Weekly Recap: Tesla Robotaxi, Mr. Beast's AI Tool, Yacine, The Social Network 2, Neuralink Update

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Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI Robo Taxi launch in Austin, Texas.

This afternoon was the big technology news.

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 show. I sent him the link. We'll see if we can bring him in.

Hey, there he is.

How you doing?

Perfect timing.

How's it going guys?

Can you see the, what's happening here?

Let me see. Can you see it?

Yeah, wow. Wow.

Yeah, there you go.

Amazing rider right here as well.

Okay.

Got some sick, sick glasses on, but yeah, we're, we're in the Robo Taxi right now. This is my fifth ride. I'm also here with Harry from the uk.

Oh, hey, what's going on?

He's a fan of the channel. Yeah. So yeah, this is my fifth ride. It's been amazing so far. 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 the thought process of like, hey, we want to make sure we have a really good launch. We want to 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. 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. And that, that's, is that, you know, for, for a lot of people that have been following the company, a lot of us knew this day was going to come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, you know, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road. But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kind of like this is, this is wild. This is wild. So is that better?

The stock is up 9% today.

9% today. Wow. Yeah.

You'll welcome everybody.

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? Did you need to go through a pre registration to get onboarded? It feels like it's not completely open access just yet.

Yeah. So yeah, we were invited. 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, no problem. 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 in its use case and I'm showing you guys here just on the road, hopefully. Does it come across, can you guys see the road, how it's driving? Yeah, very steep. Yeah, I think, I think Tesla very specifically started this very small, but now if you go. Their zip code and their phone number and email address so they can sign 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. But so far it's very small. Small geofence area, small group of people. And I think, I don't know how many cars they have on the road, but I doubt it's more than 10 right now. We're at a four way stop right now and it's navigating that, no problem. But yeah, 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.

It works.

It just takes you around and there's

no one there and you're like, it's wild that we got full self driving cars before reliable cell coverage in major cities. You're breaking up a little bit.

I mean, I have one more question. We'll let you go. Yeah. I mean what's remarkable about this is not just that it's a self driving car, but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 Model Y. Is there anything, are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket added to it, extra cameras, anything?

Nothing, Nothing. I mean there's different software, but I mean that's just, that's a software update, right? There's 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 blown. 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 420 and it's driving me around the bestselling car in the world. Like that. That is, that's a weird thing to process 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, et cetera, et cetera. No, the, the cost structure for this thing is, is the scale that Tesla has been able to achieve. That same car is going to drive itself. Right. And that just breaks everything because their cost per mile plummets. The method they've taken as far as training, the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than who can.

And they have the cars.

Right. So Tesla makes as many of these cars every five hours that Wayo has on their fleet total.

Right.

And that's the mind blowing piece of it. And way more 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, but the scale piece is the challenge. And it 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 hanging out. You know, it's like, it's monumental. This is really a monumental thing for them.

This is like Disneyland for tech bros. You can just keep taking rides around all day long. Yeah.

This is amazing.

This is like. Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, brother.

Yeah, dude.

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. Now with self driving, they're going to get into the human or robot space. 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 it's just such an honor to be part of this release.

Truly, it's an honor.

Historic. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for calling in. This was great. Yeah, we'll have fun out there.

Bye.

Talk soon.

Thank you, guys. All right, bye.

Bye.

Yeah, the scale of this thing, I Mean, 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 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 robo taxi. And you love to see it. 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 the main mission.

Pot of gold.

Pot of gold. Anyway, there's some other, there's some other

power Bottom dad says time will tell, but my bet is that this signals the death of the Waymo, leaving Google in a $20 billion hole and likely Uber as well. Very dramatic. I'm not, I'm not. I think Power powder Power Bottom dad is a very strong poster and, you know, the competitive dynamic is really heating up. I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities. Right now it's Sounds like it's 10ish cars in a very, very small area, but again, they could potentially scale a thousand times faster than Waymo. It's all just going to come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes. George Hotz last week was saying that Waymo is Artela operated. 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. 1.2 or something sort of overseeing than

a taxi cab because Taxi cab only has won.

Yeah. So the real question will be, is Tesla doing teleoperation as well? Do they? How long will these companies need to do that? But once things are really working and they're safe, Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once.

The Social Network 2 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 fun.

Definitely a main character.

Andy two Cents Money is writing some jokey dialogue here. He says, sorry, I left my oura ring at South Park Commons along with my eight sleep burner phone and bored ape ledger wallet. You absolute D sell. It's pretty funny to reimagine it, but interesting. We have a little scoop here. We actually got Our hands on the. On a couple pages of the new script.

It was left at the gym.

Yes, and we're in Hollywood.

We're in Hollywood. Where we are. And we're fairly confident it is the. It could possibly be.

This is The Social Network 2 Official. Official dialogue. Yeah, they haven't shot it yet. So we got the 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.

Sounds great.

So this happens to be taking place

in Mark Zuckerber office at night in the Meta hq.

Yeah. 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 and Nat opens the scene. You've open sourced llama, Mark. 70 billion parameters running in 8K token, context, windows and word. There's a 405 billion monster stage still in the lab.

Open source isn't unleashed, Nat. It's a guided evolution. We publish the weights so the community can help tame them.

Community? A sizable slice of fair hopped to startups like Mr. All. How's the village supposed to ride the beast without many of the original wranglers?

Talent moves, ideas stay, group query. Attention. Scaled rotary positional embeddings with NTK aware stretching. This isn't incremental, it's a step change.

Meanwhile, Yan's out there talking about non auto regressive world model hybrids, saying the next wave won't be token by token race. He's ready to retire your thoroughbred, Mark

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.

Your manifesto just made every kid with a decent GPU a potential sorcerer hugging face. Downloads are exploding. What's next? Magic carpets?

Exactly. Open weights. Let the village scale faster than our walls ever could. Purple Llama covers us cybersec eval, Llama guard, full red team cycles.

You know Purple Llama isn't bulletproof, Mark. OpenAI's minting cash behind APIs and you're handing out multilingual long context models for free.

The Llama 3 Community License only restricts firms over 700 million monthly active users. Innovation rises bottom up. Ask Ahmed. Ask Joel. Democratization is the point.

You're wagering north of $60 billion in AI capex on that democracy. It's a Big bet, Mark.

Not a bet. An ecosystem Scout is multimodal. Maverick is video first. Laura Chlora. NFR quantization. LLAMA derivatives already power agents, rag stacks, university labs.

It feeds itself provided the community keeps aligning with you.

Alignment happens in real time. RLHF, dpo, rl, rl, aif. This is an ecosystem, not a monopoly.

And if that ecosystem birth something you can't steer.

No one controls progress, nat. We guide it openly, transparently. No secret rooms. Just a billion hands shaping what's next.

Then hold on tight and hope we're ready.

We will be. We're building it together.

And scene really jumps off the page.

Wow. Riveting.

Yeah. Hollywood's bathroom.

Hollywood's back. This might save Hollywood.

Yeah, I think this will said that I'm Oscar bait right here for totally, totally sure.

Anyways, you know, maybe. Maybe somebody just left this as a. In, you know, as a prank. Knowing we'd find it, knowing we'd read

it, but entirely possible.

It's entirely possible. This is, you know, totally real.

Next up, we have yep, seen. Welcome.

Chat has been waiting.

Yaxine, how are you doing?

What's going on?

You are on mute.

No audio yet.

I do love. We got the video, we got the

weight set up in a. Is that a weight rack or.

Looks like it.

Hello. Test.

Yeah, we can. How you doing?

Testing.

Good. I haven't set up my DAC yet, so.

No, you're good.

You're good. What's happening?

Let me just ask. Let me just check. Like, let me just look at something on.

Sure. Yeah, we'll. We'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out.

Poster who needs no introduction.

He needs no introduction. Founder of Ding Board A. What are the name based of the

hosts of John and Jordy?

John and Jordy. Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yasin. Apologies.

Good to meet you.

Hello. Thanks for. Thanks for the introduction. I appreciate your time as well. And I'm like, actually a huge fan of you guys. Someone I used to work with introduced me to guys, so I found a lot of enjoyment.

That's great.

It's great to have you on. How have the last few days been

A little bit stressful, to be honest. I've slept three hours every single night because posting on Twitter has been so fun and unfortunately for.

Fun or stressful?

Yeah, so both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting and that's not good for me. But I will basically just not stop Posting.

Yeah.

But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially replace your salary you were making in the seven figure mark? You gotta really ramp it up a little bit.

I used to go on 4chan and these like people will be like, yeah, I'm like making like a million, like a mil, 2 mil at these AI companies. I'd be like, no way. There's no way you guys are making 2 million of these AI companies. And I started making like 7 digits at an AI company. I was like, wait, like these guys weren't actually lying. Like you actually make that much money at these AI companies? And it's like pretty fun work too as well. So yeah, for what's worse, like I didn't work on AI, I worked on like bugs that really annoyed me on the app and that's why I joined actually. So I joined X because there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me and I fixed quite a lot of them. So I'm pretty happy like with the work I've done.

X. X is the product I use that I find the most bugs yet. Am not just. I don't abandon the product. Like that's how addictive.

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, right, tail users, right? Like you guys are famous. Like you know the podcast of the tech bro podcast, Sorry, the host of the tech Pro podcast, you guys are famous. 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. But for most people, like an engineer who's like creating a test account and like clicking around, it's not going to be buggy for them. And for 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 understand what their pain points are. And for what it's worth, X does a really great job. I mean, it's actually remarkable how well X is run as a company and just working there. I got to learn a lot about how to get engineers motivated and really get shit done. It was awesome work there. It was super.

How do you wish you had the opportunity? You were working remotely the entire time 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.

