RYAN: Welcome back to AI for Founders. I’m Ryan Estes.
Most of us were never really taught how money works. We were only taught how to earn it, maybe how to spend it, but never how to build it.
Now imagine the largest wealth transfer in human history, somewhere between 60 trillion and 90 trillion is happening right now. And most of the inheritors don’t know what a limited partnership is.
That’s the problem CJ Fellini is trying to solve. CJ is the founder of NOYACK, a Learn, Plan Invest ecosystem using AI agents to teach financial literacy and democratize access to alternative assets like real estate, fine art and venture capital.
He’s managed billions for ultra wealthy families. Built an AI called NOYACK AI to help the next generation DIY their wealth. And his family once held a $50 million fine art portfolio before Masterworks existed.
In this episode, you’ll learn how CJ turned his father’s medical crisis into a 35 year wealth management career. Why he believes the future belongs to financial generalists and how AI agents will completely disrupt wealth management.
If you’re a founder, investor, or someone who wants to finally feel confident about your money, this one’s for you.
CJ: My pleasure to be here, Ryan. Thank you for inviting me. I’m really excited to talk about financial literacy. I feel like I always have something new to learn.
RYAN: Now let’s begin with some context about you and your company, NOYACK.
CJ: Well, son of immigrants and that’s important because it speaks a lot to my DIY ethos. Everything I do, no one can teach me anything. I have to dissect it, break it down, reverse engineer it and learn it for myself.
And I did just that. Father had a stroke. I had to leave my failed professional hockey career and take up the family business which we did and then found out that I had a talent for wealth management specifically alternative investments. I did that for 9 ultra high net worth families for 35 years after DIYing it in my 20s.
So that’s a little bit about me. I think that’s how I got here. It’s about learning about next generation and what they’re going to go through when it comes to the great wealth transfer and the 60 to 90 trillion that’s leaving my generation and older baby boomers to next gen, which is millennials, younger millennials and Gen Z.
And the abysmal state of financial literacy in this country. How are they going to DIY and what are the tools?
RYAN: Now let’s take it back. When you’re doing alternative investments, what does that include? What kind of asset classes is that?
CJ: The big one for immigrants is real estate. I mean, what immigrant do you not know that doesn’t invest in real estate, whether it’s residential, commercial, or most likely warehouse, industrial logistics. I don’t know if it’s coincidental, but for some reason we seem to understand commercial real estate better than the average bear.
So that’s a big one. That’s where we started in my history back when I was in my early 20s. But over time, as we matured as a multifamily office, we were in over eight different asset classes including secondaries and early stage venture capital fine art. We actually had a $50 million fine art portfolio before Masterworks ever knew what a fine art was and if we did a look back over 30 years, our best performing asset class was fine art.
Not deep enough, not big enough to move the needle, but on a per capita basis, best performing asset class, fine art.
RYAN: That’s cool. I want to hear your take then on the Louvre robbery recently. Did that affect you in a certain kind of way?
CJ: Well, no, I actually don’t like old masters. I couldn’t care less about the actual. I do collect personally with my wife. My wife’s on the board of a museum here in New York. We care about Black, Indigenous, people of color artists, female artists, sort of the unrecognized canon of fine art as well as contemporary.
Yeah, I mean, well, I can go into financially the cynical view of that. We do love those artists as well. Contemporary primarily is where we vibe to.
As for the Louvre, well if it wasn’t valuable or going to be more valuable, no one would risk their time and jail if it wasn’t going to be valuable and more value. So I guess they believe in the inmate thesis as well.
RYAN: OK, let’s talk about this big wealth transfer that’s going to happen over the next 20 to 30 years. What is your position and how are you forecasting what steps are you taking for this massive wealth redistribution among families?
CJ: Well, I’m speaking my own book a little bit here, but there’s a few trends that you can see. The baby boomer and now Gen X is the wealthiest, the two wealthiest generations in history. And they also are compressed in their age. So inheritances are transferring faster than any other generation.
It’s not just how much. It’s an insane amount. Anywhere from 60 to 90 trillion. I’ve heard numbers all over, but it’s in that range. That’s how fast. Normally that would be a 30 year transfer. This is happening in like 10 to 12 years. The bulk of it is happening in the next 10 to 12 years really quickly.
That’s important because if you’re not prepared and if you don’t understand limited partnership appraisal and transfer taxes and all the latest ways of tax mitigation, you’re going to get screwed.
