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

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (09:32) - NVIDIA Announces New Rubin AI Chips (20:50) - NVIDIA and Taco Bell Team up on AI Ordering (35:37) - George Sivulka (51:27) - Topher Albedo (01:05:49) - Cyan Bannister and Lee Jacobs (01:23:52) - Preston Holland (01:46:15) - The Timeline

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBPN. It is Wednesday, March 19th, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. This show starts now. We got a great show for you today, folks. We're talking Nvidia. GTC just happened. The GOAT, Jensen Wong, the Leather Jacket Killer, dropped a bunch of impressive news. We'll break it all down, tell you what the stock's doing. Also, Nvidia is partnering with Taco Bell. Let's go.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Huge.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  This is a huge development.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  The streets have been begging for it.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  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 Strategery update that we're going to take you through. And then we have an interesting deep dive into a defense contractor, not a defense tech founder, but a defense contractor, made $7 billion and became one of America's biggest alleged tax cheats. Very interesting story in the Wall Street Journal. Hopefully we'll have time to get to that, but we also have a bunch of great guests.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  So we're going to talk to some folks, give you some news, give you some updates, but we got to start with some amazing news. Folks, the astronauts are back.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  They're back. They're back.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  NASA, SpaceX, everybody working together.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:29John Coogan?

  We should hit one for every day that they were in space. 300 gong hits, folks. 300 gong hits. We're going to be here all day. It was supposed to be an eight-day tour. They were up there for 300 days. Clark on the timeline says how it feels to return from an eight-day test.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:46John Coogan?

  I've been saying that. They're pretty comfortable. I think if I get an extra 292 days for free.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Imagine you're at the Amman. You book eight days and they're like, hey.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Do they get frequent flyer miles? They can just go back forever now?

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  You're in space, your comp, your hourly comp sort of increases by 10%.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  It's exponential.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  So it just goes parabolic. If something goes bad, like you just become like a trillionaire.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  That's great. It's like Armageddon, that movie where they're like, okay, we're going to have to go blow up the asteroid. Like, what do you guys want to be paid? And they're like, we don't want to pay taxes ever again.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Just these bros going up there to drill.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  Priceless.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  Uh, it's a great movie. Uh, and, uh, Jack has some good commentary on the timeline as well. He says, if you put, quote, "Pod of dolphins greets stranded astronauts on Splashdown at the end of a movie like The Martian, people would scoff and call it ridiculous."

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  And Jake in the comments says, "Life is sometimes more beautiful than fiction."

• 2:51John Coogan?

  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, oh, and I'm not really like a culture war story, but it was very much like, oh, like.

• 3:00Jordi Hays?

  It was political.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  It became a little political, uh, 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 one got injured. It's just great.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  As the news, we look a little bit silly not doing a sort of post-game press conference, being out there in the water.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:20Jordi Hays?

  If you ever.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Tell us how it feels.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  If you ever watched WSL, which is the, this, yeah, not, not your kind of thing, uh, but it's the.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  The Women's Surfing League?

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. It's a world surfing.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  World Surfing League.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  Um, you, uh, they, they, they have a guy in the channel, which is the section of the break, just outside of where the waves are crashing.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  In the deep.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  And he's on a jet ski and he's sort of doing these sort of interviews. So.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  That's great. Yeah.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Next time we have Splashdown, we gotta be there.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Next time. Will O'Brien does a lot of work in the ocean. He says, uh, "There is something truly divine about dolphins. I believe they and 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, uh, it would not surprise me if they know exactly what's going on in this situation." That's cool.

• 4:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's a little factoid.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Give it to me.

• 4:07Jordi Hays?

  You might, uh, be fascinated by. Uh, there was a NASA astron- uh, funded experiment in the sixties with a researcher named Margaret, uh, Levat.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  And a dolphin named Peter.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  And they did have, uh, they did have sexual encounters, uh, and but.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  That's great, Jordy. Thanks for bringing that to the show.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  But it was.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  That's wonderful.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  It was a part of, NASA was trying to have an experiment to see if they could teach the creatures to speak English. So.

• 4:34John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah. I think I've actually heard that story before. Anyway.

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyways, dolphins are.

• 4:38John Coogan?

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

• 5:23Jordi Hays?

  We are so back.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  And I'm so glad that this didn't wind up being some international fiasco.

• 5:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Anyway, can you imagine? I mean, I was away from, I was away in DC, 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.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  That'd probably be the worst part about being stranded in space. If you couldn't bring an eight sleep.

• 5:45Jordi Hays?

  I imagine the eight sleep team would have tried to get eight sleeps up to them.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  They're very good at delivering them.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Using Varda.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  But like they did for the Doge team.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  But I can imagine there's the transfer mechanism and potentially the cost.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Jordi Hays?

  Right? And eight sleep is, you know, very inexpensive compared to sending a capsule up to space.

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  And so the delivery cost could have been a.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully the teams 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.

• 6:15Jordi Hays?

  And I am back.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  You're back?

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  Not at my best. I got an 84 last night, but I did sleep for.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Oh, I smoked you. 93. Let's go.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Eight hours and 38 minutes.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  I got a little bit cocky about two weeks ago. I remember I was dragging you. I was saying 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.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Oh, that's a steal. You gotta go do this.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  And let's get back to the show.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  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.

• 7:06Jordi Hays?

  Brandon, Tyler, the whole crew.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  I gotta just hand it to them. Like, I think the X algorithm has never been in a better place.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  It's gone through eras. There's been the slop era. There was the maybe racist era. There's just like crazy politics all over the timeline. And I feel like it's perfectly dialed where I'm seeing entertaining stuff. I'm not missing any tech news. I'm seeing every, all the high signal people, you know, the David Holes from Mid Journey. He posts like, once every few days. It's always really interesting.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  Although we did miss some news yesterday.

• 7:39John Coogan?

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

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

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

• 7:58John Coogan?

  I heard that.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  And we're very proud of them. And they're, 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.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  And a whole lot more. We covered this, this sort of repricing, I think like a month ago at this point.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  It was rumored and now it's confirmed.

• 8:19Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  But congrats to everyone at, at X. Fantastic work. I mean, the platforms get better. And I actually went and, 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, it limits three minutes. It's ridiculous.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  Are they trying to fry the attention of their users?

• 8:49John Coogan?

  They must be. Yeah.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  It could be a dark.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  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 genuinely wasn't trying to like, call him out on that. Like, I was like, should we be doing that? Because like, I want as much reach as possible. Like, I see this as a business. This is about money more than anything else, as we've said multiple times. Anyway, speaking of money. And guys who make a lot of it, Jensen Wong hosted a massive conference for Nvidia. He called it the Super Bowl of AI, which we love. We love sports analogies in tech. They announced the new Ruben AI chips and some corporate partnerships. So.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  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 SSRIs needs to surge 100 fold. Everybody would get pretty angry, but we love the chips. We love the chips.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  I don't even think the Celsius CEO could say that about Celsius.

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  Usage of Celsius needs to surge 100 fold. The GDP demands it.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 10:06Jordi Hays?

  10% GDP growth. Satya called it, but he called it for the wrong reason.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  It's Celsius.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  I mean, unironically, usage of our sponsors needs to surge 100 fold.

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Like, there should be hundreds of more customers, 100 times.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

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

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  Go acquire, you know, 2 million Daytonas.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  And go, you know.

• 10:30John Coogan?

  Always the Daytona.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  It's common ground. It's common ground.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  It's just, it's just a store of value. It's the Bitcoin of the watch world, I suppose.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  It is. It is.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  The gold. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal is breaking it down here. Chief Executive Jensen Wong tried to quell investor concerns about the artificial intelligence boom Tuesday at an event he dubbed the Super Bowl of AI. The world will need 100 times more computing power for advanced AI than it considered necessary a year ago. He said of the conference, that has grown from a sleepy chip developer gathering in Silicon Valley to a rock concert-like event that filled a hockey arena. I love it. AI expansion into models that can reason and act as agents to carry out tasks for humans will require far greater computational firepower, which comes from the kind of chips that Nvidia manufactures. Jensen Wong said, this year. This last year, this is where almost the entire world got it wrong.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  Nvidia shares have been volatile since the release of DeepSeek, but there's also been a lot of other things going on in the market since January. Obviously tariffs and just general Trump, you know, what's going on there? There's been other competition, other, other entrance, 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 DeepSeek was released-

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  But Jensen's basically wants to put the word out that we're back up.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Yes, that's exactly it. We're back up.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  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 Jevon's paradox disrespecters right there.

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:12John Coogan?

  Oh, bad day for those, for those investors.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  Bad day.

• 12:15John Coogan?

  We'll see.

• 12:16Jordi Hays?

  Never, never disrespect a paradox.

• 12:18John Coogan?

  Never.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  Because it'll come back to bite you.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  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 the data quickly for users. We've all seen this. Users won't want to wait 10 times longer to get an answer that relies on 10 times more data. He said, the deep research is kind of the canonical example. It's fine to go fire off a query and then come back 10 minutes later, but it'd be better if it came back immediately.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  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.

• 13:05Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny. This is the simple use case that we're all just begging, one person to build.

• 13:11John Coogan?

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

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  I, 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.

• 13:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  But you're going to have a glorious, you know, a few years where you can just-

• 13:34John Coogan?

  Some glorious secondary sales, maybe some dividends in there.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  It's going to be a good run.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:40John Coogan?

  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.

• 13:47Jordi Hays?

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

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Oh, our projections? We were, we were off by 100x, actually.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's bullish.

• 13:56John Coogan?

  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, they, 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.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  And just a little insight here, because we were talking about name popularity yesterday. Ruben is the 200, 2,924th most popular name in the United States. I expect this to surge in the Bay in 2026 as Ruben rolls out. People just kind of get it in their head. Little baby Ruben comes into the world.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  Do you think Ruben sandwiches will become more popular?