Yeah, so the person who hired me, like, was like, dude, like, let me tell you, you're going to 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 wife was pregnant. So I let them know, and congratulations, because. Yeah, so. So kid is born now. He's seven months old. So that's. By the time I joined, I was like, okay, well, we're gonna. I'm gonna work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move. But as the kid got older, my priorities started changing a bit, and I was kind of like, considering and talking to my wife about, like, different ways I could come to politics. I could totally work remotely, like, and be productive. I think after the X&Xai merger, the information Attractor got so strong, and the talent at xai, they were like, ship. They're shipped so much. Like, I used to be able to read every commit. 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 the AI people joined, it was just like, literally no way. And, I mean, I told one of the XAI guys this. It was like, you know, when. When you have, like, dinosaur and, you know, which was the Twitter code base, and you get extreme pressure, which is XAI talent. You get diamonds. That's how you get diamonds. I was so bullish after that. Like. Like, they're really, like, they're really pushing on it. It's, like, really awesome. I want. 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? And he was like, super. I mean, fortnite, by the way. Like, my manager was reading between the lines, totally surprised. Totally surprised. He looked super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him. But if you're watching this, it's okay, dude. Don't worry about it. Seriously. Some people, probably the best thing, I think, working at X is I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long. And when I joined, I was like, oh, these guys are onboarded onto everything. But that wasn't the case. My manager literally could just figure anything out it felt like he was already onboarded onto everything. But he could actually just read the code, look at the logs and figure out what the problem was. But then there 40 minutes and it didn't matter what it was. 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. He's like a really awesome guy. I think he was surprised. I. I guess, like, I guess I kind of, kind of guess what happened, to be honest. But it doesn't really matter. But anyways, like, it's been really great working there. So I was, I was gonna go to visit. Actually we were planning to visit Palo Alto. My wife is going, going on a trip with her mom with a baby. And I was like, okay, like that's one week. I know. I'm not, I don't want to go on the trip because I had work to do. Not anymore. So probably going to go and it's going to be pretty fun. But like I was going to, I was planning for that week to go to Pal. Pal Alto. But. But also my manager was like, can you come like next week? And I told my wife and she's like literally like, you know, baby in her arm, like, you know, trying to like scar 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 kind of getting used to it.

But yeah, 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 Dingboard and then I want to talk about the future. Is that the exciting.

Okay, sure. So you guys can. I'm probably going to like work a bit more on Dingboard. Um, there's a bunch of bugs that I want to fix. I just didn't have the time with my full time job. Uh, so dingboard.com is the best app ever. Dingboard.com if you want to make a meme in seconds, 15 seconds.

Meme.

I was paid user. Something happens.

I was a paid user. I loved it.

Thank you very much for paying.

Actually very, very good.

You know, like your money actually helped pay for this. Like, this is John coogan.

No way.

2% of this is John Coogan, right?

No, it was.

And give him naming rights. It is naming rights. Sell the naming rights.

Crazy 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. And then they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom. 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 Dingboard, but I

was actually like, in the process, when I joined them, I was in process of rewriting it so that I could deploy on web, like applications. Sorry. On iOS and Android, it's actually like if you guys, if you guys are a nerd, there's something called Sokol. Okay. Sokol is made by the Swedish guy. I think he's retired kind of. He works three days a week and on the four days that he, he's working on this cross platform GL graphics library, like I guess like Transpiler. So you write it in one GL language. It will produce the metal version for iOS and 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. And then John Coogan and Jordy can make memes in seconds and get more

followers on x.com this is the future I was promised.

Yeah, it feels like incredible. Founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes.

I mean, like the reason I made it was because I was like making memes on my software engineering diagramming tool. And then they like started adding a watermark and I was like, this.

Yeah.

Ruined my meme making tool. I am going to war. And then I remember, I 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. Oh, it's still there.

There. 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. Oh,

he's not. But he's actually. He's on Passport with Ben Thompson. But anyway, he's the man and we love him.

And.

But the, but the big question is like Dingboard, you're super popular online. Why didn't you go and raise like $15 million from. Gross.

Dude, man, that sounds so lame, man. Like, raising money with managing people on. I'm so not down. I'm so not down. I deserve, 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 this one in, which is why it's unplugged.

Yeah.

But, like, I could serve literally a million people.

Okay, so you're gonna blow your mind. You're gonna blow your mind with this. But sometimes you can raise 15 million and 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 many people.

Yeah. So you could raise like 50 on 500.

Exactly.

You know, take.

Take 40 million off the table. Yeah. Just. Just to kind of set yourself up. A cushion. They call it a cushion safety.

Like, I feel like you want the opposite of that. I would never trust a founder who asked for that example.

He's joking. He's joking.

Yeah, I'm joking. Never happens.

You don't. You don't want to founder with money. You want a founder with no options. You want to found her like Roy Lee from Cluey.

New Dad. New dad. Or. Or New Dad. Gotta figure it out.

Gotta figure it out.

I've gotta figure out. I. I need. I need a 2 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 10 years. But like Roy Lee, for example, CEO, I think of Clulee.

Yeah.

He got, you know, kicked out of his university. A disgrace, tartan 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.

Right?

Like, I got a kid. I would have written a check without even thinking. I don't even care what the he's doing.

Yeah, you're. You're a Roy Lee defender.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah. So here, here's.

Here's a. I want a number for dingboard. How many users did you get? How much money were you making? Give us some sort of number so we can ring the gong for you.

The peak MRR was like, like, I mean, I don't remember. I don't remember not raising. And I don't want funding. Probably is raising 10k. Indie developer.

Let's hit the gong for you.

Let's fucking go.

Let's go.

Honestly. Honestly, reading that for your fans too, because. Because you're you. You genuinely. You're you're an Internet celebrity and you have real fans. I. The question. The question I have for you is because you're a Roy Lee defender, what's your line between balancing, you know, engagement, sort of like rage baiting versus, you know, you sound like much more even keeled. You know, on the show right now.

All my rage baits. Here's what makes people so mad that I actually believe what I say. I'm not saying it piss people off. I really believe it. Like, I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry. Makes them just like. And. But like, when you're honest, like, I mean, like, you know, I'm a big believer in, like, honesty and stuff like that. And like, like, when you're honest, like, you kind of like, also the same amount of haters that you gain, you kind of 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 kind of drown it out. So, like, I mean, the reason I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video. Right around the time I got fired, I got like, an email which was a bunch of, like, really scary legal words like non disparagement. I had like, to like, Google what this meant. Like, I even know what disparagement meant. I was like, okay, I'm not gonna sign. I'm gonna wait for a lawyer. And. And then Roy Lee did this thing and I realized, like, you know what? Like, Roy Le is a legend. He's got skin in the game. Like, Royal Lee has to win. So you know what? I'm just gonna be. I'm gonna be a. I'm gonna be a 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 like, you know, Elon's done. 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 want to play with all the engineers. Like, if I was him, I would just, like, goof around with fun toys. But, like, he's actually trying to get to Mars. Like, you know, like, 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 mil. I'll be like, all right, 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.

So I don't know what you want.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Right? So.

But, like, I think that's what happens to a lot of founders. They get enough money. Like, Palmer Lucky. Palmer Lucky. It was like a chip on his shoulder. He was like. He was like, jason Cal. I'm gonna get that guy. Like, I'm so pissed. I'm gonna do it again. And he did it again. Did it again. By the way, I love Jason. I love Jason. I love Palmer Lee. I love both of them. And you know what? Jason is like the. It's like. It's like, you can't have Batman without the Joker, right? You can't have Palmer Lucky without Jason.

He's the Joker of tech, okay?

He's a joker for Palmer Lucky. For me, the Joker would be the middle manager, who I pissed off by complaining about Android bugs.

We're getting into the story where we're learning what actually happened.

We're unraveling it.

Don't worry about it. I never said anything about my don't worry. Don't worry about it.

Yeah. What's next?

Yeah, I mean.

Yeah.

So what's. What's next? All in on Dingboard building out the team.

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. This is the Dingbot.

The Dingbot.

The Dingbot.

See this?

What does it do?

I3I 3D printed this.

What does it do?

This. This is an ARM ESP32. Attached to a motor driver. Attached to a stepper driver, stepper motor. Some 3D printed things that I made with Dinkad. By the way, dingcad.com. it's currently down because I had no time to work on it, but I have, like, a local host version.

Ding Cat is coming back.

Breaking news sticks, no offense.

Oh, here's. Here's the genius of it. Okay.

It is.

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, 30 years, right?

Yep.

But with popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month. You have to buy a new one.

Oh, it's Ashburn.

There we go.

There we go.

Get them in the boardroom.

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 bucks 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 bucks. You can just buy another one. It's like, that's the feature.

You're not worried about. You're not. You're not worried about, you know, getting paperclipped by abusing your Dhabi robot because it'll come back to get you at some point.

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 programming it, right? Like, this is like a soft problem, by the way. Like the. No, we're not gonna get run away. I think the real problem with, like, AI and stuff is like, YouTube shorts. Have you seen these kids all like. Like, I saw a kid like, so he dinner so with my family. This kid was like, at the. Trying to get to the bathroom. 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 like. Like not clicking around but like. Like reaching around. 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.

So you're in retirement. Is there anything that could get you to come out of retirement? Could you?

There's anything about retirement I was quoting yesterday.

I was quoting a hundred million dollar offer. I mean, to get you back into a mega corporation. Yeah, it's going to take. Take 80 million, 100 million, 120 million. What gets you to take the job?

I think, like, I probably, like, find it really hard to say no. That's like 2.5 probably, like. But I don't think, like, the companies I would work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I'm thinking they do.

Well, what are those kind of companies? What are those kind of companies?

I'm talking.

You can run a process.

So I know you don't want to work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number?

All right, I'm going to just start doing an auction here. Okay. I got a message for 500. 500. Do I have a 600? 600. All right, 700.

Our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise 15 million. With 5 million in secondary, I could

raise Money like super easily. And like I could also get a job super easy. I mean I have friends. The thing is like I'm a very honest hard worker. Like yeah. 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 like for me, mission alignment is super important. Like I really need to like use the product to actually enjoy it.

Sure.

So I sold some dingboard T shirts on Shopify and I'm like aligned with like Toby's. Awesome.

Yeah.

And then Cohere I think is like a really interesting place to work for because they're on the come up. But mostly like, I mean.

Hold on. Yeah. Break down cohere. That. That is not the common narrative. I mean I love Aiden and I. I think it's incredible. But, but it does seem like, you know, there's got to be some sort of like geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out.

I think I just think they're based.

Dude.

Like I just. Yeah, I just think face.

Yeah. So it's just pure, pure culture. They'll figure it out.

Yeah. I mean like, you know, like it's, it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or like California, Canada. And I think they're cool.

Like they kind of. They need a poster in residence. You could basically. You could a thousand x their their impression.

Do you listen to death Grips?

Oh yeah, yeah. It goes, it goes, it goes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because. Because Aiden's a big Death grips guy.

So that just bumps cohere on top of Shopify.

Yep, yep, yep. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. He did a. He did an interview in a Death grips T shirt. I saw it and I was like, that's amazing. This guy's a killer.

But what, what's, what's wrong with just becoming a full time poster? Getting a substack set up, getting a nice.

I think I'm gonna try to become like an actual billionaire. The dingbot thing is not a joke. I'm actually going to actually do it.

That's cool.

And I'm not gonna raise. I think I can do it. I probably can find people 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 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. And I'm pretty good at software and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard. Clearly it's not hard enough to start.

