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Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI robo taxi launch in Austin, Texas this afternoon.
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That was the big technology news.
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We have someone uh who's written about the Tesla cyber cab uh in the robo taxi in the back of a robo taxi hopefully calling in to the show. Um I sent him the link.
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We'll see if we can bring him in. Hey, how you doing? Perfect timing. How's it going, guys? Can you see here? Let me see. Can you see it? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. There you go.
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Our safety rider right here as well.
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Got some sick sick glasses on.
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But yeah, we're uh we're in the Robo Taxi right now. This is my fifth ride.
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I'm also here with Harry from the UK. Oh, hey. What's going on?
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He's a fan of the channel.
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Uh yeah, so yeah, this is my fifth ride.
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It's been amazing so far.
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It really does feel like um Tesla has hit this one out of the park. truly.
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Uh the geoence area is definitely much smaller than Whimo's right now, but I think they did that uh with the thought process of like, hey, we want to make sure we have a really good launch.
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Uh we want to make sure that it's going real nice and smooth.
1:10
And uh but so far the rides I've taken have all been really, really good. Very smooth.
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It's very hard to communicate just how smooth the the car is unless you're familiar with the with the software.
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Unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on on the Teslas.
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It's very very similar to that experience.
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It's just there's just nobody there now.
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And that that's the freaky part is that, you know, for for a lot of people that have been following the company.
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Uh, 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.
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But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kind of like this is this is wild. This is wild. So, uh, is that better? Stock is up.
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The stock is up 9% today. 9% today. Wow. Uh, yeah.
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You're welcome, everybody. I'm kidding.
1:56
Yeah, give us your other takeaways.
1:56
Um, I I I saw you posted uh a good breakdown from your experience.
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Um, what else do you have to share about the process?
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Uh, did you need to go through a pre-registration to get onboarded?
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It feels like it's not completely uh open access just yet. Yeah.
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So, yeah, we were invited.
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We were part of like a very limited group of people that were invited.
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I think Tesla was just uh here.
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So, somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that. No problem.
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Um the um yeah, it's a very small group of people.
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I think uh a lot of us that have followed Tesla very closely uh over the years.
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Uh Tesla went out of their way to sort of, you know, get us uh 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.
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Uh so far it's very very limited um in its use case.
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And I'm showing you guys here just on the road hopefully. Does it come across?
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Can you guys see the the road how it's driving? It's very steep.
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Um, yeah, I think I think Tesla very specifically started this very small.
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Uh, but now if you go and their zip code and their phone number and email address um so they can sign up for the service and that's probably a way for Tesla to get some uh some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there.
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Uh but so far it's very small small geoence area, small group of people.
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Um and uh I think I I don't know how many cars they have on the road, but I doubt is more than 10 right now.
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Uh we're at a four-way stop right now and it's navigating that no problem.
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Um but yeah, I I think I think it's very limited on purpose.
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Uh 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.
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It just it just takes you around and there's no one there and you're like it's wild that uh it's wild that we got full self-driving cars before reliable cell coverage in major cities.
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You're breaking up a little bit.
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We need to drop on top of this.
3:58
I I mean I have one more question. We'll let you go.
4:01
Um uh I mean what's remarkable about this is is not just that it's a self-driving car, but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 Model Y. Is there anything?
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Are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket added to it? Extra cameras? Anything? Nothing. Nothing.
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Uh I mean that there's different software, but I mean that's just a that's a software update, right? It does.
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There's nothing that that I can gather that says, "Oh, this is a spec like a very uniquely equipped Tesla that has some additional sensors."
4:36
This looks to me like the point you made is exactly this is why this is such so mind-blowing.
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Like I just can't believe it's happening.
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The bestselling car in the world where Tesla's making over a million of these per year that costs less than $40,000 potentially less than $30,000 to make is driving itself in Austin, Texas with a paid ride. I paid $4.
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20 and it's driving me around the bestselling car in the world.
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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 cuz you think about oh self-driving a lot of sensors, etc. , etc.
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No, that the cost structure for this thing is the is sca the scale that Tesla has able has been able to achieve that same car is going to drive itself, right?
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And and that just breaks everything as their cost per mile plummets.
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The method they've taken uh as far as training the the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than Whimo can.
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And they have the cars, right?
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So Tesla makes as many of these cars every 5 hours that Whimo has on their fleet total, right?
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And that that's the mind-blowing piece of it.
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And Whimo 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.
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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 uh to our destination.
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That's my Cybert truck right there hanging out.
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Um you know it's like it's monumental.
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This is truly a monumental thing for us.
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This is like uh Disneyland for tech bros.
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You can just keep taking rides around all day long. This is amazing.
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This is like Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you, brother. Uh, yeah, dude.
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It's like, you know, sometimes I'm like afraid.
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I'm like, does my does my wife think I'm too nerdy?
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Like, am I am I getting too nerdy about this? What's going on?
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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 uh the technologies that they work in with the electric vehicle.
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Now, with self-driving, they're going to get into the the human or robot space. This is what they do.
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And so, I think this is just another reminder that they're they're full steam ahead.
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And it's uh it's very exciting and I'm it's just such an honor to be part of this this release. Truly, it's an honor. Historic. Amazing. Yeah.
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Well, thank you so much for calling in. This was great. Have fun out there. Bye. Talk soon. Thank you guys. All right. Byebye. Yeah.
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The uh the scale of this thing.
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I mean, like Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space.
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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.
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And so scale really matters.
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It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point.
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And uh yeah, they seem really set up for it.
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I love this post by Nick Cruz.
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He says, "Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the robo taxi."
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Uh and you'll love to see it.
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Little bit of side quest going on for the last 6 months.
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Uh you know, sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest, but it's not it's not the main mission. Pot of gold. Pot of gold.
7:28
Uh anyway, um there's some other uh there's some other news.
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Power Bottom Dad says, "Time will tell, but my bet is that this signals the death of the Whimo, leaving Google in a $20 billion hole and likely Uber as well." Um very dramatic.
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Uh I'm not uh I'm not uh I think power power bottom dad is a very strong poster.
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Y um and you know the the competitive dynamic is really heating up.
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I'm I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities.
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Right now it's sounds like it's 10ish cars in a very very small area.
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But but again they they could potentially scale a thousand times faster than Whimo.
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It's all just going to come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes.
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George Hotz last week was saying that uh you know Whimo has is our Tela operated.
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He said uh you know I I haven't fact checked this.
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Thankfully we're not journalists.
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We don't have to fact check.
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Uh but he said something like 1. 7 people per car.
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You know sort of uh you know overseeing more than a taxi cab because tax only has one. Yeah.
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So the the real question will be what you know is Tesla doing tele operation as well.
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Do they um you know how how long will these companies need to do that?
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But um once things are really working and they're safe Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once.
8:55
The Social Network 2 is officially in development with Aaron Sorcin returning this time as director. Uh Yakine says, "Wrong.
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I'm the director and I'm also the main character."
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I thought that was really funny.
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Definitely a main character. Uh Andy Two Cents.
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money is uh is writing some some you know jokey dialogue here.
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He says, "Sorry I left my aura ring.
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It's South Park Commons along with my eightle burner phone and board ape ledger wallet. you absolute del.
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Uh, it's pretty funny to reimagine it, but interesting.
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We have a little scoop here.
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We actually got our hands on the on on a couple pages of the new script.
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It was It was left at the gym. Yes.
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And we're in Hollywood where we are and we're fairly confident it is the it could possibly be.
9:42
This is the Social Network 2 official official dialogue. Yeah. They haven't shot. So, we got the script.
9:49
They've been doing table reads.
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Uh, we wanted to do a little table read for you today.
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Uh, so I'll break it down.
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You'll play Mark Zuckerberg. I'll play Nat Friedman. Sounds great.
9:56
So, uh, this happens to be This is taking place in Mark Zuckerberg's office at night in the Meta HQ. Yeah.
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So, a middle a minimalist expanse lit by floating AR displays and whiteboards full of transformer diagrams.
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Mark Zuckerberg is focused yet restless. He stands at a window.
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Nat Friedman is calm but energized.
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He enters and Nat opens the scene.
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You've open source llama, Mark.
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70 billion parameters running in 8K token context windows and word there's a 405 billion monster still in the lab.
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Open source isn't unleash Nat, it's a guided evolution.
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We publish the weights so the community can help tame them.
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Community a sizable slice of fair hop to startups like Mr.
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How's the village supposed to ride the beast without many of the original wranglers? Talent moves ideas stay.
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Group query attention scaled rotary positional embeddings with NTK aware stretching. This isn't incremental. It's a step change.
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Meanwhile, Yan's out there talking about non-auto reggressive world model hybrids, saying the next wave won't be tokenby token racers.
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He's ready to retire your thoroughbred, Mark.
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Yan's job is to keep the herd agile.
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Llama is today's workhorse.
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Scout and Maverick are the horizon.
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Right now, Llama is our public manifesto.
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Your manifesto just made every kid with a decent GPU a potential sorcerer.
11:15
Hugging face downloads are exploding. What's next? Magic carpets. Exactly.
11:19
Open weights let the village scale faster than our walls ever could. Purple Llama covers us.
11:27
Cyersc Evout Llama Guard full red team cycles.
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You know Purple Llama isn't bulletproof, Mark.
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Open AAI's minting cash behind APIs and you're handing out multilingual long context models for free.
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The Llama 3 community license only restricts firms over 700 million monthly active users.
11:43
Innovation rises bottom up. Ask Ahmed. Ask Joel.
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Democratization is the point.
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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.
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Laura, Chlora, NFR, quantization.
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Llama, derivatives already power agents. Rag stacks. University labs. It feeds itself.
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Provided the community keeps aligning with you.
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Alignment happens in real time. RLHF, DPO, RL, RLif.
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This is an ecosystem, not a monopoly.
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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.
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Then hold on tight and hope we're ready. We will be.
12:37
We're building it together and seen uh really jumps off the page. Wow. Riveting. Yeah, Hollywood's back. Hollywood's back.
12:46
This might save Hollywood.
12:48
Yeah, I think this will be People said that I'm Oscar bait right here for sure. Totally. Totally.
12:52
So, uh 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.
13:00
But it's entirely possible this is, you know, totally real.
13:05
Next up, we have [Music] welcome.
13:09
The chat has been waiting.
13:12
Yakine, how are you doing? What's going on?
13:16
Uh, you are on mute, brother. No audio yet. We got the video.
13:18
We got the weight set up in a Is that a weight rack or uh Looks like it. Hello, test. Yeah, we can hear. How you doing? Testing. Good.
13:27
I haven't set up my DACK yet, so No, you're good. You're good. What's happening?
13:32
Let me just uh uh ask uh uh let me just check like let me just look at something on Sure.
13:37
Uh yeah, we'll we'll we'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out.
13:45
Poster who needs no introduction.
13:47
He needs no introduction.
13:49
Um uh founder of Dingboard, a based of the hosts of John and Jordy. John and Jordy. Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yine. Apologies. Uh, good to meet you. Hello.
14:08
Thanks for thanks for the introduction.
14:10
I appreciate the time as well.
14:10
And I'm like actually like a huge fan of you guys.
14:12
Like uh someone someone I someone I used to work with uh introduced me to you guys.
14:16
So I like found a lot of enjoyment. That's great.
14:18
It's great to have you on.
14:20
How have the last few days been?
14:22
Um a little bit stressful to be honest.
14:24
Uh, I've slept three hours every single night because uh, posting on Twitter has been so fun and uh, unfortunately for fun or stressful. Yeah.
14:32
Uh, so both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting and uh, that's uh, not good for me.
14:37
But I will basically just not stop posting. Yeah.
14:40
But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially replace your salary?
14:44
You were making in the seven figure mark.
14:46
You got to really ramp it up a little bit.
14:48
You know, I used I used to go on 4chan and like people would be like, "Yeah, I'm like making like a million like a mill 2 mill at these AI companies." I'd be like, "No way.
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There's no way you guys are making 2 million at these AI companies."
14:55
And I started making like seven digits at this at an AI company.
14:58
I was like, "Wait, like these guys weren't actually lying.
15:01
Like do you actually make that much money at these AI companies?"
15:02
Um, and it's like pretty fun work too as well.
15:06
So yeah, for like I didn't work on AI.
15:06
I worked on like bugs that really annoyed me on the app and that's why I joined actually.
15:11
So I joined X because uh there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me.
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I fixed quite a lot of them.
15:14
So I'm pretty happy like with the work I've done.
15:18
done. X 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 that's super 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 the you know the podcast of the tech bro podcast sorry
15:37
the the host of the tech bro 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 like how many people are there like That's why it feels for most people like an engineer who's like creating a test and like it's not it's not going to be buggy for them. And for this is true
15:55
And for this is true across all the apps.
15:56
Power users will always experience a lot of bugs unless they have someone to like uh really like you know um talk to them and like understand what their pain points are.
16:06
And and for what it's worth, X does a really great job.
16:07
Like I mean it's actually remarkable how well X was is run as as a company.
16:11
And like just working there, I got to learn a lot about like how to get engineers motivated and like really like get [ __ ] done.
16:16
like uh it was it was awesome work there.
16:18
It was like super super how how uh do you wish you had the opportunity?
16:21
You you were working remotely the entire time and and that was maybe counter to the broader ex culture.
16:25
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.
16:32
So the person who hired me like was like dude like let me tell you you you're going to have to get to the office.
16:37
My wife uh so at the time I got the offer in between I was interviewing I found out that my my wife was pregnant.
16:43
So I let them know and congratulations because uh yeah so so the kid is born now. He's 7 months old.
16:48
Um so the by the time I joined I was like okay well we're going to I'm going to 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 I was kind of like considering and talking to my wife about like different ways I could come to politics.
16:59
I I could totally work remotely like and be productive.
17:02
I think after the X and XAI merger the information attractor got so strong and the talent at XAI they were like ship they're shipped so much.
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Like I used to be able to read every commit.
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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 codebase.
17:18
But after the Xi AI people joined it there's like literally no way.
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So they're like you're and I mean I told one of the XI guys this it was like uh you know when when you have like um dinosaur [ __ ] and you know which was the Twitter codebase and you get extreme pressure which is XAI talent get diamonds. You get diamonds.
17:35
That's how like I was so bullish after that.
17:38
Like like they're really like they're really pushing on it.
17:41
It's like really awesome.
17:43
I wanted and I and honestly I really wanted to be there.
17:45
Like I wanted to go and I think it was like probably I was talking to my manager at the time.
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I was like um can I like maybe come like twice every quarter or something was and he was like super I mean forsworth by the way like my manager was reading between the lines. Totally surprised. Totally surprised.
17:59
He looked super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him.
18:00
But it's if you're watching this it's okay dude. Don't worry about it.
18:03
you're uh seriously like some people like the probably the best thing I think like working at X is like I got to work with these engineers who have worked at Twitter for so long and when I joined I was like oh these guys like are onboarded onto everything but that wasn't the case like my manager literally could just figure anything out.
18:21
It felt like he was already onboarded onto everything but he could actually just like read the code, look the logs and figure out what the problem was within 30 minutes and it didn't matter what it was.
18:29
I I was like this guy must have been here for years.
18:30
No, he's like actually just that good.
18:32
Um, so I mean I really loved working with him.
18:35
He's like a really awesome guy.
18:35
Um, I think it was surprised.
18:37
Um, I I I guess like I guess I kind of kind of guessed what happened to be honest, but it it doesn't really matter.
18:43
But anyways, like it's been really great working there.
18:45
So I was I was going to go to visit actually we were planning to visit Palto.
18:49
My wife is going going on a trip with her mom with a baby and I was like, okay, like that's one week.
18:52
I know I'm not I don't want to go on the trip because I had work to do. Not anymore.
18:56
So I'm probably going to go and it's going to be pretty fun.
18:58
Um but like uh I was going to I was planning for that week to go to Palp Palto.
19:02
But uh 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 scarf food in her mouth for like the few seconds that she had.
19:14
She's like literally dying.
19:15
So first time parents right so we're kind of getting used to it but yeah.
19:17
No it's a crazy it's a crazy change.
19:20
What um 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.
19:26
Is that the exact Okay, sure.
19:27
So, uh, you guys can I'm probably going to like work a bit more on Dingboard.
19:30
Um, there's a bunch of bugs that I want to fix.
19:32
I just didn't have the time with my full-time job. Uh, so dingboard.
19:36
com is the best app ever. Dingboard. com.
19:38
If you want to make a meme in seconds, 15 seconds meme. I was a paid user. Something happens. I was a paid user. I loved it.
19:44
Thank you very much for paying. Very, very good.
19:46
You know, like your money actually helped pay for this.
19:49
Like this is this is John Kugan.
19:51
2% of this is John Kugan, right?
19:54
No, it was it give him naming rights.
19:57
It's actually crazy that that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages and I feel like you just pulled it forward.
20:03
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.
20:19
great but it was okay. and they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom and and so I'm using two different apps and neither of them are good anywhere near what you need and so I was always I was always a fan of of Dingboard but I was actually like in the process when I joined them I was in process of rewriting it so that I could
20:35
deploy on web like applications and sorry on iOS and Android it's actually like if you guys if you guys are a nerd there's there's something called soal okay so is made by this Swedish guy I think he's retired kind of he works three days a week and on the four days that he has he's working on this crossplatform GL um graphics library like uh I guess like transpiler. So you
20:51
So you write it in 1GL language.
