Pirate Wires - Mega Pod! Debate Recap, Trump Coin, DNA, The Downfall Of The Squad, Green Cards (ft. Martin Shkreli)

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

EPISODE #59: The Mega Pod is here! We’re off next week for the 4th of July, so we figured we’d leave you with some extra content to carry through the break. First up, an instant reaction to the train wreck that was the Presidential debates. We had to wake up early on Friday morning and record a reaction for you guys. Solana & Producer Matt discuss (What up Matt!) Then, back to your regularly scheduled pod episode. Martin Shkreli joins the show to discuss all the betting markets reaction to Trump coin and the downfall of TechCrunch. We are then joined by Kian Sadeghi & Delian Asparouhov to discuss Nucleus Genomicsm, the all-in-one DNA test. Next up, fire alarm enthusiast, Jamaal Bowman, gets voted out in NY and AOC makes a fool of herself at the rally. Finally, Trump promised green cards for all college graduates. Is this a good idea? Makes sense? Hope so. Enjoy! Featuring Mike Solana, Sanjana Friedman, Matt Marlinski, Martin Shkreli, Kian Sadeghi, Delian Asparouhov Sign Up To Pirate Wires For Free! https://piratewires.co/free_newsletter Pirate Wires Twitter: https://twitter.com/PirateWires Mike Twitter: https://twitter.com/micsolana Sanjana Twitter: https://twitter.com/metaversehell Matt Twitter: https://x.com/mattmarlinski Martin Twitter: https://x.com/MartinShkreli Kian Twitter: https://x.com/KianSadeghi5 Delian Twitter: https://x.com/zebulgar TIMESTAMPS: 0:00 - Intro 0:45 - Trump/Biden Debate Friday Morning Instant Reaction 25:00 - Welcome Martin Shkreli To The Pod! 26:00 - The Betting Markets & Trump Coin 41:45 - The Downfall Of Tech Crunch and Tech Media 57:30 - Welcome Kian Sadeghi & Delian Asparouhov to discuss Nucleus Genomicsm 1:28:00 - Shkreli & The Panel Are Back 1:29:40 - The End Of The Squad? Jamaal Bowman, Voted Out, AOC Embarrassing Rally While Being Protested By Yay-Hamas 1:48:00 - Green Cards For All College Graduates? Trump Floats The Idea 2:00:00 - Thanks For Watching Till The End! We’ll Be Back July 12th - Wish Solana A Happy Birthday! #podcast #martinshkreli #trump #biden #technology #politics #culture

So now, is it an official Trump coin? Like, what does that mean? The best part is that, you know, I didn't make a dollar from this. Barron's made $50 million from it. He kind of left me in the lurch here. I mean, there's still crazy people out there that think you and I are making everything up. But about half of them are deplorables. Yeah, but I love deplorables.

I'm fine with deplorables. Like, but they're supposed to be on our side. They donated their whole life savings. They said, every dollar I have, I bet on this. I'm like, well, I don't believe it, one. And number two, that sounds like a youth problem. Should have thought that through, yeah. The news that I reported on through FireWire at the time was correct. You're welcome. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod.

A little bit switched up this morning. We've got, first of all, Matt in the hot seat today. So this is producer Matt. I mean, I shout out Matt all the time. I'm always demanding he go and get me a clip or fix something. You're finally getting to meet the man, the myth, the legend. The reason Matt's in the hot seat is because everybody else is fucking out of town. Fire Arches is going on break. We're the last ones left. We have to, before the rest of this episode, which we recorded yesterday, we obviously have to talk about last night's

unbelievable debate. And I can't do that alone. I need my boy Matt to help me out. Just like guide me through it. I just before we get to it, we're off next week. Any other updates, Matt? It's like we're off next week. We have a whole episode coming up. We've got Shkreli on the pod. We've got Deli on the pod this weekend. Huge monster episode.

And now the debate recap. I think I had, I was taking notes like for this, I was taking notes, you know, going through points and positions and somewhere, I mean like 10 minutes in, I realized this is useless because the debate is not about these

issues. I have to start with an apology. My take the other day, and something I say a lot is, you know, debates are meaningless. They're pointless. They're useless. They're more about, you know, rhetoric than positions. They're never meaningful. And we should probably just get rid of them genuinely. Like I think a three-hour Rogan conversation or really a conversation on PirateWire, hit me up, would be more useful, just uninterrupted, a meandering talk through policy issues and things. You can really get to know somebody. The mechanics of this debate, I was like, there's no way. It's like CNN's involved. They're going to be clamping down on the mic thing. I thought Trump would be fine in that format. But overall, because he's a performer and he cracks any medium, that's what he does.

Separate from his policy positions or him as a president, you cannot deny that he's a savant level entertainer. So he was always going to thrive no matter what the medium was. But I just didn't think we'd get anything important out of this debate. I thought we'd walk away and everybody would sort of declare victory and nothing would matter. And we'd move on as if it never happened. I'd have some fun tweets, whatever. No, what happened instead was we had, I think, the first meaningful presidential debate in my entire life. Maybe there was one back decades and decades ago that I don't know. Maybe like the Nixon-Kennedy debate because it heralded like a new era of debate. It was a medium shift.

That's interesting. What we saw last night was a man who was so in Joe Biden, so mentally not there, right? So degraded, so obviously senile that we should not even be discussing the new primary or whatever, like who's going to be his replacement, which is now the sort of DNC discussion. It's like, how are we going to get rid of this person who's clearly mentally unwell? We should be discussing the 25th amendment. We don't have a president right now. He's not mentally there. Like two minutes into it, I look over at a friend with me in the room while I was watching

and tweeting and stuff. And I just want a quick check-in with him. He's not super online, more of a moderate on all of this stuff. And I just said, yo, this is crazy, right? Or is it crazy? What am I seeing here? And he's like, this is fucking crazy. He seemed to forget where he was. He lost his train of thought on every single question. He couldn't make a single point. He fumbled and mumbled through everything. Dude, bro, what was your take? I don't even really know what to say other than like, listen, the facts are he's mentally unwell. I don't know how he will be running for president. I think there's almost no chance at this point.

Every single Democratic operative is in sort of red alert status right now. Everybody is talking about what happens now that the Democrats have ditched, dodged an entire primary season. And there's going to be some weird backroom machine. We're going to learn all sorts of new rules, I'm sure, in the next coming weeks, like weird rules we never knew existed that they'll be like, oh, you're an idiot for never knowing this existed. Obviously, we can just select Gavin Newsom. It'll be some strange shit like that. But democracy from the Democratic Party has been averted. I think that there has to be a new candidate. If there's not, I mean, that's inconceivable to me. I guess that's just inconceivable to me.

I think he's not going to be the president or the presidential candidate. Yeah, there has to be. I slacked last night. I was like, I'm just sad. Legitimately sad. I doom scrolled Twitter. It's one of the few times on Twitter that everyone agrees on an actual opinion. Even CNN and MSNBC were their like funeral last night for biden and it was just it's pathetic i was like this is really really fucking pathetic and you know naively i

think we both went into it i had some questions organized i'm like okay i'm gonna ask them this question about this we didn't get to the fucking issues no it was you know and i mean they answer some questions it was cool to see. I liked hearing. We're not talking about that today. Right. They talk about issue. They talk about fucking golf, but like no one's talking about that. Everyone's talking about some bullshit about, you know, he's just, he's unfit to be president.

And you thought maybe they drug him up enough, like when he does the state of the union. So I think naively, that's how we thought we get your usual sort of copy and paste debate, but he couldn't even do that. Uh, no. thought we'd get your usual sort of copy and paste debate, but he couldn't even do that. No. And I think there's a question, obviously, that you have to be asking yourself at this point, which if you just saw the performance, which was unlike anything I've ever seen, humiliating for the country, I would say, not only, not only for him, but, but for all of us on a world stage. Um, I, I thought that, you know, like, I mean, Trump's a clown. I I'm like, he's a kind of clown entertainer, reality television star running for president in 2016. Like that was sort of like, Oh God, what are we doing here? And then, um, and then you grow to

evolve your opinion on Trump based on what's happening in the world. You have Kamala Harris giggling over, you know, falling out of a coconut tree or whatever. You're like, what the fuck is going on? This is embarrassing. This is the worst one. This is like, and it's, and it's, it's bad in a classic sort of way, which is just, we are not capable of defending ourselves right now. He is not the commander in chief. And so, yeah, it was totally humiliating. And you have to ask yourself this question of, well, there's no way that his handlers, which he definitely has, didn't know this and haven't known this for months and months and months and months, including all throughout last year when there was an opportunity for

primary. So all of the pieces start snapping together. And this is now increasingly, and I already saw, I saw Paul Graham going after Balaji for this, kind of accusing him of a conspiracy theory and dangerous ideas. This is not a conspiracy theory. It is very, very fucking obvious that the DNC wanted to avoid a messy primary, a messy chaotic primary, which is why they pretended he was well and then moved the debates. And now there's just enough time for us before the Democratic Convention this summer to choose a new candidate. They're just going to put him right in. And I do think it was, I don't know if Biden was involved in this decision-making process. My sense is probably not. My sense is he's not making many decisions at all right now. But I do think that he was not put on stage with any sense by anybody who knew him that he was going to do okay.

I think that they knew it was going to be a complete disaster, that the entire country was going to be shocked to the point that they would accept the Democrats once again, because back they did this with Bernie Sanders as well. Once again, fucking a primary, totally bypassing the democratic process and just picking somebody. But this is much more egregious than what happened with Hillary. This is really separate from the fact that he is not mentally there. The story is that the Democrats are not democratic. This is like mob party shit. I got to say, I'm shocked. I knew he was bad. I've said it. He was bad. And I would get sort of frustrated. He couldn't even walk off the stage. He couldn't even walk off the fucking stage.

From the shuffle, the very first step, I was like, oh no, this is, this is going to be, this is way worse than I thought. And I mean, I, again, I thought it was bad. We would get attacked, you know, oh, you're just being a partisan hack, whatever. And I'm like, I mean, he, he seems senile to me and whatever, I guess we'll see. Of course, I don't have any special, I don't have any sources close to the president. I had no idea that it was this bad, that it had degraded to this point. And I think that today really, and you see like Matt Iglesias and who's that asshole from MSNBC, Joe Scarborough.

The people are doing side-by-sides of commentary of theirs from just a couple of days ago. Challenging anyone who said that the president was mentally unwell. New York Times six days ago. The New York Times. These people all knew better a week ago. They did. And it was like, I want to say it was tactically stupid, but it wasn't because I think that like for the machine Democrats, Scarborough is not that. Scarborough is just a

clown on television. But Iglesias certainly is this and the New York Times certainly is this. I think that they wanted, I don't think they're like part of a conspiracy, but I think that deep down, they didn't want a messy primary either. A messy primary with what's his face, the Kennedy involved and probably Ocasio jumps in. Anything could have happened in a primary. They don't want that. They want some backroom shit where Gavin Newsom is anointed and that's that. And I do think it's that. Here, I'm not confident in my prediction. We are in uncharted territory. I'm very confident that Biden won't be running because he's not only going to lose, he's a danger to every other Democrat on the ticket with him. So I don't see a world in which they're able to keep him on at this point.

The cope I'm reading this morning is that you vote for administration, not the president. They're just trying everything they can. Well biden i mean that's always been true right yeah that's you're you're voting for the deep state you're voting for like you're voting for the machine around him that's been propping him up um you know for years and years and years the administrative state and uh that's i, that's a whole other, if the idea that they are in this much control, I say they, I'm sounding spooky by tinfoil hats on. Um, but it's just like, this is a conspiracy. I think there was a conspiracy to circumvent a primary in order to have control over the selection process. Now, I think maybe there was a chance that Biden could go and they were like, whatever, like, give it a shot,

Joe. And he just crashed and burned in a manner. I've never seen. I was, I was watching on CNN. So the moment that it ended, all the panelists came on and they were just like, this is a fucking disaster.

There's never been a disaster. Van Jones is about to cry. Like, you know, John King is all saying that it's a mess. There's never been a disaster like this. Van Jones is about to cry. John King is all saying that it's a mess. Joy Reid on MSNBC was like, I was talking to people. Jesus Christ, they went all in. Every single channel.

I mean, they've tried to throw in stuff like, oh, well, Trump. Trump lied. Trump was mean. That was the biggest argument. He was so nasty. He's never going to get suburban women when he's this nasty. And he needs those suburban women. And I'm like, one, I don't know that that's true, that he needs anybody right now. Like needs, like a certain contingent.

