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Technology's daily show (formerly the Technology Brothers Podcast). Streaming live on X and YouTube from 11 - 2 PM PST Monday - Friday. Available on X, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube.
You're watching TVPN.
Speaker 2:Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI Robotaxi launch in Austin, Texas this afternoon.
Speaker 1:Was the big technology news.
Speaker 2:We have someone who's written about the Tesla cyber cab in the robotaxi in the back of a robotaxi, hopefully, calling in to the I sent him the link. We'll see if we can bring him in. Hey.
Speaker 1:Are you Here he is. How you doing? You see timing.
Speaker 3:How's it going, guys? You see what's happening? Here. Let me see. Can you see it?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Wow. Wow.
Speaker 1:Yes. There you go. Amazing. Safety rider right here as well.
Speaker 2:Oh, nice. Okay.
Speaker 3:Got some sick sick glasses on, but, yeah, we're we're in the robotaxi right now. This is my fifth ride. I'm also here with Harry from The UK.
Speaker 1:Oh, Harry. What's going on?
Speaker 3:He's a fan of the channel. Awesome. Yeah. So, yeah, this is my fifth ride. It's been amazing so far.
Speaker 3:It really does feel like Tesla has hit this one out of the park truly. The geofence area is definitely much smaller than Waymo's right now, but I think they did that, with with the thought process of, like, hey. We wanna make sure we have a really good launch. We wanna make sure that it's going real nice and smooth. And, but so far, the rides I've taken have all been really, really good, very smooth.
Speaker 3:It's very hard to communicate just how smooth the the car is unless you're familiar with the with the software, unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on on the Teslas. It's very, very similar to that experience. It's just there's just nobody there now. That that's the freaky part is that
Speaker 2:I see.
Speaker 3:You know, for for a lot
Speaker 4:of people that have
Speaker 3:been following the company, a lot of us knew this day was gonna come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road. But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kinda like this is this is wild. Is wild. So, is that better? Stock is up 9%
Speaker 5:today.
Speaker 2:9% today. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 3:You're welcome, everybody.
Speaker 2:I'm kidding. Yeah. Give us your other takeaways. Well, I I I saw you posted a good breakdown from your experience. What else do you have to share about the process?
Speaker 2:Did you need to go through a preregistration to get onboarded? It feels like it's not completely, open access just yet.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So so, yeah, we were invited. We're we're a part of, like, a very limited group of people that were invited. I think Tesla was just, here. So somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that.
Speaker 3:No problem.
Speaker 2:Wow. Nice.
Speaker 3:The yeah. It's a very small group of people. I think a lot of us that have followed Tesla very closely, over the years, Tesla went out of their way to sort of, you know, get us, some early access so we can go out there, test the test the system, get it out there for people to see how it performs. So far, it's very, very limited Mhmm. In its use case, and I'm showing you guys here just on the road.
Speaker 3:Hopefully does it come across? Can you guys see the Yeah. Road, how it's driving? Yeah. It's a very steep yeah.
Speaker 3:Think I think Tesla very specifically started this very small. But now if you go and their and their ZIP code and their phone number and email address so they can set up for the service. And that's probably a way for Tesla to get some some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there. Mhmm. But so far, it's very small small geofence area, small group of people.
Speaker 3:And I think I I I don't know how many cars they have on the road, but I doubt it's more than 10 right now. We're a four way stop right now, and it's navigating that no problem. But, yeah. I I think I think it's very limited on purpose. But I will tell you that for those of us that are so lucky to be able to experience this firsthand, it's just it feels surreal because it works.
Speaker 3:Works. It's amazing.
Speaker 5:It's just Crazy.
Speaker 3:It just takes
Speaker 5:you around, and there's no one there.
Speaker 1:And you're like, that, it's wild that we got full self driving cars before reliable cell coverage in
Speaker 2:major cities. You're breaking
Speaker 1:up a little bit.
Speaker 4:We need
Speaker 2:to drop Mostly.
Speaker 1:Start with the top
Speaker 2:of this. I I mean, I have one more question. We'll let you go. Yeah. I mean, what's remarkable about this is is not just that it's a self driving car, but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 Model Y.
Speaker 2:Is there anything are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket, added to extra cameras, anything?
Speaker 3:Nothing. Nothing. Before. I mean, the there's different software, but, I mean, that's just a that's a software update.
Speaker 4:Right?
Speaker 3:It does there is nothing that that I can gather that says, oh, this is a specific like, a very uniquely equipped Tesla that has some additional sensors. This looks to me like the point you made is exactly and this is why this is such so mind blowing. Like, I just can't believe it's happening. The best selling car in the world where Tesla's making over a million of these per year that costs less than $40,000, potentially less than $30,000 to make is driving itself in Austin, Texas with a paid ride. I paid $4.20, and it's driving me around.
Speaker 3:The best selling car in the world. Like that that is that's a weird thing to process. Yep. Because it fundamentally breaks the like, what how we think about self driving transportation. Because you think about, oh, self driving, a lot of sensors, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 3:No. The the cost structure for this thing is the is the scale that Tesla has able has been able to achieve, that same car is going to drive itself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 3:And and that just breaks everything. Does your cost per mile plummets? The method they've taken, as far as training the the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than Waymo can. And they have the cars. Right?
Speaker 3:So Tesla makes as many of these cars every five hours that Waymo has on their fleet total. Wow. Right? And that that's the mind blowing piece of it. And Waymo should be celebrated for the work they've done because it's such an incredible such an incredible technology and I'm really happy they exist.
Speaker 3:But the scale piece is the challenge.
Speaker 2:Yep. And it
Speaker 3:seems like now that Tesla has figured out how to get paid rides going as we come to our destination, that's my Cybertruck right there just hanging out.
Speaker 2:No way.
Speaker 3:You know? That it's like, it it's monumental. This is truly a monumental thing for them.
Speaker 1:This is like, Disneyland for tech bros. You could just keep taking rides around all day long.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This is amazing. Is like,
Speaker 3:thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, brother. Yeah, dude.
Speaker 3:It's like, you know, sometimes I'm like afraid. I'm like, does my does my wife think I'm too nerdy? Like, am I getting too nerdy about this? What's going on? But it really is like it's it's it's it's just upending, you know, what Tesla has been historically great at is just upending the equation around, the technologies that they work in with the electric vehicle.
Speaker 3:Now with self driving, they're gonna get into the the human or robot space. Yeah. This is what they do. And so I think this is just another reminder that they're they're full steam ahead and it's, it's very exciting. And I'm and it's just such an honor to be part of release.
Speaker 3:Truly. It's an honor.
Speaker 2:Historic. Amazing. Yeah. Well, thank
Speaker 1:you so much for calling in. This was great. Course. Yeah. We'll back for having fun out there.
Speaker 1:Bye. Talk soon.
Speaker 3:Thank you, guys. Alright. Bye bye.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The, the the scale of this thing. I mean, it like, Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space. He's just the first person to figure out how to get the rockets go up and back every single six hours or something like that. And so Scale.
Speaker 2:Scale really matters. It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point. And, yeah, they seem really set up for it. I love this post by Nick Cruz. He says, Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the robotaxi, and you'll love to see it.
Speaker 2:Little bit of side quest going on for the last six months. You know, sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest, but it's not it's not the main mission.
Speaker 6:Pot of gold.
Speaker 2:Pot of gold. Alright. Anyway, there's some other there's some other
Speaker 1:news Power bottom dad says time will tell, but my bet is that this signals the death of the Waymo leaving Google in a $20,000,000,000 hole, and likely Uber as well. Very dramatic. I'm not I'm not I think power bottom dad is a very strong poster. Yep. And, you know, the competitive dynamic is really heating up.
Speaker 1:I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this other cities right now. It sounds like it's 10 ish cars in a very, very small area. But again, they could potentially scale a thousand times faster than Waymo. All just going to come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:George Hautz last week was saying that, you know, Waymo has is our teleoperated. He said, you know, I haven't fact checked this. Thankfully, we're not journalists. We don't have to fact check. But he said something like 1.7 people per car.
Speaker 1:Or 1.2 or something. Sort of, you know, overseeing This is
Speaker 2:more than a taxicab, because a
Speaker 1:taxicab only has Yeah, so the real question will be, you know, is Tesla doing teleoperation as well? Do they, you know, how how long will these companies need to do that? But once things are really working and they're safe Mhmm. Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once.
Speaker 2:The Social Network two is officially in development with Aaron Sorkin returning this time as director. Yaxine says, wrong. I'm the director and I'm also the main character. I thought that was really
Speaker 1:He's definitely a main character.
Speaker 2:Andy, two cents dot money is is writing some some, you know, jokey dialogue here. He says, sorry, I left my aura ring at South Park Commons along with my Eight Sleep burner phone and Bored Ape ledger wallet. You absolute desol. It's pretty funny to reimagine it. But interesting, we have a little scoop here.
Speaker 2:We actually got our hands on the on on a couple pages of the
Speaker 1:new It it was left at the gym. Yes.
Speaker 2:And we're In Hollywood.
Speaker 1:We're in Hollywood where we are. Yes. We're fairly confident it is the it could possibly be
Speaker 2:This is the Social Network two
Speaker 1:Official
Speaker 2:Official dialogue. Yeah. They haven't shot yet.
Speaker 1:Script.
Speaker 2:So with the other script, they've been doing table reads. We wanted to do a little table read for you today. So I'll break it down. You'll play Mark Zuckerberg. I'll play Nat Friedman.
Speaker 1:Sounds great.
Speaker 2:So this happens be This
Speaker 1:is taking place in Mark Zuckerberg's office at night in the Meta Yeah.
Speaker 2:So a middle a minimalist expanse lit by floating AR displays and whiteboards full of transformer diagrams. Mark Zuckerberg is focused yet restless. He stands at a window. Nat Friedman is calm but energized. He enters.
Speaker 2:And Nat opens the scene. You've opened Source Llama, Mark. 70,000,000,000 parameters running in eight k token context windows. And word there's a 405,000,000,000 monster still in the lab?
Speaker 1:Open source isn't unleashed, Nat. It's a guided evolution. We publish the weights so the community can help tame them.
Speaker 2:Community, a sizable slice of fair hop to startups like Mistral. How's the village supposed to ride the beast without many of the original wranglers?
Speaker 1:Talent moves, ideas stay. Group query attention, scaled rotary positional embeddings with NTK aware stretching. This isn't incremental. It's a step change.
Speaker 2:Meanwhile, Yan's out there talking about non autoregressive world model hybrids saying the next wave won't be token by token racers. He's ready to retire. You're thorough, Brad Mark.
Speaker 1:Yan's job is to keep the herd agile. Llama is today's workhorse. Scout and Maverick are the horizon. Right now, Llama is our public manifesto.
Speaker 2:Your manifesto just made every kid with a decent GPU a potential sorcerer. Hugging Face downloads are exploding. What's next? Magic carpets?
Speaker 1:Exactly. Open weights let the village scale faster than our walls ever could. PurpleLlama covers us. CyberSecEval, LlamaGuard, full red team cycles.
Speaker 2:You know PurpleLlama isn't bulletproof, Mark. OpenAI is minting cache behind APIs, and you're handing out multilingual long context models for free.
Speaker 1:The Llama three community license only restricts firms over 700,000,000 monthly active users. Innovation rises bottom up. Ask Ahmed. Ask Joel. Democratization is the point.
Speaker 2:You're wagering north of $60,000,000,000 in AI CapEx on that democracy. It's a big bet, Mark.
Speaker 1:Not a bet, an ecosystem. Scout is multimodal. Maverick is video first. Laura, Chlora, NFR quantization. LAMA, derivatives, already power agents.
Speaker 1:Ragstacks, University Labs, it feeds itself.
Speaker 2:Provided the community keeps aligning with you.
Speaker 1:Alignment happens in real time. RLHF, DPO, RLAIF. This is an ecosystem, not a monopoly.
Speaker 2:And if that ecosystem births something you can't steer?
Speaker 1:No one controls progress, Nat. We guide it openly, transparently. No secret rooms. Just a billion hands shaping what's next.
Speaker 2:Then hold on tight and hope we're ready.
Speaker 1:We will be. We're building it together.
Speaker 2:And seen. It really jumps off the page. Wow. Riveting. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Hollywood's back.
Speaker 1:Hollywood's back. This might save Hollywood.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think this will be People said that I'm Oscar bait right here.
Speaker 1:For sure. Totally. So
Speaker 2:Oscar bait.
Speaker 1:Anyways, you know, maybe maybe somebody just left this as a in the you know, as a prank knowing we'd find it,
Speaker 2:knowing we'd read it. It's entirely possible.
Speaker 1:It's entirely possible. This is, you know, totally real.
Speaker 2:Next up, we have Yaxine.
Speaker 1:The chat has been waiting.
Speaker 2:Yaxine, how are you doing?
Speaker 1:What's going on?
Speaker 2:You are on mute, brother.
Speaker 1:No audio yet. But I do love that.
Speaker 2:Got the weight rack. Is
Speaker 4:that a
Speaker 1:weight rack? Or
Speaker 2:Looks like it.
Speaker 4:Hello, test.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We can
Speaker 1:hear you. How are doing? Testing.
Speaker 4:Good. I haven't set up my DAC yet. So
Speaker 2:No. You're good.
Speaker 1:You're good. What's happening?
Speaker 4:Let me just ask let me just check like, let me just look at something on Sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah. We'll we'll we'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out. Probability. Who needs
Speaker 1:no introduction.
Speaker 2:He needs no introduction. Founder of Dingboard, a web base
Speaker 4:of the hosts of
Speaker 1:John and Jordy.
Speaker 4:John and Jordy. Hey. How's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yassine.
Speaker 4:Apologies.
Speaker 2:Good to meet you.
Speaker 4:Hello. Thanks for thanks for the introduction. I appreciate your time as well. And I'm, like, actually, like, huge fan you guys. Like Thank you.
Speaker 4:Someone someone I someone I used to work with introduced me to you guys. So Awesome. I, like, found a lot of enjoyment.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:No. It's great to have you on. How have the last few days been?
Speaker 4:Little bit stressful, to be honest. Good. I've slept three hours every single night because posting on Twitter has been so fun. And, unfortunately for Fun
Speaker 5:or stressful?
Speaker 4:Yeah. So both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting. Yeah. And, that's, not good for me, but I I will basically just stop posting. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially replace your salaries? You're making in the 7 figure mark. You gotta really ramp it up a little
Speaker 4:I used I used to go on Fortune, and it's like, people will be like, yeah. I'm, like, making, a million like, mill 2 mill at these AI companies. I'd
Speaker 2:be like,
Speaker 4:no way. There's no way you guys are making 2,000,000 at these
Speaker 2:AI companies.
Speaker 4:So I started making, like, seven digits of this at an AI company. I was like, wait. Like, these guys weren't actually lying. Like, do you actually make that much money at these AI companies? That's great.
Speaker 4:And it's, like, pretty fun work too as well. So, yeah, for what's worth, like, I didn't work on AI. I worked on, like, bugs that really annoyed me on Yeah. The app. And that's why I joined, actually.
Speaker 4:So I joined X because, there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me. Fixed quite a lot of them, so I'm pretty happy, like, with the work I've done.
Speaker 1:X X is the product I use that I find the most bugs yet. I'm not just I don't abandon the product. Like, that's how it takes
Speaker 2:to that.
Speaker 4:Interesting. That's a super interesting thing. And it's because there's, like, when it's a very large app. Right? So the scale is huge and you guys are like a right tail users.
Speaker 4:Like, you guys are famous. Like, the, you know, the podcast of the tech bro podcast. Sorry. The the the host of the tech bro podcast. You guys are famous.
Speaker 4:So the amount of notifications you guys get, the amount of replies you guys get, the amount of DMs that you guys get is an insane amount. You guys are so far into the right tail. But how many people are there like you? That's why it feels buggy for you. Sure.
Speaker 4:But for most people, like an engineer who's, like, creating a test account and, like, clicking around, it's not it's not gonna be buggy for them.
Speaker 1:And for
Speaker 4:what it's worth, this is true across all the apps. Power users will always experience a lot of bugs unless they have someone to, like, really, like, you know, talk to them and, like, understand what their pain points are. And and for what's worth, X does a really great job. Like, mean, it's actually remarkable how well X is is is run as as a company. And, like, just working there, got to learn a lot about, like, how to get engineers motivated and, like, really, like, get shit done.
Speaker 4:Like, it's was awesome work there. It like, super super How
Speaker 1:how, do do you wish you had the opportunity? You were you were working remotely the entire time and and that was maybe counter to the broader X culture. Do you think it's the type of organization where if you're going to work there, you should just 100% be in the office or do you think you Yeah.
Speaker 4:So the person who hired me was like, dude, let me tell you, you're going have to get to the office. My wife so at the time I got the offer, in between I was interviewing, I found out that my my wife was pregnant. So I let them
Speaker 2:know. Congratulations.
Speaker 4:Because yeah. So so the kid is born now. He's seven months old. So that's by the time I joined, I was like, Well, we're we're gonna I'm gonna work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move. But as the kid got older, priorities started changing a bit.
Speaker 4:And I so I was kinda, like, considering and talking to my wife about, like, different ways I could come to politics. I I could totally work remotely, like, and be productive. I think after the x and x AI merger, the information attractor got so strong. And the talent at x AI, they were like ship they're shipped so much. Like, used to be able to read every commit.
Speaker 4:Like, I used to actually just, like, sit there on my email and, like, click archive over and over again and read every single commit that went to the code base. But after x AI people joined, it was just, like, literally no way.
Speaker 2:It was so they're like, you're
Speaker 4:and I mean, I I told one of the x AI guys this. It was like, you know, when when you have like dinosaur shit and, you know, which was the Twitter code base and you get extreme pressure, which is x AI talent.
Speaker 2:Get diamonds.
Speaker 4:You get diamonds. That's how diamonds They're they're oil diamonds. Like, I was so bullish after that. It's like, they're really, like, they're really pushing on it. It's, like, really awesome.
Speaker 4:I want and I and honestly, I really wanted to be there. Like, I wanted to go. I think it was, like, probably I was talking to my manager at the time. I was like, can I, like, maybe come, like, twice every quarter or something? It was and he was, like, super I mean, Fortsworth, by the way, like, my manager was reading between the lines, totally surprised.
Speaker 4:Totally surprised. He looked
Speaker 2:K.
Speaker 4:Super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him. Right? But it's if you're watching this, it's okay, dude. Don't worry about it.
Speaker 2:You're,
Speaker 4:seriously, like, some people, like, the probably the best thing, I think, like, working at X is, like, I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long. Yeah. And when I joined, I was like, oh, these guys were, like, are onboarded onto everything. But that wasn't the case. Like, my manager literally could just figure anything out.
Speaker 4:It felt like he was already onboarded onto everything, but he could actually just, like, read the code, look at the logs, and figure out what the problem was within thirty minutes, and it didn't matter what it was. I I was like, this guy must have been here for years. No. He's, like, actually just that good. So, I mean, I really loved working with him.
