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

You're watching TVPN. It is Wednesday, March 19, 2025. We are live from the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today, folks. We're talking Nvidia gtc. Just happened. The goat, Jensen Huang, 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's partnering with Taco Bell. Let's go.

Huge.

This is a huge development.

The streets have been begging 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 strytechery update that we're going to take you through. And then we have an interesting deep dive into a defense conference 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 gonna talk to some folks, give you some news, give you some updates. But we gotta start with some amazing news, folks. The astronauts are back.

They're back. They're back.

NASA, SpaceX, everybody working together.

We don't typically hit gongs for returns from space, but we should hit one.

For every day that they were in space. 300 gong hits, folks. 300 gong hits. You're gonna 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.

Honestly, if you really love space though, it's kind of an amazing opportunity.

I've been saying that they're pretty comfortable. I think If I get 192 days for free. Yeah, imagine you're at the amount you book eight days and they're like, hey.

Do they get paid overtime by the way, when they're up in space? I mean, it's kind of a 24, 7.

They get frequent flyer miles. They can just go back forever now.

It should be, it should be something where every extra Hour.

Yep.

You're in space. Your comp, your hourly comp sort of increases by 10%. Just goes parabolic. If something goes bad, like you just.

Become like a trillionaire. That's great. It's like in Armageddon, that movie where the, they're like, okay, we're gonna have to go blow up the asteroid. Like what, what do you guys want to be paid? And they're like, we don't wanna pay taxes ever again. Just these bros going up there to drive. 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 comments says, life is sometimes more beautiful than fiction.

It's, it's a beautiful thing. I'm, I'm just so happy they're back. You know, this turned into a little bit of like a, not really like a 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 a, it's an inspiring story. You know, the astronauts made it through. You know, SpaceX came to the rescue. NASA sorted it out, no injured.

It's just great as the news. We look a little bit so silly not doing a sort of post game press conference, being out in the water.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

If you ever tell us how it feels, if you ever watch wsl, which is the, the. Yeah, not, not your kind of thing, but it's the, the Women's surfing. No, no, no, it's a world surfing.

World Surfing league.

You, they, they have a guy in the channel which is the section of the break just outside of where the waves are crashing and he's on a jet ski and he's sort of doing these sort of interviews. That's great.

Yeah.

Next time we have splashdown. We 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 knowingness. I, it would not surprise me if they know exactly what's going on in this situation. That's cool.

Well, here's a little factoid. Give it to me might be fascinated by. There was a NASA astronaut funded experiment in the 60s with a researcher named Margaret Levat and a dolphin named Peter. And they did have they did have sexual encounters and. But that's great, Jordy. Thanks for bringing that to the show. But it was wonderful. 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.

Yeah.

Anyway. So anyways, moving on to something less controversial. Donald Trump mentioned that. 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, with the. With one capsule and they're just doing tests and maybe they're just being. Abundance of caution and 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 use the word stranded and so that's probably how the history books will remember it. They were stranded, but they made it back thanks to American innovation. And I'm so glad that this didn't wind up being some international fiasco. 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 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. They're very good at delivering narda but like they did for the Doge team. But I can imagine there's the transfer mechanism and potentially the cost. Right. And eight sleep is, you know, very inexpensive compared to sending a capsule space. So the delivery cost could have been a.

Well, hopefully the team's on it. Eight sleep are nights that get that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. We can't recommend an eight sleep enough.

Let's see how you did. 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 eight hours at 38.

I got a little bit cocky about two weeks ago.

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 eight Sleep is having a President's day sale. But our code for $150 off. Our code gets you $350 off.

You got to go.

Yes. 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, Tyler. Yeah, the whole crew.

I gotta just hand it to them. Like I think the X algorithm has never been in a better place. Yeah, it's gone through eras. There's been the slop era, there was the 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 midjourney. He posts like once every few days. It's always really.

Although 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, I gotta just give a round of applause to the team. They've just done fantastic job.

They had to go to, they had to go to a dark place to get to their adjusted EBITDA of 1.4 billion.

I heard that.

And we're very proud of them and they're gonna be launching payment soon. So if you've ever, if you've ever wanted to pay your mutuals, you're gonna get the chance to do that a whole lot more. We covered this, this sort of repricing, I think like a month ago at.

This point it was rumored and now it's, it's great to see but congrats to everyone at X. Fantastic work. I mean the platforms get better and I actually went and did a, 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 can't upload a three hour show if it's limits three minutes. It's ridiculous.

Are they trying to fry the attention of their users?

They must be. Yeah.

It could be a dark.

It was funny when we talked to Joe Weisenthal about that and he was like, sheepish. Like, no, no, I actually really like X. Like, I just post there every once in a while. Like, you know, it's kind of dodgy. I was like, I mean, he's playing. 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 Huang 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 Rubin AI chips and some corporate partnerships. So 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 surge a hundredfold, everybody would get pretty angry. But we love the chips.

Yeah, love the chips. I don't even think the Celsius CEO could say that about Celsius.

Usage of Celsius needs to surge a hundredfold. The GDP demands it. I mean, 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 100 fold. Yeah, like there should be hundreds of more customers.

This is why we want to see companies doing large scale M and A using watches.

Yes.

Go acquire, you know, 2 million Daytonas.

Yes, yes. You know, always the Daytona.

Common ground.

Like common ground. It's just, it's just a store of value. It's the bitcoin of the watch world.

It is, it is the gold.

Anyway, the Wall Street Journal is breaking it down here. 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 100 times more computing power for advanced AI than it considered necessary a year ago, he said at the conference that has grown from a sleepy chip developer gathering in Silicon Valley to a rock concert like event that filled a hockey arena. I love it. AI expansion into models that can reason and act as agents to carry out tasks for humans who require far greater computational firepower, which comes from the kind of chips that Nvidia manufacturers. Jensen Huang said, this year, this last year, this is where almost the entire world got it wrong. Nvidia shares have been volatile since the release of Deep Seek. But there's also been a lot of other things going on in the market since January, obviously tariffs and just general Trump. You know what's going on there. There's been other competition, other other entrants. Nvidia Intel's retooling as we'll go into but there's a lot going on so. And then the market's just been selling off as a whole a model. So secrets at least 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 Chinese startup that said it had built 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 Jevons Paradox disrespecters right there. Oh, bad day for those. For those investors we'll see.