He seems to be doing generally well. And then two, I don't, can you imagine being so sexist that you think a suburban woman's looking at the television right now and she's like, I better take the vegetable because that guy was a little bit mean on TV to the vegetable. I don't think so. Like, that's just not my sense. Exactly. Having been raised by a suburban woman, I can tell you that's not the way that she thinks. And that's not the way that any intelligent woman thinks. This is like, we're in existential danger territory. And I also think there is some risk to the Democrats now because separate from Biden, who I do think they're going to replace, which is sort of like, how dare you put the country

in this position? This is an interesting vector for attack now that we've never seen before because there's so many crazy developments happening behind the scenes that do feel conspiratorial and do feel anti-democratic and do feel like really a giant middle finger, not to Republicans. Um, but first, obviously we'll tip Republicans in so far that it's a middle finger to the country generally, but it's a specifically a middle finger to the Democrats who are voting, who have no say in who their candidate is right now. Um, that is, uh, I think that it has to matter. And, um,

I don't know. I gotta say, I thought this was going to be a, a boring, I suspected there was a chance that something like this. I did. I thought maybe, maybe he still drops out before the convention, but I don't,

mostly I didn't. Mostly I thought that we were signing up for a boring election and it's no longer boring. it's no longer boring. It is no longer boring. I can't believe I doubted Trump. I can't believe I doubted Trump was going to give us an exciting election. I really did.

But here he is. I retweet the image of the band playing the Titanic. That's what it felt like last night. Something I keep coming back to this morning as I think about it, I'm just like the years of gaslighting. Now that goes back to COVID. That goes back to inflation. And some of these obviously was under Trump, but like COVID, inflation, and now Biden's health.

And like the videos have been coming out the past couple of months. And like, sure, you can argue on the margins. They're sort of doctored for like, they sort of get edited for however your stance wants to be. So like, you think he shit his pants, but really he had trouble sitting down. But if you just look at the video unedited, you go go that's an old man who like can't function properly yep and the problem with so much the past couple years like you you know what's going on you're a sentient smart human being you know what's going on and you just keep told getting told no that's not what's happening inflation's not that bad the president's great and you're like what and like

anyone who would like half a brain knows what's going on here and it it's just years of this and it just it's so fucking tiring and disgusting and shameful it's shameful like you know even even you just watch like gavin newsom speak yesterday he's not even that good he's terrible governor in california but at least he's like can speak and he's like down on the mic here the gavin newsom thing is it's just every single interview. He's a surrogate for the president. They've brought in all these like younger. And by young, I mean, I think he's like close to 60. So none of these people are that young. He looks great.

He's like comparatively young. But they're like bringing all these like the young people out to talk about how great Biden is in front of the cameras after Biden collapses post-debate because everyone knew that. We all knew he was too tired to keep going after the debate, regardless of whatever this new, very clear and present danger version of mental calamity is or mental degradation is. But they kept interviewing Newsom after and they're like, people are saying you're going to have to run now. And he's just like, ah, that's outrageous. And you can just see like a little smile cracking. Like, like he is just a friend of mine tweeted, um, a picture side-by-side of him in the Cheshire cat. And she's like, I can't unsee it now. And it's like, you could just see he's having the best night of his life. He's like, here it comes. Gonna fucking house of cards my way into the,

into the oval office. Now's my time. Skipped a primary, going straight up against Trump. It's like, it is, I mean, it makes you like not want to be into democracy, to be honest. It's like this, it's just degraded at this point where you're like. Bring back the king. It's just like, yeah, we're ready. I'm ready for an adult to just sort of like take over for a minute i would love it if we could just have it for four years like a four-year king and then it's got a timeline and he goes away but we just need a second to like

like clean this shit up um but remember we were told in 20 in 2020 we were told the adults are back in the room and like none of that has been the case i was told the adults are back well no i mean he's certainly i feel like he was wasn wasn't he born like before World War II or something? I don't know. I mean, he had to have been. I don't know how old he is. He's like, he's, this is an ancient man we're talking about. He's gone now.

I feel a little bit bad for him. But then also I remember no one asked him to run for president. Well, I guess a lot of people asked him to run for president. Well, yeah. But he was the president. Well, I guess a lot of people ask him to run for president. But he was the president. And yeah, I mean, I felt bad even tweeting about it last night while I was watching. I genuinely did. I was like, I feel like I'm attacking this frail old guy. I saw these clips of him from when he was young and he was a young senator talking about one was Roe v. Wade. And then one was later it was crime. Republicans love to attack him for the predators comment.

They're like, oh, you're calling black people super predators. He never did. He was talking about the problem of crime eloquently and correctly. And I was like, can I vote for that guy? He's like, we're cleaning up the streets. And I'm like, yes, thank you, sir. Please. And he was a different guy.

And he was already old when he was talking about predators. But before that, I mean, he was a different guy. Like, and he was already old when he was talking about predators. Uh, but before that, I mean, he, he's been in politics forever and, and, um, he wasn't,

I don't believe he was always a bad guy. Uh, I, I think that this is a tragic end for someone who's. Yeah. It's sad. Tried for a long time. And I,

I think it's like the people around him have a lot to answer for. Um, but then again, I, I think it also is a strategy. So it's like to answer for it, answer for what? They didn't do it by accident or it's all on purpose. They're trying to get someone into the White House right now. And they think that this is the best strategy, which is crazed because they're supposed to be the party of norms. But I have not seen a normal thing out of that party for many, many, many, many years. You can't say democracy is on the ballot and not even have a primary and just sneak a candidate in. You said House of Cards, that's actually a great reference. But they're going to. They're going to keep doing it. Once they place a new guy in, we're going to go straight back to democracy. Democracy, you've got to save democracy. And I'm like, well, if this is democracy, if this is the definition of democracy, I'm not a fan. I'm open to alternatives if this is what democracy... If democracy just means that a few mob bosses in DC get to select

who our president is, I'm not interested in democracy. This is crazy. This is unacceptable. I think there can be no tolerance of people now who are defending this. It is so much worse than... They brought up January 6th. That was a funny line, I will say. They brought up January 6th last night. And it's like Trump has this... I forget the exact framing of the question, but it was like, sir, let's talk about January 6th. He was like, let's talk about January 6th. The border looked great on January 6th. And I thought that was funny. I do not believe there was a coup attempt. I don't believe that it was an insurrection. I believe it was a really messy riot and Trump acted like a clown and could have done a lot better. But I think that calling it anything else is really

ridiculous, especially while Nancy Pelosi is colluding with generals, discussing what orders to and to not obey while Trump is president, given some whatever set of circumstances. They just have no ground whatsoever to be talking about coups or insurrections while the deep state is selecting who our next... Well, I don't want to say the deep. Listen, that's a little bit too far of a stretch for me. I think it's just like democratic mob bosses who are making these decisions. Hint, hint, wink, wink. Yeah, I got you. I got you. I got what you're saying. But I don't, I think, I just don't think that Trump is the danger here. I really don't after last night. Like you gotta be, you gotta really think about this. It's like the Alvin

Bragg, the sort of fake show trials. It is who actually led the coup attempt, certainly not Trump. We had six months of riots that were identical preceding January 6th all over the country. At one point on that January 6th question, after Trump knocked it out of the park with his diversion, his funny diversion, Biden was like, it's awful what you're defending. I'm not going to do it justice because it's sad to me. I don't want to get into what I saw last night in terms of the cadence of his speech. But he mentioned mobs of people crashing into buildings, breaking windows, knocking over statues. And for a second, I was actually confused. I was like, is he talking about the BLM stuff? Like the six months that I was locked in my apartment while roving mobs looted and destroyed the statues of our

forefathers across the country, Grant being pushed over, shattered in the name of anti-racism. It was a fucking cultural revolution and it was horrifying. But no, he was talking about that one day. That was the one riot they weren't okay with. And I wasn't okay with it either. I wrote about it at the time. I'm against all of the riots. I don't like any of them. I've talked about it on this podcast multiple times. There should be swift and very firm justice for all of the people who were rioting. But it wasn't a fucking coup attempt. That's not how our government works. You don't have to just like walk into the Capitol and stand at the podium and then you get to be the king. Like what planet are we on?

Ridiculous. But anyway, we have bigger problems now. Yes, seriously. That was a debate. It was wild. I was totally wrong. It was a meaningful debate. I think that we're watching history unfold right now.

I can't imagine that something like this ever happens again in our lifetime. But then again, the rules of the clown world apply. So I think for as long as the internet exists, reality is going to be very, very weird. And buckle up, I guess. It's just sad i mean i i you know i was thinking about like policy questions and we didn't get to anything like that it's just it's just this sad state that we're in and i don't know man it's i don't know where we go from here but it's well i know where we go we go to california gavin newsom moved to san francisco a couple weeks ago like what was that all about why well it was this is his home. He's moving back to his home. He's moving away from the seat of California government and to a more comfortable,

friendly environment. For what reason? Someone was pushing back against me online when I defended biology from Paul. And I was like, it's actually outrageous that you would deny something like a conspiracy on the DNC side. This is like COVID. This is like lab leak denialism at this point, I think. And someone, Megan McArdle pushed back. She's like, no, no, it's really hard to do a primary and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, yes, it's hard. But what do you think? Why do you think Gavin Newsom had a debate with Ron DeSantis last year? You think he's running for governor of Florida? You think he just did it for fun?

Or to what? Give DeSantis a boost in the primary race? No, of course there was a primary on the table. It's fucking ridiculous. It's ridiculous that we're denying this. It's just absolutely absurd. That's clearly what was happening. And I'm outraged, but I'm also also i've got to be honest like i've got a lot to write about now well that's that's the good news yeah it's gonna be

crazy like we've got content baby just like clown world chaos has returned and uh we are on the front lines my friends um thanks for tuning in we got a crazy show for you today with uh with scretly we're talking about um like the meme coin we're talking about uh tech crunch randomly we've got a whole thing on embryonic selection with delian and kian from uh from nucleus it's gonna be a fun show uh we're off again we're off next week for fourth of july uh go watch some fireworks wish me happy birthday on the 1st of July. Please do. Still got some pieces coming out on Pyrewire. So make sure to subscribe

to all of our newsletters to get all that great content and catch you back in a couple of weeks. I'll see you guys for the next American disaster. What's up, guys? Welcome back to the pod. We have, honestly, an iconic guest with us today, the legendary Martin Shkreli, I think, thoughtful autist. I mean, I'm looking at your autistic and lonely t-shirt and I'm just kind of working with it. Sort of to some internet villain, we can unpack a little bit of that today. I don't think so. I think it's a complex question, but we are here to talk about a bunch of stuff. Martin is on for the whole episode. We have a bunch of topics to hit and I'm going to get, I think I'm going to start

with one that you and I are kind of involved in together and I think there's no way sort of not to sort of talk about this. Last week, we talked a bit about the Donald Trump coin, the story and the controversy and all of that. I think this week, what I really want to talk about is this other, to me, quite interesting piece of this puzzle, which deals with betting markets in general. So while the Trump coin news was breaking by us, the the Trump coin news was breaking by us, the betting markets got involved. And there was a question of, there are two big ones that I want to talk about. The first was like, is the DJT, is it real? I think was the framing of it. And I think that's a complicated question. What makes a meme coin real? And it's like, there's more nuance there in my mind. The second question

was, is Barron Trump involved? Which he was. So both of them resolved as no, which to me is incredibly controversial and calls a lot of the sort of fundamentals here into question. I will say UMA, which is the protocol that is used by, what was used by Polymarket in this case on the sort of Barron Trump question in particular, was he involved? This is like the vote, this is how people vote. So you have a bunch of people online who are anonymously voting on the question. They're looking for a preponderance of evidence before X date, and they said no, which is really disorienting for somebody who knows that's just not true. And it's further complicated by the question of, were they betting on this themselves? There are other people who have now lost money for being right.

