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

Episode Date: June 28, 2025

(00:03) - Tesla Robotaxi (08:55) - The Social Network 2 In Development (13:05) - Yacine (Former Software Engineer at X) (41:47) - Iran Launches Attack on US Base in Qatar (45:28) - Mike Gallagher (Palantir) (01:16:24) - Hims & Hers Stock Crash (01:26:55) - Crémieux (Writer) (01:43:51) - Potential Shell-BP Deal Shakes Markets (02:00:22) - FedEx Founder Dies at 80 (02:10:41) - Mr. Beast's AI Tool Drama (02:17:26) - DJ Seo (Neuralink Co-founder) TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.comFigma - https://figma.comVanta - https://vanta.comLinear - https://linear.appEight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpnWander - https://wander.com/tbpnPublic - https://public.comAdQuick - https://adquick.comBezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.comPolymarket - https://polymarket.comAttio - https://attio.comFin - https://fin.ai/Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.comhttps://x.com/tbpnhttps://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

You're watching TVPN! Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI RoboTaxi launch in Austin, Texas This afternoon was the big technology news. We have someone Who's written about the Tesla cyber cab in the RoboTaxi in the back of a RoboTaxi Hopefully calling in to the show. I sent him the link. We'll see if we can bring him in. Hey, how you doing? Perfect timing. How's it going, guys?

Can you see the taxi? What's happening? Here, let me see. Can you see it? Yeah. Wow. Yeah, there you go. Amazing.

You got a 60 rider right here as well. Oh, there he is. Okay. You got some sick, sick glasses on, but yeah, we're in the robot taxi right now. This is my fifth ride. I'm also here with Harry from the UK.'s going on he's a fan of the channel yeah so yeah this is my fifth ride it's been amazing so far it really does feel like

Tesla has hit this one out of the park truly the geofence area is definitely much smaller than Waymo's right now but I think they did that with the thought process of like, hey, we want to make sure we have a really good launch. We want to make sure that it's going to roll nice and smooth. And but so far, the rides I've taken have all been really, really good, very smooth. It's very hard to communicate just how smooth the car is unless you're familiar with the software, unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on the Teslas. It's very, very similar to that experience. It's just there's just nobody there now.

And that's the freaky part is that, you know, for a lot of people that have been following the company, a lot of us knew this day was going to come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, you know, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road. But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kind of like this is this is wild. This is wild. So is that better? The stock is up 9% today. 9% today. Wow. Yeah, you're welcome everybody. Yeah, give us your other takeaways. Well, I saw you posted a good breakdown from your experience. What else do you have to share about the process? Did you need to go through a pre-registration

to get onboarded? It feels like it's not completely open access just yet. Yeah, so yeah, we were invited. We're a part of a very limited group of people that were invited. I think Tesla was just out here. So somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that no problem.

Wow, that's nice. Yeah, it's a very small group of people. I think a lot of us that have followed Tesla very closely over the years, Tesla went out of their way to sort of, you know, get us some early access so we can go out there, test the system, get it out there for people to see how it performs. So far it's very very limited in its use case and I'm showing you guys here just on the road hopefully does it come across can you guys see the road how it's driving yeah it's very steep. I think Tesla very specifically started this very small but now if you go

But now if you go. Now, people. And their zip code and their phone number and email address so they can sign up for the service. And that's probably a way for Tesla to get some some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there. But so far, it's very small, small geofence area, small group of people. And I think I don't know how many cars they have on the road, but I doubt is more than ten right now We're a four-way stop right now and it's navigating that no problem

But yeah, I think I think it's very limited on purpose But I will tell you that for those of us that are so lucky to be able to experience this firsthand It's just it feels surreal because it works. It works It just crazy. It just takes you around and there's no one there And it's wild that is wild that we got full self-driving cars before reliable self I mean, I have one more question. We'll let you go Yeah, I mean what's remarkable about this is is not just that it's a self-driving car,

but particularly that it looks like a stock $38,000 model. Why is there anything? Are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket added to extra cameras? Anything? Nothing, nothing. I mean, there's different software, but I mean, that's, yeah, that's a software update, right? Nothing that that I can gather that says oh, this is a specific like a very uniquely equipped Tesla that has some additional sensors this looks to me like the point you made is exactly and this is why this is such

So mind-blown like I just can't believe it's happening the best-selling car in the world This is such so mind-blowing like I just can't believe it's happening the best-selling car in the world We're test is making over a million of these per year that costs less than $40,000 potential less than $30,000 to make is driving itself in Austin, Texas With a paid ride I paid four dollars and 20 cents and it's driving me around the best-selling car in the world like that That is that's a weird thing to process Yeah because it fundamentally breaks the like what how we think about self-driving transportation because you would think about oh self-driving a lot of sensors, etc etc know that the cost structure for this thing is

The is skit the scale that Tesla has able has been able to achieve that same car is going to drive itself Yeah, right. Yeah, and that just breaks everything as your cost per mile plummets is going to drive itself. Right? And that just breaks everything because your cost per mile plummets, the method they've taken as far as training the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than Waymo can.

And they have the cars, right? So Tesla makes as many of these cars every five hours that Waymo has on their fleet total. Right? And that's the mind blowing piece of it. And Waymo should be celebrated for the work they've done because it's such an incredible technology. incredible technology and I'm really happy they exist But the scale piece is the challenge and it seems like now that Tesla has figured out how to get paid rides going as

We come to a to our destination. That's my Cybertruck right there hanging out You know, it's like it's monumental. This is a monumental thing for this like Disneyland for tech bros. You can just keep taking rides around all day long. Yeah. This is amazing. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you, brother.

Yeah, dude. It's like, you know, sometimes I'm like afraid. I'm like, does my, does my wife think I'm too nerdy? Like am I getting too nerdy about this? What's going on? But it really is like, it's, it's, it's, it's just appending. You know, what Tesla has been historically great at is just appending the equation around the technologies that they work in with the electric

vehicle now with self-driving they're going to get into the human or robot space yeah this is what they do and so I think this is just another reminder that they're their full steam ahead and it's it's very exciting and it's just such an honor to be part of this this release truly it's an honor historic yeah well thank you so much for calling in. This was great. Of course. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have fun out there. Bye.

Talk soon. Thank you, guys. All right, bye-bye. Yeah, the scale of this thing. I mean, like, Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space. He's just the first person to figure out how to get the rockets go up and back every single six hours

or something like that. And so scale really matters. It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point and yeah, they seem really set up for it. I love this post by Nick Cruz. He says Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the Robo taxi and you'll love to see it.

Little bit of side quest going on for the last six months. You know, sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest, but it's not it's not the main mission. Pot of gold. Pot of gold. Anyway, there's some other, there's some other news here. Power Bottom Dad says, time will tell, but my bet is that this signals the death of the Waymo leaving Google in a $20 billion hole and likely Uber as well.

Very dramatic. I'm not, I think power bottom dad is a very strong poster. And the competitive dynamic is really heating up. I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities. Right now it sounds like it's 10-ish cars in a very, very small area, but again, they could potentially scale a thousand times faster

than Waymo, it's all just gonna come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes. George Hots last week was saying that Waymo is Artella operated, he said, I haven't fact-checked this, thankfully, we're not journalists, we don't have to fact-check. But he said something like 1.7 people per car, you know, sort of, you know, overseeing. More than a taxicab. Yeah, so the real question will be, you know, is Tesla doing teleoperation as well? Do they, you

know, how long will these companies need to do that? But once things are really working and they're safe, Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once. The social network too is officially in development with Aaron Sorkin returning this time as director. Yaksine says, wrong, I'm the director and I'm also the main character.

I thought that was really funny. He's definitely the main character. Andy, TwoCents.money is writing some jokey dialogue here. He says, sorry, I left my aura ring at South Park Commons along with my Aidsley burner phone and Bored Ape ledger wallet, you absolute diesel. It's pretty funny to reimagine it, but interesting. We have a little scoop here.

We actually got our hands on a couple pages of the new script. It was left at the gym. Yes, in Hollywood. In Hollywood, where we are, and we're fairly confident it could possibly be. This is the social network two official dialogue. Yeah, they haven fairly confident. It is the it could this possibly be this is the social network to Official official dialogue. Yeah, they haven't shot at that script. So with the other script they've been doing table reads

We wanted to do a little table read for you today So I'll break it down. You'll play Mark Zuckerberg. I'll play not Friedman's great So this is taking place in Mark Zuckerberg's office at night in the meta HQ Yeah So a middle a minimalist expanse lit by floating AR displays and white boards full of transformer diagrams. Mark Zuckerberg is focused yet restless. He stands at a window. Nat Friedman is calm but energized. He enters and Nat opens the scene. You've open source llama Mark. 70 billion parameters running in 8k cut token context windows

and word there's a 405 billion monster still in the lab open source isn't unleashed Nat it's a guided evolution we publish the weights so the community can help tame them community a sizable slice of fare hop to startups like Mr. all how's the village supposed to ride the beast without many of the original Wranglers talent moves ideas stay. Group query attention. Scaled rotary positional embeddings with NTK-aware stretching. This isn't incremental.

It's a step change. Meanwhile, Yan's out there talking about non-auto-regressive world model hybrids, saying the next wave won't be token by token racers. He's ready to retire your thoroughbred, Mark. Yan's job is to keep the herd agile. Llama is today's workhorse. Scout and Maverick are the horizon. Right now, Llama is our public manifesto. Your manifesto just made every kid with a decent GPU a potential

sorcerer. Hugging face downloads are exploding. What's next? Magic carpets? Exactly! Open weights let the village scale faster than our walls ever could! Purple Llama covers us. CyberSec eval, Llama Guard, full Red Team cycles. You know Purple Llama isn't bulletproof, Mark. Open AI is minting cash behind APIs and you're handing out multilingual long context models for free! The Llama 3 community license only restricts firms over 700 million monthly active users. Innovation rises bottom up. Ask Ahmed. Ask Joel.

Democratization is the point. You're wagering north of $60 billion in AI capex on that democracy. It's a big bet, Mark. Not a bet, an ecosystem. Scout is multimodal. Maverick is video first. Laura, Chlora, NFR quantization. Llama derivatives already power agents.

Ragstacks, university labs, it feeds itself. Provided the community keeps aligning with you. Alignment happens in real time. RLHF, DPO, RLAIF. This is an ecosystem, not a monopoly. And if that ecosystem births something you can't steer? No one controls progress, progress Nat we guide it openly Transparently no secret rooms just a billion hands shaping. What's next?

Then hold on tight and hope we're ready. We will be we're building it together and scene Really jumps off the page Wow riveting. Yeah, Hollywood's back. Hollywood's back. This might save Hollywood. Yeah, I think this will be... People said that... I'm Oscar bait right here. For sure. Totally. Totally. So anyways, you know, maybe somebody just left this as a prank, knowing we'd find it, knowing we'd read it. It's entirely possible. It's entirely possible it's entirely possible this is you know totally real next up we have yab seen welcome the chat has been waiting yaksine how are you doing what's going on uh you are on mute no audio yet we got the video we got the weight set up in. Is that a weight rack or a? Looks like it.

Hello, test. Yeah, we can hear you. Testing, how you doing? Testing. I'm good, I haven't set up my DAC yet, so. No, you're good. You're good, what's happening? Let me just ask, let me just check,

like let me just look at something on. Sure. Yeah, we'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out. The poster who needs no introduction. He needs no introduction. Founder of Dingboard. What are the names of the hosts of?

John and Geordi. John and Geordi. Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yaseen. Apologies. Good to meet you. Hello, thanks for the introduction.

I appreciate your time as well. And I'm actually a huge fan of you guys. Someone I used to work with introduced me to you guys. So I found a lot of enjoyment. That's great. That's great to have you on. How have the last few days been? A little bit stressful to be honest.

I've slept three hours every single night because posting on Twitter has been so fun. Unfortunately for- Fun or stressful? Yeah, so both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting. And that's not good for me, but I will basically just not stop posting. But if you keep posting the way you have been,

could you potentially replace your salaries? You were making it in the seven figure mark. You gotta really ramp it up a little bit. I used to go on 4chan and these people would be like, yeah, I'm making like a million, like a two million at these AI companies. I'd be like, no way. There's no way you guys are making

two million at these AI companies. And I started making like seven digits at an AI company. I was like, wait, like these guys weren't actually lying. Like you actually make that much money at these AI companies. And it's like pretty fun work too, as well. So yeah, uh, for what's worth, like I didn't work on AI.

I worked on like bugs that really annoyed me on the app. And that's why I joined actually. So I joined X because, uh, there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me. I fixed quite a lot of them. So, um, pretty happy with the work I've done. X X is the product I use that I find the most bugs yet. I'm not just, I don't abandon the product. Like that's how interesting

That's a super interesting thing and it's because there's like when it's a very large app, right? So the scale is huge and you guys are like a right tail users Like you guys are famous like, you know the podcast of the tech bro podcast I'm sorry the the host of the tech bro podcast you guys are famous So you might have notifications you guys get the amount of replies you guys get the amount of DMS that you guys get is An insane amount you guys are so far into the right of replies you guys get, the amount of DMs that you guys get is an insane amount. You guys are so far into the right tail. But how many people are there like you?

That's why it feels buggy for you. But for most people, like an engineer who's like creating a test account and like clicking around, it's not going to be buggy for them. And for what it's worth, this is true across all the apps. Power users will always experience a lot of bugs unless they have someone to like really like talk to them and like understand what their pain points are. And for what it's worth, X does a really great job. I mean, it's actually remarkable how well X has run

as a company and just working there, I got to learn a lot about how to get engineers motivated and really get shit done. It was awesome work there. It was super cool. How do you wish you had the opportunity? You were working remotely the entire time and that was maybe counter to the broader ex culture.

Do you think it's the type of organization where if you're gonna work there, you should just 100% be in the office or do you think you could work there? Yeah, so the person who hired me was like, dude, let me tell you, you're gonna have to get to the office. My wife, so at the time I got the offer,

in between I was interviewing, I found out that my wife was pregnant. So I let them know and Yeah, so the kid is born now. He's seven months old So that's by the time I joined I was like, okay well we're gonna I'm gonna work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move but as a kid got older my party start changing a bit and I was kind of like considering and talking to my wife about like different ways that could come to policy

I could totally work remotely like and be productive I think after the X and X AI merger the information attractor got so strong and the talent at XAI, they were like, they're shipped so much. I used to be able to read every commit. I used to actually just sit there on my email and click archive over and over again and read every single commit that went into the code base. But after the XAI people joined, there was literally no way. I told one of the XAI guys this. It was so, they're like, you're, and I mean, I told one of the XAI guys this, it was like, you know, when you have like dinosaur shit, and you know, which is the Twitter code base,

and you get extreme pressure, which is XAI talent, you get diamonds, that's how you get diamonds. You're like, you know, that's like, and like, I was so bullish after that. It's like, they're really like, they're really pushing on it. It's like, really awesome. I want it, and honestly, I really wanted to be there. Like, I to be there like i wanted to go i think like probably i was talking to my manager at the time i was like um can i like maybe come like twice every quarter or something

and he was like super i mean first of all by the way like my manager was reading between the lines totally surprised totally surprised he looked super depressed in the meeting i felt so bad for him right but if you're watching this it's okay okay, dude. Don't worry about it. You're seriously like Some people like though. It's probably the best thing I think like working at X is like I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long and When I joined I was like, oh these guys were like are onboarded onto everything But that wasn't the case like my manager literally could just figure anything out It felt like he was already on board on everything

But he could actually just like read the code look logs, and figure out what the problem was within 30 minutes and it didn't matter what it was. I was like, this guy must have been here for years. No, he's like actually just that good. So I mean, I really loved working with him. He was like a really awesome guy. I think he was surprised. I guess like, I guess I kind of guess what happened to be honest, but it doesn't really matter. But anyways, it's been really great working there. So I was gonna go to visit, actually we were planning to visit Palo Alto. My wife is going on a trip with her mom and the baby.

