satellite up top got dropped off in Leo there epic drop off video of us getting like dropped off right over the Nile um so
52:56
that super cool but the the kind of novelty that we're bringing is is building these satellites to operate in this very low orbit for an extended period of time and so then we can capture imagery or other things at at a resolution that today you can only get
53:10
from planes or drones on the commercial side or from the national systems on the government side so it kind of is a breakthrough in terms of the data quality at low cost that we can capture from this new orbit where there's a lot
53:21
of drag and and different things that have prevented people from building satellites that fly this low before but that's um that's what this first site will do and we'll get down there in about two months from Leo to voo so talk about just from when you started the
53:37
company there there had been plenty of high-profile you know space oriented companies but it feels like I I just can imagine there was way less just excitement and interest even then when you were starting the company how how have kind of conversations even on the
53:53
capital side shifted since then cuz I'm sure your inbox these days is is full of inbound uh but maybe wasn't always the case yeah definitely there's a lot more interest these days in in from the cap you know Capital allocation community on
54:09
the National Security technology side and for us so the where we got the idea was actually in in president Trump's first Administration he tweeted this um classified satellite image basically Declassified it as the president people
54:22
saw it they were like well this looks like 10 centimeters per pixel which is about the size of a coaster that you put your drink on must be from a billion dollar reconnaissance satellite would be amazing to have commercially because it
54:32
could replace planes and drones for all these industrial applications that go through the Pains of flying those platforms today but it would cost a billion dollars even from Leo because you need a huge telescope and so that's what initially drove the idea for very
54:43
low earth orbit at that time there was still say investors were still bullish on Earth observation as a whole today that is not generally the case uh it's been a tough market in terms of the capital that has gone in compared to
54:56
what come out for us tapping into that commercial aircraft and drone Market which is just super fragmented and the value prop is pretty obvious if you can match that resolution from space you have Global coverage it's on demand you
55:08
image spots much more frequently and it's much cheaper um and so the resolution is key there and then to to to the question on the National Security side there's this big shift right now to proliferated architectures because of counter space threats from our
55:22
adversaries that make our big bespoke satellites very vulnerable and so what has historically uh prevented that in a lot of ways is the capability trade-off where if you proliferate and build way more satellites than a few big bespoke
55:36
ones maybe the capability isn't as good in our case b Leo really unlocks these two things that have previously been mutually exclusive which is that Exquisite capability but at low cost so now you can spend that you know cost savings on proliferation which is much
55:49
more resilient creates much more coverage and so yeah it's definitely a good time to be to be launching this first satellite first civilia with with the Tailwinds underway on the National Security side uh speaking of National
56:02
Security when you see uh Espionage and Enterprise SAS does that keep you up at night your guys are obviously in a much more uh sort of critical uh industry in many ways SAS is important but also having sort of global visibility uh neck and neck really yeah
56:19
neck and neck but um but yeah you know how do you think that uh you know H how seriously do you guys have to take security given that you're processing all this very sensitive data definitely seriously and we we not only from like a the data perspective
56:37
but a lot of our technology is iar controlled and so that drives certain security levels we have a what they call a tier three license uh from the remote sensing regulatory body that means that we have additional kind of cybercity
56:50
requirements and so that has driven us to yeah think think about the cyber security and and those sort of things um early on because we had to but yeah I mean given given what we're doing and the you know the more exposure we have
57:04
now than we did years ago it's definitely uh yeah can you talk a little bit about the pros and cons of V Leo I mean I'm sure that you get you know higher resolution with smaller telescope uh I remember early on someone was telling me that you know oh imagine the
57:20
Hubble telescope you know just turn it around and point it at Earth and that's probably what the Spy satellites look like and uh there's probably some benefits there but then you're also Fighting Gravity so do you have like crazy booster capability is that what
57:32
you're optimizing for uh like just pros and cons of ILO yeah so the we would say actually the hardest part for our architecture in Vio is like the kind of Robotics Precision pointing control system technology that we need to build
57:46
because the satellite's moving so fast and we have this big telescope and a tiny angle and so being able to collect a bunch of different areas make those images not blurry that is where really the hardest part is for any big space-based telescope but especially in
58:00
beo but then there also is a lot of atmosphere there as well so we have a bunch of propulsion on board uh being heavy and having a slick area is pretty helpful for that and so like if you put I think historically a lot of people
58:13
have looked at Vio with Cube sets and those just don't last like very long there because you can imagine like a bowling ball vers a feather ripping through the atmosphere and so we we pack a ton of mass in these pretty big satellites with solar rays covering
58:27
everything because we keep them body mounted opposed to deploying out like traditional satellites which um which which hurt some of the power but then there's a bunch of like Atomic oxygen stuff there too and there's special
58:38
Coatings and things that we do for that and to protect the Optics and and the solar race so there's a bun there's kind of like a bunch of different categories the most obvious one is drag that uh for us our average mission life will be
58:50
about five years per satellite it's actually very dependent on the 11-year solar cycle um and the good thing about the drag though is it's a safe place to be so like from a space safety perspective there's concerns in Leo if Sally's break they're in orbit for you
59:03
know 50 100 years but in in beo it's like a matter of weeks or days and so it's a not you know it's a sustainable place to be uh has running this company made you want to travel more or less I could imagine you just get an image of
59:17
somewhere sometimes and you're like H been there feel like been there it looks like but I could also see it you see this place and you're like wow this looks Fant fantastic yeah there's no one else around I got to go baren Island I found not that you have
59:30
time to travel but you know someday maybe yeah yeah have definitely gotten better at at my geography skills uh running this company for four years but I mean we we will start getting our first pictures in a couple months when we get too so that's really when we'll
59:44
have H you know been there done that in terms of all the spots that we image and how do you think about the the the market size and the trade-off between commercial and government contracts I don't know how much you can talk about
59:55
the government size but but there's like famous examples of you know satellite imagery being used to see how many cars are in the Walmart parking lot and some hedge funds saying oh Walmart's going to miss on earnings because they didn't
1:00:07
have enough cars in the parking lot buying stuff and it's a proxy metric obviously hedge funds have a lot of cash they can pay for a lot of data it's maybe less cool than hey we're helping keep America safe but uh obviously it's a real market like you're running a
1:00:20
business you got to sell to whoever you can um how are you thinking about it in the early stage for customers so this first satellite will operate solo for the first two years then we'll start depl more in 2027 and we have um pre we
1:00:34
have this Reserve program because there's a finite amount of imagery capacity that we have and we've signed 22 customers on that and the the by far majority are commercial and it's a bread of different Industries like we have mining power lines agriculture uh
1:00:49
mapping um uh natural gas pipelines like a lot of these different kind of industrial use cases and so we we see a huge opportunity there not because there's any precedent for it because like kind of like I was saying the Earth
1:01:02
observation Market has not done as well as as it was hoped but from that aircraft and drone perspective and those proof points of those those contracts we have kind of strategically tried to cover a lot of those different applications so that for the first two
1:01:14