Speaker 4:He's, like, a really awesome guy. I think I was surprised. I I I guess, like, I I guess I kinda kinda guessed what happened, to be honest, but it it doesn't really matter. But, anyways, like, it's been really great working there. Mean, so I was I was gonna go to visit actually, we were planning to visit also my manager was like, can you come, like, next week?
Speaker 4:And I told my wife, and she's like, literally, like, you know, baby in her arm, like, you know, trying to, like, scarf food in her mouth for, like, the few seconds that she had. She's, like, literally dying. So first time parents. Right? So we're kinda getting used to it.
Speaker 4:But yeah.
Speaker 1:No. It's a crazy it's a crazy change. What, why don't you give some background on what you were doing prior to X, Dingbored, and then I wanna talk about the future. Is that the
Speaker 2:exciting stuff?
Speaker 4:So, you guys can I'm probably gonna, like, work a bit more on Dingbored. There's a bunch of bugs that I wanna fix. I just didn't have the time with my full time job. So dingboard.com is the best app ever. Dingboard.com, if you wanna make a meme in seconds, fifteen seconds meme.
Speaker 2:I was paid user. A paid user. I loved it.
Speaker 4:It was amazing. Thank you very much for paying attention.
Speaker 2:Very, very good.
Speaker 4:You know, like, your money actually helped pay for this?
Speaker 2:Like, this is Let's go. This is John Kugen.
Speaker 1:No way.
Speaker 4:2% of this is John Kugen. Right?
Speaker 2:No. It was it and and You can
Speaker 1:give him naming rights. It is naming rights. Sell the
Speaker 2:naming rights. Crazy that that that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages, and I feel like you just pulled it forward. I used to have an app called, like, Photoshop Mix or something, and it was pretty good. And then they just completely deprecated it, and then they put ads in it, which was I would I was dealing with, and then they just shut it down. And it was pretty good at dropping out the backgrounds and doing it wasn't great, but it was okay.
Speaker 2:And then they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom, And and so I'm using two different apps, and neither of them are good anywhere near what you need. And so I was always I was always a fan of of Dingboard. But
Speaker 4:I was actually, like, in the process when I joined them. I was in the process of rewriting it so that I could deploy on web, like, applications and, sorry, on iOS and Android. It's actually like, if you guys if you guys are a nerd, there's there's something called SOQL. Okay? SOQL is made by this Swedish guy, I think.
Speaker 4:He's retired kind of. He works three days a week. Yep. And on the four days that he has, he's working on this cross platform GL Yes. Graphics library, like, I guess, like transpiler.
Speaker 4:So you write it in one GL language. It'll Yep. It will produce the metal version for iOS. It'll produce the version for Android, and it'll produce the version for web. So I can use the same code, and the code can be basically, like it can basically be the same code base deployed to all apps.
Speaker 4:And then John Coogan and Jordy can make memes in seconds and get more followers on x.com. Ready. This is the future I was promised.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It feels like an incredible founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes.
Speaker 4:I mean, like, reason I made was because I was, like, making memes on my Yeah. Software engineering diagramming tool, and then they, like, started adding a watermark, and I was like, fuck this. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking ruin my meme making tool.
Speaker 4:I am going to war.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:It's been two weeks. War. And then I have some I
Speaker 2:remember you had you had sponsors. This is I love this. There were sponsors when you would open a new Ding board file. It would just have a semi analysis ad from Dylan still there. Still there.
Speaker 2:Oh, it's there?
Speaker 4:Still there. So, mean, semi analysis, Dylan Patel, you should guys should go check out his Substack. He sponsored me for three months, and he stopped sponsoring me, and I was too lazy to remove it.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. He's not a Substack, but, he's actually on he's on passport with Ben Thompson. But, anyway, he's the man, and we love him. And, but the big but the big question is, like, Dingbord, you're super popular online. Yep.
Speaker 2:Why didn't you go and raise, like, $15,000,000 from a gross
Speaker 4:Dude, man, that sounds so lame, man. Ugh. Like, raising money with managing people? I'm so knocked down. I'm so knocked
Speaker 2:down. Boo.
Speaker 4:I could serve like, literally, dude, like, this I have two plugged in right now, and I don't have enough power going to my house to, like, plug plug this one in, which is why it's unplugged. Yeah. But, like, I could serve literally a fucking million people.
Speaker 2:Okay. A fucking million.
Speaker 4:So we're gonna blow your mind. We're gonna
Speaker 2:blow your mind with this. But sometimes you can raise 15,000,000, you can do what's called a secondary transaction where some of the money goes directly into your pocket. Oh. You don't have to hire that
Speaker 4:many people.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you could raise, like, 50 on 500. Exactly. And it's, you know, take
Speaker 2:take 40,000,000 straight to
Speaker 1:the bank.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Just just to kinda set yourself up a cushion. They call it a cushion.
Speaker 1:Safety deal.
Speaker 4:I feel like you want the opposite of that. I would never trust a founder who asked for that. Just, like, give me example.
Speaker 3:Tell him
Speaker 2:we just
Speaker 1:he's he's joking. He's joking.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm joking.
Speaker 4:I'm joking. Lee
Speaker 2:Never happens.
Speaker 4:You don't you don't want a founder with money. You want a founder with no options. You want a founder like Roy Lee from Cluey.
Speaker 1:New dad. New dad or or new dad. Gotta figure it out. Gotta figure it out.
Speaker 4:I've gotta figure I'm I need I need a two acre lawn and a zero turn tractor. That's what I need. I this is I need this. I will get it no matter what, maybe the next ten years. But, like, Roy Lee, for example, CEO, I think of Clue Lee.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:He he got, you know, kicked out of his university, a disgraced Tardan feather. He has no choice. I wish I got an allocation. I even know he was racing. I would have written I I need the money.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, I got
Speaker 1:a kid.
Speaker 4:I would have written a check without even thinking. I don't even care what the fuck he's doing. Yeah. You're
Speaker 1:you're a Roy Lee defender.
Speaker 2:Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1:But Yeah. So so so here here's about
Speaker 2:I want a number for Dingboard. Like, how many users did you get? How much money were you making? Give us some sort of number so
Speaker 4:we can ring the gong for you. Peak MRR was, like, like, I I mean, I don't I don't remember. I'm not raising. I don't want funding. Probably He was raising.
Speaker 2:10.
Speaker 4:10.
Speaker 2:Indeed, Developer, let's hit the gong for you. Let's fucking go. Let's go.
Speaker 1:Honestly honestly, ringing that for your fans too because you're Yes. You you genuinely you're you're a Internet celebrity and you have real fans. I the question the question I have for you is because you're a Roy Lee defender. Yeah. How what what what's your line between balancing, you know, engagement, sort of, like, rage baiting versus you know, you sound like a much more even keeled, you know, on on the show right now.
Speaker 4:All my rage baits, here's what makes people so mad Sure. That I actually believe what I say. I'm not saying it pisses people off, I really believe it. Like, I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry. It makes them just like and but like, the when you're honest, like, I I mean, like, you know, I'm I'm a big believer in, like, honesty and stuff like that.
Speaker 4:I'm like, like, when you're honest, like, you kinda, like, also the same amount of haters that you gain gain, you kinda gain twice as much as, like, people who, like, are fans of you. And I think that's what really matters. And sometimes the haters can kinda drown it out. So, like I mean, the reason I'm a I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired. Got, like, an email, which was a bunch of, like, really scary legal words, like, nondisperishment.
Speaker 4:I had, like, to, like, Google what this meant. Like, I didn't even know what disparagement meant. I was like, okay. Wait. I'm not gonna sign anything.
Speaker 4:I'm gonna wait for a lawyer. And and then Roy Lee did this thing, and I realized, like, you know what? Like, Roy Lee is a fucking legend. He's got skin in the game. Like, Roy Lee has to win.
Speaker 4:So you know what? I'm just gonna fucking be retard. I'm gonna be a retard. I'm gonna be a retard online and I'm going to have to win. And then I'm going to I'm obviously capable of winning but if I have, like you know, like, the one thing I don't understand about people like Elon who, like, work super hard, like, super smart and, you know, Elon's done.
Speaker 4:He's got, like, compounds. He's got, like, you know, tons of children he could spend all day all day with. Like, he's got all the toys he could also, he wanna play with, all the engineers he could talk to. Like, if I was him, would just, goof around with fun toys but, like, he's actually trying to get to Mars. Like, you know, like he I I feel like I feel like sometimes it's like so I think about being Elon, I could never be him because I would give up at 20.
Speaker 4:I'll be like, alright. I'm done, dude. Like, this is me. Like, I did my part. Like, I'm gonna chill with my zero turn tractor and my two acre lawn.
Speaker 1:Gotta know what you want.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Exactly. Right? So but, like, I think that's what happens to a lot of founders. They get enough money.
Speaker 4:Like, Palmer Lucky. Palmer Lucky, it was like a chip on his shoulder. He was like he was like, fucking Jason Cowell. I'm gonna fucking get that guy. Like, I'm so pissed.
Speaker 4:I'm gonna do it again. He did it again. He 100% did it again. By the way, I love Jason. I love Jason.
Speaker 4:I love Palmer. I love both of them. I'm and and you know what? Jason is like the it's like it's like you can't have Batman without the Joker. Right?
Speaker 4:You can't have Palmer Lucky without
Speaker 2:He's the Joker of Jack. Okay. Never mind. I it. I see it.
Speaker 4:He's the Joker for Palmer Lucky.
Speaker 2:For me, the Joker would be
Speaker 4:the middle manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android bugs.
Speaker 2:So never mind. We're getting into the story. We're we're learning what actually happens.
Speaker 1:We're unraveling it.
Speaker 2:Don't worry about
Speaker 4:No. I I never said anything about my no worry. Don't worry about it. No. Yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. What's next?
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean yeah. So what's what's next? All in on Dingboard? Oh.
Speaker 1:Building out the team?
Speaker 4:Okay. So Dingboard is doing great. I'm gonna, you know, keep on growing it and, like, try to get more money because I need some land. And here's why I need some land. I've been building things.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. This is the Dingbot.
Speaker 2:The Dingbot.
Speaker 1:The Dingbot. See this?
Speaker 2:What does it do?
Speaker 4:I three I three d printed this.
Speaker 2:What does it do?
Speaker 4:This this is an ARM ESP 32 attached to a a motor driver attached to a stepper driver sorry. Sorry. Stepper motor.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Some three d printed things that I made with dinkad, by the way. Dinkad.com. It's currently down because I had no time to to work on it, but I have, like, a local host version.
Speaker 1:Dinkat is coming back.
Speaker 4:Breaking in.
Speaker 2:Popsicle sticks. No offense.
Speaker 4:Oh, here's here's the genius of it. Okay?
Speaker 2:It is
Speaker 4:I need cash flow. You know, hardware is hard because you buy an iPhone and, like, you have an iPhone, it's, like, good for, like, thirty years. Right?
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 4:But with popsicle stick robots, break in a month. You have to buy a new one. Oh, it's ashplays.
Speaker 1:There we go. There we go.
Speaker 2:Get them in the boardroom.
Speaker 4:And you know what? It's like, you have a Dobby the elf robot that's, like, cleaning the house and, like, you know, it cost you $30 and it makes a mistake. You just go in and just fucking yeet it. You, like, kick it across the room because it's, like, $30. You can just buy another one.
Speaker 4:It's like it's like that's the feature
Speaker 1:you're worried about getting shitty You're not you're not worried about, you know, getting paper clipped by abusing your Dobby robot? Because it'll come back to get you at some point.
Speaker 4:Oh, no. You just program it to be happy that it gets kicked. You know? It's like Dobby's like, you know, please, you know, please, sir. You just program it.
Speaker 4:Right? Like Oh. This is like a solved problem, by the way.
Speaker 2:Like, no. We're not
Speaker 4:gonna get run away. I think the real problem with, like, AI and stuff is, like, YouTube shorts. Have you seen these kids? Like like, I saw a kid, like so I eat dinner, so with my family. This kid was, like, at the trying to get to the bathroom.
Speaker 4:He's 12 years old and he was on his YouTube shorts and he was, like, trying to, like, find the the doorknob, like clicking or like like not clicking around, but like like reaching around. It's actually kind of kind of brutal. But like that, I think that's like the real AI risk for what's worth. Like YouTube shorts specifically.
Speaker 2:So you're in retirement. Is there anything that could get you to come out of retirement? Could you There's anything more time. I was quoting yesterday. I was quoting A $100,000,000 offer?
Speaker 2:I mean, to get you back into a mega corporation.
Speaker 4:Yeah. A mega corporation
Speaker 1:gonna take back in big time.
Speaker 2:Take 80,000,000, a 100,000,000, 120,000,000. What gets you to take the job
Speaker 4:for
Speaker 2:I
Speaker 4:think, like, I probably, like, find it really hard to say no. It's, 2.5 probably. Like but I I don't think, like, the companies I've worked for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I'm thinking they do.
Speaker 1:Well, what are those kind of companies? What are those kind of companies?
Speaker 2:I'm talking about big tech.
Speaker 1:Could run a process right now.
Speaker 2:Big tech. So I know you don't wanna work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number?
Speaker 1:Alright. I'm gonna just start doing an auction here. I go okay. I got a message for 500. 500.
Speaker 1:Do I have, 600? 600. Alright.
Speaker 2:700. Our our our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise 15,000,000 with 5,000,000 in secondary?
Speaker 4:I I could raise real money, like, super easily, and, like, I could also get a job super easy. I mean, I I have friends. I I the thing is, like, I'm a very honest hard worker.
Speaker 2:Like Yeah.
Speaker 4:The places I've worked at, I could I could go back. Like, I have, like, a really strong network. So I don't really need a job and I mean, I'm not worried about getting a job. Yeah. But if I wanted to join in terms of, for me, the mission alignment is super important.
Speaker 4:Like, I really need to, like, use the product to actually enjoy it.
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 4:And so I sell sell some Dingboar t shirts on Shopify. Nice. And I'm, like, aligned with, like, Toby's awesome. Yeah. And then Coher, I think, is, like, a really interesting place to work for because they're on the come up.
Speaker 4:But mostly, like, I mean He's
Speaker 2:in Canada.
Speaker 1:He's in Canada.
Speaker 2:On. Yeah. Break down Coher. That that that is not the common narrative. I mean, I love Aiden and I I I think it's incredibly
Speaker 1:I see.
Speaker 2:But but but it does seem like, you know, there's gotta be some sort of, like, geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out.
Speaker 4:I think I just think they're based, dude. Like, I just yeah. I just think they're fucking based. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's just pure pure culture. They'll figure it
Speaker 4:out. Yeah. Mean, like, you know, like, it's it's it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or, like, California Yeah. Yeah. Canada.
Speaker 4:Okay. And I think they're fucking cool.
Speaker 2:Like, that's Okay.
Speaker 1:Kinda they need a poster in residence. Are you deaf or sorry? You a thousand x their their their impressions.
Speaker 4:Do you
Speaker 2:listen to Death Grips?
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. It goes it goes it goes Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Because because Aiden's a big Death Grips guy. So That
Speaker 4:just bumps Cohere on top of Shopify.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. Yep. Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. He did a he did an interview in a Death Grips t shirt. I saw it and I
Speaker 4:was like That's amazing.
Speaker 2:That's actually amazing. This guy's a killer.
Speaker 1:But what what's what's wrong with just becoming a full time poster, getting a sub stack set up, getting a nice
Speaker 4:I think I'm
Speaker 2:gonna try
Speaker 4:to become like an actual billionaire. The dingbot thing is not a joke. I'm actually going to actually do it.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 4:And I'm not gonna race. I think I can do it. I probably can find people to to do this for. There's a lot of things I'm really interested on the way, which is, like, doing, like, reinforcement learning for, like, control of robots, certain types of robots. I think I figured something out after listening to a popular Lucky podcast about don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in software.
Speaker 4:Mhmm. And I'm pretty good at software, and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard. Clearly, it's not hard enough to start.
Speaker 2:What what I feel like It's easy, actually.
Speaker 1:You you you proved with that that it's easy.
Speaker 2:Explain that with the, reinforcement learning for robotics. Are you thinking, like, you're gonna do stuff in simulation and then transfer the got the now the knowledge back with reinforcement learning? Are you doing the thing that, Dylan Patel was posting about with, like, the robots on the, you you know, on the harnesses trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data? Like, what are what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement?
Speaker 4:So I don't think, like, humanoid robots is what I would do. I think
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I would do robots for things that annoy me. For example, dandelions on my lawn.
Speaker 3:And I
Speaker 4:would do whatever is possible. Like, talk I I have a pretty good solid network. Like, talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich.
Speaker 1:Sure.
Speaker 4:Zurich. I don't know how to pronounce it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 4:And just be like, hey. Like, just give me feed me the papers and, like, some shitty Python code I'll clean up and make good. Sorry, researchers. You guys you
Speaker 2:guys are not nervous. Code coded. He's out of the game. Someone's gotta build the robot that picks up the letters.
Speaker 4:Exactly exactly what now because it's like, I'm fucking sick of, like, going outside and just, you know, just, like, poking out all these dandelions. I'm I'm actually so sick and tired of it. And it's so easy to build this. It's like, literally three d printer, like, you could you could even three d print the wheels. Like, you can get, like, $5 off of AliExpress.
Speaker 4:An ESP 32 costs, like, $3. I just impulse buy them. I, like, get my x ad revenue payout, and I just, like, spend the whole thing on AliExpress. My my my house, like, constantly has, like, these random AliExpress packages. I just, like, maybe build, like, a Minecraft sorting system in real life.
Speaker 4:Like
Speaker 2:yeah. I feel like I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home Depot for, $300, you know, kinda new
Speaker 4:I could also sell it for $25 on subscription, you get a new one every month.
Speaker 2:Oh. There we go. Yes. There you go. It's hard their Dobbies.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Subscription's hard work. If it breaks, it's like, I literally will tell the users, hey. I'm just, you know, a dude in there's a CNC shop here, that does wood. So, like, they do wood CNC.
Speaker 4:So I'm gonna make the robot chassis out of out of maple wood because there's lot of maple here in Ottawa. And I'm gonna laser, you know, laser on, like, made in Ottawa on it Mhmm. Except, you know, modulo the the motors inside that will be made in China until I figure out how to make motors, which shouldn't be that But I guess, like, the the the core insight I have after doing Dingboard and, like, honestly, we're working for a lot of these big tech companies is, like, there's a lot of little businesses on the way to something. Like, I'm gonna try to do this. I'm gonna realize, like, holy shit.
Speaker 4:Like, all the CAD software fucking sucks. Mhmm. And I'm gonna build it because I can. And, like, you know, with Gemini 2.5 pro, just, like, ripping on my credit card. What about Grok?