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 14:49John Coogan?

  You know, a little pastrami on rye.

• 14:50Jordi Hays?

  What's the Ruben sandwich trade?

• 14:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  Got to get on public and create the Ruben index. It's, it's a little bit of an Nvidia.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Jimmy John's. We've seen 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.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  It's just Ruben all the way down.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep. The Ruben.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. The Ruben underpins everything.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  Ruben theory of AI adoption.

• 15:14John Coogan?

  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 Ruben will offer 14 times the performance of the Blackwell, he said. The Ruben will need to be a monster hit to meet sky high investor expectations for the chipmaker. Analysts expect this series of Nvidia chips to generate nearly 40 billion in revenue in their first year of sales and more than 95 billion in their second year, according to consensus estimates. 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 and P 500. So we are

• 15:57John Coogan?

  reaching bear market territory. Not sure if we're fully in it yet, but it's been a rough couple of months.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  If you put 100K into...

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia when they went public. I'm going to run the numbers here.

• 16:11John Coogan?

  There's also a stock split.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  You would have. Oh.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  I don't know. It just needs to be adjusted for the stock split, but.

• 16:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:18John Coogan?

  You'd have a lot of money, folks.

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

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

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  And just being in the game.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  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," Huang said, noting that there is growing shortage of human labor. True. This is an area where Nvidia can build on its legacy as a gaming company, which demanded it create virtual worlds in which objects and people behaved as they would in the real world. With a slow thinking capability, Nvidia's physical AI can help robots perceive and reason about their environment and fast.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Huang's focus is actually amazing.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

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

• 17:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  Would start to let it get to their head. They'd start cellphone, you know, they'd start mobile device companies.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  He'd be buying humanoid robotics companies.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  He would just be doing a lot of stuff because they have such a big balance sheet.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  And you just don't see him doing that. He's just like focused on the next, the next chip.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, hasn't gone into fabrication. It's a 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, 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 AI, 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.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  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

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  And you were a big driver of a lot of that

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  momentum and growth.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Because you were gaming super hard.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  I've built multiple computers with many Nvidia GPUs. They're fantastic. They're the best.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  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 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 of years? It's great.

• 19:16Jordi Hays?

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

• 19:24John Coogan?

  Yep. I love it.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it makes sense. If you look at the labor market, it's pretty big.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  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 Mahon 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 Jensen Wong's Achilles heel is? Or his Achilles wrist?

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Doesn't wear a watch.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  That is true.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  And yet, his cousin Lisa Su over AMD does.

• 20:06Jordi Hays?

  Has got some hitters.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Hitters. And so Jensen

• 20:10John Coogan?

  You gotta go to Bezel. You gotta get a luxury watch. Bezel has

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  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.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  Make a statement.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  And you can bet that we will be doing wrist checks.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating that he's a jacket guy, but not a watch guy.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  I know, they pair so well.

• 20:32Jordi Hays?

  They go hand in hand. Sometimes one is a gateway drug for the other.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  He probably has something, he just hasn't really become a daily driver.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Guys is also

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Just like it's, you know, two sides

• 20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  Of the same coin, you know?

• 20:46John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, moving on to more Nvidia news, we got tacos, folks. AI is, will soon take your order at Taco Bell and Pizza Hut. Nvidia is partnering with Yum Brands that owns Taco Bell. Uh, and it's an interesting story. Uh, basically when you go to the drive-through, instead of talking to a human over a very scratchy voice line where they can barely hear what you're saying, uh, you'll just talk to an AI agent essentially. And it's kind of the most constrained conversation you can possibly have. You're just ordering from a list of like 20 items. So you can, you can very easily use an open source technology like Whisper

• 21:27John Coogan?

  or any sort of, you know, uh, speech to text to get that in there and then map that to, oh, they were saying cheeseburger. They probably meant this, they probably meant Big Mac. We can clarify that. So.

• 21:38Jordi Hays?

  So the thing here that's interesting, maybe we'll get into it in a bit, but this feels like SaaS?

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  It feels like enterprise SaaS?

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Is this potentially a marketing oriented partnership? But why is Nvidia trying to deliver voice AI at the applica-, you know, the enterprise?

• 21:58John Coogan?

  So that's what's interesting is that, is that the actual IP of the SaaS lives with Yum Brands.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so they're developing it in-house.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Yes. So Yum Brands

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  And they're buying.

• 22:08John Coogan?

  Has a CTO, a Chief Digital Officer and Technology Officer, Joe Park. And he said, they're using Nvidia's tools to, but they're building it in-house rather than relying on third-party vendors with prepackaged apps.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  So what, what's the thing that people always steal out of cars? The catalytic converter?

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  So the new catalytic converter is just stealing the GPUs from Taco Bell. You know, they have like onsite GPUs. People just ripping them out. They're like, yeah, they got Rubin, they got Rubin and Blackwell's in there. You just gotta go. It's a hundred K, you know, quick. And that, and that becomes the new hot scam.

• 22:43John Coogan?

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

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's the whole thing. It's like, why do they need to, why do they need to actually, if they're partnering with Nvidia and they're actually buying chips?

• 22:53John Coogan?

  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 distribute it on the edge because it can't always go back to the headquarters. It needs to be like quick. You can't have delays every time you push a button. So they host it all and they deploy all this and there's all the security stuff and they're actually like really, really good.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  Do you think Chick-fil-A's recruiters are just on LinkedIn, reaching out to, to these super senior?

• 23:20John Coogan?

  It's like Jane Street guys, Cinderella guys. They're like, hey.

• 23:23Jordi Hays?

  Recruiter just, they don't ask, hey, would you be open to new roles? They just 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.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  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 of the platform.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  They want that tech multiple so bad.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  They're up 2% on, in the, in the last few days.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Are they?

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  You're on public? Okay.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:13John Coogan?

  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 2,000 technologists, they have 2,000 programmers and tech people, basically.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  They're out of control.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  They will use Nvidia's 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 apps scale better 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.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  And I, 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, 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.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  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, 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?

• 26:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  What software do we need? And then, yeah, we don't really want to pay a SaaS license forever to some company that's like shipping maybe better features.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  And look how much money you're saving because you don't have to use, you know, a human to take the order. But then, 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.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, I mean, the, the, the rise of online ordering and like, I guess, digital channels is remarkable. Young brands took 19% of orders through online channels, basically their app in 2019. It's up to 50% already, pre-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 they're like, I'm going, or it's faster than waiting in the line. And young brands wants to get to 100% through digital channels rather than humans. And this is kind of the last step. You already walk into some McDonald's and there's like kiosks where you just push and in 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.

• 27:28John Coogan?

  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.

• 27:56Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  And there's going to be this sort of squeezing effect where eventually it's easy to imagine and not even too distant, in 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 paper clips.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  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 was 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 Itza, 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.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  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 backend as well.

• 29:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  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 slop, slop, slop it all together and everyone just takes

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  from the hose. Cows walking in, cows walking in one side.

• 29:49John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Humans coming in to just grab the food on the other. They don't even see each other.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of

• 29:56John Coogan?

  Bull market and beef tallow.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of cows, on the 101 right now, there's a billboard that says by PETA, "Write around all the people whose homes burned down," that says, "Meat brought the heat." And basically blaming all the fires on, um, all the fires on, uh, just humans loving a steak here or there. Um, but, uh, anyways, we don't talk about, uh,

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Politics?

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  Animal rights on the show. This is a business show.

• 30:24John Coogan?

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

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  That we do not encourage.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Industry-leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks. So go over to public.com and sign up and start investing. Anyway.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  You keep saying take private, but you mean take for profit.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Take public. Take for profit.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  You mean take for profit.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Take for profit.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  I mean, we've said this. They already know where all the most delicious endangered species live. And so they could easily start selling those rights to hunters and, and poachers, like overnight, they could be printing, printing money.

• 31:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  And so, I mean, it's a, it's just a fantastic economic opportunity.

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  That's such an insane. We've, we've spent decades developing a map of like where all the, all the most exotic animals are in the world.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  And now it's time to capitalize, capture all the value, trade at a thousand X multiple, and just, just go to the moon.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they could apply the same framework they do for, what are the hunting licenses? Like, uh, you've got to get like a tag or whatever. So they could, they could, uh, you know, do some. Proper demand planning around those ecosystems and make sure that there's real longevity in those markets.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Well, we got to, we got a guest joining in three minutes. So we're going to set this up with some timeline posts that we saw. You know, we never talk about politics on the show, but the JFK files broke and there's a tech angle. So we wanted to talk about that. So Brett 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

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  I doubt.

• 32:38John Coogan?

  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.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  This is the real Brett Favre.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  It is the real Brett Favre. Okay. It's the

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  He says he's in his bio, he says,

• 32:56John Coogan?

  It's the, it's the famous quarterback.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  Former gamer, one-time pigskin thrower, concussed film.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Okay. So Brett Favre, you know, Trump released the JFK files. There's 70,000 documents out there relating to the JFK assassination. JFK's presidency and SWYX, I believe that's SWX, host of a great podcast on AI, says, all you chat with PDF MFs. You have been preparing your entire life for this. Don't miss your shot. And George Sivulka, friend of the show, who's coming on in a few minutes, says, we've processed all 80 plus, all 80 K 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.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's almost like they timed the JFK file release with generative AI.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  The gen AI companies could get a layup and demonstrate the power of the technology.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  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? Cause I think this is like from the official corporation. This is from cognition.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  And it's a very funny post.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  They're posters.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  And it's like, it's so insider.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

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

• 34:27John Coogan?