Never, never disrespect a paradox 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 used 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. It's fine to go fire off a query and then come back 10 minutes later, but it'd be better if it came back immediately.

Yep.

And that's what we want from Nvidia baby. Wong also spent time hyping up AI agents which are designed to complete complete tasks such as booking flights or making dinner reservations. For humans, agents often rely on reasoning models.

This is the simple use case that we're all just begging one person to build.

Yeah, yeah, it's like to book a flight.

I do think this is one of those things that it's one of those things that's so deeply obvious. But if you just built a really good version of OpenAI's operator but for booking flights and hotels you could probably get to some ridiculous run rate and yeah, you're going to get cloned and wrecked by Fang eventually, but you're going to have a glorious you Know, few.

Years where you can just run glorious secondary sales. Maybe some dividends in there. Yeah, it's going to be a good run.

Yeah.

The amount of computation needed is easily 100 times more than we thought we needed this time last year. Reiterating the point. Let's go.

He's like analysts. I am the analyst now.

Or projections. We were off by 100x actually.

And it's. And it's bullish.

It's bullish. It's great. But this is the real story. He unveiled a new line of chips called Ruben that are expected to be available in the second half of 2026. And so Nvidia has a chip series, but then also they package those chips so they do chip iterations based on the different, the different manufacturing technology. And then they package those into the gaming versions, which are like the, 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. Rubin is the 202,924th most popular name in the United States. I expect this to surge today in 2026. As Ruben rolls out, people just kind of get it in their head. Little baby Reuben comes into the world.

Do you think Reuben sandwiches will become more popular?

That's true. You know, what's the Reuben sandwich trade?

Yeah.

Got to get on public. And.

It'S a little bit of Jimmy John's. We see Jimmy John's dominate the app store charts. That's where you go to get a Ruben. And then you get on OpenAI and you inference some reasoning models using Ruben chips. Yeah, it's just Ruben all the way down.

Yep. The Rubin.

Yes, yes.

The Ruben underpins everything theory of 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 chip maker. 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. Nvidia shares were down though by more than 3% after the presentation concluded. Slightly more than the tech heavy NASDAQ composite where there was a broad tech 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 years.

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 stock, but yeah, yeah, you'd have.

A lot of money, folks.

You have a lot of money, but you'd also be very old and nothing is more valuable than your youth.

Yeah.

Anyway, 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 DeepMind called Newton, that can simulate physical systems. The time has come for robots, Wong said, noting that there is a 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, long focus is actually amazing.

Oh, yeah.

If you think about. If most CEOs that had gone on this run.

Yeah.

Would start to let it get to their head. They'd start cell phone, you know, they'd start mobile device companies. 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, focus on the next. The next chip.

Yes. Hasn't gone into fabrication. It's strong partner of tsmc. No word that he's trying to get into that market. And then also, you know, even the gaming chips, like, they never, they 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, I was looking at like a summary of, of Nvidia's history and the, the, the, the AI summary that came up with it was like Nvidia pivoted to AI. And it's like, it's so funny because I guess they did in the sense that they were originally like, the whole story of Nvidia is they came out of like 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.

And you were a big driver of a lot of that momentum and growth totally because you were gaming super hard.

I've built multiple computers with many Nvidia GPUs. They're fantastic. They're the best. But. 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. A deliberate pivot from Nvidia. But they still were a massive beneficiary. And that's what has added, what, like $2 trillion to their market cap in the last couple years. It's great.

Jensen is doing a lot of heavy lifting for all the robotics company companies because he says, everyone, pay attention. This could very well be the largest industry of.

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 in an interview. Hosting the event will be a test for how the area handles the super bowl and the World cup next year. So it really was the super bowl of AI. It's great. But you know what Wong's Achilles heel is? Or his Achilles wrist.

Doesn't wear a watch that is.

And yet his cousin Lisa Su over.

AMD does, has got some hitters.

Hitters. And so, Jensen, you got to go to Bezel. You got to get a luxury watch. Bezel has 23,500 luxury watches fully authenticated in house by Bezel'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 go.

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 have the same coin.

Okay, well, moving on to More Nvidia news. We got tacos, folks. AI is will soon take your order at Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. Nvidia is partnering with Yum Brands that owns Taco Bell. And it's an interesting story. Basically when you go to the drive thru, instead of talking 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, you can very easily use an open source technology like Whisper or any sort of, you know, speech to text. So 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, 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 yum Brands.

Okay, so they're developing it in house.

Yes. So Yum Brands has a cto, a Chief Digital Officer and Technology Officer Joe park. And he said they're using Nvidia tools to build, but they're building it in house rather than relying on third party vendors with prepackaged apps.

So what, 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 Blackwell's in there, you just gotta go. It's 100k.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, quick. And that becomes the new hot scan.

Yeah, I think it'll be cloud based, hopefully.

Well, that's the whole thing. Why do they need, why do they need to actually. If they're partnering with Nvidia and they're actually buying, 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 perform. Yeah, they're cracked and they're just like really good. Because they have to deliver the software like distributed on the edge because it can't always go back to the headquarters because it needs to be like quick. You can't have delays every time you push a button. So they host it all locally and they deploy all this and there's all the security stuff and they're actually like really, really?

Do you think Chick Fil A's recruiters are just on LinkedIn reaching out to, to these super senior.

It's like Jane street guys.

They don't ask, hey, would you be open to new roles? They think, what do you think about Chick Fil A? And the person comes back, they're like, I love Chick Fil A, bro. I eat it every day for sure.

And so he said, we want to own the digital, the intellectual property. This is the head of Yum's Yum 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, and they recently announced Byte by Yum, a proprietary platform that will house the new apps. And park is the president.