Speaker 4:Gemini 2.5 pro is the best model to use for coding if you write your own coding frameworks because it's cheaper, it's faster, and it's good enough. Like, I'm not, like, giving all of my work away to I don't need a PhD level intelligence because I'm not a PhD level guy. I'm trying to write React. Like, it's not that hard to write React. I need a model that can listen to me and understand what I mean and kind of, like, doesn't avoid using too many if statements.
Speaker 4:Stop. Just stop using if if statements and, like yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So Okay. Okay. So but but here's the thing.
Speaker 1:You need you need you're you wanna build a bunch of stuff. Yeah. You need some cash flow. Why not set up why not set up, you know, some type of subscription. You have a
Speaker 4:lot of payouts.
Speaker 1:A lot of people wanna give you $10 a month, so you
Speaker 2:can have that was the Dingboard subscription that I signed up for. It was like, support this guy who's doing something cool.
Speaker 1:Yeah. The issue is Dingboard is so hard to sign up for. How do I even sign up for Dingboard right now?
Speaker 4:Go to dingboard.com.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm on
Speaker 4:Never okay. First of all, Jordy, never dealt my conversion levels ever again. Like, I am a conversion I can convert anything to anything.
Speaker 2:I am I am Okay.
Speaker 4:I am a conversion god. Okay. Go to dingboard.com.
Speaker 1:I'm Wait. You're so good. You're so good. You don't have a buy button because you wanna inspire yourself to grind harder.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Why is Go go to dingboard.com.
Speaker 5:Okay. I'm here. I'm here. Sign in first.
Speaker 1:Do I have
Speaker 5:to sign in?
Speaker 4:I don't even have to tell you what to do.
Speaker 1:Legend. Legend. Alright. I'm signing in. I'm signing in.
Speaker 1:Okay. I'm here. What do I DingScribe. There we go.
Speaker 2:Once you're subscribed
Speaker 4:wanna know what DingScribe
Speaker 1:even means?
Speaker 2:I can't not DingScribe.
Speaker 1:$12.99 per month. You gotta get your numbers up, dude.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This should be a
Speaker 4:190 per month? 50. Actually don't have the code. Like, on my server.
Speaker 2:You gotta do what Google does. It's 500 a month, but they give you six months at half price, and then it just auto converts up. Yeah. That's the that's the real ticket.
Speaker 4:Or I could just double the price.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. But the price should be, you know, cheap on day one, and they just get more and more. It should go up by 10%
Speaker 4:every month. Shit, I'm not doing that. That's some YouTube shorts kit. Surprise some kid's brain
Speaker 1:shit. Alright. I I'm a ding
Speaker 2:pro subscriber. Subscriber.
Speaker 4:I'm dinged out. Dude, Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a ding scriber. Ding scriber.
Speaker 1:You're part
Speaker 4:of You're part of the crew.
Speaker 1:I'm ding maxing.
Speaker 2:Okay. Talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2.5 pro. Are you cursor guy? Cursor.
Speaker 2:Copilot cursor? Whatever. You Never. No. No.
Speaker 2:You're saying cursor.
Speaker 4:I'm okay. I have a custom framework I've written for Neogen. So, basically, what it is is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have.
Speaker 1:So Okay.
Speaker 4:Claude and before Gemini was good. Claude and then OpenAI's models Okay. They go down all the time. Like, the infrastructure is hard to serve at scaling. I don't blame them.
Speaker 4:It's like that's a hard problem to solve. Yeah. So I have, like, always I always have a model available. Like, even if both of them are down, like, could hit deep seek over Yeah. Open router.
Speaker 4:Right? Like, it's a facade. You can but can
Speaker 2:you do that in cursor by just switching the model router?
Speaker 4:Switching what was there a hockey? So for me, it's like Oh. I have a weird I I mean, let let me let me let let me flex on you guys a bit. So I this is my
Speaker 2:Flex flex away. Woah. There we go. Woah. Woah.
Speaker 4:Nice nano, by the way. Yeah. I guess I gotta I gotta homie from from China built to make it for me. And so, basically, space space what's it? Space I don't even remember.
Speaker 4:It's all space I is l l m provider, so that's Gemini 2.5 Pro.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:Space k is Gemini Flash, and it all renders in a single markdown file.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 4:And I've created commands for these models. So, basically, like, depending on the fence, so three three apostrophes, and then there's gonna be the command name. So, like, edit file. Yeah. It can I can give basically give it into syntax to edit a file for me?
Speaker 4:And then I actually manually
Speaker 2:Is this open source? Like, you know, power the power files up? Like, like, like, can I install your your setup?
Speaker 4:So, no. It's not open source mostly because people are gonna start posting issues, and I'm just not interested in fixing them. Okay. So I'm just gonna do it for myself. I'm, like, I'm pulling up the ladder behind me.
Speaker 4:Like, I'm you know, I know how much this is If it's
Speaker 2:not a resource, you gotta raise for it. It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here. It is a cursor competitor,
Speaker 4:and it's probably going to kill cursor if I help it source it, but I'm not gonna sell for money. Just I think what's gonna naturally happen is, like, when people see me do use it, they're gonna have ideas of their own, and then they're gonna build it for themselves. Okay. Like, the the whole point of so it's it's a Neovim plug in kind of. It's, also a server, and it plugs into a bunch of I'm I'm good at software.
Speaker 4:So part of the part of the problems with so Neovim, like, is great because the software is configurable as a feature. So the best software you can get is software you can read and understand and you can actually change. The best software for you is software you've written yourself. Because if something annoys you, you can actually go change it. And that's why I really like to write my own frameworks.
Speaker 4:Cursor, I'm sure is a great product,
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:But I like, I'm just so particular about certain things. Like, for example, like, I wanna, like, implement tree sudder across multiple files and automate adding files to my context. So I have a I have a file which has a bunch of file paths, and those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm
Speaker 2:in. Mhmm.
Speaker 4:And I manage it manually by, like, literally going to the file and deleting the lines. And what I want is to automatically create an AST, so an abstract syntax tree Yeah. To be able to jump around with an LLM or, like, train a model to actually go through the AST. And this is all super obvious to me. It's like, fuck, man.
Speaker 4:Like
Speaker 1:What about, you're gonna make any products in the parenting space?
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah. So actually, have an idea. I had an idea. So I I use an e ink display. By the way, before you try to hack this, I never update the software and I never write anything private on it.
Speaker 4:So Mhmm. Go it's it's I'm I'm gonna I'm gonna put it public. So I have an e ink reader slash, like, tablet, and what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write. Instead of texting him, I wanna make like a kind of like a radio e ink display, kinda like an Etch A Sketch, which you can write on, but it synced to your parents' Etch Sketch. That's so cool.
Speaker 4:I will have one, I will have one, and my kid will have one. Yeah. And he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over over distances. Right?
Speaker 2:Write messages.
Speaker 4:I think that's like a really cool idea. I'm probably gonna build that. If you wanted to make like a gajillion dollars, it's so easy. Just look around and like come up with good ideas and actually just believe that you can do it. Like, literally just go do it.
Speaker 4:Like, it's not that hard. It's actually not get a three d printer, watch some YouTube videos. YouTube is great products. I would love it if they stopped putting shorts because there's so many great videos we can learn. Stop with the shorts.
Speaker 4:Stop.
Speaker 2:Get ready. This is gonna be a YouTube short. We're gonna edit this.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. This will
Speaker 2:be on TikTok, maybe.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We we gotta get
Speaker 4:the news. Yeah. Minecraft speed run and
Speaker 2:then, some way surfers over you, anything. AI slob.
Speaker 1:How many kids do you wanna have?
Speaker 4:So as much as God allows us to have. So just leaving it up to God and, yeah, that's how many kids.
Speaker 2:Good answer. That's great.
Speaker 1:What else what else do you have to say to the people while you're here?
Speaker 4:Thanks for doing your this podcast, guys. I know how hard I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Let's just say that. And, like, they're doing live and stuff, like, it's it's a pain in the ass. So keep it up, guys.
Speaker 4:I know, like
Speaker 2:Thank you.
Speaker 4:And and and the the the the live the live the video team at X are, like, generational talents, super good people. Like so, like, just, like, find someone find a way to reach out to them. So when you have any issues and actually talk
Speaker 1:to I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days. Otherwise, we would have been hammering you with messages every single day. But this has been Come back on whenever you wanna talk about your projects. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'd love just hang out and chat.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Thanks. I I really appreciate you guys. And yeah. So keep it up.
Speaker 4:Thanks, Austin.
Speaker 1:We're we're excited and and I'm excited to be ding maxing. Just offer offer a premium tier like, I don't know, like $10 a month or something like that. Maybe we become, you
Speaker 4:know Oh.
Speaker 2:I mean, you guys
Speaker 4:want an ad space, I'll sell you right now. Like, spit handshake. If you wanna put an ad on Dingboard, your podcast, I'll Yep. Let's say,
Speaker 2:$12.
Speaker 1:$12. Okay. Mean, that was, our we'll talk to our we'll talk to
Speaker 3:our CFO.
Speaker 4:Alright. Alright. Alright.
Speaker 1:And CFO our CFO will talk to your CFO.
Speaker 2:But but can we get the semi analysis deal where it's No. Perpetual? It's $12
Speaker 4:once, so we get it forever?
Speaker 2:Because what if you Yeah.
Speaker 1:Is it a one time? Is a one time? Or It's
Speaker 2:a great option. A lot of upside here.
Speaker 4:It depends on how good your your podcast is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, we're gonna keep working on it. Hopefully, Dingboard keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Alright. We're excited to follow.
Speaker 2:Awesome. We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Godspeed.
Speaker 2:Have a good one. Bye. This is the news of the day with the Iran crisis. Donald Trump says, everyone keep oil prices down. I'm watching.
Speaker 2:You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it. You love to see the president talking
Speaker 1:to everybody. Everybody's saying everybody's, you know, saying this is ridiculous. Yeah. But it's never been tried.
Speaker 2:People always say, oh, all that matters in in oil price is supply and demand. Yeah. Well, all you gotta do is say, hey. Supply. Go down.
Speaker 2:Hey. Supply.
Speaker 1:Go up.
Speaker 2:And demand go down. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And then
Speaker 2:we will have lower prices. I mean, there is something to that.
Speaker 1:Hasn't been tried before. It's it's worth it's worth trying something. If you
Speaker 2:do signal I mean, there there there are there are stories about oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were gonna be high, and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation, for example. Like, that does happen every once in while. But, yeah, very, very odd to post anyway. Back on watches, the watches of espionage account says men who guide the destinies of the world well wear Rolex watches. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Dan Razeen Cain in situation room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex GMT.
Speaker 2:Well, you need a GMT because you gotta know what time it is in Iran.
Speaker 1:We gotta start doing these is good one. Strong seen this. Hand.
Speaker 2:I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the the brake cracking your knuckles. But this is this is special. Like four points
Speaker 1:of attack.
Speaker 2:Mean, I guess they did hit four sites, so you gotta point to all of them.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's right. Interesting. Well, it's been an eventful morning.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:Iran attacked a US base in Qatar.
Speaker 2:Yes. That's the latest.
Speaker 1:And people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties. Mhmm. All of apparently, the missiles were taken out in the air. Yep. And this could lead to a de escalation
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And a return to a steady state of tension.
Speaker 2:Yeah. This has been my position for a long time. I'm I'm pretty anti aggression, anti war, but I'm extremely pro domes, iron domes, golden domes. I wanna be able to shoot down every missile before as soon as it leaves. No matter where it's leaving from, let's shoot it down immediately from space, from land.
Speaker 2:Do whatever you can, but missiles, nuclear bombs, these things should not be relevant in the future. But Druva has breakdown of this. The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow represents over one year of US production capacity of the GBU 57 bunker buster. Its primary explosive, AFX-seven 57, is difficult to produce, and we don't have many factories to do it. It's why way more robots are necessary, to do everything from production to automating research.
Speaker 2:I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now. Very interesting to see. Joe Wiesenthal had some polymarket news. Bombing of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025. In fact, it's at the highest level of the day.
Speaker 2:I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by we didn't actually Russian
Speaker 1:president comes out and said, hey. We might just give them a nuke.
Speaker 2:That would be bad.
Speaker 1:Which would be bad.
Speaker 2:That would be bad.
Speaker 1:The other thing that's interesting, the Fordo nuclear facility destroyed before July polymarket is only sitting at a 32% chance still on 4,000,000 of volume. I think people are basically saying, calling that it wasn't actually destroyed, or at least that's what the market is saying. So it was impacted but not, destroyed even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed, total annihilation.
Speaker 2:And up next, have Mike Gallagher from Palantir Technologies. He's the head of defense, and, he put out some comments about the partnership between Palantir and the nuclear company. Says this partnership marks the first time Palantir software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy infrastructure. So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show. Mike, how are you doing?
Speaker 2:On.
Speaker 1:Great to have you. What's going
Speaker 5:on, guys? Honored to be with you. You guys are famous.
Speaker 2:You're famous too. Thank you for joining.
Speaker 1:We're just
Speaker 6:I used
Speaker 1:to be, man. I used
Speaker 5:to be. Now I'm just, you know, I'm a Aspect.
Speaker 1:You're a techno you're a technology brother.
Speaker 2:You're one of us.
Speaker 6:You're one
Speaker 4:of us.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's actually a great place to start. I I I wanna talk about your career and the transition that you went through. There's there's a you know, obviously, it's very exciting what you're doing now. There's also this story about, like, I want you in the government too, and I want people like you in the government. And so is the government a place for high performing technologists to flourish?
Speaker 2:Is there something that needs to change there? I'm interested in digging into that. But why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment?
Speaker 5:Yeah. I I think, well, obviously, you know, from Northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kinda grew up always interested in the world outside of Wisconsin in The United States. When I went to college, I studied Arabic in The Middle East. I became fascinated by what was happening. I was an undergrad when we invaded Iraq.
Speaker 5:I was a senior in high school during 09/11. And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve. Felt very strongly about service to country, but also on a practical level, really wanted to apply the language and regional and cultural skills I was learning in a nonacademic context and felt like there was no greater challenge than joining the United States Marine Corps. So even though I didn't come from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible that I could throw myself into. I had a just really an awesome experience.
Speaker 5:Couple great deployments. Learned a ton. Was a counterintelligence, human intelligence officer. And it's kinda similarly when when I got out of the Marine Corps and, you know, I worked on a presidential campaign. I worked in the senate as a Middle East guy.
Speaker 5:Never thought about running myself. I'd moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company when some people reached out to me about running for congress. I was very young. I was 31. And I my initial reaction was hell no.
Speaker 5:I mean, was just I was not I didn't know anything about raising money. You know, I was the guy who, like, wrote the white paper that someone read before they went on TV. I wasn't wouldn't be on TV myself. I kind of thought of myself as, a pure national security professional, not a politician. I still don't think of myself that way.
Speaker 5:But honestly, it was the fact that it scared me that, like, led me to do it. I felt I felt like anything that forces you outside your comfort zone
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Is good for your your development personally. And it was I felt like it would be an extension of my military service, a way to continue my work of enhancing American deterrence, albeit from a legislative perspective. And and I swear I'll I'll wrap up after this. I went into it knowing it was never gonna be a career for me. I was the youngest guy in congress when I got elected.
Speaker 5:I always conceived of it as a season of service. I think the problem with congress is that we have too many career politicians. So I kinda always had in my head, I do a decade. And when I decided to leave, you know, Palantir was a was just an obvious way for me to continue that mission. I mean, Palantir was one of the rare companies that was unapologetically pro American military, committed a 100% to enhancing deterrence, you know, willing to say that, like, we're the good guys, you know, the commies are the bad guys.
Speaker 5:And I really felt like, you know, it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me, I. E. Now being surrounded by genius, you know, like 20 that make me feel stupid, and then a continuation of of the mission. And I've, you know, I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing World War three, and I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the warfighter every day in Palantir. So that's the the short version, and it's been really exciting.
Speaker 2:Is that is that a sort of a flow for elected politicians? Someone reaches out to them. Is there kind of like a scouting department, in in our government that's looking for up and coming talent and then keep giving them the ideas? Because I feel like the story that most people tell is is, this guy, you know, wants power or wants to you know, he's on a warpath. Everyone tells him no, and then he runs and and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will.
Speaker 2:But but which direction does it go more commonly? Was your path uncommon, or is it more the norm?
Speaker 5:Well, to be clear, I I don't wanna pretend like this was some pure, oh, shucks, mister Smith
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 5:Goes to Washington thing. Right? Like, clearly, was driven
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Ambitious, like, had kinda always had a drive my whole life
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And and wanted to, like, test myself. But honestly, it was not like I didn't think of, like, the political domain at that point Yeah. In my life. I think more often than not, people are drawn to politics. It used to be the case that, like, you'd go to law school, you'd become a lawyer, you'd run for state or local office, and then that would be a natural kind of, like, farm team that would lead into congress.
Speaker 5:And then you'd run for senate, and then you'd try and be president one day. I actually think that's changing a little bit. Like, one actually healthy thing I saw during my time in congress is we started to get more young veterans, veterans of the kind of nine eleven wars running for office, which created a cool bipartisan group of legislators that were willing to work together on stuff.
Speaker 2:That's good.
Speaker 5:I think, you know, I think we're seeing voters, like like, wanting to have more outsiders, whether it's, you know, business people, traditional, or tech bros,
Speaker 2:like Yeah.
Speaker 5:You know, you guys talk to a lot. I think people are just
Speaker 1:tired of this lawyer.
Speaker 2:It used to be Oh,
Speaker 4:so like
Speaker 1:every single person was born. Lawyer
Speaker 5:yeah. Being a lawyer seems miserable to me. No offense, lawyers. I I don't know. And I will say finally, I went in with the assumption that the fundamental problem with congress was the people.
Speaker 5:Right? The people were either purely Machiavellian, ambitious, or, like, horribly corrupt and just didn't attract the right people. Now to be sure, there are plenty of people that, like, would you know, could not like, they can't leave congress because they are otherwise unemployable. And, like, you know, they're they're, like, they're not, like, the greatest in the world. But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality, the talent, as well as the patriotism.
Speaker 5:And I would say most people run for congress wanting to serve the country, wanting to make a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from. And they get forced into a system where the incentives really don't reward hard work in the domain that congress should be focused on. Right? Like, there's really no reward for doing the boring work of oversight of the executive branch, of caring about the legislative process. The modern congress has become so structurally weak that people channel their ambition into building a media platform, social media in particular, and that almost becomes their full time job.
Speaker 5:And that that's really a a problem because we need congress to focus on the nuts and bolts of budgeting, of oversight, of proclaiming its authority from the executive branch. My I came to believe that's kind of the the fundamental problem with most things is that we've become so unbalanced in terms of the overall power of the federal government. And then within the federal government, the power is purely concentrated now in the executive branch, which is why our our presidential campaigns get so intense every four years because the stakes are high. Right? Everything is done via executive order and has profound consequences for every business.
