01:57:22 · John Coogan
[01:57:22] S0: Yeah. But Chen, his most unusual asset was in Cuba. In 2020, Imperial Tobacco sold its half of Habanos, which is the group that control that markets Cohiba, Trinidad, and the company's other famous brands. They generate roughly $500,000,000 annually in the Cuban cigar market. And there's this weird illegal Cuban cigar market that has created a bunch of pressure where the Cuban cigar companies struggle to even supply the actual the legal market because it's it's so complex. But he he he buys into habanos giving him an indirect stake of nearly one third of the Cuban cigar company. And he explored cigar warehouses in in Singapore, cargo flights between Havana and Cambodia, really starts trying to expand the operation. But his empire imploded on 10/14/2025. The US and The UK froze Chen and the Prince Group, his company's assets, with American prosecutors alleging that Prince Group was actually one of Asia's largest transnational criminal organizations operating compounds where trafficked workers were forced to conduct online scams. He denies the allegations, but in January 2026 Chen was extradited from Cambodia to China and effectively disappeared from public view. Days later liquidators were appointed to dozens of companies connected to him including the vehicle that owned his stake in the Cuban cigar company. His lawyers are fighting the liquidation but potential buyers are already circling cigar investment trying to get a stake. I don't know. Maybe things will change over time. But the bigger problem is that habaneros may have damaged the business. The price has exploded.
01:59:17 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Bridgit Mendler, Carina Hong
[01:59:17] S1: Astra has landed. What happened? Astra seems to have landed Explain. Lot in of prosumer accounts. [01:59:25] S0: Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. It's available. Let's let's refresh. I I was looking at it. It is in my personal pro account, not on the chat tab, but on the work tab. So if I go to chat.com and then I click on work and then I check the model picker, I got GPT six Astra here. And and not to make it too simple, I got light, medium, high, extra high, max, and ultra, which [01:59:52] S1: can see So the limits [01:59:54] S0: take it for a spin. If you have a ChatGPT pro account, this is your weekend. Tell your family you're locking in. You're vibe coding something in Blender taking it to Unreal Engine. That blog post, it's an Unreal Engine video game now. It's multiplayer. It's going to happen. Anyway, we have our next guest here with us in the waiting room. Let's bring in Bridgit Mendler from Northwood. Welcome back to the show, Bridgit. How are doing? Back. [02:00:20] S5: Hey, guys. Doing well. How [02:00:22] S6: are you? [02:00:22] S0: Thank you so much for hopping back on the show. Great to see you again. [02:00:26] S1: So many flags. [02:00:27] S0: So many flags. Where are you calling in from? What is this new This [02:00:31] S5: is this is old space. [02:00:32] S0: Old space. [02:00:32] S5: Okay. This is this is Northwood HQ. Okay. First first Northwood HQ. Yeah. And yeah. We we're starting to call ourselves the United Nations of Northwood. So just more more flags representing really the the countries that we have a presence in.
02:00:32 · Bridgit Mendler, Jordi Hays, John Coogan
[02:00:32] S5: Okay. This is this is Northwood HQ. Okay. First first Northwood HQ. Yeah. And yeah. We we're starting to call ourselves the United Nations of Northwood. So just more more flags representing really the the countries that we have a presence in. [02:00:47] S1: Yeah. I was gonna say it's if there were people if it was representing the people on the team, I imagine there maybe be a few more. But yeah, very very very cool. Yeah. [02:00:56] S0: Yeah. Has international expansion been like? Why is that important to the actual rollout of the the product, the technology, the business? Why do you have so many flags so quickly as a relatively young company? [02:01:12] S5: Right? No. We're we're doing startup on hard mode. Why Yeah. But so reminder, we do networking for space and Yep. You know, you can I I like to do the comparison to like a cell towers when you're going down the freeway? You need to hit different cell towers to stay in contact. Same deal with the satellite. It's just way further away. And so their equivalent of cell towers are literally on different countries or continents, and that's how you can provide the continuity of coverage. So we kind of have to stand up a bunch of sites around the world to support satellites orbiting. And, yeah, it's it's challenging. It's part of the game. But I think that's really gratifying. [02:01:48] S0: What is the state of yeah.