UMA was proudly announcing the decision, I would say. They kept pile driving into it. They wouldn't just leave it alone. They were like, of course we're right. And fuck you for questioning it. They had just endless people online attacking everybody who was like, hey, wait a minute. You have no evidence that it didn't happen. It seems like I bet correctly. What is going on here? But Polymarket broke with them and sort of publicly denounced their decision. And I think that it seems to me like this is going to be a huge thing moving forward. I imagine there's probably some sort of firm break with UMA in general coming. And I think there has to be some reconceptualization of what kinds of questions are we allowed to even... Not even allowed. What kind of questions are we capable of answering here? So brief primer,

betting markets, we've talked about them before, but for people just sort of catching up, is Donald Trump going to win the election? Straightforward case. Yes or no. People bet, they make their predictions, and it's just like, you know, straight up gambling. I think it's interesting. It adds a new layer onto reality for me. It's a new tool for sort of assessing how much people believe what they're saying. You know, do you believe this thing enough to put money down on it? That's an interesting piece of information. I think its scale is sort of still, we don't know quite how that's going to break down and reshape cultural conversations and things, but in general, I'm in favor of this new piece of information. But we did come to a point here where it got more complicated. And Martin, you're one of the central characters

here, probably the central character at this point. I would love your perspective on this specifically like the conceptual piece. What are these betting markets capable of doing? And then also just narrowly, what are your thoughts on UMA? Yeah. I mean, thanks for having me, by the way. Thank you for coming. Anytime. Obviously, markets are sort of information discounting machines. They've been doing that for really well for hundreds of years. A stock market is good at sort of predicting if a company is going to be successful in the future because lots of smart people, maybe like you and less so me, will go study the company and say, okay, this looks like a good company. Maybe this one isn't. And you have a market, whether that's

private equity and venture capital like you do or public companies like I used to do, lots of people in a room can kind of generally get it right. Now, I think that taking that and applying it to other things is a good idea. I do think that stuff like, well, who will the president be? It wasn't surprising to see the very famous pollster sort of arrive at the same conclusion as Polymarket for presidential odds. A lot of people thought that was kind of like art imitating science or science kind of following art or whatever. And I think that's pretty accurate. But the problem becomes like, well, what kind of things can you apply this to? Are markets good for everything? Can markets be determined to say

whether or not your shirt is ugly? That's really not kind of great because there's subjective opinions and some experts will say, no, that's a wonderful shirt. And some, if the crowd says, no, it's terrible. Well, who are you siding with? Who's right? And I think markets just don't have that ability to solve everything. And in this case, you have this like very basically irrelevant thing. Like, did this guy make a meme coin?

I said, this guy is the president's son. But still, you but still something that's basically irrelevant. It's not about something that'll ever move billions of dollars or something like that. So you're really trying to force these tools to apply to things that are really kind of micro markets or irrelevant. And I think whenever you do that, as you know, in the financial markets, these really small markets are more inefficient than say the bigger market for like an Apple or whatever. When you get to these really small markets, you can get it wildly wrong.

For example, when Stripe, you know, sold common stock at $5 million, you know, pre-money, they got it wrong. You know, they should have sold it for a lot more and the guy that bought got it really right. And obviously, you know, the opposite has happened with all of our bad investments in the world where we should have never done it, but we had a mispricing. And Apple, you're more or less, your chance of mispricing Apple is very, very small in the public markets. So I think that when you apply them to really, really small markets, you're going to get that massive kind of inability to get the right answer because one, nobody cares.

There's not enough people to actually put enough money into a market this small to actually care enough to get the good market outcome. For that, you need time and you need money. And you sort of missed both here where Polymarket had a very short duration bet. And over the long haul, even a small market will probably resolve correctly if it's got time for players to come and say, wait a second, I studied this. I looked at all the evidence. I didn't have time on Monday because I had a business meeting, but on Tuesday, I figured I started my research and Friday, I figured it out. They wanted this done in like 24 hours. And that leads to a ton of issues. Yeah. I think that if you'd framed it slightly different and you'd said just, will Barron Trump talk about it by Friday? Will Barron Trump admit something or deny something by Friday?

That is very easy to prove. But to say like, is it true by Friday is it feels honestly, well, I don't want to throw any crazy words out there, but it certainly doesn't work. And even if Barron Trump in that week, in a few days had come out and said, I wasn't involved, what would that have proven? That wouldn't have proven anything if he said he was not involved, not in my mind, because I know that he was involved. So whose word do you take at that point? And that just obviously proves, I think, that this specific kind of question that is... You mentioned, I heard you on Spaces last night talking about this. You talked about like, is the dress pretty or not? That's an even, obviously an even stupider example that should never happen. This one is a little bit less nuanced, but still just like, how do you prove these things in court? Like on a murder trial,

right? There's not an obvious answer to this. Like you're weighing evidence and deciding. So I don't, it's like interesting to know what the market thought, but if there's no answer here, then it's ultimately not a very meaningful question to ask. There's not an answer that they can actually answer. And they weren't. I was in this very surreal place where it was like hundreds, or maybe I have no idea how many people were voting, of people who don't know anything about this were deciding what they thought about what I knew for sure based on vibes i guess like just genuinely like the overall vibe and certainly i don't think that i was really a big part of it i think it was really you it was like a referendum on you like do i like martin or not right and

their resolution was no and and that is not useful to me like that and it's certainly not i mean maybe if it was like if polled will most people say they don't like martin or i don't even know i don't know this is stupid stuff but anyway uh yeah conceptually i think there's a flaw there i'm excited to see how it's patched up yeah i think the uma um people were actually like you could see that they had a sort of you know bias here like the way they tweeted about it and stuff like that. They wanted an interest. Weren't they betting also on Polymarket? I don't know what they did. And I want to be careful about that.

But I do know that their tweets and messages and stuff like that were all like, we want this to be true. It's obviously true in terms of me not being involved in that. I'm sorry, Bear not being involved in that. I made it up. They were like, we're sure that this is the case. This guy is such a bad guy. And it's just something that we know what happened. They don't. And to vote on something that you weren't there for is just bizarre. And this is why media needs to be trusted.

It's actually an important institution. And that a lot of people in the right wing want media to crumble because we hate them and they tell lies. But when you read the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal says, oh, Microsoft is in talks to buy Activision, you believe it because you know somebody at the Wall Street Journal doesn't want to get fired. They don't want to just put that down and pretend that it happened. And some editors looking at it and saying, hey, John, before we run the story, who'd you talk to at Microsoft? And oh, I talked to Satya. Oh yeah. Can you send me that? Or maybe I can verify it from somebody else. You don't want to just run with something without

sort of having researched it. And I think people know you and your reputation and your access to information and you would never do that. And even on just me and Baron sort of telling you about what we were up to, I think even that alone isn't enough that we pitched around 50 people and you talked to some of those people, I bet. So ultimately it's just kind of insane to me. It was surreal and partially kind of resulted in me

acting a little bit like surprised and like, well, you guys are really crazy, aren't you? Well, and also your reputation is on the line, clearly. You've gone through a lot. You have a certain kind of reputation online. You know that if this is framed as you're lying about something and doing a scam thing, it's over forever. You have a lot at stake. I understand that. To be clear, I've talked to many people and I'm not going to reveal them because, I mean, Martin, you kind of announced that you had talked to me. And so I was happy to sort of speak about that, but I'm not quite... If someone firmly denies something that I reported who was involved in this, then... I mean, there's still crazy people out there that think you and I are making everything up.

I mean, it is really interesting. I mean, the thing that bothers me... So one piece, and I would love your perspective on this too, Sanjana. The one piece that I thought was much more easy to sort of tackle, and it's going to lead into our next topic, which is fucking TechCrunch. I saw there are other betting markets and they're all shilling their market right now. And so Polyethic is... I love Polymarket, just full disclosure. And also Founders Fund invested in them. And I love the guys over there. But they're a bunch. And they were like, we're running this thing.

And only reputable news sources, it's like Fox News or CNN, not PirateWire and Mike Solana. And that just begs, or it puts to the forefront now a kind of classic question that we've been grappling with for many years at this point, which is like, what makes them better than us? Why do you have to work for the New York Times for your opinion as a journalist to matter for like, it's just trust-based. They get things wrong all the time. I don't trust them. matter for like it's it's just trust-based they get things wrong all the time i don't trust them um and that is uh like very frustrating to me that we're having this question again now with people who are supposed to be like i don't expect that from the dgen community like like d like online like shit posting pepe the frog in their image and they're like well you better get a a

new york times source that's crazy what like what are we doing here um go ahead martin what do you think about that cassandra's having a technical difficulty i think i think one of the things that you and i both learned a little bit about crypto twitter is that you you've got like this subset of of crypto twitter that's really smart you know whether that's a charlie uh noise or like you know um joey who you work with or like whoever. There's some real geniuses out there that are talking about crypto and the reality of it. But I think most of crypto Twitter, and then there's sort of,

I'm being Hillary Clinton right now. I'm talking about deplorables, but about half of them are deplorables. Yeah, but I love deplorables. I'm fine with deplorables, but they're supposed to be on our side. They're actually deplorable though, unlike the deplorables that we like. The 40% of the deplorables we like and the 50 are deplorables we don't like

because they're literally just people that have gotten like they're so either zinned or adderalled out of their mind that they want instant gratification they can't think uh logically they look at something and and shoot from the hip uh they don't want to believe something that doesn't feel right to them and so what everybody did here is they said, post-proof, post-proof, post-proof. And I said, well, you know,

this is pretty uncomfortable. It's the president's song. It's very interesting. Do you understand? Who's going to give you information? Who's going to trust me ever again if I'm like, the second I get into a bind online,

I'm like, well, here's everyone I talked to. Here are their names. Go hound them. And then it drags them. Like there are people, there are people who I think at this point people know are involved there are many who nobody has even mentioned like very prominent people we don't people whose name you will know and i'm like i'm not gonna give you that in a fucking million years some random anonymous

degenerate like schizophrenic child probably a 13 year old is telling me to tell them who like never never why we've got 500 bucks on some shit coin or something like that and it's no martin they they donated their whole life savings they say every dollar i have i bet on this i'm like well i don't believe it one and number two that sounds like a you problem should have thought that through yeah i mean i do think that that's right. And ultimately, that's what the role media has to play. So we have to trust the media. And if you don't trust some media, you can trust others.

And at the very least, you could take with a grain of salt. I might not fully trust the New York Times. But if they're saying Biden considers firing HHS director, he's probably considering it. I mean, it could be a plant. It could be fake. But it could be fake, but whether it happens or not, you have to make your own judgment. You have to use the information. And what's funny about this is the whole crypto Twitter said, Martin, we don't believe you. You're making this all up. You're going back to jail. And I said,

cool. What should I do? They said, post proof, post proof. So I posted the proof and they said, Martin, it's so terrible of you to take advantage of Aaron Trump like that. I'm just sitting here like- You were both taking advantage of him and he wasn't involved both things are true at the same time the best part is that you know i didn't make a dollar from this baron's made 50 million dollars from it he kind of left me in the lurch here having to defend this and defend myself and i love baron but ultimately it put me in a really uncomfortable position so now you know the the accusations are we know you we know you guys made this but you in you coerced him uh by giving him and making him 50 million dollars um you know because he's just a

child he's 18 you know he doesn't know anything um and i'm just sitting here like you people are fucking crazy and i think your instant reaction to all this was i'd never want to report a crypto again like yeah i didn't people i wanted out i was like how do i get out of it now how do i build a time machine and never touch this it's like i, I don't regret it. People's assumption is like, oh, he doesn't want to get involved because he's in hot water. I'm right about everything. There's nothing that I said that wasn't true at the time. So now, is it an official Trump coin? What does that mean? It would require Trump to, I guess, announce it or something. The news that I reported on through FireWires at the time

was correct. You're welcome. I want to talk about TechCrunch though. This is a mainstream media source. TechCrunch is this interesting... Martin, I don't know how plugged into dumb tech news you are. Okay. So we're caught up to speed. TechCrunch, I don't know, 13 years ago when I started working for Founders Fund was this kind of embarrassing, silly, they were the crunchy awards. They're giving awards out to startup founders. And they have a whole stable of people who are just writing stories, though, about startups. Weirdly, not that biased. I don't think that bias, just almost like press releases, just like this company exists. They

are trying to do X, Y, and Z. They were funded by whoever. It was like this era of tech that was raw, raw, like, yay, startups, we're going to build companies, change the world, which we all rolled our eyes about at the time. But in hindsight, it was really kind of charming and sweet and a nice time to be in tech. It was actually very exciting. A lot of companies did change the world, reshaped our entire reality that were built during that time. There were no notes, all kinds of... There were no notes at the top of the list. That one had nothing to do with us. TechCrunch. But it was a nice era. Now, media changed pretty sharply in 2014, 2015 especially, and then 2016 once Trump won, it was over.

TechCrunch ceased to make sense in that world. And they tried, they pivoted and tried to be nastier and it didn't work. And they kind of fell off. They were no longer relevant. They continue to be sort of goofy, but not relevant. And just recently, I don't know if you could say they're relevant anymore, but they're at least interesting because they've become sort of unhinged, psychotic, I would say, even to a certain extent. The first time I picked up on this, there's this writer, Arias, something or other, she's their space reporter. I don't even know what, I mean, okay.

She tweeted about a new defense technology company that made it almost impossible for a soldier to miss. And she was like, this is, you know, she framed it as a horrifying, just tech dystopia type thing. And I thought, it's horrifying that American soldiers are not going, they're like less likely to die. It was a crazy framing that you maybe give a pat, you're like, this is like just some stupid woke white woman thing. You know, like you kind of, you get used to these sort of takes, you even sort of get used to them from the press. It's weird from tech crunch because they used to be the sort of like, yay technology firm or, or, or, or press outlet, but whatever. The same woman now. Boeing had a failure in space that resulted in a huge delay for astronauts who are sort of couched in this, the disaster sort of couched in this series of disasters.