years we can demonstrate the value across those and we've we've like completely sold out of our capacity over over the United States as well as a few other regions our allies as well are very interested in this level of Exquisite data and so that will be a big
1:01:29
customer base for us and then from the kind of split with the National Security side um we have this you know not only this this Clarity satellite that we have but we've built the bus that we call Precision inhouse for the voo
1:01:41
environment and it can host these very large payloads and so from a platform perspective and these kind of proliferated but Exquisite Mission sets that's where some of the the opportunity with the US government will be along with delivering data from our set
1:01:56
but we also um you know see the need for these dedicated platforms and what vlo can bring to the table not only for just pictures but a lot of other things do you think the Dynamics of space have made you and the team better operators
1:02:09
there's so much around you know just sort of these long term planning Horizons like startups traditionally are like we're just trying to do this as fast as possible we're going to ship we're going to iterate but like that just doesn't you can't it doesn't that
1:02:21
you got to move fast but then you can't just you don't want to be breaking things it's expensive to get stuff up and then it sets you back years and that can be that can kill the company right so has that you know how's that impacted
1:02:34
how you you know build have absolutely like learned a ton um as a first- Time founder the last four years and it's been an amazing journey we uh I I think the main way we've approached that is just by hiring more experienced Engineers than the average startup would
1:02:51
and so that people know you know even whether they come from a new space or kind of a a tech uh world or like an OG Aerospace Prime World they know exactly what needs to be done from day one and so we've been able to move a lot faster
1:03:05
via that while still with this level of you know these aren't Cube sets these are like very complex space robots basically with Precision Optics and crazy control systems and so we don't have the uh thousand satellite production line where we're like doing
1:03:19
the on orbit testing constantly but we've spent more time testing on the ground and just kind of understanding you know the trade space from an architecture perspect perspective and I think that's helped us move faster even
1:03:29
though it is a complex capability and especially the learnings we'll take from this first one and I mean that we the commissioning that we're doing right now we're like um I think like two weeks ahead of our internal schedule because
1:03:40
you wouldn't expect to put up a Space robot and it just like it's not buggy and stuff you have to fix stuff and we've been our engineers in in here on the first day we're like is this actually the real data or is this simulated data because it's just kind of
1:03:52
working and I think a lot of that is just smart design like really good planning and that's all kind of a result of the engineering team and the bias towards you know the the seasoned experienced folks on that side it's fantastic great answer well we'll let
1:04:03
you get out of here soon last question how was DC DC was great um yeah I heard you were out there as well right uh yeah very the the podcast it's very important work we did uh manifest demo today which was awesome it was uh this event to kind
1:04:20
of present to different military and intelligence potential customers and users and it was we had the big mockup on stage of the satellite so you could see it to scale we had just done a pass where we had sent some dark dark pixels
1:04:33
through the payload sensor and um yeah yeah it was it was a great turn all the all the demos were honestly awesome like the the the guys that put on the event the everybody brought out it was it was pretty incredible to see all the tech
1:04:44
yeah Mike's a killer he's awesome event uh anyway uh thanks so much for stopping by this is fantastic a lot we be back soon cheers I want to see some of those photos yeah where where are you sending it first Aman right you send it to the Aman
1:04:59
and you and you zoom in so closely that you can read the capital allocators pitch deck that they have at the pool next to them and you can see what they're investing you talk about that good fundraising strategy right leave your deck yeah no just get a mole at
1:05:13
every Amon have them print out the deck janitor the janitor and have just leave them around the property leave by the hot tub leave them by the pool yeah whoever your head of spying is just embed them at the Aman as a janitor let
1:05:24
them let them kind of a 10 year game let them become the manager at Amiri and then you know and just sort of uh let let them become so embedded in the property uh and get the guests really trust them and say hey are you leading any series A's what's going on doing any
1:05:42
term sheets this week boom boom all it takes is one trade to make back all those stuff bags of cash it's great it is a very very cool company he was he was kind of alluding to Planet Labs we got Lee Jacobs and cyan here
1:05:59
go chain what's up congratulations guys thank you thank you already putting those LP dollars to work with some nice jewelry yeah yeah this oh this little thing that was that was fun one here at a long journey so yeah sometimes I put this on you know
1:06:17
fantastic uh can you give us the overview where' long journey start how'd you get here what are you announcing today yeah uh long journey started in 2020 when cyan and I uh you know we've been really good friends from our days at angelist uh and she had decided that
1:06:34
you know she wanted to go back into her Roots at early stage uh and we decided to start a fund together and that was in 2020 and that was like five years ago yeah I basically asked him to meet me at a coffee shop and I said what do you
1:06:46
think about me joining you and we team up together and he said I've been manifesting this basically like yes and that was it like there was no further discussion really it was was it totally I kind of knew I kind of knew it was going to happen um we had just had this
1:06:59
really powerful uh you know way of working together and when she said let's work together I was like yeah I've been waiting for you to ask for that let's do it that was about five years ago uh and today uh we announced our newest fund
1:07:13
which is 181.fm at least in crypto you know you yeah totally yeah there you go the numerology is big in Tech these days everyone loves numerology yeah totally but I prefer I prefer a more creative one than just the 42069 the 42069 is a
1:07:35
little played out at this point I like that you're um you know high is a uh is means life in you know you probably heard Lam or misfah or something you're given 18 or 36 which is like to life and we really think of it as um our role is to
1:07:55
is respectful of the dollars we've gotten from our LPS but also to give the gifts entrepreneurs so they can give more and more gifts uh and ultimately we're we're we're pro-life I mean that's not exactly what I mean to say but it's
1:08:06
like we love life here of course you know long journey yeah t is this sorry I didn't if I didn't catch it uh is this fun three fun four the third institutional fund but it's technically the the uh fourth fun I tried to it's a confusing for a reason you know just to
1:08:24
throw people off keep their toes has uh has a strategy changed at any point you know I'm obviously we have very close relationship with with Justin Mars We've joked about this on on the show who's a adventure partner uh uh at long journey for those that don't
1:08:40
know and uh I always joke about it anytime I see an exciting company Justin Mars is always like uh yeah I got in at a two and a half cap and I'm like what do you mean like so I mean like you guys have been very intentional around
1:08:55
valuation you actually have a extremely I feel like Risk on approach where you know some of some of the um and not to say it's not calculated but you know you're willing to give a $100,000 at some point to somebody who just literally just has like a crazy idea how
1:09:10
H you know talk about kind of your strategy has it evolved or is it just been coming back you know always back to early stage root start with our thesis which is Chase the magically weird and when we went and looked back at all of
1:09:23
our companies that the the highest returns they had one thing in common which was that nobody believed in them at the time and so Justin you know is remarkable at finding people and companies at their Inception point where sometimes like like he created
1:09:39
inflection grants uh for example and he's always doing interesting things on the edge like doing things Edge City when when he started King fire in 2015 he was like yeah I he was like there's a thing called bone broth and I was like
1:09:53
uh what's bone broth he was like yeah you take the bones you like squeeze them you put them in a box and you can sell them for $8 at Whole Foods and I was like okay tell me more that was pretty absurd at the time now as you know it's
1:10:05
it's a thing yeah bone broth is everywhere and everything and everybody talks about it so what we like to do is invest in things before it becomes a buzzword and it becomes consensus and so when everybody is chasing for example the application layer of AI right now
