TBPN - George Sivulka, Topher Albedo, Cyan Bannister, Lee Jacobs, Preston Holland, JFK Files, Rubin AI Chip

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

TBPN.com is made possible by:Ramp - https://ramp.comEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comFollow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV(09:32) - NVIDIA Announces New Rubin AI Chips (20:50) - NVIDIA and Taco Bell Team up on AI Ordering (35:37) - George Sivulka (51:27) - Topher Albedo (01:05:49) - Cyan Bannister and Lee Jacobs (01:23:52) - Preston Holland (01:46:15) - The Timeline

You're watching TBPN. It is Wednesday, March 19th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortures of Finance, the Capital of Capital. This show starts now. We've got a great show for you today, folks. We're talking Nvidia. GTC just happened. 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. Also, NVIDIA is partnering with Taco Bell. Let's go. Huge. This is a huge development. The streets have been begging for this. AI powered tacos. It's coming. It's not a joke. It's a real story. Also, it's actually pretty interesting.

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 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 breaking it all down in a new strategy update that we're going to take you through. And then we have an interesting deep dive into a defense contractor, not a defense tech founder, but a defense contractor made $7 billion and became one of America's

biggest alleged tax cheats. Very interesting story in the Wall Street Journal. Hopefully we'll have time to get 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. They're back. They're back. They're back. They're back. NASA, SpaceX, everybody working together. We don't typically hit gongs for returns from space. We should hit one for every day that they were in space. 300 gong hits, folks.

300 gong hits. We're going to be here all day. It was supposed to be an eight-day tour. It was supposed to be an eight-day tour. They were up there for 300 days. Clark on the timeline says how it feels to return from an eight-day test. It's kind of an amazing opportunity. I was saying that they're pretty comfortable.

I think if I get an extra 292 days for free, imagine you're at the Amman. You book eight days. Do they get paid overtime, by the way? when they're up in space. I mean, it's kind of a 24-7 big. Do they get frequent flyer miles? They can just go back forever now?

It should be something where every extra hour, you're in space, your comp, your hourly comp sort of increases by 10%. So it just goes parabolic. If something goes bad, you just become a trillionaire. It's great. It's like an Armageddon, that movie,

where they're like, okay, we're going to have to go blow up the asteroid. Like, what do you guys want to be paid? and they're like, we don't want to pay taxes ever again. Just these bros going up there to drill. It's a great movie. And 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 scoff and call it ridiculous. And Jake in the comment says, life is sometimes more beautiful than fiction. It's a beautiful thing. I'm just so happy they're back. You know, this turned into a little bit

like a, not really like a culture war story, but it was very much like, oh, like, it was political. It became a little political. But I'm just so, 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 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you ever watch, if you ever watch WSL, which is the, yeah, not your kind of thing. But it's the The women's surfing league? No, no, no, it's a world surfing league. 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. That's great. Next time we have splash down, we've got to be there. Next time, Will O'Brien does a lot of work in the ocean. He says, there is something truly divine about dolphins. I believe they and whales exist

in a nearly entirely different class of animals to the rest. They are hyper-intelligent and frequently show incredible levels of knowing this. 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 be fascinated by. There was a NASA astronaut funded experiment in the 60s with a researcher named Margaret LeVotte and a dolphin named Peter. And they did have, they did have sexual encounters. That's great, George. but it was a part of NASA was trying to have an experiment to see if they could teach the creatures to speak English. I think I've actually heard that story before.

Anyway. Anyways, dolphins are... Going on to something less controversial, Donald Trump mentioned that the 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 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 one capsule, and they're just doing tests, and maybe they're just being an abundance of caution. They actually could go if they needed to. Anyway, the White House has issued a statement, and they said they rescued the stranded astronauts. They used the word stranded. And so, that's probably how the history looks. We'll remember it. They were stranded, but they made it back thanks to American innovation.

And I'm so glad that this didn't want. find up being some international fiasca. Anyway, can you imagine, I mean, I was away from, I was away in D.C. Obviously, on Monday, I slept in a hotel on Sunday. I can't imagine being away from my eight sleep for 300 days. That would be excruciating. That's 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 to them using Varda. Yep. But like they did for the Doge team. Yep. but I can imagine there's just the transfer mechanism and potentially the cost. Yeah. Right.

An eight sleep is, you know, very inexpensive compared to sending a capsule. Sure, sure, sure. So the delivery costs could have been a... Well, hopefully the teams on it. Eight sleep are nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. We can't recommend an eight sleep enough. And I am back.

You're back? Not at my best. I got an 84 last night, but I did sleep for... Oh, I smoked. you 93. Let's go. I got a little bit, I got a little bit cocky about two weeks ago. I remember I was dragging you.

You were averaging 80s. I was in the 90s. And then I let it get to my head. We're back. We're refocused. And 8 Sleep is having a president's day sale. Oh, cool. Our code for $150 off, our code gets you $350 off.

Oh, that's a steel. You got to go do this. And let's get back to the show. Well, we have some breaking news here. X, 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 than $10 billion in September. Let's hear it for the X team, folks. This is great.

Brandon, Tyler, the whole crew. I got to just hand it to them. I think the X algorithm has never been in a better place. It's gone through eras. There's been the slop era. There was the maybe racist era. 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 David Holes from Mid Journey. You post like once every few days. It's always really interesting. We did miss some news yesterday. A little bit. But like I feel like if I'm on X, I'm seeing everything that's, everything that's relevant to me. And then also some fun stuff.

And it's the right balance. So I got to just give a round of applause to the X team. They've just done fantastic. They had to go to a dark place to get to their adjusted EBITA of $1.4 billion. I heard that. And we're very proud of them. And they're going to be launching payments soon. So if you've ever wanted to pay your mutuals, you're going to get the chance to do that.

It's fantastic. We covered this, this sort of repricing, I think like a month ago at this point. It was rumored and now it's kept. It's great to see. But congrats to everyone at, at, at, X, fantastic work. I mean, the platforms get better. And I actually went and did a little tour of the other platforms to see just like,

could we even multi-stream 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, you can't upload a three-hour show. If it limits three minutes, it's ridiculous. Are they trying to fry the attention of their users? They must be. Yeah.

There could be a dark. It was funny when we talked to Joe Wazenthal about it, and he was like sheepish. Like, no, no, I actually really like X. Like, I just posted there every once in a while. Like, you know, it's kind of dodgy. I mean, he's playing it smart. 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 see this as a business. This is about money more than anything else, as we've said multiple times. Anyway, speaking of money and guys who make a lot of it, Jensen Wong hosted a massive conference for Nvidia. he called it the Super Bowl of AI, which we love. We love sports analogies in tech. They announced the new Ruben AI chips and some corporate partnerships.

So, Jen-I-L-Lov. I love the title of this. Nvidia CEO says AI computing needs to surge 100-fold, which is like, imagine, I mean, it's pretty great that he can go out and say this and everybody gets fired up if a pharmaceutical CEO came out and said, you know, usage of SSRI needs surge 100-fold. everybody would get pretty angry, but we love the chips. Yeah, love the chips. I don't even think the Celsius CEO can say that about Celsius.

Usage of Celsius needs to surge a hundredfold. The GDP demands it. We're going to get 10% GDP growth. Satya called it, but he called it for the wrong reason. Yeah. It's Celsius. I mean, unironically, usage of our sponsors needs to surge a hundredfold. Yeah.

Like there should be hundreds of more customers. This is why we want to see companies doing large, Gail M&A using watches. Yes. Go acquire, you know, 2 million Daytonas. Yes. Yes.

And go, you know. Dayton's. Always the Daytona. It's common ground. It's just a store of value. It's the Bitcoin of the watch world, I suppose. It is. It is. The gold.

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 an event he dubbed the Super Bowl of AI. The world will need a hundred times more computing power for advanced AI than it considered necessary a year ago, he said of the conference that has grown from a sleepy chip developer gathering in Silicon Valley to a rock concert-like event

that fell to 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 manufactures. Jensen Wong said this year, this last year, this is where almost the entire world got it wrong. NVDA shares have been volatile since the release of Deepseek, but there's also been a lot of other things going on in the market since January. Obviously tariffs and just general Trump, you know, what's going on there. There's been other competition, other entrance,

Intel's retooling as we'll go into, but there's a lot going on. And then the market's just been selling off as a whole. A model, so Deepseek was released. But Jensen basically wants to put the word out that we're back up. Yes, that's exactly it. We're back up. A model released by a Chinese startup that said it had built a sophisticated AI models that required fewer of NVIDIA's chips. That led some investors to question whether future AI systems will need fewer NVIDIA chips for training and day-to-day operations.

Some Jevin's paradox disrespectors right there. Oh, bad day for those investors. We'll see. Never disrespect a paradox. Never. Because it'll come back to bite you. It will. So-called reasoning models spend more time thinking.

There's the internal reasoning tokens that I'm sure you're familiar with, about a problem before delivering an answer. They break each prompt down into steps, a process that is best to use for complex problems, according to companies building those models. They might generate so much data that computing speeds will need to 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 deep research is kind of the canonical example. It's fine to go fire off a query and then come back 10 minutes later, but it would be better if it came back immediately. And that's what we want from Nvidia, baby. Wong also spent time hyping up AI agents, which are designed to complete tasks, such as booking flights or making dinner reservations for humans.