They want that tech multiple so bad.

Yeah.

They're up 2% on, in the, in the last few days. Are they? Yeah.

You're on public. Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

Third party vendors, however, will have a role in certain areas, the company said. Andrew Sun, 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 Yum team was primed to take advantage of Nvidia tools and application frameworks like its Nim microservices, which is designed to aid AI development. Yum's 2000 technologists, they have 2000 programmers and tech people. Basically 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, and seamlessly fit into Yum's tech stack. He added. 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 Yum Brands because yes, they have to fork over the money to buy Nvidia chips, but then they kind of get the Nvidia software probably 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 and they, they'll actually build something that looks like an Nvidia gaming computer. And when you walk into like the Star Wars Star Tours, like whatever's driving that simulation is the best at the time. But then once they build the, once they build it, they lock it in and it stays there for like 40 years. Yeah. And so they're amortizing that R and 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 Yum 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.

Yeah, a lot of these, a lot of the SaaS companies are trying to, they would, 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 an order. And look how much money you just like scales because you don't have to use, you know, a human to take the order. But then, 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 cost.

Totally.

Yeah.

I mean the rise of online ordering and like, I guess digital channels is remarkable. Yum brands took 19% of orders through online channels, basically their app. In 2019. It's up to 50% already pre AI just, just the app being popular. A lot of people when they show up to McDonald's, they order on the app and then they just pick it up because I'm going or it's faster than waiting in the line. And Yum 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 and a lot of, 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 personalize 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, and there's going to be this sort of squeezing effect where eventually it's easy to imagine and not even too distant, not even the 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, you know, 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 paperclips.

This was, this was actually mapped out in this sci fi book. I think it's a book called the Automat. I think that's what it's called. It's basically a cafeteria that you walk into. And I mean, it's the. It's the vision of what you see at like an Amazon store where there's no checkout, basically, there's just these. 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 Dave Friedberg actually started a company that was kind of in the same vein called eatsa. 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 make. To automate everything on the back end as well.

Yeah.

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 go in that way and you slop it all together and everyone just takes from the hose.

Cows Walking in, cows walking in. One side, it's great. Humans coming in to just grab the food on the other, they don't even see each other.

Yep.

Speaking of bull market and beef.

Beef cows.

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 steak here or there. But anyways, we don't talk about animal rights on the show. This is a business show.

Yeah.

Well, if you are encouraged by that news or maybe discouraged by that news, why don't you go over to public.com and place your bet on Nvidia. Are they going up? Are they going down? We can't tell you. But you, you can figure it out for yourself. And remember, you can do a lot more than just bet on Nvidia with the most extreme high leverage puts and calls you can possibly imagine. You can also do multi assets, 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 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 a, it's just a fantastic economic opportunity.

That'S such an insane. We've spent decades developing a map of like where are the, all the, all.

The most exotic animals and now it's time to capitalize, capture all the value traded a thousand x multiple and just go to the moon.

Yeah, but they could apply the same framework they do for what are the hunting licensees like? The, you've got to get like a tag or whatever so they can, they could 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 a guest joining in three minutes. So we're going to set this up with some timeline posts that we saw. 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 Favre, I don't think that's the. That's must be somebody impersonating the famous quarterback. Maybe it's the actual quarterback. I don't, I don't actually know, but I doubt. Brett says I don't have enough life to go through 70,000 JFK files. Anyone know what really happened? So I reading from this, I don't actually know.

This is the real Brett Favre.

It is the real Brett Favre.

Okay.

It's the.

He says he's in his bio. He says it's the former gamer, one time pigskin thrower. There you go, 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 presidency and SW Y X. I believe that's Swix, host of a great podcast on AI says all you chat with PDF MFs, you have been preparing your entire life for this. Don't miss your shot. And George Savolka, a friend of the show who's coming on in a few minutes says we've processed all 80 plus k all 80k pages of the JFK files with AI. What questions do you want to ask? Well, we're going to ask him a bunch of questions in just a few minutes.

Yeah, it's almost like they time the JFK file release with generative AI so that the gen AI companies could get a layup 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 Devin AI tweeted prime Will depew would have embedded the entire JFK files and shipped a rag enabled chat app by now. And I was just like what is this post? Because I think this is like from the official corporation. This is from Cogn and it's a very funny post. They're posters and it's like it's so insider.

Speaking of Will, he's coming on the show.

He's coming on the show next week.

This next post. I was laughing at this earlier. He says 10 things I learned in YC winter 2025 1. Never let no one know how much dough you hold. 2. Never let them know your next move. 3. Never trust nobody. 4. Never get high on your own supplies. 5. Never sell no crack where you rest at. 6. That credit debt it. 7. Keep your family and business completely separated. Money and blood don't mix. Like okay all right. Eight, never keep no weight on you. Nine, if you ain't getting bagged, stay the F from police. Ten, if you ain't got the clientele, say, heck no.

It really hits when you censor it. Like, it's fantastic. Jordan, you do a great job.

We need a. We need a like a beaver button. So whenever there's a swear word, we just hit that instead of saying the word.

Yeah, very funny. And yeah, long history of rap lyrics in venture. And I think we have George joining the show right now. George, how you doing?

I'm good.

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, I'm, I'm just a third cup of coffee guy.

Okay.

So, yeah, yeah, that's. Where do you max. Where do you max out? Where do. Where do you hit your, your sort of zone of genius with caffeine? Is it in the, the 300 milligram range? Higher, lower?

You know, I think the, 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 gotta go. So you go for three. Because micro dose. 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 jet lagged, you're delayed, you just. Then you've got a kind of discount or you need to rely on Lucy or, you know, all the different John Coogan things. But today we're on three cups of coffee, okay?

Oh, you're on three cups of coffee. Is that because 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 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 redaction.

So.