1:10:19
we're thinking about what is next and so we're already planning ahead for the future that comes after what everyone's investing in in right now and we've done that consistently and I think that's where all of the alpha is and you know
1:10:31
it really works for us and it's where we like to play do you think it's do you think it's getting harder you know people have talked recently about how the the you know YC batches Everything feels very on Trend right you've got defense Tech space uh AI agent
1:10:46
infrastructure it feels like you know 15 years ago there were still Secrets right whereas now information gets out super quick now the benefit if you're an investor is like if you're ahead on a trend you can invest in something and then two months
1:11:00
later it's getting a 4ex you know markup and you look really good but do you find that you you know do you see that the internet is is making it even harder to stay ahead of and find what's weird or is it just about you know sort of
1:11:14
thinking differently and um no I think that so I always think that uh I love y combinator so I don't ever want to say anything negative about but you know I think that they serve a great purpose when you go i' I've found a couple of
1:11:30
companies in my career at y combinator uh butur security for example you're basically searching for a needle and a hay stack and and you're also you know you're dealing with some pretty stiff competition when you go in that room it's like the who's who of venture
1:11:45
capital and Angel Investing and so you know I don't really want to play in that Arena you know I want to dream about the future and figure out what's coming so that when that entrepreneur starts to go out and pitch people initially a lot of
1:11:59
people will be like well that doesn't fit into our thesis you know investing in nanotechnology right now right you know like no one's thinking about nanotech but maybe nanotech is one of the next things and so that's where we want to actually figure out you know
1:12:13
where are we going to be in six to eight years and that's we want to get ahead of it and do the picks and shovels of whatever that is so we did that with cruso we did that with together AI we're doing it with um we have a stealth
1:12:24
company that you know in the chip space and so we're doing things that will power AI but staying away from kind of the this Cambrian explosion of people investing in things at high valuations because we're not going to get a price Advantage if we enter now uh we should
1:12:39
have seen it in advance y yeah Sayan can you tell me about the diamond age oh my gosh yes it's my favorite book um it's by Neil Stevenson and I remember the first time I read this book um if you if you pick it up and you try to read it
1:12:53
the very first 10 pages are so there's this character that's so annoying that I couldn't get past the first 10 pages and then my husband was like hey he dies and I'm like when goes like by like page 11 if you can just get it through you can
1:13:07
get through this I think his name is Bud he's a horrible character with like a skull gun attracts to his head yes but once you get past that you know Neil Stevenson one of the reasons why he's one of my favorite authors is he's a
1:13:19
historian first and foremost and so he predicts the future by going deep into the past and understanding historically what the trends have been and you can determine how the future will play out based off of that and so one of the things that he predicted among many
1:13:32
things like in snow crash the book that he wrote he predicted meta he predict predicted uh VR he predicted second life and um there was a company called there.com and virtual reality period and then in the diamond age he predicts an
1:13:47
AI future where there's a little girl who gets a book and it's indistinguishable from an iPad and this book basically teaches her to adulthood and so you can imagine a future where you know scarcity we live in a world of abundance so the other thing in in in
1:14:04
Diamond age is everything is manufactured and 3D printed and on a on a on a level where everything is perfect so if everything's perfect the thing that becomes valuable is human Innovation and human thought and human Artistry so while everybody's worrying
1:14:20
about how we're going to mass-produce Art and music will be you know and and code and all these things are going to be created by AI The Artisan is always going to be able to create that desk that you're at you know um a piece of
1:14:33
art a piece of music that's original from the human mind is always going to stand out as being different and so I think that human Innovation and human Ingenuity and things made with human hands are just going to become incredibly valuable so I based a lot of
1:14:46
my investment decisions over the past I probably over 10 years based off of Neil Stevenson's work yeah and and so I'm just a I'm huge fan of his and I'm going to be on a panel with him coming up excited about it yeah I mean you think
1:14:59
about uh uh Palmer with oculus VR coming from Snow Crash uh Dean's favorite book for a long time was seven EES another Neil Stevenson book uh can you tell me about the actual Diamond Market I believe you invested in a company that makes
1:15:16
diamonds so interesting to go from sci-fi to actual investing thesis yeah so I invested in Diamond Foundry early and the thesis behind that was um when everybody thought that they were just going to make fancy diamonds that we wear for wedding rings I thought what is
1:15:32
the secret here the secret is that we're actually going to need compute and Diamond Wafers are going to be a thing and also industrial diamonds which are actually the more expensive diamonds and they're not pretty we're going to need that for cutting for manufacturing and
1:15:45
for you know all sorts of applications saw blades or made out of diamonds and when I went around to other investors and I told them about this future going back to Magic weird they're like you're crazy like this is just going to end up
1:15:58
being a three karat diamond and this Market is they kept comparing it to deers and caring you know comparing it to you know the the Diamond market and I said no that's not you're not seeing the bigger picture here and that was in
1:16:10
completely informed by the diamond age because in order to have this you know post scarcity future of abundance diamonds were a critical part of that and I don't know if you remember in the book but there are things that are made of diamonds in there you you know there
1:16:25
are buildings made of diamonds they're just like all of the technology was enabled because of that unlock that we needed this this material that was virtually indestructible how how important do you feel science fiction is to the Future
1:16:41
right it seems like and and is there more that the technology industry should be doing to invest in you know we have we we've had uh people like Jason Carman on the show who make documentaries about tech today he wants to eventually make
1:16:53
sci-fi but do we need to be funding a lot more science fiction media is that one of the ways we running out of sci-fi it feels like we've invented most of the things that you know I grew up with except for you know flying cars but
1:17:05
there's already flying car startups right yeah so my biggest gripe with Hollywood and with media in general is it's cheaper to create a dystopia than a Utopia so when we move into AI generation we'll be able to create Utopias cheaply and that actually will
1:17:20
allow us to tell stories about a scientific future um that actually is possible where you know before in order to render all those things and to get things that didn't exist was incredibly expensive so the filmmaker just went to
1:17:33
the dystopia it's much easier to create a wasteland to create like robots destroyed everything than to create robots made the future better for us and so I do think here's what's really interesting I gave a talk recently and I asked everybody in the audience who here
1:17:46
has read Diamond age only one person and he was 20 years old raised his hand that is alarming to me that people people are not reading more science fiction and not writing more science fiction and not thinking about the future and what it
1:18:00
can become you know I'm really excited about shows and books like free body problem because we do need to start thinking about we did send signals into space they will be received at some point and there will be aliens coming if they exist and so like these are things
1:18:14
that are existential threats not only well to all of humanity that will bind us together where we actually start caring about things as humans rather than Nation stes and things like that is when Earth is going to encounter an
1:18:29
outside force is going to be one of the most unifying forces for our entire planet and so I think we do need to think about that it is a future that could happen yeah the Utopia dist to me that more people don't read in general yeah we're not helping there I
1:18:45
can't wa we're reading post we're reading a 100 posts a day to people uh no I think the the Utopia versus dystopia thing is super important you know we see this on social media if you post uh everything's bad you'll get 100,000 likes but if you go you know no