Boeing is famously terrifying right now. Do you want to ride on it? I don't necessarily, if I had an option not to. She went after John Coogan, a colleague of mine for just like, John was like sort of laughing about this. And she was like, oh, that feel where you want to like trash Boeing so bad that you throw some astronauts under the bus. She's sort of defended. She's now taking up for boeing over space next right so now you're going you're defending like this huge huge like prime uh over a startup uh as the space reporter for

tech crunch um by the way headlines boeing's the biggest defense contractor in the world they make bombs and missiles. They're trying to hit their targets too. Yeah, but don't come for Boeing. Don't you dare come for Boeing. Then it's like there was an AI question. Headline just popped up. It was TechCrunch rooting for an AI bloodbath,

the AI bloodbath that we need. And then finally, it was this MEI attack. So Alex Wang scale um sort of uh i don't want to say famously because like everyone was just like yes and i did he didn't do this like crazy news thing it wasn't that controversial people are pretty much on board at this point but he announced dei i'm more definitely you know yes he's like we're not hiring based on sex or race obviously you have this huge hit punt it is huge hit piece comes out of TechCrunch. It was quieter beyond that, but I think there's another one coming, actually.

We'll end up inevitably talking about it. But it was weirdly quiet except for them, and it puts them in this interesting position of sort of no longer being goofy and irrelevant, but being sort of nasty and insane, which makes them more interesting, I think. I actually think that they're just playing in the market here. And I encourage them to keep going because it gives me something to be mad about,

which I'm going to be honest, sometimes enjoy on occasion. What do you guys make of the sort of tech crunch evolution? I want to start with Sanjana, just in case your internet goes out again. I mean, I think it's, I almost, I'm like entertained by them and I'm glad that they're doing something that's different than just the kind of, um, I don't know, like sort of predictable, stupid reporting that places like Wired put out, which is just, you know, you know, they, they kind of hate, they're, they're techno pessimists, but it's all sort of written in the same GPT generated style. I mean, they're they're techno pessimists but it's all sort of written in the same gpt generated style i mean they're they're taking at least a position i guess that's kind of um

i don't know controversial and it's nice to have a you know as as someone who's part of a media company that i think we sort of wear our bias on our sleeves in many ways in our reporting. And we're not, in no way are we doing kind of impartial, well, sometimes we're doing, you know, fact, we're doing a lot of fact-based reporting, but it's not, I don't think, impartial. It's nice to have a kind of caricature-like enemy, I guess, in TechCrunch. But I don't know how consequential their pieces are because I don't really hear many people talk about stuff they read on TechCrunch recently, or I don't know how many clicks and views and stuff.

Part of this is a macro change where people aren't really going to sites at all. They're seeing what they see online. And it comes down to the question of, well, where do you get your news online? And because links don't share well at all on any of the platforms, it's basically like what influencer told you about what story they're either mad about or excited about at a place. And then maybe you go and find it, but usually you're just talking about the headline. I think what's happening, there are a few things to say about this. The first is that the diaspora of journalists from like Vice and these other places that have closed down or shrunk dramatically, they have to go somewhere. And a lot of these folks decided to learn some Python and stop being journalists, but some of them decided that they wanted to stay in the career.

And they've moved to places like TechCrunch where they weren't before. So if you notice, where do the journalists come from is pretty critical and what they do just before this. And if they were in tech or something like that, that could kind of make sense. But a lot of these folks were just not even covering tech. They were just doing something else. They're covering women's issues or whatever it was, social issues or local issues for whoever. And now they are reporting on startups. And Tech Crunch, I always thought, is the place where you announce Series A financing or something like that. And you give them the exclusive

and they do an interview and they say, so-and-so unveils $48 million financing with so-and-so, you know, and it's just basically corporate PR. But, you know, I think the idea that they want to bash the industry they're in is really interesting. I had to deal with this in pharma

where there's a outfit similar called Stat. And Stat was sitting there sort of crapping on me every day. And I was like, you understand that every drug company, your revenue is drug company ads paying Stat money to get their name in Stat. But at the same time, you're writing about them and you kind of have to be careful to shit on them. So I think that's a really weird thing when the only TechCrunch ads they're going to get are, I think, people trying to recruit or sell tech software or whatever it is, any SaaS platform or something to users and readers of TechCrunch. That's the audience they have. So for them to sort of say, well, I want to see an AI bloodbath. Well, hold on a second.

I got an AI company. I'm not going to advertise with your fucking thing if you're talking about wanting an AI platform. So 20% of their revenue has gone there. And then defense tech sucks. Oh yeah, another 10% is gone. So how many things are you going to crap on before all your advertisers say, hopefully you don't cast a spell on my industry? Yeah. I think a separate problem is the tech culture side, because you said, what AI company is going to want to advertise with them now? And the problem is that they will keep doing it. Everyone in tech has this really high tolerance for being spit on. And I've never understood that. You don't need to go to these places. I don't know how much you're even getting

from them when it's like, If TechCrunch is attracting this hugely hateful audience that hates AI and hates tech conceptually, then what good is it to advertise those things there? I don't know. So I don't know just practically why they would do it. And then I don't know just... I'm willing to sort of take... lists all the time to sort of take down an enemy. I don't know. Like it doesn't make sense on either one of those points. And I wish that tech people would grow a little bit of a spine here because. Totally. Yeah, go ahead.

No, I mean, as you know, there's one sort of PR genius out there right now named Lulu. And Lulu Chang is kind of the go-to person for anything PR related. And she's been shitting on TechCrunch lately and saying, why would you ever go with these guys? And the problem that exists in the world is there's only one Lulu. And there's 50,000 other PR people who would advise you like, oh, okay, you're going to PR for a $50,000 retainer. And I'm going to sit you down with the TechCrunch reporter and tell them your story and they're going to write about you and it's going to go great. And it's really kind of cringy because there's this symbiotic relationship between the PR consultants and the reporters. And eventually,

I think the reporters want to still bring their advice in from their last job advice or wherever, BuzzFeed, where they were saying, can you believe Donald Trump said X? And they kind of feel confined in this environment there. There's only one thing they get, which is go ahead, power from their institution. Well, I would say on the bias question, because I think the bias thing is interesting. And as Sanjana mentioned earlier, we sort of wear our bias on our sleeve. And that's not to say that our facts-based reporting is facts-based reporting, but our perspective, I think, is important for how you navigate the way that we're looking at the world or something. And everybody has a bias is a thing that we're actually saying there. The New York Times has

a bias. Certainly TechCrunch has a bias. What's obnoxious is when they say that they don't and then report things that are incorrect because of their bias. And I would say in this case, it's like the bias, you either use it as a tool or... I think it's like they're having the sort of worst of all worlds here. They're pretending they're neutral, but they're clearly not. And that lack of neutrality is not helping them in a way that a voice elsewhere might. And the reason that's the case is because they all share the same voice. If every single other outlet other than PirateWires is like, we hate tech, then um and it's in the same sort of not interesting way it's just like it's bad all business is bad these people are bad ai is bad

um you know how many how many like i'm thinking of a person who's not peter because he's the easiest one and like but how many like peter steele is a blood-sucking vampire from hell But how many, like Peter Thiel is a blood sucking vampire from hell stories do you need to read? Like the first one did it and they can't let it go. Like who's reading this stuff? And I think not many people because obviously the macro is really bad. Like they're all totally failing. Now they need subscription revenue and they can't do that because nobody pays for things

unless they really love them. And it turns out nobody ever, certainly not enough people really loved this type of content. It just- Yeah, that's right. Like the information, a place I don't exactly love, but they're actually one of the few places where people actually pay for the news because they're kind of a grocery journal for tech. They get actual scoops, right?

They do actually get scoops. I think, and I have a feeling this story is going to become bigger over the next couple of weeks, the information specifically. think and this is i have a feeling this story is going to become bigger over the next couple weeks the information specifically i think there is something amiss over there shall we just say and i don't have too much to talk about there but like i'm i'm i got my ear to ground a couple of stories that have been some of the worst things i've heard over the last couple of years in media i've i i have to wait for these stories to actually come out, but it's been people dealing with them. And yeah, so I don't know.

I just have one really quick one. Blockworks is this sort of like media thing for crypto. And they literally put out an editorial that said, you're not supposed to vote for Trump because he's a bad dude. And basically, no matter what his crypto policies are. And everyone was sitting there saying, do you understand how many of us are going to jail because of Joe Biden? And how many of us are being prosecuted, sued by the SEC?

They want all our money. And you're sitting here with editorial, like it's not so bad. You know, don't give up your principles. Vote for Biden and go to jail and stand with it. And the guy's like literally trying to destroy this industry. And the tone deafness of the reporters who were just coming from a different background, I think. Yeah. For a long time, nobody else wrote about this stuff. And so you were sort of at the

mercy of that. It's still a problem. There aren't many young writers. There's not a lot of money in media. The pickings are slim, but the good news is like you are not a sociopath or a dumb person who's going to attack the people that they're covering for no good reason, then you have a little bit of an advantage in the space. Sanjay, you were about to say something. Yeah, I think that ultimately, the cultural shift is going to have to come from this transition to subscription-based revenue. And as we're saying, I think that's going of cull the ranks of these bloated media companies i mean vice falling is a harbinger of that but i think that there's a lot of these kind of legacy companies that basically you know um had a big sort of surfeit during the the rich ad years um and now

are sort of slowly um being culled. And I wouldn't be surprised if several more of these kind of tech publications, whose articles now basically just go viral for their stupid headlines that people dunk on on Twitter, things like that, and occasionally do have good reporting. I mean, to TechCrunch's credit, they do have some good reporters over there. And I sometimes read some of their pieces and get information from them but for the most part my interaction with them as someone who's who's writing about san francisco and covering sort of broadly tech related things and public policy is

pretty minimal which i think says uh something i guess so it's a lot right yeah you're right that that alone just the fact that they're not really in the discourse anymore is the kiss of death for them they're not doing subscriptions so all they can do is attention and if you're not clicking like what even are they okay we are going to take a break from this conversation to uh loop in an interview that i just did a moment ago with uh delian and uh kian of nucleus we're talking about some embryo selection genetics more broadly and uh how to create a moon people race which will be pretty interesting when we come back from that little convo uh we're hitting aoc bowman and uh should there be asylum for foreign sociology graduates maybe according, according to Donald Trump. We'll be right back.

All right. So we are going to switch it up a little bit. I want to introduce two guests to the pod. We've got Kian Sadeghi of Nucleus, founder of Nucleus, and the one, the only, Delian of Founders Fund. I was just saying before, I'm realizing, Delian, I don't hear your last name a lot. I know it. I can spell it. I don't think I can pronounce it, and I'm like, I'm realizing, Deleon, I don't hear your last name a lot. I know it. I can spell it. Don't think I can pronounce it. And I don't think I ever use it. It's like you're like the Madonna of Founders Fund.

But it's Deleon. So, dude, I want to talk. Kian, I want to start with you. And then we're going to get into sort of the funding history here. And then the controversy. I don't say your country, your company's controversial but there are controversies for us to talk about. Just tell me about Nucleus. Sure. Yeah. Thanks for so much for having me, Solana. Well, the first thing is everyone has DNA. DNA is the language of life, right? It shapes everything about us from our disease risk as well

to our trait dispositions as we'll get into. There are two fundamental changes in genomics in the last 20 years or so that has basically allowed for the creation of nucleus. The first is in the reading of DNA. The second is in the analysis of DNA. And we'll talk about some others, but those are the ones that most immediately affect nucleus. Regarding the reading of DNA, to actually sequence the entire human genome, oh, 6 billion DNA letters, it used to cost around $10 million per sample in 2006. Today, Nucleus can do that for around $399. So the first thing to know is that all DNA tests looked at small snippets of someone's DNA, maybe a single genome of 20,000, maybe just a couple of markers, right? Nucleus looks at all 100% of your DNA. So that's the first shift. The second shift is our ability to actually analyze this DNA. And the analysis layer has become much more sophisticated in the last 20 years as well.