Speaker 5:I think a healthier balance would be if congress, article one, which was envisioned by our framers, to be the dominant branch of government. In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful. They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs. Congress surrendering its power since the seventies and then in bipartisan fashion, continuing that trend has had really perverse and unintended consequences for our politics and it's why they've become so intense.
Speaker 1:In our lifetime, you think we will see term limits in in congress at all? It seems like a lot of smart people, you know, seeing certain actors over the last decade would would feel that that that would be beneficial to The United States. It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are, you know, you know, in in power for a long time but not even necessarily thinking decades or super long term. They're they're thinking in, you know, election cycles and and kind of create some distortions. But I'm curious what you think having been in there.
Speaker 1:You
Speaker 5:know, it's funny, man. By the way, can I say you have great flow? I just wanna throw that
Speaker 1:out there. Both of you,
Speaker 5:in fact. As as someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and, you know, cherish it, gentlemen.
Speaker 1:Some people should just be news anchors.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Guess. It's destiny. It's destiny.
Speaker 5:It's funny. Like, when I first came in and I got elected in 2016, and we we thought, like, our freshman class, Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill. We had a bipartisan term limits bill. I remember going to the White House. So this was Trump's first year in office.
Speaker 5:A group of six of us, three Republicans, three Democrats, went to the Oval Office to get Trump's support on our term limits bill. Because our basic theory was unless the president was using the bully pulpit to force congressional leaders to do it, it would never happen. And so if memory serves, Trump actually we did about it, endorsing the bill. And I remember I did some selfie video, you know, having just complained about members of congress focusing on social media. This is probably the
Speaker 1:You gotta dabble. You gotta dabble a little bit. Exactly.
Speaker 2:He can lift my head.
Speaker 5:I remember doing some, like, selfie video coming out of the White House, and I genuinely thought in that moment that we had momentum behind a term limits bill. It's overwhelmingly popular with the American people. I've I the counterpart the counterarguments which we can discuss, don't think are persuasive. What was unique about our bill and the reason well, the reason we thought thought it might have a chance of passing? Well, two things.
Speaker 5:One, we were
Speaker 6:in that moment to sort
Speaker 5:of drain the swamp moment, the reason Trump got elected the first time. You know, everyone's disgusted with the status quo, business as usual. He had made a pledge late in the campaign that he gonna support term limits. And then secondly, we kind of phased it in. So what was unique about our bill is we applied it to our class and all subsequent
Speaker 1:class. Grandfather in if you're if you're a career politician and you're like, yeah. Got another fifteen years that I was planning on really, you know, running it around here. You let them phase out and then the new the new guard, you put some limits on them.
Speaker 5:Yep. And then it totally Your grandfather and the grandfathers and they just sort of die
Speaker 4:off Yeah.
Speaker 5:Over time and then the new people. So and then and then we made it equal in the House and the Senate, twelve years in the House so six terms and then twelve years in the Senate. So theoretically, someone could do twenty four years, they could do twelve in the House, run for Senate and so that seemed generous to us but it died. It died a slow death and then a sudden death. You know, the problem is, you know, nobody in leadership wants to bring a term limits bill to the floor because they fear it endangers their own power.
Speaker 5:So I really do think the paradox, it's like the things we need to do to to enhance the power and the functionality of the modern congress actually require an overempowered president to make them happen. Yeah. Like, otherwise, congress won't do it on its own. And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I I I wanna kind of wrestle with this idea of of, you know, the the the executive branch having power. There are term limits there. We've also had a wildly back and forth executive branch with Trump for four years, then Biden, then back to Trump, kind of unprecedented.
Speaker 2:We'd previously been in, you know, eight year stretches for a while. And I wanna run a theory by you around Iran. My my working theory is that they're not happy with how things are going right now. And part of that is because part of how Iran got into this particular situation is that they potentially saw America as not supporting Israel aggressively during the Biden administration. And more importantly, the idea of a president who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would was it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted and he was seen as kind of like a joke almost and was de platformed from social media.
Speaker 2:How was this
Speaker 1:guy coming back?
Speaker 2:Didn't even have a account. And so he he so so if you're if you're Iran and you're thinking, well, America's backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offensive anytime soon, now is the time to start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah. And and but then, surprise, Trump's in. Now, we have to deal with the consequences of that. And so, into this weird way, America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically and maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk.
Speaker 2:And to your point about wanting to avert avert World War three, I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years. Is that bullish for avoiding World War three, or is it a risk? Or do we need to just tussle with it more? Like, how do you think about all those different concepts?
Speaker 5:Yeah. Well, first of great question. A lot of interesting threads to pull on there. The first, I would say, I would go even further back than the Biden administration to when we started to negotiate in earnest with Iran of its over nuclear program in the second half of the Obama administration. And really, it was it was it was sort of like covert negotiations that then become overt amidst the backdrop of a region that had gone from all this hope around the Arab Spring turned Arab Winter, Syrian civil war, coup in Egypt, just chaos everywhere, and then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran.
Speaker 5:Obama had sort of a theory about the region. He he talked about creating a new equilibrium in The Middle East whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from Israel and balance sort of a recognize Iran's enhanced hour and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf states and Israel. The only problem is that that that new equilibrium created intense disequilibrium and missed the real story, which was the only path to equilibrium in the region is to build off this alignment of interest between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states, which are on paper strange bedfellows, but are united by the shared threat from Iran. The long pole in the tent that links all of our traditional allies together is the threat from Iran. And if unless you want an enhanced American military presence in the region, the only way to forge a semblance of stability is to build off of that.
Speaker 5:And that was kind of genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place. Long story short, the other missed opportunity so there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran. There was a constitutional problem, which relates to what we were talking about where the Iran deal sure looked a lot like an arms control agreement. But Obama recognizing because at that time, we still had sort of pro Israel Democrats in the senate, recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the senate in this case, he constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the supreme leader. There was no congressional buy in.
Speaker 5:And so, therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash. Mhmm. Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it. Trump comes back in in his second term, and basically, he gives the Iranians sixty days to negotiate and then took the action that you just saw. So Yeah.
Speaker 5:That's a long way of me saying there 's a misunderstanding of the region and then a misunderstanding that as hard as it is to bring congress into the process, it actually makes your executive achievements more durable and, I think, improves your negotiating position. Now to get to the last part of your question, I do think the president's recent decision was the right one. I think, really, going even back before Obama's failed and flawed agreement with Iran, the Iranians have consistently used the cover of diplomacy to covertly advance their program. And at some point, we were either gonna have to accept the nuclear Iran or take kinetic action to set back their program. And this is the first time in a long time, really since our the invasion of Iraq, that we've combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent.
Speaker 5:And so I do think it gives us a chance to effectively eliminate their nuclear program. That being said, there's a lot of work we need to do in terms of rebuilding our entire defense industrial base so that the munitions we're using in CENTCOM don't completely deplete deplete the resources we need in other theaters along the way. And I'll stop there because I could talk about The Middle East for twenty minutes and all of your your audience would evaporate.
Speaker 2:No. This is fascinating. I'm really enjoying this.
Speaker 4:Do you
Speaker 2:have a follow-up there or I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1:I I wanted to get a get a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple months and and couple weeks specifically.
Speaker 5:Well, I think the so the my most, like, bullish case for what Trump has just accomplished would be not only has he set back, if not eliminated for a decade Iran's nuclear ambitions, he he could have just shattered the emerging axis of chaos, this sort of axis between Iran, Russia, and China. Because China sort of views Iran as both a a source of hydrocarbons as well as, like, a gateway to expand its influence in The Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye. This is incredibly problematic for China's view of the region. That being said, the biggest wildcard that I just don't know enough about is where Trump is gonna go next on China. There were some reporting yesterday that he was gonna allow China access to Iranian oil.
Speaker 5:And so I think it's you know, in Trump one point o, there was this tension between some more hawkish members of of the administration on China and then more dovish members at treasury. There's a there's sort of a version of this tension going on right now. And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xi Jinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it. At other times, he's, like, uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China. I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China.
Speaker 5:And so there's I guess there's there's lingering questions about how we wanna approach China, but I really think this is the serious setback for this this axis of chaos, this anti American access. Russia, of course, was getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war in Eastern Europe. I can't help but think that that's gonna be increasingly difficult given that Iran is is is is dealing with the aftermath of the attack as well as increasing internal pressure. And then hats off to the Israelis. I mean, I think this shows how valuable it is to have lethal allies that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own, but are willing to take a a a big role in the the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on The United States Of America.
Speaker 5:And in fact, what we've seen really in terms of the way they've they've gone after Hezbollah, the beeper operation, and then their systematic campaign against a nuclear facility, some of the most daring and imaginative intelligence and military work that I think I've ever seen in my lifetime. And even if one isn't as pro Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire, just how effective their military and intelligence community is.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's undeniable. A bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have any insight here. There was
Speaker 2:a lot What's the contribution we're on?
Speaker 1:No. There was some interesting price action in Bitcoin, which is hard to read too much into. But people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining, you know, a lot of Bitcoin. Fascinating. You know, maybe maybe it didn't come up for you, but I saw somebody posting that he was like, I'm not buying Bitcoin right now.
Speaker 1:It seems obvious that the regime is just like dumping order
Speaker 2:to fund, you
Speaker 1:the recovery effort.
Speaker 4:It makes
Speaker 2:sense. Yeah.
Speaker 1:But if you
Speaker 2:don't have
Speaker 1:any insight there, we can move on. I wanted to
Speaker 5:You know, I I'm afraid I don't, but I I do think, and I've said this to, all the smart crypto folks like Brian Armstrong and others. I I I think there's or a Wisconsin colleague of mine, Brian Style, who's one of the leaders in the house on this issue. You guys should have him on. He's really smart. You know, in congresswoman Wisconsin.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Style. Brian Style. Always in style.
Speaker 1:He's welcome. Welcome.
Speaker 5:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. The I think there's, like, a a an underexplored aspect or argument about, like, crypto's role in national security. Right?
Speaker 5:Because the anti crypto argue anti crypto argument is always like, this is just a way of sanctions evasion
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 5:And money laundering. And I think what people don't appreciate is, like, how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies' national security interests. And certainly, it was a case when, you know, people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan. Mhmm. That crypto was enormously valuable in that regard.
Speaker 5:It might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community. So I'm assuming that's a that's an area where, like, national security nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto. But I hadn't heard that about Yeah.
Speaker 1:Alright. Switching gears to the European continent. Yeah. Wanted to get your reaction to the the NATO spending Yep. News and maybe kind of the back story.
Speaker 1:I'm sure when when you were in congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing. But any any any reactions there?
Speaker 5:Well, listen. I think anytime first of all, this this idea that, you know, the American president would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense is not a new thing. It is not sort of unique to Trump. Eisenhower, the first supreme allied commander of NATO, like, actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies at the time. And so this is like and we've we've had democratic senators try to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO.
Speaker 5:So this is like a an old argument that is new again. I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense is a great thing for deterrence in general. I would say, however, I've always been of the view that this obsession with the inputs, I. E. What percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis.
Speaker 5:Right? Like, every NATO country could be spending 5% of their GDP on defense, but if they're all buying the wrong crap or buying stuff that isn't interoperable and doesn't actually amount to a coordinated multinational deterrence by denial effort with hard power shifted as far east as possible with the frontline states playing a unique role, then you actually have you haven't actually fighting off a common operational picture, and shout out to NATO for acquiring Maven Smart System made by Palantir Technologies. No big deal. Then you have to actually answer sports team a sports
Speaker 1:team doesn't wake up one morning and, like, let's all give it a 100%,
Speaker 2:and that's the only coordination. It's like Yeah.
Speaker 1:It is. Yeah.
Speaker 2:You could easily turn this into a jobs program where you say, yeah. We're gonna spend 5% of our GDP on horseback and cavalry. And it's like, you're gonna lose, but, yes, you're technically gonna be spending 5% and you're gonna have a massive military, but you're gonna get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs. So is there any do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly? Because it feels like it feels like to me getting from 2% to 5% is the bigger mental hurdle than the allocation of that 5%.
Speaker 2:And, yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now, but that feels like, an easier conversation or maybe I'm wrong there.
Speaker 5:I think the closer you are to the threat, the more your your thinking is sharp. Right? So it is my experience that, you know, Poland, the Baltic States tend to have a clearer view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own military. By way, we've acquired two new NATO. Acquired is the wrong term.
Speaker 5:We we've had two new countries join NATO in recent years that bring phenomenal capabilities to the table. I think, you know, traditionally, we struggled convincing the Germans who are, you know, the big elephant in the European room to make the right investments and to make more investments. My hope is that that conversation is getting better. You know? I guess I worry sometimes that kinda to relate it to what you said earlier, they they'll be privileging certain domestic companies even if they don't actually produce capability.
Speaker 5:I think it's fair to say, obviously, I'm biased because I work in an American software company, but we are the best in the world, like, by 10 orders of magnitude when it comes to software development in this country, and that's just not something that Europe does well. So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the Palantirs of the world and, you know, European hardware defense manufacturers. I'd love to see more of that going forward. And I've always been a proponent of you know, there's we have a ton of troops in in countries like Germany and Western Europe. Getting them out of garrison, shifting them further on NATO's eastern flank, taking advantage of the invitation that certain frontline states like Poland made, at least in the previous administration, to build new bases and forts that enhance our deterrence posture.
Speaker 5:I I think there's a there's a huge opportunity here. And and it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric, as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking shaking it loose right now. I mean, obviously, it's it's a bit overdetermined. I mean, you know, the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 5:And it's a massive wake up call for Europe Yeah. That they need to need to invest more and buy the right things. But I do think we have a moment here. And I think what's critical to our analysis in The US, particularly my own party, the Republican Party, is to do a better job, and I didn't quite do this well when I chaired the China Committee in Congress, in teasing out the connection between Russia and China, and why what happens in one theater affects another theater, and that it isn't just a choice between Europe or the Indo Pacific. We're a global power.
Speaker 5:We're a sole superpower. We have an existential challenge in the form of communist China. We have to pay attention everywhere. Yes. We have to make hard decisions and prioritize.
Speaker 5:Accordingly, the Indo Pacific is the priority theater. But one of the best ways we can invest more of our own exquisite resources into the Indo Pacific is to get on the same page with our allies in Europe and ensure that they're buying the right things and that the way we fight together is actually leveraging cutting edge commercial technology, software or hardware.
Speaker 2:That's great.
Speaker 1:Great.
Speaker 2:Do you have another
Speaker 1:Should we talk about the the news today? The announcement? The nuclear nuclear deal that
Speaker 5:you announced?
Speaker 2:Yeah. That'd be great. Can you break down for us?
Speaker 5:Is nuclear.
Speaker 1:Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, I wanna know the shape of the partnership, anything you can share there. But then I'd love to go into kind of what you're particularly excited about in nuclear or even just energy broadly. We've seen that The United States energy production per capita is kind of flatlined for a while. China's increasing energy production very aggressively. It feels top of mind, especially in the backdrop of the foundation model AI race that we need to be building more energy infrastructure.
Speaker 2:And there's different resources coming online. Nuclear is probably the most fascinating one that has the ability to scale because we've we've we've we've we've tamed the atom and yet and yet we can't just seem to copy paste, you know, Diablo Canyon 50 times to to actually get a massive increase in energy production. There's also stuff happening on the smaller scale. I want your take on nuclear as a whole in addition to the deal.
Speaker 3:Yeah. By the way, may
Speaker 5:get pulled to do a TV interview about this, the nuclear stuff. By the it's your fault though because my understanding is I'm just batting cleanup for Eliana
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. This point. And
Speaker 5:he talked too much, but I'm happy to come back at any point. Listen. I mean, we can't obviously, we can't dominate the, like, the commanding heights of critical technology and AI if we don't improve our our sort of all the above energy policy. Mhmm. There is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country.
Speaker 5:The Trump administration has put out some really productive EOs, but now it's incumbent upon the private sector to step up. And the nuclear company is that. I mean, they they're gonna leverage our software to build reactors, which right now take over a decade to build and collapse that timeline down. And I think we're at the forefront of something really interesting. China is investing billions of dollars in this space, putting their best and brightest on the problem, and we can't fall further behind.
Speaker 5:And, oh, by the way, it affects our military deterrence as well because our diplomacy is enhanced with foreign countries when we're able to come to them and say, you can we are a reliable partner for civilian nuclear technology, and we help you build and access that technology safely. When what I don't wanna see is a a replay of what we saw with China and five g and Huawei, where China was going all over the world saying, you can have five g Internet, cheaply. We'll just control the infrastructure. It it'll be in a box. You know?
Speaker 5:You won't even have
Speaker 1:to about worry about anything. You don't have to worry about anything.
Speaker 5:And, like, in America, it'll be like, woah. Don't do that. Time out. But if you're a country that doesn't have resources Yep. In Africa or or in the global South, like, you're probably not paying as much attention to the CI concerns.
Speaker 5:And so there's something similar playing out in the nuclear space right now. So I'm very bullish about this partnership. You know, I I think this is the cusp of something big Yeah. Both for the nuclear company and for Palantir. And we're gonna be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with Andor Olseronik and nontraditional partners with our warp speed manufacturing product and apply in into the nuclear space.
Speaker 2:That's fantastic.
Speaker 1:I'm getting pulled.
Speaker 5:I'm getting I'm getting
Speaker 2:pulled. Coming up.
Speaker 4:See you
Speaker 1:on another we'll see you.
Speaker 2:We have to
Speaker 1:be tied on soon. Come back on soon.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1:Thanks for
Speaker 4:coming on.
Speaker 2:Have good one.
Speaker 5:For Packers commentary.
Speaker 2:Alright. See
Speaker 1:guys. Cheers.
Speaker 2:Hims and Hers stock drops more than 30% after Novo Nordisk breakup. This is from The Wall Street Journal. Of course, if you're interested in stocks that are dropping because you're going short or are popping because you're going long, you gotta get in public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing industry leading yields in the trusted by millions. Anyway, the Wagoovy maker, that's Novo Nordisk, has cut ties with the telehealth company, hims and hers, citing allegations of deceptive marketing practices and drug compounding.
Speaker 2:I feel like they were the drug compounding how is this an allegation? I thought that's, like, what HIMSS was saying they were doing. They were like I felt like there was a lot of press about them being, like, proud of drug compounding because there was a shortage. But I guess it's I guess it's alleged at this point, so we'll dig into this. Novo Nordisk abruptly ended its partnership with Hims and Hers after the Danish drugmaker accused the telehealth company of illegally selling cheaper copycats.
Speaker 2:Okay. So Yeah. This is after the FDA's ruling about whether or not there was in fact a shortage. So Yep. The Novo said on Monday that it had concerns about the safety of knockoff versions of Ogivy and that Hems and Herbs deceptive marketing of such knockoffs put patient safety at risk.