Agents often rely on reasoning models. It's so funny. This is a 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 that's so deeply obvious, but if you just built a really good version of Open AIs operator, but for booking flights

and hotels, you could probably get to some ridiculous run rate. Yeah, you're going to get cloned and wrecked by Fang eventually, but you're going to have a glorious, you know, a few years where you can just run there. Glorious secondary sales, maybe some dividends in there. Yeah. It's going to be a good run. Yeah. The amount of computation needed is easily a hundred times more than we thought we needed this time last year. Reiterating the point, let's go. He's like analyst, I am the analyst now. Oh, our projections? We were off by 100x, actually.

And it's bullish. It's bullish. That's great. But this is the real story. He unveiled a new line of chips called Rubin that are expected to be available in the second half of 2026. And so, Advidia has a chip series, but then also they package those chips.

So they do chip iterations based on the different manufacturing technology. And then they package those into the gaming versions, which are like the 2080, the 3090, the 4090, the 5090. And then they also do the A100, H100, et cetera. And just a little insight here because we were talking about name popularity yesterday. Ruben is the 2,924th most popular name in the United States. I expect this to surge in the day in 2026 as Ruben rolls out. People just kind of get it in their head. Little baby rum, Rubin comes into the world.

Do you think Ruben sandwiches will be? become more popular. That's true. What's the Rubin sandwich trade? Yeah. Got to get on public and create the Rubin index. It's a little bit of an media. Jimmy Johns?

We see Jimmy Johns dominate the app store charts. That's where you go to get a Rubin. And then you get on Open AI and you inference some reasoning models using Rubin chips. Yep. It's just Rubin all the way down. Yep. The Rubin. Yes.

Yes. The Rubin underpins everything. Rubin theory of AI adoption. The AI super chip named after the astronomer who discovered dark matter, that's a cool name, is set to have more than three times the computing capabilities of the ultra-chips, an ultra version of the Rubin will offer 14 times the performance of the Blackwell, he said. The Rubin will need to be a monster hit to meet sky-high 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. Invidia 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 sell-off along with declines in the S&P 500. So we are reaching bear market territory. Not sure if we're fully in it yet, but it's been rough couple of months. If you put 100K into Nvidia when they went public, I'm going to run the numbers here. You would, you would have, Oh. It just needs to be adjusted for stockplate.

Yeah, yeah. You'd have a lot of money, folks. You'd have a lot of money, but you'd also be very old. And nothing is more valuable than your youth. Yeah. And just being in the game. The company also announced partnerships with General Motors to help 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, Long said, noting that there is growing shortage of human labor. True. This is 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, Nvidia's physical AI can help robots perceive and reason about their environment and fast-thinking. Long's focus is actually amazing. If you think about if most CEOs that had gone on this run, would start to let it get to their head. they'd start cell phone, you know, they'd start mobile device companies. Sure, sure, sure.

He'd be buying humanoid robotics companies. He would just be doing a lot of stuff because 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 chip. Yeah, hasn't gone into fabrication. It's strong partner of TSM. No word that he's trying to get into that market.

And then also, you know, even the gaming chips, like they never, they never even did like an alienware style like oh, we make a gaming computer. I think they do actually make a computer that you can buy now that you plug into a monitor and keyboard and you can inference AI on it. But that's like a very, very small extension, very small adjacency. I was looking at like a summary of Nvidia's history

and 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, Like the whole story of Invidios, they came out of scientific computing, needing to run more calculations in labs. Then graphics kind of came up and people realized that you could, with parallel computing, you could render individual pixels all simultaneously as opposed to a CPU. So you get this massive speed up then.

And then they took off during the gaming boom. And then ultimately the AI researchers. And you were a big driver of a lot of that momentum and growth because you were gaming super hard. I've built multiple computers with many Nvidia GPs. They're fantastic. They're the best. 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 algorithms faster on Nvidia GPUs and then the CUDA ecosystem kind of blossomed from there. But it doesn't feel like it was like a deliberate pivot from Nvidia, but they still were a massive beneficiary and that's what has added what like two trillion dollars to their market cap in the last couple years. I mean, Jensen is doing a lot of heavy lifting for all the robotics companies because he says, everyone pay attention.

This could very well be the largest industry of all. Yep. I love it. I mean, it makes sense. If you look at the labor market, it's pretty big. This is crazy. Hotel rates in San Jose were up to $2,500 a night as the city was festooned in Nvidia colors. Restaurants and coffee shops will earn their entire month's rent over the course of a few days.

San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan said an interview. Hosting the event will be a test for how the area handles the Super Bowl and the World Cup next year. So it really was the Super Bowl of AI. It's great. But you know what Jensen Wong's Achilles heel is or his Achilles wrist? 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 Bezell. You got to get a luxury watch.

Bezell has 23,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezell'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 that he's a jacket guy, but not a watch guy. I know.

They care so well. 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 of the same coin. Yeah. Okay.

Well, moving on to more Nvidia news, we got tacos, folks. AI is, we'll soon take your order at Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. Nvidia is partnering with young brands that owns Taco Bell. And it's an interesting story. Basically, when you go to the drive-thru, instead of talking to. to a human over a very scratchy voice line where they can barely hear what you're saying, 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 a list of like 20 items. So you can very easily use an open source technology like Whisper or any sort of speech to text to get that in there and then map that to, oh, they were saying cheeseburger, they probably meant this.

They probably meant Big Mac. We can clarify that. So the thing here that's interesting, maybe we'll get into it in a bit, but this feels like SaaS. Yeah. It feels like enterprise SaaS. Yes. Is this potentially a marketing-oriented partnership, but why is NVIDIA trying to deliver voice AI at the application, you know, the enterprise? So that's what's interesting is that is that the actual IP of the SaaS lives with young brands.

Okay. So they're developing it in-house. Yes. So Young Brands has a CTO, a chief digital officer and technology officer, Joe Park. And he said they're using Nvidia's tools to, but they're building it in-house rather than relying on third-party vendors with prepackaged apps. So what's the 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 on-site GPUs. People just ripping them out. They're like, yeah, they got Rubin. They got Rubin. They got Rubin. of blackwells in there. You just got to go. It's 100K, you know, quick. And that becomes the new hot scam. Yeah, I think it'll be cloud-based, hopefully.

Well, that's the whole thing. Why do they need to actually, if they're partnering with Nvidia and they're actually buying chips? I mean, have you ever read those articles about, like, Chick-fil-A's, like, DevOps team? They're, like, one of the most, like, high-per-for. Yeah, they're cracked. And they're just, like, really good,

because they have to deliver the software, like, distribute it on the edge because it can't all. 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 and they deploy all this and there's all the security stuff. And they're actually like really, really good. Do you think chick flas recruiters are just on LinkedIn reaching out to these super senior? It's like Jane Street guys.

Yeah. Yeah. They're reaching out like, hey. The recruiter just, they don't ask, hey, would you be open any roles? They just think, what do you think about Chick-fil-A? And the person comes back and they're like, I love Chick-fil-A-I-E-D-it every day. For sure. And so he said, we want to own the digital, the, intellectual property, this is the head of Yom's,

Yum Brands Technology Division. They operate 61,000 restaurants, and 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. And they recently announced Byte by Yum, a proprietary platform that will house the new apps.

And Park is the president of the platform. They want that tech multiple so bad. Yeah. They're up 2% in the last few days. Are they? Yeah. You're on public? Yeah, yeah.

Third party vendors, however, will have a role in certain areas, the company said. Andrew's son, NVIDIA's director of AI business development for retail said the partnership was unique for NVIDIA, partly because YUM's advanced in-house tech talent. The YM team was primed to take advantage of Nvidia tools and application frameworks like its NIM microservices, which is designed to aid AI development. Yom's 2000 technologists. They have 2,000 programmers and tech people, basically. They're out of control.

They will use NVIDIA 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 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 seamlessly fit into YUM's tech stack. he had it. I mean, you know, you're talking about SaaS and like the tech multiple, there isn't,

there is an argument where this is much more aligned economically with young brands because, yes, they have to fork over the money to buy Nvidia chips, but then they kind of get the Nvidia software probably loosely for free because I think a lot of these are like open source projects that are maintained by Nvidia. And I know someone who works at Disney on like the ride development. And when they build a new ride, they use the most cutting edge technology. So they go 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 then once they build it, they lock it in and it stays there for like 40 years. And so they're amortizing 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 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?

Yep. What software do we need? And then, yeah, we don't really want to pay a SaaS license forever to some company that's like shipping maybe better features. A lot of the SaaS companies are trying to, they would set the pricing for young brands. Cool. We have this tool. You know, there's no, you know, minimum commit, but you've got to pay, you know, 10 cents in order. Yep.

And look how much money you're saving. because you don't have to use, you know, a human to take the order. But then eventually they say, well, we're 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 costs. Totally. Yeah. I mean, the rise of online ordering and like, I guess digital channels is remarkable.

Young Brands took 19% of orders through online channels, basically their app in 2019. it's up to 50% already, pre-A-I, 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 they're like, I'm going, or it's faster than waiting in the line. And Young Brands wants to get to 100% 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 where you just push in a lot of airports. It's the same thing. And so consumers end up spending more when they buy via digital channels. Park maintains because the restaurant can upsell, personalized and entice eaters through notifications, and 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 going to be tied to our kiosks, whether it's going to be tied to AI investments to help customers 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 are trying to replace human labor at the customer interaction level and in the kitchens. Yep. And there's going to be this sort of squeezing effect where eventually it's easy to imagine and not even too distant future that there's one employee, one human employee per location who's just walking around sort of monitoring, making sure everything's getting served properly. And then eventually it's just one human for every five locations and they just sort of drive around. And then eventually we're all paper clips.