So now we can read all the DNA. And now we also know that diseases and traits are something called polygenic in nature. When we talk about polygenic, what that really means is they're not driven by a single variant in a gene, but instead the result of many DNA differences throughout the entire genome. So by employing basically these new polygenic models combined with classical genetic analysis, which looks for the presence or absence of DNA differences on a whole genome, you can basically provide people the most comprehensive assessment ever of their genetic risk for disease, as well as a disposition for traits. So that's what Nucleus does. And so, but this is like, when we talk about

embryo selection, this is like you're applying a sort of like a polygenic risk score to embryos. So we don't do IVF. We don't do anything on embryos. We do everything in adult humans. There is obviously interfacing with that, right? Like we can do preconception screening. So what you can do is basically at scale, you can sequence all, obviously, you know, your children's DNA comes from the parents, right? So you can actually, you know, simulate offspring from two parents' DNA, as well as you can do things like, you know, see if they're carriers. So you could do mass. So you can think of it as like plugging in preconception screening, which is what Nucleus does do. That's coming out actually very soon, plugging that in with an IVF clinic. So that is

actually the integration that you want. Got it. Sorry, I misunderstood based on when we were going back and forth on the emails before. So give me like the 10,000 foot down view. How are people using this? How do you want to use this? So that's a great question. So today there's, genomics is pretty fragmented, right? So maybe there's like cancer tests, neurology tests, heart tests, preconception screening, pharmacogenomics, right? Like for some reason, well, not for some reason, for technological reasons, historically, genetics has been so fragmented. So you have different tests for different applications. There's actually around 70,000 genetic tests on the market today, which is pretty insane if you think about it, because we basically combine all those 70,000

tests into one. So Nucleus is building the kind of all-in-one whole genome platform. What that means is we can do on just one test for 399, we can do all heart disease-related analysis. We can do all neurology screening analysis. You can do preconception screening, right, which is basically what I described to see if both parents are carriers for a condition. And if they are carriers, they should probably go to an IVF clinic, because I know we're going to talk about later,

to make sure they don't pass on a very serious, debilitating, monogenic disease to their offspring. Pharmacogenomics, how someone's genome actually shapes their drug response. People think of genetic testing today, especially consumer genetic testing, as frankly a gimmick. Does my pee smell like asparagus or something? Nucleus is the complete opposite of that. I mean, I also want to know if my pee smells like asparagus. I like it all. I'm in favor of the entire column of strange things. We can get into each of those later or in a bit. Dalian, what was it about this company that you liked? What brought you guys together? And I would love to know sort of like, what about the space do you,

are you really interested in right now? And then why is Nucleus the one for you? you know, societal, you know, interest that I think it's a sort of, you know, understudied area, but then also very specifically as I was starting to, you know, sort of plan my family and going through, you know, sort of genomic sequencing, screening, you know, ultimately, you know, sort of came to the conclusion that there were things that we wanted to basically, you know, sort of screen out of our, you know, sort of children in our embryos. And so while, you know, sort of nucleus is today not, you know, focused on, you know, sort of embryos and, you know, focused on, you know, sort of embryos and, you know, focused on, you know, sort of whole genome sequencing, you know, sort of for adults. Part of the limitations

today in screening on embryos is that you have more limited, you know, sort of data sets on, you know, sort of how, you know, whole genome data relates to phenotypic expression in human adults, right? You know, Kian, you know, sort of mentioned that historically, a lot of the genomic analysis was done in these sort of single gene, you know, sort of, you know, light polygenic, you know, sort of, you know, gene, you know, sort of risk scoring. But, you know, most of those data sets weren't based off of whole genome data sets. And so, you know, for very strong, you know, sort of single gene expressions, you know, think like, you know, probably by far the most popular is sort of BRCA, which is a breast cancer, you know, sort of gene where it's, you know, sort of single gene that's very well characterized and well understood. But there

may be other things that you want to screen out of your embryos where you, you know, the phenotype that you're trying to screen from the adult, but you don't really know yet what the, you know, sort of set of genes that affect it are. And really the only way to build that up is to have, you know, sort of mass scale data sets of human phenotypes with their whole genome sets. And that just like doesn't exist today again, because it is clinically, that's not how it's used today. And so the only way to really impossible, it was too expensive. It was way too expensive, you know? Yeah. Way too expensive. And then even today where it's cheap, it's just, it's not clinically relevant to like convince a 24 year old to do whole genome, you know, sequencing. And then, you know, have them also record a bunch of phenotypic data. That's not clinically,

you know, sort of relevant, but it is, you know, sort of like, like, so insurance won't pay for that, but it is, you know, extremely, yeah extremely, yeah, extremely consequential. Yeah, but that data set is extremely consequential to building up the embryo data sets. It's extremely, you know, sort of consequential to pharmaceutical development. But probably the only way to actually get that data is a direct to consumer, you know, sort of application that has the healthy 24 year olds doing, you know, sort of whole genome sequencing. And so, yeah, I'd been, you know, sort of perusing this idea space for a little while. And then, you know, sort of, you know, met Kian, you know, I want to say like two years ago now. And I think, yeah, I think the two things were, you know, sort of one, this is an idea that I'd already previously thought about. So I think literally in the midst of the pitch, I was, you know, sort of pitching him back basically.

And then the second was, you know, having also been a, you know, sort of 19 year old dropout founder, you know, sort of pursuing slightly less radical idea, but in the world of healthcare, definitely felt like I was going through a little bit of deja vu when talking to Kian and his journey, which doesn't typically happen to me, even with super young founders. And so I think it was that one-two punch kind of made it feel like a no-brainer, even 15 minutes into the call. made it feel like a no brainer, even 15 minutes into the call. I want to get, you were just mentioning something a moment ago, Delian. It's a personal topic. So you can say we're not doing it if you don't want to, but did you and Nadia, you went through the process of testing beforehand, before you guys had a kid? I'll provide some light level of detail.

And then, you know, hopefully my wife doesn't hate me for the level of detail that I provide. But we conceived our first child sort of naturally, which was maybe sort of more spuros and then also use a polygenic sort of risk-soaring startup called Genomic Prediction to do some of that, let's say, screening on our embryos. I would say what's available today is not what will be available sort of a decade from today, obviously. And hopefully, companies like Kian's massively improved the data sets that, you know, embryonic, you know, sort of screening gets even more sophisticated. But there were a set of these sort of single gene markers that are able to be screened with today's technology that we wanted to basically, you know, sort of screen out. Obviously,

we kind of, you know, sort of gambled with our first kid and just, you know, sort of did it naturally. So, you know, we care a decent amount about screening these out, not so much so, you know, we don't have, obviously, there's, you know, things like Huntington's, etc, where we wouldn't have, you know, sort of gambled on that. So we don't have anything that's like, you know, sort of that severe. But yeah, we did go through that. And so I had a very, you know, sort of, let's say, clinically relevant patient experience where, you know, I had to go through and I actually had to convince my IVF clinic to do this type of polygenic risk scoring and this type of genomic screening and had to connect them actually with the startup that was doing that type of sequencing. So we were the first patient ever. And this is one of the top four IVF clinics in the entire United States. And I was the first person that ever pushed them on this. They previously had a much more limited sort of analysis partner. much more limited, you know, sort of analysis partner.

And I think Dylan brings good points along in there, which is that there's still like a lot of resistance for polygenic scores, right? Even in adult populations, which is what we do, right? If you look at, there was a, you know, an article written about us and basically the head of the CDC. By who? First, let's just name some names first. It's Undark Magazine, which is an MIT publication. They're very thoughtful. They're very rigorous, but they're also very wrong,

which is that they wrote basically a long, long essay about me, our chief scientific officer at Nucleus, discussing kind of polygenic scores. And one quote in there was from the precision genomics division of the CDC. It's something like an interesting department name. And basically the head of this department said, there's no polygenic score to that of any clinical utility. That's just like factually not true. I mean, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, AMD, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, I mean, I can go on, right? You have models that can predict equivalent to classical genomic analysis in terms of their predictive strength using just common DNA variants. So it's simply not true. And I think there's a theme

throughout the genomic stack, right? And I think the thing is that at first glance, it might seem like, oh, adult populations is very different than embryos, but actually it's all going to be very much integrated. When I talk about this all-in-one DNA test, you're going to see that everything's going to be integrated end-to-end in genomics. And to that point, I think if you can't even give a polygenic score to adults today, physicians aren't necessarily trained in it. There's obviously resistance in the public health establishment. Different academics are concerned people's understanding probabilities. And there's also a culture of paternalism in healthcare as well. All these factors today

that mean today, that 24-year-old, that 25-year-old, that 26-year-old can't actually get what could actually be the most consequential piece of health information they could ever get in their entire lives? Because if you're actually going to prevent these conditions, you need to start early, you need to start young. So one of my favorites, yeah, go ahead, go ahead. Well, I wonder how much resistance there really is. People are super, it seems like, enthusiastic about this when it comes to 23andMe and stuff. I think that if you were just saying, hey, we're going to tell you if you have... Delia mentioned the BRCA one.

It seems like people do want this. So I guess I came in, I was going to ask a moment ago, do you think it's just this weird social pushback that you're receiving? But I don't know, that doesn't feel right actually. Feels like people are actually willing to take the test can i jump in kian give my perspective on it go ahead go ahead yeah this is definitely part of the motivation in the investment in that i think uh the thing that i hate about the current ecosystem x nucleus is that they give um analytical tools to consumers like 23andme and everybody's enthusiastic about it but they purposely hide stuff from them they don't trust consumers with the full analytical capabilities that are available in nature papers. So if you're like a PhD scientist, your ability to like read into, hey, do I have a polygenic risk

on potentially high cholesterol? Something as simple as that. There are data sets that you can go and look at that are like scientifically published and companies like 23andMe and others don't release it to consumers because they're like, oh, well, consumers aren't sophisticated like us PhDs, or I think it's ethically wrong to like release this type of data. And so I don't like the fact that like, you know, George Church, you know, at Harvard has access to a certain set of analysis that he has to do. But, you know, John Smith on Main Street is considered, you know, too dumb, deplorable, etc. And so we can't possibly let him know the health information because he's not sophisticated enough to interpret it. And so that was a lot of my frustration with this field.

I remember when I first got my DNA test, you're exactly right. It was super, super limited. And you could actually take your data to these third third parties and do this like janky version of it and find out all this other crazy shit. But I remember just really wanting to know, you know, based on available data, what were my odds of, I don't know, a bunch of shit. I would have liked something I like the genetic stuff The sort of ancestry stuff was kind of cool But it was cool to know how much Neanderthal I had in me I felt like super accomplished I'm at the 95th percentile or something Explains a lot I know The funny thing about that though is like going in

I just assumed I'm like obviously anyone who has like a lot of Neanderthal DNA Is a fucking idiot right You definitely want like as little of that as possible. And the moment that I got my results, I started thinking like they had those huge heads. Like I think it's like, those are the ascended people for sure.

It was like an immediate 180. And I didn't, I actually, I wasn't conscious either. Like I caught myself doing it. But yeah, very Neanderthal. And I'm now like very pro neanderthal in general open to neanderthal conspiracy theories um okay you so you do you think it's like i mean people a lot of that's being held back probably just because of liability purposes right like they don't want to take on the risk of telling someone you know oh you have x percentage chance of this, and then they get it anyway.

And they're like, this is the DNA. No, you think it's something else? Deli and I are both turning our heads in exactly the same motion, like we're dancing together. I think it's like people... Okay. I'm going to try to explain this as best as how I view this. 23andMe, everyone's heard of 23andMe. 23andMe, it's something called a snip chip. So it looks at less than 0.1% of your DNA. So inherently, it's fundamentally limited in what you can tell people. What that means is the analysis it gives you, any analysis it gives you is, even if they're like, oh, you're negative, you don't have something, it's extremely incomprehensive. So let's start with breast cancer. Deli mentioned BRCA, right? 23andMe, for the longest time,

they looked at three BRCA variants when there's actually more than 1,000 that are known, for example. And not just in BRCA1, BRCA2, there's other genes as well. So if you look at these, across these genes, there's thousands of breast cancer associated DNA variants. 23 would look at three of them, right? Which is obviously terrible. And now apply that to every disease they apply analysis for. And the fact that they don't provide polygenic scores historically, they didn't at all. Now they only provide a couple. It's actually still worse, the nucleuses together. So we do this kind of old school analysis across every single human genome. So in other words, if you look at like a clinical genetic test today, say from like myriad genetics, there's this weird dichotomy where people like take 23andMe as like, that's like the only genetic

test in the world. Then they go to a hospital and get like a breast cancer test, an Alzheimer's test, a Parkinson's test. And somehow that's treated like so seriously. But then 20th of May isn't, right? Imagine you took the kind of clinical consequence of one of these myriad tests, right, for a given disease and then did that whole genome. So across the entire genomes, instead of looking at a single gene, you look at 20,000 genes. And then you also get the non-genic regions. So you can also run polygenic scores. So what I'm trying to say to you, Solana, is that 20 to me, it's like a horse.

It's like being like, oh, horse versus autonomous vehicle. It's like, what are we even talking about here? It's like 20 years, nothing's changed. And I'm just like, what? Why are we talking about micro? This doesn't make any sense. This is a garbage test. No one in medicine would take it seriously.