And I was like, okay, that's one week. I know I'm not gonna go on a trip because I had work to do, not anymore. So I'm probably gonna go and it's gonna be pretty fun. But I was planning for that week to go to Palo Alto. But also my manager was like, can you come like next week? And I told my wife and she was like,

literally like, you know, baby in her arm, like, you know, trying to like scarf food in her mouth for like the few seconds that she had, just like literally dying. So first time parents, right? So we're kind of getting used to it, but yeah. No, it's a crazy, it's a crazy change. What, why don't you give some background

on what you were doing prior to X Dingboard and then I wanna talk about the future. Is that the exciting stuff? Okay, sure. So you guys can, I'm probably gonna like work a bit more on Dingboard. There's a bunch of bugs that I wanna fix. I just didn't have the time with my full-time job.

So dingboard.com is the best app ever. Dingboard.com, if you wanna make a meme in seconds, 15 seconds, meme. I was a paid user. I was a paid user. I loved it. Thank you very much. Actually, very, very good. You know, like your money actually helped pay for this. Like this is go John Coogan. No, no, it was, it was, and you should give him naming rights. It is actually crazy that that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages. And I feel like you just pulled it

forward. I used to have an app called like Photoshop mix or something and it was pretty good. And then they just completely deprecated it. And then they put ads in it, which was I would I was dealing with. And then they just shut it down. And it was pretty good at dropping out the backgrounds and doing it wasn't great, but it was okay. And then they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom. And so I'm using two different apps and neither of them Are good anywhere near what you need and so I was always I was always a fan of ding board But I was actually like in the process when I joined them

I was in process of rewriting it so they could deploy on web like applications and sorry iOS and Android Yeah, it's actually like if you guys if you guys are nerd, there's something called socal Okay, socal is made by the Swedish guy. I think he's retired kind of he works three days a week. And on the four days that he has, he's working on this cross platform GL, graphics library, like, I guess, like transpiler. So you write in one GL language, it'll, it will produce the metal version for iOS, it'll produce the version for Android, and it'll produce the version for web. So I can use the same code and the code can be basically like It can basically be the same code base deployed to all apps And then John Coogan and Jordy can make memes in seconds and get more I was on X.com

I'm so ready. This is the future I was promised Yeah, it feels like incredible founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes I mean like the reason I made it was because I was like making memes on my software engineering Diagramming tool and then they like started adding a watermark I was like fuck this. Yeah, fucking ruin my meme making tool. I am going to war. Yeah Yeah, two weeks and then I remember you had you had sponsors. This is I love this They were sponsors when you would open a new ding board file. It would just have a semi analysis ad from doing I mean, they're still there. Oh, it's still there. Okay, I mean semi analysis Dylan Patel

You should guys should go check out his sub stack. He sponsored me for three months and he stopped sponsoring me and I was too lazy to remove it. Oh, no. He's not on the sub stack. But he's actually on, he's on Passport with Ben Thompson. But anyway, he's the man and we love him. And, but the big question is like, Dingboard, you're super popular online. Why didn't you go and raise like 15 million dollars from? Dude, man, that sounds so lame and like raising money with So not down so

I have to plug in right now and I don't have enough power going to my house to like plug this one in which is okay It's unplugged. Yeah, but like I could serve literally a fucking million people. A fucking million. So we're gonna blow your mind with this, but sometimes you can raise 15 million and you can do what's called a secondary transaction where some of the money goes directly into your pocket. You don't have to hire that many people.

Yeah, so you could raise like 50 on 500 and it's, you know, take 40 million straight to the bank. Yeah, just to kind of set yourself up a cushion. They call it a cushion. Safety net. I feel like you want the opposite of that. I would never invest a founder who asks for that. Like, for example.

Tell them we told you. He's joking, he's joking. Yeah, I'm joking, I'm joking. Roy Lee. Never happens. You don't want a founder with money. You want a founder with no options. You want a founder like Roy Lee from Kluie.

New dad, new dad or new dad. Gotta figure it out. Gotta figure it out. I've gotta figure, I need a two acre lawn and a zero turn tractor. That's what I need. This is, I need this. I will get it no matter what, maybe the next 10 years. But like Roy Lee, for example, CEO, I think of Cluey, he got kicked out of his university, a disgrace tarred and feather. He has no choice. I wish I got an allocation. I even know he was raising. I would have written, I need the money, right? Like I got a kid. I would have written a check without even thinking. I don't even care what he's doing. Yeah. You're a really defender. Okay.

Okay. So here's the thing. I want a number for ding board. How many users did you get? How much money were you making? Give us some sort of numbers so we can ring the gong for you. I think the peak MRR was like, like, I mean, I don't I mean I don't remember I don't remember not raising I don't want funding probably is raising a developer let's hit the gong for you honestly honestly bringing that for your fans too because you're yes you you genuinely you're you're an internet celebrity and you have real fans the question the question I have for you is because you're a Roy Lee defender, what's your line between balancing engagement, sort of like rage baiting versus, you sound like much more even keeled

on the show right now. All my rage baits, here's what makes people so mad. Sure. That I actually believe what I say. I'm not saying it to piss people off, I really believe it. I actually really mean it when I say it. Which makes them even more angry. Makes them just like, when you're honest,

I mean, I'm a big believer in honesty and stuff like that. When you're honest, you kind of like, also the same amount of haters that you gain, you kind of gain twice as much as people who are fans of you. And I I think that's what really matters and sometimes the haters can kind of drown it out So like I mean the reason I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired. I got like an email which was a bunch of like really scary legal words like non-dispersion I had like to like Google what this meant like I even know what disparagement meant. Okay I'm not gonna sign anything. I'm gonna wait for a lawyer and and then Roy Lee did this thing and I realized like, you know what like Roy Lee is a fucking legend

He's got skin in the game. Like Roy Lee has to win. So, you know what? I'm just gonna fucking be retarded I'm gonna be a retard I'm gonna be a retard online and I'm going to have to win and then I'm going to I'm obviously capable of winning But if I have like, you know Like the one thing I don't understand about people like Elon who like work super hard like super smart and like, you know He wants done. He's got like compounds. He's got like, you know, tons of children you could spend all day all day with like, he's got all the toys you could possibly want to play with all the engineers you could talk to. Like, if I was him, I would just like goof around with fun

toys. But like, he's actually trying to get to Mars. Like, you know, like, I feel like I feel like, sometimes it's like, so I think about being Elon, I could never be him, because I would give up at 20 mil, I'll be like, all right, I'm done, dude. Like, this is me, like, I did my part's like, I think about being Elon, I could never be him because I would give up at 20 mil. I'll be like, all right, I'm done, dude. This is me, I did my part. I'm gonna chill with my zero turn tractor and my two-acre lawn. So like-

You gotta know what you want. Yeah, exactly, right? So, but like, I think that's what happens to a lot of founders is they get enough money. Like Palmer Lucky, Palmer Lucky, it was like a chip on her shoulder. He was like, he was like, fucking Jason Cowell, I'm gonna fucking get that guy.

Like, I'm so pissed, I'm gonna do it again. And he did it again. 100% did it again. He did it again Did it again? By the way, I love Jason I love Jason I love Palmer like I love both of them I'm and you know what Jason is like the it's like it's like you can't have Batman without the Joker, right? Yeah, Palmer lucky without Jason He's the Joker of time He's a joker for Palmer lucky the Joker would be the middle manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android

bugs. Okay. We're getting into the story. We're learning what actually happened. We're unraveling it. Don't worry about it. I never said anything about my... Don't worry about it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What's next? Yeah, I mean, yeah. So what's next? All in on Dingboard, building out the team. Okay. So Dingboard is doing great. I'm going to keep on growing it and try to get more money money because I need some land and here's why I need some land

I've been building things. Mm-hmm. This is the ding bot the ding bot the ding box. You this was do I threw I 3d printed this What does it do? This is this is an arm. Yes p32 attached to a motor driver attached to a stepper driver Sorry, sir. Sorry stepper motor. Okay, some 3d printed things that I made with Dink had by the way, Dink had.com it's currently down because I had no time to work on it, but I have like a local host version. Dink had is coming back breaking new popsicle sticks. No events. Oh, here's, here's the genius of it. Okay. It is. I need cashflow. You know,

hardware is hard because you buy an iPhone and like you have an iPhone. It's like good for like 30 years, right? Yep. but with popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month. You have to buy a new one. Oh There we go, there we go get them in the boardroom You know what? It's like you have a dobby the elf robot That's like cleaning the house and like, you know, it costs you 30 bucks and it makes a mistake You just go in and just fucking eat it you like kick it across the room because it's like 30 bucks You can just buy another one. buy another one it's like that's the feature you're not worried about you're not you're not worried about you

know getting paper clipped by abusing your Dobby robot uh it'll come back to get you at some point oh no you just program it to be happy that it gets kicked you know it's like Dobby's like you know please you know please sir you just program it right like oh this is like a soft problem by the way. Like, no, we're not going to get run away. I think the real problem with like AI and stuff is like YouTube shorts. Have you seen these kids all like, like I saw a kid like,

so I eat dinner. So with my family, this kid was like at the, trying to get to the bathroom, he's 12 years old and he was on his YouTube shorts and he was like trying to like find the, the door now, like clicking, like, like, not clicking around, but like, like reaching around. I was actually kind of like find the the door now like clicking or like like not clicking around like like reaching around is actually kind of kind of brutal but like that I think that's like the real AI risk for what's worth like YouTube shorts specifically. So you're in retirement is there anything

that could get you to come out of retirement could you? I was quoting yesterday. I mean to get you back into a mega corporation. Yeah it's gonna take $100 million offer? Is it going to take $80 million? $100 million? $120 million? What gets you to take the job for those? I don't think the companies I would work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. What are those kind of companies? I think like tech can run a process right now. I'm talking big tech. So I know you don't want to work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number? All right. I'm gonna just start doing an auction here. Okay. I got a message for 500 500. Do I have a 600? 600. All right.

Our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise 15 million with 5 million in secondary. I could raise real money like super easily and like I could also get a job super easy. I mean, I have friends. The thing is, it's like I'm a very honest hard worker. Like the places I've worked at, I could go back. Like I have like a really strong network. So I don't really need a job. And I mean, I'm not worried about getting a job. But if I wanted to join in terms of like, for me, the mission alignment is super important.

Like I really need to like use the product to actually enjoy it. So I sold some ding board t-shirts on Shopify and I'm like aligned with like Toby's awesome. Yeah. And then Coher, I think it's like a really interesting place to work for because they're on the come up, but mostly like, I mean, he's in Canada. He's in Canada. Hold on. Yeah. Breakdown Cohered. That is not the common narrative. I mean, I love Aiden and I think it's incredibly founder, but, but it does seem like, you know,

there's got to be some sort of like geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out. I think, I just think they're based, dude. Like, I just, yeah, I just think they're fucking based, yeah. So it's just pure culture, they'll figure it out, they will find an opportunity? You know, like, it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or like California or Canada,

and I think they're fucking cool. They got it, they need a poster in residence. Are you a Death Grips guy? You could 1000 poster in residence. Are you basically a thousand X their, their, their impression. Do you listen to death grips? Oh yeah. Yeah. It goes, it goes, it goes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cause cause Aiden's a big death grips guy. That just bumps cohere on top of Shopify. Yep. Yep. Yep. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. He did a, he did an interview in a death grips t-shirt. I saw it and I was like, that's amazing. This guy's a killer.

But what's, what's wrong with just becoming a full-time poster? Getting a sub stack set up getting a nice Come like an actual billionaire. The ding-bott thing is not a joke. I'm actually going to actually do it. That's and I'm not gonna race. I think I can do it I probably can find people to do this for there's a lot of things that are really interested on the way which is like Doing like reinforcement learning for like control of robots, certain types of robots. I think I figured something out after listening to a popular lucky podcast

about don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in software. And I'm pretty good at software and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard. Clearly it's not hard enough to start. It's easy actually. You, you, you, you proved with that,, it's not hard enough to start. It's easy, actually. You proved with that that it's easy. Yeah. Explain that with the reinforcement learning for robotics. Are you thinking like you're going to do stuff in simulation and then transfer the knowledge back with reinforcement learning? Are you doing the thing that Dylan Patel was posting about with the robots on

the harnesses, trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data? What are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement? So I don't think human-annoyed robots is what I would do. I think I would do robots for things that annoy me. For example, dandelions on my lawn. I would do whatever is possible. I have a pretty good solid network. Talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich.

I don't know how to pronounce it. And just be like, hey, feed me the papers and some shitty some shitty Python code all clean up and make good. Sorry, researchers. You guys are extremely not treatment code met coded. He's out of the game. Someone's got to build a robot that picks up the leaves exactly exactly what now because it's like, I'm fucking sick of like going outside and just you know, just like poking out all these Danielize I'm so sick and tired of it. It's so easy to build this like literally's like literally 3D printer. Like you could even 3D print the wheels. Like you can get like five bucks off of AliExpress and ESP32 costs like three

bucks. I just impulse buy them. I like get my X ad revenue payout and I just like spend the whole thing on AliExpress. My house like constantly has like these random AliExpress packages. I just like maybe build like a Minecraft sorting system in real life. Like, yeah. I feel like, I like a Minecraft sorting system in real life. Like, yeah. I feel like, I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home Depot for like 300 bucks, you know, kind of new.

I could also sell for 25 bucks on subscription and you get a new one every month. Oh, there we go. Yes. There you go. Because people are picking their Dobbies. Yeah. Subscription hardware.

It's like, if it breaks, it's like, I literally will tell the users, hey, I'm just, you know, a dude and there's a CNC shop here that does wood. So like they do wood CNC. So I'm going to make the robot chassis out of maple wood because there's a lot of maple here in Ottawa and I'm going to laser, you know, laser on like made in Ottawa on it except, you know, modulo, the motors inside that will be made in China. Until I figure out how to make motors, which shouldn't be that hard. But I guess like the, the, the core insight I have after doing ding board and

like, honestly, we're working for a lot of these big tech companies is like, there's a lot of little businesses on the way to something. Like I'm going to try to do this. I'm going to realize like, holy shit, like all the CAD software fucking sucks. And I'm going to build it because I can. And like, you know, Gemini 2.5 Pro just like ripping on my credit card. What about Grok?

Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model to use for coding if you write your own coding frameworks, because it's cheaper, it's faster, and it's good enough. I'm not giving all of my work away to... I don't need a PhD level intelligence because I'm not a PhD level guy. I'm trying to write React. It's not that hard to write React.

I need a model that can listen to me and understand what I mean and kind of doesn't avoid using too many if statements. So just stop using if statements and like, yeah. Yeah, so. Okay, okay. So, but here's the thing, you need to, you want to build a bunch of stuff.

I need some cashflow. Why not set up, why not set up, you know, some type of subscription? You have a lot of people want to give you $10 a month so you can have forever. I mean, honestly, that was the ding board subscription that I signed up for. It was like, support this guy who's doing something cool. Yeah, the issue is ding board is so hard to sign up for how do I even sign up for ding board?

right now Okay, I'm on never okay first of all Jordy never doubt my conversion levels ever again Version I can convert anything to anything. I am I am the guy I am a conversion god. Okay, go to ding board calm Oh, you're so good. You. I'm gonna explain the whole point. Wait, you're so good, you're so good, you don't have a buy button because you wanna inspire yourself to grind harder? Yeah, why is this different?

Go to dingboard.com. Okay, I'm here, I'm here. Sign in first? Do I have to sign in? I don't even have to tell you what to do. Legend, legend. All right, I'm signing in. I'm signing in.

Okay, I'm here, what do I, ding scribe. There we go, once you sign in. Do you wanna know what ding scribe even means? Check out, check'm here. What do I ding scribe? There we go. Once you know what things mean, not to ding scribe 1299 per month, you got to get your numbers up, dude. Do I don't have the code? It's like on my server. You got to do what Google does. It's 500 a month, but they give you six months at half price. And then it just auto converts up. Yeah, that's the real ticket. Or it should be double the price. Yeah, yeah. But the price should be, you know, cheap on day one and they just get more and more and should go up by 10%

Every month I'm not doing that YouTube shorts kid surprise some kids All right, I I'm a ding pro subscriber Dude Jordy never get that wrong dude, you're a ding scriber. You have to get that. Dude, Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a ding scriber. Ding scriber. You're part of the crew.