1:18:59
one's ever had more access to food education Healthcare all this stuff it's like you know nobody nobody want to see that we want conflict dystopia means conflict means antagonist about it um we don't talk about the 99% of everything
1:19:14
that's going right we fixate on the 1% that's going wrong and it becomes this narrative that the world is going to can I curse the world is going to and uh and and basically unfortunately young people when you ask them if the world is
1:19:28
a better or worse place they think it's a worse place yeah because they're on Tik Tok because they're on social media because they're being fed a feed of non-stop violence and death and Tesla cars blowing up and and so your view of
1:19:40
the world is dark and gloomy when it's actually you know people are living longer people are more prosperous you know there's so many things going on that's just so great for Humanity but we don't celebrate those things and so I'm
1:19:52
really hoping that part of the the next four years of you know when you see people working on deep Tech and there's this new sort of reinvigoration of Technology where people are excited about the future that they start actually highlighting and talking more
1:20:06
about the things that are going right than the things are going wrong that makes sense uh sort of a one last sort of random question I'm curious to get hear how you guys think about this uh we seem to be entering a period uh of sort of renewed nationalism
1:20:23
globally like Europe waking up you know America's you know fighting trade Wars with our closest allies this comes at a time where you know um Lee I think we met for the first time at this sort of popup city right and there's sort of
1:20:36
these renewed experiments around cities nation states Network States uh you know do you do you foresee a a future where people are traveling way more and we're all investing globally or are we going through an era where you know do you do
1:20:51
you do you imagine that most of this fund as an example will be deployed here in the US or you guys thinking you know how are you thinking about International yeah let's say answer the the broader frame I think from our perspective we're really
1:21:05
open-minded uh you know if you're really going to do invest in the magically weird and um do things that you know the Absurd before it becomes consensus you have to stay open-minded so we've done things all over the world in Europe and in Brazil and stuff like that but in
1:21:20
general we've always been really excited about what happens in America uh and I think if I had guess most of the dollars will be deployed that way but I um yeah these little mini cities it's such an interesting future to imagine I do think
1:21:32
that there will be we're in a recombination phase and like the Havoc actually the first name of the fund that I started was Havoc VC nval wanted me to keep it that way but um you know maybe one day we'll get back to long journey
1:21:44
we'll Rebrand and in a few years and you guys will get the exclusive on back to Havoc you know yeah havoc. VC was my URL um but I do think that the recom creates the opportunities for new ways of living in new cities and Edge City the stuff that um you know
1:22:00
Janine and team there are working on is really powerful where we met Jordy I don't know what you think about countries have the culture that we have in America where it's okay to fail like when I speak broad you know I go abroad
1:22:13
and I speak in France or Italy or wherever I have entrepreneurs who come up to me afterwards and they say you know I don't live in a culture where failure is an option and so I think that's one thing that makes us special we also have um laws that are pretty
1:22:25
well established around businesses like that we we understand how the framework Works whereas if you invest abroad you have to understand the legal framework of that country which can be problematic sometimes and then I think going back to
1:22:38
the diamond Age The Diamond age does cover Network States and it does cover um some really interesting very futuristic Concepts there there's this group of people that they call the Neo victorians and uh they basically have everything that's made by hand but
1:22:53
they're the most tech techologically Advanced and the most wealthy uh group of people and they basically band together on a set set of values and so it's possible that we'll start seeing that going forward and we might see investable opportunities in in those um
1:23:08
but it's still very Frontier and it's still very on the edge uh that sort of thinking but in general I think probably a majority of our investing is just going to stay in United States makes sense love it well thanks for stopping
1:23:21
by congrats on the new fund uh we got to bring the size gong for go thank you for bringing the chain on as well it's a big fund it's great you yeah thank you so much for having us and we'll talk to you soon see you good luck out there see you
1:23:35
later very cool it's hard to do hard to do uh for funds in basically well they didn't call it fund four because Chinese in Chinese the number four is for death so that's probably what from the numerology perspective that's probably
1:23:49
why they skipped that go straight into fund eight uh coming up quickly number of wealth that is right uh we got Preston Holland welcome to the what is up Brothers what is up Brothers if there is if there's anything that we should talk about in the temple
1:24:09
of Technology it is private jets I think that this is uh probably one of the more fitting uh segments no we've been waiting for this you're our private Aviation correspondent got the professional studio lighting set up you're looking great uh should we pick
1:24:23
it off with uh G 650 ER versus BBJ you know like like a lot of our a lot of our listeners are trying to decide between those two uh where like what considerations would you make if you're trying to make a big purchase if you're
1:24:36
going BBJ or 650 ER personally I'm going 650 ER for the sole reason the market is far more liquid bbj's tend to sit on the market I think the absorption rate is something like 450 days on Market is the average because you have to think you have Grant card
1:24:55
and Saudi princes those are your two buyers of your jet and if they don't like it then you're just going to be stuck with it whereas with the 650 ER you know let's say ramp might do another upu I don't know maybe there's a buy
1:25:08
there I don't know we'll see Eric to Eric's way too modest he's way too modest but way too modest but yeah I I take your point I take your point but hey Evan Evan Spiegel also he's got a BBJ yeah he has his own uh own hanger there too the snap hanger yeah when we
1:25:24
discussed this uh our argument was that uh BBJ a little bit less flexible on where you can take it sure it makes sense if you're a politician you're landing at major regional airports major international airports for big campaign
1:25:36
stops but if you're more of a CEO doing the offsites doing the ski trips you want something that can land at a smaller airport you think that's a reasonable way to think about it I think that I think that it's almost like you've been reading my newsletter uh
1:25:47
because I make that exact argument because BJs are very cool but now you're limited to really long runways and so who you know the whole point of private jets is that you get to access the over 5,000 runways that exist in the United
1:25:59
States which is a fun fact there's more airports than Chipotle in the United States so like just to just to put in perspective of like how many airports there are wow and we got to triple it and then we got to triple it again we need an airport in every suburb of
1:26:16
America I mean that's the answer to the flying car just have I just have airports everywhere I can fly oh I'm going 10 miles across town we have a yeah we've had a popular flying car manufacturer called GF stream for a very long time yeah yeah exactly no I always
1:26:31
say my line is you can you can sleep in a jet you can't fly a house so if you're making if you're making if you're making that kind of money you're making a you know you're making that if you're coming up oh should I buy my first house should
1:26:43
I should I get a private jet what you know the answer's obvious obvious and and you guys talk a lot about stock tips I mean we better to get good stock tips than the FBO I mean is prime listening for stock tips exactly that's right um
1:26:59
talk about uh I I'd love to get a highle market update on just private Aviation broadly we're at this interesting time you know are we in a correction are we in a recession is the economy crashing my sense is that the uh the whales that
1:27:17
sort of move the private Aviation Market are are insulated to some degree from fluctuations in the market but what's happening in your neck of the woods so private jet Flyers tend to Fly Above small Market Corrections right so you you go you look back to 2008 now
1:27:35
there's a lot of of Carnage there and and and a lot of you know you've got bad practices obviously in real estate you had a lot of bad practices in private jets too and so people were buying positions and flipping them and just a
1:27:48