It's easy, actually. You proved with that that it's easy.

Yeah. Explain that with the reinforcement learning for robotics, are you thinking like you're going to do stuff in simulation and then transfer the now the knowledge back with reinforcement learning. Are you doing the thing that Dylan Patel was posting. Posting about with like the robots on the, you know, on the harnesses, trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data? Like, what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement?

So I don't think like humanoid robots is what I would do. I think I would do robots for things that annoy me. For example, dandelions on my lawn. And I would do whatever is possible. Like talk. I have a pretty good solid network. Like, talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich. Sure. I don't know how to pronounce it.

Yeah.

And just be like, hey, like, just give me, feed me the papers and like some shitty Python code. I'll clean up up and make good. Sorry researchers, you guys.

Extremely not. Friedman code coded. He's out of the game. Someone's got to build the robot that picks up the.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

What now? Because it's like I'm sick of like going outside and just, you know, just like poking out all these dandelions. I'm actually so sick and tired of it. And it's so easy to build this. It's like literally 3D printer. Like you could, you can even 3D print the wheels. Like you can get like 5 bucks on Alpha AliExpress and ESP32 costs like 3 bucks. I just impulse buy them. I like, get my ex ad revenue payout and I just like spend the whole thing on AliExpress.

My.

My house like constantly has like these random AliExpress packages. I just like maybe build like a Minecraft sorting system in real life. Like.

Yeah, I feel like, I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home depot for like 300 bucks, you know, kind of new.

I could also sell it for 25 bucks on subscription and you get a new one every month.

Oh, there we go. Yes.

It's like if it breaks, it's like I literally will tell the users, hey, hey, I'm just, you know, a dude and there's a CNC shop here that does wood. So like they do wood cnc. So I'm going to make the robot chassis out of. Out of maple wood, because there's a lot of maple here in Ottawa. And I'm going to laser, you know, laser on, like, made in Ottawa on it, 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 hard. But I guess, like, the, The. The core insight I have after doing Dingboard and like, honestly, 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 going to try to do this. I'm going to realize like, holy shit, like, all the CAD software fucking sucks. And I'm going to build it because I can. And, like, you know, with Gemini 2.5 Pro, just, like, ripping on my credit card.

What about Grok?

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. So 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. Avoids using too many if statements. Stop. Just stop using if statements. And like. Yeah, yeah.

So. Okay, okay, so.

But. But here's the thing.

You need.

You're.

You want to build a bunch of stuff. You need some cash flow. Why not set up. Why not set up, you know, some type of subscription you have? A lot of.

A lot of people want to give

you $10 a month so you can have.

I mean, honestly, that was the Dingboard subscription that I signed up for. It was like, support this guy who's doing something. Something cool.

Yeah.

The issue is Dingboard is so hard to sign up for. How do I even sign up for Dingboard right now? Okay, never.

Okay, first of all, Jordy, never doubt my conversion levels ever again. I am a conversion. I can convert anything to anything. I am, I am. I am a conversion God. Okay, go to dingboard.com.

you're so good. You're so good. You don't have a buy button because you want to inspire yourself to grind harder.

Go to dingboard.com.

okay, I'm here.

I'm here.

Sign in first. Do I have to sign in?

I don't even have to tell you what to do.

Legend.

Legend.

All right, I'm signing in. I'm signing in. Okay, I'm here. What do I ding scribe? There we go. Once you sign up, ding scribe, 12.99 per month. You got to get your numbers up. Dude,

I actually don't have the code. It's like on my server, you got

to do what Google does. It's 500amonth, but they give you six months at half price. And then it just auto converts up. Yeah, that's interesting. That's the real ticket.

Or I could just double the price.

Yeah, yeah, but the price should be, you know, cheap on day one and then just get more and more. It should go up by 10 every month.

Dude, I'm not doing that. That's some YouTube shorts kit. Surprise. Some kids brain.

All right, I. I'm a ding Pro subscriber.

Subscriber.

I'm ding.

No, dude, you're a ding. You have to get. Dude, Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a ding scriber. You're part of the crew.

I'm ding maxing.

Okay, talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2.5 Pro. Are you cursor guy GitHub copilot? Cursor.

Never. No.

Never say curse.

Okay. I have a custom framework I've written for neovim. So basically what it is is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have. So Claude and before Gemini was good. Claude and then OpenAI's models, they go down all the time. Like, infrastructure is hard to serve at scale. Like, I don't blame them. It's like, that's a hard problem to solve. So I have, like, always. I always have a model available. Like, even if both of them are down, like, I can hit deep seek over open router, right? Like, it's a facade.

Can you do that in cursor by just switching the model router?

Switching. Is there a hockey? So for me, it's like I have a weird. I mean, let me. Let me. Let me flex on you guys a bit. So this is my keyboard.

Flex. Flex away. Whoa. There we go.

Nice nanner, by the way. I got a homie from China to make it for me. And so basically, space. Was it space? I don't remember. It's all space. I is LLM provider, so that's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Space K is Gemini Flash, and it all renders in a single markdown file. And I've created commands for these models. So basically, like, depending on the fence, so three apostrophes and Then there's going to be the command name. So like edit file. I can basically give it into syntax to edit a file for me. And then I actually manually.

Sorry, is this open source? Like, you know, files up, like, can I install your setup?

So no, it's not open source. Mostly because people are going to start posting issues and I'm just not interested in fixing them.

Okay.

So I'm just going to do it for myself. I'm like, I'm pulling up the ladder behind me. Like I'm, you know, I know how much this is.

If it's not open source, you got a raise for it. It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here.

It is a cursor competitor and it's probably going to kill cursor if I open source it. But I'm not going to sell for money. I think what's going to naturally happen is like when people see me do use it, they're going to have ideas of their own and then they're going to build it for themselves. Okay. Like the whole point of. So it's a neovim plugin kind of. It's like also a server and it plugs into a bunch of. I'm good at software. So part of the, part of the problems with SO neovim 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 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. Cursor I'm sure, is a great product, but I'm just so particular about certain things. For example, I want to implement tree sitter across multiple files and automate adding files to my context. 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 in. 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 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.

What about you're going to make any products in the parenting space?

Yeah, so actually I have an idea. I had an idea. So 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. So go. I'm going to 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 want to make like a kind of like a radio E ink display. Kind of like an Etch a Sketch which you can write on but it synced to your parents Etch and sketch. So my wife, I will have one, I will have one and my kid will have one and he'll learn how to write because we'll right to each other over. Over distances. Right?

Right. Mess.

I think that's like a really cool idea. So I'm probably going to 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. Like, it's not that hard. It's actually not. Get a 3D 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.

Stop. Get ready. This is going to be a YouTube short. We're going to edit this.

Yeah, exactly.

This will be on TikTok maybe. Yeah, we got to get the Minecraft. Yeah, Minecraft, Speedrun and play surfers over you. Anything AI slob over.

How many kids do you want to have?

So as much as God allows us to have. So just leaving it up to God and. Yeah, that's how many kids.

Good answer.

That's great.

What else, what else do you have to say to the people while you're here?

Thanks for doing 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 doing live and stuff, like, it's a pain in the ass. So keep it up, guys. I know, like, thank you. And, and, and the, the, the, the live. The live. The video team at X are like generational talents. Like super, super good people. Like, so like just like find someone to like, like find a way to reach out to them so when you have any issues and like actually talk.

Yeah. 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 great. Come come back on whenever you want to talk about your project.

Yeah, we'd love to just hang out and chat.

Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate you guys and yeah, so keep it up. Thanks.

Yeah, we're. We're excited and, and I'm excited to be ding maxing.

Just absolutely.

Offer.

Offer a premium tier, like, I don't know, like 10 grand a month or something like that. And maybe we become, you know.

Oh, I mean, if you guys want to. I'll sell you right now, like spit handshake. If you want to put an ad on ding board your podcast. Let's say 12 grand.

12 grand. Okay, we'll talk to our. We'll talk to our cfo.

All right, all right, all right.

And our cfo. Our CFO will talk to your c.

But can we get the semi analysis deal where it's perpetual. It's 12 grand once and we get it forever because what if you.

Yeah. Is it a one time. Is it a one time or.

It's a great option. There's a lot of upside here.

It depends on how good your podcast is.

Yeah, okay. Okay.

Well, we're gonna keep working on it. Hopefully Dingboard keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together.

Yeah, absolutely.

We're excited to follow.

Awesome. Talk to you soon.

Godspeed.

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. You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it. You love to see the president talking to market.

Everybody's saying. Everybody's saying this is ridiculous. But it's never been tried.

People always say, oh, all that matters in oil price is supply and demand. Yeah, well, all you gotta do is say, hey, supply, supply go down. Hey, supply go up and demand go down and we will have lower prices. I mean, there is something to that

hasn't been tried before. It's worth trying something if you do signal.

I mean, there are stories about oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were going to be high and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation, for example. Like that does happen every once in a while. But yeah, very, very odd to post. And anyway, back on watches. The watches of espionage account says men who guide the destinies of the world wear Rolex watches. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff John Dan Razine Cain in situation Room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex gmt. Well, you need a GMT because you got to know what time it is.

We got to start doing these.

This is a good strong. I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the, the break cracking your knuckles, but this is special. It's four points of attack. I mean, I guess they did hit four sites, so you got to point to all of them.

Yeah, that's right.

Interesting.

Well, it's been an eventful morning. Iran attacked US base in Qatar.

Yes, that's the latest.

And people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties. Apparently all the missiles were taken out in the air.

Yep.

And this could lead to a de Escalation.

Yeah.

And a return to a steady state of tension.

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 want to 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, do whatever you can. But missiles, bombs, nuclear bombs, these things should not be relevant in the future. But Dhruva has a breakdown of this. The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at 4 Dow represents over one year of US production capacity of the GBU 57 bunker buster. Its primary explosive, AFX 757, 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. 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 Weisenthal 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. I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by. We didn't actually.

Russian president comes out and said, hey, we might just give them a nuke.

That would be bad.

Which would be bad.

That would be bad.

The other thing that's interesting, the Fordo nuclear facility destroyed before July. Polymarket is only sitting at a 32% chance, still on 4 million in volume. So I think people are basically saying, calling that it wasn't actually destroyed, or at least that's what the market is saying. So he's impacted, but not destroyed, even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed total annihilation.

And up next, we 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, of nuclear energy infrastructure. So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show. Mike, how are you doing on.

Great to have you.

What's going on guys?

Honored to be with you. You guys are famous.

You're famous too. Thank you for joining.

I used to be, man.