You're part of the crew. I'm ding maxing. Okay, talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2.5 Pro, are you cursor guy, GitHub copilot cursor? Never say, no. Never say cursor. Okay, I have a custom framework I've written for Neovim. So basically what it is is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that

I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have. So Claude and before Gemini was good, Claude and then OpenAI's models, they'd go down all the time. Like infrastructure is hard to serve at scale. I don't blame them. It's like that's a hard problem to solve. So I have like always, I always have a model available. Like even if both of them are down, like I can hit DeepSeq over open router, right? Like it's a facade. Can't you do that in cursor by just switching the model router

Switching with was there a hockey? So for me, it's like I have a weird I mean, let me let me let me flex on you guys a bit. So this is my keyboard flex flex away. Oh There we go By the way, I got a I got a homie from China to make it for me. And so basically space, what is it? Space, I don't even remember, it's all, space I is an LLM provider, so that's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Space K is Gemini Flash,

and it all renders in a single markdown file. And I've created commands for these models. So basically like depending on the fence, so three apostrophrophes and then there's gonna be the command name. So like edit file Yeah, it can I can give it basically give it a syntax to edit a file for me and then I actually manually So is this open source like, you know files up like like can I install your your setup? So no, it's not open source mostly because people are gonna start posting issues and I'm just not interested in fixing them. So I'm just going to do it for myself. I'm like, I'm pulling up the ladder behind me. Like I'm, you know, I know how much this is.

If it's not open source, you gotta raise for it. It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here. It is a cursor competitor and it's probably going to kill cursor if I open source it, but I'm not going to sell it for money. Just a little bit. I think what's going to naturally happen is like when people see me do use it, they're going to have ideas of their own and then they're going to build it for themselves. The whole point of it, so it's a NeoVim plugin kind of, it's like also a server and it plugs into a bunch of, I'm good at software. So part of the problems

with, so NeoVim is great because the software is configurable as a feature. So like the best software you can get is like software you can read and understand and actually change. The best software for you is software you've written yourself. Is there something annoys you? You can actually go change it.

And that's why I really like to like write my own frameworks. Cursor I'm sure is a great product, but I like, I'm just so particular about certain things. Like for example, like I wanna like implement TreeSitter across multiple files and automate adding files to my context. So I have a file which has a bunch of file paths and those get added to my context

based on the workspace that I'm in. And I manage it manually by literally going to the file and deleting the lines. And what I want is to automatically create an AST, so an abstract syntax tree, to be able to jump around with an LLM or train a model to actually go through the AST. This is all super obvious to me. It's like fuck man. Like what about you're gonna make any products in the parenting space?

Oh, yeah, so actually I have an idea. I had an idea. So I use an ink display By the way before you try to hack this I never update the software and I never write anything private on it So go it's I'm gonna put it public So I have an e-ink reader slash like tablet. And what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write instead of texting him, I want to make like a kind of like a radio e-ink display, kind of like an Etch and Sketch, which you can write on, but it's synced to your parents' Etch and Sketch. So my wife will have one, I will have one, and my kid will have one.

And he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over distances, right? I think that's like a really cool idea. So I'm probably going to build that. Um, if you want him to make like a gajillion dollars, it's so easy. Just look around and like come up with good ideas and actually just believe that you can do it. Like literally just go do it. Like it's not that hard. It's actually not get a 3d printer, watch some YouTube videos. YouTube is great products. I would love it if they stopped putting shorts because there's so many great

videos we can learn. Stop with the shorts, stop. Get ready, this is gonna be a YouTube short. We're gonna edit this. Yeah, exactly. This'll be on TikTok maybe. Yeah, exactly. We gotta get computers.

Yeah, Minecraft speed run. Yeah, we'll put subway surfers over you, anything. AI slop over the top. How many kids do you wanna have? So as much as God allows us to have. So just leaving it up to God and yeah, that's how many kids. Good answer. That's great.

What else do you have to say to the people while you're here? Thanks for doing this podcast, guys. I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Let's just say that. And like the doing live and stuff, like it's a pain in the ass. So keep it up, guys.

I know like- Thank you. And the live, the video team at X They're doing live and stuff like it's a pain in the ass. So keep it up guys. I know like thank you and and and the the live the live the video team at X are like generational talents like super super good people like so like just like find someone to like like find a way to reach out to Them so when you have any issues and like actually talk Yeah, I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days Otherwise, we would have been hammering you with messages every single day. But this has been great.

Come back on whenever you wanna talk about your projects. Yeah, we'd love to just hang out and chat. Yeah, thanks, I really appreciate you guys. And yeah, so keep it up. Thanks, also. Yeah, we're excited and I'm excited to be Ding Maxing. Just offer a premium tier, like I don't know, like 10 grand a month

or something like that. Maybe we become, you know. Oh, I mean, if you guys want an ad space, I'll sell you right now, like spit handshake. If you want to put an ad on Dingboard, your podcast, I'll, let's say, 12 grand. 12 grand, okay. I mean, I was making a really good deal out of this.

We'll talk to our CFO. All right, all right, all right. And you guys do a hard, our CFO, our CFO, we'll talk to your CFO. But can we get the semi-analysis deal where it's perpetual, it's 12 grand once, So we get it forever because what if you say? Is it a one-time or a great option? There's a lot of upside here. It depends on how good your podcast is Yeah, okay. Okay, we're gonna keep working on it. Hopefully ding-boring keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together

Yeah, absolutely. All right. We're excited to follow up. Awesome, I'll talk to you soon. Godspeed. Have a good one, bye. This is the news of the day with the Iran crisis. Donald Trump says, everyone keep oil prices down. I'm watching. You're playing right into the hands of the enemy, don't do it.

You love to see the president talking directly to the market. Everybody's saying, everybody's saying this is ridiculous, but it's never been tried. People always say, oh, all that matters in oil prices, supply and demand. Yeah. Well, all you gotta do is say, hey, supply, go down.

Hey, supply, go up. And demand, go down. Yeah. And we will have lower prices. I mean, there is something to that. It hasn't been tried before. It's worth trying something if you do signal I mean there there are there are stories about Oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were gonna be high and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation

For example, like that does happen every once a while, but yeah, very very odd to post anyway Back on watches the watches of espionage account says men who guide the destinies of the world will wear Rolex watches. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Dan Razine Kane in situation room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex GMT. Well, you need a GMT because you gotta know

what time it is in Iran. We gotta start doing these. This is a good one. I haven't seen this. I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the break cracking your knuckles, but this is this is special. It's like four points of attack. I mean I guess they did hit four sites so you got to point to all of them. Yeah, that's right. Well, it's been an eventful morning. Yep. Iran attacked US base in Qatar. Yes, that's been an eventful morning. Iran attacked a US base in Qatar.

Yes, that's the latest. And people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties. Apparently all the missiles were taken out in the air. And this could lead to a de-escalation and a return to a steady state of tension. Yeah, this has been my position for a long time. I'm pretty anti-aggression, anti-war,

but I'm extremely pro domes, iron domes, golden domes. I want to be able to shoot down every missile before, as soon as it leaves, no matter where it's leaving from, let's shoot it down immediately from space, from land, do whatever you can, but missiles, bombs, nuclear bombs, these things should not be relevant in the future.

But Druva has a breakdown of this. The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow represents over one year of US production capacity of the GBU-57 Bunker Buster. It's primary explosive, AFX-757 is difficult to produce, and we don't have many factories to do it. It's why way more robots are necessary

to do everything from production to automating research. I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now. Very interesting to see. Joe Weisenthal had some polymarket news. Bombing of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025. In fact, it's at the highest level of the

day. I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by we didn't actually- Former Russian president comes out and said, hey, we might just give them a nuke. That would be bad. Which would be bad. That would be bad. The other thing that's interesting the Fordo nuclear facility destroyed but before July polymarket is only sitting in a 32% chance still on 4 million in volume So I think people are basically saying

Calling that it wasn't actually destroyed or at least that's what the market is saying. So it is impacted but not Destroyed even a Trump came out Saturday night and claimed total annihilation. And up next, we have Mike Gallagher from Palantir Technologies. He's the head of defense. And he put out some comments about the partnership between Palantir and the nuclear company.

Says, this partnership marks the first time Palantir software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy Infrastructure, so we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show Mike. How are you doing? Great to have you? Come on guys. I'm honored to be with you. You guys are famous You're famous too. Thank you for joining I used to be now. I'm just you know, I'm a has-been Your technology brother. Yes, yes.

I mean, that's actually a great place to start. I want to talk about your career and the transition that you went through. There's there's a, you know, obviously, it's very exciting what you're doing now. There's also this story about like, I want you in the government, too, and I want people like you in the government. And so

is the government a place for high performing technologists to flourish? Is there something that needs to change there? I'm interested in digging into that, but why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment? Yeah, I think obviously, you know, from Northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kind of grew up always interested in the world outside of Wisconsin, the United States. When I went to college, I studied Arabic in the Middle East, I became fascinated by what was happening. I was an undergrad when we invaded Iraq. I was a senior in high school during 9-11. And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve.

Felt very strongly about service to country, but also on a practical level really wanted to apply the language and regional and cultural skills I was learning in a non-academic context and felt like there was no greater challenge than joining the United States Marine Corps. So even though I didn't come from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible that I could throw myself into. I had just really an awesome experience, couple of great deployments, learned a ton,

was a counter intelligence, human intelligence officer. And it's kind of similarly when I got out of the Marine Corps and I worked on a presidential campaign, I worked in the Senate as a Middle East guy, never thought about running myself. I moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company. Some people reached out to me about running for Congress. I was very young, I was 31.

My initial reaction was hell no. I mean, it was just, I was not, I didn't know anything about raising money. I was the guy who wrote the white paper that someone read before they went on TV. I wasn't wouldn't be on TV myself. I kind of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician. I still don't think of myself that way. But honestly, it was the fact that it scared me that like led me to do it. I felt like I felt like anything that forced you outside your comfort zone is good for your development personally. And it was I felt like it would be an extension of my military service, a way to continue my work of enhancing American deterrence, albeit from a legislative perspective. And,

and I swear I'll wrap up after this. I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me. I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected. I always conceived of it as a season of service. I think the problem with Congress is that we have too many career elected. I always conceived of it as a season of service. I think the problem with Congress is that we have too many career politicians. So I kind of always had in my head, I do a decade and when I decided to leave, Palantir was just an obvious way for me to continue that mission. I mean, Palantir was one of the rare companies that was unapologetically pro-American military, committed 100% to enhancing deterrence, willing to say that we're the good guys,

the commies are the bad guys. And I really felt like it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me. I now being surrounded by genius, you know, like 20 somethings that make me feel stupid and then a continuation of, of the mission. And I've, you know, I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing world war three. And I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the war fighter every day in Palantir. So that's the short version.

And it's been really exciting. Is that a truthful flow for elected politicians? Someone reaches out to them. Is there kind of like a scouting department in our government that's looking for up and coming talent and then keep giving them the ideas? Because I feel like the story that most people tell is, is this guy, you know, wants power or wants to, you know, he's on a warpath. Everyone tells him no,

and then he runs and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will. But which direction does it go more commonly? Was your path uncommon or is it more the norm? Well, to be clear, I don't wanna pretend like this was some pure off-shucks, Mr. Smith goes to Washington thing, right? Like clearly I was driven, ambitious, like had

kind of always had a drive my whole life. Yeah. Um, and wanted to like test myself, but honestly it was not like, I didn't think of like the political domain at that point in my life. I think more often than not, people are drawn to politics. It used to be the case that like you'd go to law school, you'd become a lawyer, you'd run for state or local office. And then that would be a natural kind of like farm team that would lead into Congress. And then you'd run for Senate. And then you try and be president one day. I actually think that's changing a little bit. Like one actually healthy thing I saw during my time in Congress is we started to get more Young veterans veterans of the kind of 9-eleven wars running for office which created a cool Bipartisan group of legislators that were willing to work together on stuff. I think you know, I think we're seeing voters

like Like wanting to have more outsiders whether it's you know business people Traditional or tech bros like like, you know, uh, you guys talk to a lot. Um, I think people are just tired. Everyone is a lawyer. It used to be also like being a lawyer. Yeah. Being a lawyer seems miserable to me, no offense lawyers. Um, but I, I don't know. And I will say finally, I went in with the assumption that the fundamental problem with Congress was

the people, right? The people were either purely Machiavellian ambitious or horribly corrupt and just didn't attract the right people. Now, to be sure, there are plenty of people that could not, they can't leave Congress because they're otherwise unemployable. And like, you know, they're not like the greatest in the world. But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality, the talent, as well as the patriotism. And I would say most people run for Congress wanting to serve the country, wanting to make

a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from. And they get forced into a system where the incentives really don't reward hard work in the domain that Congress should be focused on, right? Like there's really no reward for doing the boring work of oversight of the executive branch, of caring about the legislative process. The modern Congress has become so structurally weak

that people channel their ambition into building a media platform, social media in particular, and that almost becomes their full-time job. And that's really a problem because we need Congress to focus on the nuts and bolts of budgeting, of oversight, of reclaiming its authority from the executive branch. I came to believe that the fundamental problem with most things is that we've become so unbalanced in terms of the overall power of the federal government. And then within the federal government, the power is purely concentrated now in the executive branch, which is why our presidential campaigns get so intense every four years, because the stakes are high, right? Everything is done via executive order and has profound consequences for every business. I think a healthier balance

would be if Congress Article 1, which was envisioned by our framers to be the dominant branch of government. In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful. They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs. Congress surrendering its power since the 70s and then in bipartisan fashion, continuing that trend has had really perverse and unintended consequences for our politics. And it's why they've become so intense. And why people are turned off by it, I think.

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

what you think having been in there. You know, it's funny, man. By the way, can I say you have great flow? I just want to throw that out there. Both of you, in fact, as someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and, you know, cherish it, gentlemen. While you still have it. Some people should just be news anchors, I guess.

It's funny. Like when I first came in and I got elected in 2016 and we, we thought like our freshmen class Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill. We had a bipartisan term limits bill. I remember going to the White House. So this was Trump's first year in office, A group of six of us, three Republicans, three Democrats, went to the Oval Office to get Trump's support on our term limits bill.

Because our basic theory was unless the president was using the bully pulpit to force congressional leaders to do it, it would never happen. And so if memory serves, Trump actually we needed about it, endorsing the bill. And I if memory serves, Trump actually, we needed about it endorsing the bill. And I remember I did some selfie video, having just complained about members of Congress focusing on social media. This is probably the APES of my power. You gotta dabble a little bit.

Yeah, exactly. I remember doing some like selfie video coming out of the White House. And I genuinely thought in that moment that we had momentum behind a term limits bill. It's overwhelmingly popular with the American people. The counterarguments which we can discuss, I don't think are persuasive. What was unique about our bill and the reason we thought it might have a chance of passing?

Well, two things. One, we were in that moment, the sort of drain the swamp moment, the reason Trump got elected the first time. You know, everyone's disgusted with the status quo business as usual. He had made a pledge late in the campaign that he's going to support term limits. And then secondly, we kind of phased it in. So what was unique about our bill is we applied it

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

Totally, you grandfather in the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time. And then the new people. So, and then we made it equal in the House and the Senate, 12 years in the House, so six terms, and then 12 years in the Senate. So theoretically someone could do 24 years. They could do 12 in the House and the Senate, 12 years in the House, so six terms and then 12 years in the Senate. So theoretically someone could do 24 years, I could do 12 in the House, run for Senate. And so that seemed generous to us, but it died.

It died a slow death and then a sudden death. The problem is nobody in leadership wants to bring a term limits bill to the floor because they fear it endangers their own power. So I really do think the paradox, it's like the things we need to do to enhance the power and the functionality of the modern Congress actually require an over empowered president to make them happen. Otherwise Congress won't do it on its own. And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I want to kind of wrestle with this idea of, you know, the executive branch having power. There are term limits there. We've also had a wildly back and forth executive branch with Trump for four years, then Biden, then back to Trump, kind of unprecedented. We'd previously

been in, you know, eight year stretches for a while. And I want to run a theory by you around Iran. My working theory is that they're not happy with how things are going right now. And part of that is because part of how Iran got into this particular situation is that they potentially saw America as not supporting Israel aggressively during the Biden administration and more importantly the idea of a President who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would Was it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted and he was Seen as kind of like a joke almost and was deplatformed from social media How is this even have a Pinterest account?