Speaker 2:In turn, Hems and Herbs accused Novo of pressuring it to steer pair to steer patients to Wagoovie regardless of whether or not it was the best option for patience. News that the deal was scrapped weighed heavily on Hims and Hers shares, sending them down 32% in afternoon trading in what would be the largest decline for the stock on record. Novo Nordisk's shares were down nearly 6% in New York. The messy breakup comes less than two months after the company's unveiled what they called a long term collaboration to directly provide Wagoovie to Hims and Hers patients.
Speaker 1:Okay. So this was somewhat predictable. Right? Talked to TMZ. TMZ has been on a generational run Yep.
Speaker 1:In the markets. Yep. Because they're one of the best, easiest ways that people can just go buy Wegovy.
Speaker 4:Yes.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 1:Now, if you're Novo Nordisk, you're like, cool. We have we're selling through this channel. But then the retailer, in this case, HIMSS, is telling customers as they come in, hey, we know you wanted Wegovy, but how about this sort of cheap knock off, this compounded version? Yep. Now, Wegovy can, it is probably legitimately concerned about safety issues.
Speaker 1:There can be issues around compounding and drug safety. But then the bigger issue is like, hey, you're marketing, you're using our brand and our products to acquire customers. And then you're getting those people in the door and you're saying, hey, how about this sort of cheaper, off the shelf alternative? And so I have to imagine that this is Novo Nordisk recognizing the value of their brand in this massive massive fast growing category and saying, we're not gonna let you leverage our brand to compete on these sort of high margin, you know, knock off products.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, like, the the Instagram ads that I saw were definitely pushing the brand name for real. Yeah. And there was a while when they wouldn't use the term Viagra, and they would use ED meds and Sildenafil and Tadalafil and all of those different like, they would use the actual underlying compound name, and they pushed it so hard that people actually started knowing the name of the underlying compound. Yeah.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, the brand name
Speaker 1:something
Speaker 1:that
Speaker 2:How
Speaker 1:do think Hempsteads will respond?
Speaker 2:Do you
Speaker 1:think they'll introduce a 10 in one shampoo?
Speaker 4:10 in one.
Speaker 1:That includes compounded GLP ones, Viagra, hair loss, medication. What else could Adderall? Caffeine.
Speaker 2:I mean, is Cognizant, Rhodiola, Panax, Ginseng, L Theanine, caffeine. Get some KLP one
Speaker 3:in here.
Speaker 1:Creatine soap with Creatine soap would be good. With all of the above.
Speaker 2:Eli Lilly is the one that lost the patent. Right? Because they forgot to pay the
Speaker 3:No.
Speaker 1:I think it was Novo Nordisk.
Speaker 2:It was Novo? Wow.
Speaker 1:They have
Speaker 2:They're all over the place.
Speaker 1:Is it is interesting to watch. Yeah. Novo Nordisk, how much do you think their stock is up over the past five years?
Speaker 2:Oh, 500%?
Speaker 1:Try a 113%.
Speaker 2:A 113. But it was a big company. Yeah. Yeah. But it's been on
Speaker 1:a Big company, but still. And how much do you think what do what do you think the the chart looks like over the last year?
Speaker 2:Oh, it's down. The GLP one boom. It's down because it it ripped up so high
Speaker 1:Down 50%.
Speaker 2:And then went down 50%, and they and they, rotated out their CEO. That's right. We covered that. Yep. Hims and Hers is at 9,000,000,000, 9,660,000,000.00.
Speaker 2:That is down from a high of maybe 15,000,000,000. And it's one of those interesting, like, SPAC targets that I think they got out through a SPAC, and they they never really went down that far. They were down, you know, yeah, like like, you know, 30%. I mean, they SPAC to $10 a share, went down to $4 a share, kind of grinded back up. Now they're at $40 a share.
Speaker 2:So if you if you bought this if you bought the SPAC and you did hold for five years, you're, you know, you're sitting on a three x, four x. Not bad. So, you know, kind of a narrative violation around the around the SPAC, like all SPACs are bad narrative.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it it and and the CEO Andrew, Dudum, we should have him on the show
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Said that, you know, I think his position, you know, we have no idea what the details of their contract actually look like, but fairly reasonable position to say we're not going to just sell one product just, you know, because it's true. Not every patient is gonna respond well to Wegovy. Yep. And they should have options.
Speaker 2:So before striking deals with brand name drug makers, telehealth firms were selling lower cost knock off versions of these drugs made by compounding pharmacies, taking market share away from, brand name makers. The compounding pharmacies had been allowed to mass produce knockoff versions conditionally because the original drugs were in short supply. Now the the whole compounding pharmacy dynamic is very different because I feel like the the the laws were created such that if a big pharmaceutical company couldn't supply you the drug, like, local pharmacist could compound it, but then the the the startups kind of, like, rolled up all the compounding pharmacies and were doing it like a much bigger scale. And it wasn't exactly what was intended originally, but I'm not sure about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the big question Is when there should be more Well, Yeah. The big question, what will there be more regulatory action around compounded GLP ones? Mhmm. And what will that do to their business?
Speaker 1:So roller coaster of a year for HIMSS. Yeah. Partnership was in announced in April 2025. Popped, terminated, just a few months later with a 35% drop.
Speaker 2:Well, if you're on GLP ones and you're losing weight and your wrists are getting thinner, you need a watch that can adapt to your new wrist size. You need to go on getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet, seriously any watch. And you can find a watch with metal links that you could take out a link if you've lost a lot of weight. You could add one back if you're in a bulking cycle.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So Keep those things handy when
Speaker 1:you're ready to
Speaker 2:start start the bowl. Exactly. This is this is key. This is very, very key. Anyway, a comment from the the CEO, Andrew Dudum.
Speaker 2:He said, hims and hers will continue access to a range of treatments, including Wegoovy, so they continue to battle it out. It'll be interesting to follow this, and we will, of course, be talking to Cremieux about this later today. There is a investing visual post here that I pulled up, about how HIMSS makes money. They're making $576,000,000 online, $10,000,000 from wholesale. That brings their total revenue to $586,000,000, which is up a 111% year over year.
Speaker 2:Gross profit there, 428,000,000. Operating expenses are 337,000,000, leaving them 92,000,000 in net income or 92,000,000 in operating income and 50,000,000 in net income. So 50,000,000 in net income for a $10,000,000,000 stock, pretty pretty high price earning ratio if that's their or if that that's an indication of their earnings, but it's been a big growth stock on a major, major trend, GLP one. And so the the the retail army has been coming out in force. King, KSM's capital said, it felt too good to be true for HIMSS to go this long without some FUD.
Speaker 2:This is more like it. Just bought $2,323,100 shares and, top secret stocks.
Speaker 1:What does the retail army call themselves?
Speaker 2:I don't know. Himbos or something.
Speaker 1:Say I'm really Him.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hims, look at the data. You can see their operating margin has improved a ton since they've gone public. They started out at negative 40% operating margin and climbed up every single quarter. They're now at a 6.5% operating margin.
Speaker 2:The number of subscribers in the millions has gone from, they were at point six, so 600,000 subscribers. Now they're at 2,400,000, and their total revenue has gone from $272,000,000 in revenue. This is the last twelve months. Now they're almost at 2,000,000,000. And so they've almost 10 x revenue from that SPAC price.
Speaker 2:And that's what's driving the stock overall to be up three to four x off the original SPAC price. So Yeah. Very good news. If you're Andrew Dudum and you need a break from grinding it out at HIMSS, book a wander. Find your happy place.
Speaker 2:Book a wander with inspiring views.
Speaker 1:Summer, Andrew.
Speaker 2:Hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, twenty four seven concierge service. It's a vacation
Speaker 1:Imagine you're in one of the gnarliest PR currencies of your life and two guys in suits on a podcast. You'd never matter just like, yeah. Take a vacation. But I think it's a bad idea somewhere along. Hims is up 2% today, John.
Speaker 2:You're good.
Speaker 1:So it's time to, you know, treat yourself.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Take your foot off the gas.
Speaker 1:Head to wander.com. And
Speaker 2:speaking of foots on gas, Ford, which makes car. Kermeux, welcome to the stream.
Speaker 1:There he is. Looking hard to him as ever.
Speaker 2:How you guys? How are doing?
Speaker 7:Doing well. Can you hear me?
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:We can hear you fine. Perfect. I'm I'm I'm looking forward to, to, you know, a future date when we can potentially see your face. But for now, your avatar looks great. Soon?
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm looking forward to it. We wanted to have you on to chat about a couple things. What's going on in GLP one world, reaction to the hims and her hers breakup. Jordy, where would you like to start?
Speaker 1:High level update on the GLP one market.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I guess, I mean, it's this miracle drug that keeps on we keep on learning about new, new diseases or problems that it can treat. It seems like it can't just stop. We got the diabetes, then weight loss, then maybe gambling addiction and other stuff. Walk us through how people are using or how doctors are prescribing GLP-1s for various conditions and what's most promising, what's on the horizon, what you're tracking next.
Speaker 7:Yes. I'm actually really glad you asked this right now because right now the ADA, the American Diabetes Association Conference is ongoing and it seems like every other presentation is about GLP-1s. They are just talking about all the latest advances. Just yesterday Amgen showed off a once monthly instead of once weekly injectable. Eli Lilly showed off an amazing combo therapy with an inhibitor called Bimagrumov, it's a very weird name that makes people not lose any muscle when they're on the drugs.
Speaker 7:They've been showing off just incredible advances all week. They've been showing off new treatments for like different conditions and whatnot. There are increasingly many indications these drugs are getting approved for. In December Tirzepatide was approved for sleep apnea. There's osteoarthritis indications incoming.
Speaker 7:There might even be, there's some effort being put into people trying to do something for cancers as well because it does seem to help with obesity related cancers and it seems to help for I don't know why with hematological cancers, the blood cancers I don't understand really the mechanism behind that. But it seems like it's just hitting every single indication now. Wow.
Speaker 1:Do you think that is? I have some guesses.
Speaker 7:I think the big reason has to do less with the direct effects of GLP-1s and more with the fact that obesity sucks. Obesity is just really really bad. It affects so many different systems. It makes your health worse on so many different levels and the things that lead to obesity are also quite bad like the bad diet, the bad habits, the not moving around very much. It's actually interesting.
Speaker 7:A lot of people after they've been on these drugs for a little while, they decide to move around more. They become more likely to go to the gym. They report their physical functioning has improved. It turns out that getting fat has made them get to the point where they are no longer looking to be active and so they just kind of fall into a hole. Practically everything is improved I think for that reason and there are some improvements that are due to direct effects of the drugs.
Speaker 7:This has like for example this one is major adverse cardiac events, major adverse cardiovascular events. Those seem to be reduced in number immediately after starting the stuff which suggests that there's a mechanism that's pretty direct. And this mechanism is also independent of weight loss. So that seems to be how that works. Same with Are
Speaker 1:looking are you looking you know, I feel like the sort of bio hacker alternative health world has for a long time, you know, talked about cancer being, you know, this metabolic disease. Do you think that could be a factor and why it should could show some promise in in treating various types of cancers?
Speaker 7:Yeah. I I think it does makes a lot of sense in that direction for the obesity related ones. But I don't think it makes sense. So years ago, there were people who suggested, I think quite wrongly, replacing certain cancer therapies with fasting because it seems to like augment the effects of cisplatin based therapies and stuff and that didn't really hold up very well. It was a bunch of theory work that didn't go anywhere.
Speaker 7:And I don't think that this would help through those purported mechanisms which again I don't really believe in. I really think it's mostly just cutting down on for example the number of cells you have or well not really the number of cells you have but Mhmm. Like the activity of being fat. It's just you have you're not as big of a person. You have less to less opportunity for cancer to really hit you when you are Smaller.
Speaker 7:Yeah. Smaller. It's like how short people tend to live longer than everything else.
Speaker 2:Bad for me.
Speaker 7:Bad for you.
Speaker 2:Fairish for me. Well, how much of the recent, like, advances in GLP one indications or or recent, like, benefits have been, just looking at all the people that are taking GLP ones for weight loss or diabetes and then seeing a secondary effect in the population that's actually running, the drug versus a new double blinded trial for a different indication? Are both things happening? Or is it are these drugs diffuse enough that you can just look at the overall population and get an idea of what's happening?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So for approved indicate FDA approved indications like obstructive sleep apnea, you do have to run additional trials. But they are seeing that these things are possible from their trials. They're seeing these things are possible from the literature and they're running based on that. So in some cases, they do see these secondary endpoints.
Speaker 7:In fact, obesity is an example of this. Back in the day when they first introduced these drugs, back around 2005 or so, the CEO of Novo Nordisk at the time actually said and I quote, obesity is primarily a social and cultural problem. It should be solved by team by means of a radical restructuring of society. There is no business for Novo Nordisk in that area referring to obesity.
Speaker 2:Wow. Yeah.
Speaker 7:So they their scientists had to push for about a decade to go, hey you look at the weight loss data. It's really impressive. And then they finally finally did it and now we have weight loss drugs.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That is that is wild. What, what concerns you? What's the catch? Seems, you know, somebody It's too good to be true.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Somebody might say, is it too good to be true? We're running this sort of massive experiment on huge swaths of the population right now. Seems to be, you know, many, many positive indicators. But what are what are kind of red flags that you think people should be kind of looking out for or or the scientific community should be wary of broadly from your point?
Speaker 7:Yeah. So I think that physicians need to be careful about prescription. And they already are. They like they don't tend to prescribe this to people who are very skinny. But the fact that this stuff is available through the gray market, very easily without prescription for very, cheap, unfortunately, I've contributed to that, Has led to what way?
Speaker 1:In what way? You mean just
Speaker 7:Oh, I made a I made a guide to doing this and a few thousand people actually like paid me $8 apiece to see all the details on it. And now I have a few thousand people who unprompted, I didn't tell them to do this, messaged me their weight loss progress and such.
Speaker 2:So Wow.
Speaker 7:Through writing this guide a few months ago, I've led to, almost 12,000 pounds of weight loss and that's just what's been reported to me. Not everybody's telling me all the And
Speaker 1:is that is that at a high level people just finding pharmacies that will compound the drug for them? What what does that actually look like? So
Speaker 7:what it looks like is buying from China. So you are ordering from a Chinese factory, you are testing the purity of the stuff and finding oh, it's 99.9%, I can use it and then using all of that. Yeah. It is not sold by Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly or any other major company working on these drugs. It's just from some Chinese company that is ripping them off.
Speaker 2:So is that patent infringement? I we we've been seeing that kind of go back and forth like Hims and Hers was able to compound because there's a shortage. I would love to see Novo Nordisk. About Eli Lilly.
Speaker 1:And say, hey. Can you please
Speaker 2:knock this off? I mean, they could do import bans or or or seize the packages at the ports. Like, that's the design of this. You can't just buy a knock off iPhone and have it delivered through the Port Of Los Angeles. Like, if a whole truckload comes through, they should stop that, but it's clearly not happening.
Speaker 7:So right now, the FDA allows this to happen because they have an exemption for research chemicals. You're technically not supposed to use these things but everybody knows that everybody uses them. It's just how it is.
Speaker 1:They're researching weight loss Yeah. I'm researching.
Speaker 2:Research maxing.
Speaker 1:I'm doing So you were saying the the potential red flags or or things to be wary of is around, what what about, the prescription activity concerns you?
Speaker 7:Mostly abuse. Not really prescription activity as so much as the abuse. There are people who are obtaining these drugs. There are people who are getting other people to get the prescriptions. There are people who are not really visiting doctors using telehealth services to get prescriptions and they are not in need of them.
Speaker 2:But why would someone use this? This doesn't feel like something that has like the euphoria associated with a stimulant.
Speaker 1:So the concern I think could be somebody has body dysmorphia. There are Is that what's going on? Really skinny.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Unfortunately,
Speaker 7:I've met a few dozen women now who have taken these drugs and been around one hundred and twenty, one hundred and thirty pounds Sure. Normal height.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 7:And now they're around one hundred and they are Okay. Don't look good anymore. They look like they're aging very quickly. They look unfortunate. And it's sad to see they're
Speaker 1:using these
Speaker 7:drugs when they didn't even need them in the first place.
Speaker 1:Interesting. The same negative effects of actual starvation.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 7:Yeah, yeah. Start getting really bad harmful effects. You probably are eating at that point more lean mass than fat mass. It is quite bad.
Speaker 2:Yep. Yep. That makes sense. So, yeah, that's always the risk. Interesting.
Speaker 1:How are you what what was your reaction to the HIMS Novo Nordisk, partnership blow So
Speaker 7:I actually think this is a big failure on Novo Nordisk part. It seems as though what they did was they partnered with HIMSS in order to catch them. My understanding is that HIMSS has been selling a little too much more than they've been supplied by the person producing the drugs which is interesting. I guess we'll get more details relatively soon if
Speaker 1:the launch commence and all So you're saying theoretically Wegovy gives them a million doses and then HIMSS is somehow selling one point two million doses of Wegovy. Is that is that what you're
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 7:Something like that. They're either compounding themselves ordering from something from China. They are doing something and, I don't know if that will hold up or show up in trial. It's an accusation.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:It's So I guess it's alleged, but we'll we'll see. We'll see.
Speaker 1:What about what about HIMSS's general position that patients should have as much choice as possible, as much access, you know, access at different price points, things like that?
Speaker 7:They are completely correct to do that. I think that HIMSS providing different dosages than are provided by Novo Nordisk is a wonderful thing. There are people who can get legitimate uses out of sort of micro dosing this stuff because it gets rid of noise. I've met many many people now and this is an increasingly common thing it seems. Really don't know how far this is gonna go.
Speaker 7:But a lot of people who are micro dosing this because it helps with their ADHD. Their ADHD is like the pathological end of food based distraction. They're not losing weight from this anymore but they are just using it in order to not think about food at all. It gets rid of that nagging feeling in the back of their head and they can focus
Speaker 1:on Yeah. I I did a twenty four hour dry fast Mhmm. From Friday night to Saturday night.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And all day Saturday, I was shocked at how much time my I was just thinking about food and water. Mhmm. Wanting food and water. And I was very freeing to some degree because I was like, well, I'm not just not having any until around dinner time. But so many points throughout the day, my mind was just going to, oh, I should go get a little tasty drink from the fridge.
Speaker 4:I should,
Speaker 1:you know, I should
Speaker 2:I'm not addicted. I'm not addicted.
Speaker 1:I'm not addicted to water.
Speaker 2:I'm not addicted to water and food.
Speaker 1:I'm not beating the water addiction allegations. Yeah. Big water guy. What what else are you tracking right now broadly? Any reactions to the NIH funding?
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah. 40%. We had Andrew Heberman on the show. He was breaking it down for us and what's going on with Jay Bhattacharya. What's your take on the cuts that have been proposed?
Speaker 7:So I don't know how much I should reveal about that. There's a lot of really good things coming. There might be some interesting developments there very soon. I'm especially hopeful about well, you know, actually, I shouldn't say that. Just there there'll be good news there soon.
Speaker 7:There'll be some changes.