This was actually mapped out in this sci-fi book. I think it's a book called the automat. I think that's what's called. It's basically a cafeteria that you walk into. And I mean, it's the vision of what you see at like an Amazon store where there's no checkout. Basically there's just these. I think this is actually a real place in New York in like the 50s or 60s. and they put the food in these like little cubbies and 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 Friedberg actually started a company that was kind of in the same vein called ETSA that was the same idea where you would when you 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 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 the time was 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 meat goes in this way and the carbs going that way and you know, slop, slop it all together and everyone just takes from the hose. Cows walking in one side. It's great. Humans coming in and just grab the food on the other. I don't even see each other. Speaking of

Bull market and beef beef tallow. Speaking of cows on the 101 right now, there's a billboard 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 all the fires on just humans loving a stake here or there.

But anyways, we don't talk about Uh, 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 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 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 calls you can possibly imagine. You can also do multi-assad investing. We do not encourage, uh,

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 of PETA and then you could sort of trade against, it's almost like a prediction market. You keep saying take private, but you mean take for profit. Take public.

Take for profit. You mean take for profit. Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Take 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 poachers, like overnight. They could be printing, printing money. Yeah. And so, I mean, it's just a fantastic economic opportunity. That's such an insane. We've spent decades developing a map of like where all the most exotic animals are in the world. And now it's time to capitalize.

Capture all the value. Trade of the thousand X multiple and just go to the moon. Yeah, but they could apply the same framework they do for what are the hunting licensee? Like you've got to get like a tag or whatever so they could, they could, you know, do some proper demand planning around those ecosystems and make sure that there's real longevity in those markets. For sure, for sure. Well, we got to, we got a guest joining in three minutes. So we're going to set this up with some timeline post that we saw. You know, we never talk about politics on the show. but the JFK files broke and there's a tech angle. So we wanted to talk about that. So Brett Farf, I don't think that's the, that must be somebody impersonating the famous quarterback.

Maybe it's the actual quarterback. I don't actually know. I doubt. Brett says, I don't have enough life to go through 70,000 JFK files. Anyone know what really happened. So I'm reading from this, I don't actually know this details. This is the real Brett Favre. It is the real Brett Fav.

Okay, it's the, he says he's in his bio. He says, it's the famous quarterback. Former gamer, one-time pigskin thrower, a concussed film. Okay. So Brett Favre, you know, Trump released the JFK files. There's 70,000 documents out there relating to the JFK assassination, JFK's presidency. And SWYX, I believe that's SWX, host of a great podcast on AI. says all you chat with PDFMFs, you have been preparing your entire life for this.

Don't miss your shot. And George Savulka, friend of the show who's coming on in a few minutes, says, we've processed 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. Yeah, it's almost like they time the JFK file release with generative AI so that the Gen. AI companies could get a layup and demonstrate the power of the technology. Yeah, 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 weren't big enough. I was waiting to be able to do proper rag on these. Anyway, Devon AI tweeted, Prime Will DePue would have embedded the entire JFK files and shipped a rag-enabled chat app by now. And I was just like, what is this public? because I think this is like from the official corporation. Like this is from cognition. 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. Yeah, this is fine. I was lying.

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 five never sell no crack where you rest at six that credit debt it seven keep your family and business completely separated money and blood don't mix like okay right uh eight never keep no weight on you nine if you ain't getting bags stay the f from police

ten if you ain't got the clientele say heck no it really hits when you censor it like yeah it's fantastic joy you do a great job we need a we need a like a beep beep beep button so whenever there's this swear word we just hit that instead of saying the word yeah very funny uh and yeah great post long long history 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 is that a is that a white claw or a celsius on your desk this is a celsius oh very good very fantastic PG-13. I love it. Are you a white claw in the middle of the day guy?

No, I'm just a third cup of coffee guy. Okay. Yeah. That's my round. Where do you max it? Where do you max that? Where do you hit your sort of zone of genius with caffeine? Is it in the 300 milligram range, higher, lower? You know, I think the unfortunate thing with caffeine is I'm probably like half

a cup of coffee and then it's just less productive. 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 you're just so good at what you do that you got to make it a little bit harder to have fun. It's when you're when you're when you're jet lagged or delayed, then you then you've got a kind of discount or or you need to fly on Lucy or or, you know, all the different John Cugan things. Thanks. We're on three cups of coffee. Okay. Oh, you're on three cups of coffee. Is that you're diving into the JFK files. Can you break us down? What have you found so far? Take us through the story. That is actually why I am on three cups of cups of coffee. I was up late responding to different

conspirators on the internet. But yeah, last night, as many folks know, there was a dump of 80,000 formerly unreleased pages with no redactions to the JFK files. for the Trump presidency. And obviously no one has time to read through ADK pages of like scribbles and scratch and a bunch of scan documents from the 70s. And we uploaded them to our system that usually looks at virtual data rooms

and a bunch of financial and legal documents and instead just toss them all in there and like instantaneously had access to an AI that could look over them. A lot of interesting things that came up, some of which I can talk about on this, on this podcast or I guess live, live, live show. And some of which I'm, I'm probably less keen on. There's definitely like a variety of different mentions of multiple shooters. There were a few different mentions that people

thought were of UFOs, but in reality, it was OCR getting stuff wrong. So there's nothing too interesting on UFOs. But then there was also, and I'm trying to pull back into some of the old questions that I was being asked. A variety of different mentions of folks like, I believe, J. Garrett Underhill, it was interestingly enough, you know, someone that a lot of conspiracy theorists believe was assassinated by the CIA for going and claiming that it was a CIA inside job. a very interesting piece of the entire, you know, uh,

dump is that you might fit like if you were to guess who are the most mentioned people. You know, you might, you might guess that it's like, you know, Lee Harvey Oswald and JFK and everybody and everybody. But it goes like in, if you extract all the 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 there's, I believe if you actually pull up 18 documents that are thoroughly about Fidel Castro. 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 CIA and the FBI. But not as much on the other standard people. that folks would usually go and look into. A lot of documents also mentioned Martin Luther King, Jr. Do you think applications of your guys' tech and more broadly, some of these models can

help us just get a better understanding of history, right? For every big story, like the JFK assassination, there's just like this incredible amount of evidence, some of which is real, some of which is not. They're all from different sources. and it's almost, 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 this is obviously not what, you know, what heavy you guys are working on, right?

You're sort of focused on the enterprise. But do you see a world where we just get a better understanding of these sort of major historical events by kind of hacker historians leveraging, you know, what you guys are doing here with the chat, with the JFK files product? Yeah, I think that ultimately a lot of history is subjective and the history books are written in a way that presents always one side of the story. And as you see a shift away from what I would call like synthesis, right, like history books, towards people using first party knowledge and then orchestrating effectively an AI

over whatever they'd like or whatever a question they'd like, you'll actually start to see people change. 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 as a tool to present like any side of an argument, whether good or bad. And that just means that there's less maybe social control that traditional media and news outlets and publishers of books would have over like the cultural zeitgeist and how people refer to historical events. Do you think there's, 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, 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 going to be. Oh, well, why is George mentioned so much? And they don't really realize that these are completely unrelated, but by contextualizing them as like one block, all of a sudden I'm kind of like data poisoning it. Do you think that's going to happen in the future? Yeah.

So interestingly, if you look at, if you look at things like rag models, so traditional like retrieval augmented generation, 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 of deep research products like Hebia. And so this is just like a differentiator between Hebia and Chadgebt Enterprise or between Hebea and even like the Perplexity Spaces product is that instead of like going and pinging a search engine, Hebeah 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 using that, it's better about, you know, know, having slightly less bias or like having the data skewed in like a, uh, uh, 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 at like a million tokens. Uh, are you, is that an important lever to pull when you're building your product and your system? Like, is that an important optimization vector or is it just let's find the smartest model or the cheapest model or maybe cost doesn't even matter because of your clients. What are you optimizing for? Ultimately, we're trying to build the product that an AGI with infinite resources and infinite intelligence would use. We're not trying to build the AGI or the model or like the longer context window. We're trying to build an agent orchestration platform where you wouldn't judge you know,

an artificial superintelligence by its ability to use an abacus or to do computations in its own context window, you would judge it by its ability to use a tool like Excel to do structured data processing. Similarly, we think that the best way to do unstructured data processing

won't even be in a larger effective context window for one model, but rather ways for it to orchestrate submodels to do computation on every file. And so if you look at what's going with the JFK files, you're actually having one God model, orchestrate a bunch of other smaller models, and read with full attention over every document, but not, you know, you 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 of these are like screenshots or like photos of like pretty messy scans of documents. Like it's not exactly like a JSON file. a ton of different processing. One of the worst parts of like running an AI company like processing old 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.