I used to be.

Now I'm just, you know, I'm a.

Has been. You're a technology brother. You're one of us.

You're one of us.

I mean that's actually a great place to start. I want to talk about your career in 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? 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 got here to this moment?

Yeah, I think obviously from Northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay. And I kind of 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. I was a senior in high school during 9 11. And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that, 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 non academic 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 just really an awesome experience, couple of great deployments, learned a ton, was a counterintelligence human intelligence officer. And kind of similarly, when I got out of the Marine Corps and I worked on a presidential campaign, I worked in the Senate as a Middle east guy. Never thought about running myself. I 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 my initial reaction was, hell no. I mean, it 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 wouldn't be on TV myself. I kind of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician. I still don't think of myself that way. But honestly, it was the fact that it scared me that like, led me to do it. I felt. I felt like anything that forced you outside your comfort zone is good for 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 I'll swear I'll wrap up after this. I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me. I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected. 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 kind of always had in my head, I do a decade. And when I decided to leave, you know, Palantir 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 100% to enhancing deterrence, willing to say that we're the good guys, the commies are the bad guys. And I really felt like it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me that is now being surrounded by genius, like 20 somethings that make me feel stupid. And then a continuation of the mission. And I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing World War iii. And I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the warfighter every day in Palantir. So that's the short version and it's been really exciting.

Is that a typical 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 giving them the ideas? Because I feel like the story that most people tell is, is this guy, you know, wants power, wants to, you know, he's on a warpath. Everyone tells him no, and then he runs and gets elected. Or kind of sheer force of will, but. But which direction does it go more commonly? Was your path uncommon or is it more the norm?

Well, to be clear, I don't want to pretend like this was some pure off shucks, Mr. Smith goes to Washington. Clearly I was driven, ambitious, like, had kind of always had a drive my whole life and wanted to test myself. But honestly, it was not like I didn't think of the political domain at that point in my life. I think more often than not people are drawn to politics. It used to be the case that 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 farm team that would lead into Congress, and then you run for Senate and then you 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 9, 11 wars running for office, which created a cool bipartisan group of legislators that were willing to work together on stuff. 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, like, you know, you guys talk to a lot. I think people are just tired.

Everyone's a lawyer. It used to be a lawyer.

Yeah, Being a lawyer seems miserable to me. No offense, lawyers, but I don't know. And I will say finally I went in with the assumption that the fundamental problem with Congress was the people, 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're otherwise unemployable and like, you know, they're not like the greatest in the world. But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality, the talent as well, as is the patriotism. And I would say most people run for Congress wanting to serve the country, wanting to make a difference, wanting to do right by 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? 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. And that's really a problem because we need Congress to focus on the nuts and bolts of budgeting, of oversight, of reclaiming its authority from the Executive branch. I came to believe that kind of 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 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. I think a healthier balance would be If Congress, Article 1, which was envisioned by our framers to be the dominant branch of government. In fact, they were concerned that Congress should grow too powerful. They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs. Congress surrendering its power since the 70s 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 and why people are turned off by it.

I think in our lifetime, do you think we will see term limits in Congress at all? It seems like a lot of smart people seeing certain actors over the last decade would feel that that would be beneficial to the United States. It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are in power for a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or super long term. They're thinking in election cycles and kind of creates some distortions. But I'm curious what you think, having been in there.

It's funny, man. By the way, can I say you have great flow. I just want to throw that out there. Both of you, in fact, as someone who's losing his hair, have to admire it and, you know, cherish it.

Gentlemen should just be news anchors. Destiny.

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 limit spill. We had a bipartisan term limits bill. I remember going to the White House. So this was Trump's first year in office. 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 tweeted about it endorsing the bill. And I remember I did some selfie video, having just complained about members of Congress focusing on social media. This is probably the apex.

You gotta dab. You got to dabble.

Exactly.

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, the counterpart, the counterarguments which we can discuss, I don't think are persuasive. What was unique about our bill and the reason, the reason we thought it might have a chance of passing? Well, two things. One, we were in that moment to sort 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's going to 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.

That's what I was going to say. You grandfather in. If you're a career politician and you're like, I got another 15 years that I was planning on really running it around here, you let him phase out and then the new guard, you put some limits on them and then it

totally, you grandfather and the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time. And then the new people. So, and then, and then we made it equal in the House and the Senate. 12 years in the House, so six terms and then 12 years in the Senate. So theoretically someone could do 24 years, I could do 12 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. So I really do think the paradox, it's like the things we need to do to enhance the power, the functionality of the modern Congress actually require an over empowered president to make them happen. Otherwise Congress won't do it on its own. And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. I want to 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. We had previously been in, you know, eight year stretches for a while and I want to 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 inducted and he was seen as kind of like a joke almost and was deplatformed from social media. How is this about.

He didn't even have a Pinterest account.

He didn't even have a Pinterest account. And so he. So if you're Iran and you're thinking, well, America is backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offensive anytime soon, now's the time to start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah and but then, surprise, Trump's in. Now we have to deal with the consequences of that. And so in 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. And to your point about wanting to avert World War 3, I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years. Is that bullish for avoiding World War iii or is it a risk? Do we need to just tussle with it? More like, how do you think about all those different concepts?

Yeah, well, first of all, 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 its nuclear program in the second half of the Obama administration. And really 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. Obama had sort of a theory about the region. 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 power and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf states and Israel. The only problem is 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. And that was kind of the 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 before, 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. And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash. Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it. Trump comes back in in his second term, and basically he gives the Iranians 60 days to negotiate and then took the action that you just saw. So that's a long way of me saying there was 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 COVID of diplomacy to covertly advance their program. And at some point, we were either going to have to accept the nuclear run or take kinetic action to set back their program. And this is the first time in a long time, really since the invasion of Iraq, that we've combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent. 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 the resources we need in other theaters along the way. And I'll stop there because I could talk about the Middle east for 20 minutes and all of your audience would evaporate.

No, this is fascinating. I'm really enjoying this. Do you have a follow up there or. I wanted to talk about.

I wanted to get a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple months and couple weeks specifically.

Well, I think so. My most bullish Case for what Trump has just accomplished would be not only has he set back, if not not eliminated for a decade, Iran's nuclear ambitions, 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 source of hydrocarbons as well as 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 wild card that I just don't know enough about is where Trump is going to go next on China. There was some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China access to Iranian oil. And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.0, there was this tension between some more hawkish members of the administration on China and then more dovish members at Treasury. 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 uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China. I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China. And so I guess there's lingering questions about how we want to approach China. But I really think this is the serious setback for 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 going to be increasingly difficult given that Iran 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. Take a big role in the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America. And in fact, what we've seen, really, in terms of the way they've gone after Hezbollah, the Beeper operation, and then their systematic campaign against the nuclear facility is 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.

Yeah, that's undeniable. Bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have Any insight here? There was a lot of Iran. There was some interesting price action in bitcoin. It's hard to read too much into, but people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining a lot of bitcoin.

Fascinating.

Maybe it didn't come up for you, but I saw somebody posting that. He was like, I'm not buying bitcoin right now. It seems obvious that the regime is just dumping bitcoin to try and fund the war effort, basically the recovery effort even. But if you don't have any insight there, we can move on. I wanted to.

I'm afraid I don't. But I do think, and I've said this to all the smart, smart crypto folks like Brian Armstrong and others, 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, young congressman from Wisconsin. Yeah, Brian Style.

He's always a great name. He's welcome. Welcome.

Exactly. Exactly. I think there's an underexplored aspect or argument about crypto's role in national security because the anti crypto argument is always like, this is just a way of sanctions evasion and money laundering. And I think what people don't appreciate is how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies national security interests. And certainly it was the case when people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan that crypto was enormously valuable in that regard. It might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community. So I think 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 switching gears to the European continent. Wanted to get your reaction to the NATO spending news and maybe kind of the backstory. I'm sure when you were in Congress you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing, but any reactions there?

Well, listen, I think anytime. First of all, this idea that 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 ally commander of NATO, actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies at the time. And so this is like. And we've had Democratic senators try to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO. So this is like 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, that is what percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis. 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,

a sports team doesn't wake up one morning and like, say, let's all give it a hundred percent and that's the only coordination.

It's like, yeah, yeah, you could easily turn this into a jobs program where you say, yeah, we're gonna spend 5% of our GP 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, have a massive military, but you're going to 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%. 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.

I think the closer you are to the threat, the more your thinking is sharp. Right. So it is my experience that 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 the way, we've acquired two new NATO. Acquired is the wrong term. We've had two new countries join NATO in recent years that bring phenomenal capabilities to the table. I think traditionally we've struggled convincing the Germans, who are 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 kind of. To relate it to what you said earlier, they. They'll be privileging certain domestic companies, even if they don't actually produce capability. 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 European hardware defense manufacturers. I'd love to see more of that going forward. And I've always been a proponent of we have a ton of troops in countries like Germany and Western Europe, 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. I think there's a huge opportunity here 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, staking it loose right now. I mean, obviously it's a bit over determined. I mean, the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine and it's a massive wake up call for Europe that they 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. 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 accordingly. The Indo Pacific is a 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.

That's great, great.

Should we talk about the news today announcement, the nuclear nuclear deal?

Nuclear.

Yeah, that'd be great. Can you break it down for us?

Everything is nuclear.

Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear.

Yeah. I mean, I want to know the shape of the partnership, Anything you can share there. But then I'd love to, 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. 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 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.

Yeah. By the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this, the nuclear stuff. It's your fault, though, because my understanding is I'm just batting cleanup for Eliana and 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 commanding heights of critical technology and AI if we don't improve our sort of all the above energy policy. There is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country. 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're going to 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. 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 want to see is a replay of what we saw with China and 5G and Huawei, where China was going all over the world saying, you can have 5G Internet cheaply. We'll just control the infrastructure. It'll be in a box. You know, you won't even have to worry.

You don't have to worry about anything. You don't have to worry about anything.

And like in America, we're like, whoa, don't do that. Time out. But if you're a country that doesn't have resources in Africa or in the global south. Like you're probably not paying as much attention to the CI concerns. 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 think this is the cusp of something big both for the nuclear company and for Palantir. And we're going to be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with with Anduril, Saronic and non traditional partners with our warp speed manufacturing product and apply it into the nuclear space.

That's fantastic.

I'm getting pulled. I'm getting pulled.

You're getting pulled.

See you on another.

We have to have you back on soon.

Come back on soon.

We'll talk to you soon.

Thanks for coming on.

Have a good come back for packers commentary.

That's great.