20:54
It'll it will produce the the metal version for iOS.
20:58
It'll produce the version for Android and it'll produce a version for web.
21:00
So I can use the same code and the code can be basically like it can basically be the same codebase deploy to all apps and then John Kugan and Jordy can make memes in seconds and get more followers on Xbox.
21:11
This is the future as promised.
21:13
Yeah, it feels like an incredible founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes.
21:16
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.
21:25
They [ __ ] ruined my meme making tool.
21:27
I am going to wars and then I remember I remember you had you had sponsors. This is I love this.
21:34
There were sponsors when you would open a new dingboard file.
21:36
It would just have a semi analysis ad from Dylan. It's still there. It's still there. Oh, it's still there. It's still there.
21:41
So I mean semi analysis Dylan Patel.
21:42
You should guys should go check out his Substack.
21:45
uh he sponsored me for three months and he stopped sponsoring me and I was too lazy to remove it.
21:51
He's not on stack but uh he's actually on he's on passport with Ben Thompson but anyway he's the man and we love him and uh but the but the big question is like ding board you're super popular online.
22:02
Um why didn't you go and raise like $15 million from a grocery dude man that sounds so lame man.
22:08
Oh like raising money with managing people on I'm so not down. I'm so not down.
22:14
I could serve like literally, dude.
22:16
Like this is I have two plugged in right now and I don't have enough power going to my house to like plug plug this one in, which is why it's unplugged.
22:21
Um, but like I could serve literally a [ __ ] million people. A [ __ ] million.
22:24
We're going to blow your mind.
22:26
We're going to blow your mind with this.
22:27
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.
22:34
You don't have to hire many people. Yeah.
22:36
So you could raise like 50 on 500 and it's, you know, take take 40 million off the table. Yeah. Yeah.
22:42
Just ju just ju just just to kind of set yourself up a cushion. They call it a cushion.
22:45
I feel like I feel like you want the opposite of that.
22:47
I would never trust a founder who asked for that. Like example joking. He's joking. Yeah, I'm joking. Roy Lee never happens.
22:54
You don't you don't want a founder with money.
22:56
You want a founder with no options.
22:57
You want a founder like Roy Lee from Cluey. New dad. New dad or or new dad. Got to figure it out. Got to figure it out.
23:05
I've got to figure I I need I need a 2acre lawn and a zeroturn tractor. That's what I need. I This is I need this.
23:11
I will get it no matter what. Maybe the next 10 years.
23:13
But like Roy Lee, for example, uh CEO, I think of Cluey who he he got, you know, kicked out of his university, a disgraced Tardan feather. He has no choice.
23:19
I wish I got an allocation.
23:22
I even know he was racing.
23:23
I would have written I I need the money, right? Like I got a kid.
23:25
I would have written a check without even thinking.
23:28
I don't even care what the Buffy's doing.
23:29
Yeah, you're you're a royal defender. Okay. Okay.
23:30
So, here's the I want a number for Dingboard.
23:33
Like, how many users did you get?
23:35
How much money were you making?
23:37
money were you making? give us some sort of number so we can ring the I think the peak MR was like like I I mean I don't uh I don't remember and I'm not raising and I don't want funding probably 10K 10k developer let's hit the gong for let's go let's go honestly honestly ringing that for your fans too because
23:58
you're you you genuinely you're you're a internet celebrity and you have real fans the question the question I have for you is cuz you're a Roy Lee defender Uh, how what what 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 on the show right now. All my rage baits. Here's what All my rage baits.
24:20
Here's what makes people so mad. Sure.
24:22
That I actually believe what I say.
24:24
I'm not saying it pisses people off. I really believe it.
24:27
Like I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry.
24:30
makes them just like and but like the when you're honest like I mean like you know I'm I'm a big believer in like honesty and stuff like that and like um like when you're honest like you kind of like also the same amount of haters that you g 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.
24:47
Uh so like I mean the reason I'm I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired.
24:52
I got like an email which was a bunch of like really scary legal words like non-disparagement.
24:56
I had like to like Google what this meant.
24:58
Like I even know what disparagement meant.
24:59
I was like, "Okay, I'm not going to sign anything.
25:02
I'm going to wait for a lawyer."
25:02
And um and then Roy Lee did this thing and I realized like, you know what?
25:05
Like Roy Le is a [ __ ] legend.
25:06
He's got skin in the game. Like Roy Lee has to win. So, you know what?
25:10
I'm just going to [ __ ] be [ __ ] I'm going to be a [ __ ] I'm going to be a [ __ ] online and I'm going to have to win.
25:14
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.
25:24
He's got like, you know, tons of children he could spend all day all day with.
25:28
like he's got all the toys he could possibly want to play with, all the engineers he could talk to.
25:32
Like if I was him, I would just like goof around with fun toys, but like he's actually trying to get to Mars.
25:36
Like, you know, like I feel like I feel like sometimes it's like I think about being Elon.
25:42
I could never be him because I would give up at 20 mil.
25:45
I'll be like, "All right, I'm done, dude."
25:46
Like this is me like I did my part like I'm going to chill with my zeroturn tractor and my twoacre lawn.
25:49
Um so got to know what you want. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Right.
25:53
So but like I think that's what happens a lot of founders.
25:55
They get enough money like Palmer Lucky.
25:56
Palmer lucky it was like a chip on her shoulder.
25:58
He was like, he was like, "Fucking Jason Cal.
25:59
I'm going to [ __ ] get that guy. Like, I'm so pissed.
26:02
I'm going to do it again." And he did it again. He 100% did it again.
26:07
Um, by the way, I love Jason. I love Jason. I love Palmer Lucky. I love both of them. I'm And you know what?
26:10
Jason is like the It's like It's like you can't have Batman without the Joker, right?
26:15
You can't have Palmer Lucky without Jason. He's the Joker of tech. Okay.
26:18
Never He's the Joker for Palmer Lucky.
26:22
For me, the Joker would be the middle manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android bugs. Uh, never mind.
26:27
Okay, we're getting into the story.
26:29
We're learning what actually happened. We're unraveling it. Don't worry about it.
26:34
I've never said anything about my Don't worry. Don't worry about it. Not bad. Yeah. Yeah. What's next? Yeah. I mean, yeah. So, what's what's next?
26:39
All in on Dingboard, building out the team. Okay.
26:42
So, Dingboard is doing great.
26:42
I'm going to, you know, keep on growing it and like try to get more money because I need some land.
26:47
And here's why I need some land.
26:48
I've been building things. Mhm. This is the Dingbot. The Dingbot. The Dingbot. See this? What does it do? I I 3D printed this. What does it do?
26:56
Um, this this is an arm ESP32 attached to a a motor driver attached to a stepper driver.
27:01
Sorry, sorry, stepper motor.
27:04
Some 3D printed things that I made with Dinkcad, by the way, dingad. com.
27:06
It's currently down because I had no time to to work on it, but I have like a local host version. Dingad is coming back.
27:12
Breaking popsicle sticks. No offense.
27:14
Oh, here's here's the genius of it. Okay, it is. I need cash flow.
27:18
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.
27:24
But with popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month.
27:28
You have to buy a new one. There we go. There we go.
27:31
Get them in the boardroom. You know what it's like?
27:34
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.
27:40
You just go in and just [ __ ] eat it.
27:41
You like kick it across the room cuz it's like 30 bucks.
27:43
You can just buy another one.
27:44
It's like it's like that's the feature.
27:46
You're not worried about you're not you're not worried about you know uh getting paperclipipped by abusing your Dobby robot.
27:52
Uh because it'll come back to get you at some point. Oh, no.
27:57
You just program it to be happy that it gets kicked.
27:59
You know, it's like Dobby's like, you know, please, you know, please, sir.
28:01
You just program it, right?
28:02
Like, oh, this is like a solved problem, by the way.
28:04
Like the No, we're not going to get run away.
28:07
I think the real problem with like AI and stuff is like YouTube shorts.
28:09
Have you seen these kids all like like I saw a kid like uh so uh he dinner so with my family.
28:15
This kid was like at the uh trying to get to the bathroom.
28:17
was 12 years old and he was on his YouTube shorts and he was like trying to like find the the doororknob like clicking like like not clicking around but like like reaching around uh 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.
28:33
Is there anything that could get you to come out of retirement?
28:35
Could you You said anything about retirement.
28:38
I was quoting yesterday$und00 million offer.
28:41
I mean to get you back into a mega corporation.
28:43
A mega take is going to take 80 million, 100 million, 120 million.
28:49
What gets you to take the job for I think I probably like find it really hard to say no to like 2. 5 probably.
28:55
Like but I I don't think like the companies I would work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I mean think they do.
28:59
Well, what are those kind of companies?
29:01
What are those kind of companies?
29:02
We can run a process talking big tech.
29:04
So I know you don't want to work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number? All right.
29:08
I'm going to just start doing an auction here. All right. Okay. I got a message for 500. 500. Do I have a 600? 600. All right. 700.
29:15
Our our 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.
29:22
I I could raise money like super easily and like I could also get a job super easy. I mean I have friends.
29:26
I the thing is like I'm a very honest hard worker.
29:28
Like the places I've worked at I could I could go back like I have like a really strong network.
29:33
So I don't really need a job.
29:34
And I mean I'm not worried about getting a job.
29:35
But if I wanted to join in terms of like for me mission alignment is super important.
29:38
like I really need to like use the product to actually enjoy it.
29:41
So I sell sold some dingboard t-shirts on Shopify and I'm like aligned with like Toby's awesome.
29:45
Um and then Coher I think is like a really interesting place to work for because they're on the come up but mostly like I mean he's in Canada. Hold on hold on.
29:52
Uh yeah break down Coher that that is not the common narrative.
29:56
I mean I love Aiden and I I I think it's incredible founder 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.
30:06
I think I just think they're based, dude.
30:08
Like I'm just Yeah, I just think they're [ __ ] based. Yeah.
30:11
So, it's just pure pure culture. They'll figure it out.
30:13
I mean, like, you know, like it's it's it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or like California or Canada.
30:19
And I think they're [ __ ] cool.
30:21
Like, they kind of they need a poster in residence.
30:23
You could basically you could thousandx their their their impressions.
30:26
Do you listen to death grips? Uh yeah. Yeah. It goes it goes it goes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
30:32
Cuz cuz Aiden's a big Death Grips guy.
30:34
So that just bumps Coher on top of Shopify. Yep. Yep. Yep. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.
30:40
He did a he did an interview in a Death Grips t-shirt.
30:41
I saw it and I was like, "That's amazing. This guy's a killer."
30:44
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 going to try to become like an actual billionaire.
30:53
The Dingbot thing is not a joke.
30:55
I'm actually going to actually do it.
30:56
And um I'm not going to race. I think I can do it.
30:58
I probably can find people to to do this for.
31:02
There's a lot of things I'm really interested on the way which is like uh doing like reinforcement learning for like uh control of robots, certain types of robots.
31:08
Um uh I think I figured something out after listening to a popular lucky podcast about don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in software and I'm pretty good at software and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard.
31:19
Clearly it's not hard enough to start.
31:21
I feel like it's easy actually you you proved with that that it's easy. Yeah.
31:26
Explain that with the uh reinforcement learning for robotics.
31:29
Are you thinking like you're going to do stuff in simulation and then transfer the the knowledge back with reinforcement learning?
31:35
Are you doing the thing that uh Dylan Patel was posting about with like the robots on the you know on the harnesses trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data?
31:44
Like what are what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement?
31:46
So I don't think like humanoid robots is what I would do.
31:49
I think I would do robots for things that annoy me.
31:51
For example, dandelions on my lawn and I would do whatever is possible.
31:54
Like talk I I have a pretty good solid network like talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich Zurich.
31:57
I don't know how to pronounce it.
32:00
Uh, and just be like, "Hey, like just give me feed me the papers and like some shitty Python code I'll clean up and make good." Um, sorry researchers.
32:07
Uh, you got this is extremely Nat Freeman code coded. He's out of the game.
32:10
Someone's got to build the robot that picks up the lips. Exactly.
32:14
Exactly what N cuz it's like I'm [ __ ] sick of like going outside and just, you know, just like poking out all these dandelions.
32:20
I'm I'm absolutely so sick and tired of it.
32:22
And it's so easy to build this.
32:23
It's like literally 3D printer.
32:25
Like you could you could even 3D print the wheels.
32:26
Like you can get like five bucks of off AliExpress and ESP32 cost like three bucks. I just impulse buy them.
32:32
I like get my X ad revenue payout and I just like spend the whole thing on AliExpress.
32:36
My my my house like constantly has like these random AliExpress packages.
32:39
I just like maybe build like a Minecraft sorting system in real life.
32:43
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.
32:48
I could also sell it for 25 bucks on subscription and you get a new one every month. Oh, there you go. Yes.
32:52
People are taking their Dobbies subscription.
32:55
It's like if it breaks, it's like I literally will tell the users, "Hey, I'm just, you know, a dude in and, uh, there's a CNC shop here, uh, that does wood."
33:03
Uh, so like they do wood CNC.
33:05
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.
33:10
And I'm going to laser, you know, laser on like made in Ottawa on it.
33:13
Um, 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.
33:19
Um, 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.
33:30
I'm going to realize like holy [ __ ] like all the cat software [ __ ] sucks and I'm going to build it because I can and like you know with Gemini 2.
33:36
5 Pro just like ripping on my credit card. What about Grock? Uh, Gemini 2.
33:42
5 Pro is the best model to use for coding if you write your own coding frameworks because it's cheaper.
33:46
Uh, it's faster and it's good enough.
33:48
Like I'm not like giving all of my work away to I don't need a PhD level intelligence because I'm not a PhD level guy.
33:55
I'm trying to write React.
33:57
Like it's not that hard to write React.
33:58
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.
34:05
Just stop using if if statements and like Yeah. Yeah. So Okay. Okay.
34:07
So, but here's the thing.
34:09
You need you want to build a bunch of stuff. You need some cash flow.
34:13
Why not set up why not set up, you know, some type of subscription? You have a lot of fans.
34:17
A lot of people want to give you $10 a month so you can hack.
34:20
Honestly, that was the Dingboard subscription that I signed up for.
34:22
It was like support this guy who's doing something cool.
34:25
The issue is Dingboard is so hard to sign up for.
34:27
How do I even sign up for Dingboard right now? Go to dingboard. com. Okay.
34:32
Never Okay, first of all, Jordy, never doubt my conversion levels ever again. I can I am a conversion.
34:36
I can convert anything to anything.
34:39
I am I am I am a conversion god. Okay. Go to dingboard. com. I'm wait. You're so good. You're so good.
34:45
You don't have a buy button cuz 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?
34:53
I didn't even have to tell you what to do. Legend. Legend.
34:57
All right, I'm signing in. I'm signing in. Okay, I'm here. What do I Dingcribe? There we go.
35:02
Once you're Want to know what dingcribe even means? not dingcribe. $12. 99 per month.
35:07
You got to get your numbers up, dude.
35:13
I don't actually don't have the code. It's like on my server.
35:14
You got to do what Google does.
35:16
It's 500 a month, but they give you six months at half price and then it just auto converts up.
35:19
Yeah, that's that's the real ticket.
35:22
Or just double the price. Yeah. Yeah.
35:24
But the price should be, you know, cheap on day one and then just get more and more.
35:27
It should go up by 10% every month. [ __ ] dude. I'm not doing that, man.
35:30
That's some YouTube shorts.
35:32
Kry some kids brain [ __ ] like that. All right.
35:34
I I'm a ding pro subscriber. Subscriber. I'm ding. No, dude. You're a ding. You have to get that.
35:42
Dude, Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a dingcriber. Ding. You're part of the crew. You're part of the crew. I'm ding maxing. Okay.
35:49
Talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2. 5 Pro. Are you cursor guy? GitHub copilot cursor.
35:53
What do you No, never say cursor. I'm Okay.
35:56
I have a custom framework I've written for Neoim.
36:00
So, basically what it is is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have.
36:03
So, uh, Claude and before Gemini was good, Claude and Open AI's models, um, they'd go down all the time.
36:12
Like, infrastructure is hard to serve at scale.
36:13
Like, I don't blame them.
36:14
It's like that's a hard problem to solve.
36:16
Uh, so I have like always I always have a model available like even if both of them are down like I can hit deepsek over open router, right? Like it's a facade.
36:24
Can't you do that incursor by just switching the model router? Switching what? Was there a hotkey?
36:29
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. There we go. Nice by the way.
36:40
I got a I got a homie from from China built to make it for me.
36:45
Um and uh so basically space space uh what is it?
36:48
Space I don't even remember.
36:50
It's all space I is uh the LLM provider. So that's Gemini 2. 5 Pro. Space K is Gemini Flash.
36:56
And it all renders in a single markdown file. Okay.
36:59
And I've created commands for these models.
37:01
So basically like depending on the fence.
37:05
So three uh three apostrophes and then there's going to be the command name.
37:07
So like edit file it can give basically give it a syntax to edit a file for me.
37:13
And then I actually manually is this open source like you know files up like like can I install your your setup?
37:19
Uh so uh 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.
37:26
So I'm just going to do it for myself.