But you're already set up for that. It's more expensive, even slower. There's, you know, it's there's a context window issue there. Yeah. What we do is we have probably the highest throughput indexing and like a highest accuracy. accuracy indexing engine that will actually use multimodal models for really hard documents, sometimes use like standard OCR, do like table and layout detection and all this other stuff to feed it into something that LMs 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 describing the company early on and I was like, oh, that sounds kind of cool. And then like I saw you again like a couple years later. I was like, oh, this guy's working on like the hottest thing in the world. So how did you say like what's the prehistory of the company? Uh, prehistory is, uh, I think I made an early bet on large language models and it paid off. Um, I was in a PhD at Stanford. Uh, and I was working on, honestly, just studying meta learning because I thought it would be a really important piece of technology. And as kind of like summer of 2020 unfolded, uh, open AI destroyed all of our research.

They released a paper on GP3, which was, hey, large language models are meta learners. And it took like the academic world that was trying to build AGI and we're like, okay, you're never going to do it. It's going to happen in a close first way. And opening I will probably be the people that invented. And so I think being close to that shift and being close to the realization that this 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 customers that would pay for anything, building the best possible enterprise product that I thought future agents, that I thought future people working alongside LLMs would want. And that just set us up to strike in a really fast, big, and market-grabbing way when the iron was hot. That's awesome. I think, yeah.

Oh, please. You're focused on the enterprise, but I'm just interested to get your opinion. here because we've we talked about it yesterday with Scott from Cognition. Do you feel like we're close to have you 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 you'll book your hotel it'll do this 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 GPT, sort of conversational chat search experience. People talk more about like super intelligence timelines than they do about just like AI booking me a flight. I want to know, I want to know your flight booking agent timeline. Yeah. That's what I want to know. It's definitely more near term than supertileged. Then papercliff. Papercliffs 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 worst space for a startup to work. And honestly, there's a million startups now building B2B AI, like trying to compete with us

and a bunch of 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 you're already way too late. Like that you have to start way before everyone's trying to build it. But I think it will be done by Open A.I. this year or sometime in the next year. I don't think it's going to be a startup that doesn't. And I think it's just not because it requires partnerships.

It requires like honestly API handshakes between agents and APIs of external providers like Delta and United. And I think that'll be that'll be a problem that requires a large language model scale company or training scale company to. Yeah, I think that's a good point. We have the anti-bought industrial complex that's just like preventing bots everywhere. And so if you're trying to build a consumer AI agent that's just a rebranded bot, it's very hard to do unless you're open AI and you can go to DoorDash and say, look, like, let's do this deal. Our users want this. We're going to be able to drive, you know, a very meaningful amount of traffic. Well, can you give us an update on kind of

where the company is, where people can find you and just kind of wrap it up because we've got to move on to the next guy? Absolutely. The company is heavy AI. You could just search. heavy on Google and then click on one of our paid ads to drive up our customer acquisition cost. And it's heavier.com now, I noticed. You got the dot com. We got there was someone squatting on that for like, you know, the longest period of time. I was like, they know exactly who I am. They're just going to charge me and create a lot of money for it. But yeah, you can find us on on heavy AI or heavya.com. And I'm George Savulka on Twitter at G. Savulka. And we should be releasing as as the Trump administration releases more files of

variety of other interesting like AI deep dives. So I give follow and big fan of this uh of this show. Thanks for asking. Thanks for calling in. Yeah, it's been fantastic way to just demonstrate the power of the product and thank you for your public service. Appreciate it. Thanks. Talk soon. Bye. Citizen technojournalist. Citizen techno journalist. My two favorite, uh, wildcard JFK conspiracies, uh, the driver was responsible. Okay. People think that there's this conspiracy. You want to grab the hat, John? Yeah, yeah, the hat. People think that the driver was responsible because 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. He wanted to like send a message to someone. And so he was like, I'm going to die for this. So he got. Strangest way.

I mean, I guess people use that to. But there's an unlimited amount of conspiracies. The crazy thing is, is I do. believe there was there was truly many many documentaries 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 tofer from albedo welcome to the stream wow that is a great background the command center the command center in the command center congratulations thank you thank you very fantastic uh yeah young company uh incorporated in 2020 right and first satellites in orbit already.

And breaking news, you've got to update your Wikipedia page because on Albedo space, it says the company plans to launch its first satellite in 2025. That's old news. Old news. Yeah, hopefully someone updates that. We need to figure out the Wikipedia thing. Yeah, we started late 2020 and Y Combinator Winter 21 batch. Fantastic.

So I forgot to start. Wow, hard tech in YC, another narrative violation. But break it down for me, like what does the satellite? actually do and like where is the path I see on the wiki again plan to have a fleet of 24 spacecraft is that 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 be leo very low earth orbit and so this first one they're pretty big they're like walk in freezer size we just launched this first one on friday as the cake top run transport of 13 so like the big satellite up top got

dropped off in Leo, but epic drop-off video of us getting like dropped up right over the Nile. So that was super cool. But the kind of novelty that we're bringing 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 a resolution that today you can only get from planes or drones on the commercial side or from the national systems on the government side. And 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 of drag and different things that have prevented people from building satellites that fly this low before. But that's what this first satellite will do. And we'll get down there in about two months from Leo to V Leo. So talk about just from when you started the company, there, there had been plenty of high profile space oriented companies. But it feels like I just can imagine there was way less just excitement and interest even then when you were starting the company, how have kind of conversations even on the capital side shifted since then? Because I'm sure your inbox these days is full of inbound, but maybe it wasn't always a case. Yeah, definitely there's a lot more interest these days

from the capital allocation community on the national security technology side. And for us, So where we got the idea was actually in President Trump's first administration, he tweeted this classified satellite image, basically declassified it as the president. People 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. It would be amazing to have commercially because it 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. So that's what initially drove the idea for very lower 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.

It's been a tough market in terms of the capital that has gone in compared to what's 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 image spots much more frequently. And it's much cheaper. And so the resolution is key there.

And then 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 adversaries that make our big bespoke satellites very vulnerable. And so what has historically prevented that in a lot of ways is the capability tradeoff, where if you proliferate and build way more satellites than a few big bespoke ones, maybe the capability isn't as good. But in our case, V-Leo really unlocks these two things that have previously been mutually exclusive, which is that exquisite capability, but at low costs. So now you can spend that, you know, cost savings on proliferation, which is much more resilient, creates much more coverage. And so, yeah, it's definitely a good time to be to be launching this first satellite before Sibilia with with the tailwinds underway on the national security side. Speaking of national security, when you see espionage and enterprise SaaS, does that keep you up at night? You guys are obviously in a much more sort of critical industry in many ways. SAS is important, but also having sort of global visibility.

Neck and neck, really. Yeah, neck and neck. But yeah, do you think that, you know, how seriously do you guys have to take security given that you're processing all this very sensitive data? Definitely seriously. And we not only from like a, the data perspective, but a lot of our technology is ITAR controlled. And so that drives certain security levels.

We have a what they call a tier three license from the remote sensing regulatory body. That means that we have additional kind of cybersecurity requirements. And so that has driven us to, yeah, think about the cybersecurity and those sorts of things early on because we had to. But, yeah, I mean, given what we're doing and the more exposure we have now than we did years ago, it's definitely, 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. I remember early on someone was telling me that, you know, oh, imagine the Hubble telescope, you know, just turn it around and point it at Earth. And that's probably what the spy satellites look like.

And there's probably some benefits there. But then you're also fighting gravity. So do you have like crazy booster capability? Is that what you're optimizing for? Like just pros and cons of V Leo? Yeah. So we would say actually the hardest part for our architecture in Vileo is like the kind of robotics, precision points and control system technology that we need to build because the satellite is moving so

fast. 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 Vileo. But then there also is a lot of atmosphere there as well. So we have a bunch of propulsion on board. 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 have looked at Vialia with CubeSats. And those just don't last like very long there because you can imagine like a bowling ball versus feather ripping through the atmosphere. And so we we pack a ton of mass in these pretty big satellites with solar rays covering everything because we keep them body mounted opposed to deploying out like traditional satellites, which, which, which, which, which, which, some of the power. But then there's a bunch of, like, atomic oxygen stuff there, too. And there's special coatings and things that we do

for that and to protect the optics and the solar race. So there's a bunch, there's kind of like a bunch of different categories. The most obvious one is drag that for us, our average mission life will be about five years per satellite. It's actually very dependent on the 11 year solar cycle. 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 satellite's, break they're in orbit for you know 50 hundred years but in be leo 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 somewhere sometimes and you're like ah been there i don't you go to the Maldives i don't need to go to the Maldives i don't know it looks like it's a much water but i could also see it you see this place and you're like wow this looks fantastic yeah there's no one else around i got to get over there barren island i found not that you have time to travel, but, you know, someday maybe. Yeah, yeah, I have definitely gotten better at my geography skills running this company for four years. But I mean, we, we will start getting our first pictures in a couple months when we get to Vileo. So that's really when we'll have, you know, been there, done that in terms of all the supply that we image and, and they travel less.