Cheers. 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 got to get on public investing. For those who take it seriously, they got multi asset investing industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. Anyway, the Wagovi maker, that's Novo Nordisk, has cut ties with the telehealth company, Hims and Hers, citing allegations of deceptive marketing practices and drug compounding. I feel like they were the drug compounding. How is this an allegation? I thought that's like what Hims was saying they were doing. They were like. I felt like there was 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 drug maker accused the telehealth company of illegally selling cheaper copycats. Okay, so this is after the FDA's ruling about whether or not there was in fact a shortage. So the Novo said on Monday that it had concerns about the safety of knockoff versions of a goofy and that Hims and Herbs deceptive marketing of such knockoffs put patient safety at risk. In turn, Hims and Hers accused Novo of pressuring it to steer to steer patients to Weguvi regardless of whether or not it was the best option for patients. News that the deal was scrapped weighed heavily on Hims and her shares, sending them down 32% in afternoon trading. In what would be the largest decline for the stock on record, Novo Nordisk shares were down nearly 6% in New York. The messy breakup comes less than two months after the companies unveiled what they called a long term collaboration to directly provide Waguvi to Hims and hers patients.

Okay, so this was somewhat predictable, right?

Talk to Tim Parker about this.

HIMS has been on a generational run in the markets because they're one of the best, easiest ways that people can just go buy WeGovi. Right now if you're Novo Nordisk and you're like, cool, we're selling through this channel. But then the retailer in this case hims, is telling customers as they come in, hey, we know you wanted WeGovy, but how about this sort of cheap knockoff, this compounded version? Now WeGovy can, it is probably legitimately concerned about safety issues. There can be issues around, 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 going to let you leverage our brand to compete on these sort of high margin knockoff products.

Yeah, I mean like the Instagram ads that I saw were definitely pushing the brand name for real. 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 advertisement, actual underlying compound name. And they pushed it so hard that people actually started knowing the name of the underlying compound. Yeah, but yeah, the brand names.

How do you think Hemisphere will respond? Do you think they'll introduce a 10 in 1 shampoo that includes compounded GLP1s Viagra? Hair loss medication? What else could Adderall, Caffeine.

I mean this is cognizant, Rhodiola, Panax, ginseng, L Theanine, caffeine. Get some GLP1 in here.

Creatine soap with Creatine soap would be good with all the above.

Eli Lilly is the one that lost the patent. Right. Because they forgot to pay the.

No, I think it was Novo Nordisk.

Oh, Novo. Wow.

They have, they're all over the place. It is interesting to watch Novo Nordisk. How much do you think their stock is up over the past five years?

Ooh, 500%.

Try 113%.

113. But it was a big company.

Yeah, yeah, but it's been a big company, but still. And how much do you think, what do you think the chart looks like over the last year?

Oh, it's down.

The GLP one.

Boom. It's down because it ripped up so high.

Down 50%.

Went down 50%. And they rotated out their CEO. That's right, we covered that. Hims and hers is at 9 billion, 9.66 billion. That is down from a high of maybe 15 billion. 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 spake to $10 a share. Went down to $4 a share, kind of grinded back up. Now they're at $40 a share. 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 3x4x. Not bad. So, you know, kind of a narrative violation around the, around the SPAC. Like all SPACs are bad. Narrative.

Yeah, yeah. I mean it. And, and the CEO, Andrew Dudum, we should have him on the show, set that, you know, I think his position, you know, we have no idea what the details of their, 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 going to respond well to wegovy and they should have options.

So before striking deals with brand name drugs makers, Telehealth firms were selling lower cost knockoff 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 whole compounding pharmacy dynamic is very different because I feel like the laws were created such that if a farm big pharmaceutical company couldn't supply you the drug, like your local pharmacists could compound it. But then the, the, the startups kind of like rolled up all the compounding pharmacies and we're doing it like a much bigger scale and it wasn't exactly what was intended originally, but I'm not sure about that.

Yeah, so the big question is when there should be more well, yeah, the big question, will there be more regulatory action around compounded GLP1s and what will that do to their business? So rollercoaster of a year for him's partnership was announced in April 2025. Popped terminated just a few months later with a 35% drop.

Well, if you're on GLP1s 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 or you could add one back if you're in a bulking cycle.

Yeah, yeah. So keep those links when you're ready to start the bull.

Exactly. This is, this is key, this is very, very key. Anyway, comment from the, from the CEO Andrew Dudum. He said hims and hers will continue to, to offer access to a range of treatments including Weguvi. 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 million online, $10 million from wholesale. That brings their total revenue to $586 million which is up 111% year over year. Gross profit there, 428 million. Operating expenses are 337 million leaving them 92 million in net income or 92 million in operating income and 50 million in net income. So 50 million in net income for 10 billion dollar stock. Pretty, pretty high price to earnings ratio if that's their, if that's an indication of their earnings. But it's been a big growth stock on a major, major trend, GLP1. And so the, the, the, the retail army has been coming out in force. King KSM's capital said it felt too good to be true for hims to go this long without some FUD. This is more like it just bought 2300. 2300 shares and top secrets.

What does the retail army call them?

I don't know, himbos or something.

Say I'm really him.

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. The number of subscribers in the millions has gone from they were at 0.6, so 600,000 subscribers. Now they're at 2.4 million. And their total revenue has gone from $272 million in revenue. This is the last 12 months. Now they're almost at 2 billion. And so they've almost 10x revenue from that SPAC price and that's what's driving the stock overall to be up 3 to 4x off the original SPAC price. So, yeah, very good news. If you're Andrew Dudham and you need a break from grinding it out at hymns. Book a wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views.

Summer Andrew.

Hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 247 concierge service. It's a vacation.

Imagine you're in one of the gnarliest PR crises of your life and two guys in suits on a podcast they've never met are just like, yeah, take a vacation. I think it's a bad idea. HIMS is up 2% today. John, you're good. So it's time to, you know, treat yourself.

Yeah, take your foot off the gas. Head to wander.com and speaking of foots on gas, Ford, which makes car cremu. Welcome to the stream.

There he is, looking handsome as ever.

How you guys? How you doing?

Doing well. Can you hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you fine. I'm looking forward to a future date when we can potentially see your face. But for now, your avatar looks great. Soon. Okay, I'm looking forward to it. We wanted to have you on to chat about a couple things. What's going on? GLP one world reaction to the Hims and hers breakup. Jordy, where would you like to start?

High level Update on the GLP1 market.

Yeah, I guess. I mean, it's this miracle drug that keeps on. We keep on learning about 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 GLP1s for various conditions and what's most promising, what's on the horizon and what you're tracking next.

Yeah, so 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 GLP1s. 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 a, an inhibitor called Bima Grumab. It's a very weird name that makes people not lose any muscle when they're on the drugs. 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, terepatide was approved for sleep apnea. There's osteoarthritis indications incoming. 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 know understand really the mechanism behind that. But it seems like it's just hitting every single indication now.

Wow.

Why do you think that is? I have some guesses.

I think the big reason has to do with less with the direct effects of GLP1s 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, 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 is 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. This has like for example, this one 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 chronic kidney disease.

Are you looking? Are you looking? You know, I feel like the sort of biohacker 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 treating various types of cancers?

Yeah, I think it does make 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. 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 a number of cells you have, but like the activity of being trans 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. Yeah, smaller. It's like how short people tend to live longer than everything else.

Bad for me.

Bad for you.

Bearish for me. How much of the recent like advances in GLP1 indications or recent benefits have been been just looking at all the people that are taking GLP1s 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 are these drugs diffuse enough that you can just look at the overall population, get an idea of what's happening? Happening?

Yeah. So for approved indica, 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 the, these things are possible from the literature and they're running based on that. So in some cases they do see these secondary endpoints. 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, 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.

Wow.

Yeah. So they, their scientists had to push for about a decade to go, hey, you should look at the weight loss data. It's really impressive. And then they finally, finally did it and now we have weight loss drugs.

Yeah, that is wild. What concerns you? What's the catch? It seems it's too good to be true. 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 many, many positive indicators. But what are kind of red flags that you think people should be kind of looking at, out for or. Or the scientific community should be wary of? Broadly, from your point.

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's available through the gray market very easily without prescription for very, very cheap. Fortunately, I've contributed to that. Has led you a lot of.

In what way? You mean just, oh, I made a.

I made a guide to doing this and a few thousand people actually like paid me $8 a piece 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, message me their weight loss progress and such. So through writing this guide a few months ago, I've led to almost 12,000 pounds of weight loss. And that's just been reported to me. Not everybody's telling me all the results.

And is that at a high level? People just finding pharmacies that will compound the drug for them? What does that actually look like?

So 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, 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.

So is that patent infringement we've been seeing that kind of go back and forth. Like hims and hers was able to compound because there was a shortage. There's also that news about Eli and

say, hey, can you please knock this off?

Yeah, I mean, they could do import bans or. Or seize the packages at the ports. Like, that's the design of this. You can't just buy a knockoff 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.

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.

They're researching weight loss. Yeah, I'm researching research maxing. So you were saying the potential red flags or things to be wary of is around. What about the prescription activity concerns you?

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. They're using telehealth services to get prescriptions, and they are not in need of them.

But why would someone abuse this? This doesn't feel like something that has, like the euphoria associated with a stimulus.

So the concern, I think somebody has body dysmorphia.

Is that what's going on?

Really skinny.

Unfortunately, I've met a few dozen women now who have taken these drugs and been around 120, 130 pounds, normal height, and now they're around 100. And they are. They don't look good anymore. They look like they're aging. Aging very quickly. They look unfortunate. And it's. It's sad to see that they're using these drugs when they didn't even need them in the first place.

Interesting.

The same name. It's actually effects of. Of start actual starvation.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You start getting really bad harmful effects. You probably are eating at that point more lean mass than fat mass. It is quite bad.

Yep, Yep. That makes sense. Yeah. That's always the risk. Interesting.

How are you? What was your reaction to the HIMS Novo Nordisk partnership blowup?

So I actually think this was a big failure on Nova Nordis part. It seems as though what they did was they partnered with HIMS in order to catch them. My understanding is that HIMS 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 the law commenced all that.

Theoretically, WOVI gives them a million doses and then HIMS is somehow selling 1.2 million doses of WeGovy. Is that. Is that what you're. Yeah, something like that.

They're either compounding it themselves, ordering 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, so I guess it's alleged, but we'll see. We'll see.

What about HIMS general position? That patients should have as much choice as possible, as much access, you know, access at different price points, things like that.

They are completely correct to do that. I think that HIMS 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. I really don't know how far this is going to go. But a lot of people who are microdosing 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 on work.

