#41 - Jake Adler, Founder & CEO of Pilgrim

24:47So you might have double-stranded or single-stranded DNA or likewise for RNA as well. And basically you can separate it. You take the nucleic acid and you have this little pore and you can feed the nucleic acid through the pore. And it sounds like, It's literally like the game where you're putting the block in, and based off of the base that's going through the pour at one time, there's a change, and I don't want to get overly in the weeds here, but there's a change in the ionic resistance. So there's a general disruption of ionic current that indicates which base is actually in the pore. So you can basically have a mechanism that can do near real time, extremely rapid sequencing without requiring something that is as big as this container over here and would enable us to effectively be able to understand the threat that we're collecting in real time.

25:33So the reason this is relevant is if we're talking about something like H5N1, right, where like the avian flu that we're seeing right now, where we have like, you know, we've had to kill like roughly 175 million chickens. I think 170 million chickens at this point. You know, the cost of eggs have increased well above like 300 percent to like, I think, six dollars a card in at this point. But H5N1 in humans has a mortality rate of close to 50 percent. So it's a bit of a coin flip whether you're going to live or die. And right now, the H5N1 strain that is predominant across the country is largely enzootic, which means that it's mostly within the animal population.

26:14So it's not transmissible in humans. Researchers, like I think five years ago, determined that it only requires five point mutations. So five mutations and bases for it to spill over and become zoonotic or to become transmissible in humans. Now, if you're relying on PCR technology, you wouldn't be able to necessarily determine or see that distinction. And that's incredibly relevant when we're talking about trying to do some variant of real-time detection or improved detection, where we want to be able to tell whether or not you're looking at a strain or mutation of H5N1 that is transmissible in only chickens, or as actually now spilled over into the human population as well.

26:51And the current solutions don't enable that capability. There's also a wild set of other challenges involved in the current solutions we have deployed. Do you want to talk about those? Yeah. So there's sort of two distinct angles you can think of. Notably, you can start off kind of from the national security angle. So in 2001, after the 9-11 attacks, there was a couple of reporters, the journalists and politicians who received letters in the mail. And in the letters, when they opened them, there was this dry powder. So, you know, initially they probably thought like, whatever, right? Like it's a prank, right?

27:25And roughly five days later, they started to develop symptoms. So they started to develop fever. They started to develop diarrhea. They started to have irritation on the lungs. And what they realized is that powder was actually anthrax. So it was basically the anthrax spores. And, you know, basically in the letter that they would open, it said like, death to America, like the most like terrorist looking writing you could imagine. and it was a long string. And point is, initially, you know, obviously we assumed that it was related to Al-Qaeda or related to some adversary. And as we kind of continued the investigation, we had to actually close down a couple of post offices because the letters were obviously used or deployed through the postal service.

28:07And I think roughly five people died, 21 people were injured. But point is - Like just at the post office? No, no, generally from the anthrax attacks. It's called Amerithrax. Most people aren't aware that this occurred because it kind of is under overshadowed or undershadowed rather by by by 9-11. But point is, obviously, it was a really severe attack and it was one that we didn't really have any mechanism to prevent. So, you know, as we can kind of continue the investigation and we actually looked at the spores, we recognized that they had some level of familiarity. So they weren't actually novel.

28:41They didn't look engineered. And when we actually put a little more time into it, we realized that the spores actually originated from a sample at USAMRID. USAMRID is the Army Institute for Infectious Diseases. So USAMRID has sort of been the key player involved in the U.S.'s role in biological weapons and chemical weapons through the Edgewood Arsenal, through Fort Detrick, and through generally a few of the different installations they have. But point is, we recognize that the origin of these spores came from what we call RID, or the Institute, which is USAMRID. And as we kind of did more research, we thought that's pretty odd, right?

29:20And we recognized that it was actually an army officer. And interestingly enough, it was an army officer who I believe was leading the development of the anthrax vaccine. So to gather or garner demand for his anthrax vaccine, he proliferated an anthrax attack killing five people and injuring 21 just to create that relevant demand to drive appropriations towards what he was developing. Has there been any other cases like throughout history or even in the U.S. of people doing something similar to that? So there's another theory. Again, I'm going to say theory, but there's another theory around Usamrid's involvement in tick-borne Lyme disease.