  He's coming on the show next week.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  This next post, I was, I was li- I, I was laughing at this earlier. He says 10 things I learned in Y C winner 2025. One, never let no one know how much dough you hold. Two, never let them know your next move. Three, never trust nobody. Four, never get high on your own supply. Five, never sell no crack where you rest at. Six, that credit, dead it. Seven, keep your family and business completely separated. Money and blood don't mix. Like, alright. Uh, eight, never keep no weight on you. Nine, if you ain't getting bags, stay the F from police. 10, if you ain't got the clientele, say heck no.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  It really hits when you censor it like that. It's fantastic, George. You're doing a great job.

• 35:18Jordi Hays?

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

• 35:25John Coogan?

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

• 35:37Speaker 02

  I'm good.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  I'm good.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  Is that a, is that a White Claw or a Celsius on your desk?

• 35:42John Coogan?

  This is a Celsius.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Oh, very good.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  P G 13. I love it.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Are you, are, are you a White Claw in the middle of the day guy?

• 35:51Speaker 02

  No, I'm, I'm, I'm just a third cup of coffee guy.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  So, yeah.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Where do you max, where do you max that? 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?

• 36:08Speaker 02

  You know, I think, uh, the, the unfortunate thing with caffeine is, uh, I'm probably like half a cup of coffee and then it's just less productive. I I I think I think I think it actually just distracts you slightly. You need to be like.

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  So you gotta go. So you go for three because you're so you're just so good at what you do that you gotta make it a little bit harder to have fun.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  It's when when you're when you're jet lagged or delayed, you then you then you've got a kind of discount or or you need to rely on Lucy or or you know, all the different John Coogan things. We're on three cups of coffee.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  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.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  That is, uh, that is actually why I I am on three cups of cups of coffee. I was I was up late responding to to different. Uh, you know, conspirators on the internet. But yeah, last night, uh, as as many folks know, there was a dump of 80,000 formerly unreleased pages with no redactions uh to the JFK files. Uh, for the Trump presidency, uh, and obviously no one has time to read through 80k pages of like scribbles and scratch and and and a bunch of of scanned documents from the seventies. And, uh, we uploaded them to our system that usually looks at virtual data rooms and a bunch of of of financial and legal documents and instead just toss them all in there and

• 37:36Speaker 02

  like instantaneously had access to an AI that could look over them. Um, a lot of interesting things that that came up, some of which I can talk about on this on this podcast or or I guess live, live, live show, uh, and some of which I'm I'm I'm probably less keen on. Um, there's definitely like a variety of different mentions of multiple shooters. Um, 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 on UFOs. Um, but then there was also. And I'm trying to pull back into some of the old questions that was being asked.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  A variety of different mentions of folks like, I believe, Jay Garrett Underhill. It was, interestingly enough, you know, someone that a lot of conspiracy theorists believe was assassinated by the CIA for going and claiming that it was a CIA

• 38:35Speaker 02

  inside job.

• 38:37Speaker 02

  The very interesting piece of the entire, you know, dump is that you might, like, if you were to guess who were 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.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:24Speaker 02

  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, the other standard people that, you know, folks would usually go and look into.

• 39:40Speaker 02

  A lot of documents also mention Martin Luther King Jr.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  Do you think

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  applications of, of your guys' tech and, and more broadly, some of these models can help us just get a better understanding of history, right? For every big story, like, you know, the JFK assassination, there's just like this incredible amount of evidence, some 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, that this is obviously not what, you know, what, what heavier 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?

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Leveraging, you know, what you guys are doing here with, with the chat with the JFK files product?

• 40:38Speaker 02

  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, right, 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.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  And that just means that there's less maybe social control that traditional media and news outlets and publishers of books. Would have over like the cultural zeitgeist and how people refer to historical events.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  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 meta gaming 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. Is that, do you think that's going to happen in the future?

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so interestingly, if you look at, if you look at things like rag models, so traditional like retrieval augmented generation. And you ask questions like, who are the people mentioned? You can data poison it.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  One of the things that you're seeing with a lot of deep research products. Like Hebe, and so this is just like a differentiator between Hebe and ChatGPT Enterprise or between Hebe and. And even like the perplexity spaces product. Is that instead of like going and ping a search engine, Hebe goes in, reads every single file. And tells you whether or not they're related or not. So it's not search engine, it's more infinite effective context window. So the AI can process a lot more information and and using that. Uh, it's it's better about, you know, having slightly less bias or like having the data skewed in like a. Uh, in in a way that, um, you know, a search engine might.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Speaking of context windows, I know that there's been like a little bit of an arms race. Google, I think, has like the biggest one at like a million tokens. Uh, are you, is that an important lever to pull when you're building your product and your system like? Is that a 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?

• 43:36Speaker 02

  Um. Ultimately. We're trying to build the product that an AGI with infinite resources and infinite intelligence would use.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  We're not trying to build the AGI or the model or like the longer context window. We're trying to build an agent orchestration platform. Where you wouldn't judge. Uh, you know, a a artificial super intelligence by its ability to use an abacus. Or to like to do computations in its own context window, you would judge it by its ability to use a tool like Excel. To do structured data processing. Uh, similarly, I 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.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  And read with full attention over every document, but not, you know, you have to. Jam that all into one infinitely long context window, it's an infinite effective context window.

• 44:37John Coogan?

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

• 44:51Speaker 02

  A ton of different processing. One of the the worst parts of like running an AI company, like processing old documents is that the documents like aren't are messy and like ideally, you'd want like a multimodal model that could process pictures of every document and do that.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  But you're already set up for that.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  More expensive, even slower. There's, you know, it's there's a context window issue there.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Uh, what we do is we we have probably the highest throughput indexing and like a highest accuracy, accuracy indexing engine that will actually use multimodal models for really hard documents, sometimes use like standard OCR, do like table and layout detection and all this other stuff to feed it into something that LMS can like process in an easy way.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  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 of years later. I was like, oh, this guy's working on like the hottest thing in the world. So, uh, how did you like, what's the prehistory of the company?

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Uh, prehistory is, uh, I think I I made an early bet on large language models and it paid off. Um, I was in a PhD at Stanford, uh, and I was working on honestly just studying meta learning because I thought it would be a really important piece of technology. And as kind of like summer of 2020 unfolded, uh, OpenAI destroyed all of our research. They released a paper on GPT three, which was, hey, large language models are meta learners. And it took like the academic world that was trying to build AGI and we're like, okay, you're never going to do it. It's going to happen, uh, in a closed source way and and OpenAI will probably be the people that that invented. And so I think being close to that shift and being close to the realization that this technology was going to be important

• 46:38Speaker 02

  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 like in the desert, searching for customers that would pay for anything. Building the best possible enterprise product that I thought future agents, that I thought future people working alongside L L Ms would want. Uh, and that just set us up to strike in a really fast, big and market grabbing way when the iron was hot. I think, yeah, oh, please.

• 47:11Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're focused on the enterprise, but I'm, I'm just interested to get your opinion here because we've, we talked about it, uh, yesterday with Scott from cognition. Do you feel like we're close to, have you, have you seen any teams get, uh, 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 gonna book a flight. It'll book your hotel, it'll do this and, and we just haven't, there's no dominant product that's doing that today. I'm curious just to get your opinion there. Do you feel like we're close to that super, super magic moment other than? The sort of chat G P T sort of conversational chat search.

• 47:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, people talk more about like super intelligence timelines than they do about just like AI booking me a flight.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  I want to know, I want to know your flight booking agent timeline.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  That's what I want to know.

• 48:05Speaker 02

  It's definitely more near term than, uh.

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Then paperclip it.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, um, paperclips are, are your airplanes. I would say, um,

• 48:17Speaker 02

  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 B two B 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. Um, but I, I think it will be done by OpenAI this year or sometime in the next year. Um, I don't think it's going to be a startup that does it. And I think it's just not because it requires partnerships.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  It requires like honestly, API handshakes between agents uh and and and APIs of external providers like Delta and United. And and I think that'll be that'll be a problem that requires a large language model scale company uh or training scale company to.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that's a good point. We have the anti-bot industrial complex. It's just like present preventing bots everywhere. And so if you're trying to build a consumer AI agent, that's just a a rebranded bot. It's very hard to do unless you're OpenAI and you can go to DoorDash and say, look, like, let's do this deal. Our users want this. We're going to be able to drive, you know, in a a very meaningful amount of traffic. So.

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Well, can you give us an update on kind of uh where the company is, where people can find you? And uh just kind of wrap it up because we've got to move on to the next guy.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Um, the company is Hebe AI. You could just search Hebe on Google and then click on one of our paid ads to drive up our our customer acquisition cost.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  And it's Hebe.com now. I noticed you got the dot com.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  We we got we there was someone squatting on that for like, you know, uh, the longest period of time. And I was like, they they know exactly who I am. They're just going to charge me a crazy amount of money for it. Um, but yeah, you can find us on on Hebe AI or Hebe.com. And I'm George Sivulka on Twitter at G Sivulka, and we should be releasing as as the Trump administration uh releases more files, a variety of other interesting like AI deep dives. So I give follow and big fan of this uh of this show. Thanks for having me.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  Thanks for calling in.

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been fantastic way to just demonstrate the power of the product and and thank you for your public service.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  Appreciate it.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 50:30John Coogan?

  Talk soon. Bye.

• 50:31Jordi Hays?

  Citizen techno journalist.

• 50:33John Coogan?

  Citizen techno journalist. Uh, my two favorite uh wildcard JFK conspiracies. Uh, the driver was responsible. People think that there's this conspiracy theory.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  You want to grab the hat, John?

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the hat. So people think that the driver was responsible because uh there was like an there's a burst of acceleration right at the wrong time. And it shows that like, maybe he was in on it, like slowing the car down to make the shot easier. And then the really crazy conspiracy, it was a suicide by JFK. He wanted to like send a message to someone. And so he was like, I'm going to die for this. So he got himself shot.