Yeah, I did a 24 hour dry fast from Friday night to Saturday night and all day Saturday. I was shocked at how much time my, I was just thinking about food and water, wanting food and water. And I was, you know, and it 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. I should, you know, I should.

I'm not addicted.

I'm not, I'm not addicted to water. I'm not beating the water addiction allegations. Yeah, big water guy. What else are you tracking right now? Broadly, any reactions to the NIH funding?

Oh, yeah, 40%. We had Andrew Huberman 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?

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 will be good news there soon. There'll be some changes, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, I guess. Zooming out, like what, what does good look like to you? Are you generally in favor of taxpayer funded?

Every American gets a $10,000 biohacking budget annually.

They can buy research chemicals, biohacking vouchers.

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.

So they're not profitable enough. They have troubles with R and D. That public money is very, very useful. We need more public funding than we currently have.

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.

Elsewhere.

And that that was with historical levels of public funding that that kind of contributed to those returns. To some degree, 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 want to keep making progress. You just have to throw more money at these things. And I think we will start doing that very shortly. These cuts are a little alarming to start, but they are not the end of the discussion. Remember, we are. It's still only five months into this presidency and they have a lot of really big plans. They have a lot of trouble getting appointees through the Senate and they have a hiring freeze ongoing right now. That is interminable. We don't know when it's going to end. But once that is over, they'll be issuing NPRMs left and right. It's going to be deregulatory, like massacre. It's going to be wonderful.

Wow.

Well, that's what else is exciting to you in biotech right now in.

Well, I wanted to say on the ham's point, with the different pricing and whatnot, I think perhaps the most exciting thing right now in that area is that Novo Nordisk is run by idiots. Like they're very smart people, but they're just total idiots.

Hey, everybody misses the patent. What do they do?

I think it was Eli Lilly, but they missed.

No, no, this is Novo Nordisk.

Oh, there's Novo that lost the patent fee.

Yeah, they just forgot 450 bucks or something.

Yes, it was 250 and then they missed it and they were told you're one year out. You can pay a late fee, like an extra $200 late fee on it.

And they just didn't.

They still failed. It is amazing. So that enables a wonderful, wonderful program that the FDA show should pursue immediately. The FDA and the CMS have to collaborate on this, but it's the section 804 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 approved 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. And if we're giving people, if we're giving Americans five dollar 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 going to see people getting hot again and make America hot again. The real meaning of aha.

The real meaning of Aha.

The real meaning of maha.

Let's go. There we go. There we go. Inside baseball. Very exciting. Well, 15 minutes was not enough time to have you back on again soon. Thank you for, thank you for all the insights.

Yeah, thanks for coming on. We'll have, we'll, we'll have you back on soon. This is great.

And if you dox yourself anywhere other than here, we will be very upset.

So might have to. Oh, no.

Sorry, guys. You guys have a good one.

All right, we'll talk to you soon.

Bye. Shell is in turn 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 20 months. Months. Morning Brew is breaking it down here. Shell, BP is clocked at maybe 80 billion, but the deal's pending. Exxon and Pioneer are doing a $60 billion M&A deal. Chevron and Hess deal still pending, but it's at 53 billion. DBAC and Endeavor don't even know those companies, but $26 billion deal there. ConocoPhil and Marathon at 17 billion and Occidental and Crown Rock at 12 billion. If you think the AI, M&A deals are hot, you got to go over

to Big oil, Big oil.

Oil and gas, Big tech, Big oil, Big Pharma. These are the industries where the big dollars get thrown around. They don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the Decacorn exchanging business.

True.

Pretty interesting. The immediate market reaction to Shell, potential deal for BP. BP jumped 7% and Shell dropped 2.6%. I want to 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 month? This is the week. Okay.

Yeah, they've both kind of retraced since Shell said.

Said?

Nah, we're not talking at all.

So by market cap, shells around 207 billion. BP's around 87 billion. Those are big companies. Big, big companies. Anyway, we can run through the Wall Street Journal's report here. But first, if you're planning a complex post merger integration, you gotta get on linear.

I'm sure your commitment to just use linear Forever. Everything is.

No, but of course, 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 get on 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 to build software.

If you're worried about getting paperclip, they

should be on Linear.

If you're worried about getting paperclipped, get your agents on Linear. They will thank you for it.

Yeah. A deal for BP which has a market value of roughly 80 billion, would be a landmark combination for two super major oil companies. Super major is a better term than mag7 in my opinion. We need that for the tech companies. The super majors.

Super majors.

Super majors.

Oh, you're in the major leagues. I'm in the super majors.

So good. 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. Potential terms of the deal couldn't be learned in a top up is far from certain. But the discussions are moving slowly. BP is currently valued around $80 billion. Taking into account a premium, a deal could end up as the largest corporate oil deal since the $83 billion 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 you remember tracking the Deepwater Horizon still?

Yeah, I remember tracking it very closely in the Thunder Horse Track.

Were you monitoring the situation?

I was monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading Equity research reports about BP from the sell side banks. And I understood it to the level of knowing that the tract that they were drilling into was called the Thunder Horse Track, which is the section of the crust that they're drilling the oil into.

So crazy. Total costs associated with Deepwater Horizon, including cleanup fines and settlements reached approximately 65 billion. So nearing their total enterprise value.

Massive. Also, great movie. I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie. Deepwater Horizon.

Is it a documentary.

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 like that it's awesome. 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 val. The value. The. Capturing the value in Shell through continuing to focus on performance discipline and simplification. Wow.

Nice.

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.

A TVPN spokesman said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value in TVPN through continuing to focus on performance discipline and simplification.

John, we should never, you should never decline to comment. You should always just do it.

Leave a comment like that.

Just do it. Bake it into the LLM.

Switch your business to ramp.com. do you have any comments on your intern allegedly contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch your business.

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 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 billion. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill fated push away from fossil fuel fuels into renewable energy. It's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters. And so it seems like actually 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 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. 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 kind of 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 owns more than 5% of BP shares, has pushed for changes with the energy companies.

Interesting though, BP had been performing not, you know, had basically been down only for the financial crisis. And then Deepwater Horizon hit and it was just down.

Even when asked publicly, Shell's chief executive officer said that recently the company's bar for big dealmaking 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 U.S. 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. That's right.

That's right.

All the oil companies had to change all their internal documentation. And so Bloomberg News reporting earlier, 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.

Well, it would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it something other than the Gulf of America.

Well, 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, 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 venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that it is not available to everyone. They are in the business of selling money, but not everyone can buy it. And so that kind of puts it in the same league as ultra high net net worth wealth management products or even high horology. Rolexes that are in demand, people, they still advertise Rolexes. They advertise them at lax. The clocks are Rolexes or if you go to an F1 match, you'll see a lot of advertisements.

Tech will put an ad for the cubitus in an airport.

Every issue 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.

Well, yeah, let's talk about, about the current strategy. Right. Current strategy is post on X.

Yes.

Go on podcasts.

Yes.

You can start your own podcast. Many people have done that.

Yes.

The challenge is that venture capitalists are deeply conflicted by making a wide variety of investments, and that has to inform. Inform their opinion on different markets. And so if you, 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, XYZ company is clearly dominating. If you look at the data and you look at what customers are saying, 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 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.

And the problem with that is that it takes the focus off of you and puts it on your guest. And so it's like, yeah, the person's a good interviewer, but like, what do they actually believe?

Yeah. Yeah. So the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking, you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing. You can't get away from it. It's all marketing all the way down. Now, these sort of subcategories, I think, that are interesting. 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 in the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord. And some people, it resonates with them. Other people want to 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. But then the alternative is instead of hiring a production team and producing podcasts yourselves, you could do something like what you're talking about.

Yeah. 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 airport bookshops and he just dropped an amazing book. And then that book just continued to compound and was extremely valuable in terms of building his brand. Naval has a similar story where 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. But when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near term Thesis or they're not news products. 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, 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. 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.

It's better to pump your bags when you end up being. Being tremendously correct.

Exactly.

Some of the early writing, if you like, and even commentary on Sam Altman just clearly ended up being true.

Yeah, 100%. And he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI 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. Marc Andreessen, similar. The ability to go into the Wall Street Journal and write an op ed is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that idea. But it has to be from the individual investor. I don't think it's something that can be formulated from a team necessarily. So there's this, like, there's kind of this, like, I feel like we're going to see more of like this barbell strategy where the future might be like, whether 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? I was thinking venture capitalist 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 Thompson newsletter.

Yeah, exactly.

But like, but I think aligning with these iconic properties.

Yeah. People who are doing their life's work

getting a full page ad in the Journal.

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 going to put in this issue. We're just going to be on the back there looking good and telling you the vibe of the.

So, John, a full page color ad in the journal costs around $248,000.

Yes.

Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great, like, truly great producer for their own show. And so is it going to be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the Journal for a day

or

have your own podcast?

Yeah. And there are more narrow properties too that are like, the Journal is extremely broad in all of business, but there really are more narrow products that would work. But every time they've gotten there, it's been misaligned around, like, what the actual coverage is. But I don't know, maybe we'll see an F1 team. Maybe we'll see Jetsuitex, the terminal sponsored by a VC firm. That would make a lot of sense. You gotta make sense in Silicon Valley at the Jetsuitex terminal. And boom, you're presented with 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, FedEx founder Fred Smith, who passed away today. Below is the first ever FedEx plane, which you can 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.

Imagine how many likes he would have gotten on social media.

Everyone's like, this is your flex. You're just trying to go viral. This is Clulee.

This is Cluly. For logistics.

Clearly for logistics. Total legend burning VC dollars on a plane. Bears.

I think he was using Vegas.

I think he was doing cash flow. Yeah. Anyway, Max Meyer has a story that we should read through. Fred Smith, An American Life. He says Fred Smith died on Saturday. 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.

Imagine how key that would have been to business before the Internet.

Incredible. Yeah.

You're trying to do deals.

If you give FedEx a package on a Monday, it can be in Paris by Wednesday morning or in Shanghai by Thursday for a few hundred dollars. 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. Frederick Wallace Smith was born in 1944 in Mississippi. Fred's grandfather, James Buchanan Smith, captain Mississippi river steamer boats. 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. 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. 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. Yeah. Yeah. So according to James Smith's obituary, those 200 coaches each came to a halt during the regularly scheduled routes for one minute when the funeral began. The young Fred was just four when his father died. 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.

Interesting, because Defense is who was the founder that we had on the show. So I'm completely blanking on his name, the name of the company, and who invested in the company. But he had this defense focused supply chain management startup.

Yes.

It was one of our.

Probably first you're talking about Rune Logistics.