30:00So there was a researcher who was actually working on trying to determine what viruses or pathogens they can embed with ticks as a means of using them for as a biological weapon so this actually relates to something japan did and you in their unit 731 um and this would have been uh during world war ii they had something called the oogie bomb and it was basically the ceramic bomb um and it would have uh flies or fruit flies that they would coat in viruses or they would just be carrying the virus they just dropped that and it also food and And basically they would drop that bomb onto a city or onto a region.

30:35And what would happen is the fruit flies would rapidly proliferate. And what would happen is the food would attract rats and would attract other small creatures. And the fruit flies would kind of gather around those rats and infect a bunch of the smaller animals in the city. And those rats, as you know, through the Black Plague, were one of the leading causes of transmission. So it's one of those things where— How many times did this happen? How many cities were this drop on? I'm not sure of certain occurrences of it. they were really nasty um like units so the people leading up 731 actually got um at least some of them got immunity after world war ii for sharing like a lot of information about what they were building you know if we kind of look like there's there's somewhat of a modern parallel to what the ccp is doing right now um and along with the russians so like even recently uh there was this instance of a um of a reporter who used planet labs which you're probably familiar with and they actually surveyed, they kept track on a couple of the major Russian bioweapon facilities, and they saw a movement.

31:33And actually, we're seeing now that Russia is actually modernizing one of their high containment BSL-4, so the most severe pathogens you can imagine. So right now, and I don't want to get sidetracked, but smallpox, which is probably one of the worst viruses in history, one of the worst pathogens we've encountered, basically causes these big boils to form on the body. The reason it's so bad is smallpox, the actual particles travel like smoke. So for example, there's an instance of, I forget where it was specifically, but there's an instance of a hospital where a patient had smallpox in one room.

32:07And basically, I think on the opposite side of the hospital, somebody also contracted smallpox. Just through the like AC vents or something? Through the AC vents and generally through the windows, like leaving windows open. But my point is that generally when we're talking about these threats, BSL-4 facilities would be containing variola, which is smallpox. After smallpox was eradicated, we basically kept two samples. So it was sort of like a Cold War era kind of thing. But one of the samples went, I think maybe before, but one of the samples went to the Vector Institute in Russia, and then the other sample went to the CDC in the US.

32:40Now, we're not confident generally from an intelligence standpoint, from what I understand, that Russia has not removed that smallpox. And why did we give it to them? That was sort of part of the deal. It was like sort of like the final, like the, it's like, you know, like the seed vault. Are you familiar? It's like sort of like a seed vault. Except for like an extremely deadly virus. Well, I think that the premise is that if we started to see the proliferation of it again, then both of the major superpowers had the relevant virus to then begin to work towards maybe developing a new vaccine. Now, there's also a report that I think who, like the World Health Organization, I think They had this big trove of variola vaccines.

33:20And we don't get vaccinated for variola anymore because it's been fully eradicated, which is also an interesting story how they did it. But it's very similar to sort of the strategy with Ebola as well. But if you look at your parents' arm, if they're assuming they're Canadian or American, you might see a scar on their left arm. It's like this weird little bruise. That's actually from the variola vaccine. So they basically stab your arm a few times. Like they had a needle that would stab your arm and then they would inject you with the vaccine just to get to the relevant immunity. But we don't we don't do it anymore.

33:51But point is, why did we stop? Oh, because it's been eradicated. So it's one of those things where having to do that obviously causes like mental scars on people to stab them. But also producing the vaccine for a threat that isn't relevant is irrelevant. My point is that we actually had the World Health Organization. They have this massive trove of variola vaccines. And I'm pretty sure that they didn't want to pay for the refrigeration costs. And they just dumped all of them. So now the U.S. has a policy that per every one citizen, we have a variola vaccine in storage somewhere, which is obviously very great.

34:27But you've got to have come to this question of like, and look, I got five COVID vaccines. And I can walk you through them. I even got the Chinese ones, too. Wait, why? Why did you get all of them? I was international at the time. Interesting. I got Cinepharm, and I got Pfizer, and I got Moderna. Did you have any side effects? The worst was from Cinepharm, so the Chinese one. What was that like? Just incredibly lethargic, sick. And actually, there's a reason why that happens. It's because they're giving you an extremely large dose of mRNA, largely because the delivery vehicle they're using. So this wasn't the Cinepharm one, but Pfizer, Moderna, both were mRNA vaccines.