Speaker 2:I guess
Speaker 1:I gotta take
Speaker 2:a look. I guess zooming out, like, what what what does good look like to you? Are you generally in favor of taxpayer funded in Every American gets
Speaker 1:a $10,000 biohacking budget annually.
Speaker 2:Yes. Maybe some people would say
Speaker 7:biohacking vouchers.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, some people would say, like, you know, the the the big pharma companies are profitable. They should bear this expense, not the American. Yeah.
Speaker 4:So
Speaker 7:they're not profitable enough. They have troubles with r and d. Yep. I public money is very, very useful. We need more public funding than we currently have.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. When you actually look at biotech returns, you know, just looking at the asset class, the logical thing to do would just be to invest elsewhere. Mhmm. And that that was with historical levels of public funding
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That that kind of contributed to those returns to some degree.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 7:Yeah. We have a dearth of funding at the moment and we need to increase it. We need to improve the allocation and also increase the amount. There's really no way around it. If we wanna keep making progress, you just have to throw more money at these things.
Speaker 7:And I think we will start doing that very shortly. Yeah. These cuts are a little alarming to start Yep. But they are not the end of the discussion. Remember, we are it's still only five months into Yeah.
Speaker 7:This presidency. They have a lot of really big plans. They have a lot of trouble getting appointees through the senate. They they have a hiring freeze ongoing right now that is interminable. We don't know when it's going to end.
Speaker 7:But once that is over, they'll be issuing NPRMs left and right. It's going to be deregulatory like massacre.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be wonderful.
Speaker 1:Wow. Well that's exciting to you in biotech right now in
Speaker 7:Well I wanted to say, on the Ham's point with the different pricing and what not. Mhmm. I think perhaps the most exciting thing right now in that area is that Novo Nordisk is run by idiots. Like they're they're very smart people but they're just total idiots.
Speaker 1:Okay. They Hey, everybody misses the the patent. You know? What what do they do? They they
Speaker 4:I think
Speaker 2:it was Eli Lilly, but, they they No.
Speaker 7:No. No. This is Novo Nordisk.
Speaker 2:Oh, there's Novo that lost the the the patent, fee?
Speaker 1:Yeah. They just Oh, yeah. Forgot the bill. $450 or something.
Speaker 7:Yes. It was 250 and then they missed it and they were told, you're one year out, you had you pay a late fee, like an extra $200 late fee on it and
Speaker 2:They just didn't.
Speaker 7:They still failed. It amazing.
Speaker 2:That's wonderful.
Speaker 7:That enables a wonderful wonderful program that the FDA should pursue immediately. The FDA and the CMS have to collaborate on this. But it's the section eight zero four importation program and it allows individual US states to import as much of the generic drugs or any other type of drug that's produced in Canada and has like an indication of proof here and whatnot as they want to reduce costs. So for example, Florida will, whenever they get this actually going, have much cheaper EpiPens. They'll be able to lower the cost of drugs by importing cheap generics from Canada and because cheap generic Ozempic is going to be coming from Canada in 2026, every state can just jump on the program.
Speaker 7:If we're giving people, if we're giving Americans $5 a week Ozempic then we're going to see perhaps an end to the chronic disease crisis. We're going to see obesity tackled meaningfully. We're gonna see people getting hot again and make America hot again. Real meaning of The
Speaker 2:real meaning The real meaning of
Speaker 1:There we go. Inside baseball. That's amazing. Very exciting. Well, fifteen minutes was not enough time.
Speaker 2:Never enough.
Speaker 1:Back on again soon. Thank you for, thank you for all the insights.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Thanks for coming on. We'll we'll we'll have you back on soon. This is great.
Speaker 3:Absolutely. Good one.
Speaker 1:And if you docs yourself anywhere other than here, we will be very upset. So Might have
Speaker 7:to Oh, no. Sorry, guys. Okay. You guys
Speaker 3:have a good one. Alright.
Speaker 2:Cheers. Bye. Shell is inter in early talks to acquire rival British Petroleum, BP, but Shell denies the Wall Street Journal's report that it's in talks to acquire BP. So we have a little bit of an update to the story. And M and A just in the last twenty months, Morning Brew is breaking it down here.
Speaker 2:Shell BP is clocked at maybe 80,000,000,000, but the deal's pending. Exxon and Pioneer are doing a $60,000,000,000 m and a deal. Chevron and Hess, deal still pending, but it's at 53,000,000,000. D Back and Endeavor, don't even know those companies, but $26,000,000,000 deal there. ConocoPhill and Marathon at 17,000,000,000, and Occidental and Crown Rock at 12,000,000,000.
Speaker 2:So if you think the AI m and a deals are hot, you gotta go over to big oil.
Speaker 1:Big oil. Oil and gas.
Speaker 2:Big tech, big oil, big pharma. These are these are the industries where the where the big dollars get thrown around. They don't they don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the in the decacorn exchanging business. True. Pretty interesting.
Speaker 2:So the immediate market reaction to Shell's potential deal for BP, BP jumped 7%, and Shell dropped 2.6%. I wanna know what they're doing more recently. It looks like BP is up now 1.5% on the day. How is Shell how is BP doing over the week or the or the month? This is the week?
Speaker 5:Because of the day.
Speaker 2:Okay. Yeah.
Speaker 1:They've they've both kind of retraced since Shell said, nah. Yeah. We're not talking at all.
Speaker 2:So by market cap, Shell's around 207,000,000,000. BP's around 87,000,000,000. Those are big companies. Big, big companies. Anyway, we can run through the Wall Street Journal's report here.
Speaker 2:But first, if you're planning a complex post merger integration, you gotta get on linear.
Speaker 1:John, you're that your commitment to just using linear for everything is No.
Speaker 2:But of course, if you're if you're building if you're building modern software, if you need to streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps, you gotta go linear. Linear is a purpose built tool for planning and building products. And plus, they got linear for agents. But, you know, oil and gas companies do need to
Speaker 4:build software.
Speaker 1:You're worried about getting paper clipped They
Speaker 2:should be on linear.
Speaker 1:If you're worried about getting paper clipped, get your agents on linear. Yep. They will thank you for it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So a deal for BP, which has a market value of roughly 80,000,000,000, would be a landmark combination for two super major oil companies. Super major is a better term than Mag seven in my opinion. We need that for the tech companies. The
Speaker 1:super majors.
Speaker 2:Super majors.
Speaker 1:Are you in the major leagues? I'm in the super majors.
Speaker 2:So good. So talks between company representatives are active, according to people who are familiar with the matter, leak into the Wall Street Journal. And BP is considering the approach carefully. Acquiring BP would put Shell on firmer footing to challenge larger competitors, such as ExxonMobil and Chevron. It would be a landmark combination of two so called super major oil companies, a group of multinational behemoths that dominate the production of the world's most important energy sources.
Speaker 2:Potential terms of the deal couldn't be learned, and a tie up is far from certain, but the discussions are moving slowly. BP is currently valued around 80,000,000,000, taking into account a premium. A deal could end up as the largest corporate oil deal since the $83,000,000,000 mega merger that created ExxonMobil at the turn of the century. It would also be easily the biggest m and a deal of the year so far in a market that has been rattled by president Trump's, antitrust policy. And so you can see that the combined entity would be somewhere in the Do
Speaker 1:you remember tracking the Deepwater Horizon still?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I remember tracking it very closely in the Thunder Horse track.
Speaker 1:Were you monitoring the situation?
Speaker 2:Monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading equity research reports about BP from the from the sell side banks, and I and I understood it to the level of knowing that the that the tract that they were that they were drilling into was called the Thunder Horse Tract, which is the section of the crust that they're drilling the oil into.
Speaker 1:So crazy. So BP's total costs associated with Deepwater Horizon, including cleanup fines and settlements, reached approximately 65,000,000,000. So nearing their total enterprise value at the Massive.
Speaker 2:Also, great movie. I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie, Deepwater Horizon.
Speaker 1:Is it a documentary?
Speaker 2:No. It is a it is a it is a, you know, nonfiction recreation, but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the, on the oil rig. And I believe
Speaker 1:Mark Walberg's movie is like that.
Speaker 2:It's awesome. It's it's a really, really great movie. Highly recommend it. A Shell spokesperson said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value the capturing the value in Shell through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification.
Speaker 1:Wow. Nice.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Fantastic. Basically saying like, hey. No comment, but, you know, also, like, we're we're shilling for shell over here. We're shilling for shell.
Speaker 1:A TBPN spokesman said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value in TBPN through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification, John.
Speaker 2:We should never You should never decline to comment. You should always just do an average.
Speaker 1:Comment like that.
Speaker 2:Just do an average. Bacon in the LLM. This is Switch your business to ramp.com.
Speaker 1:Do you have any comments on on your your intern allegedly, you know, contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch your business for now.
Speaker 2:As we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on getting our viewers on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Shell comes into the talks from an operating from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years. Shell, which like BP is based in The United Kingdom, but has operations around the world, has a market value of more than $200,000,000,000. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy. It's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters.
Speaker 2:And so it seems like actually their their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business oil has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because, like, the the those M and A sell side research reports that I was reading during the Deepwater Horizon crisis, they were very accurately predicting the impact, the long term impact of that crisis on the stock immediately. Yeah. So it was priced into the stock very quickly, and the stock dropped a ton and wiped a ton of market cap off. But then they were kinda set up to kind of rebuild, and there weren't many surprises coming down the pipe after a few months or a few years. And so, more recently, Elliott Management, which which owns more than 5% of BP's shares, has pushed for changes at the energy company's
Speaker 1:last had been performing, not, you know, had had basically been down only For two since the financial crisis and then Deepwater Horizon hit. Yep. And it was just down even.
Speaker 2:When asked publicly, Shell's chief executive officer said that recently the company's bar for big deal making would be high. Shell in May announced a multibillion dollar share buyback plan, the latest in a long series of big share repurchases. Shell has been working with bankers on a potential sale of its chemical assets in Europe and The US, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. For Shell, acquiring BP would take years of integration complicated by culture clashes and possibly the sale of overlapping assets, but a deal could give Shell's global trading business, greater reach and bolster its dominance in areas like liquefied natural gas. Analysts and investors also see a good matchup in the company's Gulf Of Mexico operations, which The US now calls the Gulf Of America.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:That's right.
Speaker 2:All of the oil companies had to had to change all their internal documentation. And so Bloomberg News
Speaker 1:reports earlier. Right?
Speaker 2:I think it's sticking. Yeah. Until the next election and there'll be a new EO and it'll go back to something else. But
Speaker 1:Well, would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it Yeah. Something other than the Gulf Of America.
Speaker 2:Well, we we there's some other news in here, but I think it'd be fun to debate the future of venture capital marketing. I was on a call recently with a GP at a very big fund, and they were asking me about strategy and where the future is going. And media is obviously evolving very quickly, and I was kind of noodling on a bunch of different things. But what I came to was maybe this idea that that venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that, like, you it is not available to everyone. They are in the business of selling money, but not everyone can buy it.
Speaker 2:And so that kind of puts it in the same league as, you know, ultra high net worth wealth management products or even Rolexes. High horology Rolexes that are in demand. People, they still advertise Rolexes. They advertise them at at LAX. The clocks are Rolexes.
Speaker 2:Or if you go to an f one match, you'll see a lot of, you know, advertisements.
Speaker 1:Tech will put an ad for the Cubitus in an airport.
Speaker 2:Every every issue of the of The Economist comes with an ad for basically a holy trinity watch on the back, whether it's Vacheron or AP or Patek, but you can't just go and buy those. And so it's very odd that they're doing this, like, luxury brand building without a product that you can just immediately go buy. And I'm wondering if that's the future of venture capital marketing. And so my my thought was that maybe maybe that's where the VC firm should really be pushing into.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah. Let's talk about the current strategy. Right? Yes. Current strategy is post on X.
Speaker 1:Yes. Go on podcasts.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:You can start your own podcast. Yes. Many people have done that. Yes. The challenge is that venture capitalists are deeply conflicted
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:By making a wide variety of investments.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:And that has to inform inform their opinion on different markets.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so if you're deeply convicted and trying to give coverage to a certain sector, it becomes very hard. Because you can't go on there and say, x y z company is clearly dominating. Yep. You know, if you look at the data and you look at, you know, what customers are saying when if you have another portfolio company over here that you happen to back. And so it creates this sort of challenge of providing great media products Yep.
Speaker 1:Because of that conflict. Yep. Now, you can still get around this, right, and there's different ways and there's different approaches. You can do an interview show, which allows you to, but that's just like one type of content.
Speaker 2:And the problem with that is that it takes the focus off of you and puts it on your guests. Yeah. The person. Right? And so it's like, yeah, the person's a good interviewer, but like, what do they actually believe?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Yeah. So the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking, you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing. Yep. Can't get away from it.
Speaker 1:It's all marketing all the way down. Now, these sort of subcategories I think that are interesting. I've I've always said that Sam Lesson, right? He's got fans, he's got haters. But he creates, he has a unique media product and the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord and some people, it resonates with them.
Speaker 1:Other people wanna dunk. But it is an effective format in order to provide commentary and it's very efficient. Right? He doesn't need a big marketing team to actually pull that off. So, I think it's super key to find a specific format.
Speaker 1:But then the alternative is instead of hiring a production team and producing podcasts yourselves Yep. You could do something like what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:Yep. I I when I think of, like, the four really great or, like, a few really great VC marketing examples, I think of Zero to One by Peter Thiel. He's never tweeted, but he's tweeted once and it was a link to his book. And that book was such a good outcome that it sold in in airport bookshops. Right?
Speaker 2:And he just dropped an amazing book, and then that book just continued to compound and was extremely valuable in terms of, like, building his brand. Naval has a similar story where his his Twitter posts, the how to get rich without getting lucky went so viral. And when I think about both of those, and then it was eventually turned into a book. Yep. But when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near term thesis or they're not they're not news products.
Speaker 2:They're reflections on how the world works. Reflections on, like, timeless principles. Right? Then I think about Paul Graham's blog. It's not on a regular cadence.
Speaker 2:You know, it's on a weekly substack. It's not a news product. It's reflections on, like, how did Steve Jobs run his company? And maybe he'll draw maybe he'll like pump his bags a little bit by like talking about Airbnb, but he's talking about like what Airbnb did in like 2009 or something. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's like, it's completely irrelevant and it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm getting a buy rating on the stock right now.
Speaker 1:It's better to pump your bags when you end up being tremendously correct.
Speaker 2:Exactly. Exactly. Of the early writing Yeah.
Speaker 1:If you like, and even commentary on Sam Altman Yep. Just clearly ended up being true.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Right?
Speaker 2:A 100%. And and it's not and and he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or or Airbnb at this moment. He's not talking about Airbnb's newest release. He's talking about Brian Chesky as a person years ago, and it's reflective. And I think that that works really well.
Speaker 2:Marc Andreessen, similarly, the ability to go into The Wall Street Journal and write an op ed is is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that that idea, but it has to be from the individual investor. I don't think it's something that can be, like, formulated from a team necessarily.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's this, like there's kind of this, like I feel like we're gonna see more of, this barbell strategy where the future might be, like, when the GP has a really really insightful piece of commentary, they take it to a Wall Street Journal op ed or a book or a thread or a screenshot essay, or you're just seeing the brand. And you're seeing the brand on the back of and I was thinking, like, what is the equivalent of, like, the Patek Philippe ad that appears on the back of The Economist every week? It's like, I was thinking venture capitalists should go and buy the back of, like, the Stanford Review or, like, the Waterloo, you know, campus newspaper. Like, that should have an ad for a venture capital
Speaker 1:Thompson newsletter.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. But like, the the But I think aligning
Speaker 1:with these iconic properties.
Speaker 2:Yeah. People who are doing their life's work.
Speaker 1:Full page ad in Yeah. In in the journal.
Speaker 2:But most importantly, like like, when when Patek Philippe sponsors The Economist, they are not trying to shift The Economist's coverage towards, like, being more bullish on Swiss watches. They're just like, we don't even know what you're gonna put in this issue. We're just gonna be on the back there looking good and telling you the vibe of
Speaker 1:So John, a full page color ad in the journal Yes. Costs around $248,000.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great, like, truly great producer for their own show. Yeah. And so is it gonna be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the journal for a day? Yeah. Or or have your own podcast?
Speaker 2:Yeah. And there are more narrow properties too that are like, the the journal is extremely broad in all of business. There but there but there really are more narrow products that would work. But every time they've gotten there, it's been it's been it's been misaligned around, like like like, what the actual coverage is. But I don't know.
Speaker 2:I maybe we'll see, maybe we'll see an f one team. Maybe we'll see JetSuiteX, the terminal, like, sponsored by a VC firm. That would make a lot of sense.
Speaker 1:Like, you get off
Speaker 2:in Silicon Valley at the JetSuiteX terminal, and boom. You're presented with a an ad for a VC firm. Let's take you through a beautiful obituary to the founder of FedEx, Fred Smith. So Ryan Peterson, posted a photo of the original FedEx plane. He said, RIP to logistics legend and outspoken defender of free trade.
Speaker 2:FedEx founder Fred Smith, who passed away today. Below is the first ever FedEx plane, which you see at the Air and Space Museum Annex next to Dulles Airport in Virginia. Look at that. He must have been so stoked when he bought this. Like, his business was finally growing that he could own his own plane.
Speaker 1:Imagine how many likes he would have gotten on social media posting that pic.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Everyone's like, this is your flagship. You're just trying to go viral. This is clearly
Speaker 1:This is clearly for logistics.
Speaker 2:This is clearly for logistics.
Speaker 1:Total legend.
Speaker 2:Burning VC dollars on a plane.
Speaker 1:Bear is so using Vegas dollars.
Speaker 2:Doing cash flow. Yeah. Anyway, Max Meyer has a story that we should read through. Fred Smith and American Life. He says Fred Smith died on Saturday.
Speaker 2:He was the founder of Federal Express, which became FedEx, one of the largest logistics companies on Earth. Smith was an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word and an American patriot. He bent reality and created something entirely new, and he ran toward an extremely difficult problem. The fruits of Fred's work are as follows. If you give a box or document to FedEx by 6PM, you can have it delivered almost anywhere in The United States or Canada by 8AM the next morning.
Speaker 1:Imagine how key that would have been to business before
Speaker 2:Incredible. Incredible.
Speaker 1:Yeah. You're trying to do deals? If you give key customer.
Speaker 2:Give FedEx a package on on a Monday, it can be in Paris by Wednesday morning or in Shanghai by Thursday for a few $100. Most of us take overnight delivery for granted, but take a step back and the fact that we can essentially airdrop physical packages anywhere in the world is mind boggling. Smith's death is a reminder not to take the miracles of modern life for granted. They were built by people like Fred Smith. These are a few words about the man himself and the dazzling system that is FedEx.