And there’s something else. Aside from financial literacy, intergenerational conversations about wealth, family wealth, are at a surveyed low of all time.
We actually did a 5000 respondent survey. This is for our newsletter millennial audience. Over 6 to 7 months we received 5000 respondents to a very big survey.
One of those things that we surveyed was how much conversation they have with their parents about transferring wealth, what the family does, et cetera. 8 percent. 8 percent had serious conversations with their parents and extended family members about this.
RYAN: That’s crazy to me.
CJ: That’s crazy to me.
RYAN: That kind of puts a spotlight on the stereotype of boomers in general, which is narcissistic, not letting go of power, wanting to stay in the saddle as long as possible, not divulging critical information.
CJ: It is characteristic of that generation that they were met probably with a little bit of stoicism from their parents. You don’t talk about money, you don’t talk about politics, you don’t talk about religion at the dinner table. And now they’re 80 years old and it never changed.
And Gen X, millennials are starting to look around like, hey man, what are we supposed to do? We never got those instructions.
RYAN: You know, you’ve got kind of a suite of products and infotainment. Talk to us a little bit about NOYACK AI because this looks really interesting. A first AI agent for financial literacy, so you can ask the agent about taxes, retirement accounts, investing. I would be really interested to hear how you trained this agent and who’s the ideal user for the product.
CJ: Thank you for that intro. Well, first what we are. I’ll do a little background before I jump into NOYACK AI, which is a small conversational small language model.
What we are is two things. NYC Wealth Club is a 501-C3 registered nonprofit with the mission of financial literacy for young adults. And NOYACK Investing Club is providing digitally native access to alternative investments, all asset classes.
We’re building agentic AI, three AI agents. You mentioned the first one, which is in financial literacy owned by NOYACK Investing Club NYC, Inc. Then that’s our ecosystem name.
They are the bridge from literacy to action, from knowing to making choice to taking action.
NOYACK AI is the first of our agents that we built over the last two years and we’ve been training it nonstop.
The original information really started with our newsletter. Our newsletter, which just celebrated this last Sunday, was our 100th edition. That’s right, weeks. I’m very proud of that. Consistency is everything as an ex pro athlete. It’s not about how great you can be in one day, so decent you can be every day. 100 straight weeks.
And we used all of the learning from our expertise in alternative investments, others in personal finance, debt reduction, estate planning, retirement planning. We use these newsletters as the training.
We built 2000 words every week and that went into the training of the model over and over continuously. We started with a bulk of beginning information, which are the basics that we all learned from Economics 101 and personal finance over the years.
A lot of the alternate investment general information was trained from experts in my network. So between podcasts and all of our content, the training foundation of the small language model is all of the content we created over a couple of years, which is a ton.
RYAN: Well, I mean, even if it might be a small language model, that’s exactly what the large language models are doing too. They’re scraping newsletters, social media and podcast transcriptions in a major way.
CJ: Absolutely. In fact, weirdly, one of our hyperspecific newsletters showed up in Claude by Anthropic. And I was like, wait a minute, I wrote about this topic and that phrase seems oddly reminiscent. I remember this and I went back. It was a couple months earlier. I went like, that turned a phrase about a specific alternative investments. It was about land. It was about agtech land investing, farmland investing. And I used a very specific phrase, which is sort of an insider jargon. And there it was.
And I’m like, they scraped our newsletter.
RYAN: That’s so funny. That’s great, though. That’s awesome.
CJ: Yeah, no, except they didn’t credit me. So no one knows where it came from. They think it came from Anthropic, which you did.
RYAN: Yeah, so look, I love this conversation of financial literacy. Do you think there’s something that exists in the world which is financial virtuosity? You know, if literacy is what you did when you were studying Spanish 2:01 and you’re like, oh, don’t ask a la biblioteca, you know, it’s like, OK, I’ve established maybe a little bit of literacy here, but can you truly get to a new plateau at some point? What is that?
CJ: Well, actually, the virtuosity assumes that someone wakes up in the morning and says, I want to be the best. Financial literacy. I mean, that’s really what you’re describing.
And I can tell you even as a professional investment professional, real estate professional, finance professional, generally no one wakes up thinking they’d rather do anything else in life than become an expert in financial literacy. Maybe there’s a few. I’ll find that tribe.
What really is important is the bell curve, that center bell curve, median of people who need to be cognizant enough in order to improve their life, manage their life and provide for whatever they choose, family home, whatever retirement, making movies, maybe they want to finance movies. Well, they better work really hard because to finance movies you need to start with a large fortune.