lot of a lot of nonsense shenanigans that happened what we're experiencing right now is is uh not that the market has got really hot during Co you saw uh if you look at like valuation softwares in private Aviation and they do exist um you see this kind of
1:28:04
depreciation curve and there's a pop right at the end of 2020 tended to Peak right fall fall of 2022 which is when all the other you know sort of assets so um but but really peaked in that we've been coming down off that high we're not
1:28:19
I wouldn't say that we're back to normal quite yet so like if you look at the trajectory we should should have been on in 2019 barring the pandemic cuz you got to remember you know if if if you remember way back then which felt like
1:28:31
30 years ago but um during the pandemic so many people that probably could have flown private but didn't now said oh well I still want to be able to travel so I'm going to go ahead and fly private you see you saw wheels up you saw Vista
1:28:44
you saw all these companies just kind of Go Bananas in growth because so many new entrance were into the market well that's since eased off as you know interest rates have gone up and the economies cooled off a little bit and you you know kind of the The Fringe uh
1:28:59
private flyers I an interesting quote that I heard um in kind of a a happy hour setting from an aviation executive was there's a lot of wheels up King Air Flyers going back to comfort plus uh they're not even the first class Flyers
1:29:12
they're more the Comfort plus flyers and so you know we kind of had this this Market correction but um this year there's there's some Tailwinds for 2024 some optimism 2023 in kind of the transaction space was relatively slow you typically see a bump in the fourth
1:29:26
quarter and we did again last year but not quite as as sharp as we had kind of in previous years and what everybody's expecting a lot of people anticipating bonus depreciation and for those that are not obsessed with buying assets and
1:29:40
depreciating them it means that you can take 100% of the cost in the first year to reduce your tax basis so what it ends up doing kind of when you do do the math uh is it's about 20% of your purchase price that you get in tax savings in
1:29:52
that first year so if you finance the aircraft you know now you basically are just paying monthly for access to the airplane um and are able to carry it you know over over the life of of that you're own the owning the aircraft Charter Market slowed down a fair amount
1:30:06
last year um it's recovered okay in the first quarter this year not you know not to the to the levels that it was in 22 and 23 um but it's uh it's definitely better or sorry 21 and 22 it's better than it was in 2023 um but there's been
1:30:20
this and this is a macro shift into kind of fractional The Net Jets and flex Jets of the world even from owning aircraft or chartering there's been a lot of growth in kind of that segment so it's a little bit about what we're seeing bonus
1:30:33
appreciation whenever it does get passed uh it's definitely going to be a stimulant to uh transacting of airplanes when when is the when when will that be decided is it is it known and and what's your is there a prediction Market set up
1:30:47
for this yet are you are you going that's a good question I I would I would love to see if poly markets got a uh got a 100% bonus appreciation setup like when it actually happens so Trump addressed it in the State of the Union speech he he said 100% costing that's
1:31:02
kind of code word for 100% bonus depreciation as the rest of us know it um it was it was almost through Congress last year I love that he's addressing the private jet Market in the State of the Union great well the private jet Market got it well it's it's a beautiful
1:31:18
funny that you mentioned that it's a beautiful contrast from uh the last budgetary proposal which specifically called out private jets something like 12 times specifically in like a two-page document basically saying we're going to
1:31:32
cut all of the private jet loopholes for you know corporate Executives yada yaada yada obviously Trump is a he likes private Aviation I there's there's no there there is no hiding it that Trump appreciates a good private jet um and so
1:31:47
uh so yeah so so kind of the sentiment is a little bit more positive 100% budg appreciation actually almost made it all the way through Congress last year uh but the Republican uh the Republican Senate did not want to give the Biden
1:31:59
Administration a win before the election and so it it died but it was it was there I mean we were we were on the you know two yard line so I think I I I don't I don't know exactly when kind of what I'm hearing from some of my clients
1:32:11
is they're anticipating you know one of those any day now type things uh from what they're hearing in Washington so I I think it's any day now what about starlink uh how has adoption been of starlink on private jets it means it seems like it' be a no-brainer but are
1:32:25
there barriers to actually retrofitting planes and are there certain planes that are easier to retrofit is it expensive I imagine that it's got to be the number one request for a lot of people it it definitely is starlink is gobbling up
1:32:40
market share but as a percentage of the overall Fleet installation base it's still pretty small um I don't know exactly off the top of my head what the what kind of the percentage penetration is but it's growing faster than any of the other providers right so there's
1:32:54
there's transitions you have um connectivity in in private jets has been undergone a little bit of a transition from uh surface to air so think uh cell phone tower to private jet to satellite from above low earth orbit um and so
1:33:11
there's been the the Legacy ground to ground to air systems are kind of phasing out you've got the atg 4,000 for instance which is a very technical uh older uh wi-fi system now they have the selection between do I go to the L5 Wi-Fi or do I switch over to starlink
1:33:29
and when you talk about you know it's it's anywhere from $150 to $350,000 to install the equipment and then uh last time that I looked I think the unlimited Wi-Fi package was like 10 grand a month uh for unlimited starlink uh it's it's
1:33:45
funny they the way they measure that is by speed how fast are you going is how they determine how they're going to charge you wow so if you go under 300 mil an hour it's like 200 bucks a month and if you go over that it's like 10,000 a month so it's pretty significantly
1:34:00
different uh you ever heard this line before uh what's the difference between private AV private Aviation and uh crack cocaine I have you can you can you can quit crack cocaine uh I I have a more uh I'd love to get your take um uh Vista jet
1:34:20
announced a $600 million investment I believe it was was yesterday I think that's when um when we first chatted about having you come on um what are what are you know historically private Aviation you see a lot of tech guys look
1:34:35
at the market and say I'm gonna I need to dominate this I love this I need to I need to get a piece of it uh you know we we've seen sort of a lot of Silicon Valley attempts at cracking the private Aviation code that just haven't worked
1:34:50
for one reason or another uh some of these companies like even over the last few years I feel like they spaed and then like really struggled right um talk about the the Vista fundrays and then maybe I'd love to kind of hear you expand around is this should Venture
1:35:07
just stay far away and just let private Equity play their game or their Venture opportunities in the category yeah so Vista jet just announced uh $600 million fund Ray uh which interesting enough it that's actually down off of the the original
1:35:22
leak uh came in the fall was going to be around a billion dollars and then come February it was going to be 800 million and then they settled it at $600 million so um not it's not public information of what it raised at Vista is actually
1:35:36
based in Malta uh so they're not even a they're not a US entity and so there's a lot different reporting rules and all that kind of stuff well we're not going to hit the siis gong because they didn't they didn't hit their target but maybe a
1:35:48
little little golf clap yeah little pencil on the gong um yeah but they uh it really the the main reason is when you think about software and you think about um financing growth of something that has really low fixed costs and low cost of good sold um you
1:36:08
can really gas it with a bunch of capital and and it's going to just grow really quickly because your cost of good sold don't scale proportionately with that Revenue growth that's the whole beautiful point of venture right is that you can if I've got a a pile full of
1:36:24
money today I can throw gas in the fire and it's going to grow exponentially well private Aviation is just really expensive um and so Vista the reason that they raised this mostly is for kind of a deleveraging activity they they had
1:36:37
levered up a lot of their assets they do have a really young Fleet which is part of the the appeal for Vista so if you guys remember back to uh Taylor Swift flying back for the Super Bowl if you've followed that Saga um she flew on Vista
1:36:52
yet uh because it's there they're young they're young airplanes they're really good at International operations so if you're going to Asia a lot or you're going to Europe a lot from the United States this is a really good option for