Speaker 2:Frederick Wallace Smith was born in 1944 in Mississippi. Fred's grandfather, James Buchanan Smith, captained Mississippi River steamboats. Fred's father, James Frederick Smith, was the founder of the Smith Motor Coach Company, which would go on to become Dixie Greyhound Lines after an acquisition in 1931. From steamboats to buses to jumbo jets in three generations, the family stayed on the cutting edge of motorized transportation. In 1925, the elder Smith seeking to create the transportation line out of Memphis converted a truck into a small bus and drove it himself.
Speaker 2:Within a few years, James Smith had dozens and dozens of coaches. By the time he died suddenly in 1948, he commanded over 200. Wow. So he died four years after the son was born. Wow.
Speaker 2:So he basically grew up without a without a or maybe that's the grandfather. According to James Smith's obituary no. No. No. He's the dad.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. So according to James Smith's obituary That's terrible. Those 200 coaches each came to a halt during their regular regularly scheduled routes for one minute when the funeral began. The young Fred was just four when his father died.
Speaker 2:Wow. In 1962, the young Smith enrolled at Yale University where he was fraternity brothers with future president George w Bush. Bush asked Smith to serve as the secretary of defense twice, and Smith declined twice. Wow.
Speaker 1:Interesting because defense is, who who was the founder that we had on the show? I'm completely blanking on his name, the name of the company, and who invested in the company. But he had this like, defense focused supply chain management startup. Yes. It was one of our probably first
Speaker 2:You're talking about Rune, logistics. Rune. Yes.
Speaker 1:But it's something he said about
Speaker 2:Not not the AI poster. The legendary poster. Not the legendary poster. Logistics scene. Of OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Yes. So the young Smith was a member of the infamous Cloak and Dagger secret society.
Speaker 1:He is not beating the
Speaker 2:Secret society. Do you see allegations? It was at Yale that he wrote his first paper about his concept for using airplanes to deliver packages with a hub and spoke system. Wow. He's like, I got an idea.
Speaker 2:I got a business plan. I just need somebody to build it for me. I. E. That instead of point to point package transport, everything would be brought to a single hub by air and then redistributed.
Speaker 2:We talked to somebody about this on the show, how how now we think of it as, like, inefficient to bring everything to one place and then and then do the hub and spoke thing because now we have, you know, DoorDash and Waymo and, you know
Speaker 1:Last just last mile.
Speaker 2:All these different last mile solutions. But at the time, this was revolutionary. Everything would be brought to a to a single hub. Repeat that cycle every night while turning a profit, and you have a viable system for overnight delivery. The paper is said to have earned an average grade roasted.
Speaker 2:In 1966, the founder of FedEx graduated from Yale and volunteered to receive a commission in the Marine Corps. He served two tours in Vietnam. For his service in Vietnam, president Nixon decorated Smith with a silver star and a bronze star. The silver star citation read in part, unhesitatingly rushing through the intense hostile fire to position the heaviest con to the position of heaviest contact, lieutenant Smith fearlessly removed several casualties from the hazardous area and shouting words of encouragement to his men, directed their fire upon the advancing enemy soldiers successfully repulsing the hostile attack. Moving boldly across the fire swept terrain to an elevated area, he calmly disregarded repeated North Vietnamese attempts to direct upon him as he skillfully adjusted artillery fire and airstrikes upon the hostile positions to within 50 meters of his own location.
Speaker 2:Wow. What a life. And continued to direct the movement of his unit. Wow. What a badass.
Speaker 1:So at this point, 1973, he's 29 years old. He lost his dad at four. He goes to Yale with George Bush, then goes to Vietnam, does two tours, gets a silver and a bronze star.
Speaker 2:It's crazy.
Speaker 1:War hero.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And now he's decided to launch Federal Express in Memphis. Smith had studied military procurement and been working on the idea for nearly ten years after writing the Yale paper. He writes this paper. He's like, okay, ten years later.
Speaker 2:Most founders have an idea and they pivot in two months.
Speaker 1:So he writes this paper,
Speaker 2:gets an average grade ten years later. This is the same
Speaker 4:as company.
Speaker 1:The company launched with a fleet of 14 French Dassault jets, which delivered a few 100 packages on their first day of service. There we go.
Speaker 2:Wow. He's just like,
Speaker 1:just zero to one. According to FedEx, Laura Smith named his new service Federal Express because he hoped to attract the attention of the Federal Reserve Bank, a prospective customer. This is funny, like the name you would think Federal Express, you would just assume that it's an extension of the government.
Speaker 2:I did when I was a kid. I was like, just pretty smart. United Postal Service. But US You realize that States Postal Service.
Speaker 1:These are all same. FedEx. Like, it was just a better product experience than USPS. Even as a kid, you kind of
Speaker 2:feel it out.
Speaker 1:Feel it out. The system that Smith had conceived at Yale worked. It really worked and nothing like it existed. The USPS existed principally to deliver letter mail and didn't have aircraft. UPS was a giant of a ground delivery throughout The United The US.
Speaker 1:Federal Express though would specialize in rapid air delivery just five years after the first Federal Express flights. The company was list listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Wow. Today, the FedEx fleet consists of nearly 700 aircraft and about 200,000 vehicles, and FedEx employs half a million workers around the world.
Speaker 2:Wow. Every night at the FedEx super hub at the Memphis International Airport, hundreds of jets land at the airport.
Speaker 1:The ultra hub.
Speaker 2:Yeah. The super hub. Bringing packages to its many sorting machines. A few hours later, the jets take back off to every corner of The United States and the world at their destinations. The other half of the fleet awaits feeder aircraft to take packages to smaller airports and the FedEx Express trucks that take packages to their final destination.
Speaker 1:The financial finesse needed to actually make a model like this, not just lose massive amounts of money.
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can go out of business so many times. And, yeah, there is that story about him, almost losing money, going to Vegas, and then putting the the the treasury on black and winning it back and doubling it and making payroll the next day, saving the company. Maybe apocryphal. There's been rumors that maybe it was like, you know, some mob related thing and he took
Speaker 1:a loan Yeah. Tinfoil, yeah, the tinfoil hat explanation is like, you know, he
Speaker 2:either did Either way, got it done.
Speaker 1:He did some type of, you know, this is entirely internet speculation, it's probably not true, but it's possible that he, like, you know, was, you know, needed a reason to have a bunch of cash, right? Yep. And maybe did something else. But the story is incredible and it will live on.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Smith retired from FedEx in 2022 after almost fifty years leading the company. He has survived by nine of his 10 children and his wife, Diane, his daughter Windland, Smith Rice died in 2005 of a terminal cardiac condition.
Speaker 2:It's very
Speaker 1:And one has to think that his father, Mr. Smith, who died with 200 vehicles to his name, would be impressed that his son died with 200,000 vehicles to his name and a fleet of jets to match. So incredible story and may he rest in peace.
Speaker 2:Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. Also one of the greatest logos of all time, the FedEx logo, has that secret arrow in it. Love that.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Hidden there. Once you see it, you can't un not this logo. The the next logo, the more modern FedEx logo has the secret arrow in there once you see that.
Speaker 1:They're moving. They're moving.
Speaker 5:And there,
Speaker 1:if you wanna understand more about Frederic Smith
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:Go to Founders Podcast Yep. And listen to episode one five one, 151 on FedEx.
Speaker 2:Subscribe to Arena Mag to read more of, Max's writing. Mister Beast has rolled back the launch of his ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. He says, hey. Thanks for all your feedback on the ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:Okay. So clearly Yes. The thumbnail industrial complex Yes. Came for him hard. Yep.
Speaker 1:They're probably making, you know, death threats Yep. In the comments. It sounds like it was pretty intense. My thing here, you know, I I I have to agree with Lulu. This this is one of MrBeast's like many businesses.
Speaker 1:Right? In general, like, it's something he wants to create for creators Yep. And distribute widely. Yep. But the obvious reason that he should have kept the AI thumbnail tool is you're by if you can roll out AI in this way, you can save millions of creators that create YouTube videos a lot of money because many of them are not going be able to afford to commission a hand designed thumbnail.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And so, the the right thing to do for the creators broadly is to make a tool like this Yep. Available. Make it as cheap as possible, so as many people as possible can use it.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 1:And not give in to the small number of people in the world Mhmm. That make thumbnails like that that's their sort of day to day. Those people that make thumbnails, like, there's a lot of things you could do. You could adjust. You could go and make edit videos.
Speaker 1:Right? AI video editors are not that good today. Yep. You could do that.
Speaker 2:It's very odd because the yes. It's like we're we're destroying the job of a of thumbnail artist or real real thumbnail artist, but that's a job that was created like two years ago. Like, I I think I met the first, like, full I literally was at a YouTube conference just a few years ago and I met the first real thumbnail artist where that was his entire job, full time. Yeah. And and mister beast hired a few of those folks.
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 1:the whole point is the whole point is
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:That person can probably make much better thumbnails than AI Yes. Can right now. Yes. Still. And so For sure.
Speaker 1:Go up market.
Speaker 2:Yes. Work with
Speaker 1:creators that are willing to spend money.
Speaker 2:Yes. And
Speaker 1:make a make a make an entry level tool that anybody can use. Yes. To generate an AI, you know, an AI generated thumbnail. Yeah. Like it it just
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm surprised that.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean I'm surprised that he he rolled this back and gave in the Totally. But, you know, it it's very possible that the thumbnail industrial complex
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You know, has has a massive lobbying arm Yeah. You know, and and and said, you know, we're we're gonna work on getting, you know, your other businesses blacklisted. You know?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Like like, there's even a there's even a, like, a continuum of technology that exists within the pre AI thumbnail generation Yeah. Workflow. So at one point, I was making thumbnails the way people usually do compositing different images together, pick a background, cut yourself out of a green screen image, put that over the face over the background.
Speaker 2:That's like the standard thing. Put some text over it. At one point, I actually experimented with Ben shooting practical thumbnails. So we would go and design, like, of compositing a background, we would design a background image of wall and and print out pictures, pin them on the wall, and I would stand in front of the wall of images. And they didn't really perform better.
Speaker 2:And so I think, like, using a design tool like figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together is great. They're just using software in general is completely justified and and no one really talked about like, well, if you're if you're just compositing images Yeah. Then you're not filming them practically. All of a sudden, you're putting set decorators out of out of business because it's not like I was hiring a set decorator.
Speaker 2:I was just saying like, hey, Ben, me and you are gonna practically set up this thumbnail Yeah. And then take the photo.
Speaker 1:So here's here's the real evidence as to why mister beast should have kindly told the thumbnail artist to
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:F off. Okay. I ran a quick query here basically to try to estimate how many people actually earn a living making thumbnails by looking at platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and all these different things and then doing some type of So generally, we're estimating two to 5,000 people make at least a thousand dollars a month designing thumbnails across
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:All different types of platforms. Meanwhile, there are over 2,000,000 YouTube creators that are in the YouTube Partner Program. Yep. Meaning, they're making ad revenue. YouTube is a business for them.
Speaker 1:Yep. And so, you wanna serve the 2,000,000 people by giving them great tools that they can use to run better, more profitable content businesses? Or do you want to build your product for the thumbnail industrial complex, which is just a few thousand people
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:That are probably not even doing it full time. Yeah. Right? They're just earning earning some type of living. So Yeah.
Speaker 4:I think it
Speaker 2:gets to, like, the importance of, like, how how abstract should your title be? Because we were talking about this earlier. Like, if you if you if you did a job shadow on a lawyer in 1950 and then you did a job shadow on a lawyer today, it's probably a very different day. Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:A modern lawyer is like sending text messages and is on signal and sending emails and probably using ChatGPT to just search for things and pulling for stuff from LexisNexis instead of going to the archives. The old lawyer is like Hopefully, not teams Hopefully
Speaker 1:not dumping docs
Speaker 2:and ChatGPT. But still it's it's like a modern it's a very modern
Speaker 7:Something like that.
Speaker 2:Modern experience.
Speaker 1:Harvey Harvey.
Speaker 2:But we still call those people lawyers. We haven't changed the title. Whereas, a person
Speaker 1:Even Crosby, the company we had on is is just an AI native law firm. Yeah. So they actually have lawyers. They're just more efficient.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Versus versus someone who is like like super narrowly defined as like, I am a typist at a law firm.
Speaker 2:It's like, yeah, you lost your job, but did you really were you permanently unemployed because you insisted on being someone who uses a typewriter, or did you learn to use a computer? And then did you learn to dictate things to a voice model? And then did you learn and yes, there will be some job displacement but mostly it's like people flow into different categories all the time. So I would imagine that a lot of the real thumbnail artists that succeed going forward are the ones who either leverage AI or go into video editing or become creators themselves or do a million other things that they can that they can hire for.
Speaker 1:Because we would pay real money for a good thumbnail Absolutely.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. Right now.
Speaker 2:Yes. If you're a thumbnail artist, reach out to us.
Speaker 1:And you're
Speaker 4:trying to be We
Speaker 2:would love to have better thumbnails.
Speaker 1:Top 10 thumbnail designers in the world Yes. That wanna be paid a premium for it, we're happy to pay.
Speaker 2:Yes. Yes. Yes.
Speaker 1:Otherwise, we'll probably Yes. Just keep slopping it up.
Speaker 2:Slopping it up with our templates. Welcome to Studio DJ. What's going on?
Speaker 6:Hey, guys. What's going on?
Speaker 2:It's great to have you. Congratulations. Massive day. Massive day.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Massive day. Thank you. Thank you.
Speaker 2:Break it down for us. For those who haven't watched the full one hour video, we'll obviously link it here. But, what are the key announcements? What do you think it's important what what do think is important to share?
Speaker 6:Sure. Yeah. So the ten second summary of our update is that Neuralink is working reliably and has already changed the lives of seven human participants that we've been working with. It's it's really been a privilege working with all those participants individually. And that, you know, we sort of lay down our next set of milestones, which is most immediately going to market and enabling the scaling of this technology to thousands of people, eventually millions, and also to just go beyond the movement and expand functionalities into speech, vision, and hopefully getting to the speed of inner thoughts.
Speaker 6:And and then there's a little bit of a hint as to what the the path to kind of the the ultimate goal of neuronic would be, which is to understand and unlock the mystery of the mind.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Elon teased that in the opener, and I was somewhere between, like, tearing up from emotions and like pumping my fist with excitement because it feels like, you know, this is the main quest. You can see that he's lit up about this and you can see that he's, he's just it's just He felt incredibly back Yeah.
Speaker 4:To put
Speaker 2:it in another way. So, yeah, it was exciting. Give us a little bit of your background and how you wound up at Neuralink.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Sure. Let's see. So I grew up in South Korea. And growing up, I loved Ninja Turtles and Pokemon.
Speaker 6:I also really like Legos and just in general, taking things apart and putting it together. And came to The States at age 13 and studied electrical engineering. You know, I loved, loved, loved RF circuit design and computational electromagnetics. And I wanted to be an academic. My dad's a professor.
Speaker 6:And, you know, decided to go to grad graduate school in Berkeley to design the next generation wireless communication chips for cell phones. And then in the Bay Area, learned that people can start companies. I didn't know that was a thing that people can do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:You know, at the time, there wasn't really anything interesting happening. You know, no offense to other builders at the time, but I decided to finish my PhD and did my thesis work in neural implants and had the opportunity to join Neuralink as a founding team member when I was graduating, and that was almost nine years ago.
Speaker 2:What was the take me through some of the history. I mean, nine years to get here. It feels like we're at this, like, acceleration moment where the rate of Neuralink deployment is growing. This feels exponential. But in the in in those first nine years, what were the key milestones that you remember and the key turning points?
Speaker 6:Sure. Yeah. I mean, think a lot of people don't realize that when Neuralink started out, it was it was really just a group of, you know, six or seven of us and we didn't really have anything. We, you know, when I first showed up to the office at the time, we actually shared the office with, you know, OpenAI at the Pioneer Building in San Francisco. Wow.
Speaker 6:It was just a bunch of us. We had we didn't even have chairs and desks. So one of the first thing we did on the first day was to go out to, Staples and buy chairs. So, you know, incredible amount of work has kinda gone into, you know, really building the hardware, just kind of the foundational pieces to, you know, generate the dataset that's necessary for us to iterate on the device. And it took about, I would say, you know, year and a half, two years to get the first kind of generation of brain chips working on the lab, you know, at the time starting with smaller animal models with rats and then slowly graduating to bigger and bigger species, pigs, sheep, that starts to represent more the anatomies of the humans.
Speaker 6:And, you know, about four years ago now, we had the demo with one of our monkeys, pager Mhmm. You know, that that played the the game Pong. We called it the mind Pong. Mind Pong. One of the key moments to sort of demonstrate what what the capabilities to types of devices can be.
Speaker 6:And, you know, I think I should also maybe step back and say that, you know, Neuralink really is sitting on the shoulders of the giants here. You know, there's there's been decades, decades of research that's gone into the the field that we're in called brain computer interface or brain machine interface. And that really set the foundation for, you know, derisking the scientific aspects of what this could be. And, you know, there's obviously a lot of challenges in scaling that product, making it a product itself, and that's that's what we are taking on.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I wanna talk about the those giants, the shoulders of the giants that you're standing upon and how you think about the role of research and development in the public sector, in academia, playing into commercializable technologies. There's discussions about this with the NIH and biotech. Obviously, you know, SpaceX is the perfect it feels like the perfect story to me where, you know, who was gonna pay for a moon landing in the sixties? That no venture capitalist would would have underwritten that.
Speaker 2:But because we did that, we learned a lot. And then when it became time for it to be rolled out at scale, Elon stepped up with SpaceX and then the rest is history. So what can you tell me about the history of BCI in the kind of public sector side? Universities. Universities versus other stories that have been done at different companies that may have failed but contributed to community.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We Andrew Huberman on
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like a week or so ago talking about his concern around, you know, NIH funding and all the issues from a pure kind of health standpoint. Yeah. But this feels, you know, relevant as well.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, it's incredibly important. I mean, you see this even today. There's a very much an active research going on in the BCI field, you know, just sort of looking at the next frontier of different targets and different indications that can really open up opportunities for people that have, you know, various different types of neurological condition. And, you know, I I think the history of brain computer interface and, you know, the first product that Neuralink is working on, you know, we we named it telepathy because, you know, really it's enabling someone who has lost that mind body connection through diseases like traumatic spinal cord injury or ALS, which really over time is a horrible condition that really takes away every part of your muscles over time eventually leading to death.
Speaker 6:And those were the indications and what what Neuralink is able to do is place this device and these set of electrodes in a part of the brain called the motor cortex or the hand knob area. So basically, you're thinking about moving your hand or wrist area, there's a lot of neurons that are, firing in response to that, and we're able to record that intention and then translate that to, you know, moving cursor on the screen or robotic arm, you know, physical things in the space. And that was purely purely done as an academic research funded by Department of Defense, and and, you know, twenty, thirty years ago, and that really set the foundation for what is possible. And, you know, I think back twenty, thirty years ago, if someone were to try to get venture money out of that, I I don't think anyone would have pursued that scientific pursuit. And, you know, I there still continues to be a lot of research and important work that's gone into academia for other indications.