35:02The mRNA vaccines need a vector, or they need a system to actually deliver it to your cells. and what they use is something called a lipid nanoparticle, which is this little fatty particle that you can embed based off charges, basically mRNA, or generally you can embed nucleic acids, but it works best with mRNA. And the problem is that lipid nanoparticles, they reach the cell membrane or the cell wall, and they basically cause the cell to form what we call an endosome, or basically a little vehicle that can bring in this little particle carrying the mRNA into the cell. The problem is that that vehicle, the endosome, is incredibly acidic.

35:35So it's very low on the pH scale. I think it ranges like a late stage endosome is like 4.3 in pH. And what happens is it disrupts the lipid nanoparticle. And if that lipid nanoparticle can't break out of the endosome, then the mRNA is broken down by enzymes. So I think roughly, basically, if you got it, did you get a Pfizer and Moderna vaccine? I got, I think, Johnson and Johnson and Pfizer. Okay. So the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine used this solution. And basically, what we call So that first process of it getting into that vehicle is like 80 to 90 percent efficient. The process of escaping that vehicle is like 5 percent efficient.

36:13So they had to give you like 50 micrograms of mRNA. I think it's like 20 times as much as you actually like need or it was a significant amount more than you would need because of the limited efficiency and actually getting it into the cytosol or the cytoplasm of your cells, which then enables the actual spike protein to form and that creates the general immunity. Right. So back to my point on smallpox, though, those are contained or that would largely be used in a high containment facility or a BSL-4 lab. We're currently in a BSL-2 lab. So like today, I just received like rhinovirus, which is the common cold and an H1N1, which I can bring if you want to see it.

36:49But it's one of those things where also we can handle recombinant proteins. So like in-house here, we have anthrax lethal factor. We also have the light chain and the heavy chain of botulinum. um so and additionally we have this over here which is peroxane so this is actually a um uh again a phosphate compound so this is about 70 as potent as sarin and what will that do to you and this causes something called sludge which is um salivation lacrimation urination defecation gastrointestinal distress and emesis so you're basically pissing it's followed you're pissing shitting, vomiting, crying, screaming, and then you have a spastic seizure.

37:28And the way that something like this works, so the mechanism of action is really interesting, actually. So your neurons use a neurotransmitter called acetylcholine to actually support with the transmission of electrical signaling or the transmission of general information. And what this does is generally what happens is you have acetylcholine, which is released in the synaptic cleft, so between the two neurons, and you also have an enzyme. So generally when we're talking about neurotransmitters and how they function, you'll have a neurotransmitter release, typically through a vesicle, into the synaptic cleft.

37:59And then you have an enzyme that will break it down over time. Or let's say, for example, like, are you familiar with like an SSRI? Yeah, like Lexpro. Okay, so an SSRI is a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor. So what that means is basically it prevents the neurons. So this is actually really cool. But what normally happens is your neurons release the neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft. It should activate the next neuron in chain. And what an SSRI does is it blocks the neuron, the presynaptic neuron, from reabsorbing basically the serotonin and leaves it there for longer. So then that way, you have a higher likelihood of that second neuron firing.

38:35Now, the reason this is relevant is when we're talking about something like acetylcholine, when we're talking about a nerve agent, like an organophosphate compound, what it does is it binds to acetylcholine esterase. And when we're talking about esterase, we're talking about an enzyme, right? So the relevance here is that basically what this does is it binds to the enzyme responsible for breaking down the acetylcholine. So what that means is the neurotransmitter that's responsible for getting neurons to fire is left in your neurons for so long that you go into a spastic seizure, that your muscles twitch, right?

39:06And then it causes all these secondary effects that we see that results in death, right? And it isn't like a movie where you have like this big cloud or a small cloud, and you put on your gas mask. Most of the time, you've been exposed and you have no idea, right and the nerve agent antidotes that we how long does it take to know five minutes or less right so like it really depends on the agent but in in five minutes you can begin to start experiencing the effects actually i think you mentioned you saw the article that i wrote in the article i had a video of them actually applying i think sarin or a vx agent to a rabbit and you can start seeing the rabbit like twitching all over the place and everything which is really unfortunate um but the nerve agent antidotes like to pam um and um an atropine which is sort of what ATP, which is what we deploy warfighters with today, are basically Cold War era solutions.