How do you think about the market size and the tradeoff between commercial and government contracts? I don't know how much you can talk about the government size, 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, well, Walmart's going to miss on earnings because they didn't 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 obviously, it's a real market. Like, you're running a business. You've got to sell to whoever you can. How are you thinking about it in the early stage for customers? So with this first satellite will operate solo for the first two years. then we'll start deploying more in 2027. And we 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 by far majority are commercial. And it's a breadth of different industries. Like we have mining, power lines, agriculture, mapping, natural gas pipelines, like a lot of these different kind of industrial use cases. And so we see a huge opportunity there, not because there's any precedent for it. is like kind of like I was saying, the Earth observation market has not done as well as it was hoped. But from that aircraft and drone perspective and those proof points of those contracts,

we have kind of strategically tried to cover a lot of those different applications so that for the first two years, we can demonstrate the value across those. And we've like completely sold out of our capacity 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 customer. race for us. And then from the kind of split with the national security side, we have this, you know, not only this clarity satellite that we have, but we've built the bus that we call precision in-house for the V-Leo 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 opportunity with the U.S. government will be, along with delivering data from our satellites, but we also, you know, see the need for these dedicated platforms and what VLeo 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? 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, it doesn't, it doesn't, you got to move fast, but 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 has that impacted how you build? Have absolutely like learned a ton as a first time founder the last four years and it's been an amazing journey. We, I think the main way we've approached that is just by hiring more experienced engineers than the average startup would. And so that people know, you know, even, Whether they come from a new space or kind of a tech 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 via that while still with this level of, you know, these aren't kubats.

These are like very complex space robots basically with precision optics and crazy control systems. And so we don't have the thousand satellite production line where we're like doing 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 perspective. And I think that's helped us move faster, even though it is a complex capability. And especially the learnings we'll take from this first one. And I mean, the commissioning that we're doing right now, we're like, I think like two weeks ahead of our internal schedule. Because 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. We've been our engineers

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 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. That's fantastic. Great answer. Well, we'll let you get out of here soon. Last question.

How was D.C.? D.C. was great. Yeah, I heard you were out there as well, right? Yeah, very briefly. The podcast, it's a very important work. Yeah. We did manifest demo day, which was awesome. It was amazing.

at this event to kind of present to different military and intelligence, potential customers and users. And 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 pixels through the payload sensor. And yeah, yeah, it was a great turn. All the demos were honestly awesome. Like the guys that put on the event that everybody brought out, it was pretty incredible to see all the tech. Yeah, Mike's a killer. He's an awesome event.

Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by. is fantastic. Great to meet you. Thanks, ma'am. We'll have to be back. Appreciate it. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. I want to see some of those photos. Yeah. Where are you sending it first? Amman, right? You send us to the Amman and you, and you zoom in so closely that you can read the capital allocator's pitch deck that they have at the pool next to them, and you can see what they're investing in your You've talked about the good fundraising strategy, right? Leave your deck around the Mon. Yeah, no, just get a mole at every Amman. Yes. Have them print out the deck. The janitor. The janitor and have just leave them around the property.

Leave by the hot tub, leave them by the pool. Whoever your head of spying is, just embed them at the Amman as a janitor. Let them kind of cruise around. It's a 10-year game. Let them become the manager at Amangiri. And just sort of let them become so embedded in the property and get the guests really trust them and say, hey, are you leading any series A's? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's going on?

Doing term sheets this week. Boom. All it takes is one trade to make back all those duffles bags of cash. It's great. It is a very, very cool company. He was kind of alluding to Planet Labs. We got Lee Jacobs and Sian. Let's go.

Hey, welcome. Hey, guys. What's up? What's up? Congratulations, guys. Thank you. Already putting those LP dollars to work with some nice jewelry. Yeah, yeah.

Oh, this little thing. Oh, yeah. That was fun one. That was fun one. Around here at Long Journey. So yeah, sometimes I put this on. Fantastic. Can you give us the overview?

Where'd Long Journey start? How'd you get here? What are you announcing today? Yeah. Long Journey started in 2020 when Sian and I, you know, we've been really good friends from our day as an angelist. And she had decided that, you know, she wanted to go back into her roots at early stage. And we decided to start a fun 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 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 related.

That was it. Totally. I kind of knew it was going to happen. We had just had this really powerful, 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. And today, we announced our newest fund, which is 181.18, as many 18s as we could fit in with 18 on the,

on the end of it. There's always, there's always a few more, at least in crypto, you know? 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 four 2069. The four 2069 is a little played out at this point. I like that you're, totally. Yeah, you know, high is a, it means life.

Yep. You know, you've probably heard to Lechayem or, or Nisfer or something. You're given 18, in our 36, which is like to life. And we really think of it as our role is to, is really respectful of the dollars we've gotten from our LPs,

but also to give the gifts to entrepreneurs so they can give more and more gifts. And ultimately we're, we're pro-life. I mean, that's not exactly what I mean to say, but it's like, we love life here. Yeah, of course. You know, long journey. Yeah, is this, sorry, if I didn't catch it,

is this Fund Three, Fund Four? The third institutional fund, but it's technically the fourth fund. I tried to, it's confusing for a reason, you know, just to throw people off. Keep them on their toes. Keep on their toes. Has a strategy changed at any point? You know, obviously we have a very close relationship with Justin Maers.

We've joked about this on the show, who's a venture partner at Long Journey for those that don't know. And I always joke about it. Anytime I see an exciting company, Justin Mears is always like, yeah, I got in at a two and a half cap. What do you mean? So, I mean, like, you guys have been very intentional around valuation. You actually have extremely, I feel like risk on approach where, you know, some of the, and not to say it's not calculated, but, you know, you're willing to give $100,000 at some point to somebody who just literally just has like a crazy idea.

How, you know, talk about kind of your strategy. Has it evolved or has it just been coming back, you know, always back to the early stage really? I mean, we start with our thesis, which is Chase the Magically Weird. And when we went and looked back at all of our companies that had 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 he created inflection grants, for example, and he's always doing interesting things on the edge, like doing things in Edge City.

When he started Kettle in fire in 2015, he was like, yeah, he was like, there's a thing called bone broth. And I was like, what's bone broth? He was like, yeah, you take these 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 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, we're thinking about what is next. And so we're already planning ahead for the future that it comes after what everyone's investing in right now. And we've done that consistently. And I think that's where all of the alpha is. And, you know, it really works for us and it's where we like to play. Do you think it's getting harder, you know, people have talked recently about how the, you know, the YC batches, everything feels very on trend, right? You've got defense tech, space, AI agent infrastructure. It feels like, you know, 15 years ago, there were still secrets, right?

Whereas now information gets out super quickly. 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 later, it's getting a 4x, you know, markup and you look really good. But do you find that, you know, do you see that the internet is making it even harder to stay ahead of and find what's weird? Or is it just about, you know, sort of thinking differently. No, I think that, so I always think that I love Y Combinator, so I don't ever want to say anything negative about them. But, you know, I think that they serve a great purpose.

When you go, I found a couple of companies in my career at Y Combinator. But again, your-Flock security with YC security, for example, you're basically searching for a needle in a haystack. 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 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 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, 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 Crusoe,

we did that with Together AI. We're doing it with, we have a stealth company that's 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 gonna get a price advantage

if we enter now. We should have seen it in advance. Yeah. Yeah. So, Ian, can you tell me about the Diamond Age? Oh my gosh. Yes. It's my favorite book. It's by Neil Stevenson. And I remember the first time I read this book. If you pick it up and you try to read it, the very first 10 pages or 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, win. It was like by like page 11. If you can just get it through, if you can get through this, I think it's a 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 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 things, like in Snowcrash, the book that he wrote, he predicted meta, he predicted VR, he predicted second life. and there was a company called there.com in virtual reality, period. And then in the Diamond Age, he predicts an 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 Diamond Age is everything is manufactured and 3D printed. and 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 about how we're going to mass produce art and music will be, you know, 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, a piece of 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 my investment decisions over the past, I don't know, probably over 10 years based off of Neil Stevenson's work.

And so I'm just a, I'm a huge fan of his. And I'm going to be on a panel with him coming up. Yeah. I'm excited about it. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, you think about Palmer with Oculus VR coming from Snow Crash. Delian's favorite book for a long time was Seven Eves, another Neil Stevenson book. Can you tell me about the actual diamond market?

I believe you invested in a company that makes diamonds. And that's 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 when everybody thought that they were just going to make fancy diamonds that we wear for wedding rings, I thought, what is 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 for, you know, all sorts of applications, saw blades are made out of diamonds. And I went around to other investors and I told them about this future. Going back to magically weird, they're like, you're crazy. Like, this is just going to end up being a three-carat diamond. And this market is, they kept comparing it to De Beers and, you know, comparing it to, you know, the diamond market. And I said, no, you're not seeing the bigger picture here. And that was completely informed by the diamond age. Because in order to have this 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. There are buildings made of diamonds. They're just like, all of the technology was enabled because of that unlock, that we needed this material that was virtually indestructible. How important do you feel science fiction is to the future, right? It seems like, and is there more that the technology industry should be doing to invest?

And we've had people like Jason Carmen on the show who make documentaries about tech today. He wants to eventually make sci-fi. But do we need to be funding a lot more science fiction media? Is that one of the ways? Are we running out of sci-fi? It feels like we've invented most of the things that I grew up with except for, you know, flying cars, but 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 allow us to tell stories about a scientific future that actually is possible where 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 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 has read Diamond Age. Only one person, and he was 20 years old, raised his hand. That is alarming to me, that people are not reading more science fiction and not writing more science fiction and not thinking about the future and what it can become. 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 these are things 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 states and things like that, is when Earth is going to encounter an 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. It's disturbing to me that more people don't read in general. Yeah, we're not helping there. I can't wait to rest. We're reading 100 posts a day to people. No, I think the utopia versus dystopia thing is super important. You know, we see this on social media if you post.