02:01:48 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Bridgit Mendler
[02:01:48] S0: What is the state of yeah. [02:01:50] S1: What what is the actual process of a search look like? I imagine in a bunch of areas of the world, you are looking at a region that encompasses multiple countries, and so are you basically doing like a road show and you know, you wanna get buy in, but then there's probably also incentives that you can get, but like, how does that actually work? If I'm not not planning to compete. To be clear. [02:02:14] S5: Give me the secret. Yeah. No. It I mean, the annoying answer is it depends. It really depends on what the satellite operator is maximizing for. So some will care about, you know, their contact time metrics. So wanting to make sure that they can have, you know, minimal windows of gaps between their contacts. Others will care about, can you drop data in this one very specific location? And so once we have that customer parameter, then the question is, know, you where's the infrastructure that makes things cheap and easy for Northwood? What country is is a good partner? And and then kind of kick off the the the lease hunt and the construction and all that from there, and then we get it up and running. So, yeah. We've we've been busy. We've been doing that in a lot of different countries, and was thinking it could be fun showing the factory floor. So it's been filling up a bit, and so we need to move to the new spot. So these are our portal and prism units. [02:03:10] S0: What's the serrated edges for? Do you have pigeons that land on the edges of the I've only seen those on like park benches in New York City.
02:03:10 · John Coogan, Bridgit Mendler, Jordi Hays
[02:03:10] S0: What's the serrated edges for? Do you have pigeons that land on the edges of the I've only seen those on like park benches in New York City. [02:03:19] S5: Yeah. No. You're not the first person to ask about that. Really for our antenna performance. So we we wanna make sure that we're really precisely hitting where we wanna go and Okay. And, you know, RF has this thing called side lobes Yeah. Which can means that the the signals will bounce off in kind of unintended ways. And so that's a way for us to kinda control where the signals go. [02:03:38] S0: Interesting. So if I How much space in in pigeon defense, things that might make my WiFi better or worse? [02:03:47] S5: Literally two birds with one stone. Avoid the pigeon, avoid the Oh. No. I I actually I I don't [02:03:53] S0: know that. You have to test it. [02:03:55] S1: So how much space do you actually need in a country? Is this like you can get by with like a quarter of an acre or how like the the the Yeah. Hardware doesn't look like massive. [02:04:06] S0: Yeah. You're not building like scratch [02:04:08] S1: power and it's secure Yeah. And it but No.
02:04:08 · Jordi Hays, Bridgit Mendler, John Coogan
[02:04:08] S1: power and it's secure Yeah. And it but No. [02:04:12] S5: That's the whole deal. We we compress it a lot. So our our portal system, which is right here Mhmm. It's designed to replace a 7.3 meter dish antenna, which is a hard number to visualize, but think of like a two story building. And so those portal antennas, you can combine, like, six or eight of them together and it replaces that. But the cool thing is you can actually do multiple satellite contacts at once. So what might take like multiple football fields to support that much contact, you can actually do in basically the size of like a strip mall parking lot. [02:04:46] S1: Mhmm. Very cool. [02:04:49] S0: I had something else. Now I'm blanking. Lost my train of thought. [02:04:54] S5: Yeah. [02:04:55] S0: I guess I guess my question was what is driving growth of demand for ground stations satellite connectivity generally? Yeah. We've seen Starlink's meteoric rise. Then more recently, I think earlier this year, there's sort of like the the like the other side, the other team that's emerging. There's some deals with ASTS, some other earlier stage. There was an acquisition. Yeah. There's a few other Internet providers. Feels like there's at least going to be an attempt at making that a duopoly or oligopoly. But then there's also we've talked to Planet Labs. There's so much else that's going up in space. There's government stuff. What what what do you see as, like, both the near term driver of demand for you and then also longer term?