39:54They are also therapeutics. They're not prophylaxis. And what I mean by that is they're a solution that treats or attempts to treat it. Now, it doesn't fully do that. You still need to get medical attention. It slows down the effects a bit. And actually, I think 2PAM is reactivating, so it can sort of reactivate those enzymes and help the body. um but generally um you know we're looking at solutions that are applied post exposure so if you don't know you've been exposed um it's impossible to like do something about it right so that's why we have something i actually have it on the table too but we have um auto injectors so uh are you familiar with do you want to go grab yeah so this is something i've used this is something that i actually use so i just ran the marathon and i uh basically i was like what doping can i do um and like how can i elevate my capability so i end up running it in an exoskeleton uh along with uh using peptides um and i actually finished and you have a picture of this right like we can just throw it up in the podcast i have a picture of it um but also we have the exoskeleton over there too you can try it we can maybe get a photo of you trying it on after but point is when we're talking about um the the the usage of nerve of nerve agent antidotes generally if you've been exposed to a nerve agent you don't want to sit there and start like like you know pulling up the relevant you know mount and then injecting yourself right so you you're like twitching and throwing up and vomiting exactly right so you'll use something like this which doesn't contain anything right now but generally you have a syringe in here okay and that and it's just like it's just bring motion that automatically injects it's going auto injector so it automatically injects a specific dose and you can get these uh people use these a lot for like insulin wait so were you just like on the trail just injecting yourself with this stuff but the reason is so i was using bpc 157 which is a body protection compound okay seven uh what does it do so it's a compound that actually supports angiogenesis which is the formation of new blood vessels and reduces inflammation now for some reason for me i don't know if this is like a global effect like across other individuals but if you use bpc 157 or when i used it it would basically reduce any pain i had anywhere in my legs so you know the day of the marathon at like four three four in the morning i sat there injecting basically every part of my calf with bpc 157 um and i had basically no pain at all during the marathon except in my my feet but it's one of those things where you know i think with 20 27 miles um where with no training it was definitely harder than i thought but i think that the the the exoskeleton um the exoskeleton helped a lot um the problem is that the battery doesn't support the entire run so i had to carry five batteries on my back too right um but it was one of those things that i think really did contribute um it was really exciting to see because how much how much of the run does the exoskeleton kind of make easier so is it like a 15 impact or 20 impact or i'll put i'll put it on you afterwards and you'll see it they've a mode called hyper mode and technically that thing can go one horsepower so it can go fast um it can go really really fast um the problem is from a battery standpoint it can't run at one horsepower for the entire duration of the marathon so i was running at like 15 to 20 which is like relatively close to like nothing but like i do think what it does is and you'll try it on after but it physically lifts your foot up and puts your other foot down so it kind of like it trolls you it like moves your body for you it's like one of those machines at the gym yeah um but exactly it's like one of those but imagine using that to walk forward right so 27 miles exactly um but anyways my point is for for these nerve agents generally you're going to be using an auto injector there's also something called a mop suit which you probably do want to put on screen if possible but uh sure why not it's this big clunky suit that you have to get into when because you don't want to contaminate other people and also if you touch something if you touch a nerve agent you can contaminate yourself again so if you treat yourself if it's on your hands you can put it back into your face and you can like reabsorb it or re-aspirate it it'll just destroy you again right so it's one of those things where you have to basically get into this mop suit it's this big bulky suit it's incredibly um uh there's really bad thermal management so you know you're getting into the suit and you're you know i know people who've been in it for two days at a time right and you're like pissing through a tube or something but it's really gnarly um it's it's really bad so why would you be in it for two days at a time like what would you have to have in order to not i think that was more of a training exercise that they put them through um i think that was like an army national guard training thing that they did i think if i recall correctly but um generally if you if you're going um and i think if you're getting general training um you have to go into a mob suit even if you've seen like those videos of of uh people in the army going through like basic training yeah they put them in like that facility and expose them to a bunch of like um uh uh tear gas right and then they kind of leave them in there for like i think like 30 minutes and see what happens really well i think what does it oh okay yeah i think they have a mask on but it's still i would hope so very painful um so anyways it's it's one of those things where um obviously we need to see the creation of and this is something we were working on as well a while back was a next generation nerve agent antidote.