To the JFK files or the Trump presidency. And obviously no one has time to read through 80k pages of like, scribbles and scratch and a bunch of scanned 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 instantaneously had access to an AI that could look over them. A lot of interesting things that, that came up, some of which I can talk about on this, on this podcast or, I guess, live show, and some of which 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's 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, who 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.

The.

A very interesting piece of the entire, you know, dump is that you might think, 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 a variety of other people. 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, so there's, there's, 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. But not as much on the, on the other standard people that, you know, folks would usually go and look into. A lot of documents also mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. Do you think.

Applications of your guys's tech and more broadly, some of these models can help us just get a better understanding of history, right? For every big story like, you know, the JFK assassination, there's just like this incredible amount of evidence, some 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 Hevea, 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, 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 like presents always one side of the story. And as you see a shift away from what I would call like syntheses like history books towards people using first party knowledge and then orchestrating effectively an AI over whatever they'd like or whatever 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, 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, oh well, why is George mentioned so much? And you know, they don't really realize that these are completely unrelated, but by contextualize, 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 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 ChatGPT Enterprise, or between Hebia and, and even like the Perplexity Spaces product is that instead of like going and pinging a search engine, Hebbia goes in, reads every single file and tells you whether or not they're related or not. So it's not search engine, it's more infinite effective context window. So the AI can process a lot more information and, and Using that, it's, it's better about, you know, having slightly less bias or like, having the data skewed in, like, in a way that, 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. 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 the longer context window. We're trying to build an agent orchestration platform where you wouldn't judge artificial superintelligence by its ability to use an abacus or to like 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, like, the best way to do unstructured data processing won't even even be in a larger effective context window for one model, but rather ways for it to orchestrate sub models to do computation on every file. And so if you look at what's going on with the JFK files, you're actually having one God model orchestrate a bunch of other smaller models and read with full attention over every document, but not, you know, have to jam that all into one infinitely long context window. It's an infinite effective context window.

Was there any pre processing that you had to do with the files? Because I imagine a lot of these are like screenshots or photos of pretty messy scans of documents. It's not exactly like a JSON file.

A ton of different processing. One of the worst parts of running an AI company, like processing old documents, is that the documents 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 more expensive, even slower. There's, you know, it's, there's a context window issue there.

Yeah.

So what we do is we have probably the highest throughput indexing and like a highest 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 LLMs can like process in an easy way.

Can you talk a little bit about the history of the company? Because you started like before the AI boom and I remember you describing the company early on and I was like, ah, that sounds kind of cool. And then like I saw you again like a couple years later, it's like, oh, this guy's working on like the hottest thing in the world. So how did you like, what's the prehistory of the company?

Prehistory is, I think I made an early bet on large language models and it paid off. I was in a PhD at Stanford 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, OpenAI destroyed all of our research. They released a paper on GPT3 which was, hey, large language models are meta learners. And it took the academic world that was trying to build AGN were like, okay, you're never going to do it, but it's going to happen in a closed source way. And OpenAI 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 spend the next two years 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.

I think, oh please, you're focused on the enterprise. But I'm just interested to get your opinion here because 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, it'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, gbt, sort of conversational chat search, People talk more about.

Like super intelligence timelines than they do about just like AI booking Me a flight? Yeah, I want to know, I want to know your flight booking agent timeline. Yeah, that's what I want to know. It's definitely more near term than paperclip.

Yeah, yeah paperclips are, are your airplane. I would say 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 in. Honestly, there's a million startups now building B2B AI like trying to compete with us and a bunch of our other competitors are trying to build. It's like it's already too late. Like if the whole world's trying to do it, like you're already way too late like that you have to, you have to start way before everyone's trying to build it. But I, I think it will be done by OpenAI 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, and, and APIs of external providers like Delta and United and, and I think that'll be, that'll be a problem that requires a large language model scale company, a training scale company to.

Yeah, I think that's a good point. We have the anti bot industrial complex that present 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 OpenAI and you can go to doordash and say look, let's do this deal. Our users want this. We're going to be able to drive 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 Hebia 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 hebia.com now. I noticed you got the dot com.

There was someone squatting on that for like you know, the longest period of time. And I was like, they, they know exactly who I am. They're just going to charge me a crazy money for it. But yeah, you can find us on, on hebby AI or hebby.com and I'm George S on Twitter at GCA and we should be rele as the Trump administration releases more Files a variety of other interesting like AI Deep dives. So give it a follow and big fan of this. Of this show. Thanks for.

Thanks for calling in.

Yeah, it's fantastic. Way to just demonstrate the power of the product. And thank you for your public service. Appreciate it.

Thanks guys.

Talk soon. Bye.

Citizen Techno journalist.

Citizen Techno journalist. My two favorite wild card JFK conspiracies. The driver was responsible. People think that there's this conspiracy.

You want to grab the hat, John?

Yeah, yeah, the hat. So 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 gonna die for this. So he got.

Strangest way. I mean, I guess strangest use that too.

But there's an unlimited amount of conspiracy.

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 Topher from Albedo. Welcome to the stream. Wow, that is a great background.

The Command Center.

The Command center and the Command Center.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Young company incorporated in 2020. Right. And first satellites in orbit already. And breaking news. You 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. Yeah. Hopefully someone updates that. We need to figure out the Wikipedia thing. We started late 2020 and Y Combinator winter 21 batch.

Fantastic.

We got to start.

Wow. Hard tech in yc. Another narrative violation. But. 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 Belio. 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 topper on transporter 13. So like the big satellite up top got dropped off in LEO as epic drop off video of us getting like dropped off 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, 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 Velio.

So talk about just from when you started the company. 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 wasn't always the case.