37:27
I'm like I'm pulling up the ladder behind me like I'm you know I know how much this is open. You got a raise for it.
37:31
It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here.
37:34
Uh 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.
37:42
Just 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.
37:47
Like the the whole point of so it's a Neoim plugin kind of it's like also a server and it plugs into a bunch of I'm I'm good at software.
37:52
Um so uh part of the part of the problems with uh uh so Neov like is great because the software is configurable as a feature.
38:02
So like the the best software you can get is like software you can read and understand and actually change.
38:06
The best software for you is software you've written yourself because if something annoys you, you can actually go change it.
38:12
And that's why I really like to like write my own frameworks.
38:14
Cursor I'm sure is a great product, but I like I'm just so particular about certain things.
38:18
Like for example like I want to like implement um uh tree sitterter across multiple files and automate adding files to my context.
38:25
So I have a I have a file which has a bunch of file paths and those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm in and I manage it manually by like literally going to the file and deleting the lines and um what I want is to automatically create an a so an abstract syntax tree um to be able to jump around with an LLM or like train a model to actually go through the a and this is all super obvious to me. It's like [ __ ] man.
38:46
Like what about uh you're going to make any products in the parenting space? Uh yeah.
38:49
So actually I have an idea. I had an idea.
38:51
So I I use an e-ink display.
38:53
Um by the way before you try to hack this uh I never update the software and I never write anything private on it.
38:58
So go it's it's I'm I'm going to put it public.
39:01
Um so I have an e- in reader uh like tablet.
39:03
And what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write.
39:07
Uh instead of texting him, uh I want to make like a kind of like a radio e- in display kind of like an etching sketch which you can write on but is synced to your parents etch and sketch.
39:18
So my wife will have one, I will have one and my kid will have one and he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over over distances, right?
39:25
I think that's like a really cool idea.
39:26
So I'm probably going to build that.
39:27
Um if you wanted to make like a gajillion dollars, it's so easy.
39:29
Just look around and like come up with good ideas and actually just believe that you can do it.
39:34
Like literally just go do it. Like it's not that hard. It's actually not. Get a 3D printer.
39:37
Watch some YouTube videos.
39:39
YouTube is great products.
39:40
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.
39:45
This is going to be a YouTube short.
39:47
We're going to edit this.
39:50
This will be on Tik Tok maybe. Minecraft. Yeah.
39:53
Minecraft speedrun and play surfers over you. Anything. AI slop over.
39:59
How many kids do you want to have?
40:01
Uh so as much as God allows us to have.
40:03
Uh, so just leaving it up to God and uh, yeah, that's how many kids. Good answer. That's great. What else?
40:09
What else do you have to say to the people while you're here?
40:10
Uh, thanks for doing your this podcast, guys.
40:13
I know how hard I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Uh, let's just say that.
40:19
And like, uh, the doing live and stuff, like it's it's a pain in the ass. Uh, so keep it up, guys. I know like Thank you.
40:24
And and and the the the live the live uh the video team at X are like generational talents.
40:30
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 to I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days otherwise we would have been hammering you with messages every single day but this has been great come come
40:46
back on whenever you want to talk about your project just hang out and chat thanks I really appreciate you guys and uh yeah so keep it up thanks we're we're excited and and I'm excited to be ding maxing just offer offer a premium tier like I don't know like 10 grand a month or something like that and maybe we become you Oh, I mean if you guys want an ad space, I'll sell you right now. Like spit handshake. If you want to put Like spit handshake.
41:04
If you want to put an ad on dingboard your podcast, I'll uh let's say 12 grand. 12 grand. Okay.
41:12
We'll talk to our We'll talk to our CFO. All right. All right. All right.
41:17
Our CFO our CFO will talk to your CFO.
41:20
But but but can we get the semi analysis deal where it's perpetual?
41:24
It's 12 grand once and we get it forever because what if you is it a one time or option.
41:29
There's a lot of upside here.
41:32
It depends on how good your your podcast is. Yeah. Okay. Okay.
41:35
Well, we're going to keep working on it.
41:36
Hopefully, Dingboard keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together. Yeah, absolutely. All right. We're excited to follow. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon. Godspeed. Have a good one. Bye.
41:45
This is the news of the day with the Iran crisis.
41:50
Uh Donald Trump says, "Everyone keep oil prices down. I'm watching.
41:55
You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it."
41:59
You love to see the president talking to everybody.
42:03
Everybody's saying everybody's, you know, saying this is ridiculous, but it's never been tried.
42:08
People always say, "Oh, all that matters in in oil prices, supply and demand." Yeah.
42:12
Well, all you got to do is say, "Hey, supply go down.
42:15
Hey, supply go up and demand go down and then we will have lower prices."
42:23
I mean, there is something to that.
42:23
That has been tried before.
42:24
It's it's worth it's worth trying something if you do signal.
42:27
I mean there there are there are stories about uh 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.
42:37
Like that does happen every once in a while but uh yeah very very odd to post anyway.
42:40
Um uh back on watches the watches of espionage account says men who guide the destinies of the world while wear Rolex watches.
42:51
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Dan Razine Kaine in situation room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex GMT.
42:58
Well, you need a GMT because you got to know what time it is in St. This is a good one. I haven't seen this.
43:03
I've seen the Merkel route.
43:05
I've seen the the the the break cracking your knuckles.
43:11
But this is this is special.
43:11
It's four points of attack.
43:13
I mean, I guess they did hit four sites, so you got to point to all of them. Yeah, that's right. Interesting.
43:19
Well, it's been an eventful morning.
43:21
Uh Iran attacked a US base in Qatar. Yes, that's the latest.
43:26
And uh people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties.
43:32
All of apparently all the missiles were taken out in the air.
43:34
Y and this could lead to a deescalation and a return to a steady state of tension.
43:43
Yeah, this has been my position for a long time.
43:45
I'm I'm pretty anti-agression, anti-war, but I'm extremely pro domes, iron domes, golden domes.
43:53
I want to be able to shoot down every missile before as soon as it leaves.
43:57
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.
44:08
Um, but uh, Duva has a breakdown of this.
44:11
The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at Ford DAO represents over one year of US production capacity of the GBU57 bunker buster.
44:19
Its primary explosive AFX 757 is difficult to produce and we don't have many factories to do it.
44:27
It's why way more robots are necessary um to do everything from production to automating research.
44:32
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.
44:40
Um Joe Weisenthal had some polyarket news.
44:43
Uh bombing the of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025.
44:50
In fact, it's at the highest level of the day.
44:52
I wonder what's driving that.
44:53
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.
45:04
The other thing that's interesting, the uh Foro nuclear facility destroyed by before July poly market is only sitting at a 32% chance still on four million in volume.
45:13
So I think people are basically saying calling that it wasn't actually destroyed or at least that's what the market is saying.
45:20
So it was impacted but not uh destroyed even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed uh total annihilation.
45:28
And up next we have Mike Gallagher from Palunteer Technologies.
45:30
He's the head of defense and uh he put out some comments about the partnership between Palunteer and the nuclear company.
45:38
Uh says this partnership marks the first time Palunteer software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy infrastructure.
45:46
So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show. Mike, how are you? What's going on? Great to have you. What's going on, guys?
45:53
I'm 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.
46:00
Now I'm just, you know, I'm a has been.
46:02
You're a techn You're a technology brother. You're one of us. You're one of us.
46:06
I mean, that's actually a great place to start.
46:08
I I I want to talk about your career and the transition uh that you went through.
46:11
Uh there's there's a you know, obviously it's very exciting what you're doing now.
46:18
There's also this story about like I want you in the government too and I want people like you in the government.
46:25
And so is the government uh a place for high-erforming technologists to flourish?
46:30
Is there something that needs to change there?
46:32
I'm interested in to digging into that.
46:33
But why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment?
46:38
Yeah, I I think well obviously, you know, from northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kind of grew up always interested in the world outside of Wisconsin in the United States.
46:49
When I went to college, I studied Arabic in the Middle East.
46:51
I became fascinated uh by what was happening.
46:55
I was an undergrad when we invaded Iraq.
46:56
I was a senior in high school during 9/11.
46:58
And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve.
47:04
Um 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.
47:22
So even though I didn't come from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible that I could throw myself into, I had a just really an awesome experience.
47:31
Couple great deployments, learned a ton was the counter intelligence human intelligence officer.
47:36
And kind of similarly when when I got out of the Marine Corps and you know I worked on a presidential campaign, I worked in the Senate as a Middle East guy.
47:44
Never thought about running myself.
47:45
I'd moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company when a some people reached out to me about running for Congress. I was very young. I was 31.
47:55
And I my initial reaction was hell no.
47:55
I mean, it was just I was not I didn't know anything about raising money.
47:59
You know, I was the guy who like wrote the white paper that someone read before they went on TV.
48:04
I wasn't wouldn't be on TV myself.
48:06
I kind of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician.
48:10
I still don't think of myself that way.
48:12
Um, but honestly it was the fact that it scared me that like led me to do it.
48:17
I felt I felt like anything that force you outside your comfort zone is good for your your development personally and it was I felt like it would be an extension of my military service, a way to continue my work of enhancing American deterrence, albeit from a legislative perspective.
48:32
And and I'll swear I'll I'll wrap up after this.
48:34
I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me.
48:38
I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected.
48:40
I always conceived of it as a season of service.
48:44
I think the problem with Congress is that we have too many career politicians.
48:48
So I kind of always had in my head I do a decade and when I decided to leave um you know Paliner was a was just a obvious way for me to continue that mission.
48:58
I mean, Pounder was one of the rare companies that was unapologetically pro-American military, committed 100% to enhancing deterrence, you know, willing to say that like we're the good guys, you know, the commies are the bad guys.
49:13
And um I really felt like, you know, it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me, i. e.
49:21
now being surrounded by genius you like 20somes that make me feel stupid and then a continuation of of the mission and I' you know I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing World War II and I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the war fighter every day in Palunteer.
49:39
So that's the the short version and it's been really exciting.
49:44
Uh is that is that a typical flow for elected politicians?
49:46
Someone reaches out to them.
49:48
Is there kind of like a scouting department uh in in our government that's looking for up and cominging talent and then put giving them the ideas?
49:56
Because I feel like the story that most people tell is is ah this guy, you know, wants power or wants to, you know, he's on a war path.
50:04
Everyone tells him no and then he runs and and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will.
50:08
Um but but which direction does it go more commonly?
50:10
Was your path uncommon or is it more the norm?
50:14
Well, to be clear, I I don't want to pretend like this was some pure ash Mr.
50:19
Smith goes to Washington thing, right?
50:22
Like clearly I was driven, ambitious, like had kind of always had a drive my whole life um and wanted to like test myself, but honestly, it was not like I didn't think of like the political domain at that point in my life.
50:37
I think more often than not, people are drawn to politics.
50:39
It used to be the case that like you'd go to law school, you'd become a lawyer, you'd run for state or local office, and then that would be a natural kind of like farm team that would lead into Congress, and then you'd run for Senate, and then you'd try and be president one day.
50:54
I actually think that's changing a little bit.
50:57
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.
51:13
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, uh that you guys talk to a lot.
51:26
Um I think people everyone was a lawyer.
51:29
It used to be everyone every single person being a lawyer. Yeah.
51:33
Being a lawyer seems miserable to me. No offense lawyers. Um but I I don't know.
51:38
And I will say finally I went in with the assumption that the fundamental problem with Congress was the people, right?
51:46
The people were either purely mchavelian ambitious or like horribly corrupt and just didn't attract the right people.
51:56
Now, to be sure, there are plenty of people that like would, you know, could not like they can't leave Congress because they are otherwise unemployable and like, you know, like they're not like the greatest in the world.
52:08
But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality, the talent, as well as the patriotism.
52:14
And I would say most people run for Congress wanting to serve the country, wanting to make a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from.
52:23
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?
52:33
Like there's really no reward for doing the boring work of oversight of the executive branch of caring about the legislative process.
52:40
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.
52:51
And that 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.
53:03
executive branch. my I came to believe that kind of the the fundamental problem with most things is that we become so unbalanced in terms of the overall power of the federal government and then within the federal government the power is purely concentrated now in the executive branch which is why our our presidential campaigns get so intense
53:21
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 one which was envisioned by our framers to be the dominant gr br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br br branch of government. In
53:35
In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful.
53:38
They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs.
53:40
Congress surrendering its power since the 70s and then in bipartisan fashion continuing that trend has had really perverse and unintended consequences for um our politics and it's why they've become so intense and why people are turned off by it.
53:53
I think in our lifetime, do you think we will see term limits in in Congress at all?
53:59
It seems like a lot of smart people, you know, seeing certain actors over the last decade would would feel that that that would be beneficial to the United States.
54:09
It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are, you know, you know, in in power for a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or super long term.
54:18
They're they're thinking in, you know, election cycles and and kind of creates some distortions.
54:24
But I'm curious what you think having been in there.
54:26
You know, it's funny, man.
54:28
By the way, can I say you have great flow?
54:29
I just want to throw that out there.
54:31
Both of you, in fact, as as someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and um you know, cherish it, gentlemen.
54:40
Should just be news anchors, I guess. Destiny. Yeah.
54:46
Um it's funny like when I first came in and I got elected in 2016 and we we thought like our freshman class, Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill.
55:00
We had a bipartisan term limits bill.
55:02
I remember going to the White House.
55:04
So this was Trump's first year in office.
55:06
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.
55:20
And so, if memory serves, Trump actually uh tweeted about it, endorsing the bill, and I remember I did some selfie video, you know, having just complained about members of Congress focusing on social media.
55:30
This is probably the the apex. You got to dabble.
55:34
You got to dabble a little bit. Exactly.
55:37
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.
55:44
It's overwhelmingly popular with the American people.
55:46
I've I the counterpart the counter arguments which we can discuss I don't think are persuasive.
55:51
What was unique about our bill and the reason the reason we thought it might have a chance of passing? Well, two things.
55:56
One, we were in that moment the sort of drain the swamp moment.
55:58
The reason Trump got elected the first time you know everyone's disgusted with the status quo business as usual.
56:03
he had made a pledge late in the campaign that dudes was going to support term limits.
56:09
Um and then uh secondly, we kind of phased it in.
56:13
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.
56:19
You grandfather in if you're if you're a career politician and you're like I got another 15 years that I was planning on really, you know, running it around here.
56:26
you let them phase out and then the new the new guard you put some limits on them and then it you grandfather in the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time and then the new people um 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.
56:45
So theoretically someone could do 24 years I could do 12 in the House run for Senate and so that seemed generous to us.
56:50
Um but it died it died a slow death and then a sudden death.
56:53
you know, the the problem is, you know, nobody in leadership wants to bring a a term limits bill to the floor, uh, because they fear it endangers their own power.
57:03
Um, so I really do think the paradox, it's like the things we need to do to to enhance the power and the functionality of the modern Congress actually require an overempowered president to make them happen.
57:17
Like otherwise, Congress won't do it on its own.
57:19
And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense. Yeah. Yeah.
57:23
I I I want to kind of wrestle with this idea of uh of you know the the the executive branch having power.
57:31
There are term limits there.
57:33
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.
57:40
We had previously been in, you know, eight-year stretches for a while.
57:43
Um and I want to run a theory be uh by you around Iran.
57:47
My my working theory is that they're not happy with how things are going right now.
57:52
Uh 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.
58:06
And more importantly, the idea of a president who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would was it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted and he was uh seen as kind of like a joke almost and was deplatformed from social media.
58:24
How is this guy Pinterest account?
58:26
He didn't even have a Pinterest account.
58:27
And so he he so so if you're 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.
58:42
And and but then surprise, Trump's in.
58:45
Now we have to deal with the consequences of that.
58:49
And so in this weird way, America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically.
58:54
And maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk.
59:00
And to your point about wanting to avert avert World War II, I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years.
59:08
Is that bullish for avoiding World War II or is it a risk or do we need to just tussle with it more?
59:15
Like how do you think about all those different concepts? Yeah.
59:20
Well, first of all, great question.
59:21
A lot of interesting threads to pull on there.
59:22
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 over it over its nuclear program in the second half of the Obama administration.
59:35
And really it was it was it was sort of like covert negotiations that then become overt amidst the backdrop of a region that had gone from all this hope around the Arab Spring turned Arab winter, Syrian civil war, coup in Egypt, just chaos everywhere.
59:48
And then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran.
59:51
Um Obama had sort of a theory about the region.
59:55
He he talked about creating a new equilibrium in the Middle East whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from Israel and balance sort of a recognize Iran's enhanced power and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf states and Israel.
1:00:14
The only problem is that that that new equilibrium created intense disequilibrium and missed the real story which was the only path to equilibrium in the region is to build off this alignment of interest between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states which are on paper strange bedfellows but are united by the shared threat from Iran.
1:00:36
The long pole in the tent that links all of our traditional allies together is the threat from Iran.
1:00:39
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.
1:00:47
And that was kind of the genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place.
1:00:52
Long story short, the other missed opportunity.
1:00:54
So there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran.
1:00:57
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.
1:01:04
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.
1:01:15
He constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the Supreme Leader.
1:01:23
There was no congressional buyin.
1:01:25
And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash.
1:01:32
Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it.
1:01:34
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.
1:01:43
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.