44:57So, you know, everything right now is, and I want to rephrase the term antidote. So everything's typically post-exposure and that seems relevant because obviously you wouldn't want to inject your body with a bunch of compounds, you know, and then maybe not get, or not encounter the threat. And then all of a sudden you have, yeah, you just have a bunch of stuff in your body and there's no reason. So what we were doing is, you know, I mentioned nanoparticles before. are the nanoparticles that are used in the vaccines. So in the Pfizer and the Moderna vaccine, we're just like basically these lipid particles.

45:25And that's actually over there. It's an image of one, but you can think of them as like these little fatty cholesterol particles. And they can be like one layer, two layers, but generally they're very biocompatible, but they're very susceptible to like enzymes and degradation. What we were developing was this five layer particle and it was not composed of fats, but polymers. So plastics. And what you could do is you can actually create this particle that would more effectively get into the cells, almost taking a backdoor entry approach. And this is through a mechanism called nanoelectroporation.

45:59What that means in practice is basically your cells, your cell membrane has like a polarity to it. And what you can do is there's a specific voltage that will actually cause a breakdown of the cell membrane and the formation of a pore. So you have to imagine like you have like this, this like a castle wall, right? And what you can do is you can basically shock the wall and the drawbridge falls down, right? And you can kind of have direct entry as opposed to like relying on like a convoy to like bring you in, right? So like we were like, how do we get around doing like a convoy approach, which is equivalent to your endocytosis, to a drawbridge approach, which is like your electroporation.

46:34So shocking a cell to open it, right? To like force it open for us. And we built a little nanoparticle that basically had this inner ball that would rapidly hit different walls of the outer shell. And it would produce this electric field that would cause or basically shock the cell membrane. And it would enable the drawbridge to come down and force it. So that traditionally, like electroporation, like I said, in terms of the nanoparticles or the material getting into your cells for lipids is only about 5 % to 10 % efficient. Electroporation is close to 95%. So it'd be dramatically more efficient in transfection or delivery of any payload.

47:12So you can be talking mRNA vaccines instead of plasma DNA, small molecule drugs, peptides, proteins, enzymes, whatever it may be, nanobodies. It could really be a wide variety of things. I'd be curious. So I know you've got like all these different compounds and chemicals and all sorts of stuff in your lab. What is what are you taking regularly? So I'm probably like a weird case study. I have generally found that like one of the things I contribute or care most of is probably my sleep, which I know we had a conversation with this earlier. But that probably seems counterintuitive on face value.

47:48But like – Do you want to just tell people like how much you're sleeping right now? So, yeah, I mean, generally don't mind if I'm not very articulate. Right now I'm on like two hours within the last 40 hours of work, right? But I've tried to do like different regimens around my sleep. I've tried to do the polyphasic stuff where you sleep like three hours throughout the day and then take your random naps. Right now, it's like one of those things where I don't even think it's like I think people make sleep and make like waking up like a thing about discipline. And they're like, I need to like get up at six in the morning and run.

48:19And I just think that adds additional thought to your day. Right. Like I'm not really somebody who aligns well to schedules. I just go to bed when it makes sense to go to bed. And generally that works very well for me. now i know everyone's different but like you know there's you know i'll bring up edison again but there's like a photo which i can share with you of the guy would literally just like he'd be working for like 40 hours straight and just get on a bench that looks exactly like this and just lie on the bench and sleep and the only way he could do this really people don't know this is that edison was deaf uh he was actually deaf um and he couldn't hear effectively so if you actually watch videos there's a clip on youtube of um of a day in the life of edison and you see all these people coming up right beside him and they have to go up to him in his right ear and scream in his right ear and initially if you don't realize he's deaf you're like why why is everyone just screaming right beside his face um but he was really deaf and it's really hilarious because he created the phonograph right um so it's one of those things where um it's like you know it's like the similar thing with like zuckerberg being like a nerd and he created the so like a the most proliferate social app he's a super introvert so like yeah it's one of the it's it's weird it's like being an outsider kind of gives you a perspective that you might otherwise not have right but he's so deaf that he would just get on his bench like literally something like this with no pillars and just fall asleep right he's so deaf he thought about hearing yeah um but he actually used to say that he um he he felt very grateful or very fortunate that he couldn't hear because he felt that there's all these distractions like that like like audio distractions around him and if he wasn't interested in a conversation he would just pretend like not to hear it i know i know like personally Like I had real issues going to sleep for years because like even slight variations in noise level would just wake me up.