The real bridge is the action. Lot of people can become literate enough. The word is a little bit hackney, right? It’s about how do I do all the things that I need to do and do it without 18 fragmented professionals.
I need life insurance to protect my family’s future. I need second-to-die policies. I need a retirement plan. I need to understand should I have a Roth or a traditional 401K? Am I a solo practitioner? I need a SEP IRA. Is there a conversion? What are the pitfalls?
By the way I want to increase my allocation to alts, to private markets up to 25 percent. How do I do that? Where do I do it and what is appropriate for me given my risk tolerance? I have two kids. By the way, I have student debt that I just cannot get rid of. How do I do that and still maintain an emergency fund for those rainy days?
All these things generally would take about 5 to 6 professionals outsourced to make happen and then you probably have four or five different bank accounts, money market, maybe a brokerage account at TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab. You’re like I can’t even remember the logins to my five accounts.
How many hours did you spend trying to log into your accounts during COVID?
RYAN: Yeah, I can’t remember the password and I gotta reset.
CJ: So the next step from the learning and understanding the choices is that bridge to action to planning. And that is our next agent called Profit AI, which is a portfolio optimization. It takes into account your risk tolerance, your disposable investable cash, your panoply of investments from fixed income to cash to life insurance policies to all, et cetera, and then makes recommendations based on what’s called modern portfolio theory, which is basically what Yale used for 20 years to become the number one endowment in history.
My mentor Swenson, who passed away unfortunately a couple years in the middle of COVID, he made Yale number one endowment 20 years running using modern portfolio theory and advocating for alts.
And now we’re doing it for the individual. So then you take that and this is our third built quarterback AI. So you have the learning, the choices and where you stand in financial literacy. You have the portfolio optimization and realizing some of the investment actions. And then you have someone who would normally be a registered investment advisor, a wealth manager or maybe a rich uncle, right? You’re there’s always a rich uncle involved. Hopefully he’s honest or she’s honest.
That is what manages it all. As I build and conclude the building of quarterback AI, what I notice is that the registered investment advisory industry is history. I think and the consolidation in the wealth management industry is history.
Why? Well, first of all, fees. Second of all, their agendas are not aligned. This is a 30 year history. In every group, there’s great ones, but by and large, the role of a wealth manager is to not get sued. It’s to not lose.
So when you’re worried more about beta, meaning their own risk versus your alpha, your seeking return in the most optimized risk optimized way, you’re not going to do well. You’re going to be a race to the middle. Mediocrity is really what the industry strives for and if you’re trying to accomplish things that you know you could do better yourself, you’re not going to strive. You can accept mediocrity.
RYAN: Yeah.
CJ: So if what we’re building and I think it will prove to be anywhere close to our expectations, it’s going to dislocate the investment industry, which strives for mediocrity and create the individual who can manage their wealth, benefiting anyone knowing what their risk tolerance is, not striving for mediocrity and taking risk, not avoiding risk.
Alright, wealth management is risk avoidance. Knowing what you should and can’t do, especially once you become financially literate. That’s taking smart, educated risk.
RYAN: Yeah, well, it’s statistically most people would be falling to the place where they’re feeling insecurity about their wealth, they’re feeling insecure about their retirement options, they’re probably insecure with their spending and probably insecure about what they really want because everyone wants to educate themselves a little bit better and have some opportunities and investments, but maybe that cruise to Mexico’s looking good too. And that’s what they really want.
So I think alternative investments are great because most people are going to come into investing late, which means they’ve got ground to cover. They’re not going to max out your Roth, max out your 401K and everything else. But ultimately you want to buy index funds. Do you got 30 years? We’re going to have to do something a little bit more aggressive.
Now, obviously we’re not giving advice, but when you’re looking at alternative asset classes, are you including venture type deals? What about crypto? What’s your take?
CJ: So there’s fourteen major alternative investment asset classes. Real estate is by far the largest. And real estate also has subsets. You have residential, commercial. Commercial itself has seven different subcategories. Logistics data centers, medical healthcare, et cetera.
Now, should everyone be in everything? No.
There’s two problems with alternate investments as I see for the individual. I don’t like to use the word retail. I think that’s a monitor given by Wall Street to denigrate the individual investor. I think it’s ridiculous.