1:01:54
and I think improves your negotiating position.
1:01:58
Now, to get to the last part of your question, I do think the president's recent decision was the right one.
1:02:04
I think really going even back before Obama's failed um and flawed agreement with Iran, the Iranians have consistently used the cover of diplomacy to covertly advance their program.
1:02:14
And at some point, we were either going to have to accept a nuclear Iran or take kinetic action to set back their program.
1:02:22
And this is the first time in a long time really since our the invasion of Iraq that we've combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent.
1:02:30
And so I do think it gives us a chance to effectively eliminate their nuclear program.
1:02:34
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 Sentcom don't completely deplete the resources we need in other theaters along the way.
1:02:47
And I'll stop there because I could talk about the Middle East for um 20 minutes and all of your your audience would evaporate. No, this is fascinating.
1:02:53
I'm really enjoying this.
1:02:55
Do you have a follow-up there or I wanted to talk about I I wanted to get a get a a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple months and and couple weeks specifically.
1:03:08
Well, I think that so the my most like bullish case for what Trump has just accomplished would be not only has he set back if not eliminated for a decade Iran's nuclear ambitions, he could have just shattered the emerging axis of chaos.
1:03:25
this sort of access between Iran, Russia and China because China sort of views Iran as both a a source of hydrocarbons as well as like a gateway to expand its influence in the Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye.
1:03:42
Um, this is incredibly problematic for China's view of the region.
1:03:48
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.
1:03:53
There was some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China access to Iranian oil.
1:03:56
And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.
1:03:59
0 there was this tension between some more hawkish members of of the administration on China and then more dovish members at Treasury.
1:04:09
There's a there's sort of a version of this tension going on right now.
1:04:12
And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xiinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it.
1:04:16
At other times he's like uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China.
1:04:22
I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China.
1:04:28
And so there I guess there's there's lingering questions about how we want to approach China.
1:04:34
But I really think this is the serious setback for this this access of chaos, this anti-American access.
1:04:40
Russia, of course, was um getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war uh in Eastern Europe.
1:04:46
I can't help but think that that's going to be increasingly difficult given that Iran is is is is dealing with the aftermath of the attack as well as increasing internal pressure.
1:04:56
And then hats off to the Israelis.
1:04:58
I mean, I think this shows how valuable it is to have lethal allies that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own, but are willing to take a a a big role in the the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America.
1:05:16
And in fact, what we've seen really in terms of the way they've they've gone after Hzbollah, the beeper operation, and then uh 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.
1:05:32
And even if one isn't as pro-Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire uh just how effective their military and intelligence community is. Yeah, that's undeniable.
1:05:44
Uh bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have any insight here.
1:05:48
There was a lot of wrong.
1:05:48
Um there was uh some interesting price action in Bitcoin.
1:05:55
It's hard to read too much into uh but people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining bit, you know, a lot of Bitcoin. Fascinating.
1:06:03
You know, maybe maybe it didn't come up for you, but I I I saw somebody posting that he was like, "I'm not buying Bitcoin right now.
1:06:11
It seems obvious that the regime is just like dumping in order to try and fun, you know, basically the recovery effort even.
1:06:17
But if you don't have any insight there, we can move on.
1:06:20
I wanted to, you know, I I'm afraid I don't, but I I do think and I've said this to like all the smart crypto folks like Brian Armstrong and others.
1:06:28
I I think there's um or a Wisconsin colleague of mine, Brian Style, who's one of the leaders in the House on this issue.
1:06:34
You guys should have him on.
1:06:35
He's really smart young congressman from Wisconsin. Um, yeah. Brian style. He's always in style. Name. He's welcome. Welcome. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
1:06:44
Uh, I think there's like a an underexplored aspect or argument about like crypto's role in national security, right?
1:06:54
Because the anti-crypto ar anti-crypto argument is always like this is just a way of sanctions, evasion, and money laundering.
1:06:59
And I think what people don't appreciate is like how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies national security interests.
1:07:04
And certainly was the case when, you know, people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan.
1:07:09
Um, that crypto was enormously valuable in that regard.
1:07:12
It might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that uh are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community.
1:07:20
So, I'm assuming that's a that's an area where like national security nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto, but I hadn't heard that about.
1:07:29
Um, switching gears to the European continent.
1:07:31
Uh, wanted to get your reaction to the the NATO spending news and maybe kind of the backstory.
1:07:38
I'm sure when when you were in Congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing, but um, any any any reactions there?
1:07:46
Well, listen, I think anytime first of all you this this idea that you know the American president would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense is not a new thing.
1:07:59
It is not sort of unique to Trump.
1:08:03
Eisenhower uh the first supreme ally commander of NATO like actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies time.
1:08:12
So this is like and we've we've had Democratic senators uh try to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO.
1:08:20
So this is like a an old argument that is new again.
1:08:22
I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense is a great thing for deterrence in general.
1:08:30
I would say however I've always been of the view that this obsession with the inputs i. e.
1:08:38
What percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis, right?
1:08:44
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.
1:09:12
And shout out to NATO for acquiring Maven smart system made by Palanteer Technologies. No big deal.
1:09:19
Um then you have actually a sports team sports team doesn't wake up one morning and like say let's all give it 100%.
1:09:27
And that's the only coordination.
1:09:29
It's like yeah you could easily turn this into a jobs program where you say yeah we're going to spend 5% of our GDP on horseback and cavalry.
1:09:35
And it's like you're going to lose, but yes, you're technically going to be spending 5% and you're going to have a massive military, but you're going to get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs.
1:09:44
So, is there any do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly?
1:09:50
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%.
1:09:58
And yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now, but that feels like uh an easier conversation.
1:10:04
Or maybe I'm wrong there.
1:10:08
I think the closer you are to the threat, the more your thinking is sharp, right?
1:10:12
So it is my experience that, you know, Poland, the Baltic states tend to have a clearer view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own uh military.
1:10:24
By the way, we've acquired two new NATO.
1:10:26
Acquired is the wrong term.
1:10:28
We we've had two new countries join NATO in recent years that bring phenomenal capabilities to the table.
1:10:33
I think you know traditionally struggled convincing the Germans who are you know the big elephant in the European room uh to make the right investments and to make more investments.
1:10:44
My hope is that that conversation is getting better.
1:10:45
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.
1:10:58
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.
1:11:12
So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the Palenters of the world and you know European hardware defense manufacturers.
1:11:24
I'd love to see more of that going forward.
1:11:25
And I've always been a proponent of um you know there's we have a ton of troops uh in in countries like Germany in Western Europe.
1:11:34
um getting them out of garrison, stiffening 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.
1:11:48
I I think there's a there's a huge opportunity here.
1:11:50
Um and and it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric, as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking shaking it loose uh right now.
1:12:00
Uh I mean obviously it's it's a bit overdetermined.
1:12:04
I mean you know the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine and it's a massive wakeup call for Europe um that they need to need to invest more and buy the right things.
1:12:15
So, but I do think we have a moment here.
1:12:16
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, and teasing out the connection between Russia and China.
1:12:29
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.
1:12:37
We have an existential challenge in the form of communist China.
1:12:40
We have to pay attention everywhere.
1:12:41
Yes, we have to make hard decisions and prioritize.
1:12:45
Accordingly, the Indoacific is the priority theater.
1:12:46
But one of the best ways we can invest more of our own explicit resources into the Indoacific 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. Great. Great.
1:13:04
Should we talk about the the news today?
1:13:06
The announcement, the nuclear nuclear uh deal that you Yeah, that'd be great.
1:13:11
Can you break down for us?
1:13:13
Uh everything is nuclear. Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear. Yeah.
1:13:16
I mean, I want to know the shape of the partnership.
1:13:17
Anything you can share there.
1:13:19
Uh but then I'd love to go into kind of um what you're particularly excited about in nuclear or or even just energy broadly.
1:13:27
Uh we've seen that the United States energy production per capita has kind of flatlined for a while.
1:13:34
China's increasing energy production very aggressively.
1:13:38
It feels top of mind especially in the backdrop of the foundation model AI race um that we need to be building more energy infrastructure and there's different resources coming online.
1:13:48
Nuclear is probably the most fascinating one that has the ability to scale because we've we've we've we we've we've tamed the atom and yet and we can't just seem to copy paste uh you know Diablo Canyon 50 times to to actually get a massive increase in energy production.
1:14:04
There's also stuff happening on the smaller scale.
1:14:07
Uh I want your take on nuclear as a whole in addition to the deal. Yeah.
1:14:12
By the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this the nuclear stuff by it's your fault though because my understanding is I'm just um batting cleanup for Eleana point and he talked too much but I'm happy to come back at any point.
1:14:26
Um listen I mean we can't obviously we can't uh dominate the like the commanding heights of critical technology and AI if we don't improve our our sort of all the above energy policy.
1:14:38
Um there is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country.
1:14:43
The Trump administration has put out some really productive EOS, but now it's incumbent upon the private sector to step up and the nuclear company is that I mean they they're going to leverage our software to build reactors which right now take over a decade to build uh and collapse that timeline down.
1:14:57
And I think we're at the forefront of something really interesting.
1:15:01
Um, China is investing billions of dollars in this space, putting their best and brightest on the problem, and we can't fall further behind.
1:15:08
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.
1:15:22
when what I don't want to see is a replay of what we saw with China and 5G and Huawei where China is going all over the world saying you can have 5G internet cheaply.
1:15:31
We'll just control the infrastructure.
1:15:34
Um it'll be in a box, you know, you won't even have to worry about anything.
1:15:39
You don't have to worry about anything.
1:15:40
And like in America like whoa, don't do that. Time out.
1:15:44
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.
1:15:51
And so there's something similar playing out uh in the nuclear space right now.
1:15:55
So I'm very bullish about this partnership.
1:15:57
Um you know I I think this is the cusp of something big both for the nuclear company and for Palanteer and we're going to be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with and old Seronic and nontraditional partners with our warp speed manufacturing uh product and apply it uh in in to the nuclear space. That's fantastic. I'm getting pulled.
1:16:12
I'm getting you on another We'll see.
1:16:15
We have to have you back on. Come back on soon. We'll talk to you soon.
1:16:19
Come back for Packers commentary. Great. Cheers.
1:16:20
Hims and Hers stock drops more than 30% after Novo Nordisk breakup.
1:16:27
This is from the Wall Street Journal.
1:16:30
Of course, if you're interested in stocks that are dropping because you're going short or are popping because you're going long.
1:16:37
You got to get on public investing for those who take it seriously.
1:16:39
They got multiasset investing, industryleading yields, and they're trusted by millions.
1:16:43
Anyway, uh the Wagui maker, that's Novo Nordisk, has cut ties with the teleahalth company, HIMS and hers, citing allegations of deceptive marketing practices and drug compounding.
1:16:53
I feel like they were the drug compounding.
1:16:56
How is this an allegation?
1:16:58
I thought that's like what was saying they were doing.
1:16:59
They were like I felt like there was a lot of press about them being like proud of drug compounding because there was a shortage, but I guess it's I guess it's alleged at this point. So, we'll dig into this.
1:17:10
Um, Nova Nordisk abruptly ended its partnership with Hims and hers after the Danish drug maker accused the teleaalth company of illegally selling cheaper copycats.
1:17:18
Okay, so this is after the FDA's uh ruling around about uh whether or not there was in fact a shortage.
1:17:26
So the Novo said on Monday that it had concerns about the safety of knockoff versions of Aguvi and that Hims and Herbs deceptive marketing of such knockoffs put patient safety at risk.
1:17:35
In turn, hims and hers accused Novo of pressuring it to steer to steer patients to Wagui regardless of whether or not it was the best option for patients.
1:17:47
News that the deal was scrapped weighed heavily on him and her shares, sending them down 32% in afternoon trading in what would be the largest decline for the stock on record.
1:17:57
Novo Nordisk's shares were down nearly 6% in New York.
1:18:02
The messy breakup comes less than two months after the companies unveiled what they called a long-term collaboration to directly provide wagui to him and hers patients.
1:18:11
Okay, so this was somewhat predictable, right?
1:18:14
Uh talked to Parker about this.
1:18:17
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 WGOI right now.
1:18:26
If you're Nova Nordisk and you're like, "Cool, we have we're selling through this channel."
1:18:29
But then the retailer, in this case, HIMS is telling customers as they come in, hey, we know you wanted WGOI, but how about this sort of cheap knockoff, this compounded version, now WGOI can is probably legitimately concerned about safety issues.
1:18:47
There can be issues around compounding in in in drug safety.
1:18:49
Uh 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 uh off-the-shelf alternative?
1:19:03
And so I have to imagine that they this this is Nova 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 um compete on these sort of high margin you know knockoff products. Yeah.
1:19:21
I mean like the the Instagram ads that I saw were definitely pushing the brand name for real. Yeah.
1:19:28
And there was a while when they wouldn't use the term Viagra and they would use ED meds and selenophil and tadalaphil and all of those different like they would use the actual underlying compound name and they pushed it so hard that people actually started knowing the name of the underlying compound. Yeah.
1:19:47
Um but yeah uh the brand name how do you think will respond?
1:19:52
Do you think they'll introduce a 10in-1 shampoo?
1:19:53
101 that includes compounded Y GLP1s, Viagra, hair loss. Yeah. Medication. What else could? Add aderall. They can put caffeine.
1:20:06
I mean, this is Cognizola, Panax, Jensen, Altheanine, caffeine. Get some GP1 in here.
1:20:14
Creatine soap with creatine soap would be good with all the above.
1:20:21
Eli Liy is the one that lost the patent, right?
1:20:22
Because they forgot to pay the No, I think it was Nova Nordis. It was Novo. Wow.
1:20:27
They have They're all over the place.
1:20:29
It is It is interesting to watch. Yeah. Novo Nordisk.
1:20:32
How much do you think their stock is up over the past 5 years? Oo, 500%. Try 113%. 113.
1:20:39
But it was a big company. Yeah. Yeah.
1:20:43
But it's been on a big company, but still.
1:20:45
And how much do you what what do you think the the chart looks like over the last year? Uh oh, it's down. The GLP1 boom.
1:20:49
It's down because it it ripped up so high% went down 50% and they and they uh rotated out their CEO. That's right. We covered that.
1:20:59
Uh Hims and hers is at 9 billion 9. 66 billion.
1:21:02
Um that is down from a high of maybe 15 billion.
1:21:07
Um and it's one of those interesting like spa targets that I think they got out through a spa and they they never really went down that far.
1:21:16
They were down, you know, yeah, like like, you know, 30%.
1:21:19
I mean, they spacked at $10 a share, went down to $4 a share, kind of grinded back up.
1:21:28
Now they're at $40 a share.
1:21:28
So, if you if you bought this, if you bought the spa and you did hold for five years, you're, you know, you're sitting on a 3x, 4x, not bad.
1:21:37
So, you know, um kind of a narrative violation around the around the spa, like all spacks are bad narrative. Yeah. Yeah.
1:21:47
Yeah, I mean it it and and the CEO Andrew uh Dudham, we should have him on the show, uh said that uh uh 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 uh reasonable position to say we're not going to just sell one product uh just, you know, because it's true, not every patient is going to respond well to WGOI. Yep.
1:22:14
And uh they should have options.
1:22:17
So before striking deals with brandame drug makers, teleaalth firms were selling lowerc cost knockoff versions of these drugs made by compoundingarmacies, taking market share away from uh brandame makers.
1:22:26
The compoundingies had been allowed to mass-produce knockoff versions conditionally because the original drugs were in short supply.
1:22:34
Now the the whole compounding pharmacy dynamic is very different because I feel like the the the laws were created such that if a far big pharmaceutical company couldn't supply you the drug like your local pharmacists could compound it but then the the these startups kind of like rolled up all the compoundingies and were doing it like a much bigger scale and it wasn't exactly what was intended originally but I'm not sure about that.
1:23:00
Um so the big question u well the big question what will there be more regulatory action around compounded GLP1s and what will that do to their business so roller coaster of a year for him you know partnership was in uh announced in April 2025 popped terminated uh 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.
1:23:30
You need a watch that can adapt to your new wrist size.
1:23:34
You need to go on getbzzle. com.
1:23:35
Your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.
1:23:40
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.
1:23:48
So, when you're ready to start start the bowl, Exactly. This is this is key. This is very very key.
1:23:55
Um anyway, uh comment from the uh from the CEO Andrew Dudham.
1:24:01
He said him and hers will continue to offer an access to a range of treatments including Wagui.
1:24:06
So they continue to battle it out.
1:24:08
It'll be interesting to follow this and we will of course be talking to Kremu about this later today.
1:24:13
Um there is a investing visual post here that I pulled up um about how HIMS makes money.
1:24:20
Uh they're making $576 million online, $10 million from wholesale.
1:24:24
That brings their total revenue to $586 million, which is up 111% year-over-year.
1:24:32
Gross profit there, $428 million.
1:24:37
Uh operating expenses are 337 million, leaving them 92 million in net income or 92 million in operating income and 50 million in net income.
1:24:46
So 50 million in net income for a $10 billion stock.
1:24:52
Pretty pretty high price to earnings ratio if that's their if if that's an indication of their earnings.
1:24:57
Um but it's been a big growth stock on a major major trend GLP1.