• 51:08Jordi Hays?

  Strangest way. I mean, I guess people use that to.

• 51:11John Coogan?

  But there's an unlimited amount of conspiracies about JFK.

• 51:13Jordi Hays?

  The crazy thing is, is I do believe there was, there was truly. Many, many documentaries released all at the same time.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:22Jordi Hays?

  And it was just intentional. Like, I'm sure the truth was always in there somewhere.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to Topher from Albedo. Welcome to the stream. Wow, that is a great background.

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  The Command Center.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  The Command Center.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  In the Command Center.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Uh, 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.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  Old news.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, hopefully someone updates that. We need to figure out the Wikipedia thing. Yeah, we started, uh, late 2020 in Y Combinator winner 21 batch.

• 52:05John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Forgot our start.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Wow, hard tech in, in Y C. Another narrative violation. Uh, but, but break it down for me. Like, what does the satellite actually do? Uh, and like, where is the path I see on the Wiki again? Plan to have a fleet of 24 spacecraft. Is that accurate? Are you thinking bigger? Uh, and what happens when this constellation goes up?

• 52:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so basically what we do, or we, we build satellites that fly super low in this new orbit called B Leo, very low earth orbit. And so this first one, they're pretty big. They're like walk-in freezer size. We just launched this first one on Friday. As the cake topper on transporter 13. So like the big satellite up top got dropped off in Leo. It was epic drop off video of us getting like dropped off right over the Nile. Um, so that was super cool. But the, the kind of novelty that we're bringing is, is building these satellites to operate in this very low orbit for an extended period of time. And so then we can capture imagery or other things at a resolution that today you can only get from planes or drones on the commercial side

• 53:05Speaker 03

  or from the national systems on the government side. And so it kind of is a breakthrough in terms of the data quality at low cost that we can capture from this new orbit where there's a lot of drag and, and different things that have prevented people from building satellites that could, that fly this low before. But that's, um, that's what this first satellite will do. And we'll get down there in, in about two months from Leo to V Leo.

• 53:27Jordi Hays?

  So talk about just from when you started the company, there, there had been plenty of high profile, you know, space oriented companies, but it feels like.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  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 is full of inbound, but maybe it wasn't always the case.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. There's a lot more interest these days in from the capital, you 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 10 centimeters per pixel, which is about the size of a coaster that you put your drink on. Must be from a billion dollar reconnaissance satellite. Would be amazing to have commercially because it could replace planes and drones for all these industrial applications that go through the pains of flying those platforms today. But it would cost a billion dollars even from LEO because you need a huge telescope. And so that's what initially drove the idea for very low Earth

• 54:37Speaker 03

  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

• 55:18Speaker 03

  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, Be Leo really unlocks these two things that have previously been mutually exclusive, which is that exquisite capability, but at low costs. So now you can spend that, you know, cost savings on proliferation, which is much more resilient, creates much more coverage. And so, yeah, it's definitely a good time to be to be launching this first satellite, Be First Civilia, with with the tailwinds underway on the national security side.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 56:12Jordi Hays?

  Neck and neck, really. Yeah, neck and neck. But yeah, you know, how do you think that, you know, how seriously do you guys have to take security, given that you're processing all this very sensitive data?

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Definitely seriously. And we, not only from like a, the data perspective, but a lot of our technology is ITAR controlled. And so that drives certain security levels. We have a, what they call a tier three license from the remote sensing regulatory body. That means that we have additional kind of cybersecurity requirements. And so that has driven us to, yeah, think about the cybersecurity and those sorts of things early on because we had to. But yeah, I mean, given, given what we're doing and the, you know, the more exposure we have now than we did years ago, it's definitely, yeah.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about the pros and cons of VLEO? I mean, I'm sure that you get, you know, higher resolution with smaller telescope. I remember early on, someone was telling me that, you know, oh, imagine the Hubble telescope, you know, just turn it around and point it at Earth, and that's probably what the spy satellites look like. And there's probably some benefits there, but then you're also fighting gravity. So do you have like crazy booster capabilities? Is that what you're optimizing for? Like just pros and cons of VLEO?

• 57:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the, we would say actually the hardest part for our architecture in VLEO is like the kind of robotics, precision points in control system technology that we need to build because the satellite's moving so fast and we have this big telescope in 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 VLEO. But then there also is a lot of atmosphere there as well. So we have a bunch of propulsion onboard. Being heavy and having a slick area is pretty helpful for that. And so like if you put, I think historically, a lot of people have looked at B L E O with CubeSats and those just don't last like very long there because you can imagine like a bowling ball versus a

• 58:13Speaker 03

  feather ripping through the atmosphere. And so we, we pack a ton of mass in these pretty big satellites with solar arrays covering everything because we keep them body mounted opposed to deploying out like traditional satellites, which, um, which, which hurt some of the power. But then there's a bunch of like atomic oxygen stuff there too. And there's special coatings and things that we do for that and, and to protect the optics and the, and the solar arrays. So there's a bunch, there's kind of like a bunch of different categories. The most obvious one is drag that, uh, for us, our average mission life will be about five years per satellite. It's actually very dependent on the 11 year solar cycle. Um, and the good thing about the drag though, is it's a safe place to be. So like from a space safety perspective, there's concerns in LEO. If satellites break, they're

• 58:56Speaker 03

  in orbit for, you know, 50, a hundred years. But in, in B L E O, it's like a matter of weeks or days. And so it's a not, you know, it's a sustainable place to be.

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 59:12John Coogan?

  I know what it looks like. It's a bunch of water.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  But I could also see it. You see this place and you're like, wow, this looks fantastic.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's no one else around. I gotta go. Barren island I found.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  Not that you have time to travel, but you know, someday maybe.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I have definitely gotten better at, at my geography skills, uh, running this company for four years. But I mean, we, we will start getting our first pictures in a couple of months when we get to B L E O. So that's really when we'll have, uh, you know, been there, done that in, in terms of all the supplies that we image and, and maybe travel less.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  How do you think about the, the, the market size and the trade off between commercial and government contracts? I don't know how much you can talk about the government size, but, but there's like famous examples of, you know, satellite imagery being used to see how many cars are in the Walmart parking lot and some hedge fund saying, oh, well Walmart's going to miss on earnings because they didn't have enough cars in the parking lot buying stuff and it's a proxy metric. Obviously hedge funds have a lot of cash. They can pay for a lot of data. It's maybe less cool than, hey, we're helping keep America safe. But, uh, obviously it's a real market. Like you're running a business. You got to sell to whoever you can. Um, how are you thinking about it in the early stage for customers?

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  So with this first satellite will operate solo for the first two years, then we'll start deploying more in 2027. And we have, um, 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, uh, mapping, um, uh, natural gas pipelines, like a lot of these different kind of industrial use cases. And so we, we see a huge opportunity there, not because there's any precedent for it, because uh, like, kind of like I was saying, the, the earth observation market has not done as well as it, as it was hoped, but from that aircraft and drone perspective and those proof points of those, those contracts.

• 1:01:03Speaker 03

  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, 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, um, we have this, you know, not only this, this clarity satellite that we have, but we've built the bus that we call precision in-house for the V Leo environment. And it can host these very large payloads. And so from a platform perspective and these kind of proliferated, but exquisite mission sets,

• 1:01:44Speaker 03

  that's where some of the, the opportunity with the US government will be along with delivering data from our satellites. But we also, um, you know, see the need for these dedicated platforms and what V Leo can bring to the table, not only for just pictures, but a lot of other things.

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the dynamics of space have made you and the team better operators? There's so much around, you know, just sort of these long-term planning horizons, like startups traditionally are like, we're just trying to do this as fast as possible. We're going to ship, we're going to iterate, but like that just doesn't, you can't, it doesn't, you, you gotta move fast, but you can't just, you don't want to be breaking things. It's expensive to get stuff up and then it sets you back years and that can be, that can kill the company, right? So, uh, has that, you know, how's that impacted how you, you know, build?

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Have absolutely like learned a ton as a first time founder the last four years and it's been an amazing journey. We, I, I think the main way we've approached that is just by hiring more experienced engineers than the average startup would. And so that people know, you know, even whether they come from a new space or kind of a tech world or like a OG aerospace prime world, they know exactly what needs to be done from day one. And so we've been able to move a lot faster via that while still with this level of, you know, these aren't 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

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  constantly, but we've spent more time testing on the ground and just kind of understanding, you know, the trade space from an architecture perspective. And I think that's helped us move faster, even though it is a complex capability and especially the learnings we'll take from this first one. And I mean, that we, 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, in here on the first day, we're like, is this actually the real data or is this simulated data? Because it's just kind of working. And I think a lot of that is just smart design, like really good planning. And that's all kind of a result of the engineering team and the bias towards, you know, the, the seasoned experienced folks on that side.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:03:55Speaker 03

  Great answer.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Well, we'll let you get out of here soon. Last question, how was DC?

• 1:04:00Speaker 03

  DC was great. Um, yeah, I heard you were out there as well, right?

• 1:04:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, very briefly.

• 1:04:05Speaker 03

  The, the podcast, it's very important work.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  We did a manifest demo day, which was awesome. It was this event to kind of present to different military and intelligence, potential customers and users. And it was, we had the big mockup on stage of the satellite. So you could see it to scale. We had just done a pass where we had sent some dark, dark pixels through the payload sensor. And, um, yeah, yeah, it was, it was a great turn. All the, all the demos were honestly awesome. Like the, the guys that put on the event, the, everybody brought out, it was, it was pretty incredible to see all the tech.

• 1:04:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, Mike's a killer. He's an awesome event. Uh, anyway, uh, thanks so much for stopping by. This is fantastic.