But there’s two problems that hold back the individual investor from really getting involved and allocating appropriately to alternative investments. One is due diligence. It’s hard to due diligence an individual deal or a fund. It’s not easy. I did it for 30 years. It took me 10 years to learn how to do it well. So I can tell it’s not easy. If you mess up and you make a bad decision based on poor due diligence, that’s a risk.
And two, illiquidity. So they’re both bad. Illiquidity is probably the tougher one. To know when you’re going to need cash is the hardest part because one, you’re not getting out of alternative investments, generally not. That’s a blanket statement, but generally you’re not.
Two, if you try, then you have to bail and someone’s going to take you out in a 70 percent haircut to 20 to 30 cents on the dollar. It’s going to be a disaster for you.
Those two issues are about planning and budgeting. Budgeting comes in. I think very much everyone thinks it’s about having a house budget. And of course, that’s important. How much should you spend?
What’s really important is to know how much you can invest and plan and have an emergency fund. In order to do alternative investments, you have to begin with budgeting and doing budgeting with a sensitivity analysis of looking at your life, not over two months or six months. Over two years. You should budget and track for two or three years and you can also learn at the same time concurrently.
But you should not be investing in anything illiquid until you have three years, two or three years of your budgeting history.
Now you can do that manually and we who hasn’t done it for spreadsheets for the last 20 years, right. But there are going to be tools including ours and others that are going to take that two to three years of personal data and give you 3 to 5 to 10 year plan on what to do, what to invest and portfolio optimization recommendations, not advisory by the way.
One. People who are asking about these tools from this are registered investment advisors and when they speak to them, I’m like, let me just get this straight. You need RIAs to do the job that you trained and licensed Series 63, 65 and 66 to do for your clients. That seems I don’t know it doesn’t seem right to me. You should be doing the job with tools and manual input and subject matter expertise.
But anyway that falls on deaf ears.
RYAN: So the tool itself, you know, everyone’s got their spreadsheet going back a couple of years, they load it into the agent and it’s giving them recommendations based on their budgeting and spending.
CJ: Yeah, so that’s quarterback AI and that’s what’s in early beta stage. We’re loading a lot of our own budget information over years and it’s starting to make forecasts.
And that’s the forecast. How much should you have for your emergency fund? How much should you have for your house fund? How much do you have for your children’s 529 and college education fund? And it’s starting to balance all of these needs, then you might say necessities and even what’s your fun need? What’s your cruise, your trip to Punta Mita, Mexico? It’s essentially your ski trip and it’s starting to balance them, which you would have 3 or 4 professionals trying to do.
And then it also is taking real-time, real-time changes in your portfolio. So you have a public portfolio. It’s bringing in data sources from public securities, fixed income. You get promoted, you get a higher salary. It’s taking in that. You go into a higher tax bracket. It counteracts the higher salary. It considers that. It’s not easy.
I do, and I hand it to those very good registered investment advisors who have done it well, but those are usually reserved for the super wealthy who can afford to pay the best in the RIA industry. They’re not coming for us. Those managers, they’re like, listen, if I’m going to do the same thing and be really good at it, I might as well work for Bill Gates, not for CJ Fellini.
RYAN: Yeah, well, it’s might as well stack points, right? It prints the same work. It’s just I might as well get a point on a big mountain, then a little hill.
CJ: Yeah, and I’m like, I’m with you, brother and sister. I get it. Go work for Bill. You don’t need me.
RYAN: So what would you say to somebody like me? I’m the kind of guy who I’ve got all my spreadsheets and maybe I’m a little hesitant to put them into the machine because I’m afraid of judgment. Which is to say that like once the machine looks at all my expenses, it’d be like, Ron, you should probably invest in Canes, considering how much your fat self is eating that chicken.
CJ: You know, that’s actually a very interesting question which we had because you look at technology generally and especially AI, but I mean, I know there’s people around Belushi. I’m still wrapping my head around and we’re immersing it every day, but I’m still wrapping my head about that. They might just be age specific.
So I look at it as hyper rational. It is. I’m a data nerd. That’s how I started to do what I did and numbers and numbers geek and I say this is a tool that takes us from the Abacus to the HP-13C calculator, et cetera and keeps going. It’s just another one in the progression of tools taking rational data points and spinning out a rational conclusion.