Everything's bad. You'll get 100,000 likes. But if you go, you know, no one's, ever had more access to food, education, healthcare, all this stuff. It's like, you know, nobody nobody wants to see that. We want conflict. Yeah, we need. Dystopia means conflict means antagonists. If you think about it, we don't talk about the 99% of everything that's going right. We fix it 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 shit. And basically, unfortunately, young people, when you ask them if the world is a better or worse place,

they think it's a worst place because they're on TikTok, because they're on social media, because they're being fed a feed of nonstop violence and death and Tesla cars blowing up. And so your view of 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 really hoping that part of 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 about the things that are going right than the things are going wrong. That makes sense. One last sort of random question, and I'm curious to get here how you guys think about this. We seem to be entering a period of sort of renewed nationalism globally, like Europe's waking up, you know, America's, you know, fighting trade wars with our closest allies. This comes at a time where, you know, Lee, I think we met for the first time at this sort of pop-up city, right? And there's sort of these renewed experiments around cities, nation-states, network states. You know, do you foresee 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 you imagine that most of this fund as an example will be deployed here in the U.S.? Are you guys thinking, How are you thinking about international? Yeah, let's answer the broader frame. I think from our perspective, we're really open-minded. If you're really going to do invest in the magically weird and 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 general, we've always been really excited about what happens in America. And I think if I had to guess, most of the dollars will be deployed that way. but I yeah these little mini cities it's such an interesting future to imagine I do think that there will be we're in the recombination phase and like the havoc actually the first name of the fund that I started was havoc Vccc if I wanted me to keep it that way but you know maybe one day we'll get back to long journey we'll rebrand and in a few years and you guys will get the exclusive on back to havoc but you know yeah Havoc that VC was my URL but I do think that the recombination creates the opportunities for new ways of living and new things. cities and edge city, the stuff that, you know, Janine and team there are working on is really powerful where we met, Jordy. I don't know what you think about. I think 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 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 laws that are pretty well established around business like that 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 the Diamond Age, the Diamond Age does cover network states, and it does cover some really interesting, very futuristic concepts there. There's this group of people that they call the Neo-Victorians, and they basically have everything that's made by hand, but they're the most technologically advanced and the most wealthy 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 those. But it's still very frontier and it's still very on the edge, that sort of thinking. But in general, I think probably a majority of our investing is just going to stay in the United States. Makes sense. Love it. Well, thanks for stopping by. Congrats on the new We got to ring the size gong. There we go. Thank you for bringing the chain on as well. It's a big fund.

That's great. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. And we'll talk to you soon. See you guys. Good luck out there. Bye. See later.

Very cool. It's hard to do. Hard to do for funds in basically four years. Well, they didn't call it fund four. No, I know. In Chinese, the number four is for death. So that's probably what from the numerology perspective, that's probably why they skip that, go straight into funding.

fund eight coming up quickly. That's right. That is right. We got Preston Holland. Welcome to the stream. There is. What is up brothers? What's up?

Brothers. If there is anything that we should talk about in the Temple of Technology, it is private jets. I think that this is probably one of the more fitting segments. No, we've been waiting for this. You're our private aviation correspondent. You got some professional studio lighting set up. You're looking great. Should we pick it off with G650 ER versus BBJ?

You know, like a lot of our listeners are trying to decide between those two. Where, like, what considerations would you make if you're trying to make a big purchase? If you're going BBJ or 650 ER, personally, I'm going 650 ER. For the sole reason, the market is far more liquid. BBJs 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 Cardone 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 up round. I don't know. There's a buyer there. I don't know. We'll see. Eric's way too modest. He's way too modest.

Way too modest. But yeah, I take your point. I take your point. But hey, Evan Spiegel. He's also a buyer. He's got a BBJ. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point.

He has his own hangar there, too. The snap hanger. Yeah. When we discussed this, our argument was that BBJ, a little bit less flexible on where you can take it. Sure, it makes sense if your politician, you're landing at major regional airports, major international airports for big campaign stops. But if you're more of a CEO doing the off-sites, 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 it's almost like you've been reading my newsletter because I make that exact argument because BBJs 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 States, which is a fun fact. There's more airports than Chipotle's in the United States. Just to put into 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 America. That's the answer to the flying car. I just have airports everywhere. I can fly, oh, I'm going 10 miles across town. We have a flying.

Yeah, we've had a popular flying car manufacturer called Gulfstream for a very long time. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, I always 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 that kind of money. You know, you're making that. If you're coming up, oh, should I buy my first house? Should I get a private jet?

You know, the answer's obvious. answers obvious. And you guys talk a lot about stock tips. I mean, where better to get good stock tips than the FBO? I mean, it is prime listening for stock tips. That's right. Talk about, I'd love to get a high-level market update on just private aviation broadly. We're at this interesting time.

Are we in a correction? Are we in a recession? Is the economy crashing? my sense is that the whales that sort of move the private aviation market 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 look back to 2008. Now there's a lot of carnage there. 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 lot of nonsense shenanigans that happened. What we're experiencing right now is not that. The market has got really hot during COVID. You saw, if you look at valuation softwares in private aviation and they do exist, you see this kind of depreciation curve. And then there's a pop right at the end of 2020, tended to peak, right, fall of 2022, which is when all the other sort of assets. But really peaked in that.

We've been coming down off that high. I wouldn't say that we're back to normal quite yet. So like if you look at the trajectory we should have been on in 2019 barring the pandemic, because you've got to remember, you know, if you remember way back then, which felt like 30 years ago, but during the pandemic, so many people that probably could have flown private but didn't now said, oh, well, I'd still want to be able to travel. So I'm going to go ahead and fly private.

You saw wheels up, you saw Vista, you saw all of these companies just kind of go bananas and growth because so many new entrants were into the market. Well, that's since eased off as interest rates have gone up and kind of the economy's cooled off a little bit and you know, kind of the fringe private flyers. An interesting quote that I heard in kind of a happy hour setting from an aviation executive was there's a lot of wheels up king air flyers going back to Comfort Plus. they're not even the first class flyers. They're more the comfort plus flyers.

And so we kind of had this market correction. But this year, 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 quarter. And we did again last year. But not quite as sharp as we had kind of in previous years and what everybody is expecting. A lot of people anticipating bonus depreciation. And for those that are not obsessed with buying assets,

and 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 the math is about 20% of your purchase price that you get in tax savings in that first year. So if you finance the aircraft, you know, now you basically are just paying monthly for access to the airplane and are able to carry it, you know, over the life of the drone, owning the aircraft. Charter market slowed down a fair amount last year. It's recovered okay in the first quarter this year. not, you know, not to the levels that it was in 22 and 23. But it's definitely better, sorry, 21 and 22.

It's better than it was in 2020. But there's been 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 appreciation, whenever it does get passed, it's definitely going to be a stimulant to transacting of airplanes.

When is the when will that be decided? Is it is it known? And what's your is there a prediction market set up for this yet? Are you going? That's a good question. I would I would love to see if polymarkets got a got a 100% bonus depreciation set up like when it actually happens. So Trump addressed it in the state of union speech. He said 100% costing. That's kind of code word for 100% bonus depreciation as the rest of us know it. 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. Yeah. Well, the private jet market got, well, it's a beautiful, funny that you mentioned that, it's a beautiful contrast from 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 cut all of the private jet loopholes for, you know, corporate executives, yada, yada, yada. obviously Trump is a he likes private aviation there's there's no there there is no hiding it that

Trump appreciates a good private jet and so so yeah so kind of the sentiment is a little bit more positive 100% budget appreciation actually almost made it all the way through Congress last year but the Republican the Republican Senate did not want to give the Biden administration a win before the election and so 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 don't know exactly when, kind of what I'm hearing from some of my clients is they're anticipating, you know, one of those any day now type things from what they're hearing in Washington. So I think it's any day now. What about Starlink?

How has adoption been of Starlink on private jets? It means it seems like it would be a no-brainer, but are 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 definitely is. Starlink is gobbling up market share, but as a percentage of the overall fleet installation base, it's still pretty small. I don't know exactly off the top of my head what kind of the percentage penetration is, but it's growing faster than any of the other providers, right? So there's transitions. You have connectivity in private jets has been undergone a little bit of a transition from surface to air.

So think cell phone tower to private jet to satellite from above low earth orbit. And so there's been 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 older Wi-Fi system. Now they have the selection between do I go to the L5 Wi-Fi or do I switch over to Starlink? And when you talk about, you know, it's anywhere from $150,000 to $350,000 to install the equipment. And then last time that I looked, I think the unlimited Wi-Fi package was like $10,000 a month for unlimited Starlink.

It's funny. The way they measure that is by speed. How fast are you going is how they determine how they're going to charge you. So if you go under 300 miles 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 different. You ever heard this line before? What's the difference between private aviation and crack cocaine?