Yeah, definitely there's a lot more interest these days from the capital know capital allocation community on the national security technology side. And for us. So the 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 10cm per pixel which is about the size of a coaster that you put your drink on. Must be from a billion dollar reconnaissance satellite. Would be amazing to have commercially because it 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 Lego because you need a huge telescope. And so that's what initially drove the idea for very low Earth orbit. At that time there was still say investors were still bullish on Earth observation as a whole. Today that is not generally the case. 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 trade off, where if you proliferate and build way more satellites than a few big bespoke ones, maybe the capability isn't as good. In our case, BELEO really unlocks these two things that have previously been mutually exclusive, which is that exquisite capability, but at low cost. So now you can spend that cost savings on proliferation, which is much more resilient, creates much more coverage. And so, yeah, it's definitely a good time to be launching this first satellite, V4 Sevilla, 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, SaaS is important, but also having sort of global visibility.

Neck and neck, really.

Yeah, neck and neck. But. But yeah, do you think that. 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 the data perspective, but a lot of our technology is itar controlled and so that drives certain security levels. We have what they call a Tier 3 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, given what we're doing and the, you know, 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 telescopes. 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 elio?

Yeah, so the. We would say actually the hardest part for our architecture in VEO is like the kind of robotics precision points and control system technology that we need to build because the satellite's moving so fast and we have this big telescope and a tiny angle and so being able to collect a bunch of different areas make those images not blurry. That is where really the hardest part is for any big space based telescope, but especially in Belio. 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. But I think historically a lot of people have looked at Velia with cubesats and those just don't last like very long there because you can imagine like a bowling ball versus a 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 hurts 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, and to protect the optics and the solar rays. 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 satellites break, they're in orbit for 50, 100 years. But in Belio it's like a matter of weeks or days. And so it's a not, you know, it's a sustainable place to be.

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.

Feel like I'm the Maldives. I know what it looks like, it's a bunch of 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 go. 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 will start getting our first pictures in a couple months when we get to Velia. So that's really when we'll have been there, done that. In terms of all the spots that we imagine and maybe travel less.

How do you think about the market size and the trade off between commercial and government contracts? I don't know how much you can talk about the government size, but there's famous examples of satellite imagery being used to see how Many cars are in the Walmart parking lot and some hedge fund say, saying, oh well, Walmart's gonna 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 gotta sell to whoever you can. How are you thinking about it in the early stage for customers?

So this first satellite will operate solo for the first two years, then we'll start deploying more in 2027. And we have, 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, because 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, 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, 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 base for us. And then from the kind of split with the national security side, we have this, you know, not only this, this clarity satellite that we have, but we built the bus that we call precision in house for the Veleo 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 US Government will be, along with delivering data from our satellites. But we also see the need for these dedicated platforms and what Veleo 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 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 that doesn't, you can't. It doesn't. You got to move fast but 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 how's that impacted how you build?

Have absolutely learned a ton as a first time founder the last four years and it's been an amazing journey. 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 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. These aren't cubesats. 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 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 were like, is this actually the real data? 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 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 dc?

DC was great. Yeah, I heard you were out there as well. Right, yeah, very briefly, the podcast. It's very important work. We did Manifest Demo day which was awesome. It was 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, it was a great turnout all the demos were honestly awesome. Like the guys that put on the event, everybody brought out. It was pretty incredible to see all the tech.

Yeah, Mike's a killer. He's. Awesome event. Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by. This is fantastic.

Great to meet you. Thanks.

I'll be back soon.

Cheers.

I want to see some of those photos.

Yeah.

Where are you sending it first? Amman.

Right.

You send us the Iman and you zoom in so closely that you can read the capital allocators pitch deck that they have have at the pool next to them and you can see what they're investing.

Talked about this good fundraising strategy. Right.

Leave your deck on.

Yeah, no, just get a mole at every Amman. Have them print out the janitor. The janitor and have. Just leave them around the property by the hot tub. Leaving by the pool.

Yeah, Whoever your head of spying is, just embed them at the Amman as a janitor. Yeah, let them, let them kind of.

It's a 10 year game. Let them become the manager at Amangiri and that, you know, 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.

What's going on?

Doing any term sheets this week? Boom, boom. All it takes is one trade to make back duffel bags of cash.

It's great. It is a very, very cool company. He was, he was kind of alluding to Planet Labs.

We got Lee Jacobs and Cyan.

Let's go. Welcome.

What's up?

Congratulations, guys.

Thank you, thank you.

Already putting those LP dollars to work with some nice jewelry.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, this little thing.

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 did Long Journey start? How'd you get here? What are you announcing today?

Yeah, Long journey started in 2020 when Cyan and I, you know, we've been really good friends from our days at 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 fund together. And that was in 2020 and that was like five years ago.

Yeah, I basically asked him to meet me at a coffee shop and I said, what do you 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, 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. So that was about five years ago. And today we announced our newest fund, which is 181.18. As many 18 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 42069. The 42069 is a little played out at this point.

I like that you're going, you know, high is a. Is means life. And, you know, you've probably heard L' chaim or mitzvah or something. You're given 18 or 36, which is like. 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 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, I didn't. If I didn't catch it. This is Fun three, Fun 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. Has. Has a strategy changed at any point? You know, I'm. Obviously, we have a very close relationship with. With Justin Mares. We've joked about this on the show. He's a venture partner at Long Journey for those that don't know. And I always joke about it, it anytime I see an exciting company, Justin Mares is always like, yeah, I got in at a two and a half cap. And I'm like, what do you mean? Like. So I mean, like, you guys have been very intentional around valuation. You actually have a extremely, I feel like risk on approach where, you know, some of. 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 early stage.

Roots 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. Like he created inflection grants, for example. And he's always doing interesting things on the edge, like. Yeah, doing things. I mean, Edge City.

When.

When he started Kettle and fire in 2015, he was like, yeah, I. He was like, there's this 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. 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 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. Do you think it's getting harder? You know, people have talked recently about how the, you know, 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 Forex markup and you look really good. But do you find that. Do you see that the Internet is making it even harder to stay ahead and find what's weird? Or is it just about 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 security was 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. 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, you know, in the chip space. And so we're doing things that will power AI, but staying away from kind of the. This Cambrian explosion of people investing in things at high valuations because we're not going to get a price advantage if we enter now. We should have seen it in advance.

Yeah.

Can you tell me about the Diamond Age?