Now, if you’re worried about how you feel about those conclusions, that is a question I’ve never actually had. And if it influences your use of these tools, maybe I don’t want to hear this. I don’t know. You’re not saving enough. I know I’m not. I should be getting that life insurance policy. Yeah, I gotta be honest with you. That’s a tough one. And I think it also speaks to the ethical use of AI, by the way. And I think those questions are and listen, I’m going to be honest, we haven’t addressed it.
We’re still trying to get the right answers at the fastest output possible. But yeah, your personal wealth management is wrought with emotion. It shouldn’t be, but there’s emotion running through it, how you feel, judgments, et cetera. So it’s a very interesting question, one that makes me think a lot more about next stage, next phase of building of our agents. But how does someone feel about the answers they get? Yeah, I never even thought about it.
RYAN: Yeah, good point. And you know, that’s one thing that I try and talk to my kids about early. You know, we got them some investment accounts and stuff so they can learn about the market and learn about trading a little bit. Learn about supporting companies that they use. You know, I think that’s important, but also how they’re feeling about their own financial literacy. And I think a lot of it was falling on deaf ears until I started really talking to them about like, OK, how do you want to live when you’re retired? Like, how, what do you see yourself doing?
So really visualizing putting yourself there, starting to put dollars around that. And then with AI, you know, you can create these little calculators very simply to say like, OK, well you’ll have these retirement benefits if you do XYZ, but this is the amount of income you’re going to have to stack over the next 30 years in order to live the way that you want to.
So then the light bulbs start going off because for kids right now, it’s really hard to look into the crystal ball and say like, what should I do for a career? How should I approach money? Particularly because we don’t even know what kind of jobs will exist in five or ten years. So like, where do you shoot?
When I was a kid, the only jobs I really knew about were what was on Mr. Rogers neighborhood. So all those jobs now are difficult. They’re all robots.
CJ: Yeah, so basically jobs are not actually if you’re HVAC repair, forget it, you’re going to do very, very well forever.
RYAN: How old are you if I may ask? How old are your kids?
CJ: 18 and 16.
RYAN: Did you start a while ago on what you just described?
CJ: Yeah, absolutely.
RYAN: That’s great. I mean, listen, that really that I love hearing that. I mean, it’s not common. That is not common for parents talking to their 8, 10 year old. My sons are four and five. I’m starting to, but they’re not really getting it. The five year old actually wants to be an engineer and he’s getting it. And he’s also apparently very greedy. I’ve come to learn. So he’s starting to understand the power of the purse. So kids have just kind of naturally been drawn to finance. Like, they’re both really good with money, very responsible. It was probably about a year ago that my son was like, oh, dad, I can’t get anymore money in my piggy bank. I’m like, oh, that’s cool. Wait, what do you mean you can’t get any more money in there? And he’s like, I can’t push it anymore. I was like, is that thing full of cash? He’s like, let me see that. It’s like everything disappear in the next coming weeks. Weighs 15 pounds. I was like, dude, let’s make a video and smash this thing open and put this in your account. You should be making returns on this. So he was all about it. He had $3,000. If you know, that’s insane, that’s insane. The stuff that we’re getting bigger, bigger banks, you know, I wonder it brings up another question. Is there a genetic predisposition to being good with money?
CJ: I wonder. No one’s ever tested that. I wonder. I mean, obviously left brain, right brain, you know, you could say, but I’ve known a lot of very smart mathematicians who couldn’t figure out their own finances worth a damn.
RYAN: Well, I mean, it’s almost like a cliche, like doctors and lawyers just have financial distress because they’re like, oh, buying jewelry. Don’t even get me started on that. I’m alienating so many different people on this podcast. We all know doctors. I’ve had 23 surgeries without them. I’m held together with chicken wire in my body. But we created a large medical office portfolio. So I worked with doctors as tenants for 20 years. And I can say unequivocally maybe the worst group of people with money than I’ve ever been.
CJ: And I’m not saying that’s because we’re really charging your rent? It’s, I think it’s yeah, I spent a lot of funny conversations explaining things.
RYAN: Amazing. Cool. I’ll talk a little bit about the nonprofit arm of the company. That’s a very interesting wrinkle, particularly in a time now where it appears that nonprofits turn into profits.
CJ: Well, yeah, it’s funny. And by the way, that’s, I would think that’s what we’re emulating. None. I didn’t emulate something. I’m a better editor than I am a writer. And so I like to copy success where I see it versus try and reinvent the wheel all the time.