• 1:04:44Speaker 03

  Great to meet you.

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  We'll be back soon.

• 1:04:46Speaker 03

  Cheers.

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  I want to see some of those photos.

• 1:04:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  Where are you sending it first? Aman, right? You send it to the Aman and you zoom in so closely that you can read the capital allocators pitch deck that they have at the pool next to them and you can see what they're investing in competitors.

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  You've talked about the good fundraising strategy, right?

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  Leave your deck around Aman.

• 1:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, just get a mole at every Aman and have them print out the decks.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  The janitor.

• 1:05:09Jordi Hays?

  The janitor and have, just leave them around the property.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  Take your-

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Leave them by the hot tub, leave them by the pool.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, whoever your head of spying is, just embed them at the Aman as a janitor.

• 1:05:17Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:05:18John Coogan?

  Let them, let them kind of cruise around.

• 1:05:19Jordi Hays?

  It's a 10-year game. Let them become the manager at Aman Giri and then, you know, and just sort of let them become so embedded in the property and get the guests really trust them.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:32Jordi Hays?

  And say, "Hey, are you leading any Series As lately?"

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, what's going on?

• 1:05:35Jordi Hays?

  "You doing any term sheets this week?" Boom.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  Boom.

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  All it takes is one trade to make back all those duffel bags of cash.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

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

• 1:05:48Jordi Hays?

  We got Lee Jacobs and Cyan Bannister. Here we go.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  Hey, guys. What's up?

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Nice chain.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  What's up? Congratulations, guys.

• 1:05:57Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

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

• 1:06:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, this, oh, this little thing.

• 1:06:03Jordi Hays?

  No, that was, that was fun one.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  That was fun one.

• 1:06:06Speaker 04

  Around here at Long Journey. So, yeah, sometimes I put this on, you know.

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Can you give us the overview? Where'd Long Journey start? How'd you get here? What are you announcing today?

• 1:06:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. Long Journey started in 2020 when Cyan and I, you know, we've been really good friends from our day as an angelist. And she had decided that, you know, she wanted to go back into her roots at early stage. And we decided to start a fund together. And that was in 2020 and that was like five years ago. So.

• 1:06:36Speaker 05

  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 or relationship. That was it.

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  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. That was about five years ago. And today, we announced our newest fund, which is 181.18. As many 18s as we could fit in with 18 on the on the end of it.

• 1:07:12Jordi Hays?

  There's always, there's always a few more, at least in crypto, you know.

• 1:07:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally. Yeah. There you go.

• 1:07:19John Coogan?

  Numerology is big in tech these days. Everyone loves numerology.

• 1:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:07:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're going, you know, high as a, is means life. And, you know, you've probably heard lachaim or

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:39Speaker 04

  or misfer or something, you're given 18 or 36, which is like to life. And we really think of it as, our role is to is really respectful of the dollars we've gotten from our LPs, but also to give the gifts to entrepreneurs so they can give more and more gifts. And ultimately, we're, we're, we're pro life. I mean, that's not exactly what I mean to say, but it's like, we love life here.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:08:02Speaker 04

  You know, long journey.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is this, sorry, if I didn't catch it. Is this fund three, fund four?

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  The third institutional fund, but it's technically the, the fourth fund. I tried to, it's confusing for a reason, you know, just to throw people off.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Keep them on their toes. 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 Marres. We've joked about this on the, on the show, who's a venture partner at Long Journey, for those that don't know. And I always joke about it. Anytime I see an exciting company, Justin Marres 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 an 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 a hundred thousand dollars at some point to somebody who just literally just has like a crazy idea.

• 1:09:03Jordi Hays?

  How, you know, talk about kind of your strategy. Has it evolved or has it just been coming back, you know, always back to kind of early stage roots?

• 1:09:11Speaker 05

  We start with our thesis, which is chase the magically weird. And when we went and looked back at all of our companies that had the highest returns. They had one thing in common, which was that nobody believed in them at the time. And so Justin, you know, is remarkable at finding people and companies at their inception point. Where sometimes like, like he created inflection grants, for example, and he's always doing interesting things on the edge, like doing things in Edge City.

• 1:09:39Speaker 04

  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, uh, 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 eight dollars at Whole Foods. And I was like, okay, tell me more. That was pretty absurd at the time. And now, as you know, it's, it's a thing.

• 1:09:59Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's, do you think it's getting harder? You know, people have talked recently about how the, you know, the YC batches, everything feels very on trend, right? You've got defense tech, space, AI agent infrastructure. It feels like, you know, 15 years ago, there were still secrets, right? Whereas now, information gets out super quickly. Now the benefit, if you're an investor is like, if you're ahead on a trend, you can invest in something. And then two months later, it's getting a Forex, you know, markup and you look really good. But do you find that, you know, do you see that the internet is, is making it even harder to stay ahead of and find what's weird? Or is it just about, you know, sort of thinking differently and?

• 1:11:11Speaker 05

  No, I think that, so I always think that I, 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, I found a couple of companies in my career at Y Combinator. Uh, but

• 1:11:27Speaker 04

  Block security with

• 1:11:28Speaker 05

  Block security, for example, you're basically searching for a needle in a haystack.

• 1:11:32Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:11:32Speaker 05

  And, and you're also, you know, you're dealing with some pretty stiff competition. When you go in that room, it's like the who's who of venture capital and angel investing. And so, you know, I don't really want to play in that arena. You know, I want to dream about the future and figure out what's coming so that when that entrepreneur starts to go out and pitch people initially, a lot of people will be like, well, that doesn't fit into our thesis. You know, investing in nanotechnology right now.

• 1:11:58Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:11:59Speaker 05

  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, um, 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. Uh, we should have seen it in advance.

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  Yep. Yeah.

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  So Ian, can you tell me about the Diamond Age?

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  Oh my gosh, yes. It's my favorite book. Um, it's by Neil Stephenson. And I remember the first time I read this book, um, if you, if you pick it up and you try to read it, the very first 10 pages or so, there's this character that's so annoying that I couldn't get past the first 10 pages. And then my husband was like, hey, he dies. And I'm like, when? It was like by like page 11. If you can just get it through. If you can get through this, I think his name's Bud. He's a horrible character with like a skull gun attached to his head.

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:13:06Speaker 05

  But once you get past that, you know, Neil Stephenson, 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 predicted VR. He predicted Second Life and um there was a company called there.com and virtual reality period. And then in the Diamond Age, he predicts an 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.

• 1:13:50Speaker 05

  And so you can imagine a future where, you know, scarcity, we live in a world of abundance. So the other thing in in in Diamond Age is everything is manufactured and 3D printed. And on a on a on a level where everything is perfect. So if everything's perfect, the thing that becomes valuable is human innovation and human thought and human artistry. So while everybody's worrying about how we're going to mass produce art and music will be, you know, and and code and all of these things are going to be created by AI. The artisan is always going to be able to create that desk that you're at. You know, um, a piece of art, a piece of music that's original from the human mind is always going to stand out as being different.

• 1:14:31Speaker 05

  And so I think that human innovation and and human ingenuity and things made with human hands are just going to become incredibly valuable. So I based a lot of my investment decisions over the past uh probably over 10 years based off of Neil Stephenson's work.

• 1:14:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:46Speaker 05

  And and so I'm just a, I'm a huge fan of his and I'm going to be on a panel with him coming up.

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Speaker 05

  Excited about it.

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, you, I mean, you think about uh uh Palmer with Oculus VR coming from Snow Crash. Uh, Delian's favorite book for a long time was Seven Eves, another Neil Stephenson book. Uh, can you tell me about the actual diamond market? I believe you invested in a company that makes diamonds. And that's so interesting to go from sci fi to actual investing thesis.

• 1:15:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, so I invested in diamond foundry early and the thesis behind that was when everybody thought that they were just gonna make fancy diamonds that we wear for wedding rings. I thought, what is the secret here? The secret is that we're actually gonna 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 gonna 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 gonna end up being a three-carat diamond and this market is, they kept comparing it to De Beers and

• 1:15:55Speaker 05

  caring, you know, comparing it to, you know, the diamond market. And I said, no, that's not, you're not seeing the bigger picture here. And that was in completely informed by the diamond age, because in order to have this, you know, post scarcity future of abundance, diamonds were a critical part of that. And I don't know if you remember in the book, but there are things that are made of diamonds in there. You know, there are buildings made of diamonds. They're just like, all of the technology was enabled because of that unlock, that we needed this, this material that was virtually indestructible.

• 1:16:29Jordi Hays?

  How, how important do you feel science fiction is to the future? Right? It seems like, and, and is there more that the technology industry should be doing to invest? And, you know, we have, we've, we've had, uh, 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?

• 1:16:52John Coogan?

  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, flying cars, but there's already flying car startups, right?

• 1:17:01Speaker 05

  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 has read Diamond Age? Only one person, and he was twenty years old, raised his hand.

• 1:17:46Speaker 05

  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 Three 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.

• 1:18:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the utopia.

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  It's disturbing to me that more people don't read, in general.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're not helping there.

• 1:18:39John Coogan?

  I can't wait to.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  We're reading posts, we're reading a hundred posts a day to people. Uh, no, I think the, the utopia versus dystopia thing is super important. You know, we see this on social media. If you post, uh, everything's bad, you'll get 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, you know, nobody.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  Nobody wants to see that stuff. We want conflict.

• 1:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need.

• 1:19:01John Coogan?

  Dystopia means conflict, means antagonists.

• 1:19:03Speaker 05

  Because if you think about it, um, we don't talk about the ninety-nine percent of everything that's going right. We fixate on the one percent that's going wrong. And it becomes this narrative that the world is going to, can I curse? The world is going to shit. And, uh, 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

• 1:19:47Speaker 05

  the, the next four years of, you know, when you see people working on deep tech and there's this new sort of reinvigoration of technology, where people are excited about the future, that they start actually highlighting and talking more about the things that are going right than the things that are going wrong.