Oh, my gosh, yes. It's my favorite book. It's by Neal Stephenson. And I remember the first time I read this book, if you. If you pick it up and you try to read it the very first ten 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, when? It was like, Violet, page 11. If you can just get approved, if you can get through this. I think his name, name's Bud. He's a horrible character with, like a skull gun attracted to his head.

Yes.

But once you get past that, you know, Neal 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 Snow Crash, the book that he wrote, he predicted Meta, he predicted VR, he predicted Second Life, and there was a company called their.com and 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, in diamond age is everything is manufactured and 3D printed and on a, on a level where everything is perfect. So if everything's perfect, the thing that becomes valuable is human innovation and human thought and human artistry. So while everybody's worrying 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. A piece of art, a piece of music that's original from the human mind is always going to stand out as being different. I think that human innovation and human ingenuity and things made with human hands are just going to become incredibly valuable. I based a lot of my investment decisions over the past, probably over 10 years based off of Neal Stephenson's work. And so I'm just, I'm a huge fan of his and I'm going to be on a panel with him coming up. I'm really 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 Neal Stephenson book. Can you tell me about the actual diamond market? I believe you invested in a company that makes diamonds that's so interesting to go from sci fi to, 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 3 carat diamond. And this market is. They kept comparing it to De Beers and caring, you know, comparing it to, you know, the, the diamond market. And I said, no, that's not. You're not seeing the bigger picture here. And that was 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 you know, 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, you know, I grew up with, except for, you know, 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, you know, before, in order to render all those things and to get things that didn't exist was incredibly expensive. So the filmmaker just went to 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 is Red 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. You know, I'm really excited about shows and books like Free Body Problem because we do need to start thinking about. We did send signals into space, they will be received at some point and there will be aliens coming if they exist. And so like, these are things 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, yeah. The utopia versus me that more people don't read in general.

Yeah, we're not helping there.

I can't wait to.

We're reading posts. 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 a hundred thousand 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 engaging.

We want conflict.

Yeah, we need.

Dystopia means conflict means antagonist.

Think about it. We don't talk about the 99% of everything that's going right. We fixate on the 1% that's going wrong. And it becomes this narrative that the world is going to. Can I curse the world is going to. And, and, and basically, unfortunately, young people, when you ask them if the world is a better or worse place, they think it's a worse place because they're on TikTok, because they're on social media, because they're being fed a feed of non stop violence and death and Tesla cars blowing up. And, and so your view of 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 that are going wrong.

That makes sense. Sort of a one last sort of random question. I'm curious to hear how you guys think about this. We seem to be entering a period of sort of renewed nationalism globally. Like Europe's waking up, America's fighting trade wars with our closest allies. This comes at a time where 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, states. 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 do you imagine that most of this fund as an example will be deployed here in the US or 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 on a recombination phase and like the Havoc actually the first name of the fund that I started was Havoc. Naval wanted me to keep it that way. But you know, maybe one day we'll get back to long journey, we'll rebrand in a few years and you guys will get the exclusive on back to Havok.

Fantastic.

Yeah, Havoc VC was my URL. But I do think that the recombination creates the opportunities for new ways of living in new 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 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 businesses like that. We, we understand how the framework works. Whereas if you invest abroad you have to understand the legal framework of that country, which can be problematic sometimes. And then I think going back to 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 fund. We got to ring the size gong.

There we go. So thank you for bringing the chain on as well.

It's a big fund.

It's great.

Thank you.

Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

And we'll talk to you soon.

See you guys.

Good luck out there.

See you later. Very cool. It's hard to do. Hard to do. Four funds in basically.

Well, they didn't call it fund four. No, I know Chinese. In Chinese, the number four is for death. So that's probably what, from the numerology perspective, that's probably why they skipped that. Go straight to Fund 8. Coming up quickly.

That's right.

Number of wealth.

That is right. We got Preston Holland.

Welcome to the stream.

What is up, brothers? What's up, brothers? If there is. If there's 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, professional studio lighting set up. You're looking great.

Should we kick it off with G650ER versus BBJ? You know, like a lot of our. 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 650er? Personally, I'm going 650er 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 650er, you know, let's say ramp might do another up round. I don't know. Maybe there's a buyer there. I don't know. We'll see.

Eric's too. Eric's way too modest.

He's way too modest, but way too modest.

But.

Yeah, I. I take your point. I take your point.

But. Hey, Evan, Evan Spiegel, he's also a buyer.

He's got a bbj. Yeah, he has his own own hangar. There too.

The snap hanger.

Yeah. When we discuss this, our argument was that bbj, little bit less flexible on where you can take it. Sure. It makes sense. If you're a politician, you're landing at major regional airports, major international airports for big campaign 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, I think that it's almost like you've been reading my news 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. So like, just, 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.

I mean, that's the answer to the flying car.

Car.

Just have. I just have airports everywhere. I can fly. Oh, I'm going ten miles across town.

We have a 650.

Er.

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 making a, you know. Yeah, you're making that. If you're coming up, oh, should I buy my first house? Should I, should I get a private jet? Jet what? You know, the answer's obvious.

The answer's obvious.

Well, and you, 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, you know, are we in a correction, are we in a recession? Is the economy, economy crashing? My sense is that the, 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, you go, you look back to 2008 now. There's a lot of, of carnage there and a lot of, 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, a lot of nonsense shenanigans that happened. What we're experiencing right now is, is not that the market has got really hot during COVID You saw, if you look at like valuation softwares in private aviation and they do exist, you see this kind of, of depreciation curve and then there's a pop right at the end of 2020 tended to peak right fall, fall of 2022, which is when all the other, you know, sort of assets so but, but really peaked in that we've been coming down off that high. We're not, 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 got to remember, you know, if, 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 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 in growth because so many new entrants were into the market. Well that since eased off as you know, interest rates have gone up and kind of the economy's cooled off a little bit and 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, but not quite as sharp as we had kind of in previous years. And what everybody's expecting, a lot of people anticipating bonus depreciation. And for those that are not obsessed with buying assets and 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 it's 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, over the life of, 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, to the levels that it was in 22 and 23, but it's, it's definitely better. Sorry, 21 and 22, it's better than it was in 2023. But there's been this, 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 depreciation. Whenever it does get passed, it's definitely going to be a stimulant to transacting of airplanes.