You didn't even have a Pinterest account and so he he so so if you're if you're Iran and you're thinking well America is backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offensive anytime soon now is the time to Start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah, but then surprise trumps in, now we have to deal with the consequences of that. And so, into this weird way, America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically, and maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk.

And to your point about wanting to avert World War III, I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years. Is that bullish for avoiding world war three? Or is it a risk? Do we need to just tussle with it more? Like, how do you think about all those different concepts? Yeah. Well, first of all, great question. A lot of interesting threads to pull on there. The first, I would say, I would go even further back than the Biden administration to when

we started to negotiate in earnest with Iran of its overt nuclear program in the second half of the Obama administration. And really it was sort of like covert negotiations that then become overt amidst the backdrop of a region that had gone from all this hope around the Arab Spring turned Arab winter, Syrian civil War, coup in Egypt, just chaos everywhere. And then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran. Obama had sort of a theory about the region. He talked about creating a new equilibrium in the Middle East whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from Israel and balance sort of a recognize Iran's

enhanced power and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf States and Israel. The only problem is that that that new equilibrium created intense disequilibrium and missed the real story, which was the only path to equilibrium in the region is to build off this alignment of interests between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states, which are on paper strange bedfellows, but are united by the shared threat from Iran. The long pole in the tent that links all of our traditional allies together is the threat from Iran. And unless you want an enhanced American military presence in the region, the only way to forge assemblance of stability is to build off of that.

And that was kind of the genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place. Long story short, the other missed opportunity. So there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran. There was a constitutional problem, which relates to what we were talking about before, where the Iran deal sure looked a lot

like an arms control agreement, but Obama recognizing, because at that time we still had sort of pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate, recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the Senate in this case, he constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the Supreme Leader.

There was no congressional buy-in. And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash. Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it. Trump comes back in in his second term, and basically he gives the Iranians 60 days to negotiate and then took the action that you just saw.

So that's a long way of me saying there was a misunderstanding of the region and then a misunderstanding that as hard as it is to bring Congress into the process, it actually makes your executive achievements more durable and I think improves your negotiating position. Now to get to the last part of your question, I do think the president's recent decision was the right one. I think really going even back before Obama's failed and flawed agreement with Iran, the Iranians have consistently used the cover of diplomacy to covertly advance their program. And at some point, we were either going to have to accept the nuclear run or take kinetic action to set back their program. And this is the first time in a long time, really since the invasion of Iraq, that we've

combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent. And so I do think it gives us a chance to effectively eliminate their nuclear program. That being said, there's a lot of work we need to do in terms of rebuilding our entire defense industrial base so that the munitions we're using in CENTCOM don't completely deplete the resources we need in other theaters along the way. And I'll stop there because I could talk about the Middle East for 20 minutes and all of your audience would evaporate. No, this is fascinating.

I'm really enjoying this. Do you have a follow up there or I wanted to talk about- I wanted to get a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple months and couple weeks specifically. Well, I think so that my most like bullish case for what Trump has just accomplished would be, not only has he set back, if not eliminated for a decade, Iran's nuclear ambitions,

he could have just shattered the emerging axis of chaos, this sort of axis between Iran, Russia, and China. Because China sort of views Iran as both a source of hydrocarbons as well as like a gateway to expand its influence in the Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye. This is incredibly problematic Americans and our allies in the eye. This is incredibly problematic for China's view of the region. That being said, the biggest wild card that I just don't know enough about is where Trump is going to go next on China. There were some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China

access to Iranian oil. And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.0, there was this tension between some more hawkish members of the administration on China and then more dovish members at Treasury. There's a there's sort of a version of this tension going on right now. And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xi Jinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it. At other times, he's like uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China.

I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China. And so I guess there's lingering questions about how we want to approach China. But I really think this is the serious setback for this axis of chaos, this anti-American access. Russia, of course, was getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war in Eastern Europe. I can't help but think that that's going to be increasingly difficult given that Iran is dealing with the aftermath of the attack,

as well as increasing internal pressure. And then hats off to the Israelis. I mean, I think this shows how valuable it is to have lethal allies that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own, but are willing to take a big role in the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America. In fact, what we've seen really in terms of the way they've gone after Hezbollah, the beeper operation, and then their systematic campaign against the nuclear facility, some of the most daring and imaginative intelligence and military work

that I think I've ever seen in my lifetime. And even if one isn't as pro-Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire just how effective their military and intelligence community is. Yeah, that's undeniable. Bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have any insight here. There was a lot of-

What's the population of Iran? No. Yeah. There was some interesting price action in Bitcoin, which hard to read too much into, but people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining a lot of Bitcoin. Fascinating.

Maybe it didn't come up for you, but I saw somebody posting that he was like, I'm not buying Bitcoin right now. It seems obvious that the regime is just dumping in order to fund the war effort. Basically, the recovery effort even. It would make sense. But if you don't have any insight there, we can move on.

I wanted to. I'm afraid I don't, but I do think, and I've said this to like all the smart crypto folks like Brian Armstrong and others. I think there's, or a Wisconsin colleague of mine, Brian Stile, who's one of the leaders in the house on this issue. You guys should have him on.

He's really smart. You know, in Congress, Wisconsin. Yeah. Brian Stile. He's always in style. Welcome. Welcome. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. I think there's like a, an underexplored aspect He's always in style. Brian's style. His welcome. Welcome. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

I think there's like an underexplored aspect or argument about like crypto's role in national security, right? Because the anti-crypto argument is always like, this is just a way of sanctions evasion and money laundering. And I think what people don't appreciate is like how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies' national security interests. And certainly it was a case when, you know, people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan that crypto was enormously valuable in that regard.

It might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community. So I shouldn't get to that's an area where like national security nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto. But I hadn't heard that about switching gears to the European continent. I wanted to get your reaction to the NATO spending news and maybe kind of the backstory. I'm sure when you were in Congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing, but any reactions there? Well, listen, I think anytime, first of all, this idea that the American president

would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense is not a new thing. It is not sort of unique to Trump. Eisenhower, the first supreme ally commander of NATO, like actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies at times. So this is like, and we've had democratic senators tried to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO. So this is like a, an old argument that is new again. I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense

is a great thing for deterrence in general. I would say, however, I've always been of the view that this obsession with the inputs, i.e. what percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis. Every NATO country could be spending 5% of their GDP on defense, but if they're all buying the wrong crap or buying stuff that isn't interoperable and doesn't actually amount to a coordinated multinational deterrence by denial effort with hard power shifted as far east as possible with the frontline states playing unique role. Then you actually have, you haven't actually fighting off a common operational picture

and shout out to NATO for acquiring Maven smart system made by Palo Alto technologies. No big deal. Um, then you have actually, it's like a sports team. A sports team doesn't wake up one morning and like, let's all give it 100%. And that's the only coordination. It's like, you know. Yeah, yeah. You can easily turn this into a jobs program where you say,

yeah, we're going to spend 5% of our GDP on horseback and cavalry. And it's like, you're going to lose. But yes, you're technically going to be spending 5%. And you're going to have a massive military. But you're going to get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs. So is there any,

do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly? Cause it feels like, it feels like to me, getting from 2% to 5% is the bigger mental hurdle than the allocation of that 5%. And yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now, but that feels like An easier conversation or maybe I'm wrong there I think the closer you are to the threat the more you're thinking you're thinking is sharp, right?

So does my experience that you know Poland the Baltic states? Tend to have a clear view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own military. By the way, we've acquired two new NATO, acquired is the wrong term. We've got two new countries joined NATO in recent years that bring phenomenal HIP abilities to the table. I think, you know, traditionally struggled convincing the Germans who are, you know, the big elephant in the European room to make the right investments and to make more investments. My hope is that that conversation is getting better.

I guess I worry sometimes that kind of related to what you said earlier, they'll be privileging certain domestic companies even if they don't actually produce capability. I think it's fair to say obviously I'm biased because I work in an American software company, but we are the best in the world like by 10 orders of magnitude when it comes to software development in this country. And that's just not something that Europe does well. So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the palanters of the world and European hardware defense manufacturers.

I'd love to see more of that going forward. And I've always been a proponent of, you know, we have a ton of troops in countries like Germany and Western Europe, getting them out of garrison, shifting them further on NATO's Eastern flank, taking advantage of the invitation that certain frontline states like Poland made at least in the previous administration to build new bases and forts that enhance our deterrence posture. I think there's a huge opportunity here. And it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric, as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking it loose right now. Obviously, it's a bit over determined.

I mean, you know, the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And it's a massive wake-up call for Europe that they need to invest more and buy the right things. But I do think we have a moment here. And I think what's critical to our analysis in the US, particularly my own party, the Republican party, is to do a better job.

And I didn't quite do this well when I chaired the China committee in Congress, in teasing out the connection between Russia and China and why what happens in one theater affects another theater and that it isn't just a choice between Europe or the Indo-Pacific. We're a global power. We're a sole superpower. We have an existential challenge in the form of communist China. We have to pay attention everywhere. Yes, we have to make hard decisions and prioritize accordingly, the Indo-Pacific is the priority theater. But one of the best ways we can invest more

of our own exquisite resources into the Indo-Pacific is to get on the same page with our allies in Europe and ensure that they're buying the right things and that the way we fight together is actually leveraging cutting edge commercial technology, software or hardware. That's great. Great. Should we talk about the news today?

The announcement, the nuclear deal that you guys want? Yeah, that'd be great. Can you break it down for us? Everything is nuclear. Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear. Yeah, I mean, I want to know the shape of the partnership, anything you can share there,

but then I'd love to go into kind of what you're particularly excited about in nuclear or even just energy broadly. We've seen that the United States energy production per capita is kind of flatlined for a while. China's increasing energy production very aggressively. It feels top of mind, especially in the backdrop of the foundation model AI race, that we need to be building more energy infrastructure. And there's different resources coming online. Nuclear is probably the most fascinating one that has the ability to scale,

because we've tamed the atom, and yet we can't just seem to copy paste Diablo Canyon 50 times to actually get a massive increase in energy production There's also stuff happening on the smaller scale. I want your take on nuclear as a whole in addition to the deal Yeah, I by the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this the nuclear stuff But it's your fault though because of my understanding if I'm just batting cleanup for Eliana Oh, yeah, and he talked too much, but I'm happy to come back at any point.

Listen, I mean, we can't obviously we can't dominate the like the commanding heights of critical technology and AI if we don't improve our sort of all the above energy policy. There is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country. The Trump administration has put out some really productive EOs, but now it's incumbent upon the private sector to step up. And the nuclear company is that. I mean, they're gonna leverage our software

to build reactors, which right now take over a decade to build and collapse that timeline down. And I think we're at the forefront of something really interesting. China is investing billions of dollars in this space, putting their best and brightest on the problem, and we can't fall further behind. And by the way, it affects our military deterrence as well

because our diplomacy is enhanced with foreign countries when we're able to come to them and say, we are a reliable partner for civilian nuclear technology, and we help you build and access that technology safely. When what I don't wanna see is a replay of what we saw with China and 5g and Huawei, where China was going all over the world saying, you can have 5g internet steeply, we'll just control the infrastructure. Um, it'll be in a box, you know, you won't even have to worry about anything.

And like in America, we'll be like, Whoa, don't do that time out. But if you're a country that doesn't have to worry about anything. And like in America, we're like, whoa, don't do that. Time out. But if you're a country that doesn't have resources in Africa or in the global south, like you're probably not paying as much attention to the CI concerns. And so there's something similar playing out in the nuclear space right now. So I'm very bullish about this partnership. You know, I think this is the custom of something big for the nuclear company and for Palantir. And we're going to be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with and orals, Saronic and non-traditional partners with our warp speed manufacturing product

and apply it in to the nuclear space. That's fantastic. I'm getting pulled. I'm getting pulled. You're getting pulled. We'll see you on another. We'll see you. We have to have you back on soon. Come back on soon. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. I'll come back for Packer's commentary. All right. Great. Cheers. Hims and hers stock drops more than 30% after Novo Nordisk breakup. This is from the Wall Street Journal.

Of course, if you're interested in stocks that are dropping because you're going short or are popping because you're going long, you gotta get in public investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields and they're trusted by millions. Anyway, the Wagoovie maker, that's Novovo nordisk has cut ties with the telehealth company hims and hers citing allegations of deceptive marketing

practices and drug compounding I Feel like they were the drug compounding. How is this an allegation? I thought that's like what James was saying they were doing they were like I felt like there was a lot of press about them being like proud of Drug compounding because there was a shortage, but I guess it's I guess it's alleged at this point. So we'll dig into this Novo Nordiska roughly ended its partnership with him and hers after the Danish drug maker accused the telehealth company of illegally selling cheaper copycats Okay, so this is after the FDA's ruling around about whether or not there was in fact a shortage.

So the Novo said on Monday that it had concerns about the safety of knockoff versions of a WGOOVEE and that Hims and Herb's deceptive marketing of such knockoffs put patient safety at risk. In turn, Hims and Hers accused Novo of pressuring it to steer patients to Wagoovie, regardless of whether or not it was the best option for patience.

News that the deal was scrapped weighed heavily on him and her shares, sending them down 32% in afternoon trading in what would be the largest decline for the stock on record. Novo Nordisk's shares were down nearly 6% in New York. The messy breakup comes less than two months after the company's unveiled what they called a long-term collaboration to directly provide Wagoovey to Hims and Her as patients.

Okay, so this was somewhat predictable, right? We talked to TJ Parker about this. Hims has been on a generational run in the markets because they're one of the best, easiest ways that people can just go buy Wegovi. Yes. Now, if you're a Nova Nordisk and you're like, cool, we're selling through this channel,

but then the retailer, in this case, Hims, is telling customers as they come in, hey, we know you wanted Wegovi, but how about this sort of cheap knockoff, this compounded version? Now, Wegoviigovy is probably legitimately concerned about safety issues. There can be issues around compounding and drug safety.

But then the bigger issue is like, hey, you're marketing. You're using our brand and our products to acquire customers. And then you're getting those people in the door and you're saying, hey, how about this sort of cheaper, off-the the shelf alternative? And so I have to imagine that this is Nova Nordisk recognizing the value of their brand in this massive, massive fast growing category

and saying, we're not gonna let you leverage our brand to compete on these sort of high margin, you know, knockoff products. Yeah, I mean, like the Instagram ads that I saw were definitely pushing the brand name for real. And there was a while when they wouldn't use the term Viagra and they would use ED meds and sildenafil and todolafil and all of those different,

they would use the actual underlying compound name and they pushed it so hard that people actually started knowing the name of the underlying compound name and they pushed it so hard that people actually started knowing The name of the underlying compound. Yeah But yeah, the brand name. How do you think him? He'll respond you think they'll introduce a 10-in-1 shampoo That includes compounded. Yep, GLP ones Viagra hair loss. Yeah medication. What else could adderall?

Viagra, hair loss, medication, what else could, Adderall? They could put some caffeine. I mean, this is Cognizant, Rhodiola, PanX, Genseng, L-Theanine, caffeine. You got some GLP-1 in here. Creatine soap with. Creatine soap would be good. With all the above. Eli Lilly's the one that lost the patent, right?

Because they forgot to pay the. No, I think it was Novo Nordis. Novo? Wow. They have. They're all over the place. It is interesting to watch. Yeah.

Novo Nordis, how much do you think their stock is up over the past five years? Ooh, 500%. Try 113%. 113, but it was a big company, yeah. Yeah. But it's been a big company. But still, and how much do you think what do you think the chart looks like over the last year oh it's down the GLP one boom it's down

because it ripped up so high and 50 percent and they and they rotated out their CEO that's right we covered that yeah hims and hers is that nine billion nine point six six billion that is down from a high of maybe fifteen billion Hims and hers is at 9.66 billion. That is down from a high of maybe 15 billion. And it's one of those interesting SPAC targets that I think they got out through a SPAC and they never really went down that far. They were down, you know, yeah, like 30%.