AARP. People don’t know that AARP is not only a nonprofit for the advancement of retired persons, right? Association for the advancement of retired persons. It’s the largest affiliate marketing for profit on the planet, most successful, most profitable by far. It does its mission. It does it very well. But it also has a very profitable business.
Now you mentioned about capitalism et cetera and how your children were learning about what they want to do, what kind of companies they want to promote, pursue, invest in. Well, I actually think that this sort of nonprofit to for profit is going to become more normalized and not in the OpenAI way, in more on the AARP way.
Because social capitalism amongst younger generations, Gen Z and millennials is a very big thing. I’ve had a lot of conversations where I listen. I come from a very transactional generation. If it’s transactional, I don’t care about what they were doing. I want to know what the returns are.
I do more. I do much more so now than I have kids. But when I talk to younger generations, they not only, in fact, they don’t want to know what the returns are first. They want to know what is this social impact? What is the mission? Why? And then they say, oh, by the way, what are the numbers, right? That is the reverse of what I was brought up with.
Understanding that a mission can also be profitable, something mission driven can also be profitable, I think is the way of the younger generations understanding of capitalism, which is really encouraging.
RYAN: You know, I think probably Gen Z, they get it, yeah. Like, they want to have meaning behind their investments and they want to feel like they’re contributing to a better world, which is beautiful.
So, you know, for example, there was this trend or there was this accusation of greenwashing that was going around. Which is to say when they would build a new Walmart, they would use repurposed materials and they put solar panels on it and do all these really cool carbon neutral things where you would think the more protest kind of people would be like, oh great, they’re doing good things. But rather they’re like, no, you’re just using this as a ploy to get people to buy into your concept.
But it’s like, isn’t that the best thing you could possibly do? Like if you’re doing good for everybody and making money at it, it’s like, no, this is the direction we want to go at. It’s like, OK, we agree, you know, so I feel like it’s really loosening up now where people are saying like, hey, where’s the win-win situations here? We all want to make a buck and if we can do it and satisfy some of our more noble principles, even better.
CJ: Yeah, listen, the most altruistic or the most utopian says not only do we want them to do good, but we want them to want to do good for the right reasons. Motivation. However, to really advance and it really advances, especially amongst a capitalist society that has been transactional for a very long time should worry about the outcomes and let the motivations overtime with generations taking over the leadership. Those motivations will come. The ones that are more altruistic, the right motivations.
But if you’re getting the outcomes at any stage and even if Walmart is using it for promotional marketing purposes and yet you’re still getting the benefits, yeah, let’s worry about that as step one. And then step two, let’s worry about why they’re doing it after that.
I think it’s like an overly pragmatic viewpoint. I don’t think it’s wrong. I like seeing the actual tangible benefit and I’m OK with that.
RYAN: Yeah, 100 percent. I love it. OK, CJ, are you ready for the lightning round?
CJ: Yeah. Shoot, let’s do it.
RYAN: OK. You have a very successful career in finance. Congratulations. The listeners of this show love business ideas. Do you have any business idea rattling around in there that’s been driving you crazy that maybe you can share with us?
CJ: Jesus, you have someone like me that’s another hour podcast. What I have to do is run through my top three. I have like 8. I’m not getting it. Yeah, I’ll give you something that’s very generic retail. I’ll give you something a little bit advanced and then investments.
The generic retail is if you go to storage facilities, there’s like 60 percent of what’s in the storage facility that’s never going to get used, never going to be repurposed. It’s just going to get ultimately thrown away. So the old school flea markets, the souks should happen right at those storage facilities and there should be an eBay for storage facilities. Absolutely all of the excess material and guess what, all storage facilities have a lot of land. There should be traveling markets exchanging those goods right there like a physical eBay. That’s one and that’s a franchise line that anyone can do.
Now a little bit more advanced than that is one that we are sort of pursuing, but it’s a slow burn. Similarly, there is a tremendous excess capacity in parking garages. I don’t mean the ones under buildings, I mean the block full 1000 unit parking lots, right? Parking garages, structured parking. Post COVID, there’s like 60 percent vacancy.
There used to be an average vacancy around Tier 1, Tier 2 urban cities of about 75 to 80 percent. They were cash machines. Yeah. Post COVID, not as good as it was. You know, there’s a return to work movement, but there’s still a lot of people not returning.
You’re turning those into logistics depots, micro fulfillment centers where Amazon lockers, Walmart lockers, cold storage facilities because small artisanal grocers, they need to be able to ship within 30 minutes and they cannot afford a million square foot regional cold storage facility like Whole Foods can. Your mom and pops places they need 2000 square feet of cold storage, especially if they’re an organic specialist. That food has to stay cold all the time, right.