Rune. But something he said about not the AI poster. The legendary poster.

Not the legendary poster. The logistics company.

The scene of OpenAI.

Yes. So the young Smith was a member of the infamous cloak and dagger secret society.

He is not feeding the secret society 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, 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. Hub by air and then redistributed. We talked to somebody about this on the show. How now we think of it as like inefficient to bring everything to one place and then do the hub and spoke thing. Because now we have, you know, Doordash and Waymo and you know, last mile. All these, all these different last mile solutions. But at the time, this was revolutionary. Everything would be brought 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. 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, the 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 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 reported 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.

Wow.

And continued to direct the movement of his unit. Wow. What a badass.

So at this point, yeah, 1973, he's 29 years old, he lost his dad at 4. He goes to Yale with George Bush, then goes to Vietnam, does two tours, gets a Silver and a Bronze Star. Crazy war hero. And now he's decided to launch Federal Express in Memphis. Smith had studied military procurement and been working on the idea for nearly 10 years after writing the Yale paper. So he writes this paper. He's like, okay, 10 years later, most

founders have an idea and they pivot through two months.

So he writes, this paper gets an average grade. This is like later. Ten years later, the company launched with a fleet of 14 French Dassault jets, which delivered a few hundred packages on their first day of service. There we go.

Wow.

He's just like just 0 to 1. According to FedEx lore, Smith named his new service Federal Express because he hoped to attract the attention of the Federal Reserve Bank, a prospective customer. But it's funny like that the name you would, you would think Federal Express, you would just assume that, that it's an extension of the government.

I did when I was a kid, I was like, oh, United Postal Service. But as a kid, you realize United

States postal service using FedEx, like it was just a better product experience than USPS. Even as a kid, you kind of feel it out, 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 U.S. federal Express, though, would specialize in rapid air delivery. Just five years after the first Federal Express flights, the company was 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.

Wow. Every night at the FedEx Super Hub at the Memphis International Air Airport, hundreds of jets land at the airport, the ultra hub, 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.

The financial, financial finesse needed to actually make a model like this, not just lose massive amounts of money.

Yeah, you could 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 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 a tinfoil. Yeah, the tinfoil hat explanation is like, you know, he, either way, he got it done. He did some type of, you know, and 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. And maybe did something else. But the story, story is incredible and it will live on.

Yeah.

Smith retired from FedEx in 2022 after almost 50 years leading the company. He is survived by nine of his 10 children and his wife, Diane. His daughter, Winland Smith rice died in 2005 of a terminal cardiac condition. It's very sad and one has to think that his father, his father, Mr. Smith, who died with 200 vehicles to his name, would be impressed that his son died with 200, 100,000 vehicles to his name and a fleet of jets to match. So incredible story and may he rest in peace.

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.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Once you see it, you can't. Not this logo, the next logo, the more modern FedEx logo has the secret arrow in there.

Once you see that they're moving, they're moving and there. If you want to understand more about Frederick Smith, go to Founders podcast and listen to episode 151151 and subscribe to

Arena Mag to read more of Max's writing. Mr. Beast has rolled back the launch of his View Stats AI thumbnail tool. He says, hey, thanks for all your feedback, feedback on the View Stats AI thumbnail tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission.

And okay, so clearly the thumbnail industrial complex came for him hard. They're probably making, you know, death threats in the comments. It sounds like it was pretty intense. My thing here, you know, I have to agree with Lulu, this, this is one of Mr. Beast's like many businesses, so in general, like it's something he wants to create for creators and distribute widely. But the obvious reason that he should have kept the AI thumbnail tool is 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 to be able to afford to commission a hand designed thumbnail. And so the, the right thing to do for the creators broadly is to make a tool like this available, make it as cheap as possible so as many people as possible can use it and not give in to the small number of people in the world that make thumbnails. Like that's their sort of day to day, those people that make thumbnails. There's a lot of things you could do. You could adjust, you could go and make, edit videos Right. AI video editors are not that good today. You could do that.

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 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. And Mr. Beast hired a few of those folks.

But the whole point is, the whole point is, yes, that person can probably make much better thumbnails. Yes, AI can right now still. And so go up market.

Yes.

Work with creators that are willing to spend money and make a, make it. Make an entry level tool that anybody can use.

Yes.

To generate an AI. You know, an AI generated thumbnail.

Yeah.

Like it just, I mean, I have a bunch of surprise. Yeah, I mean, surprised that he, he rolled this back and gave in. But you know, it's very possible that the thumbnail industrial complex has a massive lobbying arm and said, we're going to work on getting your other businesses blacklisted.

Yeah, I mean it's interesting. There's even a continuum of technology that exists within the pre AI thumbnail generation 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. 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 instead of compositing a background, we would design a background image of wall 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. 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. Just using software in general is completely justified. And no one really talked about like, well, if you're, if you're just compositing images, 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. I was just saying like, hey Ben, me and you are going to practically set up this thumbnail and then take the photo.

So here's, here's the real evidence as to why Mr. Beast should have kindly told the thumbnail artist to F off. 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 multiple. So Generally we're estimating two to five thousand people make at least $1,000 a month designing thumbnails across all different types of platforms. Meanwhile, There are over 2 million YouTube creators that are in the YouTube Partner Program, meaning they're making ad revenue. YouTube is a business for them. And so do you want to serve the 2 million 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 that are probably not even doing it full time. Right? They're just earning. Earning some type of living.

I think it gets to the importance of how abstract should your title be? Because we were talking about this earlier. 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. A modern lawyer is sending text messages and is on signal and sending emails and probably using chat GPT to just search for things and pulling for stuff from LexisNexis instead of going to the archives. The old lawyer is like having teams.

Hopefully not dumping your docs.

No, probably not. But still, it's. It's like a modern. It's a very modern. Something like that modern experience. But we still call those people lawyers. We haven't changed the title.

Whereas even Crosby, the company we had on is. Is just an AI native law firm firm. So they actually have lawyers. They're just more efficient.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Versus versus Someone who is like, like super narrowly defined as like, I am a typist at a law firm. It's like, yeah, you lost your job, but did you really lose. 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 have.

Yeah, it's funny because we would pay real money for a good thumbnail.

Absolutely.

Right now.

Yes. If you're a thumbnail artist, reach out

to us and you're trying to.

We would love to have better thumbnails.

Top 10 thumbnail designers in the world and want to be paid a premium for it. We're happy to pay.

Yes, yes, yes.

Otherwise we'll probably.

Yes. Just keep slopping it up with our templates. Welcome to the studio. Dj.

What's going on?

Hey, guys.

What's going on?

It's great to have you.

Congratulations.

Massive day.

Massive day.

Yeah.

Massive day. Thank you, thank you.

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 do you think is important to share?

Sure, yeah. So the 10 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 really been a privilege working with all those participants individually and that we 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. And then there's a little bit of hints as to what the path to kind of the ultimate goal of Neuralink would be, which is to understand and unlock the mystery of the mind.

Yeah. Elon teased that in the opener and I was somewhere between tearing up from emotions and pumping my fist with excitement because it feels like this is the main quest. You can see that he's lit up about this and you can see that he's just.

It felt incredibly bad back to put it that way.

It was exciting. Give us a little bit of your background and how you wound up at Neuralink.

Yeah, sure.

Let's see.

So I grew up in South Korea, and growing up I loved Ninja Turtles and Pokemon. 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. I loved, loved, loved RF circuit design and computational electromagnetics. And I wanted to be an academic. My dad's a professor and decided to go to 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 the thing that people can do at the time, there wasn't really anything interesting happening, no offense to other builders at the time, but 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.

Take me through some of the history. I mean, nine years to get here. It feels like we're at this acceleration moment, moment where the rate of neuralink deployment is growing. It feels exponential. But in those first nine years, what were the key milestones that you remember and the key turning points?

Sure, yeah.

I mean, I think a lot of

people don't realize that when neuralink started out, it was really just a group of six or seven of us, and we didn't really have anything. When I first showed up to the office at the time, we actually shared the office with OpenAI at the Pioneer Building in San Francisco.

Wow.

It was just a bunch of us. We didn't even have chairs and desks. So one of the first things we did on the first day was to go out to Staples and buy chairs. So incredible amount of work has gone into really building the hardware, the foundational pieces to generate the data set that's necessary for us to iterate on the device. And it took about, I would say, year and a half, two years to get the first generation of brain chips working on the lab 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 anatomy of the humans. And about four years ago now, we had the demo with one of our monkeys, Pejer, that played the game Pong. We called it the Mind Pong. And that was one of the key moments to demonstrate what the capabilities, the types of devices can be. And I think I should also maybe step back and say that neuralink really is sitting on the shoulders of the giants here. There's been decades of research that's gone into the field that we're in called brain computer interface or brain machine interface. And that really set the foundation for de risking the scientific aspects of what this could be. And there's obviously a lot of challenges in scaling the that product, making it a product itself, and that's what we are taking on.

Yeah, I want to talk about 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 SpaceX is the perfect, it feels like the perfect story to me where who was going to pay for a moon landing in the 60s? No venture capitalist would have underwritten that. 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 the rest is history. So, so what can you tell me about the history of BCI in the kind of public sector side?

Universities.

Universities versus stories that have been done at different companies that may have failed but contributed to the community.

Yeah, we had Andrew Huberman on like a week or so ago talking about his concern around NIH funding and all the issues from a pure kind of health standpoint. But this feels relevant as well.

Yeah, I mean it's incredibly important. I mean, you see this even today there's very much an active research going on in the BCI field, just sort of looking at the next frontier of different targets and different indications that can really open up up opportunities for people that have various different types of neurological condition. And I think the history of brain computer interface and the first product that neuralink is working on, we named it Telepathy because 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, it's a horrible condition that really takes away every part of your muscles over time, eventually leading to death. Those were the indications. And what neuralink is able to do is place this device and these set of electrodes in the part of the brain called the motor cortex or the hand knob area. So basically, if 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 moving cursors on a screen or robotic arm. Physical things in the space. And that was purely, purely done as an academic research funded by Department of defense and 20, 30 years ago. And that really set the foundation for what is possible. And I think back 20, 30 years ago, if someone were to try to get venture money out of that, I don't think anyone would have pursued that scientific pursuit. And there still continues to be a lot of research and important work that's gone into academia for other indications. And I do worry about what the future looks like on that front.

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 Don't know know 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 de risk it, right?

Yeah.