I mean, they spacked at $10 a share, went down to $4 a share, kind of grinded back up mean they spacked at $10 a share went down to $4 a share kind of grinded back up now They're at $40 a share So if you if you bought this if you bought the SPAC and you did hold for five years You're you know, you're sitting on a 3x 4x not bad So, you know Kind of a narrative violation around the around the SPAC like all SPACs are bad narrative yeah yeah I mean it and and the CEO Andrew Dudum we should have him on the show said that you know I think his position

you know we have no idea what the details of their of their contract actually look like but fairly reasonable position to say, we're not going to just sell one product, just because it's true, not every patient is gonna respond well to Wigovie, and they should have options. So before striking deals with brand name drug makers, telehealth firms were selling lower cost knockoff versions

of these drugs made by compounding pharmacies taking market share away from Brand name makers the compounding pharmacies had been allowed to mass produce knockoff versions Conditionally because the original drugs were in short supply now the the whole compounding pharmacy Dynamic is very different because I feel like the laws were created different because I feel like the laws were created such that if a big pharmaceutical company couldn't supply you the drug, like your local pharmacist could compound it, but then the startups kind of like rolled up all the compounding pharmacies and were doing it like a much bigger scale and it wasn't exactly what was intended originally, but I'm not sure about that.

Yeah. So the big question is when should they be more? Well, yeah, the big question what will there be more regulatory action around compounded GLP ones and what will that do to their business? So roller coaster of a year for him's partnership was announced in April 2025 popped terminated just a few months later with a 35% drop. Well, if you're on GLP ones and you're losing weight and your wrists are getting thinner, you need a watch that can adapt to your new wrist size.

You need to go on getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to source you any watch on the planet, seriously any watch. And you can find a watch with metal links that you could take out a link if you've lost a lot of weight. Or you could add one back if you're in a bulking cycle. Yeah. So something like a Nautilus.

Keep those links handy when you're ready to start the bulk. Exactly. This is key, this is very, very key. Anyway, a comment from the CEO, Andrew Dudum, he said, Hymns HRS will continue to offer access to a range of treatments, including Wagyuvi, so they continue to battle it out. It'll be interesting to follow this,

and we will, of course, be talking to CREMU about this later today. There is a investing visual post here that I pulled up about how HIMS makes money. They're making $576 million online, $10 million from wholesale. That brings their total revenue to $586 million, which is up 111% year over year. Gross profit there, $428 million. Operating expenses are $337 million, leaving them $92 million in operating income and $50 million in operating income

and 50 million in net income. So 50 million in net income for a $10 billion stock, pretty high price to earnings ratio, if that's an indication of their earnings, but it's been a big growth stock on a major, major trend, GLP one, and so the retail army has been coming out in force King KSM's capital said it felt too good to be true for him to go this long without some fud This is more like it just bought 2300

2300 shares and Top-secret what is the retail army call themselves? I don't know and Top Secret. What is the retail army call themselves? I don't know. Himbo's or something. Say I'm really him. Yeah. Hims, look at the data.

You can see their operating margin has improved a ton since they've gone public. They started out at negative 40% operating margin and climbed up every single quarter. They're now at a 6.5% operating margin. The number of subscribers in the millions has gone from, they were at.6, so 600,000 subscribers. Now they're at 2.4 million,

and their total revenue has gone from $272 million in revenue. This is the last 12 months. Now they're almost at two billion. And so they've almost 10x revenue from that SPAC price, and that's what's driving the stock overall to be up three to four X off the original SPAC price. So, very good news.

If you're Andrew Dudum, and you need a break from grinding it out at Hems, book a Wander, find your happy place. Book a Wander with inspiring views. It's summer summer and your hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24-7 concierge service, it's a vacation. Imagine you're in one of the gnarliest PR crises of your life and two guys in suits on a podcast. You never matter just like yeah take a vacation but I think it's a bad idea. Hymns is up 2% today John. So it's time to you know treat yourself. bad idea to put off the gas. Hims is up 2% today, John. You're good.

So it's time to treat yourself. Yeah, take your foot off the gas. Head to wander.com. And speaking of foots on gas, Ford, which makes car, Cremu, welcome to the stream. There he is, looking handsome as ever. How you guys doing? Doing well. Can you hear me? Yeah, we can hear you fine. Um, I'm,

I'm, I'm looking forward to, uh, to, you know, a future date when we can potentially see your face. Um, but for now, your avatar looks great soon. Okay. I'm looking forward to it. Um, we wanted to have you on to chat about a couple things. Uh, what's going on GLP one world reaction to the hims and her hers breakup? Jordy, where would you like to start? High level update on the GLP one market. Yeah, I guess I mean it's this miracle drug that keeps on we keep on learning about new new

Diseases or problems that it can treat. It seems like it can't just stop. We got the diabetes, then weight loss, then maybe gambling addiction and other stuff. Walk us through how people are using or how doctors are prescribing GLP-1s for various conditions and what's most promising, what's on the horizon, and what you're tracking next.

Yeah, so I'm actually really glad you asked this right now because right now the ADA, the American diabetes association conference is ongoing and it seems like every other presentation is about GLP ones. They are just talking about all the latest advances. Just yesterday, Amgen showed off a once monthly instead of once weekly injectable. Eli Lilly showed off an amazing combo therapy with an inhibitor called Bimagruma. It's a very weird name that makes people not lose any muscle when they're on the drugs. They've been showing off just incredible advances all week. They've been

showing off new treatments for like different conditions and whatnot. There are increasingly many indications that these drugs are getting approved for. In December, Terzepotide was approved for sleep apnea. There's osteoarthritis indications incoming. There might even be, there's some effort being put into people trying to do something for cancers as well, because it does seem to help with obesity related cancers. And it seems to help for, I don't know why, with hematological cancers, the blood cancers. don't know understand really the mechanism behind that but

It seems like it's just hitting every single indication now. Well Why do you think that is I have some guesses? I think the big reason has to do less with the direct effects of GLP-1s and more with the fact that obesity sucks. Obesity is just really, really bad. It affects so many different systems. It makes your health worse on so many different levels. And the things that lead to obesity are also quite bad, like the bad diet, the bad habits, not moving around very much.

It's actually interesting. A lot of people, after they've been on these drugs for a little while, they decide to move around more. They become more likely to go to the gym. They report their physical functioning has improved. It turns out that getting fat has made them get to the point where they are no longer looking to be active. And so they just kind of fall into a hole.

Practically everything has improved, I think, for that reason and there are some improvements that are due to direct effects of the drugs. This has like for example this one is major adverse cardiac events, major adverse cardiovascular events. Those seem to be reduced in number immediately after starting the stuff which suggests that there's a mechanism that's pretty direct and this mechanism is also independent of weight loss. So that seems to be how that works. Same with chronic kidney disease.

Are you looking, you know, I feel like the sort of biohacker alternative health world has for a long time, you know, talked about cancer being, you know, this metabolic disease. Do you think that could be a factor and why it could show some promise in treating various types of cancers? Yeah. I think it does make a lot of sense in that direction for the obesity-related ones, but

I don't think it makes sense. So years ago, there were people who suggested, I think quite wrongly, replacing certain cancer therapies with fasting because it seems to like, augment the effects of cisplatin-based therapies and stuff. And that didn't really hold up very well. It was a bunch of theory work that didn't go anywhere. And I don't think that this would help

through those purported mechanisms, which again, I don't really believe in. I really think it's mostly just cutting down on, for example, the number of cells you have, or well, not really a number of cells you have, but, uh, like the activity of being fat, it's just, you have, you're not as big of a person. You have less to, less opportunity for cancer to really hit you when you are. Smaller. Yeah.

Smaller. It's like how short people tend to live longer than everything else. Bad for you. Bad for you. Bearish for me. Bad for you. Barish for me. How much of the recent advances in GLP-1 indications or recent benefits have been just looking at all the people that are taking GLP-1s for weight loss or diabetes and then seeing a secondary effect in the population that's actually running the drug versus a new double-blinded trial for a different indication.

Are both things happening or are these drugs diffuse enough that you can just look at the overall population and get an idea of what's happening? Yeah. So for FDA-approved indications like obstructive sleep apnea, you do have to run additional trials, but they are seeing that these things are possible from their trials or seeing these things are possible from the literature, and they're running based on that. So in some cases, they do see these secondary endpoints. In fact, obesity is an example of this.

Back in the day when they first introduced these drugs, back around 2005 or so, the CEO of Novo Nordisk at the time actually said, and I quote, obesity is primarily a social and cultural problem. It should be solved by team, by means of a radical restructuring of society. There is no business for Novo Nordisk in that area, referring to obesity. Wow. Yeah. So their scientists had to push for about a decade to go, Hey, you should look at the weight loss data. It's really impressive. And then they finally, finally did it. And now we have weight loss drugs. Yeah, that is, that is wild. Um, what, uh, what concerns you? What's the catch? Seems, uh, you know, uh. Yeah, somebody might say, is it too good to be true? We're running this sort of massive experiment

on huge swaths of the population right now. Seems to be, you know, many, many positive indicators, but what are kind of red flags that you think people should be kind of looking out for or the scientific community should be wary of broadly from your point. Yeah, so I think that physicians need to be careful about prescription and they already are.

They don't tend to prescribe this to people who are very skinny, but the fact that this stuff is available through the gray market very easily without prescription for very, very cheap, fortunately I've contributed to that, has led to a lot of people- In what way? In what way?

You mean just- Oh, I made a guide to doing this and a few thousand people actually paid me $8 apiece to see all the details on it. And now I have a few thousand people who, unprompted, I didn't tell them to do this, message me their weight loss progress and such. So through writing this guide a few months ago, I've led to almost 12,000 pounds of weight loss. And that's just what's been reported to me. Not everybody's telling me all the results.

And is that at a high level, people just finding pharmacies that will compound the drug for them? What does that actually look like? So what it looks like is buying from China. So you are ordering from a Chinese factory, you are testing the purity of the stuff and finding, oh, it's 99.9%, I can use it, and then using all of that. It is not sold by Nova Nordisk, Eli Lilly,

or any other major company working on these drugs. It's just from some Chinese company that is ripping them off. So is that patent infringement? I w we've been seeing that kind of go back and forth like hims and hers was able to compound because there was a shortage. I would love to see Nova Nordisk go to the CCP and say, Hey, can you please knock this off? Yeah. I mean they can do import bans or, or, or seize the packages at the port. It's like, that's the design of this. You can't just buy a knockoff iPhone and have it delivered through the Port of Los Angeles.

Like if a whole truckload comes through, they should stop that, but it's clearly not happening. So right now the FDA allows this to happen because they have an exemption for research chemicals. You're technically not supposed to use these things, but everybody knows that everybody uses them. It's just how it is. They're researching weight loss on themselves. Yeah, I'm researching. End of one, I'm researching.

Research maxing. Yeah. I'm doing research. So you were saying the potential red flags or things to be wary of is around, what about the prescription activity concerns you? Mostly abuse. Not really prescription activity as concerns you? Mostly abuse. Not really prescription activity as so much as the abuse.

There are people who are obtaining these drugs. There are people who are getting other people to get the prescriptions. There are people who are not really visiting doctors. They're using telehealth services to get prescriptions and they are not in need of them. But why would someone abuse this? This doesn't feel like something that has like

the euphoria associated with a stimulant. So the concern I think would be somebody has body dysmorphia. Is that what's going on? Really skinny. something that has like the euphoria associated with a stimulant or somebody has body dysmorphia. Is that what's going on? Really skinny. Yeah. Unfortunately, I've met a few dozen women now who have taken these drugs and been around 120, 130 pounds, normal height, and now they're around a hundred and they are, they don't look good anymore. They look like they're aging very quickly. They look unfortunate. And it's sad to see that they're using these drugs

when they didn't even need them in the first place. Interesting. The same negative effects of actual starvation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you start getting really bad, harmful effects. You probably are eating at that point more lean mass than fat mass. It is quite bad.

Yep, yep, that makes sense. Yeah, that's always the risk. How are you, what was your reaction to the Hymns, Novo Nordisk partnership blow up? So I actually think this is a big failure on Novo Nordisk part. It seems as though what they did was they partnered with Hymns in order to catch them. My understanding is that Hymns has been selling a little too much more than

they've been supplied by the person producing the drugs, which is interesting. I guess we'll get more details relatively soon if the lawsuit commences all that. Theoretically, Wigovia gives them a million doses and then HIMS is somehow selling 1.2 million doses of Wigovia, is that where you're at? Yeah, something like that. They're either compounding it themselves

or ordering from something from China. They are doing something. And I don't know if that will hold up or show up in trial. It's an accusation. It's, so I guess it's alleged, but we'll see, we'll see. What about, what about Hymns's general position that patients should have as much choice as possible, as much access, you know, access at different price points,

things like that. They are completely correct to do that. I think that HIMS providing different dosages than are provided by Novonortis is a wonderful thing. There are people who can get legitimate uses out of sort of micro-dosing this stuff because it gets rid of noise. I've met many, many people now,

and this is an increasingly common thing it seems. I really don't know how far this is gonna go, but but a lot of people who are microdosing this because it helps with their ADHD. Their ADHD is like the pathological end of food-based distraction. They're not losing weight from this anymore, but they are just using it in order to not think about food at all. It gets rid of that nagging feeling in the back of their head and they can focus. Yeah, I I did a 24-hour dry fast from Friday night to Saturday night. Yeah, and

All day Saturday. I was shocked at how much time my I was just thinking about food and water wanting food And I was you know, and I was very freeing to some degree because I was like well I'm not just not having any until around dinnertime And it was very freeing to some degree, because I was like, well, I'm just not having any until around dinnertime. But so many points throughout the day, my mind was just going to, oh, I should go get a little tasty drink from the fridge.

I'm not addicted. I'm not addicted. I'm not addicted to water. I'm not addicted to water. I'm not beating the water addiction allegations. Big water guy. What else are you tracking right now broadly? Any reactions to the NIH funding?

Oh yeah, 40%. We had Andrew Huberman on the show. He was breaking it down for us and what's going on with J. Bhattacharya. What's your take on the cuts that have been proposed? So I don't know how much I should reveal about that. There's a lot of really good things coming. There might be some interesting developments

there very soon. I'm especially hopeful about. Well, you know, actually, I shouldn't say that just there there'll be good news there soon. There'll be a some changes, I guess. Yeah, yeah, I guess zooming out like what what does good look like to you? Are you generally in favor of taxpayer funded in every American gets a $10,000 biohacking budget?

Vouchers? Yeah, I mean, some people would say like, you know, the, the, the big pharma companies are profitable. They should bear this expense, not the, yeah. So they're not profitable enough. Um, they have troubles with R andD. That public money is very, very useful. We need more public funding than we currently have. Yeah, when you actually look at biotech returns,

just looking at the ASIC class, the logical thing to do would just be to invest elsewhere. And that was with historical levels of public funding that kind of contributed to those returns to some degree. Yeah. We have a dearth of funding at the moment and we need to increase it. We need to improve the allocation and also increase the amount.

There's really no way around it. If we want to keep making progress, you just have to throw more money at these things. And I think we will start doing that very shortly. These cuts are a little alarming to start, but they are not the end of the discussion. Remember, it's still only five months into this presidency and they have a lot of really big plans. They have a lot of trouble getting appointees through the Senate and they have a hiring freeze ongoing right now that is interminable.

We don't know when it's going to end, but once that is over, they'll be issuing NPRMs left and right. It's going to be deregulatory, like massacre. It's going to be wonderful. Wow, well that's what else is exciting to you in biotech right now in- Well, I wanted to say on the Hems point with the different pricing and whatnot,

I think perhaps the most exciting thing right now in that area is that Novo Nordisk is run by idiots. They're very smart people, but they're just total idiots. Hey, everybody misses the patent. You know, what do they do? They forgot to do it. They have Eli Lilly, but they missed the patent. No, no, this is Novo Nordisk.

Oh, there was Novo that lost the patent fee. Yeah, they just forgot to pay the bill. It was 450 bucks or something. Yes, it was 250 and then they missed it and they were told you're one year out, you can pay a late fee, like an extra $200 late fee on it. And they still failed.