I have. Yeah. You can quit crack cocaine. I have a more, I'd love to get your take. VistaJet announced a $600 million investment. I believe it was yesterday. I think that's when we first chatted about having you come on. And what are, what are, you know, historically private aviation, you see a lot of tech guys look at the market and say, I'm going to, I need to dominate this. I love this. I need to, I need to get a piece of it. You know, we've seen sort of a lot of Silicon Valley attempts at cracking the private aviation code that just haven't worked for one reason or another. Some of these companies, like even over the last few years, I feel like they spacked and then like really struggled, right?

talk about the Vista fundraise and then maybe I'd love to kind of hear you expand around. Should venture just stay far away and just let private equity play their game or are there venture opportunities in the category? Yeah. So VistaJet just announced $600 million fundraise, which interesting enough, that's actually down off of the original leak came in the fall where it was going to be around a billion dollars. And then come February, it was going to be $800. 800 million and then they settled it as $600 million. So it's not public information of what it raised

at. Vista is actually based in Malta. So they're not even a, they're not a U.S. entity. And so there's a lot different reporting rules and all that kind of stuff. Well, we're not going to hit the size gong because they didn't, they didn't hit their target, but a little golf clap. Yeah. A little pencil on the gong. Yeah. But they, really the main reason is, When you think about software and you think about financing growth of something that has really low fixed costs and low cost of goods sold, you can really gas it with a bunch of capital and it's going to just grow really quickly because your cost of goods sold don't scale proportionately with that revenue growth.

And that's the whole beautiful point of venture, right? Is that you can, if I've got a pile full of money today, I can throw gas in the fire and it's going to grow exponentially. Well, private aviation is just really expensive. And so Vista, the reason that they raised this mostly is for kind of a de-leveraging activity. They had levered up a lot of their assets. They do have a really young fleet, which is part of the appeal for Vista. So if you guys remember back to Taylor Swift flying back for the Super Bowl, if you followed that saga, she flew on Vistajet.

Because 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 you because not every charter operator is great at that type of international operation. And so they had levered up all of their planes. And then they went on a buying spree and they bought ExoJet. They bought Talon Air. They bought, I mean, like literally went on a private equity style roll up of a bunch of different

providers in the space because, you know, having to thought that, you know, if you get to a certain scale, then you know, you all of a sudden unlock a lot of opportunity. Well, if you think of traditional EBITDA, right, if you remember what the Deh East has for, depreciation, if you hold the assets, like that's a real cost. That's not just a financial ad back cost. And so kind of restructuring some of the debt on their fleet and freeing up free cash flow in order to be able to continue to service their members. And so, you know, they're not publicly traded.

They kind of flirted with an IPO a couple of times now. But frankly, the companies in private aviation that have 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 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 market. 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 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. And we're trying to run a business here. That, that, that, kind of introduces a pretty poor competitive 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 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 SaaS, my B2BHR SaaS that I own. Like, no one's going to be like, oh, wow, tell me more. Well, not after Monday. Yeah. Yeah. Not after Monday. Okay, I got, I got, I got, spies are you doing?

I got a question for you. Has there been any corporate espionage? Corporate espionage meets private aviation rights, somebody bugging their competitors, Gulfstream, picking up those private conversations. Have we seen that before in the past? Oh, none that I'm aware of, but that sounds, that sounds juicy. You might be given some bad actors, some ideas. Yeah, no, we know, we know you got some stories.

But I do have a question on kind of like the future of the industry. obviously a huge cost associated with private aviation is just the pilot, two pilots, et cetera. There's companies like, what's the one that does automation for the military, flight automation? Oh, flight automation? I don't know. Palantir? Shield. Don't they do that?

Oh, I mean, they make drones, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Are there exciting companies working on autonomous flying? I know a lot of the underlying manufacturers. have really 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 sort of landing? They're talking to a self-driving, or like self-driving cars for the Sky company, but they were

working on the C-130, and the AC-130, 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. you can have deterministic software for like cruise control, but you can't have an AI generated non-deterministic system actually choosing to step on the gas or the brakes. And so his solution was he puts an iPad here that tells the human what to do

and then there's a human in 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 a big regulatory issue. the FAA is historically, well, it's the government. So like, first of all, like, let's set the benchmark of speed and innovation at that. And then, you know, the FAA is somewhere below whatever that benchmark is, which 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 private jet. Like regulatory capture in this situation to a certain extent is good. The problem is when you start to disrupt and interrupt some of that regulatory framework, you have to create an entirely new basis for how you think about some of these technologies. So a couple of interesting companies that are doing this. And your point to the end of loop that's totally right. And frankly, there's a long slew of basically the whole framework for the regulation is built around the pilot.

And so you now have to create a scenario, basically create an entire new regulation for automated flight. One interesting household name brand company that's doing really cool stuff in kind of the safety world is Garmin. So like they don't just make watches. They also make avionics and aircraft. And so 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 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, where essentially there's a button,

and I call it the oh shit button. And if something happens, you push the oh shit button and the screens go white and it 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 it's designed for, it's literally designed for emergency situations. It's not for, you know, every day. Or a crew had a couple extra drinks. You know, don't do that.

Don't do that. Don't pairing you on, private jets. They mix, but not in the cockpit. Usually John gets angry if anybody mentions Garmin, but it's in regard to Garmin sport watches. Oh, yes. Yes. We're responsible at Bezell.

We're supportive of their aviation products. Yes. Yeah. The, well, the dueling apps on their sport watches is just, UX just But anyway So that's an interesting Company's cool

There's a company called Skyrise You guys may have heard of them They've done a couple of raises I got to fly their simulator Over the summer And so it's a helicopter simulator And essentially what it is Is a fly-by-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 Like an envelope that you can't go beyond and basically create an unrecoverable situation. So helicopters have a lot of different 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. That's really cool because 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. and another fund. There's a lot of movement actually going to Dubai now in that sector. So the sovereign wealth funds are starting to pick up the slack where USVCs have gotten a little tired

with projections. I mean, 2025 is supposed to be our year of flying cars. And I don't know if you see any outside, but I know that I personally don't. But we got slop on the timeline. Yep. So there's that. Last question I'm going to leave you with. Preston, if you were flying, you don't do this very often, but let's say hypothetically you're flying in a commercial aircraft. The pilot had an issue. Would you be able to land a Boeing 707 fairly easily? You're confident in that? I think everybody, every guy. I know it's pretty confident, but where's your confidence level out of 10? Yeah, I'm about halfway through my 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 the guy. You're the guy. You're the guy we're putting in the cockpit.

I at the very least know what to say to the air traffic controller, and I know that I know the buttons that we need to push to alert everybody that like, hey, by the way, like, heads up coming in hot. Coming in hot. Well, thank you for coming in hot. This is a fantastic conversation. We appreciate you stop. Thank you so much.

Our private jet correspondent. Yeah, well, we'll have to do the next version of this. On a private plane. Thank you, by the way. The other, you were helping us look at a, at a flight recently. We didn't end up an up playing trigger. Hey, if you're looking to fly private, go talk to Preston. He will walk you through the process and get you some great prices.

So thank you for coming on. Look forward to the next conversation. Thanks a lot. Thanks, guys. This is fun. Cheers to soon. If you were on a private plane, you get off and you need to find a place to crash, a place to sleep, nice little vacation home to rent.

What would you do? I would use the driveway of a wander as a private air strip, and I would just land at the closest one. Perfect. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds,

top tier cleaning, and 24-7 concierge service. It's a vacation home but better folks. Go to Wander.com and use code TBPN. And also they're given away a Wander. So sign up and you can win. Not the whole house, but a free trip.

A free trip. Wander.com slash TbPN. Check it out. Yeah. Let's do some timeline. Get out of here. What do you think? Let's do it.

I'm excited for some. timeline. Yeah, me too. I'm an itching for it. It's not a real show unless you get some posts in. I like this one from ATF recovery diver, took the GF to the Hell Yeah Museum. It's just, it's just suits of armor and like crazy tapestries. And I love it. I love it. It's fantastic. 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 Fisher. And over the next four years, it evolved into a proper smartwatch platform that never lost its distinctive personality until Fitbit bought it.

Now, it is back with an open-sourced OS and new hardware. I don't know. Do you remember the story of Pebble at all? Wait, it's called Repebble. Repebble, because they're repurposing it. I guess they couldn't get the full.com. But this has been talked about for a long time. It was a YC company.

Eric Mikovsky became a YC partner after Pebble. Fascinating company, one of the few consumer hardware e-commerce companies. So it was a bit of a mentor to me back in 2012. Talk to them a bunch. Crazy business because it was a very popular Christmas gift, as all consumer electronics are. And so they had to do this crazy demand planning and forecasting,

where if they didn't lock in the design by July or August, then get them all made and know their marketing plans to ship to the Best Buz by by by October to get them on shells by November, to get them under Christmas trees by December. Like they would just miss their 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.

But they definitely basically invented the smart watch became very popular and then Apple came out with the Apple watch and absolutely decimated them. But I don't think you should be afraid of Apple coming up to you now because as we've covered on the show before, Apple isn't innovating anymore. That is right. But who knows?

I'm on the site. It says for those unfamiliar with Pebble, it is an e-paper smart watch with simple functionality, long battery life and fun, quirky design. Yeah. It's a week-long battery life. It sounds like the founders just self-funded everything to date

to just get this back into business. And I love that. He says, I have personally funded development for these new watches. I just really want them myself. So the whole team, as soon as, I mean, they had a very tough funding environment with the Apple competition.

They kind of framed it as 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 that they eventually had to sell the business. But immediately, everyone on that team, even kind of just some of the random executives were like, we got to buy it back. We got to do it. I love this company. And I love that hustle.