1:24:59
And so uh the the uh the the retail army has been coming out in force.
1:25:05
Uh King KSM's capital said it felt too good to be true for him to go this long without some FUD. This is more like it.
1:25:14
just bought 2,300 2,300 shares and uh top secret stock.
1:25:21
What do they what does the retail army call themselves? I don't know. Himmos or something. Say I'm really him. Yeah. Uh HIMS. Look at the data.
1:25:29
You can see uh their operating margin has improved a ton since they've gone public.
1:25:36
They started out at negative 40% operating margin and climbed up every single quarter. They're now at 6. 5% operating margin.
1:25:44
the number of subscribers in the millions has gone from uh they were at 6 so 600,000 subscribers now they're at 2.
1:25:51
4 4 million and their total revenue has gone from $272 million in revenue.
1:25:58
Uh this is the last 12 months.
1:26:02
Now they're almost at 2 billion.
1:26:05
And so they've almost 10x revenue from that spa price.
1:26:07
And that's what's driving the stock overall to be up 3 to 4x off the original spa price. So yeah, very good news.
1:26:15
Uh if you're Andrew Dudham and you need a break from grinding it out at him, book a wander. Find your happy place.
1:26:22
Book a wander with inspiring view.
1:26:25
Andrew hotel grade amenities. Dreamy beds. Top tier cleaning. 247 concier service. It's a vacation.
1:26:30
Imagine you're in one of the gnarliest PR crises of your life and two guys ensued on a podcast that you've never met are just like, "Yay, take a vacation."
1:26:40
I think it's a bad idea long.
1:26:40
Him is up 2% today, John. You're good.
1:26:43
So, it's time to, you know, treat yourself. Yeah.
1:26:47
Take your foot off the gas. Head to wander. com.
1:26:48
And speaking of foots on gas, Ford, which makes cars, Kremx, welcome to the stream.
1:26:56
There he is looking handsome as ever.
1:27:02
How you guys How you doing? Doing well. Can you hear me?
1:27:04
Yeah, we can hear you fine. Um, perfect.
1:27:06
I'm I'm I'm looking forward to uh to, you know, a future date when we can potentially see your face.
1:27:14
Um, but for now, your avatar looks great soon. Okay.
1:27:16
I'm looking forward to it.
1:27:18
Um, we wanted to have you on to chat about a couple things.
1:27:22
Uh, what's going on GLP1 world, reaction to the HIMS and herm hers breakup.
1:27:28
Uh, Jordy, where would you like to start?
1:27:30
Uh, highlevel update on the GLP1 market.
1:27:33
Yeah, I guess uh I mean it's this miracle drug that keeps on we keep on learning about new uh new diseases or problems that it can treat.
1:27:45
It seems like it can't just stop.
1:27:45
We got the diabetes, then weight loss, then maybe gambling addiction and other stuff.
1:27:51
Walk us through where how people are using or how doctors are prescribing GLP1s for various uh conditions and what's most promising, what's on the horizon, and what you're tracking next. Yes.
1:28:02
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. Mhm.
1:28:12
They are just talking about all the latest advances.
1:28:14
Uh just yesterday, Amjen showed off a once monthly instead of once weekly injectable.
1:28:21
Um Eli Liy showed off an amazing combo therapy with a an inhibitor called uh Bimaguma.
1:28:26
It's a very weird name that makes people not lose any muscle when they're on the drugs.
1:28:33
Um they've been showing off just incredible advances all week.
1:28:35
They've been showing off new treatments uh for like different conditions and whatnot.
1:28:40
There are increasingly many indications that these drugs are getting approved for.
1:28:43
In December, Tzepide was approved for sleep apnea.
1:28:46
Um there's osteoarthritis indications incoming.
1:28:50
Um there might even be there's some effort being put into people trying to uh 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.
1:29:05
I don't know understand really the mechanism behind that, but it seems like it's just hitting every single indication now. Wow.
1:29:11
Um, why do you think that is? I have some guesses.
1:29:18
I think the big reason has to do less with the direct effects of GLP-1s and more with the fact that obesity sucks.
1:29:26
Uh, obesity is just really, really bad.
1:29:29
It affects so many different systems.
1:29:29
It makes your health worse on so many different levels.
1:29:33
And the things that lead to obesity are also quite bad.
1:29:35
Like the bad diet, the bad habits, the uh not moving around very much.
1:29:40
It's actually interesting.
1:29:42
A lot of people after they've been on these drugs for a little while, they decide to move around more.
1:29:48
They become more likely to go to the gym.
1:29:49
They report their physical functioning is improved.
1:29:51
Uh 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.
1:30:02
practically everything is improved I think for that reason and there are some improvements that are due to direct effects of the drugs.
1:30:09
Uh this has like for example this one is major adverse cardiac events major cardiovascular events.
1:30:15
Um 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.
1:30:25
So that seems to be how that works.
1:30:29
Same with chronic kidney disease.
1:30:30
Are you looking are you looking um 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.
1:30:40
Do you think that could be a factor and why it should could show some promise in in treating various types of cancers?
1:30:51
Yeah, I I think it does makes a lot of sense in that direction for uh the obesity related ones, but I don't think it makes sense.
1:30:57
So years ago there were people who suggested I think quite wrongly replacing certain cancer therapies with fasting because it seems to like uh augment the effects of sysplatin based therapies and stuff and that didn't really hold up very well.
1:31:10
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.
1:31:19
Um I really think it's mostly just cutting down on for example the number of cells you have or well not really the number of cells you have but uh like the activity of being fat.
1:31:27
It's just you have you're not as big of a person.
1:31:31
You have less to less opportunity for cancer to really hit you when you are smaller. Yeah. Smaller.
1:31:38
It's like how short people tend to live longer ahead of everything else. Bad for me. Yeah, bad for you. Bearish for me.
1:31:46
Um well h how much of the recent uh like advances in GLP1 indications or or recent like benefits have been uh 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 uh the drug versus a new double-blinded trial for a different indication.
1:32:12
Are both things happening or or is it is are are these drugs diffuse enough that you can just look at the overall population and get an idea of what's happening? Yeah.
1:32:23
So for approved indic FDA approved indications like obstructive sleep apnnea, you do have to run additional trials, but they are seeing that these things are possible from their trials.
1:32:32
They're seeing the these things are possible from the literature and they're running based on that.
1:32:34
So um in some cases they do see these secondary endpoints.
1:32:38
In fact, obesity is an example of this.
1:32:39
Back in the day when they first introduced these drugs, uh, back around 2005 or so, the CEO of Novo Nordisk at the time actually said, and I quote, "Obesity is primarily a social and cultural problem.
1:32:51
It should be solved by team by means of a radical restructuring of society.
1:32:54
There is no business for Nova Nordisk in that area, referring to obesity." Wow. Yeah.
1:32:59
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."
1:33:07
And then they finally finally did it and now we have weight loss drugs.
1:33:14
Yeah, that is that is wild.
1:33:16
Um what uh what concerns you? What's the catch?
1:33:19
It seems uh you know uh somebody too good to be true.
1:33:24
Yeah, somebody might say is it too good to be true?
1:33:26
We're running this sort of massive uh experiment on huge swaths of the population right now.
1:33:31
seems to be, you know, many many positive indicators.
1:33:34
But, uh, what are what are kind of red flags that you think, uh, people should be kind of looking out for or or the scientific community, uh, should be wary of broadly from your point? Yeah.
1:33:46
So, I think that physicians need to be careful about prescription.
1:33:52
Uh, and they already are.
1:33:52
Uh, and they already are. are they like they don't tend to prescribe this to people who are very skinny but the fact that this stuff is available through the gray market um very easily without prescription for very very cheap uh unfortunately I've contributed to that
1:34:04
um has led to a lot 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 uh 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, uh,
1:34:23
So, uh, through writing this guide a few months ago, I've led to almost 12,000 lbs of weight loss.
1:34:31
And that's just what's been reported to me.
1:34:32
Not everybody telling me all the results.
1:34:34
And is that is that at a high level?
1:34:36
People just finding uharmacies that will compound the drug for them.
1:34:41
What What does that actually look like?
1:34:43
So, what it looks like is buying from China.
1:34:45
So, you are ordering from a Chinese factory.
1:34:48
you are uh testing the purity of the stuff and finding oh it's 99.
1:34:52
9% I can use it and then using all of that uh it is not sold by Nova Nordisk Eli Liy 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 I we've been seeing that kind of go back and forth like him and hers was able to compound because there's a shortage that news about Eli and say hey can you Please knock this off.
1:35:18
Yeah, I mean they could do import bans or or or seize the packages at the ports.
1:35:23
Like that's the design of this.
1:35:25
You can't just buy a knockoff iPhone and have it delivered through the port of Los Angeles.
1:35:28
Like if a whole truckload comes through, they should stop that.
1:35:32
But it's clearly not happening.
1:35:34
So right now the FDA allows this to happen because they have an exemption for research chemicals.
1:35:37
You're technically not supposed to use these things, but everybody knows that everybody uses them. It's just how it is.
1:35:46
They're researching weight loss on themselves.
1:35:48
I'm researching kind of one.
1:35:50
I'm researching research maxing. Yeah.
1:35:53
So, you were saying the the uh the potential uh red flags or or things to be wary of is around uh what what about uh the prescription activity concerns you? Mostly abuse.
1:36:02
Uh not not really prescription activity as much as the abuse.
1:36:07
There are people who are obtaining these drugs.
1:36:08
There are people who are getting other people to get the prescriptions.
1:36:11
There are people who are not really visiting doctors.
1:36:12
They're using teley health services to get prescriptions.
1:36:14
and they are not in need of them.
1:36:17
But why would someone abuse this?
1:36:18
This doesn't feel like something that has like the euphoria associated with a stimulant.
1:36:23
So the concern I think or testosterone body dysmorphia is what's going on really skinny.
1:36:30
Unfortunately, I've met a few dozen women now who have taken these drugs and been around 120 130 lbs normal height.
1:36:38
Uh and now they're around 100 and they are they don't look good anymore.
1:36:40
They look like they're aging very quickly.
1:36:43
They look uh 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.
1:36:48
The same negative effects of of star actual starvation. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:36:52
You start getting really bad harmful effects.
1:36:56
You probably are eating at that point more lean mass than fat mass. It is uh quite bad. Yep. Yep. That makes sense. Yeah. That's always the risk. Interesting.
1:37:03
Um how are you what was your reaction to the HIMS Nova Nordisk uh partnership blow up?
1:37:11
So, I actually think this was a big failure on Nova Nort's part.
1:37:12
It seems as though what they did was they partnered with HIMS in order to catch them.
1:37:16
Um, 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 uh interesting.
1:37:26
I guess we'll get more details relatively soon if the law that theoretically WGOI gives them a million doses and then HIMS is somehow selling 1.
1:37:35
2 million doses of Waggoi.
1:37:35
Is that is that what you're Yeah, something like that.
1:37:39
They're either compounding it themselves or ordering from something from China.
1:37:41
They are doing something and uh I don't know if that will hold up or show up in trial. It's an accusation.
1:37:46
Um it's so I guess it's alleged, but we we'll see. We'll see.
1:37:51
What about what about Hims's general position that patients should have as much choice as possible uh as much access you know access at different price points things like that.
1:38:05
They are completely correct to do that.
1:38:06
I think that hymns providing different dosages than are provided by Novodorisk is a wonderful thing.
1:38:10
There are people who can get legitimate uses out of um sort of micro doing this stuff because it gets rid of noise.
1:38:17
I've met many many people now and this is uh an increasingly common thing it seems.
1:38:21
I I really don't know uh how far this going to go but a lot of people who are micro doing this because it helps with their ADHD.
1:38:28
Their ADHD is like the pathological end of foodbased distraction.
1:38:32
They're not losing weight from this anymore, but they are just using it in order to not think about food at all.
1:38:38
It gets rid of that nagging feeling in the back of their head, and they can focus on work. Yeah.
1:38:42
I I did a 24-hour uh dry fast uh from Friday night to Saturday night. Yeah.
1:38:48
And all day Saturday, I was shocked at how much time my I was just thinking about food and water, wanting food and water.
1:38:56
Uh, and I was and it was very freeing to some degree cuz I was like, well, I'm not just not having any until around dinner time.
1:39:04
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.
1:39:10
I should, you know, I should I'm not addicted. I'm not addicted.
1:39:12
I'm not addicted to water.
1:39:13
I'm not addicted to water.
1:39:15
I'm not beating the water addiction allegations. Big water guy.
1:39:19
Um, what what else are you tracking right now broadly?
1:39:21
Uh, any reactions to the NIH funding? Oh, yeah. 40%.
1:39:24
Uh we had Andrew Humemerman on the show.
1:39:27
He was breaking it down for us and what's going on with Jay Badacharia.
1:39:30
Uh what's your take on the cuts that have been proposed?
1:39:34
So I don't know how much I should reveal about that.
1:39:36
There's a lot of really good things coming.
1:39:37
Uh there might be some interesting developments there very soon.
1:39:44
I'm especially hopeful about well you know actually I shouldn't say that.
1:39:49
Uh just there there will be good news there soon.
1:39:50
Um there will be some changes.
1:39:54
Uh not going to take Yeah. Yeah.
1:39:55
I guess zooming out like what what does good look like to you?
1:39:58
Are you generally in favor of taxpayer funded?
1:40:04
Every American gets a $10,000 biohacking budget annually.
1:40:07
They can buy research biohacking vouchers. Yeah.
1:40:13
I mean, some people would say like, you know, the the the big pharma companies are profitable.
1:40:17
They should bear this expense, not the American.
1:40:18
So, they're not profitable enough.
1:40:21
Um they have troubles with R&D.
1:40:23
uh that public money is very very useful.
1:40:26
We need more public funding than we currently have. Yeah.
1:40:31
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 and that that was with historical levels of public funding uh that that kind of contributed to those returns to some degree.
1:40:47
Yeah, we have a deer of funding at the moment and we need to increase it.
1:40:51
We need to improve the allocation and also increase the amount.
1:40:53
There's really no way around it.
1:40:55
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.
1:41:00
Um these cuts are a little alarming to start, but they are not the end of the discussion.
1:41:05
Remember, we are it's still only 5 months into this presidency and they have a lot of really big plans.
1:41:11
They have a lot of trouble getting appointees through the Senate.
1:41:14
They have a hiring freeze ongoing right now that is uh interminable.
1:41:16
We don't know when it's going to end, but once that is over, they'll be issuing NPRM left and right.
1:41:24
It's going to be uh deregulatory on like massacre.
1:41:28
It's going to be wonderful. Wow.
1:41:30
Well, what else is exciting to you in uh biotech right now in Well, I wanted to say on the Ham's point with the different pricing and whatnot.
1:41:41
I think perhaps the most exciting thing right now in that area is that Nova Nordisk is run by idiots.
1:41:46
Like they're very smart people, but they're just total idiots.
1:41:51
They Hey, everybody misses a the the patent.
1:41:54
You know what do they do?
1:41:56
They they forget Eli Liy.
1:41:58
But uh they miss this Novaist.
1:41:58
Are those Novo that lost the the the patent uh fee?
1:42:04
Yeah, they just they forgot to pay the bill 450 bucks or something.
1:42:05
Yes, it was 250 and then they missed it and they were told you're one year out you have you can pay a late fee like an extra $200 late fee on it and they just didn't they still failed yet it is amazing. That's wonderful.
1:42:20
So, uh that enables a wonderful wonderful program that the FDA should pursue immediately.
1:42:24
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 um and has like an indication of proof here and whatnot uh as they want to reduce costs.
1:42:44
So, for example, Florida will whenever they get this actually going have much cheaper EpiPens.
1:42:52
They'll be able to lower the cost of their drugs by importing cheap generics from Canada.
1:42:55
And because cheap generic Ozmpic is going to be coming from Canada in 2026, every state can just jump on the program.
1:43:03
And if we're giving people if we're giving Americans $5 a week Ozic, then we're going to see perhaps an end to the chronic disease crisis.
1:43:11
We're going to see obesity tackled meaningfully.
1:43:15
We're going to see people getting hot again and make America hot again. The real meaning of aa.
1:43:21
The real meaning of a real meaning of There we go. There we go. Inside baseball. Very exciting.
1:43:29
Well, 15 minutes was not enough time to have you back on again soon.
1:43:32
Uh thank you for uh thank you for all the insights. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.
1:43:37
We'll we'll we'll have you back on soon. This is great.
1:43:38
And if you dox yourself anywhere other than here, we will be very upset.
1:43:43
So, might have to Sorry, guys.
1:43:47
You guys have a good one. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.
1:43:51
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.
1:44:02
So, we have a little bit of an update to the story.
1:44:03
Um, and uh, M&A just in the last 20 months, uh, Morning Brew is breaking it down here.
1:44:10
Uh, Shell BP is clocked at maybe 80 billion, but the deal is pending.
1:44:15
Exo, X, Exxon, and Pioneer are doing a $60 billion M&A deal.
1:44:21
Chevron and Hess uh deal still pending, but it's a 53 billion.
1:44:24
Debbac and Endeavor don't even know those companies, but 26 billion deal there.
1:44:31
Konico Phil and Marathon at 17 billion and accidental and Crown Rock at 12 billion.
1:44:36
So if you think uh the AI M&A deals are hot, you got to go over to big oil.