It is amazing. That enables a wonderful, wonderful program that the FDA should pursue immediately. The FDA and the CMS have to collaborate on this But it's the section 804 importation program and it allows individual US states to import as much of the Generic drugs or any other type of drug that's produced in Canada And has like an indication of proof here and whatnot, as they want to reduce costs. So for example, Florida will, whenever they get this actually going,

have much cheaper EpiPens. They'll be able to lower the cost of their drugs by importing cheap generics from Canada. And because cheap generic Ozempic is going to be coming from Canada in 2026, every state can just jump on the program. And if we're giving people, if we're giving Americans $5 a week,

Ozempic, then we're going to see perhaps an end to the chronic disease crisis. We're going to see obesity tackled meaningfully. We're going to see people getting hot again and make America hot again. The real meaning of aha. The real meaning of aha. Oh, the real meaning of aha.

Let's go. There we go. Inside baseball. That's amazing. Very exciting. Well, 15 minutes was not enough time. Never enough. We should have you back on again soon.

Thank you for all the insights. Yeah, thanks for coming on. We'll have you back on soon. This is great. Absolutely, it's a good one. And if you dox yourself anywhere other than here, we will be very upset. So. Might have to. Oh no. Sorry guys. I'll do it as a play. You guys have a good one. And if you docks yourself anywhere other than here, we will be very upset

Shell is in turn in early talks to acquire rival British petroleum BP But shell denies the Wall Street Journal's report that it's in talks to acquire BP so we have a little bit of an update to the story. And M&A, just in the last 20 months, Morning Brew's breaking it down here. Shell BP is clocked at maybe 80 billion, but the deal's pending. Exxon and Pioneer are doing a $60 billion M&A deal.

Chevron and Hess, deal's still pending, but it's at 53 billion. D-Bac and Endeavor, don't even know those companies, but $26 billion deal there. Conoco, Phil and Marathon at 17 billion, and Occidental and Crown Rock at 12 billion. So if you think the AI M&A deals are hot, you gotta go over to big oil.

Big oil, oil and gas. Big tech, big oil, big pharma, these are the industries where the big dollars get thrown around. They don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the deck of corn exchanging business. True. Pretty interesting. So the immediate market reaction to Shell's

potential deal for BP, BP jumped 7% and Shell dropped 2.6%. I want to know what they're doing more recently. It looks like BP is up now 1.5% on the day. How is Shell, how is BP doing over the week? Or the month? This is the week? Okay. Yeah, they've both kind of retraced since Shell said,

nah, we're not talking at all. So by market cap Shell's around 207 billion, BP's around 87 billion. Those are big companies. Big, big companies. Anyway, we can run through the Wall Street Journal's report here. But first, if you're planning a complex post-merger integration, you gotta get on linear. I'm sure. John, your commitment to just use linear for everything is. No, but of course, if you're building modern software, if you need to streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps, you gotta get on linear.

Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, and plus, they got linear for agents. But, you know, oil and gas companies do need to build software. If you're worried about getting paper clipped. They should be on linear. If you're worried about getting paper clipped, get your agents on linear.

They will thank you for it. Yeah. So a deal for BP, which has a market value of roughly 80 billion, would be a landmark combination for two super major oil companies. Super major is a better term than mag-7 in my opinion. We need that for the tech companies, the super majors. Super major is just super-

Oh, you're in the major leagues? I'm in the super majors. So good. So talks between company representatives are active, according to people who are familiar with the matter, leak into the Wall Street Journal, and BP is considering the approach carefully. Acquiring BP would put Shell on firmer footing to challenge larger competitors such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron.

It would be a landmark combination of two so-called super major oil companies, a group of multinational behemoths that dominate the production of the world's most important energy sources. Potential terms of the deal couldn't be learned and a tie up is far from certain, but the discussions are moving slowly. BEP is currently valued around $80 billion, taking into account a premium, a deal could end up as the largest corporate oil deal since the $83 billion mega merger that created Exxon Mobile at the turn of the century. It would also be easily the biggest M&A deal of the year

so far in a market that has been rattled by President Trump's antitrust policy. And so you can see that the combined entity would be somewhere in the deep. Do you remember tracking the Deepwater Horizon spill? I do, yeah, I remember tracking it very closely in the Thunderhorse track. Were you monitoring the situation?

I was monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading equity research reports about BP from the Southside banks, and I understood it to the level of knowing that the track that they were drilling into was called the Thunderhorse tract, which is the section of the crust that they're drilling the oil into.

It was fascinating. It's so crazy. EP's total cost associated with Deepwater Horizon, including cleanup, fines, and settlements, reached approximately 65 billion, so nearing their total enterprise value. Massive. Also, great movie.

I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie, Deepwater Horizon. You should check it out. Is it a documentary? No. I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie Deepwater Horizon. You should is it a documentary No, it is a it is a it is a You know nonfiction recreation, but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the on the oil rig And I believe like that. It's awesome. It's a really really great movie. I highly recommend it A shell spokesperson said as we have said many times

before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value in Shell through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification. Wow, nice. Yeah, fantastic. Basically saying like, hey, no comment, but also like, we're shilling for shell over here. We're shilling for shell TBPN spokesman said as we have said many times before we are sharply focused on capturing the value in TBPN through continuing to focus on

performance discipline and simplification John we should never you should never decline to comment you should always Bake it into the LLM this is what your business is ramped up Do you have any comments on on your your intern allegedly, you know contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch your business as we have said many times before We are sharply focused on getting our viewers on numeral HQq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Shell comes into the talks operating

from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years. Shell, which like BP, is based in the United Kingdom, but has operations around the world, has a market value of more than $200 billion. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill-fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy.

It's also suffered years of management of evil and operational disasters. And so it seems like actually their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business oil has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because like those M&A sell-side research reports that I was reading during the Deepwater Horizon crisis they were very accurately predicting the impact the long-term impact of that crisis on the stock

immediately yeah so it was priced into the stock very quickly and the stock dropped a ton and wiped a ton of market cap off But then they were kind of set up to kind of rebuild and there weren't many Surprises coming down the pipe after a few months or a few years and so more recently Elliott management which owns more than 5% of BP shares has pushed for changes with the energy company interesting. I've been performing for changes with the energy company. It's interesting though, BP had been performing, not, you know, had basically been down only for a few years. Since the financial crisis

and then Deepwater Horizon hit and it was just down even. When asked publicly, Shell's chief executive officer said that recently the company's bar for big deal making would be high. Shell in May announced a multi-billion dollar share buyback plan, the latest in a long series of big share repurchases.

Shell has been working with bankers on a potential sale of its chemical assets in Europe and the US, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. For Shell, acquiring BP would take years of integration, complicated by culture clashes, and possibly the sale of overlapping assets. But a deal could give Shell's global trading business greater reach and bolster its dominance in areas

like liquified natural gas. Analysts and investors also see a good match up in the company's Gulf of Mexico operations, which the US now calls the Gulf of America. That's right, that's right. All of the oil companies had to change all their internal documentation. And so Bloomberg news- That's right. All of the oil companies had to change all their internal documentation. Um, and so Bloomberg news earlier, right? I think it's sticking. Yeah.

Until the next election and there'll be a new EO and it'll go back to something else. But well, it would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it. Yeah. Something other than the Gulf of America. Well, um, uh,. Well, there's some other news in here, but I think it'd be fun to debate the future of venture capital marketing. I was on a call recently with a GP at a very big fund, and they were asking me about strategy

and where the future is going, and media is obviously evolving very quickly and I was kind of noodling on a bunch of different things but what I came to was maybe this idea that that venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that like you it is not available to everyone they are in the business of selling money but not everyone can buy it and so that kind of They are in the business of selling money, but not everyone can buy it. And so that kind of puts it in the same league as,

you know, ultra high net worth wealth management products or even high horology. Rolexes that are in demand, people, they still advertise Rolexes. They advertise them at LAX, the clocks are Rolexes. Or if you go to an F1 match you'll see a lot of you know Tech will put an ad for the cubitus Yeah an airport every every issue of the of the economist comes with an ad for

Basically a holy trinity watch on the back whether it's Vacheron or AP or Patek But you can't just go and buy those and so it's very odd that they're doing this like luxury brand building without a product that you can just immediately go by. And I'm wondering if that's the future of venture capital marketing. And so my, my thought was that maybe, maybe that's where the VC firm should really be pushing into. Well, yeah, let's talk about the current strategy, right? The current strategy is post on X, go on podcasts.

Yes. You can start your own podcast. Yes. Many people have done that. Yes. The challenge is that venture capitalists are deeply conflicted by making a wide variety of investments and that has to inform their opinion on different markets. So if you're deeply convicted and trying to give coverage to a certain sector, it becomes very hard because you can't go on there and say XYZ company is clearly dominating. If you look at the data and you look at what customers are saying, if you have another portfolio company over here that you happen to back And so it creates this sort of challenge of providing great

Media products because of that conflict. Yeah now you can still get around this right and there's different ways and there's different approaches You can do an interview show which allows you to But that's just like one type of content and the problem that is that it takes the focus off of you and puts it on your guy the person yeah so it's like yeah the person is a good interviewer but like what do they actually believe yeah yeah so the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing you can't get away from it it's all marketing all the way down now the sort of subcategories I think that are interesting I've always said that Sam Lesson, right,

he's got fans, he's got haters, but he creates, he has a unique media product in the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord, and some people, it resonates with them, other people wanna dunk, but it is an effective format in order to provide commentary,

and it's very efficient, right? He doesn't need a big marketing team to actually pull that off. So I think it's super key to find a specific format. But then the alternative is instead of hiring a production team and producing podcasts yourselves, you could do something like what you're talking about. Yeah, when I think of like the four really great,

or like a few really great VC marketing examples I think of Zero to one by Peter Thiel He's never tweeted But he's tweeted once and it was a link to his book and that book was such a good outcome that it sold in In airport book shops, right And he just dropped an amazing book and then that book just continued to compound and was extremely valuable in terms of building his brand.

Naval has a similar story where his Twitter posts, the How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky, went so viral. And when I think about both of those, and then it was eventually turned into a book, but when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near term thesis, or they're not, they're not news products. They're reflections on how the world

works. Reflections on like timeless principles, right? Then I think about Paul Graham's blog. It's not on a regular cadence. You know, it's not a weekly sub stack. It's not a news product. It's reflections on like regular cadence. It's not a weekly sub stack. It's not a news product. It's reflections on like, how did Steve Jobs run his company? And maybe he'll draw, maybe he'll like pump his bags a little bit

by like talking about Airbnb, but he's talking about like what Airbnb did in like 2009 or something. And it's like, it's completely irrelevant and it doesn't feel like, oh, I'm getting a buy rating on the stock right now. It's better to pump your bags when you end up being tremendously correct.

Exactly. Some of the early writing, I feel like, and even commentary on Sam Altman just clearly ended up being true. Yeah, 100%. And he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or Airbnb at this moment. He's not talking about Airbnb's newest release.

He's talking about Brian Chesky as a person years ago and it's reflective and I think that that works really well. Mark Andreessen, similarly, the ability to go into the Wall Street Journal and write an op-ed is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that idea, but it has to be from the individual investor. I don't think it's something that can be like formulated from a team

necessarily. Yeah. So there's this like, there's kind of this, like I feel like we're going to see more of like this barbell strategy where the future might be like when the GP has a really, really insightful piece of commentary, they take it to a wall street Journal op-ed or a book or a thread or a screenshot essay or you're just seeing the brand and you're seeing the brand on the back of and I was thinking like what is the equivalent of like the Patek Philippe ad that appears on the back of The Economist every week. It's like I was thinking venture

capitalists should go and buy the back of like the Stanford Review or like the Waterloo You know campus newspaper like that should have an ad for a venture capital firm Thompson newsletter Yeah, exactly, but like but I think a lining of these iconic properties Yeah, people who are doing their life's work full page ad and yeah in the journal But most importantly like like when when Patek Philippe sponsors the economist They are not trying to shift the economists coverage towards like being more bullish on Swiss watches They're just like we don't even know what you're gonna put in this issue We're just gonna be on the back there looking good and telling you the vibe of so John a full-page color ad in the journal

Yes costs around two248,000. Yes. Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great, truly great producer for their own show. Yeah. And so is it gonna be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the journal for a day?

Yeah. Or have your own podcast? Yeah, and there are more narrow properties too that are like, the journal for a day or have your own podcast. Yeah, and there are more narrow properties too that are like the journal's extremely broad in all of business, but there really are more narrow products that would work, but every time they've gotten there, it's been misaligned around like what the actual coverage is. But I don't know, maybe we'll see an F1 team, around like what the actual coverage is.

But I don't know, maybe we'll see an F1 team. Maybe we'll see JetSuiteX, the terminal, like sponsored by a VC firm. That would make a lot of sense. Like you get off in Silicon Valley at the JetSuiteX terminal and boom, you're presented with an ad for a VC firm. Let's take you through a beautiful obituary to the founder of FedEx, Fred Smith. So Ryan Peterson posted a photo of the original FedEx plane.

He said, RIP to logistics legend, an outspoken defender of free trade, FedEx founder, Fred Smith, who passed away today. Below is the first ever FedEx plane, which you can see at the Air and Space Museum annex next to Dulles Airport in Virginia. Look at that. He must have been so stoked when he bought this. Like his business was finally growing that he could own his own plane. Imagine how many likes he would have

gotten on social media. Yeah everyone's like this is your flex. You're just trying to go viral. This is clearly This is clearly for just clearly for logistics total legend Burning VC dollars on a plane Bear he was using Vegas Yeah, anyway, Max Meyer has a story that we should read through Fred Smith and American Life.

He says, Fred Smith died on Saturday. He was the founder of Federal Express, which became FedEx, one of the largest logistics companies on Earth. Smith was an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word and an American patriot. He bent reality and created something entirely new and he ran toward an extremely difficult problem.

The fruits of Fred's work are as follows, if you give a box or document to FedEx by 6 p.m. you can have it delivered almost anywhere in the United States or Canada by 8 a.m. the next morning. Imagine how key that would have been to business before the internet. Incredible, yeah. You're trying to do deals?

If you give a key customer? If you give FedEx a package on a Monday, it can be in Paris by Wednesday morning or in Shanghai by Thursday for a few hundred dollars. Most of us take overnight delivery for granted, but take a step back and the fact that we can essentially airdrop physical packages anywhere in the world is mind boggling. Smith's death is a reminder not to take the miracles of modern life for granted. They were built by people like Fred Smith. These are a few words about the man himself and the dazzling system that is FedEx. Frederick Wallace Smith was

born in 1944 in Mississippi. Fred's grandfather James Buchanan Smith captained Mississippi River steamboats. Fred's father James Frederick Smith was the founder of the Smith Motor Coach Company, which would go on to become Dixie Greyhound Lines after an acquisition in 1931. From steamboats to buses to jumbo jets in three generations, the family stayed on the cutting edge of motorized transportation. In 1925, the elder Smith,

seeking to create the transportation line out of Memphis, converted a truck into a small bus and drove it himself. Within a few years, James Smith had dozens and dozens of coaches. By the time he died suddenly in 1948, he commanded over 200. Wow. So he died four years after the son was born. Wow. So he basically grew up without a, without a, or maybe that's the grandfather.

Um, according to James Smith's obituary, um, no, no, no, no, he's the dad. Yeah. Yeah. So according to James Smith's obituary, no, no, no, he's the dad. Yeah, yeah, so according to James Smith's obituary, those 200 coaches each came to a halt during their regularly scheduled routes for one minute when the funeral began. The young Fred was just four when his father died, wow. In 1962, the young Smith enrolled at Yale University where he was fraternity brothers

with future president George W Bush Bush asked Smith to serve as the Secretary of Defense twice and Smith declined twice Wow He interesting because defense is who was the founder that we had on the show I'm completely blanking on that his name the name of the company and who invested in the company But he had this like defense focus supply chain management startup. Yes, it was one of our probably first talking about rune logistics rune. Yes, but something he said about not not the AI poster. The legendary poster, not the legendary poster. The logistics

scene of opening. Yes. So the young Smith was a member of the infamous cloak and dagger secret society. He is not beating the deep state allegations. It was at Yale that he wrote his first paper about his concept for using airplanes to deliver packages with a hub and spoke system. Wow, he was like, I got an idea, I got a business plan, I just need somebody to build it for me.