No scientists would take it seriously. Then once you go from there, there's the ideological issue, which is the secondary issue. So fish was the technology issue. Then it's the ideological issue, which you're kind of touching on, right? Which is like, why would 23 not provide analysis on something like intelligence, for example? Why would they not provide analysis on something like schizophrenia or other neuropsychiatry? My sense about all of this is that that is like the main thing that's holding us back is just like this sense that there are genes associated with intelligence among the sort of general population. And this like this feeling of like we don't it's just better if we don't know. It's just like socially better not to know.

Like people don't want to fully know. And I do think that's what's holding people like the 23andMe thing back. I think there's also a religious piece. So let's talk about IVF for a second, which is good. Go ahead. No, go ahead, Salman. Go ahead. One thing that I was going to say before you move on to IVF, I think it's worth for the audience, and Keon will be able to describe this probably better than I can, but it's not due to liability reasons. As long as you're not making a clinical assessment and you're just providing the data, but not saying a prescription of you should or should not go do these X, Y, Z clinical things, you are not, you know, sort of clinically liable. Obviously,

Keon, maybe you can describe the like, you know, sort of nuance there, but you can actually be pretty open on describing. Oh, good. Yeah. Also, we're not diagnosed anyone. So, Delia makes two points. One is that we're not giving any necessary, we're not a doctor, we're not a physician. We don't tell people what to do once they receive the information. They should go to genetic counselor. They should go to a physician for that information. Secondarily is that we're not diagnosing anyone. Even in BRCA variants, not a diagnosis. So that's something that's very important to remember. When we apply this stuff to, I mean, obviously there are two speeds on this. One is knowing

yourself. And I think that's sort of closely related to a prediction on what me and my partner, we have a kid, what are the probabilities there that we're looking at going into this? Then there's something more like that's already controversial for many people. But I think that one's much less controversial. It is certainly much, much less controversial than the next one, which is a two-pronged one. Increasingly, there's the concept of IVF. It seems to be becoming controversial. Certainly, you have the, I believe it was the Baptist Church. They're anti-IVF now. That sets the tone for the religious right in America. It becomes politically important. The Republicans keep trying to say, no, no, no, we're not anti-IVF

because I think they're terrified of fucking up the next election uh ivf is super it's popular on both sides of the aisle right many people have kids that way and um you sort of once you have a kid that way you're like are you fucking kidding me like it's not controversial that my child exists um but you have uh rep matt rosendale came out um just this week uh with it wasn't like a bill to stop it or something. It was like a defunding suggestion, but it's like the first anti-IVF thing. Part of that is just religiously motivated in general in IVF. But then when it comes to selection, now we're talking about the question of what kinds of kids we're going to allow to exist. Is the framing, I think that would be the negative framing that people are coming at this from. There is a lot of anxiety there. There are certain things that

seem to be acceptable, watching for diseases. There are certain red lines that are absolutely not. And intelligence is certainly one of them. I would love to know how you guys are thinking about this sort of controversy generally and as much perspective as you're willing to share on it. I feel like, Delyne, you're going to be a little more... Well, let's just see. You know what? You guys just tell me what you think. I mean, I think it'd just be power to the people, basically. It's just, I have XYZ number of embryos that I create. Give me all of the scientific tools that are available to a PhD in a lab and let me make my decision basically on what I want to, you know, sort of birth versus not. Yeah, I think in some ways, you know, this is like, you know, sort of parallel to the, you know, sort of power that you're given

once the child is born, right? Like, I would like to choose, you know, what medical treatments I give my child, and I'm going to choose to give him the polio vaccine because I don't want him to have a miserable life having polio. If I want to, you know, sort of screen out, you know, Huntington's disease or other things that I think will make their life miserable beforehand, that should also be, you know, in the power of like the parents. And so, you know, I tend to take, I think, a very sort of libertarian viewpoint here where like, I may choose for a certain set of traits. Shaquille O'Neal may like fully optimize for height. And that's, you know, entirely in his prerogative. And he wants to have like massive NBA babies. And other may fully optimize for height, and that's entirely in his prerogative. And he

wants to have massive NBA babies. And other people may optimize for other things. And it's not to say that there should be some government, societal-wide, here are the types of babies that should exist versus not. I think everybody should decide what kind of babies they want to have. And people are already making that implicit decision by choosing which partner they have. And so people are already doing genetic screening of their kids by choosing a partner. What's the difference between that and basically just like once you're with the partner doing even further, more specific, basically screening? Yeah, this is sort of the GMO debate. It's like, well, all of our food's been genetically modified. We're just picking up the pace.

Also, we've all been genetically modified. We're you know, we're not like the platypus that, you know, came out of the water for the first time. We got modified a bunch of times, you know, through evolution. You know, I think we're in this unique point, you know, sort of in human history where we obviously talked about, you know, sort of Neanderthals, but, you know, there's a whole set of, you know, sort of subspecies within Homo, right? There's Homo erectus, obviously us Homo sapiens, you know, there's, you know, sort of subspecies within Homo, right? There's Homo erectus, obviously us Homo sapiens, you know, there's, you know, sort of a multitude of those. We happen to be in this rare moment where like the Homo sapiens, you know, sort of species happened to be the one that was, you know, slightly more brutal, slightly smarter, actually slightly smaller than some of the other ones. And so that ended up, you know, sort of dominating. We basically murdered all our other,

you know, sort of species. And I think we're in this like really rare sort of 10 to 20,000 year period where all humans will happen to be the same species. And then in the future, through evolutionary pressures, if there's, you know, sort of a species of humans that lives on the moon, there's going to for sure be selective pressure on the moon. It's a totally different environment. There might be things that, you know, in like lower gravity, you know, naturally things that like, you know, certain genes do better versus not. And so over the course of even like a thousand years of the selective pressure of the moon, almost certainly humans will speciate. But then also these like artificial pressures, obviously, you know, massively, you know, sort of speed, you know, sort of that up. And so I think we're in this, you know, it'd be a very interesting, you know, sort of societal

moment when you are trying to maintain a basically like democratic republic, you know, sort of civil society. And we're having such a know sort of civil society and we're having such a hard time doing that today when we're all the same species let alone like you know a thousand years from today when there's you know homo martian homo lunar uh and whatever homo this is a crazy way this is a crazy way to defend the technology though it's like we're talking about speciation and like it's like we're creating like lord of the rings universe right we're gonna have like elves and fuck yeah man you want pointy ears go get pointy ears

that sounds pretty sick like make yourself forever and have pointy ears you know or Shaquille O'Neal is gonna make a bunch of like nine foot you know ginormous you know sort of you know humans that are gonna just like dominate at basketball go ahead Tim I would say one thing which is that like I think

Dali makes some excellent points there. And I think just like today, if you look at the United States, there's around 20 to 30 million people that have inherited monogenic disease, 20 to 30 million. If you actually do population level whole genome sequencing, so if you do preconception screen with nucleus A and then plug that into an IVF clinic, you could basically eradicate all diseases from the population in a couple of generations. So that's a very practical, tangible, real thing that affects everyone. I mean, obviously, it should be up to the liberty of the parents, but I don't think most parents want their kid to be unfortunately born with a very serious disease. I think I see my cousin who suddenly died in her sleep at age 14. And I think, wow, if multiplication can stop that from

happening, that seems like the single kind of most obvious preventative measure that obviously everyone in the United States should just swab their cheek and do, right? So I think like Deleon's right on the kind of like the super sci-fi vision of this, but also there's a very real, tangible, with the technology we have today, effect of companies like nuclear genomics. I do have one last question here, and then we got to move on, unfortunately, because I have a ton of them. But what I'm going to ask is,

we're talking about, here we are talking about, obviously, it's like the health stuff, ground floor, I get it. It's ground floor, but it's not even being done yet. That's what's insane to me, right? Like right now, but like right now, like literally right now, Solana, there's millions of people in the United States that have a pathogenic variant, right? For breast cancer, colorectal cancer, high cholesterol, and you know, 70,000 people die a year from these conditions. Like these are the number one killers and greater than 90% of these people don't know they have a pathogenic variant. So like we're talking about millions of lives are at stake over a swab. That's 399. I mean, how much is like,

it's, it's, it's like, I, I totally think we, like we should talk sci-fi and kind of have the genetic stack, but like today I'm astonished that all these people who are trying to do quantified health, et cetera, et cetera, they take like 20 vitamin C supplements. They don't have their genome sequence, but it doesn't make sense. So I think it's something that we need to be integrated in. We fully know about some of these things. Some of them are really easy, right? Like cystic fibrosis is one gene and it's like a knockout gene. So you could potentially knock it out early on if you catch it or something. It's a monogenic disease, yes. But then some are more complicated. You have multiple genes working in tandem

and you want to knock one out or two out and who knows what else you're doing. Intelligence seems to be this way where it's like there are clusters of things and we're not entirely sure how it works. I guess just the last easy, it should be an easy question, it's just like how do you think about second order effects? Are you a little bit nervous about what you don't know? So I think about this in a lot of respects. So as you mentioned, a lot of these diseases and traits are polygenic in nature, right? And again, just so the audience understands, polygenic just refers to the fact that it's not driven by a single gene, but the complex interaction of many DNA differences or variants in someone's genome,

which just means all their DNA. So what ends up happening is you can actually make predictions from these different variants without necessarily understanding the underlying causal mechanism, which has interesting implications for genome editing. I'm thinking about the ARC Institute's publication yesterday about the kind of evolution of CRISPR and Patrick Hsu, who's also an investor in Nucleus' work there, but we can put that to the side for a second and go back to your question, which is that what you find is that what scientists basically do is they measure how much of the variation in a specific trait like intelligence could be maximally attributed to genetics, right? So across every disease and every trait, they map a certain

number, intuitively height. Height, basically scientists estimate that 80% of height can be attributed to genetics, right? So ideally, if you build a kind of perfect genetic model, there would still be 20% unaccounted for. Intelligence is estimated around 50%, right? So if you build the perfect genetic model, you get to 50%, then environment kicks in. So that's one thing to consider, which is that even if you build perfect genetic models, there would still be, obviously, there's still some degree of free will and environmental effects. That goes without saying. Moreover, I would think the thing to consider is that there, to your point of kind of unknown unknowns, is that certain genetic variants are associated with more than one thing.

So like take intelligence, for example. Implicitly, as you optimize for someone's intelligence, you're also optimizing for autism, right? These things are associated at the genetic level, right? They don't just have a single effect on a specific trait. So that's another implication, which is if parents all go and say, oh, I want my kid to be super intelligent, they should have the right and the sovereignty to potentially do that. Obviously, asterisks are sound and we should be conscious and clever

in that there are unexpected consequences. You could also be optimized if your kid to be super autistic. And that's something that a parent has to kind of understand and calibrate and that we have to be, I think, cautious as we employ this technology, which is there's always this balance in nature nature is never just a it's just like not a one one one size solution here if that makes sense

yes uh i'm going to give you the uh last word delian and then we're gonna we're gonna cut this one thoughts on i mean like what is uh any sort of what is the takeaway that you think just on the subject the subject level like people need to kind of keep in mind i think for me it's just an excitement around um you know this type of accessibility on whole genome sequencing in terms of price point was literally only accessible it became possible in like the past like 12 months and so literally um uh you know i think my like takeaway would be that i hope people recognize that this is now a like sort of tool in your tool set and it's a tool that is relevant even if you're like young and healthy because it allows you to then just kind of focus in on the areas like if you're a healthy 22 year old you're like well man do i really bother going for like a

liver screen or a stomach screen or xyz organ versus if you now have a whole genome that tells you, hey, you actually highly, highly likely to have like liver failure, go take that to genetic counselor. And now you can be like, okay, I can focus most of my like, you know, sort of energy when I'm doing my annual screening on just like monitoring basically like my liver, you know, sort of health. And that may you sort of significantly improve your longevity. And so, you know, the, the way that I describe it is like, you know, for the first time we have a bit of like a, like Google maps of your body and people should just download that map and know what it is. So they're informed over the course of their, you know, sort of life. And there's all these like downstream other implications that I'm like super excited about. But I think the most

important thing to like take away is if like you're an audience member that's listened to this and you haven't ever done a whole genome sequence there's a variety of providers i'm obviously heavily predisposed to recommend you know certain nucleus but either way you should find like the map of your body basically and if you want to have kids if you want to have kids it's an obvious thing right like yeah you know if you want to have kids you should know what your carrier for today and if you want you should also ask the person you're dating i mean that's the thing an obvious thing you should do if you're serious about getting married and having a kid you should show me your dna i mean i don't think it's Jackson I mean, I don't think it's out of the question.