1:44:42
Big oil, oil and gas, big tech, big oil, big pharma.
1:44:45
These are these are the industries where the the big dollars get thrown around.
1:44:49
They don't they don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the in the deck of corn exchanging business. True. Pretty interesting.
1:44:55
Um so the immediate market reaction to Shell's potential deal for BP.
1:45:00
BP jumped 7% and Shell dropped 2 6%.
1:45:04
I want to know what they're doing more recently.
1:45:09
It looks like BP is up now 1. 5% on the day.
1:45:13
Uh how is Shell how is BP doing over the week or the or the month? This is the week. Okay.
1:45:22
H um yeah, they've they've both kind of retraced since Shell said, "Nah, we're not talking at all."
1:45:28
So, by market cap, Shell's around 207 billion, BP's around 87 billion. Those are big companies. Big big companies.
1:45:35
Uh anyway, we can run through the Wall Street Journal's report here.
1:45:40
Um but first, if you're planning a complex post merger integration, you got to get on linear.
1:45:48
John, your commit your commitment to just use linear for everything is no.
1:45:52
But of course, if you're if you're building if you're building modern software, if you need to streamline issues, projects, and product road maps, you got to get on linear.
1:45:59
Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products and plus they got linear for agents.
1:46:05
But uh you know oil and gas companies do need to build software.
1:46:10
If you're worried about getting paper they should be on linear.
1:46:12
If you're worried about getting paperclipipped get your agents on linear.
1:46:15
They will thank you for it. Yeah.
1:46:17
Uh so a deal for BP which has a market value of roughly 80 billion would be a landmark combination for two super major oil companies.
1:46:25
Super major is a better term than mag 7 in my opinion.
1:46:28
We need that for the tech companies.
1:46:30
The super major super major.
1:46:31
Oh, you're in the major leagues. I'm in the super majors. So good.
1:46:35
So, uh, uh, talks between company representatives are active.
1:46:40
According to people who are familiar with the matter, leak into the Wall Street Journal, and BP is considering the approach carefully.
1:46:49
Acquiring BP would put Shell on firmer footing to challenge larger competitors such as Exxon Mobile and Chevron.
1:46:53
Uh, 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.
1:47:04
Potential terms of the deal couldn't be learned.
1:47:09
Uh, and a tie up is far from certain.
1:47:11
Uh, but the discussions are moving slowly.
1:47:13
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 Exxon Mobile at the turn of the century.
1:47:23
It would also be easily the biggest M&A deal of the year so far in a market that has been rattled by President Trump's uh uh antitrust policy.
1:47:33
Um and so you can see that the combined entity would be somewhere in the Do you remember tracking the Deep Water Horizon spill?
1:47:42
Yeah, I remember it tracking it very closely in the Thunderhorse track.
1:47:44
Were you monitoring the situation?
1:47:46
you monitoring the situation? I was monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading equity research reports about BP from the from the Southside banks and I and I understood it to the level of knowing that the that
1:47:58
the tract that they were that they were drilling into was called the Thunderhorse tract which is the section of the crust that they're drilling the oil into DP's total cost associated with Deep Water Horizon including cleanup fines and settlements reached approximately 65 billion. So nearing
1:48:12
So nearing their total enterprise value at the moment. Also great movie.
1:48:18
I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie. Deep Water Horizon.
1:48:22
You should Is it a documentary?
1:48:23
No, it is a it is a it is a, you know, non-fiction recreation, but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the uh on the oil rig.
1:48:36
And I believe Mark Wahberg said that it's awesome.
1:48:38
It's it's a really really great movie. Highly recommend it.
1:48:40
Uh 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. Uh fantastic.
1:48:56
Basically saying like, "Hey, no comment, but you know, also like we're we're shilling for shell over here.
1:49:04
We're shilling for shell."
1:49:06
Um, 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."
1:49:16
John, we should never You should never decline to comment.
1:49:18
You should always just do it like that. Just do it. Bake it in the LLM. This is Twitcherbusramp. com.
1:49:27
Do you have any comments on on your your intern allegedly, you know, contributing funds to overthrow a government? switch your business.
1:49:36
A as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on getting our viewers on numeralhq.
1:49:41
com sales tax on autopilot.
1:49:43
Spend less than 5 minutes per month on sales tax compliance.
1:49:46
Um Shell comes into the talks from an operating from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years.
1:49:54
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.
1:50:05
BP has been a lagard among the major oil companies after an ill- fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy.
1:50:12
Uh it's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters.
1:50:15
And so it seems like actually their their desire their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business oil has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because like the the those M&A sellside research reports that I was reading during the uh Deep Water Horizon crisis, they were very accurately predicting the impact the long-term impact of that crisis on the stock immediately.
1:50:38
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.
1:50:53
And so, um, more recently, uh, Elliot Management, which owns more than 5% of BP shares, has pushed for changes at the energy company.
1:51:01
he had been performing uh not you know had had basically been down only since the financial crisis and then Deep Water Horizon hit and it was just down even uh when asked publicly Shell's chief executive officer said that recently the company's bar for big deal making would be high.
1:51:24
Shell in May announced a multi-billion dollar share buyback plan, the latest in a long series of big share repurchases.
1:51:30
Shell has been working with bankers on a potential sale of its chemical assets in Europe and the US.
1:51:35
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 uh greater reach and bolster its dominance in areas like liqufied natural gas.
1:51:52
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.
1:52:01
All the oil companies had to had to change all their internal documentation.
1:52:06
Um and so Bloomberg News reported this earlier. I think it's sticking. Yeah.
1:52:10
Until the next election and there'll be a new EO and it'll go back to something else.
1:52:13
But well, it would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it. Yeah.
1:52:19
Something other than the Gulf of America.
1:52:24
Well, um I we there's some other news in here, but I think it'd be fun to debate the future of venture capital marketing.
1:52:33
I was on a call recently with a uh GP at a very big fund and they were asking me about strategy and where the future is going and um media is obviously evolving very quickly and I was kind of noodling on a bunch of different things but what I came to was maybe this idea that that venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that like you it is not available to everyone.
1:53:01
They're in the business of selling money, but not everyone can buy it.
1:53:04
And so that kind of puts it in the same league as, you know, ultra high netw worth wealth management products or even Rolex high herology Rolexes that are in demand.
1:53:14
People, they still advertise Rolexes.
1:53:16
They advertise them at um at at uh at LAX.
1:53:18
the clocks or Rolexes or if you go to an F1 match, you'll see a lot of, you know, advertisements.
1:53:27
Tech will put an ad for the cubitus an airport.
1:53:28
Every every issue of the of the Economist comes with an ad for basically a holy trinity watch on the back.
1:53:37
Uh whether it's Vashron or AP or Pac, but you can't just go and buy those.
1:53:43
And so it's very odd that they're doing this like luxury brand building without a product that you can just im immediately go buy.
1:53:50
And I'm wondering if that's the future of venture capital marketing.
1:53:53
And so my my thought was that maybe maybe that's where the VC firm should really be pushing into.
1:53:59
Well, yeah, let's talk about the current strategy, right?
1:54:02
The current strategy is post on X. Yes. Go on podcasts. Yes.
1:54:04
You can start your own podcast.
1:54:09
Many people have done that. Yes.
1:54:11
Um the challenge is that uh venture capitalists are deeply conflicted by making a wide variety of investments and that has to a form inform their opinion on different markets.
1:54:26
And so if you're deeply convicted and trying to give coverage to a certain sector, it becomes very hard because you can't go on there and say XYZ company is clearly dominating.
1:54:34
you know, if you look at the data and you look at, you know, what customers are saying when if you have another portfolio company over here that you happen to back and so it creates this sort of challenge of providing great media products because of that conflict.
1:54:53
Now, you can still get around this, right?
1:54:55
And there's different ways and there's different approaches.
1:54:56
Uh you can do an interview show which allows you to um 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 person.
1:55:06
And so it's like yeah the person's a good interviewer but like what do they actually believe? Yeah. Yeah.
1:55:10
So the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing.
1:55:16
You can't get away from it.
1:55:17
It's all marketing all the way down.
1:55:18
Um now the sort of subcategories I think that are interesting.
1:55:23
I've always said that uh Sam Lesson, right, he's got fans, he's got haters, but he creates he has a unique media product and the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord and some people it resonates with them, other people want to dunk, but it is an effective format in order to provide commentary and it's very efficient, right?
1:55:44
He doesn't need a big marketing team um to actually pull that off.
1:55:48
So, I think it's super key to find a specific format.
1:55:51
Um, but then the the alternative is instead of hiring a production team and producing podcasts yourselves, you could do something like what you're talking about. Yeah.
1:55:59
I I when I think of like the four really great or like a few really great VC marketing examples, I think of uh 0ero to1 by Peter Teal.
1:56:10
He's never tweeted, but he's tweeted once and it was a link to his book.
1:56:15
And that book was such a good outcome that it sold in in airport bookshops, right?
1:56:20
And he just dropped an amazing book and then that book just continued to compound and was extremely valuable in terms of like building his brand.
1:56:30
Naval has a similar story where his his Twitter posts the how to get rich without getting lucky went so viral.
1:56:37
And when I think about both of those, and then it was eventually turned into a book. Yeah.
1:56:41
But when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near-term thesis or they're not they're not news products.
1:56:49
They're reflections on how the world works.
1:56:52
Reflections on like timeless principles, right?
1:56:55
Then I think about Paul Graham's blog.
1:56:58
It's not on a regular cadence.
1:57:01
You don't It's not on a weekly Substack. It's not a news product.
1:57:05
It's reflections on like how did Steve Jobs run his company?
1:57:07
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.
1:57:17
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.
1:57:23
It's better to pump your bags when you end up being tremendously correct. Exactly.
1:57:27
Some of the early writing, I feel like, and even commentary on Sam Alman just clearly ended up being true. Yeah. 100%.
1:57:33
and and it's not and and he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or or Airbnb at this moment.
1:57:39
He's not talking about Airbnb's newest release.
1:57:44
He's talking about Brian Chesy as a person years ago and it's reflective and I think that that works really well.
1:57:49
Uh Mark Andre similarly, the ability to go into the Wall Street Journal and write an op-ed is is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that that idea, but it has to be from the individual investor.
1:58:01
I don't think it's something that can be like formulated from a team necessarily. Yeah.
1:58:09
So, there's this like there's kind of this like I feel like we're gonna see more of like this barbell strategy where the future might be like when the GP has a really really insightful piece of commentary.
1:58:21
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 PC Philippe ad that appears on
1:58:38
the back of the economist every week it like I was thinking venture capitalist should go and buy the back of like the Stanford review or like the waterlue you know campus newspaper like that should have an ad for a venture capital firm Thompson newsletter. Yeah, exactly. But Yeah, exactly.
1:58:51
But like but I think aligning with these iconic properties. Yeah.
1:58:55
People who are doing their life's work.
1:58:57
Full page ad in in the journal.
1:59:00
But most importantly like like when when PC Philippe sponsors the Economist, they are not trying to shift the Economist's coverage towards like being more bullish on Swiss watches.
1:59:11
They're just like we don't even know what you're going to put in this issue.
1:59:15
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.
1:59:25
Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great like truly great producer for their own show. Yeah.
1:59:34
And so, is it going to be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the journal for a day? Yeah.
1:59:41
Or or have your own podcast? Yeah.
1:59:45
And there are more narrow properties too that are like the the journal is extremely broad in all of business there.
1:59:50
But there but there really are more narrow products that would work, but every time they've gotten there, it's been it's been um it's been misaligned around um uh like like what the actual coverage is. Um but I don't know.
2:00:06
I maybe we'll see a maybe we'll see an F1 team.
2:00:08
Maybe we'll see Jetsweet X, the terminal, like sponsored by a VC firm.
2:00:12
That would make a lot of sense.
2:00:14
It's like you get off in in Silicon Valley at the Jetsweet X terminal and boom, you're presented with a an ad for a VC firm.
2:00:20
Let's take you through uh a beautiful obituary to the founder of FedEx, Fred Smith.
2:00:26
So Ryan Peterson uh posted a photo of the original FedEx plane.
2:00:32
He said RIP to logistics legend and outspoken defender of free trade, FedEx founder Free Fred Smith, who passed away today.
2:00:39
Below is the first ever FedEx plane which you can see at the Air and Space Museum annex next to Dallas airport in Virginia. Look at that.
2:00:49
He must have been so stoked when he bought this.
2:00:51
Like his business was finally growing that he could own his own plane.
2:00:54
Imagine how many likes he would have gotten on social media posting that pick. Yeah.
2:00:58
Everyone's like, "This is your flag.
2:01:01
You just have to appreciate it.
2:01:02
You're just trying to go viral.
2:01:03
This is clearly this is clearly for logistics.
2:01:06
This is clearly for logistics. total legend.
2:01:08
Uh burning VC dollars on a plane bear.
2:01:12
I think he was using Vegas dollars doing cash flow. Yeah.
2:01:19
Anyway, Max Meyer has a story that we should read through.
2:01:21
Um Fred Smith and American Life.
2:01:23
He says, "Fred Smith died on Saturday.
2:01:26
He was the founder of Federal Express, which became FedEx, one of the largest logistics companies on Earth.
2:01:32
Smith was an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word and an American patriot.
2:01:36
He bent reality and created something entirely new.
2:01:40
And he ran toward an extremely difficult problem.
2:01:43
The fruits of Fred's work are as follows.
2:01:45
If you give a box or document to FedEx by 6 p. m.
2:01:47
, you can have it delivered almost anywhere in the United States or Canada by 8 a. m. the next morning.
2:01:53
Imagine how key that would have been to business before. Incredible. Yeah.
2:01:59
Um you're trying to do deals.
2:02:02
If you give if you give FedEx a package on on a Monday, it can be in Paris by Wednesday morning or in Shanghai by Thursday for a few hundred dollars.
2:02:10
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.
2:02:20
Smith's death is a reminder not to take the miracles of modern life for granted.
2:02:24
They were built by people like Fred Smith.
2:02:26
These are a few words about the man himself and the dazzling system that is FedEx.
2:02:31
Frederick Wallace Smith was born in 1944 in Mississippi.
2:02:33
Fred's grandfather, James Buchanan Smith, captain Mississippi River steamboats.
2:02:40
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.
2:02:47
From steamboats to buses to jumbo jets and three generations, the family stayed on the cutting edge of motorized transportation.
2:02:55
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.
2:03:03
Within a few years, James Smith had dozens and dozens of coaches.
2:03:07
By the time he died, suddenly in 1948, he commanded over 200. Wow.
2:03:10
So, he died four years after the son was born. Wow.
2:03:16
So, he basically grew up without a without a or maybe that's the grandfather.
2:03:20
Um, according to James Smith's obituary, um, No, no, no, no. It was the dad. Yeah. Yeah.
2:03:26
So, according to James Smith's obituary, um, those 200 coaches each came to a halt during their regular regularly scheduled roots for one minute when the funeral began.
2:03:35
Uh, the young Fred was just four when his father died. Wow.
2:03:39
In 1962, the young Smith enrolled at Yale University where he was fraternity brothers with future President George W. Bush.
2:03:45
Bush asked Smith to serve as the Secretary of Defense twice and Smith declined twice. Wow.
2:03:51
You interesting because defense is uh who who was the the founder that we had on the show.
2:03:56
I'm completely blanking on the his name the name of the company and who invested in the company but he had this like defense focused supply chain management startup. Yes.
2:04:05
It was one of our probably first you're talking about Rune Logistics. Rune. Yes.
2:04:09
Uh but it's something he said about not the AI poster. The legendary poster.
2:04:14
Not the legendary poster.
2:04:17
uh the logistics of opening up. Yes.
2:04:20
Uh so uh uh the young Smith was uh a member of the infamous cloak and dagger secret society.
2:04:27
He is not beating the secret society allegations.
2:04:32
Uh 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.
2:04:42
I just need somebody to build it for me. I. e.
2:04:43
that instead of point-to-point package transport, everything would be brought to a single hub by air and then redistributed.
2:04:48
We talked to somebody about this on the show, how how now we think of it as like inefficient to bring everything to one place and then and then do the hub and spoke thing because now we have, you know, Door Dash and Whimo and uh, you know, just last mile all these all these different last mile solutions.
2:05:05
But at the time, this was revolutionary.
2:05:06
Um, everything would be brought to a to a single hub.
2:05:10
Uh, repeat that cycle every night while turning a profit and you have a viable system for overnight delivery.
2:05:16
The paper is said to have earned an average grade roasted.
2:05:18
Uh, in 1966, the founder of FedEx graduated from Yale and volunteered to receive a commission in the Marine Corps.
2:05:27
He served two tours in Vietnam.
2:05:28
For his service in Vietnam, the President Nixon decorated Smith with a silver star and a bronze star.
2:05:36
The Silver Star citation read in part, "Unhesitatingly rushing through the intense hostile fire to position the heaviest con to the position of heaviest contact, Lieutenant Smith fearlessly removed several casualties from the hazardous area and shouting words of encouragement to his men, directed their fire upon the advancing enemy soldiers, successfully repulsing the hostile attack.
2:05:58
Moving boldly across the fire swept terrain to an elevated area, he calmly disregarded repeated North Vietnamese attempts to direct upon him as he skillfully adjusted artillery fire and air strikes upon the hostile positions to within 50 meters of his own location.