I.e. that instead of point to point package package transport everything would be brought to a single hub by air and then redistributed We talked to somebody about this on the show how? now now we think of it as like inefficient to bring everything to one place and then Do the hub and spoke thing because now we have you know door dash and Waymo and you know That's just last mile all these all these different last mile solutions But at the time this was revolutionary Everything would be brought to a single hub Repeat that cycle every night while turning a profit and you have a viable system for overnight delivery

The paper is said to have earned an average grade 1966 the founder of FedEx graduated from Yale and volunteered to receive a commission in the Marine Corps He served two tours in Vietnam for his service in Vietnam The president Nixon decorated Smith with a silver star and a bronze star the silver star citation read in part Unhesitatingly rushing through the intense hostile fire to position the heaviest con to the position of heaviest contact lieutenant Smith fearlessly removed several casualties from the hazardous area and Shouting words of encouragement to his men Directed their fire upon the advancing enemy soldiers successfully repulsing the hostile attack moving boldly across the fire swept terrain

To an elevated area. He calmly disregarded repeated North Vietnamese attempts to direct upon him as he skillfully adjusted artillery fire and airstrikes upon the hostile positions to within 50 meters of his own location. Wow. What a life and continue to direct the movement of his unit. Wow. What a bad ass. At this point, yes, so 1973 he's 29 years old. He lost his dad at four. He goes to Yale with George Bush, then goes to Vietnam, does two tours, gets a silver and a bronze star. It's crazy.

War hero. And now he's decided to launch Federal Express in Memphis. Smith had studied military procurement and been working on the idea for nearly 10 years after writing the Yale paper So he writes this paper. He's like, okay 10 years most founders have an idea they pivoted through two months He writes this paper This is like years later. This is the same 10 years later The company launched with a fleet of 14 French to salt jets

Which delivered a few hundred packages on their first day of service there we go Wow He's just like just zero to one According to FedEx Laura Smith named his new service federal express because he hoped to attract the attention of the Federal Reserve Bank The customer is funny like that the name you would you would think federal express you would just assume that it's an extension of the government I did when I was a kid. I was like, oh United Postal Service, but FedEx like it was just a better product experience that USPS So when as a kid you kind of feel it out feel it out The system that Smith had conceived at Yale worked it really worked and nothing like it existed the USPS

Existed principally to deliver letter mail and didn't have aircraft. UPS was a giant of a ground delivery throughout the US. Federal Express though would specialize in rapid air delivery just five years after the first Federal Express flights. The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Wow. Today the FedEx fleet consists of nearly 700 aircraft and about 200,000 vehicles, and FedEx employs half a million workers around the world. Wow.

Every night at the FedEx Super Hub at the Memphis International Airport, hundreds of jets land at the airport. The Ultra Hub. The Super Hub, bringing packages to its many sorting machines. A few hours later, the jets take back off to every corner of the United States and the world

at their destinations. The other half of the fleet awaits feeder aircraft to take packages to smaller airports and the FedEx express trucks that take packages to their final destination. The financial finesse needed to actually make a model like this this not just Lose massive amounts of money. You can go out of business so many times

And yeah, there is that story about him almost losing money going to Vegas and then putting the Treasury on black and winning it back and doubling it and making payroll the next day saving the company and winning it back and doubling it and making payroll the next day saving the company maybe apocryphal there's been rumors that maybe it was like you know some mob related thing and he took the tin foil yeah the tin foil had explanation is like you know he got it done he did some type of you know and this is entirely internet speculation it's probably not true but it's possible that he like you know was you, needed a reason to have a bunch of cash.

Right. And maybe did something else. But the story is incredible and it will live on. Yeah. Smith retired from FedEx in twenty twenty two after almost 50 years leading the company. He is survived by nine of his 10 children and his wife, Diane, his daughter, Winland Smith, rice died in 2005 of a terminal

Cardiac condition it's very sad and one has to think that his father his father. Mr Smith who died with 200 vehicles to his name would be impressed that his son died with 200,000 vehicles to his name and a fleet of jets to match so Incredible story and may he rest in peace. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. Also, one of the greatest logos of all time, the FedEx logo has that secret arrow in it. Love that.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Once you see it, you can't uneat, not this logo, the next logo, the more modern FedEx logo has the secret arrow in there. Once you see that they're moving You can't move in and there if you want to understand more about Frederick Smith go to founders podcast Yeah, listen to episode one five one hundred and fifty one

Subscribe to arena mag to read more of max's writing Mr. Beast has rolled back the launch of his ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. He says, hey, thanks for all your feedback on the ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission. Okay, so clearly the thumbnail industrial complex came for him hard. They were probably making, you know making death threats in the comments. It sounds like it was pretty intense. My thing here, I have to agree with Lulu.

This is one of MrBeast's many businesses, right? So in general, it's something he wants to create for creators and distribute widely. But the obvious reason that he should have kept the AI thumbnail tool is you're by if you can roll out AI in this way you can save millions of creators that create YouTube videos a lot of money because many of them are not going to be able to afford to commission a hand-designed thumbnail. And so the

the right thing to do for the creators broadly is to make a tool like this available, make it as cheap as possible, so as many people as possible can use it. And not give in to the small number of people in the world that make thumbnails, like that's their sort of day to day. Those people that make thumbnails, like there's a lot of things you could do. You could adjust, you could go and make edit videos, right?

AI video editors are not that good today. You could do that. It's very odd because the, yes, it's like, we're destroying the job of thumbnail artist, or real thumbnail artist, but that's a job that was created like two years ago. I think I met the first like, full, I literally was at a YouTube conference

just a few years ago, and I met the first real thumbnail artist where that was his entire job full time. And MrBeast hired a few of those folks. But the whole point is, the whole point is that person can probably make much better thumbnails than AI can right now. And so go up market, work with creators that are willing to spend money Yeah, and make a make it make an entry-level tool that anybody can use. Yes to generate an AI You know an AI generated thumbnail. Yeah, like it just I mean I'm surprised. Yeah

I mean prize that he he rolled this back and gave in the but you know It's very possible that the thumbnail industrial complex. Yeah, you know has has a massive lobbying arm Yeah, you know and and and said, you know, has, has a massive lobbying arm, you know, and, and, and said, you know, we're going to work on getting, you know, your other businesses, yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Like, like there's even a, there's even a, like a continuum of technology that exists within the pre AI thumbnail generation workflow. So at one point I was making thumbnails

the way people usually do, compositing different images together, pick a background, cut yourself out of a green screen image, put that over the face over the background, that's like the standard thing, put some text over it. At one point I actually experimented with Ben shooting practical thumbnails. So we would go and design, like instead of compositing a background,

we would design a background image of wall and print out pictures, pin them on the wall. And I would stand in front of the wall of images and they didn't really perform better. And so I think like using a design tool like figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together, is great. They're just using software in general is completely justified and no one really talked about like,

well, if you're just compositing images, then you're not filming them practically, all of a sudden you're putting set decorators out of business because it's not like I was hiring a set decorator, I was just saying like, hey, Ben, me and you are gonna Practically set up this thumbnail and then take the photo. So here's here's the real evidence as to why mr. Beast should have Kindly told the thumbnail artist to yes F off

I ran a quick query here basically to try to estimate how many people actually earn a living making thumbnails by looking at you know platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and all these different things and then doing some type of multiple so generally we're estimating two to five thousand people make at least a thousand dollars a month designing thumbnails across yes all different types of platforms meanwhile there are over two million YouTube creators that are in the YouTube Partner Program, meaning they're making ad revenue. YouTube is a business for them. And so do you want to serve the two million people

by giving them great tools that they can use to run better, more profitable content businesses? Or do you want to build your product for the thumbnail industrial complex, which is just a few thousand people. Yeah that are probably not even doing it full-time Yeah, they're just earning earning some type of living so I think it gets to like the importance of like how how abstract should your title be because we were talking about this earlier like If you if you if you did a job shadow on a lawyer in 1950 and then you did a job shadow on a lawyer in 1950,

and then you did a job shadow on a lawyer today, it's probably a very different day, right? Modern lawyers like sending text messages and is on signal and sending emails and probably using ChatGPT to search for things and pulling for stuff from LexisNexis instead of going to the archives. The old lawyer is like having teams and stuff.

Hopefully not dump your docs in chat. No, probably not. But still, it's like a modern, it's a very modern. Something like that. Modern experience. Harvey. But we still call those people lawyers.

We haven't changed the title. Whereas a person who's. Even Crosby, the company we had on, is just an AI native law firm. Yeah. So they actually have lawyers. They're just more efficient. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Versus someone who is super narrowly defined as like, I am a typist at a law firm. It's like, yeah, you lost your job, but did you really lose? Were you permanently unemployed because you insisted on being someone who uses a typewriter? Or did you learn to use a computer? And then did you learn to dictate things to a voice model? And then did you learn, and yes,

there will be some job displacement, but mostly it's like people flow into different categories all the time, so I would imagine that a lot of the real thumbnail artists that succeed going forward are the ones who either leverage AI or go into video editing or become creators themselves or do a million other things that they can have higher leverage on. Yeah, it's funny because we would pay real money for a good thumbnail designer right now.

Yes, if you're a thumbnail artist, reach out to us. And you're trying to be the top 10 thumbnail designers in the world that want to be paid a premium for it. We're happy to pay. Otherwise, we'll probably just keep slopping it up. Slopping it up with our templates. Welcome to Studio DJ. What's going on? Hey guys, what's going on? It's great to have you.

Congratulations. Massive day. Massive day. Yeah, massive day. Thank you, thank you. Break it down for us. For those who haven't watched the full one hour video, we'll obviously link it here,

but what are the key announcements? What do you think it's important? What do you think is important to share? Sure. Yeah. So the 10 second summary of our update is that Neuralink is working reliably and has already changed the lives of seven human participants that we've been working with. It's really been a privilege working with all those participants individually. And that,

you know, we sort of lay down our next set of milestones, which is most immediately going to market and enabling the scaling of this technology to thousands of people, eventually millions, and also to just go beyond the movement and expand functionalities into speech, vision, and hopefully getting to the speed of inner thoughts. And, and then there's a little bit of a hints as to what the, the path to a kind of the ultimate goal of Neuralink would be, which is to understand and unlock the mystery of the mind. Yeah. Elon teased that in the opener and I was somewhere between like tearing up from emotions and like pumping my fist with excitement because it feels like, you know, this is the main quest.

You can see that he's lit up about this and you can see that he's, um, he's just, it's just incredibly back. Yeah. So it was exciting. Um, give us a little bit of your background and how you wound up at Neuralink. Yeah, sure. Um, let's see. So I grew up in South Korea. And growing up, I love Ninja Turtles. And Pokemon. I also really like Legos. And just in general general taking things apart and putting it together and came to the States at age 13 and Studied electrical engineering, you know, I loved loved loved RF circuit design and computational electromagnetics and I wanted to be an academic like that's a professor and

you know decided to go to grass graduate school in Berkeley to design the next generation wireless communication chips for cell phones. And then in the Bay Area, I learned that people can start companies. I didn't know that was the thing that people can do. At the time, there wasn't really anything interesting happening. No offense to other builders at the time, but I decided to finish my PhD and did my thesis work in neural implants and had the opportunity to join Neuralink as a founding team member when I was graduating. And that was almost nine years ago. What was the, take me through some of the history.

I mean, nine years to get here. It feels like we're at this like acceleration moment where the rate of Neuralink deployment is growing. It's feels exponential. But in those first nine years, what were the key milestones that you remember and the key turning points? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize that when Neuralink started out, it was really just a group of, you know, six or seven of us.

And we didn't really have anything. When I first showed up to the office, at the time we actually shared the office with OpenAI, the Pioneer building in San Francisco. It was just a bunch of us. We didn't even have chairs and desks. So one of the first things we did on the first day was to go out to Staples and buy chairs.

So, incredible amount of work has kind of gone into, you know, really building the hardware, kind of the foundational pieces to, you know, generate the data set that's necessary for us to iterate on the device. And it took about, I would say, you know, year and a half, two years to get the first kind of generation of brain chips working on the lab. You know, at the time, starting with, you know, smaller animal models with rats, and then slowly graduating to bigger and bigger species, pigs, sheep, that starts to represent more the anonyms of the humans. And about four years ago now, we had the demo with one of our monkeys, Pager,

that played the game Pong, we called it the mind Pong. And that was one of the key moments to sort of demonstrate what the capabilities of these types of devices can be. And I think I should also maybe step back and say that Neuralink really is sitting on the shoulders of the giants here. There's been decades of research that's gone into the field that we're in called brain-computer interface or brain-machine interface. And that really set the foundation for de-risking the scientific aspects of what this could be. And, you know, there's obviously a lot of challenges in scaling that product, making it a product itself. And that's, that's what we are taking on.

Yeah. I want to talk about those giants, the shoulders of the giants that you're standing upon and how you think about the role of research and development in the public sector, in academia, playing into commercializable technologies. There's discussions about this with the NIH and biotech. Obviously, you know, SpaceX is the perfect, it feels like the perfect story to me where you know Who was gonna pay for a moon landing in the 60s? That no venture capitalist would have underwritten that but because we did that we learned a lot and then we and then when it became Time for it to be rolled out at scale Elon stepped up with SpaceX and the rest is history

so What what can you tell me about the history of BCI in the kind of public sector side? Universities. Universities versus just other stories that have been done at different companies that may have failed but contributed to the community. Yeah, we had Andrew Huberman on like a week or so ago

talking about his concern around NIH funding and all the issues from a pure kind of health standpoint, but this feels relevant as well. Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly important. I mean, you see this even today. There's a very much an active research going on in the BCI field, you know, just sort of looking at the next frontier of different targets and different indications that can really open up opportunities for people that have, you know, various different

types of neurological condition. And, you know, I think the history of brain-computer interface and, you know, the first product that Neuralink is working on, you know, I think the history of brain computer interface and, you know, the first product that Neuralink is working on, you know, we named it telepathy, because, you know, really it's enabling someone who has lost that mind-body connection through diseases like traumatic spinal cord injury or ALS, which really over time, it's a horrible condition that really takes away every part of your muscles over time, it's a horrible condition that really takes away every part of your muscles over time, eventually leading to death. And those were the indications.

And what Neuralink is able to do is place this device and these set of electrodes in a part of the brain called the motor cortex or the hand knob area. So basically, if you're thinking about moving your hand or wrist area, there's a lot of neurons that are firing in response to that. And we're able to record that intention and then translate that to, you know, moving cursors on the screen or robotic arm, you know, physical things in the space. And that was purely, purely done as an academic research funded by the Department of Defense 20-30 years ago. And that really set the foundation for what is possible.

And I think back 20-30 years ago, if someone were to try to get venture money out of that, I don't think anyone would have pursued that scientific pursuit. And there still continues to be a lot of research and important work that's gone into academia for other indications. And, you know, I, I do worry about sort of, what the future looks like on that phone. Can you walk us through the current installation of the Neuralink product? I know that there were specific machines you had to build and kind of walk through because it's, I don't know if it's semi-invasive is the correct term. of the Neuralink product. I know that there were specific machines you had to build and kind of walk through,

because it's, I don't know if semi-invasive is the correct term. Is it extremely invasive? I don't know what term we're using, but it feels like you've done exactly what's necessary and not any further, but it's still significant, but you've done a ton of work to de-risk it, right? Mm-hmm, yeah, yeah.

So I guess maybe before we dive into some of the specifics of how Neuralink devices installed, maybe let me take a step back and kind of describe why go into the brain in the first place and why that's important. And typically the analogy that's used in the field is that of the stadium. So, you can really think about neural signals

as audio signals. The frequency spectrum is actually very similar in the analogy of neurons talking to each other, speaking different languages. It's actually a pretty good analogy. So the idea is that if you're standing outside the stadium, you can get a sense of how the game is going based on the cheers and the boos of the crowd.