I don't think it's out of the question. Eventually you have an integration of whole genome sequencing data with dating apps and people can obviously at their choosing, if they would like, to basically be opted out of being matched with someone who has also a carrier for a condition. I think that's in the individual sovereignty of the customer. So these are all things I think if you you want to be you know um healthy live long and have healthy kids i think it's it's a must thank you guys so much uh for joining this was awesome i have a million more questions i'm gonna have to bring you both back on to talk about them especially the moon people no offense i know the health stuff yes

and your company amazing but i i have a lot of questions about the moon people. Talk to you guys later. It's been real. Thanks for having us. Bye, y'all. All right, so we had a kind of fun, political couple of days. We had AOC jumping around on stage to, was it, what was it? Enough by Cardi B.

You're not familiar? Cardi B, sort of panning out and seeing like not much of a crowd there. She's getting chased by a mob of pro-Palestine people, I think. Maybe that's a little bit of an exaggeration. Sanj will break it down in a second. And all of this is sort of like a last ditch effort to save Bowman, who is the crazed squad member who pulled the fire alarm in the middle of a vote in Congress. And then that somehow wasn't a crime and nobody cared. We just kind of let it go. But I guess someone cared. His constituents cared. He just lost his election. There seems to be some sort of interesting

leftist devouring, leftist thing happening. Sajana, can you break it down for us? Well, I mean, Jamal Bowman lost his in new york's 16th district um and it was kind of a it wasn't really a landslide but it was a pretty dramatic loss uh for for bowman he lost to george latimer uh who i believe formerly represented that district in in the new york state senate um and you know the squad sort of adjacent left is chalking this up to apex contributions because apexc did pour you know tens of millions of dollars into this race i think it was like one of the costliest primaries uh of all time um but really like jamal bowman from what i've been reading uh is sort of

seen among people who live in this district which is basically westchester uh county and then part of the bronx is kind of out of touch um and you know the sort of the the symbol of this out of touchness was that he held this rally which apparently wasn't even in the district um there's there's a map that shows sort of the where his rally is and and where where his district is and it's pretty far out um and it's like this expletive filled rally where he says you know the south bronx is going to show motherfucking apec who's boss and all this shit and um you know the south bronx is like a tiny like he's got like a tiny bit of the bronx in his district and it's not even the Southern portion. So it's this kind of, you know, insane thing for him to have said, but AOC did show up and she, you know, marches on stage and sort of does a little dance to Cardi B. There's like 50 people in the crowd.

Can I just say that she took her, I noticed you're, she's doing this rally, like I'm going to get in a fight right now, but she lets her hair down like when you ever see a girl who's about to get in a fight her hair goes up it's like it's a ponytail it's tight she's about to kill someone aoc's impulse in a fight is to be like look at my hair hair down yeah yeah no it was it it was all very performative you couldn't really understand what she's saying because she's sort of screaming at the crowd like you know we're gonna fight and the crowd seems a little bit confused actually actually. I mean, it this very um sort of radical pro-palestine group um that's chanting you know aoc your hands are dead or sorry aoc your hands are red 40 000 dead or something like that um and you know apparently she was she was mobbed at her

bus which they graffitied afterward um But she did win her primary, it should be said, by a very sizable margin. I mean, there was very little money in that race from what I've read because it was kind of a foregone conclusion that she would win. But Bowman's loss, I think, is pretty remarkable because he was a rising star for a while. And then the fire alarm antics happened. He did get away with... I mean, he was censored, I think, by Congress, but he didn't really receive a punishment, I think, that most people would have thought. I don't know if it's true. I was told as a kid, they were like, if you pull the fire alarm in a school, you're going to prison. I remember being like a second grader. They're like, we will take you to jail. And we have like, we'll know who it is. There's like dust, special dust on there. We'll get your

fingerprints. Like that's it. You're locked up for life. I lived in fear of the fire alarm, in fear. So I always thought like, well, what if I think it's a fire? Then I pull it and then I go to jail. And I was wrong. Yeah. wrong yeah i mean those people uh sort of pulling a fire alarm is what it's almost like to me it's like that thing where people say you know you could technically bite your finger off but you've got this you know mechanism in your brain that would stop you from uh you know exerting the force necessary to bite it off i feel like for most people pulling a fire alarm if there's no fire is like biting your finger off. It's just your brain wouldn't allow you to do it.

But Bowman's missing that. There he was just casually. And the pictures of it are really crazy. Like he just, he's like, no big deal. And then lies about it. It's like, but we can see what is going on. And that is sort of the, that's such a good sort of metaphor for reality right now. It's like, we can see it with our own eyes. And they're saying, no, you're wrong. That never happened. What's your take on that?

I mean, this, or maybe Sandra, do you have a take before I say like Martin's opinion on this? Just like what is going on right now in general, do you think? I guess I would say high level. I mean, Jamal Bowman, I think is like, he was an exceptionally bad candidate. I mean, there's, there is, I don't know, people are sort of saying this might be the death of the squad. And, you know, I did think it was really funny that AOC gets mobbed by these Palestine people when she's probably the most, you know, radically pro-Palestine, one of the most radically pro-Palestine people in Congress. And so I do think this kind of like irony of the left, the far left devouring its children like saturn devouring his son uh is is sort of poignant and weird and funny but i don't know honestly how much we can

extrapolate from the bowman stuff because i just think he was like so widely disliked in this district where he was seen as like really out of touch um yeah i think there's some homeostasis right so like if an organism is sensing that it's killing itself or starving itself it's going to modulate itself to get to a place where it can succeed and if that means the democratic party actually i've seen a bunch of republicans actually bemoan this sit no pun intended uh saying that they don't want this to happen because the republicans are going to be less competitive. If you're, I guess, running against a bunch of crazies, you can kind of just not be crazy and win. And now, if they're not going to have the AOCs, the Bowmans, the Talibs, et cetera, and we're going to have to run against these very sober candidates that could be inspiring in other

ways, this is more competitive. And I think you're going to see both parties will sort of like try to like reach this equilibrium where they can be maximally competitive. Yeah, I agree with that. I saw someone tweet something along the lines of, the Democrats are getting very good at removing their crazies. And they were talking about Corrid Bush specifically, who was the next one that seemed like she was having a hard time in her primary. This is the faith healer one of the squad. She's the one who believes that she cured someone's, I think, like cancerous wealth or something. It was her. Which that endeared me to her, honestly.

And I also thought, because people were making fun of it, obviously, online, how could you not? But I thought, one, I would subscribe to the Faith Healer newsletter. I want to know more about what weird shit you think you can do. And number two, I think there are probably a lot of people who that resonated with. Because she wasn't embarrassed about it. She wasn't joking about it. She was just like, I prayed to Jesus and this happened. And then people underestimate how Christian many people are in the country.

And I don't know. Weirdly, it was like one of the more endearing things that she's ever said, in my opinion. But having a hard time, and I agree with you, Martin, this for the Republicans is easy. You don't have to even talk about what Joe Biden is saying if you can just point to Rashida Tlaib, who in my... I mean, Rashida Tlaib is like... I think most of the squad is not that. I think Rashida full on would like us to be destroyed. I just genuinely feel that way whereas i think that like ilan omar is kind of just this obnoxious she's people are like she's i don't think she's i don't think she's muslim i think that she's i think she's like i really

don't i think that she's like a woke like like kind of collegey sort of american i know that she's you know from somalia or whatever but like i don't that's I know that she's from Somalia or whatever, but I think that she's super American. I feel that energy from her. She's like a woke American. And she's pretty good on free speech stuff. She has defended previously, during the January 6th thing, I remember her expressing some skepticism of what was going on. I thought that was admirable and atypical. And while I disagree with her on almost everything, I do respect someone who has values

that they're committed to that are also ostensibly pro-American. We have a lot of people in tech who that hardcore free speech message resonates with, like the Edward Snowden camp. But Rashida is not that. And it's very easy to just put her up and be like, look what this person said about America. That's this guy. And if you lose that, well, that's going to be a harder race. But I also don't know how they're going to in these really, really left-wing places. AOC can't lose, right?

Right. But super quickly, when George Santos was sort of booted out of Congress, I thought I'd take his seat just for fun. Just for like, you know, until it was you know, it was a partial, like, instead of the full two years, it was just a partial, like, six, nine months. What is the story there? Well, I actually looked into it, because I know Santos a little bit. I wouldn't call us close friends or anything.

And I was like, you know what? Fuck it. Let me be the congressman. And I actually live in the district. Because of my probation or whatever, I have to live here. And I can't live in Manhattan. So I live in the district. I know the guy.

It's like, look, this is easy. Everyone knows who I am. I'll go shake some hands and I'll win this thing. No problem. As opposed to these other two guys that nobody's ever heard of. And it turns out

that they made it almost impossible to run for Congress, especially in New York. So they changed the rules during COVID where you can only go on the ballot if you're Republican or Democrat functionally. You're an independent? The hoops you have to go through as an independent

are so tall, it's impossible. And it was really, really eye-opening because I actually went through the paperwork. I said, okay, I'll spend a little money on this. Let's see what happens. And they said, you need like 50,000 signatures, hand signed, notarized. And I was like, what the fuck? We could have got, Martin, we can get you 50,000 signatures.

You just got to put a little grease into it. This tiny time frame. And they have to be notarized or signed by a witness. And it has to be a registered voter. And it's like, Jesus Christ, the person that actually gets to go and like 10,000 people voted to decide who's going to replace Santos. And, you know, there was more work into just getting you on the ballot than actually running the election. So it'd be great if we could actually use technology instead of like, why can't we docusign this? You know, I'm sitting there like, am I really going to fake all fake all these addresses i also just feel like why is it necessary at all like i think it'd just be easier

to run um and maybe also i mean i i wonder could you have gone as a republican a little bit is there a time frame that you have to have had you had to have been a republican for x amount of years probably before the amount of rules that you have to check off is just specifically made so that only political insiders could do this. If you're a guy that's just somebody off the street, there's no way you could do it. If you're a rich guy or gal, you could theoretically, if you hire the right people and plan this out years in advance, you could do it. plan this out years in advance, you could do it, but it really has to get easier because there's a lot of people that we'd love to see in Congress that just don't have that will to go through every stupid checkmark for months and months and months before you can even be on the ballot. I've been thinking about this in a broader sense, just the rules of society and what they,

like the number of rules in society and what the outcomes sort of naturally are. And I think there's a business version of this as well, like a small business version of this. So to start like a food truck in San Francisco or something is so difficult to do. Like you're really killing all of these potential opportunities and you're also kind of biasing the entire system in favor of a certain kind of person who has a lot of time on their hand and a lot of patience for bureaucracy and so tends to like it. And so in politics, if you're weighing towards bureaucrats, that's the time, very crippling of just sort of new businesses, of the kinds of new ideas you might get in Congress. And it doesn't seem like we have a precedent for a bureaucracy at scale. Democracy is pretty new. And just sort of historically, America has been around for a long time.

And I keep wondering, is there a point where you get to this point where you just have so many rules that nothing is possible? You actually do just need a reset of some kind. And it feels to me like we're very close to that. And I don't know what tips it over where we're like, okay, we got to get rid of 90% of the rules that we have right now for everything, not just getting into office, but starting a company, even just like what you can do in your day-to-day life, right? Yeah, I don't know. What do you guys think about that crazy idea that's exploding? I love what you said about the people who can

tolerate bureaucracy end up being selected for, and the people who tolerate success get selected for business. They don't want to be anywhere near a bunch of forms. And the DocuSign example is a really good example. You guys have invested in how many companies, but how many deals do you now see on DocuSign versus signed by paper and pen? Sam Bankman filed for bankruptcy of FTX on DocuSign. It is the standard kind of thing to do now. But for me, who I think would be an overwhelming candidate, because just the name recognition alone, even if 70% of people hate me, 30% that love me will go to the polls and everybody else won't go to the polls, and you'd win a landslide. And that's how Trump happens.