2:06:14
Wow, what a and continued to direct the movement of his unit. Wow, what a badass.
2:06:18
Uh so at this point 1973 he's 29 years old. He lost his dad at 4.
2:06:25
He goes to Yale with George Bush, then goes to Vietnam, does two tours, gets a silver and a bronze star. It's crazy. War hero. Yeah.
2:06:33
And now he's decided to launch Federal Express in Memphis.
2:06:39
Smith had studied military procurement and been working on the idea for nearly 10 years after writing the Yale paper.
2:06:45
So he writes this paper and he's like, "Okay, 10 years later."
2:06:49
Most most founders have an idea and they pivot through two months.
2:06:53
So he writes this paper, gets an average grade, 10 years later.
2:06:56
10 years later, the company launched with a fleet of 14 French to Sault jets, which delivered a few hundred packages on their first day of service. There we go. Wow.
2:07:04
He's just like just zero to one.
2:07:07
Um, according to FedEx, Laura Smith named his new service Federal Express because he hoped to attract the attention of the Federal Reserve Bank, a prospective customer.
2:07:18
It's funny like that the name you would you would think Federal Express.
2:07:20
You would just assume that it's an extension of the government. I did when I was a kid.
2:07:25
I was like, United Postal Service as a kid United States Postal Service, these are using FedEx like it was just a better product experience than USPS.
2:07:35
Even as a kid, you'd kind of feel it out. Feel it out.
2:07:37
Um the system that Smith had conceived at Yale worked.
2:07:39
It really worked and nothing like it existed.
2:07:42
The USPS existed principally to deliver letter mail and didn't have aircraft.
2:07:47
UPS was a giant of a ground delivery throughout the the US.
2:07:50
Federal Express though would specialize in rapid air delivery just 5 years after the first Federal Express flights.
2:07:57
The company was lift listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Wow.
2:08:00
Uh today, the FedEx fleet consists of nearly 700 aircraft and about 200,000 vehicles.
2:08:06
And FedEx employs half a million workers around the world. Wow.
2:08:10
Every night at the FedEx Super Hub at the Memphis International Airport, hundreds of jets land at the airport.
2:08:17
The Ultra Hub Super Hub uh bringing packages to its many sorting machines.
2:08:22
Uh a few hours later, the jets take back off to every corner of the United States and the world at their destinations.
2:08:29
Uh 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.
2:08:38
the financial finesse needed to actually make a model like this, not just lose massive amounts of money.
2:08:47
You could go out of business so many times.
2:08:49
Um, and yeah, there is that story about him uh almost losing money, going to Vegas, and then putting the the the treasury on black and winning it back and doubling it and making payroll the next day, saving the company. Uh, maybe apocryphal.
2:09:05
There's been rumors that maybe it was like, you know, some mob related thing and he took him long. The tin foil.
2:09:11
Yeah, the tinfoil had explanation is like, you know, he got it done.
2:09:15
He did uh some type of, you know, and this is entirely internet speculation.
2:09:19
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?
2:09:28
Um and and maybe did something else.
2:09:30
But, uh the story is incredible and it will live on. Yeah.
2:09:36
Uh Smith retired from FedEx in 2022 after almost 50 years leading the company.
2:09:39
He has survived by nine of his 10 children and his wife Diane.
2:09:41
His daughter Winland Smith Rice died in 2005 of a terminal cardiac condition. It's very sad.
2:09:49
And one has to think that his father his father Mr.
2:09:51
Smith who died with 200 vehicles to his name would be impressed that his son died with 200,000 vehicles to his name and a fleet of jets to match.
2:10:01
So, incredible story and may he rest in peace.
2:10:05
Anyway, let's move on to the timeline.
2:10:08
Uh, also one of the greatest logos of all time, the FedEx logo has that secret arrow in it. Love that. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
2:10:15
Once you see it, you can't un not this logo, the the next logo, the more modern FedEx logo has the secret arrow in there.
2:10:23
Once you see that, they're moving. They're moving.
2:10:27
And there if you want to understand more about Frederick Smith, go to Founders Podcast and listen to episode 151, 151.
2:10:37
Subscribe to Arena Mag to read more of Max's writing. Mr.
2:10:41
Beast has rolled back the launch of his View Stats AI thumbnail tool.
2:10:44
He says, "Hey, thanks for all your feedback on the View Stats AI thumbnail tool.
2:10:49
We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission.
2:10:57
And okay, so clearly the thumbnail industrial complex came for him hard.
2:11:02
They were probably making, you know, death threats in the comments.
2:11:04
It sounds like it was pretty intense.
2:11:06
My thing here, you know, I I have to agree with Lulu.
2:11:11
Um, this this is one of Mr.
2:11:13
Beast's like many businesses, right?
2:11:13
So, in general, like it's something he wants to create for creators and distribute widely.
2:11:19
But the obvious reason that he should have kept the AI thumbnail tool is you're by if you can roll out AI in this way, you can save millions of creators that create YouTube videos a lot of money because many of them are not going to be able to afford to commission a handdesigned thumbnail.
2:11:39
And so the the right thing to do for the creators broadly is to make a tool like this available.
2:11:45
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.
2:11:53
That's their sort of dayto-day th those people that make thumbnails like there's a lot of things you could do. You could adjust.
2:12:01
You could go and make edit videos, right?
2:12:02
AI video editors are not that good today. Yep. You could do that.
2:12:07
It's very odd because the Yes.
2:12:07
It's like we're we're destroying the job of a of thumbnail artist or real real thumbnail artist.
2:12:15
But that's a job that was created like two years ago.
2:12:16
Like I I think I met the first like full I literally was at a YouTube conference just a few years ago and I met the first real thumbnail artist where that was his entire job full-time and and Mr.
2:12:27
Beast hired a few of those folks.
2:12:30
And but the whole point is the whole point is that person can probably make much better thumbnails than AI.
2:12:36
Yes, can go up market, work with creators that are willing to spend money and make a make it make an entrylevel tool that anybody can use to generate an AI, you know, an AI generated thumbnail.
2:12:50
Like it it just I mean I'm surprised I'm surprised that he he rolled this back and gave in.
2:12:56
Butty, you know, it's very possible that the thumbnail industrial complex, you know, has has a massive lobbying arm, you know, and and and said, you know, we're going to work on uh getting, you know, your other businesses blacklisted, you know. Yeah.
2:13:12
I mean, it's interesting like like there's even a there's even a like a continuum of technology that exists within the pre-AI thumbnail generation workflow.
2:13:23
So, um, at one point I was making, uh, thumbnails the way people usually do compositing different images together.
2:13:30
Pick a background, cut yourself out of a green screen image, put that over the face over the background.
2:13:35
That's like the standard thing. Put some text over it.
2:13:37
Um, at one point I actually experimented with Ben shooting practical thumbnails.
2:13:41
So we would go and design like instead of compositing a background we would design a background image of wall and and print out pictures pin them on the wall and I would stand in front of the wall of images and they didn't really perform better and so I think like using a design tool like figma.
2:13:59
com think bigger build faster.
2:14:01
or Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.
2:14:04
Uh is a great just using software in general is completely justified and and no one really talked about like well if you're if you're just compositing images then you're not filming them practically.
2:14:15
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.
2:14:20
I was just saying like hey Ben me and you are going to practically set up this thumbnail and then take the photo.
2:14:27
So, here's here's the real evidence as to why Mr.
2:14:29
Beast should have uh kindly told the thumbnail artist to Yes. f off.
2:14:35
Um uh I ran a quick query here uh basically to try to estimate how many people actually earn a living making thumbnails by looking at, you know, platforms like uh Upwork and Fiverr and all these different things and then and then doing some type of multiple.
2:14:52
So, generally, um, we're estimating 2 to 5,000 people make at least $1,000 a month designing thumbnails across Yes.
2:15:00
all different types of platforms.
2:15:02
Meanwhile, there are over 2 million YouTube creators that are in the YouTube partner program, meaning they're making ad revenue.
2:15:10
They're YouTube is a business for them.
2:15:11
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?
2:15:31
They're just earning earning some type of living. So, yeah.
2:15:32
I think it gets to like the importance of like how how abstract should your title be?
2:15:38
Because we were talking about this earlier, like if you if you if you did a job shadow on a lawyer in 1950 and then you did a job shadow on a lawyer today, it's probably a very different day, right?
2:15:51
A modern lawyer is like sending text messages and is on Signal and sending emails and probably using Chat GPT to to search for things and pulling for stuff from Lexus Nexus instead of going to the archives.
2:16:02
going to the archives. The old lawyer is like having teams hopefully not dumping 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
2:16:19
person even Crosby the company we had on is is just an AI native law firm so they actually have lawyers they're just more efficient yeah yeah versus um 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
2:16:35
but did you really lo did 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
2:16:49
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. Funny because we
2:17:03
Funny because we would pay real money for a good thumbnail right now. Yes.
2:17:08
If you're a thumbnail artist, reach out to us and you're trying to be would love to have better thumbnails.
2:17:13
Top 10 thumbnail designers in the world that want to be paid a premium for it. We're happy to pay. Yes. Yes. Yes.
2:17:18
Otherwise, we'll probably just keep slopping it up. Uh with our templates. Welcome to Studio DJ. What's going on?
2:17:30
Hey guys, what's going on? It's great to have you. Congratulations. Massive day. Massive day. Yeah, massive day. Thank you. Thank you.
2:17:37
Uh, break it down for us.
2:17:39
Uh, for those who haven't watched the full 1hour video, we'll obviously link it here, but uh, what are the key announcements?
2:17:46
What do you think it's important?
2:17:47
What what do you think is important to share? Sure. Yeah.
2:17:50
So, the 10-second summary of our update is um that Neuralink is working reliably and has already changed the lives of seven human participants that we've been working with.
2:17:59
that we've been working with. Uh it's it's really been a privilege working with uh all those participants individually and that um you know we sort of lay down our next set of milestones which is most immediately going to market and enabling the scaling of this technology to thousands of
2:18:15
people eventually millions and also to just go beyond uh the movement and expand functionalities into speech vision and hopefully getting to the speed of inner thoughts and and then there's a little bit of a hint as to what the the path to uh kind of the the ultimate goal of Neuronink would be, which is to understand and unlock the mystery of the mind. Yeah, Elon teased
2:18:36
Yeah, Elon teased that in the opener and I was somewhere between like tearing up from emotions and like pumping my fist with excitement because it feels like, you know, this is the main quest.
2:18:50
You can see that he's lit up about this and you can see that he's um he's just it's just he felt incredibly back to put it back.
2:19:01
So yeah, it was exciting.
2:19:01
Um give us a little bit of your background and how you wound up at Neurolink. Yeah, sure. Um let's see.
2:19:08
So I grew up in South Korea and um growing up I love Ninja Turtles um and Pokemon.
2:19:16
I also really like Legos uh and just in general taking things apart and putting it together.
2:19:24
And um came to the states at age 13 and studied electrical engineering.
2:19:30
You know, I loved loved loved RF circuit design and computational electromagnetics.
2:19:33
And I wanted to be an academic.
2:19:36
My dad's a professor and um you know, decided to go to grad graduate school in Berkeley to uh design the next generation wireless communication chip for cell phones.
2:19:45
And then uh in the Bay Area learned that people can start companies.
2:19:49
I didn't know that was a thing that people can do. Yeah.
2:19:52
Um you know at the time there wasn't really anything interesting happening.
2:19:56
You know no offense to other builders at the time but you know decided to finish my PhD and uh did my thesis work in neural implants and uh had the opportunity to join Neurolink as a founding team member when I was graduating and that was almost nine years ago.
2:20:10
What was the take me through some of the history?
2:20:14
I mean nine years to get here.
2:20:15
It feels like we're at this like acceleration moment where the rate of Neuralink deployment is growing. This feels exponential.
2:20:24
Um but in the in those first nine years, what were the key milestones that you remember and the key turning points? Sure. Yeah.
2:20:35
I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize that when Neuralink started out, it was it was really just a group of, you know, six or seven of us and we didn't really have anything.
2:20:44
We um, you know, when I first showed up to the office at the time, we actually shared the office with um, you know, OpenAI at the Pioneer Building in San Francisco. Wow.
2:20:52
Uh, it was just bunch of us.
2:20:55
Uh, we had we didn't even have chairs and desks.
2:20:57
So, one of the first thing we did on the first day was to go out to uh, Staples and buy chairs.
2:21:01
Um so you know incredible amount of work has kind of gone into uh you know really building the hardware uh kind of the foundational pieces to you know generate the data set that's necessary for us to iterate on the device and it took about I would say you know year and a half two years to get the first kind of generation of uh brain trips working on the lab.
2:21:26
uh you know at the time starting with you know smaller animal models with with rats and then slowly graduating to uh bigger and bigger species uh pigs, sheep uh that starts to represent more the anatomy of the humans and you know about four years ago now um we had the demo with one of our monkeys pager um uh you know that that played the the game pong.
2:21:51
We called it the mind pong.
2:21:53
And that was a one of the key moments to sort of demonstrate what what uh the capabilities the types of devices can be.
2:22:00
And you know, I think I should also maybe step back and say that um you know, Neurolink really is uh sitting on the shoulders of the giants here.
2:22:10
Um you know, there's there's been decades decades of research that's gone into the the field that we're in called brain computer interface or brain machine interface.
2:22:18
or brain machine interface. And that really set the foundation for you know de-risking the scientific aspects of what this could be and um you know there's obviously a lot of challenges in scaling that product making it a product itself and that's
2:22:33
that's what we are taking on yeah I I want to talk about th those giants the shoulders of the giants that you're standing upon and how you think about uh the role of research and development in the public sector in academia playing into commercializable technologies. Uh
2:22:52
Uh there's discussions about this with the NIH and biotech.
2:22:56
Um obviously, you know, SpaceX is the perfect it feels like the perfect story to me where, you know, who was going to pay for a moon landing in the '60s.
2:23:07
Uh that no venture capitalist would would have underwritten that.
2:23:10
Uh but because we did that we learned a lot and then we and then when it became time for it to be rolled out at scale Elon stepped up with SpaceX and then the rest is history.
2:23:21
Um so what what can you tell me about the history of BCI in the kind of uh public sector side um universities versus stories that have been done at different companies that may have failed but contributed to the to the community.
2:23:42
Yeah, we had we had Andrew Huberman on like a week or so ago talking about his concern around, you know, NIH funding and and all the issues from a pure kind of health standpoint, but but this feels, you know, relevant as well. Yeah.
2:23:56
I mean, it's it's incredibly important.
2:23:58
I mean, you see this even today.
2:24:00
There's uh a a very much a um an active uh research going on in in the BCI field.
2:24:07
BCI field. um you know just sort of looking at the next frontier of different targets and different indications that can really open up opportunities for people that have um you know various different types of neurological condition and you know I I think the history of brain computer interface and you know the first product that Neurolink is working on you know we we named it telepathy because you know really it's enabling someone who has
2:24:32
lost that mind body connection through diseases like traumatic spinal cord injury or ALS which really over time uh it's a horrible condition that that really um takes away every part of your muscles over time uh eventually um leading to uh death and um you know
2:24:53
those were the indications and and you know what what what Neuralink is able to do is place this device uh 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
2:25:04
area. So basically if you're thinking about moving your hand or wrist area, there's a lot of neurons that are uh firing in response to that and we're able to record that intention and then translate that to you know moving cursors on a screen or robotic arm uh you know physical things in the space and that was purely purely done as an academic research funded by department of defense um and and um you know 20 30
2:25:28
years ago and that really set the foundation for what is possible and you know I back 20 30 years ago if someone were to try to get venture money out of that I I don't think anyone would have pursue that scientific pursuit and you know I
2:25:43
there still continues to be a lot of research and important work that's gone into academia for other indications and you know I I I do worry about sort of what the future looks like on that frontline. Uh can you walk us through
2:25:54
Uh can you walk us through the current installation of the neural link product?
2:26:00
I know that there were specific machines you had to build and kind of walk through because it's I I don't know if if semiinvasive is the correct term.
2:26:08
Is it extremely invasive?
2:26:10
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 derisk it, right? Mhm. Yeah. Yep.
2:26:23
So I guess maybe before we dive into some of the specifics of how Neurolink devices installed um maybe let me take a step back and kind of describe why go into the brain in the first place and why that's important. Yeah.
2:26:36
And typically the analogy that's used uh in the field is that of the stadium.
2:26:40
So you know you can really think about neural signals as kind of audio signals.
2:26:45
um the frequency spectrum is actually very similar in the analogy of neurons talking to each other speaking different languages.
2:26:53
It's actually a pretty good analogy.
2:26:54
So the idea is that um you know if you're standing outside the stadium uh you can kind of get a sense of how the game is going based on the cheers and the booze of the crowd but you won't be able to tell me exactly what's going on on the game.
2:27:07
You know how's the game actually going?
2:27:10
What are the teams actually talking about?
2:27:11
When are the key moments happening?
2:27:13
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?
2:27:21
Like you need to actually drop the microphone inside the arena.
2:27:25
And you can kind of think about what Neurolink is doing uh in a similar analogy.
2:27:29
So you know you can get neural signals from uh you know on the surface of the brain or even outside the the skull without having to go through a um uh cranottomy.