So underutilized parking garages are becoming multi-purpose micro fulfillment centers called mobility hubs. And here’s the capper. The rooftops for the bigger ones are going to be where the electric vehicle takeoff and landing, the air taxis. That’s how they’re going to distribute. They’re going to land on top of old parking garages.
People are gonna drive away right from that air taxi. There’ll be an Uber waiting for them and a driverless Uber. So they will go from a driver in a vertical takeoff and landing electric air taxi to a driverless Uber out of the parking garage and into right in downtown, wherever they are.
RYAN: Love that. How close are we to air taxis?
CJ: The first urban flight will take place in the third quarter, September through the fourth quarter of this year. There’s going to be a New York City flight taking people to Kennedy Airport.
RYAN: Incredible. Now the biggest issue about all of this adoption is they need airport. They need landing spots, yeah.
CJ: And the existing ones like the airports, they’re done. They’re full and they’re also not where you want to be. They’re not in downtown. There is a big move and I’ve already spoken to Job Archer. They’re the leading told of companies both public and they’re looking at landing on rooftops of large parking garages.
RYAN: Incredible. The three skyscrapers downtown Denver that were sold like 9 years ago for 170 million and sold last year for 7 million. Which is just to say that all these cities are going to have these gigantic open spaces in them. What would you do with those? Big buildings with nobody in them. That’s a tough one.
CJ: They don’t work as residential conversions ever. I mean, they just don’t. Especially the public reads so they don’t get hammered. Large commercial floor plates, especially the larger floor plates, do not work as residential conversion and I hate to say this. There really isn’t a repurpose, which is crazy when you think about how many commercial office buildings we have.
RYAN: Yeah, the percentage of commercial office buildings we have, they don’t. It’s I still think even though there’s a huge return to work movement and return to office RTO, I still think one of the greatest risks we have in the real estate sector is commercial office.
I used to think it was strip malls, all those malls that no one goes to anymore. I don’t think so anymore. So maybe there’ll be an idea that comes up in strip malls, they’re becoming game centers. You know, they’re becoming digital, digital Pokémon. There you go, right? With your phone using hybrid AR to play a game. Who knows, maybe they’ll be another idea.
CJ: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, for me, it’s padel. I love padel.
RYAN: Yeah. I love padel. Yeah. I’m too embarrassed to play pickleball. I’m sorry. I’m still young enough not to want to play pickleball. Got surprised to play squash. But yeah, no, I am a little still very concerned about commercial office.
CJ: Yeah, and for good reason. Is there any entrepreneur or CEO that you follow closely or admire?
RYAN: Geez, that’s another that’s another hour as well. Umm, other than the obvious in the realm of AI. There is someone who is creating a similar agent called Copilot dot Money very impressed with him. He’s a former Google ML machine learning scientist and he’s coming up with this app and I only know him from afar. It just won an App Store award, not just for its functionality, but for its UX. Brand new. I think he understands. And again, it’s in our bailiwick, it’s in our area.
I could go on. I mean, Sam Zell, the late Sam Zell was my real estate mentor and David Swenson, the Yale CIO. So I can go on and they’re dead. So that’s what happens when you’re old like me. All your mentors are dead. So I’m trying to give you one that is not only alive, but actually young and killing it.
Yes, his name is Andres. He is the founder of Copilot dot Money and I’m very impressed with what he’s doing.
RYAN: Cool. Shout out to Andres. Amazing. If you were pronounced his last name, I’d tell you when it’s too. It’s a Spanish slash Basque name that I can’t.
CJ: Oh yeah, I’m hopeless. I could barely read English.
RYAN: Knowing what you know now you’re entering college as a freshman, what would you study?
CJ: Oh, that’s easy. Machine learning and if you’re looking for a quick job, in fact, you’re coming out right now. I told my nephew, my nephew just got out of college. I had three, one is still in college and two just got out. Or if you haven’t studied data science and machine learning, well, it’s too late. Obviously you’re already out. I mean, you can always go back. And that’s not true. It’s never too late.
Prompt engineer. Yeah, that is the number one job for the next 5 years. Become a prompt engineer and understand how to manipulate the training of every single model. Know everything there is to know about the individual models, the uses and as a common category, agentic. What we’re doing.