They haven't slapped an LLM in this thing yet. There's no mention of AI. It's a hardware device in 2025 without. I still think the kids watch is the opportunity there. There are some brands that have done. They already have a children's. They're popular. Daytona Children's Nautilus.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I guess we should have a children's smart watch as well. For sure. Well, when they get pebble off the ground, they need to advertise it. I think they should put up a billboard. I think they should go to adquick.com because adquick.com makes out-of-home advertising easy and measurable. They could say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQQquick combines technology,

out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Boom. Moving back to the Wiz acquisition, which we covered yesterday, amend and pretend is breaking down who made money. Wizbacker Sequoia Capital is posed to deliver a return of about 25 times its invested capital from the cybersecurity. startups pending sale to Google. The multiple on invested capital, MOIC is roughly 10% stake in WIS. Alphabet agreed to buy for 32 billion in cash.

So Sequoia is about to reap $3 billion from the sale. And amended pretend just says, was this a Sean McGuire? We'll have to ask it. Maybe it's possible. He definitely has worked with the team. I mean, yeah, he posted about it.

His haters are in disbelief right now. And so Amanda Pretend says, it's good to see Sequoia and Green Oaks finally get a win on the board. Yeah, absolutely killer. You don't see that often. I'm kidding. Average week for them. Yep. Average week, size. It is, it is funny when you are a really scaled allocator if a big exit is happening and you're a multi-stage fund and you're not in it. It's like, what were 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 yeah well uh let's move over to online dating eric jong at x a i says he just deleted hinge i will 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 the xiai team huge alpha just going to x or xa i and just getting into the bangor vortex that is the team yeah it's so crazy You've seen, you know, blowing you up and helping you hit some big numbers. It is like a remarkable shift from the pre and post Elon owning Twitter. Because before Elon 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 X, like the everything app, their employees clearly like to get wild on the timeline, which we love to see. you got it. You got it. Mene Marzakis says, if you leave before 6 p.m., be honest with yourself. It's a half day. Love this. Lotham band.

Yeah, Mene is a good friend. And he's on the founding team at another very close friend. And yeah, they're absolute grinders. And they're actually, I meant to put this in, but their company called Anon, they're working on B2B agent product and they're hiring for a bunch of roles. So go check it out. Shout out to that. Absolute dogs.

Let's go to Luke Metro. He's reposting a video of a Xiaomi EV factory, someone sharing that the SU7 Ultra parks itself while he heads to a meeting. Ben, do we have a video? Luke Metro says, in 10 years,

Americans traveling abroad are going to look at Xiaomi cars like Boris Yeltsin 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 Ben.

He just said tomorrow. So anyways, I'll explain the video. So this is a complete and utter knockoff of the Taekon. Oh, yeah? It does look pretty cool. Yep. They made some upgrades. They added a wing.

Does it depreciate the same depreciation? I'm sure even faster. Even faster. Apparently this is like one of the top selling cars in China. I mean, 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 to the karaoke machine inside of it. They have ones with like the LED. bar on the back so you can send a message to the person that's tailgating you. They're having lots of fun. But yes, we want to stay competitive. Yeah, but it's pretty funny. It's to be dominant. You just sort of drives up, gets out of his car.

It parks itself. It's a pretty cool demo at the very least. But if you're running a car company and you want to compete with Xiaomi, you've got to get your finances in order, folks. Time is money. You got to save both. Head over to ramp.com. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place.

Go to ramp. Anyway, ramp. Ramp. We got a post from Tyler. He says Pompelona has the running of the bulls. California needs the running of the bears. This is a great pick, too, if you can scroll down. He's fresh out of a run.

I love how, yeah, he's really out there doing things. You can just run from bulls. Yeah, I wonder how much more dangerous it would be to run with bears. Do you think that's significant? Bulls are dangerous. Bears are very. very dangerous. Is it comparable? So I've seen, you would never have seen this. Okay. Because you don't follow mankind's greatest athletic pursuit, MMA. Okay. But the Russians, there's a bunch of videos that

come out of Russia with these wrestlers growing up that actually wrestle with bears. MMA, is it? Muscle Man assault or something? What is it standpoint? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Something like that. You can wrestle with bears. Okay. We briefly looked into getting one just I think the future of the Boy Scouts is just... Domesticating bears. Our young American boys learning to wrestle with bears. Yep. And learning the dance between sort of mankind and nature.

I love it. We got a post from Signal. He says every post you write should be instantly shareable to a group chat. You need to give people at least one of these three reasons, and they'll take action immediately. To flex an opinion, they couldn't articulate or hadn't considered it 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 profound. The best posts do all three

at once, and we call this a signal, a signal post named after a great signal. And I'd say if you're in Signals group chat, you know, hats off to you. You're some of the most brilliant folks. We really, you know, salute to you. And hopefully this post finds it's into your group chat. There we go. You can also just glaze your way into a group chat. I mean, someone else was posting about that how like,

it was Nikita. Nikita was saying like, you need to, you need to like be 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 so that's another way to get into the group chat. Be shareable instantly. Nate Cooper. We got a Nate Cooper post. I thought this was a good reminder. Don't build to an exit. Don't build to a sale.

Build a great business. I think every entrepreneur you know if you grow up reading tech crunch you have the 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 period of time but they were adding like 200 million ARR a year right so it's like they didn't need to sell yeah and they They could have just kept growing the business. They had a lot of optionality. They could have gone, you know, public. They could have, you know, gone. There's a bunch of, you know, potential buyers 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 desperate. You're not, you don't need the sale. It's also just focus. Right. Individual customer, et cetera. So. Totally.

Should we go to Sean Frank? Breaking down influencer marketing. That's right. CEO of Ridge Wallet. One of the best wallets. the world. I carry one. He's actually the top wallet salesman in the world. I would argue. I bet they sell more wallets. He is. 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,

they are a fantastic performance marketing organization and everyone will know. You, you get it. You get it. So he says, I've spent $10 billion, $10 million on influencer marketing. $10 million. I would think that he spent way more than that. Well, he spends a lot on Facebook. No, I know, but I feel like I personally... You gotta get those numbers up, Sean. Come on. No, he spent way more than that.

He just picked a nice round number. He's being humble. He says, influencer marketing is the closest thing to be able to pay for word of mouth marketing. 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 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 two minutes. There are five big ad units you should buy. Infeed, social post, story posts, in content ad reads on YouTube podcast ads and content rights. It goes down. 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, but the important thing is I own a company that does YouTube advertising for brands, and you can go use brandednative.com. So thank you, thank you for the plug. Branded native actually got started via Ridge, you know, basically running their in-house YouTube marketing strategy. It turns out a bunch of brands need it. So it's now run by the great Maria Taverni. you can just email DME. I'll connect you to her.

She's fantastic. Run some ads, folks. And run some ads. We love ads. I love ads of all types. We got another post from Near. I'd like to publicly state I don't buy the whole. There will be a ton of new jobs thing for normal people.

There will be many new jobs, but not for normal people. So lesson, be abnormal. Yes. Yeah. Be goaded. Yeah. Skill issue. Find some, yeah, I mean, find some weird hobby or something or some, some weird segment of the

marketing going to. George was on talking, you know, talking about leveraging LLMs to understand historic history. That'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 a $5 million your business if you just get the content right and really. Yeah, it's kind of like you don't want to be in a massive horde of undifferentiated labor because that will be the first target for an AI company

because they'll say, oh, well, there's 10 million people doing the exact same job. It's very automatable versus, oh, yeah, there's a one-of-one person. What's the economic value of creating an AI system that can replace that one person, crawl though not that much. So you won't be replaced. We got a fundraise from my friends over at Crossman. They're excited to announce a $23.6 million fundraise led by Rivet Capital. Also a friend over there, Zach Rosen, who's the man.

We saw him at Demo Day briefly. To bring every business and AI agent on chain, 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. Crossman's all-on-one platform makes building on-chain easy with low-code APIs for wallet, stablecoins, on ramps, tokenization, and credentials. Crossman has a really cool story.

In the sort of NFT boom, they built a way to basically buy NFTs with a credit card. So they just like rocketed. Their growth was insane. 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 party round. and they were raising, I believe, on like an uncapped note because they were just growing so quickly.

There was like some small discount. I was like, oh, 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. I ended up, but got in and very excited about what they're doing. 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. Shout out to Tom. like when you find an 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 prominent family members. I asked him for copies so I could make episodes about them.

He said, absolutely not. I have no interest in educating my competitors. Amazing. Feel different. I love it. skill issue though we tell the world pretty much everything yep we told them our secret plan yes which is to be the news yeah be the news you want to see in the world be the most profitable podcast in the world um uh this is a fun show yeah it's great good guess i would have liked to do

another four hours of timeline but we have more stories for tomorrow we can go through intel and uh maybe that uh the the eight billion seven billion dollar defense contractor so stay tuned for Maybe we'll get through that. I still want to go through humanoid robotics supply chain stuff. There are so many deep dives to do and not enough time, folks. But we have Delyan coming on tomorrow, our space correspondent, Delta V with Dahlion. As we're calling the segment, we have a bunch more people scheduled. So stay tuned.

Stay locked in, folks, and have a great day. We should see if Dillian could bring a dolphin to his appearance since they love space, clearly, and celebrate it. They celebrate it. Thank you for tuning. in folks we'll see tomorrow we'll see tomorrow great day bye