Yep. So I guess maybe before we dive into some of the specifics of how neuralink devices installed, maybe let me take a step back and can describe why go into the brain in the first place and why that's important. And typically the analogy that's used in the field is that of the stadium. So you can really think about neural signals as audio signals. The frequency spectrum is actually very similar. And the analogy of neurons talking to each other, speaking different languages, it's actually a pretty good analogy. The idea is that if you're standing outside the stadium, you can kind of 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. 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 and you can kind of think about what neuralink is doing in a similar analogy. So you can get neural signals from on the surface of the brain or even outside of the skull without having to go through a craniotomy. But the type of signals and the resolution that you will get is going to be much worse. 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 neural signatures, because we believe that that's necessary for kind of a long term mission of understanding and unlocking the mystery of the brain. And in order to do that, you basically want to 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 consistency of a tofu or a jello. And it also moves a lot because every heartbeat, every breath that you take, it's moving a lot. And that's one of the things that we have to learn in a hard way when we work with our participants in designing these electrodes to be tiny fraction, fraction of a human hair. One of our, what we call thread, which Is these tiny wires that have electrodes are about 1/20 of a human hair. And they're also flexible, so they move with the brain rather than if it's a rigid thing. You can cause a lot of scarring as you're breathing. When you build these tiny, tiny threads that are manufactured with conventional lithography tools in our own clean room facilities. Now the question is, okay, how do you actually insert these? They're very small, and even the best neurosurgeons won't be able to insert them precisely in the location that we want. 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 just did not see a world where there's some sort of robotics and some sort of not having human in the loop. So it's essentially 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 manipulating and inserting these tiny threads one by one as quickly as you can in the region of interest. And what ends up happening is that we currently go through a process to drill a hole in the skull called the craniotomy. And then we actually expose different layers of the tissue. 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. And then once you put the skin over, everything's completely invisible, everything is completely wireless and you basically become a cyborg. And that process takes about three hours.

Right now, can you talk to me about how noisy the data is and if there's any advances in AI that help denoising of the data? I've seen incredible demos of, oh, take this ancient black and white, gray 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. Have there been any developments in AI recently that have been relevant? Do you think that will happen in the future? Is it already happening or is it just kind of a complete side quest?

Yeah, there's a lot of opportunities where AI can help help in some ways understand the biological brain that it's inspired by in really interesting ways. There are a couple places that we currently use AI, I think 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. So there's, there's a lot of innovations that we've had in neuralink on low power and low noise amplifier designs and being able to digitize that as quickly as possible into digital bits that then you can apply a lot of interesting signal processing as well as really at the end of the day, this giant pipeline that we call neural decoding. What is the human intent and how can you actually translate that to something useful? So, so as of right now, we have a very simple machine learning 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. So if you look at a human brain, there's what's called neuroplasticity, which 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. And it's a learning system.

Right.

And as well as the machine learning model, the silicon neural net is also learning about the brain, but also your brain is learning about the silicon. Basically this new mode of communication that you have gotten as a neuralink. And in many ways I think there's some opportunities and we're starting to see kind of interesting traits where now that we have not just one, but seven human participants, there's some similarities that we see in kind of the data set 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. 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, John is thinking about moving to the left and this is what the neural patterns look like and collect that data over time and then improve the system. But you do get drift over time due to the fact that as I mentioned, your neural state is always going through a plasticity.

Can you talk about, can you talk about the translation and the evolution of what outputs you're actually trying to map to? Because, because if I remember Pong, Pong's unique in that 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. But then when I've seen Nolan P1, 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 in one way way I'm thinking jump. In another way, I'm thinking send the message of just press the A button. And so there's like, how much data can you get out? Are you trying to increase that? Has that already increased? Is it going to kind of operate at a higher level of abstraction that then gets translated into computer use? Or is it more like as long as I can puppeteer to ten fingers, then you can translate those into ten different actions and remap those and have people menu accordingly. Like the investment banker who doesn't use a mouse.

Right. So the update that we just released a couple hours ago actually has some videos of what the latest capabilities with neuralink that participants have 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, there's a right joystick for aiming, and there's a bunch of different buttons for swapping weapons, reload and shooting, et cetera, et cetera. And they're able to do this.

It's going to make me cry. Team Deathmatch with your boy after.

Well, the other thing that's actually kind of interesting is that at Neuralink, we also talk about going beyond the limits of biology and then actually achieving superhuman capabilities.

Yeah.

So we're already,

I was going to say, like we're actually already starting to see some signs of it.

Interesting. So that was my next question. Right now you guys are generally focused on outputs, right? Controlling an arm or playing a video game or navigating some type of computer. At what point would you focus on or starting to spend more time around sort of the inputs into the brain?

Yes, inputs. So one of the major applications for that is product that we call blindsight. So giving sight back to people that have lost it. And that's primarily going to be 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 set of of impulses that then stimulate the part of your brain called the visual cortex, which is on the back of your head. And it basically gives you your sight back.

Right.

Because the way vision works is that you have your light hitting your retina converted to electrical signals. And at the end of the day, it's your brain where you're seeing and having that conscious experience. But if you have anything break in that circuit, you can directly go to the brain, stimulate those neurons that are giving you that visual experience and be able to see. And our plan is to have our first blind site patient next year.

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've spoken to Nolan P1 and I mean, he's incredibly, he's a huge beneficiary of neuralink, but also, 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 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 like an ensemble of products or something where neuralink's a key technology, but then there's other approaches that are actually potentially more compatible or complementary as opposed to directly competitive.

Yeah, I mean, I think in the long future, you know, I think there's going to be a lot of application layers that are going to 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. And that machine can be your computer's laptop or, you know, your computers, phones or prosthetics or some. Some other thing. And I'm really excited to kind of see what the creative minds can kind of think about in terms of the application on top of it.

Yeah, it feels like there will be like a hierarchy of needs within the app store of like, you know, some people might want to use neuralink so that they can see or talk or manipulate the world, but then other people might want to use inputs to be like, every time I'm about to pick up a bag of Cheetos, just like, don't work, make the arm not Work. And so I just can't physically pick

up the ad blocker.

It's an ad blocker for overeating or turning on the tv.

I want to talk about hiring. Obviously this event was not for the shareholders, it was for recruiting. 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?

Yeah, there's one metric that we basically look for in any candidate and that's. It's hard to actually get it. It down to a quantitative number. But we try to look for literally ego divided by ability. So ego to ability ratio. And we want that to be significantly less than 1. So you can have a little bit of ego, but you better have 10 times, 100 times more abilities to offset that. And we found that to be actually really important thing to look for, especially given that that one. This is an extremely interdisciplinary effort. 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 think it's a very, very unique space in that.

And not to mention FF lawyers too. I was baffled by that, that you guys are executing at such a high level. Regulatory.

I was going to ask a completely different discipline. And I'm saying this to me, looking at Neuralink, 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, I'd rather I'll stay in the Elon orbit, but I'd like to just work on rocket science. I just like to be a rocket scientist. And so, yeah, I'd be interested to get your view on it just because you have so many different factors. The 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 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 it's just going to be hard but very achievable. You almost want them to think that it's borderline impossible, but push through that.

Yeah.

So a lot of people have misconception that neuralink is a science company. We're really a technology and an engineering company. And there's also this misconception that, oh yeah, at Neuralink you guys probably spend a lot of time talking about future of humanity and uploading consciousness and et cetera, et cetera. In some ways, yes, we do talk about those things, but it's like 0.1% of our conversation, like 99.9% of the time it's about hardcore engineering problems and in many ways 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 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 at Neuralink. You actually don't even need to have a prior experience in brain. I took some neuroscience classes 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 the brain that, 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 for where the company is right now. I love that ego to ability framework. But talk about interdisciplinary work. Is there a world where you need RF engineers who are just great at that and they're not really good at to have to cross over? Or are you still looking for the types that can 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 you might just be in a stage where 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. Has that evolved over time and can you speak to that?

Yeah.

So Neuralink is still a very small company. We have 300 people total across Austin and Fremont. And there are definitely a set of problems where I would say we need gpus. So people that are very specialized in things or, sorry, CPUs. But yeah, we're still looking for or way more GPUs.

Yeah, 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 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 want to dig into ego a little bit more because I find that very interesting. How does ego manifest in an employee? And is that something that can be controlled, or do you think 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 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 kind of an interesting question from a philosophical perspective as well.

I might also consider launching the Ego app, in which you can dial it on the neuralink app store. Just dial it up and down.

Hey, I'm getting a. I'm going in for a job interview at neuralink. Turn this down all the way.

Yeah. Or if somebody's joining TVPN and we think they're super talented, but the ego is too high, I can say you're welcome to join, but we just got

to dial it back.

You got to install the app.

Yeah.

People learn. I've seen this time and time again, especially people that are earlier in their career have a lot of opportunities to kind of shape how they work within an organization. And that really, it's not about pushing for your ideas, but it's pushing for what's best for the company. And I've seen that change. And I think once you have sort of, it really just fosters a great environment where people debate the merits of ideas rather than kind of putting sort of their ego in front so that it becomes sometimes, like, not a technical discussion, but an emotional discussion. But, yeah, that's certainly coachable.

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 injection injury and als. And what else are you excited about? Yeah.

And even in there, it's like, are you feeling, like, generalized breakthroughs that make each individual product advance to some degree?

I guess, also, like, are there differences.

Yeah.

Are there differences in solving for ALS versus solving for traumatic spinal injury?

Yeah, there certainly is. For als. It is a neurodegeneration so their conditions just gets worse as the time progresses.

So

that makes it very difficult. One of our participants is in what's called a late stage als, which means that he's effectively locked in, so unable to move, unable to speak even, and is connected to a mechanical ventilator to basically keep him alive in a similar ways that basically Stephen Hawking was able to sort of live the last 50 plus years of his lives. And for them, they also have more fatigue and they have different needs, as you can imagine, from someone like Nolan, who's still very vibrant, who still can speak, who can still kind of engage with the world in different ways, and their application, their needs will change as a result of it. But really what we also talk about is that we're building a generalized input output device and technology for the brain. So for someone who is quadriplegic, 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. 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 are useful for that particular situation. Similar to how when 10 different people are given a computer, they will use that 10 different unique ways. And we're seeing that. And that's something that's been wonderful to see, the wide range of diverse use cases for different participants.

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?

Neuralink.com careers and I would definitely encourage people to check out this latest update that we've had. It's been an incredible progress.

A lot of companies 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 going to have an impact, like, expect to stay, you know, stay for a few decades.

It's not a jobs page, it's a careers page. Because you're going to be here for 40 years.

Substantially.

Yeah.

Well, we're excited to follow along.

Thank you so much for joining.

Thanks for the update.

We'll talk to you soon.

Hey, thanks for having me.

Cheers.