Speaker 6:And, you know, I I do worry about sort of what the future looks like on that front.
Speaker 2:Can you walk us through the current installation of the Neuralink product? I know that there were specific machines you had to build and kind of walk through because it's I I don't know if it'd be if semi invasive is the correct term. Is it extremely invasive? I don't know what term we're using, but it feels like you've done exactly what's necessary and not any further, but it's still significant. But you've done a ton of work to to derisk it.
Speaker 2:Right?
Speaker 6:Mhmm. Yep. Yep. So I guess maybe before we dive into some of the specifics of how Neuralink device is installed, Maybe let me take a step back and kinda describe why go into the brain in the first place and why that's important.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 6:And typically, analogy that's used in the field is that of the stadium. So, you know, you can really think about neural signals as an audio signals. The frequency spectrum is actually very similar in the analogy of neurons talking to each other, speaking different languages. It's actually a pretty good analogy. So the idea is that, you know, if you're standing outside the stadium, you can kinda get a sense of how the game is going based on the cheers and the boos of the crowd, but you won't be able to tell me exactly what's going on on the game.
Speaker 6:You know? How's the game actually going, what are the teams actually talking about, when are the key moments happening. And in order for you to really understand those types of information and get that type of information, you need to be in the arena. Right? Like, you need to actually drop the microphone inside the arena.
Speaker 6:And you can kind of think about what Neuralink is doing in a similar analogy. So, you know, you can get neural signals from, you know, on the surface of the brain or even outside of the skull without having to go through a craniotomy. But the the type of signals and the the resolution that you will get is gonna be much, much worse.
Speaker 4:Mhmm.
Speaker 6:And so there's a trade off there. So now we've decided from day one that we would want to get the highest signal, highest resolution, you know, neural signatures, because we we believe that that's necessary for kind of the long term mission of, understanding and unlocking the mystery of the brain. And in order to do that, you basically wanna make these, electrodes that are recording neural signals as small as possible and also as flexible as possible. So your brain, you can kind of think of it as a, sort of a consistency of a tofu or a jello. It's a and and it also moves a lot because every every heartbeat, every, you know, breath that you take, it's moving moving a lot.
Speaker 6:And that's one of the things that we have to learn in a in a in a hard way when we, you know, work with our participants. And so in designing these electrodes to be tiny, you know, fraction fraction of a human hair. So one of our
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 6:What we call thread, which is these tiny wires that have electrodes, are about one twentieth of a human hair. And they're also flexible, so they kinda move with the brain rather than, you know, if it's a rigid thing, you you can cause a lot of scarring as as you're breathing. So when you build these tiny tiny threads that are manufactured with conventional lithography tools in in our own, clean room facilities, now the question is, okay. How do you actually insert these? They're they're very small, and even the best neurosurgeons won't be able to insert them precisely in the location that we want.
Speaker 6:So we, ended up designing a surgical robot. And again, this was something that was kind of in the vision of the company from day one where, also looking at scaling this to millions, if not billions of people eventually. We we just did not see a world where there's some sort of robotics and some sort of not having human in the loop. So, you know, it's essentially this this precision robotic tool that has a bunch of cameras that are looking at the surface of the brain, making sure that you're avoiding vessels, and then insert manipulating and inserting these tiny threads one by one, you as quickly as you can in the the in the region of interest. And what ends up happening is that, you know, we currently go through a process to drill a hole in the skull called the craniotomy.
Speaker 6:And then we actually expose different layers of the tissue. You know, there's many different layers of the brain before you get to it. The first layer that you see is a dura mater. And then once you have the brain exposed, we insert these threads one by one with a surgical robot. And then the hole that we created on the skull is actually replaced by the implant base that has the battery, the computer, and everything.
Speaker 6:And then once you put the skin over, everything is completely invisible. Everything is completely wireless, and you basically become a cyborg. And that process takes about three hours right now.
Speaker 2:Can you talk to me about the how noisy the data is and if there's any advances in AI that help denoising of the data. I've seen, like, incredible, you know, demos of, oh, take this ancient black and white grainy image and just make it look amazing or even unblurring images. Like, we're actually at the CSI moment where you can be like, zoom in on that. Zoom in on that and it works. Has has have there been any developments in AI recently that have been relevant?
Speaker 2:Do you think that will happen in the future? Is it already happening, or is it just kind of a complete side quest?
Speaker 6:Yeah. No. There's there's a lot of, opportunities where AI can help, you know, in some ways understand the biological brain that it's inspired by Yeah. In in in really interesting ways. There are a couple places that we currently use AI.
Speaker 6:I, you know, I think on the on the electro side, unfortunately, there's not a lot that you can do. In the end, there's very tight margin in terms of signal to noise ratio. Mhmm. So there's a lot of innovations that we we've had in Neuralink on, you know, low power and low noise amplifier designs and being able to digitize that as quickly as possible into digital bits. But then you can apply a lot of interesting kind of signal processing as as well as, really, at the end of the day, this giant pipeline that we call neural decoding.
Speaker 6:You know, what is the human intent and how can you actually translate that to something useful? So, as of right now, we have a, you know, very simple, machine learning, you know, AI kind of there to, translate those thoughts and intents into something useful. And the thing that is actually very interesting is that it's not a static data points either. Right? So if you look at a human brain, you know, there's what's called neuroplasticity, means that from day to day or even depending on the context, like, there's difference in neural states that are represented even from the same brain region.
Speaker 6:And it's a learning system. Right? And as well as the the machine learning model, the silicon neural net is also learning about the brain, but also your brain is learning about the the silicon, basically, this new mode of communication that you have, gotten as a Neuralink. And in in many ways, I think there's there's some opportunities and we're starting to see kind of interesting trace where now that we have not just one but seven human participants, there's some similarities that we see in in kind of the dataset and there's opportunities where we can use that kind of base similarities to improve the calibration time. So meaning, you can't immediately use this device as is.
Speaker 6:You have to go through a calibration, make sure when you're thinking about moving to the left, we have a stream of neural signals that then say, oh, okay. You know, John is thinking about moving to the left, and this is what the neural patterns look like. And, you know, collect that data over time and then, you know, improve improve the system. But you do you do get drift over time due to the fact that, as I mentioned, your your state is always going through a plasticity. So
Speaker 5:Can you talk about as we yeah.
Speaker 1:Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can you talk about the the translation and the evolution of, like, what outputs you're actually trying to map to? Because if I remember Pong, Pong's unique in that it's it's just up or down. It's not an x and y grid that you're trying to control. You're just controlling up and down.
Speaker 2:But then when I've seen Nolan p one, it's clear that he can use a mouse in an x and y axis and then also click. And when I think about playing a video game, I'm kind of using all 10 digits. I'm, in one way, I'm thinking jump. In another way, I'm thinking send the message of just press the a button. And so there's a there's like how much data can you get out?
Speaker 2:Are you trying to increase that? Has that already increased? Is it is it going to kind of operate like a higher level of abstraction that then gets translated into computer use? Or or is it more like as long as I can puppeteer 10 fingers, then I you can translate those into 10 different actions and remap those and have people menu accordingly, like the like the investment banker who doesn't use a mouse.
Speaker 6:Right. So, the the update that we just released couple hours ago actually has some videos of, you know, what the latest capabilities with Neuralink, you know, that participants been able to do. I guess one thing that I will highlight is that there's a video of two of our participants playing a first person shooter game. And if you actually think about it, that's quite sophisticated control. There's a left joystick, for movement.
Speaker 6:There's a right joystick for aiming, and there's a bunch of different buttons for swapping weapons, reload, and shooting, etcetera, etcetera. And So so gonna
Speaker 2:make me cry. It's gonna make me cry.
Speaker 1:Team death team death match after with your boy after Well,
Speaker 6:the other thing that's actually kind of interesting is that, you know, at Neuralink, we also talk about, you know, going beyond the limits of biology and then actually achieving superhuman capabilities.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So that
Speaker 6:this is Oh, I was gonna say, like, we're actually already starting to see some signs of it.
Speaker 1:Interesting. So that that was my next question. Right now, you guys are generally focused on outputs, right? Controlling, an arm or or playing a video game or or navigating, some type of computer. At what point would you focus on or or start starting to spend more time around sort of the inputs into the brain?
Speaker 6:Yes. Inputs, so one of the major applications for that is a product that we call blindsight. Giving sight back to people that have lost And that's primarily going to be an input. So imagine basically someone who's blind being able to have a set of glasses with embedded camera that's capturing the scene. And that gets converted into a set of impulses that then stimulate the part of your brain called the visual cortex, which is on the back of your head.
Speaker 6:And it basically gives you your sight back. Right? Because the way vision works is that you have your lights hitting your retina converted to electrical signals. And at the end of the day, it's your brain where you're seeing and having conscious experience. But if you have anything break in that circuit, you can directly go to the brain, you know, stimulate those neurons that are giving you that visual experience and be able to see.
Speaker 6:And our plan is to have our first blind sight patient next year.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about some of the how you see the ecosystem developing around Neuralink long term, if you can speak to it at all? I'm just imagining that when I when I I've spoken to Nolan P1 and, I mean, he's, you know, incredibly benefit he's a huge beneficiary of of Neuralink, but also voice interfaces because he can speak. And so as that technology gets better, that becomes an extra tool in the arsenal. I'm imagining someone wearing, you know, glasses that act as blindsight, but then also having an audio modulation there that could help as well. And there's a whole bunch of other and I'm wondering if there's going to be, an ensemble of products or something that where, you know, Neuralink's a key key technology, but then there's other approaches that are actually more compatible or or complementary as opposed to directly competitive.
Speaker 6:Yeah. I mean, I think in the long future, you know, I I I think there's gonna be a lot of application layers that are gonna be built on top of Neuralink, you know, in a similar ways that when the iPhone was released. I mean, it was it was a cool device, but also it didn't really do a lot until you started developing a bunch of applications on top of it. So I can imagine a world where there's a Neuralink app store. And in the end, it just kind of provides a conduit both into and out of your brain, some ways of getting the human intent out to a set of machines.
Speaker 6:And that machine can be your computer's laptop or, you know, your computer's phones or prosthetics or some some other thing. And and I'm I'm really excited to kind of see what the the the creative minds can kind of think about in terms of application on top
Speaker 4:of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That it it feels like there will be, like, a hierarchy of needs within the App Store of, like, you know, some people might wanna use Neuralink so that they can see or talk or, you know, manipulate the world. But then other people might wanna use inputs to be like, every time I'm about to pick up, you know, bag of Cheetos, just like, you know, don't work. Like, make the arm not work. And so I can't I just can't physically pick up the It's an ad blocker.
Speaker 1:Domino. It's an ad blocker for like overeating,
Speaker 2:you know, or
Speaker 1:or on the TV.
Speaker 2:I love that. That's amazing. I I wanna talk about hiring. Obviously, this event was was not for the shareholders. It was for recruiting.
Speaker 2:Can you talk about the Neuralink culture? Can you talk about what skills you're looking for and what it takes to get a job at Neuralink today?
Speaker 6:Yeah. There's, there's one metric that we basically look for in in any candidate, and that's, it it's hard to actually get it down to a quantitative number but, you know, we try to look for literally ego divided by ability. So ego to ability ratio. And we want that to be significantly less than one. So you can have a little bit of ego but you better have, you know, 10 times, 100 times more abilities to offset that.
Speaker 2:That's amazing.
Speaker 6:And we we found that to be actually really important thing to look for especially given that, one, this is an extremely interdisciplinary effort. Mhmm. You know, it's extremely I don't think there's a place where you can have lunch with, you know, someone who's an expert in RF chip design to robotics to neurosurgery to animal care specialists. I I think it's a very, very unique space in that.
Speaker 2:And Not to mention FDA lawyers too. I'm always baffled by that that you guys are executing at such a high level regulatory I was gonna ask completely different discipline.
Speaker 1:And and I'm saying this to me, looking at NERLYNX, it has to be the hardest problem set in the world. Sure. It's hard. I'm trying to think of others and it's hard to come up with anything that really comes close to it. And I imagine that can be really daunting to some people that say, oh, I'd rather, I'll stay in the Elon orbit, but I'd like to just work on rocket science.
Speaker 1:You know, I'd just like to be a rocket scientist. Yeah. And so I'm, yeah, I'd be interested to get your view on it just because you have so many different factors, interdisciplinary nature of it, then, okay, well, you know, now the brain's actually moving and it's not moving consistently, but it's moving based on, you know, the way the heart's beating or or things like that. It just feels like the most difficult problem set and I guess that must be a good filtering function and that you don't want people to come in thinking that, you know, it's just gonna be hard but, you know, very achievable. You almost want them to think that it's borderline impossible but sort of push through that.
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people have misconception that Neuralink is a science company. Mhmm. We're really a technology and an engineering company.
Speaker 6:And, you know, I there's also this misconception that, oh, yeah. In Neuralink, you guys probably spend a lot of time talking about, like, future of humanity and, like, uploading consciousness and etcetera etcetera. Like, in some ways, yes. Like, we do talk about those things, but it's, like, point 1% of our conversation. Like, 99.9% of the time, it's about far core engineering problems.
Speaker 6:And in many ways, you know, brains moving, the material properties, mechanical properties of the brain, those are engineering constraints. But at the end of the day, it's an engineering problem. Right? So, you know, we're really looking for just hardcore engineers. And in many ways, we have a saying that you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work in Neuralink.
Speaker 6:You actually don't even need to have a prior experience in brain. I took some neuroscience classes in in grad school, but I didn't really know anything about the brain. It really is just engineering a great system to be able to study and peer into the dynamics of brain that, we all have that we don't really understand and haven't even scratched the surface of. So it's a technology first, engineering first company.
Speaker 2:For where the company is right now, is I love that ego to ability framework, but talk about interdisciplinary work. Is is there is there a world where you need RF engineers who are just great at that and they're not really gonna have to cross over? Or are you still looking for the types that can, you know, bring together different ideas from different disciplines and actually bridge different groups? How relevant is that? I'm sure that's important at the executive level, but, like, you might just be in a stage where, you know, you need to go and solve a key problem in a narrow domain and so you're really looking for just someone who's fantastic at that.
Speaker 2:Has that evolved over time? And and can you speak to that?
Speaker 6:Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Neuralink is still a very small company. You know, we have 300 people total across Austin and Fremont. And, yeah, there are definitely a set of problems where I would say we we need GPUs, so people that are very specialized in things.
Speaker 2:Go ahead.
Speaker 6:Or sorry. CPUs. Yeah. But, yeah, like, we're still we're still we're still looking for, way more GPUs.
Speaker 2:Yeah. It it I mean, you're hiring for UI UX here, but then also clinical and surgery and robotics and ASIC. That's fascinating. Firmware electronics. I'm just looking through it.
Speaker 2:Machining. It's really like, if you're good at anything, it seems like as long as you're great at it, you can go and work there. I wanna I wanna dig into ego a little bit more because I find that very interesting. How does how does ego manifest in in an employee? Like like, and is that something that can be controlled?
Speaker 2:Or or is it is it do you think it's some it's somehow innate, or can it be kind of coached out of someone? When I think of ego, I often think about someone who's maybe overconfident, but then they might go through an experience that humbles them and then they come out on the other side much lower ego. And so maybe you're not in the position to be the one to take that risk, but but how do you think about the shape of ego as just a human trait? I mean, you're kind of studying the brain, so it's an interesting question from a philosophical perspective as well. I might also consider launching the ego app Yes.
Speaker 1:In which you can dial it dial it on the Neuralink app store just dial it up and down.
Speaker 2:Hey. I'm getting I'm getting a I'm I'm I'm going in for a job in Neuralink. Turn this down all the way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Or if somebody's joining TVPN and we think they're super talented, the ego is too high, I can say, well, you're welcome to join, but we're gonna dial it back. You gotta install the app. Yeah.
Speaker 6:People learn. I I I've I've seen this time and time again, especially especially people that are, you know, earlier in their career have, you know, a lot of opportunities to kinda shape how they work within an organization and that, you know, really, it's not about pushing for your ideas, but it's pushing for what's best for the company. And I I've seen that change. And, you know, I think once you have sort of like, it it really just fosters a a great environment where people, you know, debate the merits of ideas rather than, you know, kind of putting sort of their ego in front so that it becomes sometimes, like, not a technical discussion but an emotional discussion. And but, yeah, that's that's certainly coachable.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. I want to talk about the patients. It was interesting to see how fast you moved on from spinal injury to ALS. Is there a third indication that you're interested in solving in the near term? Is this more of a question of just let's scale up because there's a lot of folks that really could benefit just in spinal injury and ALS?
Speaker 2:And what else are you excited about?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Even in there, it's like, does do you are you feeling like generalized breakthroughs that make each individual product, you know, advance
Speaker 2:to some degree? Or are there differences in for ALS versus solving for traumatic spinal injury?
Speaker 6:Yeah. There certainly is. For ALS, it is a neurodegenerative condition, so their condition just gets worse as the time progresses. So, you know, that makes it very difficult. Know, one of our participants is in what's called the late stage ALS, which means that he's effectively locked in.
Speaker 6:So unable to move, unable to speak even, and is connected to a mechanical ventilator to basically keep him alive. You know, in a similar way that basically Stephen Hawking was able to sort of live the last fifty plus years of his lives. And, you know, for them, they also have more fatigue and they have different needs as as you can imagine from someone like Nolan who can who's still very vibrant, who still can speak, who can who can still, you know, kind of engage with the world in different ways and their application, their needs will change as a result of it. But really, you know, what what we also talk about is that we're building a generalized input output device and technology for the brain. So, you know, for someone who is quadriplegic, which which means they're sort of paralyzed from neck down, whether it's due to spinal cord injury, whether it's due to ALS, whether it's due to brainstem stroke, whether it's due to some other things that have caused you to be in that state.
Speaker 6:We're hoping that it could be generalizable enough that with the same hardware, they may have different firmware and different applications that they, will find more, useful for their particular situation similar to how, you know, when 10 different people are given a computer, they will use that 10 different unique ways. And we're seeing that, and and that's something that's been, kinda wonderful to see the wide range of diverse use cases for different participants.
Speaker 2:Well, this has been fantastic. We'll let you get back to the very important work that you're doing. Where can people go to learn more about what you're hiring for?
Speaker 6:Neurlink dot com slash careers, and I would definitely encourage people to check out this, latest update that we've had. It's been an incredible progress in
Speaker 1:the past. It's lot of will put up a careers page and then people go there, work for an average about a year and a half or something like that. This actually feels like a career because if you're gonna have an impact, like, expect to stay you know, stay for
Speaker 2:a few decades. It's not it's not a jobs page. It's a career page. It's because you're gonna be here for forty years substantially.
Speaker 1:Well, we're very excited to follow on.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for joining.
Speaker 1:Thanks for the update.
Speaker 2:We'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 6:Hey. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Cheers. Bye.