• 1:20:04Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Sort of a one last sort of random question. I'm curious to get 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. You know, America's, you know, fighting trade wars with our closest allies. This comes at a time where, you know, Lee, I think we met for the first time at this sort of pop up city, right? And there's sort of these renewed experiments around cities, nation states, network states. You know, do you, do you foresee a future where people are traveling way more and we're all investing globally? Or are we going through an era where, you know, do you, do you, do you imagine that most of this fund as an example,

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  will be deployed here in the US? Or are you guys thinking, you know, how are you thinking about international?

• 1:20:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, let's answer the broader frame. I think from our perspective, we're really open minded. You know, if you're really going to do invest in the magically weird and do things that, you know, the absurd before it becomes consensus, you have to stay open minded. So we've done things all over the world in Europe and in Brazil and stuff like that. But in general, we've always been really excited about what happens in America. And I think if I had to guess, most of the dollars will be deployed that way. But I, yeah, these little mini cities, it's such an interesting future to imagine. I do think that there will be, we're in the recombination phase and like the Havoc, actually the first name of the fund that I started was Havoc VC. Naval wanted me to keep it that way, but you know, maybe one day we'll get back to Long Journey.

• 1:21:37Speaker 04

  We'll rebrand in a few years and you guys will get the exclusive on Back to Havoc. But you know, 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.

• 1:22:00Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:22:14Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:14Speaker 05

  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 um, 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 uh, group of people and they basically band together on a set set of values.

• 1:22:54Speaker 05

  And so it's possible that we'll start seeing that going forward and we might see investable opportunities in in those. Um, but it's still very frontier and it's still very on the edge. Uh, that sort of thinking, but in general, I think probably a majority of our investing is just going to stay in the United States.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 1:23:13Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for stopping by. Congrats on the new fund. Uh, we gotta ring the size gong for you.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:23:20John Coogan?

  It's a big fund.

• 1:23:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's great to talk to you guys.

• 1:23:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, thank you so much for having us.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon. Good luck out there.

• 1:23:27Speaker 05

  Bye. See you later.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. It's hard to do, hard to do uh, for funds in basically four years.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Fund four because Chinese in Chinese, the number four is for death. So that's probably what from the numerology perspective, that's probably why they skip that, go straight into fund eight uh, coming up quickly. The Chinese number of wealth.

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  That is right. Uh, we got Preston Holland.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 1:23:55Preston Holland?

  What is up brothers? What is 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.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Now, we've been waiting for this. You're our private aviation correspondent. You got the professional studio lighting setup. You're looking great. Uh.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  Should we pick it off with uh, G six fifty ER versus BBJ, you know, like, like a lot of our, a lot of our listeners are trying to decide between those two. Uh, where, where, like, what considerations would you make if you're trying to make a big purchase?

• 1:24:29Preston Holland?

  If you're going BBJ or 650 ER, personally, I'm going 650 ER for the sole reason the market is far more liquid. BBJs tend to sit on the market. I think the absorption rate is something like 450 days on market is the average because you have to think you have Grant Cardone and Saudi princes. Those are your two buyers of your jet. And if they don't like it, then you're just going to be stuck with it. Whereas with the 650 ER, you know, let's say Ramp might do another up round. I don't know. There's buyer there. I don't know. We'll see.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  Eric's way too modest.

• 1:25:04John Coogan?

  He's way too modest.

• 1:25:05Preston Holland?

  Way too modest.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  But yeah, I take your point. I take your point.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  But hey, Evan Spiegel.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Evan Spiegel. He's got a BBJ. Yeah. He's got a BBJ. Yeah. He's got his own hangar there, too.

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  The Snap hangar.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. When we discussed 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 offsites, doing the ski trips, you want something that can land at a smaller airport. You think it's a reasonable way to think about it?

• 1:25:37Preston Holland?

  I think that, I think that it's almost like you've been reading my newsletter because I make that exact argument because BBJs are very cool, but now you're limited to really long runways. And so who, you know, the whole point of private jets is that you get to access the over 5,000 runways that exist in the United States, which is a fun fact. There's more airports than Chipotle's in the United States. Just to, just to put into perspective of like, how many airports there are.

• 1:26:03John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  And we gotta triple it. And then we gotta triple it again. We need an airport in every suburb of America.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the answer to the flying car. Just have, just have airports everywhere. I can fly, oh, I'm going 10 miles across town?

• 1:26:16Jordi Hays?

  We have a.

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  650 ER.

• 1:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've had a popular flying car manufacturer called Gulfstream for a very long time.

• 1:26:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:26:23Jordi Hays?

  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, if you're making a, you know, if you're making that, if you're coming up, oh, should I buy my first house? Should I, should I get a private jet? What you know, the answer is obvious. Answers obvious.

• 1:26:40Preston Holland?

  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.

• 1:26:50Jordi Hays?

  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 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?

• 1:27:20Preston Holland?

  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 and a lot of, you know, you've got bad practices, obviously, in real estate. You had a lot of bad practices in private jets, too. And so people were buying positions and flipping them and just a lot of 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 depreciation curve, and then there's a pop right at the end of 2020,

• 1:28:02Preston Holland?

  tended to peak right fall of 2022, which is when all the other, you know, sort of assets. 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've got to remember, you know, if you remember way back then, which felt like 30 years ago, but during the pandemic, so many people that probably could have flown private but didn't now said, oh, well, I still want to be able to travel, so I'm going to go ahead and fly private. You see, you saw Wheels Up, you saw Vista, you saw all of these companies just kind of go bananas in growth because so many new entrants were into the market. Well, that's since eased off as, you know, interest rates have gone up and kind of the

• 1:28:47Preston Holland?

  economy has cooled off a little bit and you, you know, kind of the 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, you know, we kind of had this this market correction, but this year, there's there's some tailwinds for 2024, some optimism. 2023 in kind of the transaction space was relatively slow. You typically see a bump in the fourth quarter, and we did again last year, but not quite as as sharp as we had kind of in previous years and what everybody's expecting. A lot of people anticipating bonus depreciation. And for those that are not obsessed

• 1:29:32Preston Holland?

  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 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, the 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.

• 1:30:13Preston Holland?

  But there's been this, and this is a macro shift into kind of fractional, the net jets and flex jets of the world, even from owning aircraft or chartering, there's been a lot of growth in kind of that segment. So it's a little bit about what we're seeing. Bonus depreciation, whenever it does get passed, is definitely going to be a stimulant to transacting of airplanes.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 1:30:42Preston Holland?

  That's a good question. I would I would love to see if poly markets 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 he said 100% costing. That's kind of code word for 100% bonus depreciation as the rest of us know it. It was it was almost through Congress last year.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  I love that he's addressing the private jet market in the State of the Union.

• 1:31:07Preston Holland?

  Yeah, well, the private jet market got it. Well, it's it's a beautiful, funny that you mentioned that. It's a beautiful contrast from the last budgetary proposal, which specifically called out private jets, something like 12 times specifically in like a two-page document, basically saying, we're going to cut all of the private jet loopholes for, you know, corporate executives, yada, yada, yada. Obviously, Trump is, he likes private aviation. There's, there's no, there, there is no hiding it that Trump appreciates a good private jet. And so, so yeah, so, so kind of the sentiment is a little bit more positive. A hundred percent 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

• 1:31:52Preston Holland?

  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.

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:32:30Preston Holland?

  It, it definitely is. Starlink is gobbling up market share, but as a percentage of the overall fleet installation base, it's still pretty small. I don't know exactly off the top of my head what 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 a cell phone tower to private jet to satellite from above low earth orbit. And so there's been, the legacy ground to, ground to air systems are kind of phasing out. You've got the ATG 4000,

• 1:33:11Preston Holland?

  for instance, which is a very technical, older Wi-Fi system. Now they have the selection between, do I go to the L5 Wi-Fi or do I switch over to Starlink? And when you talk about, you know, it's, 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 is like 10 grand a month for unlimited Starlink. It's, it's funny. They, the way they measure that is by speed. How fast are you going? Is how they determine how they're going to charge you. So if you go under 300 miles an hour, it's like 200 bucks a month. And if you go over that, it's like 10,000 a month. So it's pretty significantly different.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  You ever heard this line before? What's the difference between private aviation and crack cocaine?

• 1:34:03Preston Holland?

  I have, yeah.

• 1:34:05Jordi Hays?

  You can quit crack cocaine.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  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'm gonna, I need to dominate this. I love this. I need to, I need to get a piece of it. You know, we've seen sort of a lot of Silicon Valley attempts at cracking the private aviation code that just haven't worked for one reason or another. Some of these companies, like even over the last few years, I feel like they spacked and then like really struggled, right?

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the Vista fundraise and then maybe I'd love to kind of hear you expand around, is this, should venture just stay far away and just let private equity play their game? Or are there venture opportunities in the category?

• 1:35:07Preston Holland?

  Yeah, so Vista Jet just announced a $600 million fundraise, which interesting enough, that's actually down off of the, the original leak came in the fall. Where it was going to be around a billion dollars and then come February, it was going to be 800 million. And then they settled at a $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, they're not a US entity. And so there's a lot different reporting rules and all of that kind of stuff.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're not gonna hit the size gong because they didn't, they didn't hit their target, but a little golf clap.

• 1:35:43Preston Holland?

  Yeah. Little pencil on the gong.

• 1:35:48Preston Holland?

  But they, really the, the main reason is.

• 1:35:52Preston Holland?