And then you actually hear the message. You're like, hold on, I actually kind of like this guy. And you go from 70-30 to 50-50. And as long as your guys are energized, you can win. So I think that the only reason I wanted to do it is to sort of troll and say that I'm not going to quit my job to be a congressperson. I'm just going to keep working as a software guy and let me know when there's votes and stuff and I'll vote when I need to, but I'm not going to stop doing what I'm doing. And that's sort of the way Congress was envisioned, actually, to begin with. So I think that the DocuSign test is actually a really good one because it really puts up a gate of rationality of like, no, to enter this gate, you've got to be really irrational,

bureaucratic, and stupid. That's the only way you're coming in. And I looked at it like, I'm not fucking doing this. You've got to be kidding me. Thinking about California as this example of disgovernance, I think there is, you know, California is massively mismanaged. I mean, doing a deep dive into their budget right now, and they've just got this like massively underfunded pension liability. You know, they just have closed their budget deficit, quote unquote, but like almost 40% of that closure scale and on a long enough time horizon,

the kind of, you know, civil rot and social unrest that it promotes will ultimately undermine a democracy. And I think that like we saw a kind of low level instance of that during, you know, Black Lives Matter and some of this kind of like massive looting that went unchecked. And we had suspension of normal rules of law and order. And I almost think it would take a sort of massive social change that almost inevitably looks like violent revolution uh unfortunately for some

of the bureaucracy i don't know i i would like to think not but when you've got such a sclerotic sort of powerful bureaucracy that um commands so much capital and has you know um monopoly over state violence like i don't know what the sort of outcome is. I mean, you can sort of chip away at it through reforms, but I don't know. I agree. I mean, a lot of it because it's like a crazy thing, but it's not that I'm saying we need a violent revolution, but I agree that I don't know how else you get rid of this crippling, not just stifling, but literally crippling bureaucracy. I mean, you look at public transit in California, for example, we've talked about the high-speed rail.

We talk about law and order. These are things that actually people care a lot about. The idea of law and order, that is the social contract. If you're not protecting people from violence with your monopoly on violence, then you're not a legitimate government. And there's only so long that people, I think, will tolerate that. I think that probably the violence has to get worse that's happening to people, and then something is triggered.

And it will feel something like a big reset of some kind. I do think we just need the expiration dates on laws would be helpful. That'd be cool. I think idealism giving way to pragmatism is exactly what's happening. You know, Bowman's idealistic, you know, wow, I'm going to change the world. And people are like, well, this change is actually not great. And I want the police to protect me from being murdered. Yeah, that is a great, I love the idea, the frame of idealism being replaced with pragmatism.

I think that that is actually just personally how I felt over the last five years or something. I've become super pragmatic. And I have these idealistic things that I care about. They're like my North Stars, libertarianism or something. But in terms of what I want politically is, I just want things to work. And that's really my bar is like,

well, does this work or not? And if it's not working, that's a problem. I don't care what the ideology was behind it or wouldn't it be nice if, does it work or not? It doesn't. Homelessness in San Francisco does not work. Great. What are some ideas for how to fix this problem?

And if you're not coming at me with a solution, then I'm not supporting you in any way. In fact, I will oppose you with everything I have. If you're just talking about weird, stupid ideas rather than like, how do we get these people off of the fucking streets? I don't want to hear from you anymore. My tolerance for that kind of talking is it's zero. I have no tolerance left for that. My cup is full of bullshit. I cannot take any more. Speaking of more bullshit, this was a Trump one. I mean, it's not bullshit. It's an open-ended question. Let's see what you guys think. Kind of bullshit.

It's sort of bullshit. Trump went on the all-in thought. Obviously, concurrently, there's the will stances of the world accusing people who want deportation of illegal immigrants of ethnic cleansing so this is like the far left is saying like deportation is equivalent to literal genocide um and doubling down tripling down he's still talking about this uh trump in their opinion is like you know the most anti-immigrant president of all time and he's gonna kill a bunch of people um 20 million he'll be taking people who are not even immigrants he's gonna be going to people's houses who are american citizens and I guess shipping them to Mexico for some reason. But then Trump gets on the all-in pod and he's just like, I love immigration.

And it's like, we got to be a smart country. And we're going to do, he said, anyone with a college degree. Like he says, and he like goes back to it. He's like, wait, anyone with a college degree, not even just a and he doubled, he like goes back to, he's like, wait, anyone with a college degree, not even just a full, not even a four year degree,

anyone who gets a two year degree in any subject, um, we're going to give citizen a green card. We're going to give in America, um, which just to me sounds really stupid, um, for many reasons, but maybe I'm wrong. Martin, what was your take on all that? Yeah, I actually don't mind that. I'm a little bit different. You know, I don't just believe every right wing thing. So like I like kind of subscribe to most of it other than the immigration stuff.

So I didn't mind it. It's not a huge issue for me. I do think we need population in our country. So it's not such a bad, terrible thing. It's better. It's better than population shrinking or dramatically shrinking, I think. If people want to come to America, we should let them. But I do think that one of the things we have to remember about all presidents is that they don't know what they're talking about, about virtually everything.

One of the things that came out of my Trump crypto thing was that Trump thought it was a metal coin that we wanted to launch. I saw that text yesterday. We explained to him what wasn't, or his son did. Very quickly, he said, no, dad, it's a crypto thing. And he's, oh, okay, okay, got it, because there's already a Trump metal coin. And so again, I think he's a brilliant guy. And even Baron and I said that, he said, Martin, if you gave him two pages about crypto, that was just everything he needed to know, he would read it and just know it cold in five minutes. And I believe that.

I can't blame a 78-year-old guy for not knowing the finer points of distributed ledger technology. And in fact, that's not what we vote for somebody to do. Or we'd vote for Vitalik Buterin to be president. We vote for somebody who can make good decisions and hire people. So I think if this is the way he wants to go, I ride with it. make good decisions and hire people. So I think if this is the way he wants to go, you know, I, I ride with it. And, and I don't think that I do think you're right about like, okay, just two years getting associates degree, you know, in, in history, does that earn you a green card? Does that a skilled worker? Probably not. But, you know, I do think we, at the flip side,

we shouldn't be, you know, there shouldn't be no lottery for like math PhDs to like, you know, pray that they could get into America. I agree with that, but that's easy to say that I agree with that. I think the bigger problem... So the campaign, it seems like, has been walking back that specific claim. But I don't... It's like the earlier conversation we were having about what is the value inherent of the New York Times. I think the New York Times deserves a lot of the brand that it has for being excellent reporting, even though ideologically very different. But like a CNN, for example, what is the value inherent of CNN versus Pirate Wires? And I just

reject that completely. I don't think that they're better. College, what is the value inherent of a degree from the middle of the country in sociology or something? And to me, it's close to nothing. of a degree from the middle of the country in like sociology or something. And to me, it's like close to nothing. And what we really need are, if we're going to be bringing people in, I think that we should actually just ask ourselves, what do we need? And let's get a lot of them. I think there are laws in the books to limit the number of doctors we can bring in, for example. And it's like, just get rid of that shit. We should have unlimited doctors. We should have tons of doctors. We have a fucking health crisis in this country and people can't find a doctor. We should have all of the doctors, for example, to start there. But what I don't want to do is create this weird, we don't need any more status associated with useless degrees. degrees and uh sajid i believe you mentioned something a while ago when we were first or a couple weeks ago we were first talking about this uh you talked about the overproduction of the elite

and how this is this feels sort of late to me these two concepts these two topics yeah i mean i think they're definitely well it's it's just another sort of it adds more even more elite cachet to uh if the green card plan were to go through it add even more elite cachet to uh if the green card plan were to go through it add even more elite cachet to really non-elite degrees in the sense that they don't necessarily sort of map on uh to an elite skill set or even an elite sort of disposition in the sense of like a noblesse oblige kind of thing um but i think that i mean my thought with this the reason i was so shocked by by what trump said is because it's green cards he was talking about specifically i mean green cards are a path to like citizenship basically it's permanent residency once you have a green card you can stay in the

u.s for the rest of your life um and i do think there's more sensible ways to do a kind of graduate visa i mean currently what we have with this insane sort of student visa system is you get an F1 visa and then you can apply for an extension to stay for another 24 or 36 months, depending on whether or not you're in STEM or not. But that's an arduous process. And, you know, England, for example, has a system where you can automatically convert a student visa to a two year visa while you look for a job or while you work. And then you can transition that to a skilled visa. Canada has a points based system, you know, where different provinces can sort of decide, you know, what criteria they want in visa applicants and are sort of ranked according to a much more logical system than what we have, which is like this bizarre lottery thing. And I think to me, the green card stapled to your diploma

and the lottery are kind of like on the same end of the insane spectrum. They're just sort of different ways of going about it. I mean, I think it's equally insane to say, okay, math PhDs have to go through this lottery where we're sort of picking names out of a hat and determining who gets to stay here and who doesn't. And it has nothing to do with whether or not you've got an amazing business idea or if you even have a job offer necessarily. As it is to say, you got a two-year degree in sports management from a random university because your dad is maybe, I don't know, an Emirati mogul who wants somehow to have influence in American politics or whatever.

That to me seems insane. And I think that obviously Trump was kind of speaking extemporaneously. So I don't know if that's really going to be. I think it's a mistake also. Having said all of that, I think it's a mistake to extrapolate too much based on off-the-cup comments. Yeah, I think he's making the whole thing up as he went along. He's like,

Jason Calacanis just seemed like he wanted that. Trump was like, well, you got it, kid. It's all yours. I think, though, like many Trump things, he was hitting on, and Sandra, you actually just sort of jogged this thought while you were speaking about the difference in different country systems on the college thing. Trump, as a more sort of America first nationalist type guy, is maybe hitting on a problem more than a solution with the proposed solution.

And the problem that no one's really talking about at all is this use of American resources to train people from foreign countries that we then throw away. So there's this drain on our resources happening where it's like, there are two ways you could go about it. In his mind, let them all stay. But the other thing is like, we shouldn't have people over here and be putting resources into their education at the expense of an American if we're then just going to give them away. The problem is that though, it's that resource drain. And I think that is true and an interesting way to think about it. I don't think we... We're a more liberal country. And I mean that in a classic sense. So we don't think about like, well, what use is this to us very often? It's just like, well, it's freedom and anything goes. But yeah, there are resources

that go into that. There is an opportunity cost when you're training a foreign resident who then certainly when you just automatically send them back and that system is dumb. So it's like, I think he's right about- And getting financial aid to, yeah, I mean, we're- That is like, that is for me, that is a hard, that is a red line. You're not getting money

from us to do this. It's crazy that that happens. Yeah. Yeah. I think Trump, I mean, I will say also like, people are missing the broader context

of that discussion too, where Trump was, it was prefaced by Trump talking about his border wall and sort of, you know, his remain in Mexico policy. And he was he was very emphatic about the need to sort of reinstate a sane policy on the southern border. And so I think, you know, it's not as if the the the green card thing did kind of come out of the blue but i do think like directionally the conversation was still like vintage trump uh sort of you know talking about um he mentioned

the remain in mexico policy which the biden administration immediately scrapped and is arguably responsible for why we have this migrant crisis and um yeah you know um well i want to leave the last word to you mart Martin. We had a crazy conversation today. We discussed the polymarket stuff. We discussed just betting markets conceptually, UMA. We hit tech crunch, insanity, all the genomics stuff. We have leftism devouring its own and now border security, the border in general, asylum for sociology grads. I mean, could you connect all those dots? Probably not.

But if you want to leave us with one thought, what is it? Yeah, I think they all are sort of connected in a lot of ways where it's just poor critical thinking. Like you have to be able to take your time with some of these really hard to understand things, let your emotions sort of die down and then think about what is the right thing or the wrong thing to do. In the case of polymarkets, you have this fast and rash rush to judgment. The same thing happened with Bowman and the idealism of like, oh, this guy's promising

a brave new world. I love it. I love it. And then you start to sit there and say, wait a second, I didn't love this. I should have thought about this more. And the same thing I think applies to TechCrunch, where you sort of hope and wish that you have this independent use. But then when you consider the source and realize that you have this independent news, but then when you

consider the source and realize that these are folks that aren't thinking that hard about what they're reporting about, they're thinking about reporting about the things they care about. And they're trying to see the world the way they wish it was, not the way that it actually is. And they're trying to mold reality and sort of distort it into what they want it to be. And so a lot of this comes from just like, you know, sort of the Kahneman type heuristical errors where we just don't have, you know, an easy way as humans to sort of distill all the reality and think about it carefully. And, you know, it always comes from like just emotions and just sort of your brain playing tricks on you

and wanting you to think something. And all of the mistakes I made in my life, all of them, which some people would say is like the encyclopedia of mistakes, is all the mistakes I've made in my life come from like a quick emotional response. And even this Trump thing, the Trump coin thing, it sort of came from this giddiness of, you know, wow, we have this $400 million token and this crazy guy was betting us $100 million that was fake. And I'm sitting here in the room with the guy. I know it's not fake. And I got so giddy that I kind of over pushed this. And again, we just have to be careful and slow and calm. And it's a lot harder to do that than it seems. Word. I agree. Thank you so much for joining us. And to the rest of you guys,

Pirate Wires is off next week for the 4th of July. We take the whole week off. It's one of two weeks we get off a year for America's birth, which happens to coincide with my own birth on the 1st. So send me birthday cards and gifts. It's been real.

Rate, subscribe, review, leave a comment. Tell the world about the Pirate Wires Daily. Thank Martin for coming and catch you guys in a couple weeks.