2:27:39
um but the the type of signals and the the resolution that you will get is going to be much uh much worse and so there's a trade-off there.
2:27:48
So now we've decided from day one that we would want to get the highest signal uh highest resolution um you know neural signatures um because we we believe that that's necessary for kind of the long-term mission of uh understanding and unlocking the mystery of the brain.
2:28:04
And in order to do that, you basically want to make these um electrodes that are recording neural signals as small as possible and also as flexible as possible.
2:28:14
So your brain, you could kind of think of it as a um sort of a consistency of a tofu or jello.
2:28:18
Uh it's a and and it also moves a lot u because every every heartbeat, every you know, breath that you take, it's moving moving a lot.
2:28:27
And that's one of the things that we had to learn uh in a in a in a hard way when we um you know work with our participants.
2:28:33
And so in designing these electrodes to be tiny you know fraction fraction of a human hair.
2:28:41
Um so one of our uh what we call thread which is these tiny wires that have uh electrodes are about 12th of a human hair.
2:28:48
And um they're also flexible so they kind of move with the brain rather than um you know if it's a rigid thing you you can cause a lot of scarring as as you're breathing.
2:28:56
So when you build these tiny tiny threads that are manufactured with conventional lithography tools in in our own um clean room facilities.
2:29:08
Now the question is okay how do you actually insert these?
2:29:13
Uh they're they're very small and even the best neurosurgeons won't be able to insert them precisely in the location that we want.
2:29:18
So we uh 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 um also looking at scaling this to millions if not billions of people eventually.
2:29:31
Uh we we just did not see a world where there's some sort of robotics and some sort of um not having human in the loop.
2:29:38
Um, so you know, it's essentially this this precision uh robotic tool that has bunch of cameras that are looking at the surface of the brain, making sure that you're avoiding vessels um and then insert manipulating and inserting these tiny threads one by one um you know as quickly as you can in the in the in the region of interest.
2:29:59
And what ends up happening is that you know we currently go through a process to uh drill a hole in the skull um called the cranottomy and then we actually expose different layers of the tissue.
2:30:12
You know there's many different layers of the brain before you get to it.
2:30:15
uh the first layer that you see as a dura motor.
2:30:17
And then once you have the brain exposed, um we insert these threads one by one with a surgical robot.
2:30:24
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.
2:30:31
And then once you put the skin over, everything is completely invisible.
2:30:34
Everything is completely wireless.
2:30:36
And uh you basically become a cyborg.
2:30:38
And that process takes about 3 hours right now.
2:30:42
Can you talk to me about uh the how noisy the data is and if there's any uh advances in AI that help denoising of the data?
2:30:52
I've seen like incredible you know demos of oh take this ancient black and white grainy image and just make it look amazing or even unblurring images like we're actually at the CSI moment where you can be like zoom in on that zoom in on that and it works.
2:31:07
Um, has has has have there been any developments in AI recently that have been relevant?
2:31:15
Do you think that will happen in the future? Is it already happening?
2:31:17
Or is it just kind of a complete side quest? Yeah.
2:31:21
No, there's there's a lot of um opportunities where AI can help, you know, in some ways understand the biological brain that it's inspired by um in in in uh really interesting ways.
2:31:33
Um there are a couple places that we currently use AI.
2:31:35
currently use AI. I you know I think on the on the electro side unfortunately there's not a lot that you can do um in the end there's very tight margin in terms of signal to noise ratio um so there's a lot of innovations that we we've had um in Neurolink on you know low power and low noise amplifier
2:31:59
designs and being able to digitize that as quickly as possible into digital bits that then you can apply a lot of interesting kind signal processing um as as well as um really at the end of the day this giant pipeline that we call neural decoding you know what is the human intent and how can you actually translate that to something useful. So
2:32:16
translate that to something useful. So uh as of right now we have a you know very simple uh machine learning uh uh you know AI kind of there to um translate those thoughts and intents into something useful and um the the thing that is actually very interesting
2:32:32
is that it's not a static data points either right so if you look at a human brain um you know there's what's called neuroplasticity which means that from day to day uh or even depending on the context like there's difference in neural states that are represented even from the same brain region and um it's a learning system, right? And as well as
2:32:51
learning system, right? And as well as the the machine learning model, the silicon neural net is also learning about the brain but also your brain is learning about the the silicon uh basically this new mode of communication that you have um gotten as a neural link and uh in many ways I think there's
2:33:09
there's some opportunities and we're starting to see kind of interesting trace where now that we have not just one but seven human participants there's some similarities that we see um in 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
2:33:26
So meaning you can't immediately use this device as is.
2:33:29
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.
2:33:36
Um, you know, John is thinking about moving to the left and this is what the neural patterns look like."
2:33:41
And um, you know, collect that data over time and then, you know, improve improve the system.
2:33:47
But you do you do get drift over time um, due to the fact that as I mentioned your neural uh, state is always going through a plasticity.
2:33:54
So, um, can you talk about as we Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.
2:34:00
Can you talk about the the translation and the evolution of like what outputs you're actually trying to map to?
2:34:06
Because if I remember Pong, Pong's unique in that it's it's just up or down.
2:34:10
It's not an X and Y grid that you're trying to control.
2:34:13
You're just controlling up and down.
2:34:15
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.
2:34:23
And when I think about playing a video game, I'm kind of using all 10 digits.
2:34:29
I'm in one way I'm thinking jump.
2:34:32
In another way, I'm thinking send the message of just press the A button.
2:34:36
And so there's a there's like how much data can you get out?
2:34:40
Are you trying to increase that?
2:34:42
Has that already increased?
2:34:44
Is it is it going to uh kind of operate like a higher level of abstraction that then gets translated into computer use or or is it more like as long as I can puppeteer 10 fingers then I you like you can translate those into 10 different actions and remap those and have people menu accordingly like the like the investment banker who doesn't use a mouse. Right.
2:35:09
So, um, the the update that we just released, uh, a couple hours ago actually has some videos of, you know, what the latest capabilities with Neurolink, um, you know, that participants been able to do.
2:35:20
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.
2:35:27
And if you actually think about it, that's quite sophisticated control.
2:35:30
There's a left joystick uh, for movement.
2:35:32
There's a right joystick for aiming.
2:35:34
And there's a bunch of different buttons for swapping weapons, reload, and shooting, etc. , etc. And so make me cry. It's gonna make me cry.
2:35:42
Team death team deathmatch after with your boy after Well, the other thing that's actually kind of interesting is that, you know, at Neuralink, we also talk about, you know, going beyond the limits of biology and then actually achieving superhuman capabilities. Yeah.
2:35:55
So, we're already Oh, I was going to say like we're actually already starting to see some signs of it. Interesting.
2:36:02
So that that was my next question.
2:36:05
Uh right now you guys are generally focused on outputs, right?
2:36:08
Controlling uh an arm or or playing a video game or or navigating uh some type of computer.
2:36:14
At what point would you focus on or or sp starting to spend more time around sort of the inputs into the brain? Yes. Um inputs.
2:36:24
So one of the major applications for that is a product that we call blind sight.
2:36:30
So giving sight back to people that have lost it and that's primarily going to be an input.
2:36:37
So uh imagine basically someone who's blind being able to uh have a uh set of glasses with embedded camera that's capturing the scene and that gets converted into set of uh 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 uh your sight back. Right?
2:36:56
Cuz the way vision works is that you have your light hitting your retina converted to electrical signals.
2:37:02
And at the end of the day, it's your brain where you're seeing and having that conscious experience.
2:37:07
But if you have anything break in that circuit, you can directly go to the brain, you know, stimulate those neurons that are giving you that visual experience and be able to see.
2:37:16
And our plan is to have our first blind sight patient uh next year.
2:37:18
Can you talk about some of the how you see the ecosystem developing around uh Neuralink long term?
2:37:27
I if you can speak to it at all.
2:37:29
I'm just imagining that when when when I when I uh I've I've spoken to Nolan P1 and uh I mean he's you know incredibly bene he's a huge beneficiary of of Neurolink but also voice interfaces because he can speak and so as that technology gets better that becomes an extra tool in the arsenal.
2:37:48
I'm imagining someone wearing, you know, glasses that act as blind sight, but then also having an audio modulation there that could help as well.
2:37:56
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 that where you know, Neuralink's a key key technology, but then there's other approaches that are actually more compatible or or complimentary as opposed to directly competitive. Yeah.
2:38:15
Yeah, I mean I think in the long future, you know, I I I think there's going to be a lot of application layers that are going to be built on top of Neurolink, 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.
2:38:31
applications on top of it. So I can imagine a world where there's a neural link 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
2:38:47
computers laptop or you know your computers phones or prosthetics or some some other thing and and I'm I'm really excited to kind of see what the the the creative minds can kind of think about in terms of the application on top of yeah that it it feels like there will be
2:39:02
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 you know manipulate the world but then other people might want to use inputs to be like every time I'm about to pick up you know bag of Cheetos
2:39:16
just like you know don't work you know like make the arm not work and so I can't I just can't physically pick up the admino it's an ad blocker for like overeating you know or or turning on the TV I love that amazing uh I I want to talk about uh hiring. Obviously, this
2:39:31
Obviously, this event was was not uh for the shareholders.
2:39:36
Uh it was for recruiting.
2:39:39
Um can you talk about the Neuralink culture?
2:39:41
Can you talk about what skills you're looking for and what it takes to get a job at Neuralink today?
2:39:49
Yeah, there's um there's one metric that we basically look for in in any candidate and that's um and it's it's hard to actually get it down to a quantitative number, but you know, we try to look for literally ego divided by ability.
2:40:03
So, ego to ability ratio.
2:40:03
Um and we want that to be significantly less than one.
2:40:09
So, you can have a little bit of ego, but you better have, you know, 10 times 100 times more abilities to uh offset that. That's amazing.
2:40:16
And uh we we found that to be actually really important thing to look for especially given that one this is an extremely interdisciplinary effort. Mhm.
2:40:30
Um you know it's extremely I don't think there's a place where you can have lunch with um you know someone who's an expert in RF chip design to robotics to neurosurgery to animal care specialists.
2:40:45
I think is a very very uh unique space in that and not to mention FD lawyers too.
2:40:51
I I'm always baffled by that that you guys are executing at such a high level regulatory completely different discipline and and I'm saying this to me looking at Neuralink it has to be the hardest problem set in the world. It's hard.
2:41:06
I'm trying to think of others and it's hard to come up with anything that really comes close to it.
2:41:12
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, you know, I'd just like to be a rocket scientist."
2:41:21
Um, and so I'm I'm yeah, I'd be interested to get your view on it just because you have so many different factors the the interdisciplinary nature of it.
2:41:29
then okay well you know now the brain's actually moving and it's not moving consistently but it's moving based on you know the way the heart's beating or or things like that.
2:41:39
It just feels like the most difficult problem set and I guess that must be a good filtering function and that you don't want people to come in thinking that you know it's just going to be hard but you know very achievable.
2:41:53
You almost want them to think that it's borderline impossible but sort of push through that. Yeah. Yeah.
2:41:58
So you know a lot of people have misconception that Neurolink is a science company.
2:42:03
We're really a technology and an engineering company.
2:42:07
And you know I there's also this misconception that oh yeah and neural link you guys probably spend a lot of time talking about like future of humanity and like uploading consciousness and etc etc like in some ways yes like we do talk about those things but it's like.
2:42:21
1% of our conversation like 99.
2:42:23
conversation like 99.9% of the time it's about hardcore engineering problems and in many ways you know brains moving the material properties mechanical properties of the brain those are engineering constraints but at the end of the day it's an engineering problem right so um you know we're really looking for just hardcore engineers and in many ways we have a saying that you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work
2:42:45
at neurolink you actually don't even need to have a prior experience in brain uh I took some neuroscience classes in in grad school but I didn't really know anything about the brain uh it really is just engineering a great system to be
2:42:57
able to study and peer into the dynamics of brain that you know 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. Is I I I I love that ego to ability
2:43:11
Is I I I I love that ego to ability framework, but uh talk about interdisiplinary work.
2:43:17
Is is there is there a world where you need RF engineers who are just great at that and they're not really going to have to cross over or are you still looking for the types that can uh you know bring together different ideas from different disciplines and actually bridge different groups? How relevant is that?
2:43:39
I'm sure that's important at the executive level, but like you might just be in a stage where you know you need to go and solve a key problem in a narrow domain and so you're really looking for just someone who's fantastic at that.
2:43:52
Has that evolved over time and and can you speak to that? Yeah. Yeah.
2:43:54
So um you know Neuralink is still a very small company.
2:44:00
Um you know we have 300 people uh total across Austin and Fremont and yeah there are definitely set of problems where I would say we we need uh GPUs so people that are very specialized in things or sorry um CPUs um but yeah like we're still we'll still we're still looking for uh way more GPUs.
2:44:18
Yeah it I mean you're hiring for UIUX here but then also clinical and surgery and robotics and ASIC. That's fascinating.
2:44:30
Firmware, electronics, I'm just looking through it. Machining.
2:44:32
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.
2:44:39
Um, I want to I want to dig into uh ego a little bit more uh because I find that very interesting.
2:44:46
Um h how does how does ego manifest in in an employee?
2:44:50
like like and is that something that can be controlled or or is it is it do you think it's some it's somehow innate or can it be kind of coached out of someone?
2:45:00
When I think of ego, I often think about um 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.
2:45:11
And so maybe you're not in the position to be the one to take that risk.
2:45:16
Um but but how do you think about the shape of ego as just a human trait?
2:45:21
I mean, you're kind of studying the brain.
2:45:22
So, it's kind of an interesting question from a philosophical perspective as well.
2:45:24
I might also consider launching the ego app in which you can, you know, dial it dialink on the Neuralink app store.
2:45:32
Just dial it up and down.
2:45:34
Hey, I'm getting I'm getting a I'm I'm going in for a job interview at Neuralink.
2:45:37
Turn this down all the way. Yeah.
2:45:38
Or somebody's joining TVPN and we think they're super talented, but the ego is too high.
2:45:41
I can say, "You're welcome to join, but we're just going to have to dial it back.
2:45:44
You got to install the app." Yeah. People learn.
2:45:49
Uh I I' I've seen this time and time again.
2:45:51
Uh especially especially people that are you know uh earlier in their career have um you know a lot of opportunities to kind of shape how they work within an organization and that you know really it's not about pushing for your ideas but it's pushing for what's best for the company.
2:46:07
And I I've seen that change and um you know I think once you have sort of like it it really just fosters like a great environment where people you know debate the merits of ideas rather than you know kind of putting sort of their ego in front so that it becomes sometimes like not a technical discussion but a an emotional discussion and um but yeah that's that's certainly coachable.
2:46:33
I want to talk about the patience.
2:46:33
Uh it was interesting to see how fast you moved on from uh spinal injury to ALS.
2:46:43
Uh is there a third uh indication that you're interested in in uh in solving in the near term?
2:46:50
Uh is this more of a question of just let's scale up because there's a lot of folks that really could benefit just in spinal injury and ALS.
2:47:00
Um and what what else are you excited about in there?
2:47:02
It's like does do are you feeling like generalized breakthroughs that make each individual product, you know, advance to some degree or also like are there sort of verticalized breakthrough? Yeah.
2:47:14
Are there differences in solving for ALS versus solving for traumatic spinal injury?
2:47:20
Yeah, there certainly is.
2:47:20
Uh for ALS, it is a neurodeenerative condition.
2:47:25
So their conditions just gets worse as the time progresses.
2:47:28
So um you know that that makes it very difficult.
2:47:32
You know, one of our participants is in what's called a late stage ALS, which means that he's effectively locked in.
2:47:37
So, unable to move, unable to speak even, and is connected to a a mechanical ventilators to basically keep him alive, you know, in a similar ways that basically uh Stephen Hawking uh was able to sort of live the last 50 plus years of his lives.
2:47:54
And um you know for them they also have more fatigue and they have different needs um as as you can imagine from someone like Nolan who can who's still very vibrant who still can speak who can who can still you know kind of engage with the world in a different ways and their application their needs will change as a result of it.
2:48:12
Um but really you know what what we also talk about is that we're building a generalized input output device and technology for the brain.
2:48:19
technology for the brain. So, you know, for someone who is um 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 brain stem stroke, whether it's due to some other
2:48:34
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 uh will find more uh useful for that partic particular situation. similar to how you know when 10
2:48:48
similar to how you know when 10 different people are given a computer they will use that 10 different unique ways and we're seeing that and and that's something that's been uh kind of wonderful to see the wide range of diverse use cases for different participants.
2:49:02
Well, this has been fantastic.
2:49:04
We'll let you get back to the very important work that you're doing.
2:49:07
Where can people go to learn more about what you're hiring for? Neuralink. com/careers.
2:49:12
And I would definitely encourage people to check out this uh latest update that we've had.
2:49:16
It's been an incredible progress in the past.
2:49:17
It's 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.
2:49:24
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.
2:49:29
It's not it's not a jobs page.
2:49:31
It's a career page because you're going to be here for 40 years substantially. Yeah.
2:49:34
Well, we're excited to follow along.
2:49:36
Thank you so much for joining the update. We'll talk to you soon.
2:49:39
Hey, thanks for having me. Cheers. Bye. [Music]