  When you think about software and you think about financing growth of something that has really low fixed costs and low cost of goods sold, you can really gas it with a bunch of capital and it's going to just grow really quickly because your cost of goods sold don't scale proportionately with that revenue growth. And that's the whole beautiful point of venture, right? Is that you can, if I've got a pile full of money today, I can throw gas in the fire and it's going to grow exponentially. Well, private aviation is just really expensive. And so Vista, the reason that they raised this mostly is for kind of a deleveraging activity. They had levered up a lot of their assets. They do have a really young fleet,

• 1:36:34Preston Holland?

  which is part of the appeal for Vista. So if you guys remember back to Taylor Swift flying back for the Super Bowl, if you've followed that saga, she flew on VistaJet, because it's their 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 have levered up all of their planes, and then they went on a buying spree, and they bought Exojet, they bought Talon Air, they bought, I mean, like, literally went on a private equity style roll up of a bunch of different providers in the space, because, you know, having the thought that, you know,

• 1:37:17Preston Holland?

  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 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

• 1:38:00Preston Holland?

  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.

• 1:38:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's part of it. It's part of it, too, that some guys and girls out there love private aviation so much that they'll own an asset almost as a trophy asset. They just don't really care how much money it makes. They just want to say that they're in the game. Is that part of it? And then if you're trying to compete on really putting up earnings, you're like, well, this guy doesn't care if he makes like, as long as he's breaking even, he's happy. And we're trying to run a business here. That that kind of introduces a pretty poor competitive dynamic.

• 1:38:53Preston Holland?

  Yeah, I mean, there's no industry that is sexier. I mean, let's be honest, right? Like, to say that you own a portion of a private jet company is something to talk about it. You know, the cocktail factor, which is like a real thing when you're raising money, right? Hey, check out my B2B SaaS, my B2B HR SaaS that I own. Like, no one's gonna be like, oh, wow, tell me more.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  Well, not after Monday. They're gonna be like, what's your spying operation?

• 1:39:17Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I got, I got.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  What spies are you doing?

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  I got a question for you. Has there been any corp?

• 1:39:22John Coogan?

  Corporate espionage?

• 1:39:23Jordi Hays?

  Corporate espionage meets private aviation, right? Somebody bugging their competitors, Gulfstream, getting, picking up those private conversations. Have we seen that before in the past?

• 1:39:34Preston Holland?

  Oh, not none that I'm aware of. But that sounds, that sounds juicy. We might be given some bad actors some ideas.

• 1:39:40Jordi Hays?

  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 with private aviation is just the pilot, two pilots, et cetera. There's companies like, what's the, what's the one that does automation for the military? Flight automation?

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  Oh, flight automation? I don't know, Palantir?

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Shield.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Shield.

• 1:40:06Jordi Hays?

  Don't they do that?

• 1:40:07John Coogan?

  Shield, I mean, they make drones, but yeah.

• 1:40:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. Are there exciting companies working on autonomous flying? I know a lot of the underlying manufacturers have really good autopilot, but how close are we to sort of more integrated systems that are, you know, communicating with air traffic control and actually just sort of landing?

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  They talked to a self-driving, like self-driving cars for the Sky company, but they were working on the C-130.

• 1:40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32John Coogan?

  And then the AC-130, more like troop transport than private aviation. But there's a bunch of interesting laws he was talking about where you can't have a non-deterministic system in the loop. They're 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 or the brakes. And so his solution was he puts an iPad here that tells the human what to do, and then there's a human in the loop at every step. But I'd be interested to just hear about like, what's the state of self-driving technology in planes?

• 1:41:07Preston Holland?

  Yeah, so there's a big regulatory issue. The FAA is historically, well, it's the government. So like, first of all, like, let's set the benchmark of speed and innovation at that. And then, you know, the FAA is somewhere below whatever that benchmark is, which is by, 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, 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.

• 1:41:50Preston Holland?

  So a couple of interesting companies that are, that are doing this, and your point to the end of loop, that's totally right. And frankly, there's, there's a long slew of, basically the whole framework for the regulation is built around the pilot. And so you now have to create a scenario, basically create an entire new regulation for automated flight. One interesting household name brand company that's doing really cool stuff in kind of the safety world is Garmin. So like they don't just make watches. They also make avionics and aircraft. And so they came out with a feature, I don't know, a couple of years ago called AutoLand, and it's specifically designed for kind of the owner flown pilot. You can get it in King Airs

• 1:42:34Preston Holland?

  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.

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Or a crew had a couple of extra drinks.

• 1:43:13Jordi Hays?

  Don't do that. Don't do that.

• 1:43:14John Coogan?

  Don't pair in on private jets. They mix, but not in the cockpit.

• 1:43:18Jordi Hays?

  Usually John gets angry if anybody mentions Garmin, but it's in regard to Garmin sport watches.

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 1:43:26Jordi Hays?

  We're supportive of their aviation products.

• 1:43:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:43:29Preston Holland?

  Yeah, the, well, the dueling apps on their sport watches is just UX just.

• 1:43:37Preston Holland?

  But anyway, so, 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 it's, 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

• 1:44:18Preston Holland?

  and put yourself into an unsafe situation. That's really cool because, you know, everybody loves to talk about flying cars and there's been a lot of. Carnage in the flying car space recently. I mean, it seems like almost every week, somebody can't raise another fund. There's a lot of movement actually going to Dubai now in that sector. So, so the sovereign wealth funds are starting to pick up the slack where USVCs have gotten a little tired with projections. I mean, 2025 is supposed to be our year of flying cars. And I don't know if you see any outside, but I, I know that I personally don't.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  But we got slop on the timeline.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  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, I know is pretty confident, but where's your confidence level out of 10?

• 1:45:17Preston Holland?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm about halfway through my private pilot. So I'm going to go with better than probably 80% of the guys on board, 90% of the guys. I mean,

• 1:45:26Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so you're the guy.

• 1:45:28John Coogan?

  You're the guy we're putting in the cockpit.

• 1:45:30Preston Holland?

  I, I at the very least know what to say to the air traffic controller. And I know that, I know the buttons that we need to push to alert everybody that like, hey, by the way, like, heads up, coming in hot.

• 1:45:40John Coogan?

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

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much, our private jet correspondent. We'll have to do the next version of this.

• 1:45:51John Coogan?

  On a private plane.

• 1:45:52Jordi Hays?

  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, end up playing trigger. But hey, if you're looking to fly private, go, go talk to Preston. He will walk you through the process and get you some great prices. So thank you for coming on. Look forward to the next conversation.

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  Thanks a lot.

• 1:46:12Preston Holland?

  Thanks, guys. This was fun.

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:46:15John Coogan?

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

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:46:31John Coogan?

  Perfect.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  Find your happy place.

• 1:46:36Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 1:46:37John Coogan?

  Book a Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Go to wander.com and use code TBPN. And also, they're giving away a Wander, so sign up and you can win.

• 1:46:49Jordi Hays?

  Not the whole house, but a free trip.

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  A free trip.

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  Wander.com/TBPN. Check it out.

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's do some Timeline. Get out of here. What do you think?

• 1:46:57Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. I'm excited for some Timeline.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, me too. I'm 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. And it's just, it's just, it's just suits of armor and like crazy tapestries. And I love it. I love it. It's fantastic. And another thing that should be in the Hell Yeah Museum is the Pebble. Pebble is back. Back in 2012, Pebble was my on-ramp to wearable technology, says Michael Fisher. And over the next four years, it evolved into a proper smartwatch platform that never lost its distinctive personality until Fitbit bought it. Now it is back with an open-source OS and new hardware. I don't know, do you remember the story of Pebble at all?

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  Wait, it's called Re-Pebble?

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  Re-Pebble, because they're repurposing it. I guess they couldn't get the full .com. But this has been talked about for a long time. It was a YC company. Eric Mikovsky became a YC partner after Pebble. Fascinating company. One of the few consumer hardware e-commerce companies. So was a bit of a mentor to me back in 2012. Talked to them a bunch. Crazy business because it was a very popular Christmas gift, as all consumer electronics are. And so they had to do this crazy demand planning and forecasting where if they didn't lock in the design by July or August, then get them all made and know their marketing

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  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, 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 Apple coming after you now, because as we've covered on the show before, Apple isn't innovating anymore.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  That is right. I'm on the site. It says, for those unfamiliar with Pebble, it is an e-paper smartwatch with simple functionality, long battery life and fun quirky design.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  And

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  It's a week-long battery.

• 1:49:10Jordi Hays?

  It sounds like the founders just self-funded everything to date to just get this back into business. And I love that. He says, I have personally funded development for these new watches. I just really want them myself. So.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  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. 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 that hustle.

• 1:49:51Jordi Hays?

  They haven't slapped an LLM in this thing yet. There's no mention of AI. It's a hardware device in 2025.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  I still think the kid's watch is the opportunity there. There's, there are some, some brands that have done wristwatches for kids that are popular.

• 1:50:09Jordi Hays?

  Daytona, Children's Nautilus.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:13Jordi Hays?

  I guess we should have a children's smartwatch.

• 1:50:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Well, when they get Pebble off the ground, they need to advertise it. I think they should put up a billboard. I think they should go to adquick.com because adquick.com makes out-of-home advertising easy and measurable. They could say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway.

• 1:50:38Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 1:50:38John Coogan?

  Moving back to the Wiz acquisition, which we covered yesterday, Amend and Pretend is breaking down who made money. Wiz 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, M O I C, 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 Amend and Pretend just says.

• 1:51:07Jordi Hays?

  Was this a Sean McGuire?

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  We'll have to ask him. Maybe it's possible.

• 1:51:10Jordi Hays?

  He definitely has worked with the team. I mean.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, he posted about it.

• 1:51:14Jordi Hays?

  His haters are in disbelief right now.

• 1:51:18John Coogan?

  And so, Amanda Pretend says, "It's good to see Sequoia and Green Oaks finally get a win on the board."