But you won't be able to tell me exactly what's You can kind of get a sense of how the game is going based on the cheers and the boos of the crowd, but you won't be able to tell me exactly what's going on in the game, how's the game actually going, what are the teams actually talking about, when are the key moments happening. And in order for you to really understand those types of information and get that type of information, you need to be in the arena, right? Like you need to actually drop the microphone inside the arena. And you can kind of think about what Neuralink is doing in a similar analogy. So, you know, you can get neural signals from, you know,

on the surface of the brain or even outside the skull without having to go through a craniotomy. But the type of signals and the resolution that you will get is gonna be much, much worse. And so there's a trade off there. So now we've decided from day one that we would want to get the highest signal, highest resolution, you know, neural signatures, because we, we believe that that's necessary for kind of a long term mission of understanding and unlocking the mystery of the brain. And in order to do that,

you basically wanna make these electrodes that are recording neural signals as small as possible and also as flexible as possible. So your brain, you can kind of think of it as a sort of a consistency of a tofu or jello. And it also moves a lot, because every heartbeat, every breath that you take, it also moves a lot because every heartbeat, every, you know, breath that you take, it's moving, moving a lot.

And that's one of the things that we have to learn in a hard way when we, you know, work with our participants. And so in designing these electrodes to be tiny, you know, fraction, fraction of a human hair. So one of our, what we call thread, which is these tiny wires that have electrodes, are about one 20th of a human hair. And they're also flexible. So they kind of move with the brain rather than, you know, if it's a rigid thing, you can cause a lot of scarring as you're breathing. So when you build these tiny, tiny threads that are manufactured with conventional

lithography tools in our own clean room facilities, now the question is, OK, how do you actually insert these? They're very small and even the best neurosurgeons won't be able to insert them precisely in the location that we want. So we ended up designing a surgical robot. And again, this was something that was kind of in the vision of the company from day one, where also looking at scaling this to millions,

if not billions of people, eventually, we just did not see a world where there's some sort of robotics and some sort of not having human in the loop. So it's essentially this precision robotic tool that has a bunch of cameras that are looking at the surface of the brain, making sure that you're avoiding vessels, and then manipulating and inserting these tiny threads one by one as quickly as you can in the region of interest. And what ends up happening is that we currently go through a process to drill a hole in the skull called a craniotomy.

And then we actually expose different layers of the tissue. There's many different layers of the brain before you get to it. The first layer that you see is a dura mater. And then once you have the brain exposed, we insert these threads one by one with a surgical robot. And then the hole that we created on the skull is actually replaced by the implant base that has the battery, the computer and everything. And then once you put the skin over, everything's completely invisible. Everything's completely wireless. And you basically become a cyborg. And that

process takes about three hours right now. Can you talk to me about how noisy the data is, and if there's any advances in AI that help denoising of the data? I've seen incredible demos of, oh, take this ancient black and white grainy image and just make it look amazing, or even unblurring images. We're actually at the CSI moment where you can be like, zoom in on that, zoom in on that and it works.

Have there been any developments in AI recently that have been relevant? Do you think that will happen in the future? Is it already happening or is it just kind of a complete side quest? Yeah, there's a lot of opportunities where AI can help, you some ways, understand the biological brain that it's inspired by in really interesting ways. There are a couple places that we currently use AI. I think on the electro side, unfortunately, there's not a lot that you can do. In the end, there's very tight margin in terms of signal to noise ratio. So there's a lot of innovations that we've had in Neuralink on, you know, low power, and low noise amplifier designs and being able to digitize that as quickly as

possible into digital bits, that then you can apply a lot of interesting kind of signal processing as well as really at the end of the day, this giant pipeline that we call neural decoding. What is the human intent and how can you actually translate that to something useful? So as of right now, we have a very simple machine learning AI kind of there to translate those thoughts and intents into something useful. The thing that is actually very interesting is that it's not a static data points either. If you look at a human brain, there's what's called neuroplasticity, which means that from

day to day or even depending on the context, like there's difference in neural states that are represented even from the same brain region. And it's a learning system, right? And as well as the machine learning model, the silicon neural net is also learning about the brain, but also your brain is learning about the silicon, basically this new mode of communication that you have gotten as a Neuralink.

In many ways, I think there's some opportunities and we're starting to see kind of interesting trace where now that we have not just one but seven human participants, there's some similarities that we see in kind of the data set and there's opportunities where we can use that kind of base similarities to improve the calibration time. So meaning you can't immediately use this device as is you have to go through a calibration, make sure when you're thinking about moving to the left, we have a stream of neural signals that then say, Oh, okay. You know, John is thinking about moving to the left and this is what the neural patterns look like. And

you know, collect that data over time and then, you know, improve, improve the system. But you do, you do get drift over time, um, due to the fact that as I mentioned, your neural, uh, state is always going through a plasticity. So, um, can you talk about the translation and the evolution of like, what outputs you're actually trying to map to? Because if I remember Pong, Pong's unique in that it's just up or down.

It's not an X and Y grid that you're trying to control. You're just controlling up and down. But then when I've seen Nolan P1, it's clear that he can use a mouse in an X and Y axis and then also click. And when I think about playing a video game, I'm kind of using all 10 digits. In one way I'm thinking jump,

in another way I'm thinking send the message of just press the A button. And so there's like, how much data can you get out? Are you trying to increase that? Has that already increased? Is it going to kind of operate like a higher level of abstraction that then gets translated into computer use?

Or is it more like, as long as I can puppeteer 10 fingers, then you can translate those into 10 different actions and remap those and have people menu accordingly, like the investment banker who doesn't use a mouse. Right. So the update that we just released a couple of hours ago actually has some videos of what the latest capabilities with Neuralink that participants have been able to do. I guess one thing that I will highlight is that there's a video of two of Our participants playing a first-person shooter game and if you actually think about it, that's quite sophisticated control

There's a left joystick for movement There's a right joystick for aiming and there's a bunch of different buttons for swapping weapons reload and shooting etc. Etc And so sorry, what's doing this thing cry is gonna make me cry team death match after with your boy after the other thing that's actually kind of interesting is that you know at Neuralink we also talk about you know going beyond the limits of biology and then actually achieving superhuman capabilities yes so that we're already oh I was gonna say like we're actually already starting to see

some signs of it interesting so that was my next question. Right now, you guys are generally focused on outputs, right? Controlling an arm or playing a video game or navigating some type of computer. At what point would you focus on or start starting to spend more time around sort of the inputs into the brain? Yes. Inputs. around sort of the inputs into the brain? Yes, inputs. So one of the major applications for that is a product that we call Blindsight.

So giving sight back to people that have lost it. And that's primarily going to be an input. So imagine basically someone who's blind, being able to have a set of glasses with embedded cameras that's capturing the scene. And that gets converted into a set of impulses that then stimulate the part of your brain called the visual cortex, which is on the back of your head. And it basically gives you your sight back, right? Because the way vision works is that you have your lights hitting your retina converted to electrical signals. And at the end of the day, it's your brain where you're seeing

and having that conscious experience. But if you have anything break in that circuit, you can directly go to the brain, you know, stimulate those neurons that are giving you that visual experience and be able to see. And our plan is to have our first blind site patient next year. Can you talk about some of the, how you see the ecosystem developing around, uh, Neuralink long-term, if you can speak to it at all. I'm just imagining that when, when, when I, when I, uh,

I've spoken to Nolan P one and, uh, I mean, he's, you know, incredibly benefit. He's a huge beneficiary of, of Neuralink, but also voice interfaces because he can speak. And so as that technology gets better, that becomes an extra tool in the arsenal. I'm imagining someone wearing, you know, glasses that act as blindsight, but then also having an audio modulation there that could help as well. And there's a whole bunch of other, and I'm wondering if there's going to be like an ensemble of products or something

that where, you know, Neuralink's a key, key technology, but then there's other approaches that are actually more compatible or complimentary as opposed to directly competitive. Yeah. I mean, I think in the long future, you know, I think there's going to be a lot of application layers that are going to be built on top of Neuralink, you know, in a similar ways that when the iPhone was released, I mean, it was a cool device,

but also it didn't really do a lot until you started developing a bunch of applications on top of it. So I can imagine a world where there's a Neuralink app store. And in the end, it just kind of provides a conduit both into and out of your brain, some ways of getting the human intent out to a set of machines. And that machine can be your computer's laptop or your computer's phones or prosthetics or

some other thing. And I'm really excited to kind of see what the creative minds can kind of think about in terms of the application on top of it. Yeah, it feels like there will be like a hierarchy of needs within the app store of like you know some people might want to use Neuralink so that they can see or talk or you know manipulate the world But then other people might want to use inputs to be like every time I'm about to pick up You know bag of Cheetos just like you know don't work Make the arm not work, and so I can't I just can't physically pick up the ad blocker It's an ad blocker for like over eating or turning on the TV I want to talk about hiring

obviously this event was was not for the shareholders it was for recruiting can you talk about the Neuralink culture? Can you talk about what skills you're looking for and what it takes to get a job at Neuralink today? Yeah, there's, um, there's one metric that we basically look for in, in any candidate. And that's, um, it is, it's hard to actually get it down to a quantitative number, but you know, we try to look for literally ego divided by abilities. So ego to ability ratio. And we want that to be significantly less than one.

So you can have a little bit of ego, but you better have, you know, ten times, hundred times more abilities to upset that. And we found that to be actually really important thing to look for, especially given that one one this is an extremely interdisciplinary effort you know it's extremely I don't think there's a place where you can have lunch with you know someone who's an expert in RF chip design to robotics, to neurosurgery, to animal care specialists, I think is a very, very unique space in that. And you know what else?

Not to mention FDA lawyers too. I'm always baffled by that, that you guys are executing at such a high level on regulatory. I was gonna ask- This is a completely different discipline. And I'm saying this to me, looking at Neuralink, it has to be the hardest problem set in

the world. Sure. It's hard I'm trying to think of others and it's hard to come up with anything that really comes close to it and I imagine that can be really daunting to some people that say I'd rather I'll stay in the Elon orbit but I'd like to just work on rocket science. I just like to be a rocket scientist and so I'm yeah I'd be interested to get your view on it just because you have so many different factors, the interdisciplinary nature of it, then, okay, well, you know, now the brain's actually moving

and it's not moving consistently, but it's moving based on, you know, the way the heart's beating or things like that. It just feels like the most difficult problem set. And I guess that must be a good filtering function and that you don't want people to come in thinking that, you know, it's just gonna be hard, but you know, very achievable.

You almost want them to think that it's borderline impossible, but sort of push through that. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, a lot of people have misconception that Neuralink is a science company. We're really a technology and engineering company. And, you know, there's also this misconception that, oh yeah, at Neuralink, you guys probably spend a lot of time talking about like future of humanity and

like uploading consciousness and etc, etc. Like, in some ways, yes, like we do talk about those things, but it's like 0.1% of our conversation, like 99.9% of the time, it's about hardcore engineering problems. And in many ways, you know, brains moving, the material properties, mechanical properties of the brain, those are engineering constraints. But at the end of the day, it's an engineering problem, right? So you know, we're really looking for just hardcore engineers. And in many ways, we have a saying that you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work at Neuralink. You actually don't even need to have a prior experience in brain. I took some neuroscience classes in grad school, but I didn't really know anything about the brain.

It really is just engineering a great system to be able to study and peer into the dynamics of brain that we all have that we don't really understand and haven't even scratched the surface of. So it's a technology first engineering first company. For where the company is right now is I love that ego to ability framework, but talk about interdisciplinary work. Is, is there, is there a world where you need RF engineers who are just great at that and they're not really going to have to cross over or are you still looking

for the types that can, uh, you know, bring together different ideas from different disciplines and actually bridge different groups. How relevant is that? I'm sure that's important at the executive level, but like you might just be in a stage where, you know, you need to go and solve a key problem in a narrow domain. And so you're really looking for just someone who's fantastic at that.

Has that evolved over time and can you speak to that? Yeah. Yeah. So, um, you know, Neuralink is still a very small company. Um, you know, we have 300 people, uh, total across Austin and Fremont and yeah, there are definitely a set of problems where I would say we, we need, uh, GPUs. So people that are very specialized in things or sorry, um, CPUs. Um, but yeah, like we're still, we'll still, we're still looking for a way more GPUs. Yeah. It's, it, I mean, you're hiring for UI, UX here,

but then also clinical and surgery and robotics and ASIC. That's fascinating. Firmware, electronics, I'm just looking through it. Machining, it's really like, if you're good at anything, it seems like as long as you're great at it, you can go and work there. I wanna dig into ego a little bit, cause I find that very interesting. Um, how does, how does ego manifest in, in an employee? Like, like,

and is that something that can be controlled or, or is it, is it, do you think it's some, it's somehow innate or can it be kind of coached out of someone? When I think of ego, I often think about, um, someone who's maybe overconfident, but then they might go through an experience that humbles them and then they come out on the other side much lower ego. And so maybe you're not in the position to be the one to take that risk, but how do you think about the shape of ego as just a human trait? I mean you're kind of studying the brain, so it's kind of an interesting question from a philosophical

perspective as well. I might also consider launching the Ego app, which you can dial it in the app store, on the Neuralink app store, just dial it up and down. Hey, I'm going in for a job interview at Neuralink. Turn this down all the way. Yeah, or if somebody's joining TVPN and we think they're super talented,

but the ego's too high, I can say, well, you're welcome to join, but we're just gonna have to dial it back. You gotta install the app. Yeah. People learn. I've seen this time and time again, especially people that are, you know,

earlier in their career have, you know, a lot of opportunities to kind of shape how they work within an organization. And that, you know, really it's not about pushing for your ideas, but it's pushing for what's best for the company. And I've seen that change. And, you know, I think once you have sort of,

like it really just fosters a great environment where people, you know, debate the merits of ideas rather than, you know, kind of putting sort of their ego in front so that it becomes sometimes like not a technical discussion, but an emotional discussion. And, um, but yeah, that's certainly coachable. I want to talk about the patients. Uh, it was interesting to see how fast you moved on from, uh, spinal injury to ALS. Uh, is there a third indication that you're interested in solving in the near term?

Is this more of a question of just let's scale up because there's a lot of folks that really could benefit just in spinal injury and ALS, and what else are you excited about potentially working on? Yeah, and even in there, it's like, are you feeling like generalized breakthroughs that make each individual product, you know, advance to some degree? I guess also like, are there differences? Yeah. Yeah. Are there differences in solving for ALS versus solving for traumatic spinal injury?

Yeah, there certainly is. For ALS, it is a neurodegenerative condition, so their conditions just get worse as the time progresses. So, you know, that makes it very difficult. You know, one of our participants is in what's called a late stage ALS, which means that he's effectively locked in, so unable to move, unable to speak even, and is connected to a mechanical ventilator to basically keep him alive. And in a similar way, it's that basically, Stephen Hawking was able to sort of live the last 50 plus years of his lives.

And for them, they also have more fatigue and they have different needs, as you can imagine from someone like Nolan who can still very vibrant, who still can speak, who can still kind of engage with the world in a different ways and their application, their needs will change as a result of it. But really, you know, what we also talk about is that we're building a generalized input output device and technology for the brain. So, you know, for someone who is quadriplegic, which means they're sort of paralyzed from back down, whether it's due to spinal cord injury, whether it's due to ALS, whether it's due to brain stem stroke, whether it's due to some other things that have caused

you to be in that state, we're hoping that it could be generalizable enough that with the same hardware, they may have different firmware and different applications that they will find more They may have different firmware and different applications that they will find more useful for that particular situation, similar to how when 10 different people are given a computer, they will use that 10 different unique ways. And we're seeing that. And that's something that's been kind of wonderful to see the wide range of diverse use cases for different participants. Well, this has been fantastic.

We'll let you get back to the very important work that you're doing. Where can people go to learn more about what you're hiring for? Neuralink.com slash careers. And I would definitely encourage people to check out this latest update that we've had. It's been an incredible progress in the past.

It's a lot of companies will put up a careers page and then people go there and work for an average of about a year and a half or something like that this actually feels like a career because if you're gonna have an impact like you know stay for a few decades. It's not a jobs page it's a careers page because you're gonna be here for 40 years essentially. Yeah well we're excited to follow on. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for the update. We'll talk to you soon. Hey thanks for having me. Cheers.