1:37:03
you because not every Charter operator is great at that type of international operation and so they had levered up all their planes and then they went on a buying spree and they bought EXO jet they bought Talon air they bought I mean
1:37:15
like literally went on a private Equity style rollup of a bunch of different providers in the space because you know having the thought that you you know if you get to a certain scale then you know you all of a sudden unlock uh a lot of opportunity well if you think of
1:37:30
traditional ebitda right uh if you remember what the d stands for depreciation if you hold the assets like that's an that's a real cost that's not just a financial addback cost and so kind of restructuring some of the debt on their Fleet and freeing up free cash
1:37:44
flow in order to be able to continue to to service their members and so you know they're they're they're not publicly traded they kind of flirted with an IPO a couple of times now um but frankly the companies in private Aviation that have
1:37:58
gone public have you know tended to struggle because retail investors and institutional investors do not understand the space because they don't understand the cost of the fuel fluctuation costs and the engine maintenance costs and oh guess what all
1:38:13
of our pilot salaries just doubled because the airlines doubled so now we have to follow suit and so reporting quarter to quarter is really challenging in this business because it's really hard to take a step back in a public
1:38:24
market and kind of see the bigger picture and so that's kind of why these companies it's part of it too that some guys and girls out there love private Aviation so much that they'll own an asset almost as a trophy asset they just don't really care how much money it
1:38:39
makes they just want to say that they're in the game is that part of it and then if you're trying to compete on really putting up earnings you're like well this guy doesn't care if he makes like as long as he's breaking even he's happy
1:38:52
and we're trying to run a business here that that kind of introduces a pretty poor competitive uh Dynamic yeah I mean there's no industry that is sexier I mean let's be honest right like to say that you own a portion of a private jet company is something to
1:39:08
talk about it you know the cocktail factor which is like a real thing when you're raising money right hey check out my B2B SAS my B2B HR SAS that I own like no one's going to be like oh wow tell me more well not after Monday they're be
1:39:22
like oper I got got spies are you doing I got a question for you has there been any Corp has corporate Espionage meets private Aviation right somebody bugging their competitors golf stream get picking up those private conversations uh have we seen that
1:39:39
before in the past oh not none that I'm aware of but that sounds that sounds juicy you might be given some some Bad actors some ideas yeah no we know we know you got some stories but um I I do have a a question on on kind of like the
1:39:52
future of the industry obviously huge cost associated with with private Aviation is just the the pilot two pilots Etc uh there's companies like U what's the what's the one that does automation for the military um flight automation oh flight
1:40:09
automation I don't know paler Shield don't they do oh Shield I mean they make drones but yeah yeah yeah okay uh are are are there exciting companies working on autonomous flying I know a lot of the underlying manufa facturers have really
1:40:24
good autopilot but how close are we to sort of more Integrated Systems that are you know communicating with air traffic control and actually just self-driving or like self-driving cars for the sky company but they were working on the
1:40:38
C130 and then the ac130 more like troop transport than private Aviation but there's a bunch of interesting laws he was talking about where you can't have a non-deterministic system in the loop there like you can have deterministic software for like a cruise control but
1:40:54
you can't have an AI generated uh non-deterministic system actually choosing to step on the gas of the brakes and so his solution was he puts an iPad here that tells the the human what to do and then there's a human in
1:41:07
the loop at every step but I'd be interested to just hear about like what's the state of self-driving technology in Planes yeah so there's there's a big regulatory issue um the FAA is historically um well it's the government so like first of all like
1:41:22
let's The Benchmark of speed and and Innovation at that and then you know the fa is somewhere below whatever that Benchmark is which is by is by Design I mean look nobody wants to feel unsafe when they get on a commercial airliner or even when they're getting onto a
1:41:39
private jet like regul regulatory capture in this situation to a certain extent is good the problem is is when you start to disrupt and interrupt some of that regulatory framework you have to create an entirely new basis for how you
1:41:54
think about some of these Technologies so couple of interesting companies that are that are doing this and and and and your point to the end the loop um that's totally right and and I frankly there's there's a a long slew of of basically
1:42:08
the whole framework for the regulation is built around the pilot and so you now have to create a a scenario basically create an entire new regulation for automated flight one interesting uh household name brand company that's doing really cool stuff in kind of the
1:42:25
safety world is Garmin uh so like they don't just make watches they also make avionics and aircraft and so uh they came out with a feature I don't know a couple of years ago called Autoland and it's specifically designed for kind of
1:42:38
the owner flown pilot you can get it in King airs and vision Jets and tbms I think epic's about to come out with it um where essentially there's a button and I call it the oh button and if something happens you push the oh button and the screens go white and it
1:42:54
says okay you know we're in emergency scenario it communicates with the tower it finds your nearest airport it puts your gear down it lines you up on the approach and literally lands you on the runway without a pilot intervention now
1:43:08
it's designed for it's literally designed for emergency situations it's not for you know every day but or or a crew had a couple extra drinks and you know don't do that don't do that on private jets they mix but not in the cockpit usually John gets angry
1:43:25
if anybody mentions Garmin but it's in regard to Garmin sport watches no yes yes we're we're supportive of their Aviation products yes yeah the uh well the dueling apps on their uh sport watches is just ux just um uh but anyway so so that's an
1:43:45
interesting company there's a company called skyrise you guys may have heard of them they've done a couple of raises uh I got to fly their simulator uh over the summer and so it's a helicopter simulator and essentially what it is is
1:43:59
a flyby wire system fully reimagined avionics and what it does is now there's still a human in the loop and you're still flying it but what it does is it sets up uh like an envelope that you can't go beyond and basically create uh an unrecoverable situation so
1:44:15
helicopters have a lot of different uh variables when you're talking about tilt and lift and all that kind of stuff this basically makes sure that you as the pilot cannot exceed those barriers and put yourself into an unsafe situation
1:44:28
that's really cool because I you know everybody loves to talk about flying cars and there's been a lot of Carnage in the flying car space recently I mean it seems like almost every week somebody can't raise another fund uh there's a
1:44:41
lot of movement actually going to Dubai now uh in that sector so so The Sovereign wealth funds are starting to pick up the slack where us VCS have gotten a little tired with projections I mean 2025 supposed to be our year of flying cars and I don't know if you see
1:44:56
any outside but I I know that I personally don't but we got slop on the timeline yep so there's that uh last last question I'm going to leave you with uh Preston uh if you were flying you don't do this very often but let's say hypothetically you were flying in a
1:45:11
commercial aircraft uh the pilot had an issue would you be able to land a Boeing 707 fairly easily you confident in that I think everybody every guy I know is pretty confident but where's your confidence yeah I'm I'm about halfway through my
1:45:25
Private Pilot so I'm going to go with better than probably 80% of the guys on board 90% of the guys I mean okay so you're you're the guy we're putting in the cockpit I I at the very least know what to say to the air traffic
1:45:39
controller and I know that I know the buttons that we need to push to alert everybody that like hey by the way like this is coming in hot coming in hot uh well thank you for coming in hot this was a fantastic conversation we appreciate you stopping so much our
1:45:53
private jet correspondent we'll have to do the next version of this on a private thank you by the way the other you were helping us uh look at a at a at a flight recently we did a trigger but hey if you're looking to fly private uh go go
1:46:10