When, when is the, when, when will that be decided? Is it, is it known? And, and what's your, is there a prediction market set up for this yet? Are you, are you going.

That's a good question. I would, I would love to see if Polymarker market's got a, got a 100 bonus depreciation set up like when it actually happens. So Trump addressed it in the State of the Union speech. He said 100% costing, that's kind of code word for 100% bonus depreciation, as the rest of us know.

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, from the last budgetary proposal which specifically called out private jets something like 12 times, specifically in a two page document basically saying we're going to cut all of the private jet loopholes for corporate executives, yada yada yada. Obviously Trump is, he likes private aviation. There is no hiding it that Trump appreciates a good private jet. And so, yeah, so kind of the sentiment is a little bit more positive. 100% 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, I don't, 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'd 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, still pretty small. I don't know exactly off the top of my head what the, what kind of the percentage penetration is, but it's growing faster than any of the other providers. Right. So there's, there's transitions. You have connectivity in, 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 air systems are kind of phasing out. You've got the ATG4000 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 it's anywhere from 150 to $350,000 to install the equipment. And then last time that I looked, I think the unlimited WI fi package was like 10 grand a month. 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 10,000amonth. So it's pretty significantly different.

You ever heard this line before? What's the difference between private aviation and crash crack cocaine? I have, you can quit crack cocaine. I, I have a more. I'd love to get your take. Vista jet announced a $600 million investment. I believe it was yesterday. I think that's when, when we first chatted about having you. Come on, what are, what are, you know, historically private aviation. You see a lot of tech guys look at the market and say I need to dominate this. I love this. I need to get a piece of it. We've seen 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, even over the last few years, I feel like they spacked and then really struggled. 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 a $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, then come February it was going to be 800 million and then they settled it as $600 million. So not pub. 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 US entity. And so there's a lot different reporting rules and all that kind of stuff.

Well, we're not going to hit the size gong because they didn't, they didn't hit their target. But maybe a little golf clap.

Yeah, little pencil on the golf dog. But they really the, 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 goods sold, you can really gas it with a bunch of capital and, and it's going to just grow really quickly because your cost of goods sold don't scale proportionately with that revenue. Growth. Growth. 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, 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, 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 the 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 D stands for, depreciation, if you hold the assets, like that's an, that's a real cost. That's not just a financial add 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 this 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 and kind of see the bigger picture. And so that's kind of why these.

Companies, it's part of it too, that some guys and girls out there love private aviation so much that they'll own an asset, almost is 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 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 SAS, my B2B HR SaaS that I own. Like, no one's gonna be like, oh, wow, tell me more.

Well, not after Monday. Yeah, be like, what's your spying operation?

Okay, I got, I got.

What spies are you doing?

I got a question for you. Has there been any corp has corporate espionage Meets private aviation. Right. Somebody bugging their competitors. Gulf Stream get picking up those private conversations. Have we seen that before in the past?

Oh, not none that I'm aware of, but that sounds, that sounds juicy. You might be giving 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 Shield.

Don't they do that?

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.

Turning to a self driving or like self driving cars for the Sky Company. But they were working on the C130 and the AC130. More like troop transport than private aviation. But there's a bunch of interesting laws he was talking about where you can't have any, a non deterministic system in the loop there. Like 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 with 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 and planes.

Yeah, so there's, 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, and innovation at that. And then you know, the FAA is somewhere below whatever that benchmark is, which is by, is by design. I mean, look, nobody wants to feel unsafe when they get on a commercial airliner or even when they're getting onto a 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 in the loop, that's totally right. And frankly there's a long slew of, 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, but.

Or a crew had a couple extra drinks, you know. Don't do that. Yeah, don't do that.

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.

No.

Yes, yes. We were sponsored by Bezel.

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. 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 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 us VCS have gotten a little tired with, 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, I know that I personally don't.

But we got slop on the timeline.

Yep.

So there's that last, 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 confident in that? I think everybody, every guy, every guy I know is pretty confident. But where's your confidence level? Out of 10?

Yeah, I'm about halfway through my private pilot, so I'm gonna 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 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, like, heads up. Coming in hot.

Coming in hot. Well, thank you for coming in hot. This is a fantastic conversation. We appreciate you stopping by.

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, at a flight recently. We didn't end up going trigger. But hey, if you're looking to fly private, go, go talk to Preston and 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 was fun.

Cheers.

If you were on a private plane, you get off and you need to find a place to crash, place to sleep, nice little vacation home to rent. Where? What would you do?

I would use the driveway of a wander as a private airstrip and I would just land the closest one.

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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've been 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, it's just suits of armor and crazy tapestries and, and I love it.

I love it.

It's fantastic. And another thing that should be in the Hellya 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 source 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. They're repurposing it. I guess they couldn't get the full document but this has been talked about for a long time. It was a YC company. Eric Minkowski became a YC partner after pebble fan. Fascinating company. One of the few consumer hardware e commerce companies so was a bit of a mentor to me back in 2012. Talked to them a bunch. Crazy business because it's, it was a very popular Christmas gift as all consumer electronics are and so they had to do this crazy demand planning and forecasting 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 Buys by October, to get them on shelves 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 their revenue would come in that Q4 window and so so very difficult business. But they definitely basically invented the smartwatch, 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 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 smartwatch with simple functionality, long battery life life and fun quirky design. Yeah and It's a week long battery. 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, the whole team, as soon as, I mean they had like 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 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, even kind of just some of the random executives were like we gotta buy it back, we gotta do it. We go. I love this company and I love.

Interesting. 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's, there are some, some, some brands that have done.

They already have it for kids. Daytona Children's Nautilus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I guess we should have a children's smartwatch.