So there’s one thing to build what we’re building. There’s another thing knowing how to use them effectively and we’re DTC, but there’s going to be a B to B component of this, right? And prepare them. So imagine the old, you know, the Maytag repair person, you know, the washing machine repair. Imagine if that is now a digital version of AI agent repair.
That prompt engineering which is more of a content play and if your data science and machine learning, agentic AI repair. Yeah, those are my 2 jobs for the next 10 years, really, especially as the tools for building agents, you know, if it’s Nathan or it’s Claude or whatever it is, those get more sophisticated and you know, all of your agents will need to be updated. And as you’re building swarms of agents and now you have 50 agents working in unison. Yeah, the Maytag guy for your agents. I love it.
RYAN: These are gems. Tell you what, this is how fast it’s moving and I can’t imagine it. And again, I’ve mentioned all of a couple times, but my head sometimes can’t wrap around how fast things are moving. So we spent six months building one of our agents right now, we now have to go back and rebuild the first two months because we’ve moved the industry and the technology has moved that fast. And as we’re building it, we’re actually repairing and rebuilding the beginning.
CJ: Yeah, 100 percent. That’s how fast this move. It’s wild. It’s so cool.
RYAN: OK, last, last question for you, CJ, I really appreciate your time. What is something you know now, deeply, that you wish you knew earlier?
CJ: These are great questions, right? They really are. Thanks. We should be prepared. Actually a pretty big preparation guy and apparently I didn’t, I should have asked for these questions. They’re great.
The rise of the DIY mentality. I grew up with there was a specialist for everyone. Again, I’ve had 23 surgeries for my hockey career, 10 knees. But I’ve gone to 15 different specialist doctors, right? Hyper specialist.
I think the future is in the rise of the generalist. And what I used to think, the world is won by the specialist people who know that one thing and they know it so well, they know it better than others. I don’t believe that anymore. So I wish I saw the rise of the generalist because I would have with that anticipated better the rise of networking and digital networking, social media, LinkedIn, for example, you know, the six degree principle and I would have anticipated the rise of things like the large language model and the conversational models because these are the realm of the generalist, not the hyper specialist.
However, that said, we’re going back to a specialist way and agentic AI is bringing the specialist back to the foreground, saying if you want an agent for personal management, an agent for this, an agent for that. So I guess what I’m saying is, yeah, I would have loved to have seen the rise of the generalist instead of thinking that everyone has to be a specialist. You got to be a real estate guy, you got to be a knee, a knee surgeon. No, you need to know a little bit about a lot of things.
RYAN: Interesting. How are your knees?
CJ: They’re terrible. They’re new. Well, they’re good. I mean they’re good now. They’re both replaced. They were terrible for a lot. I had a knee surgery every year for ten straight years.
RYAN: My gosh, was it acute injuries or was it just kind of wear and tear from playing hockey all those years?
CJ: One was acute and a trilateral ACL, MCL and PCL blow. Yeah, all three, all three, all three ligaments just blew to shreds. Yeah, that was a pretty bad one. That was impact. Everything else was degradation over time. I lost all my cartilage, so I was bone on bone for a long time and they just kept chipping away, chipping away, chipping. I finally like we got nothing left to chip. If you have to go in for new. I think that’s another. I wish I knew. Do the new knees earlier. Don’t replace them way earlier. You don’t even need any of the old knees to listen. I know there’s a wing at my surgeon’s house called the Fellini wing. He’s driving a Fellini car. You know, 10 surgeries. Are you kidding me?
RYAN: Incredible. Oh CJ this has been so much fun. Where can people connect with you online?
CJ: Well, let’s see, we can find me on LinkedIn. Apparently I’m everywhere on LinkedIn but our website, thank you for asking is we are NOYACK and YACK. We are NOYACK.com and you can sign up. It’s a free trial and we also have a newsletter as I mentioned, really proud of it. But you can also sign up for the newsletter on the website. We are NOYACK.com and podcasters, financial calculators. The website is gorgeous and there’s just a whole host of resources.
RYAN: Thanks for coming on the show and talking about it.
CJ: This was great. Some of the best questions I’ve had in this speaking engagement ever. Thank you.
RYAN: Nice. Well, now I feel guilty. I mean, they’re pretty challenging. I should have given to you beforehand.
CJ: That’s alright. If I can’t think on my feet, I shouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.
RYAN: Tremendous. Thanks so much, CJ. See you later.
CJ: Thanks again, Ryan.