talk to Preston he will uh walk you through the process and uh get you some great prices so thank you for coming on look forward to the next conversation thanks a lot thanks guys this was fun cheers CCH you soon uh if you were on a private plane you get off and you need
1:46:24
to find a place to crash place to sleep nice little vacation home to rent where what would you do I would use the driveway of a wander as a private airst strip and I would just land at the closest one perfect find your happy place find your
1:46:43
happy book a wander with inspiring views Hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning and 247 con a service it's a vacation home but better folks go to wanderer.com and use code TBN and also they're giving away a wander so sign up
1:46:55
and you could win not the whole house but a free trip a free trip wanderer.com tvpn check it out yeah let's do some timeline get out of here what do you think let's do it I'm I'm excited for some timeline yeah me too I've been
1:47:06
itching for it it's not a real show unless you get some posts in uh I like this one from ATF recovery diver took the GF to the hell yeah Museum and it's just it's just it's just suits of armor and and like like crazy tapestries and uh and I love it I love it it's
1:47:26
fantastic uh and another thing that should be in the hell yeah museum is the pebble pebble is back back in 2012 Pebble was my on-ramp to wearable technology says Michael fiser and over the next four years it evolved into a proper Smartwatch platform that never
1:47:40
lost its distinctive personality until Fitbit bought it now it is back with an open- sourced OS and new hardware uh I don't know do you remember the story of pebble at all wait it's called rep Pebble re Pebble because they're
1:47:53
repurposing it I guess they couldn't get the full dotcom but uh this has been talked about for a long time it was a YC company Eric movy became a YC partner after Pebble fan fascinating company one of the few consumer Hardware e-commerce
1:48:06
companies so was a bit of a mentor to me back in 2012 talked to them a bunch uh crazy business because it's it was a very popular Christmas gift as all consumer electronics are and so they had to do this crazy demand planning and forecasting
1:48:23
where if they didn't lock in the design by by July or August then get them all made and and know their marketing plans to ship to the best buys by by October to get them on shelves by November to get them under Christmas trees by December like they would just miss their
1:48:40
entire plan for the year because I don't know 60 70 80% of the revenue would come in that Q4 window and so very difficult business uh but they definitely basically invented the Smartwatch became very popular and then Apple came out
1:48:54
with the Apple watch and absolutely decimated them um but I don't think you should be afraid of coming after you now because as we've covered on the show before Apple isn't innovating anymore knows I'm on the site it says for those unfamiliar with Pebble it is
1:49:09
an eaper SmartWatch with simple functionality long battery life and fun quirky design yeah and uh a week long battery sounds like the founders just self-funded everything to date to just get this back into business and I love
1:49:22
that he says uh I have personally funded development for these new watches I just really want them myself so the whole the whole team as soon is I mean they had like a very tough funding environment with the Apple competition they kind of framed it as
1:49:36
like a David and Goliath story but it didn't really break through Apple was just delivering at such a higher level on the actual functionality and features and just styling and distribution and all the different things integration um
1:49:48
that they eventually had to sell the business but immediately everyone on that team even even kind of just some of the random Executives were like we got to buy it back we got to do it we I love this company and I love that they
1:49:58
haven't slapped an an llm in this thing yet there's no mention of of uh of AI it's a hardware device in 2025 without I still think the kids watch is the opportunity there there's there are some some some brands that have done uh watches for kids populara children's
1:50:18
Nautilus yeah yeah yeah I guess we should have a children's Smartwatch yeah as well for sure uh well when they get uh Pebble off the ground they need to advertise it I think they should put up a billboard I think they should go to
1:50:31
adi.com because adi.com makes outof home advertising easy and measurable they could say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only ad quick combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe
1:50:44
anyway boom uh moving back to the whiz acquisition which we covered yesterday uh amend and pretend uh is breaking down who made money whiz backer Sequoia capital is posed to deliver a return of about 25 times its invested capital from
1:50:59
the cyber security startups pending sale to Google uh the multiple on invested capital moic is roughly 10% stake in whiz alphabet agreed to buy for 32 billion in cash so seoa is about to reap three billion from the sale and amended says was this a Shawn Maguire we'll have
1:51:16
to ask him he he he's definitely has worked with the team I mean yeah he posted about it his his haters are are in are in disbelief right now and and so Amanda pretend says it's good to see Sequoia and green ox finally get a win on the board yeah yeah absolutely you
1:51:32
don't see that often I'm kidding uh average week for them y you know average size it is it is funny when when you are a really scaled allocator if a big exit is happening and you're multi-stage fund and you're not in it it's like what were
1:51:50
you doing the last five years you had how many you know sometimes they just intentionally are passing other times they don't necessarily have an opportunity to get in but well uh let's move over to online dating Eric Jong at aaii says he just deleted hinge I will
1:52:06
not go on another date until we achieve AGI the only late night grind in my foreseeable future will be of the professional variety there we go instant Banger you love these posts from huge Alpha just going to X or xai and just
1:52:23
getting into the Banger Vortex that is the team you know it's so your scene you know blowing you up helping you hit some big numbers it is it is like a remarkable shift from the pre- and post Elon owning Twitter because before Elon
1:52:37
owned Twitter I never saw a single SpaceX person on the timeline or a Tesla person on the timeline and I really don't see them that often now so SpaceX and Tesla clearly have a culture of like hey don't post but xai and and X like the the everything app
1:52:53
uh their employees clearly like to get wild on the timeline which we love to see got it got it uh men marakis says uh if you leave before 6 PM be honest with yourself it's a half day love this's Yeah man man's a good friend uh and uh he's on the founding team at uh
1:53:12
at another very close friend uh and yeah they're absolute Grinders and they're actually uh I meant to put this in but they they're a company uh called Anan they're working on uh B2B agent product and they're hiring for a bunch of roles
1:53:24
so go check it out shout out to them Absolute dogs uh let's go to Luke Metro uh he's reposting a video of a xiaomi EV Factory uh someone sharing that the su7 ultra Parks itself while he heads to a meeting do we have a video uh Luke Metro
1:53:40
says in 10 years uh Americans traveling abroad are going to look at xiaomi cars like Boris yelson looked at American grocery stores hey guys if we don't just for the record if we don't have video tomorrow I want to see some angry DMS to
1:53:54
Ben um he just said tomorrow so anyways I'll explain the video so this is a complete and utter knockoff of the tyon oh yeah it does look pretty cool y they made some upgrades they added a wing does it depreciate the have the same
1:54:08
depreciation I'm sure even faster but apparently this is like one of the top selling cars in in China China gets crazy with these cars they have one that floats you can literally drive it through a lake and it won't sink that's amazing they have another one that comes
1:54:22
with the karaoke machine inside of it uh they have they have ones with like the LED bar on the back so you can send a message to the person that's tailgating you uh they're having lots of fun uh but yes we we want to we want to stay
1:54:34
competitive want our to be dominant you just sort of drives up gets out of his car it Parks itself uh it's pretty cool demo yeah at the very least but if you're running a car company and you want to compete with xiaomi you got to get your finances in order folks time is
1:54:49
money you got to save both head over to ramp.com use corporate cards bill payments accounting and a whole lot more all in one place go to ramp.com anyway ramp ramp uh we got a post from Tyler it says pomp pompona has the running of the
1:55:03
bulls California needs the running of the Bears this a great pick too if you can scroll down he's fresh out of a run I love how yeah he's really he's really out there doing doing things you can just run from Bulls yeah I wonder how
1:55:19
much more dangerous it would be to run with bears do you think that's signific Bulls are dangerous bears are very dangerous is it comparable so I've seen uh you would never have seen this okay because you don't follow uh Mankind's greatest uh