Yeah.

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 advertising easy and measurable. They could say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising only Ad Quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, boom. Moving back to the Wiz acquisition which we covered yesterday. Amend and Pretend is breaking down. Who made money? Whiz backer 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 Wiz. Alphabet agreed to buy for 32 billion in cash. So Sequoia is about to reap 3 billion from the sale.

And Amen says is this a Sean McGuire?

We'll have to ask him.

I mean he, he definitely has worked with the team. I mean yeah, he posted about it. His, his haters are in, 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, yeah, absolutely.

You don't see that often. I'm kidding. Average week for them, you know, average week size. It is, it is funny when, 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.

Well, let's move over to online dating. Eric Zhang at XAI 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 Huge Alpha.

Just going to X or XAI and just getting into the banger vortex that is the team.

You know, it's so crazy.

You seen, you know, blowing you up, helping you hit some big numbers.

It is, it is like a remarkable shift from the pre and post Elon owning Twitter because before Elon owned Twitter, I never saw a single Space X 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.

Got it, Got it.

Many Marzakis says if you leave before 6pm, be honest with yourself, it's a half day.

Love this Lotan Ben. Yeah, Many 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 they're a 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 the 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. He just said tomorrow. So anyways, I'll explain the video. So this is a complete and utter knockoff of the Taycan. 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. But apparently this is like one of the top selling cars in, in China.

I mean, Germany 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 with a karaoke machine inside of it. They have, they have ones with like the LED bar on the back so you can send a message to the person that's tailgating you. They're having lots of fun. But yes, we, we want to, we want to stay competitive.

Yeah. But it's pretty funny to be dominant. He just sort of drives up, gets out of his car, it parks itself. It's pretty cool demo.

Yeah.

At the very least.

But if you're running a car company and you want to compete with Xiaomi, you got to get your finances in order, folks. Time is 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.com anyway.

Ramp, ramp.

We got a post from Tyler. It says pump. Lona has the running of the bull. 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. He's really out there doing, 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 dangerous.

Is it comparable I've seen. You would never have seen this.

Okay.

Because you didn't. 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, with these wrestlers growing up that actually wrestle with bears.

Mma. Muscle man assaults or something. What does it stand for?

Exactly. Exactly. Something like that. You can wrestle with bears.

Okay.

I, we, we. We briefly looked into getting one. Just. I think the future of the Boy Scouts is just domesticating bears. Our American, 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 the these three reasons, and they'll take action immediately. Deflects an opinion they couldn't articulate or had hadn't considered until now to post a thought they're too afraid to say outright. To signal their own wit or intellect to everyone else by sharing something extremely relevant, funny, or profound. The best posts do all three at once. And we call this a signal. A signal post.

Yeah.

Named after the great signal.

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 its way into your group chat.

There we go.

We got another way into a group chat. I mean, somebody 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.

Yeah.

And so that's another way to get into the group chat. 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. Don't build to a sale. Build a great business. I think every entrepreneur, you know, if you grow up reading TechCrunch, you have this 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 Wiz, it's like, you know, 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 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, there's a bunch of, you know, potential buyers at a, at a range of prices and having that optionality because they were just building a good business. It's the best thing to do. You just make better decisions when you're not desperate, you're not, you don't need the sale customer, etc. So totally.

Should we go to Sean Frank, breaking down influencer marketing?

He's right.

CEO of Ridge Wallet, one of the best wallets in the world. I carry one.

He's actually the top wallet salesman in the world, I would argue. I bet they sell more wallets than.

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 $10,010,000,000,000 on influencer marketing.

$10,000,000. I would think he spent way more than that.

Well, he spends a lot on Facebook so.

No, I know but I feel like.

I personally got to get those numbers up. Sean, come on.

No, he spent way more than that. He just picked a nice round.

He's been humble. 10 million.

Influencer marketing is the closest thing to be able to pay for word of mouth marketing. You can't turn a switch to scale word of mouth. But influencers have direct relationships with fans they talk to and with their audience. Youtubers in particular are getting a hundred percent 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 in feed, social post, story posts in content ad reads on YouTube, podcast ad ads and content rights. He 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 the 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, 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 DM me, 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 of. Yeah, 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 goated.

Yeah. Skill issue. Find some. Yeah, I mean find some weird, a hobby or something or some, some, some.

Weird segment of the market like George was on, you know, talking about leveraging LLMs to understand historic history. It's basically what he's doing in this one edge case as a marketing strategy. But you could imagine somebody who just nerds out using LLMs to better understand history. And that's probably, you know, a $5 million a year business. If you just get the Content. Right. And really?

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like you don't want to be in a, in a massive hoard 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 yeah, 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? Probably not that much. So yeah, you won't be replaced.

We got a fundraise from my friends over at Cross Mint. They're excited to announce a 23.6 million dollar fundraise led by Rivet Capital. Also friend over there, Zach Rosen, who's a 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 stablecoins to transact in the real economy. Me Crossman's all in one platform makes building on chain easy with low code APIs for wallets, 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 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 Cross Mint 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 I'll just, like I'll just wait like whatever, I'll wait for the next round. And then the next round came like a week later. So I just ended up paying, ended up at got, got in and very excited about what they're doing.

So well, I think we should close out with the David Senra post here. He's quoting Tom Osmond who says heard a great line the other day on founders podcast. Shout out to something 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 an. So I could make episodes about them. He said absolutely not.

Not.

I have no interest in educating my competitors.

Amazing.

Built 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.

Profitable podcast in the world.

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 maybe that the. The 8 billion. 7 billion dollar defense contractor. So stay tuned for tomorrow. 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 Delian coming on tomorrow. Our space correspondent Delta V with Delian where as. 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 day.

We should see if Delian should could bring a dolphin to this. To the. To his appearance. Since they love space clearly and celebrate it. They celebrate. Thank you for tuning in folks. We will see you tomorrow.

We'll see you tomorrow.

Great day.

Bye.