• 1:51:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, absolute killers.

• 1:51:26Jordi Hays?

  You don't see that often. I'm kidding. Uh, average week for them, you know?

• 1:51:31John Coogan?

  Average week, size lord.

• 1:51:32Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is funny when, when you are a really scaled allocator.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:37Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 1:51:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:51:47Jordi Hays?

  You know, sometimes they just intentionally are passing, other times they don't necessarily have an opportunity to get in, but...

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Well, uh, let's move over to online dating. Eric Jang 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."

• 1:52:09Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Instant banger.

• 1:52:11John Coogan?

  You love these posts from the XAI team.

• 1:52:13Jordi Hays?

  Huge alpha just going to X or XAI and just getting into the banger vortex that is the team, you know?

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  It's so crazy.

• 1:52:21Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:52:25John Coogan?

  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 SpaceX person on the timeline or a Tesla person on the timeline. And I really don't see them that often now. So SpaceX and Tesla clearly have a culture of like, hey, don't post. But XAI and, and X, like the, the everything app, uh, their employees clearly like to get wild on the timeline, which we love to see.

• 1:52:50Jordi Hays?

  You got it, you got it.

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Uh, Mene Marzakis says, "If you leave before 6pm, be honest with yourself. It's a half-day."

• 1:52:58Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  Shout out to them.

• 1:53:19Jordi Hays?

  Absolute dogs.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  Uh, let's go to Luke Metro. Uh, he's reposting a video of a Xiaomi EV factory. Uh, someone sharing that the SU7 Ultra parks itself while he heads to a meeting.

• 1:53:31Jordi Hays?

  Ben, do we have a video?

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  Uh, Luke Metro says in 10 years, uh, Americans traveling abroad are going to look at Xiaomi cars like Boris Yeltsin looked at American grocery stores.

• 1:53:43Jordi Hays?

  Hey guys, if we don't, just for the record, if we don't have video tomorrow, I want to see some angry DMs to Ben. He just said tomorrow. So anyways, I'll explain the video. So this is a complete and utter knockoff of the Taycan.

• 1:53:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it does look pretty cool.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:58Jordi Hays?

  They made some upgrades. They added a wing.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  Does it depreciate? The same depreciation?

• 1:54:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure even faster. But apparently this is like one of the top selling cars in China.

• 1:54:08John Coogan?

  I mean, China gets crazy with these cars. They have one that floats. You can literally drive it through a lake and it won't sink. That's amazing. They have another one that comes with a karaoke machine inside of it. Uh, they have, they have ones with like the LED bar on the back. So you can send a message to the person that's tailgating you. Uh, they're having lots of fun. Uh, but yes, we, we want to, we want to stay competitive.

• 1:54:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's, it's pretty funny.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  To be dominant.

• 1:54:31Jordi Hays?

  He just sort of drives up, gets out of his car, it parks itself. Uh, it's a pretty cool demo.

• 1:54:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:36Jordi Hays?

  At the very least.

• 1:54:37John Coogan?

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

• 1:54:50Jordi Hays?

  Ramp.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  Ramp. Uh, we got a post from Tyler. It says Pomplona has the running of the bulls. California needs the running of the bears.

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  This is a great pick too. If you can scroll down, he's fresh out of a run.

• 1:55:05John Coogan?

  I love how, yeah, he's really, he's really out there doing, doing things.

• 1:55:09Jordi Hays?

  You can just run from bulls.

• 1:55:11John Coogan?

  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?

• 1:55:22Jordi Hays?

  So I've seen, you would never have seen this.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:25Jordi Hays?

  Because you don't follow mankind's greatest athletic pursuit, MMA.

• 1:55:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:30Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  MMA, is it muscle man assault or something? What does it stand for?

• 1:55:40Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  I, we, we briefly looked into getting one. Just, I think the future of the Boy Scouts is just.

• 1:55:53John Coogan?

  Domesticating bears.

• 1:55:54Jordi Hays?

  Our American, young American boys learning to wrestle with bears.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:55:59Jordi Hays?

  And learning to dance between sort of mankind and nature.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:56:06Jordi Hays?

  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. To flex an opinion they couldn't articulate or hadn't considered until now, to post a thought they're too afraid to say outright. To signal their own wit or intellect to everyone else by sharing something extremely relevant, funny, or profound. The best posts do all three at once. And we called this a Signal, a Signal post.

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:36Jordi Hays?

  Named after the great Signal.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I'd say if you're in Signal's 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.

• 1:56:50Jordi Hays?

  All right, there we go.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  You can also just glaze your way into a group chat. I mean, someone else was posting about that, how like, it was Nikita. Nikita was saying like, you need to, you need to like, be really nice to designers because it'll do numbers and they'll share it in their slacks and everyone will look at it if you're nice to their designs.

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:06John Coogan?

  And so that's another way to get into the group chat, be shareable instantly.

• 1:57:11Jordi Hays?

  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 the sense that companies just start. They have a good idea and then they get bought for a billion dollars and. Those exits can happen randomly and by chance and you can get lucky, but the really big exits like Wiz, it's like, you know, phenomenal outcome in a very short period of time, but they were adding like 200 million ARR a year, right? So it's like, they didn't need to sell.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:47Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  It's also just focus, right?

• 1:58:07Jordi Hays?

  Individual customer, et cetera.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

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

• 1:58:13Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

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

• 1:58:19Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:58:31Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  They are, they are a fantastic performance marketing organization and everyone will know, you, you get it, you get it. So he says, "I've spent 10 billion, $10 million on influencer marketing."

• 1:58:43Jordi Hays?

  10 million dollars? I would think that he's spent way more than that.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  Well, he spends a lot on Facebook.

• 1:58:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, but I feel like I personally...

• 1:58:51John Coogan?

  You gotta get those numbers up, Sean, come on.

• 1:58:53Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  Okay, he's being humble.

• 1:58:59Jordi Hays?

  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 100% attention share. It's the closest to word of mouth marketing you can pay for. The time impression quality of these ads are high. Facebook ads are a swipe and gone. A YouTube creator ad can be two minutes.

• 1:59:24Jordi Hays?

  There are five big ad units you should buy. In-feed, social posts, story posts, in-content ad reads, on YouTube podcast ads, in-content rights. It goes down. Above ad units, let's talk program strategies. Gifting, free product with guaranteed post, affiliate, pay-for-content, flat-fee posting, CPM-based deals. So he goes into a bunch of details here, but the important thing is I own a company that does YouTube advertising for brands and you can go use brandednative.com. So thank you, thank you for the plug. Branded Native actually got started via Ridge, you know, basically running their in-house YouTube marketing strategy. It turns out a bunch of brands need it.

• 2:00:07Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:00:16John Coogan?

  Run some ads, folks.

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  And run some, run some ads. We love ads. I love ads of all types. We got another post from Nir. "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.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah.

• 2:00:41Jordi Hays?

  Be goaded.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, skill issue. Find some, yeah, I mean, find some weird hobby or something, or some, some, some weird segment of the market.

• 2:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Like George was on, you know, talking about leveraging LLMs to understand historic history. That's basically what he's doing in this one edge case as a marketing strategy. But you could imagine somebody who just nerds out using LLMs to better understand history and that's probably, you know, a $5 million a year business if you just get the content right and really.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's kind of like you don't want to be in a, in a massive horde of undifferentiated labor because that will be the first target for an AI company. Cause they'll say, oh, well, there's 10 million people doing the exact same job. It's very automatable versus, oh yeah, there's a one of one person. What's the economic value of creating an AI system that can replace that one person? Probably not that much. So you won't be replaced.

• 2:01:42Jordi Hays?

  We got a fundraise from my friends over at Crossment. They're excited to announce a $23.6 million fundraise led by Rivet Capital, also a friend over there, Zach Rosen, who's the man. We saw him at Demo Day briefly, to bring every business and AI agent on-chain. Just as every business moved online, every business will move on-chain. And with the rise of AI agents, there will soon be billions of new economic actors using stablecoins to transact in the real economy. Crossment's all-in-one platform makes building on-chain easy with low-code APIs for wallets, stablecoins, on-ramps, tokenization, and credentials. Crossment has a really cool story. In the sort of NFT boom, they built a way to like, basically buy NFTs with a credit card. And so they just like rocketed. Their growth

• 2:02:26Jordi Hays?

  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 Crossment was a customer of 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. And 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, but got in and very excited about what they're doing.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  Well, I think we should close out with the David Senra post here. He's quoting Tom Osman, who says, "Heard a great line the other day on Founders Podcast,"

• 2:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Shout out to Tom.

• 2:03:05John Coogan?

  "That's 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, so I could make episodes about them. He said, absolutely not. I have no interest in educating my competitors."

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:03:31John Coogan?

  Built different. I love it.

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Skill issue, though. We tell the world pretty much everything.

• 2:03:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:38Jordi Hays?

  We told them our secret plan.

• 2:03:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Which is to be the news.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Be the news you want to see in the world.

• 2:03:43John Coogan?

  Be the most profitable podcast in the world.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  This is a fun show.

• 2:03:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's great. Good guests.

• 2:03:49Jordi Hays?

  I would have liked to do another four hours of timeline.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  But we have more stories for tomorrow. We can go through Intel and maybe that the eight billion, seven 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 we're calling the segment, we have a bunch more people scheduled. So stay tuned, stay locked in, folks, and have a great day.

• 2:04:23Jordi Hays?

  We should see if Delian should, could bring a dolphin.

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:04:26Jordi Hays?

  To this, to the, to his appearance.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 2:04:28Jordi Hays?

  Since they love space, clearly, and celebrate it.

• 2:04:30John Coogan?

  They celebrate it.

• 2:04:31Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in, folks. We will see you tomorrow.

• 2:04:33John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:04:34Jordi Hays?

  Great day.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  Bye.