1:55:35
athletic Pursuit MMA okay but uh the Russians there's a bunch of videos that come out of Russia with with these wrestlers growing up that actually wrestle with bears MMA muscleman assaults or something what is it stand for exactly exactly something like that
1:55:50
um but uh you can wrestle with bears okay I we we we briefly looked into getting one just I think the future of the Boy Scouts is just domesticating Bears our America Young American uh boys learning to wrestle with bears yep um and uh learning the dance between sort
1:56:08
of mankind and nature um I love it we got a post from signal he says every post you write should be instantly sharable to a group chat you need to give people at least one of the these three reasons and they'll take action immediately to flex
1:56:23
an opinion they couldn't articulate or hadn't considered until now to post a thought they're too afraid to say outright to Signal their own wit or intellect to everyone else by sharing something extremely relevant funny or
1:56:34
profound the best posts do all three uh at once and we call this a signal a signal post yeah uh named after the great signal signal and I'd say if you're in signals group chat you know uh hats off to you you're some of the most brilliant folks we really you know
1:56:52
salute to you and uh hopefully this post Finds Its way into your group chat there we go your way into a group chat I mean someone else was posting about that how like uh it was Nikita Nikita was saying like you need to uh you need to like be
1:57:07
really nice to designers because it'll do numbers and they'll share it in their slacks and everyone will look at it if you're nice to their designs and and so that's another way to get into the group chat be sharable instantly uh Nate
1:57:18
Cooper we got a Nate Cooper post I thought this was a good reminder don't build to an exit don't uh don't build to a sale build a great business um I think every entrepreneur you know if you grow up reading Tech crunch you have the
1:57:31
sense that companies just start they have a good idea and then they get bought for a billion dollars and those exits can happen randomly and by chance and you can get lucky but the really big exits like Whiz It's like you know phenomenal outcome in a very short
1:57:47
period of time but they were adding like 200 million AR a year right so it's like they didn't need to sell yeah and they could have just kept growing the business they had a lot of optionality they could have gone you know public
1:57:59
they could have you know gone there's there's a bunch of you know potential buyers at a at a range of prices and having that optionality because they were just building a good business it's the best thing to do you just make better decisions when you're not
1:58:11
desperate you're not you don't need the sale you individual customer Etc so totally uh should we go to Sean Frank breaking down influencer marketing he's CEO of r wallet uh one of the best wallets in the world I carry one he's
1:58:26
actually the top wallet salesman in the world I would bet they sell more wallets then and I think of the ridge wallet as a status symbol it lets everyone know when you pull out a ridge wallet you take Performance Marketing seriously that's right they are a they are a
1:58:39
fantastic Performance Marketing organization and everyone will know you you get it you get it uh so he says I've spent 10 billion1 million on influencer marketing 10 million I would think that he spent way more than that I well he spends a lot on Facebook so no I know
1:58:56
but I I feel like I personally you got to get those numbers up Sean come on no he spent way more than that he's just he just picked a nice round number being humble influencer marketing is the closest thing to be able to pay for Word
1:59:09
of Mouth marketing you can't turn a switch to scale word of mouth but influencers have direct relationships with fans they talk to and With Their audience YouTubers in particular are getting 100% attention share it's the closest to Word of Mouth marketing you
1:59:21
can pay for the time impression quality of these ads are high Facebook ads are a swipe and gone a YouTube Creator ad can be 2 minutes there are five big ad units you should buy in feed social post story posts in content ad reads on YouTube
1:59:35
podcast ads and content wrs it goes down um above ad units let's talk program strategies gifting free product with guaranteed post affiliate pay for Content flat fee posting CPM based deals so he goes into a bunch of details here
1:59:50
but the important thing is is uh I own a company that does the uh YouTube uh advertising for Brands and you can go use Brandon native.com so thank you thank you for the plug uh uh Brandon native actually got started uh via Ridge uh you know basically running their
2:00:09
in-house uh YouTube marketing strategy and turns out a bunch of Brands need it so it's now run by the great uh Maria tver uh you can just email uh DM me I'll connect you to her uh she's fantastic run some ads folks and run some run some
2:00:25
ads we love ads I love ads of all types yeah uh we got another post from uh near yep I'd like to publicly State I don't buy the hole there will be a ton of new jobs thing for normal people there will be many new jobs but not for normal
2:00:40
people so lesson be abnormal yes yeah be goated yeah skill issue uh find some yeah I mean find some weird hobby or something or some some some weird segment of the market uh George was on you know talking about leveraging
2:01:02
llms to understand historic history it's basically what he's doing in this one Edge case as a marketing strategy but you could imagine somebody who just nerds out using llms to better understand history and that's probably you know a $5 million year business if
2:01:19
you just get the content right and and really yeah yeah it's kind of like you don't want to be in a in a massive horde of undifferentiated Labor because that will be the first Target for an AI company because they'll say oh well
2:01:33
there's 10 million people doing the exact same job it's very automatable versus yeah oh yeah there's a one of one person what's the economic value of creating an a an AI system that can replace that one person probably not that much so yeah you won't be replaced
2:01:49
uh we got a fund raise from uh my friends at Crossman they're excited to announce a $23.6 million fund raise led by rivet Capital uh also friend over there Zach Rosen who's the man we saw him at demo day briefly um to bring every business
2:02:04
and AI agent on chain uh just as every business moved online every business will move on chain and with the rise of AI agents there will soon be billions of New Economic actors using stable coins to transact in the real economy um crossman's all-in-one platform makes
2:02:18
building onchain easy with low code apis for wallets stable coins on ramps tokenization and credentials um Crossman has a really cool story they in the sort of nft Boom they built a way to like basically buy nfts with the credit card
2:02:30
so they just like rocketed their growth was insane um and they have just kept this tremendous Pace up expanded the product to do a bunch of other things this was an example so Crossman was a customer of party round and uh they were raising I believe uh on like an uncap
2:02:47
note because they were just growing so quickly there was like some small discount I was like H I'll just like I'll just wait like whatever I'll wait for the next round and then the next round came like a week later so I just ended up paying ended up but uh got got
2:03:01
in uh and and very excited about what they're doing so well I think we should close out with the David senra post here he's quoting Tom Osman who says heard a great line the other day on Founders podcast something like when you find an
2:03:13
edge shut up about it feel like this is more important ever than now yes secrets are important and David senra says I had dinner with one of the wealthiest people on the planet his family has commissioned two biographies of
2:03:26
prominent family members I asked him for copies so I could make an so I could make episodes about them he said absolutely not I have no interest in educating my competitors amazing bu different I love it skill issue though we tell the world
2:03:43
pretty much everything yep we told them our secret plan yes which is to be the news be the news you want to see in the world the most profitable podcast in the world um uh this is a fun show yeah this great good gu I would have liked to do
2:03:57
another four hours of timeline we have more stories for tomorrow we can go through Intel and uh maybe that uh the the8 billion 7 billion doll defense contractor so stay tuned for tomorrow maybe we'll get through that I still want to go through humanoid robotics
2:04:12
supply chain stuff there are so many deep Dives to do and not enough time folks um but we have Delian coming on tomorrow our space correspondent Delta V with Deli in we're as as we're calling the segment we have a bunch more people
2:04:25
scheduled so stay tuned stay locked in folks and have a great day we should see if Delian should could bring a dolphin oh to this to the to his appearance since they love space clearly and celebrate it thank you for tuning in folks we will see you tomorrow