49:59Sleep is one of those really sensitive things. It's also like one of those things where we kind of just give in. Like I think this is probably one of the things that frustrates me the most. And even with viruses too, we treat it the same where it's like it's almost like God forsaken. it's like you kind of what you know before you go to bed you know you basically submit yourself and you you hope you know you're gonna wake up the next day feeling good right but you can do very little um generally or most people do very little to try and improve the outcome it's not like you can go to it's like you know the parallel here is like you know you can go to the gym and decide what weights you want to lift and and you can decide what exercises you want to do and that really does impact sort of the the the the structure and the workout that you're gonna you're going to accomplish.

50:42Right. But when it comes to sleep, you're really just like, you just lay down and hope for the best. So that was one of the things that really frustrated me. And so something that's frustrating me for a long time, it was actually one of the things that inspired the creation of the first interface that we were building, which was new sleep, which was this brain computer interface, or you can imagine this device that would basically shock you to sleep. Wasn't it like a headband? Yeah. And that was also very intentional to Max literally talked about this when I, when I interviewed him last he literally talked about like using that and he said that there was he felt like there was some you know some difference so there's a so tavns which is the modality we were exploring or transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation um basically modulates the parasympathetic nervous system so you might be familiar with like the the fight or flight um which is like sort of like the the general um term that might that's well understood um but it down it down regulates the like the fight or flight mechanism um and and kind of puts you more into like the more of the calm, relaxed state.

51:40So it amplifies the parasympathetic nervous system. It reduces the sympathetic, which is like fight or flight. And there has been some really strong efficacy on sleep. So like, for example, you know, I think that there was like a significant reduction in the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, which is one of the kind of the clinical metrics that we would employ, as well as the Insomnia Severity Index for tracking kind of the differences in sleep quality. But Brian Johnson uses VNS as well. He's a big advocate for it. Actually, I think I have the same device upstairs that he has as well. But yeah, for my sleep, like, you know, I'll admit I've never slept on a bench before.

52:17I have and I frequently sleep on the couch. And even beyond that, like, you know, before bed, if I know I'm going to have like a longer sleep, like for me, that's like six and a half hours. Then I'll take GABA. I'll take a bit like a very low dose of melatonin, like 200 micrograms of melatonin. I'll take glycine as well. Where do you get the 200 micrograms? Because I take like, I used to take melatonin and it was five grams and it was just like grabbing from Costco. My understanding is it's something like almost a hundred times what you actually need or some crazy. I think Warren, who is like a good blogger, has a good post on this, which I highly recommend.

52:51I'm not going to quote them. I'm not sure if it's a man or a woman. But point is, yes, you are correct. Your pineal gland generally doesn't produce anywhere close to that level of melatonin. um and that's also why you experience drowsiness the next day um so to actually you know generally 200 micrograms of um you can procure from a lot of different places i got i get it from life extension um that's a good source thorne i don't think has that low dosage but thorne is also very good for supplements as well um i know the superpower folks are a big fan of them um also i think momentous is a newer brand that does some really good supplements but yeah i mean i i'm i'll i'll be really honest it's like as much or rather as least i the least i can think about like the basics of living, the happier I am.

53:37So like, you know, my mentality is like, how can I like opt for like 95 % robot and like reduce like as much human - Cognitive load. No, you're not like as much, reduce as much human characteristics as possible. Like how can I reduce as much human need as possible? So like the need for social interaction, the need for food, the need for sleep, like - And how do you systematically go about reducing that? So I don't wanna mislead you and say it's systematic. It's just like, it's just, I just work. Like, I don't like, it's like, it's one of those things where I, I've tried to like optimize my environment for like the least amount of friction possible.

54:13So like we're recording in our main lab. This is like, you know, a BSL2 facility, broad spectrum prototyping. So we have like everything ranging from like advanced spectroscopy all the way to organic synthesis and nano, like nanomaterial and nanofabrication. I wanted to have a space where I could like build whatever I wanted to build. Right. And this is really relevant because we're working on a diversity or like a diverse set of initiatives alongside like the federal government or for the federal government. Right. And one of the things I've tried to do is like I think many people resort to like higher dopamine sources.

54:48So easily getting easily distracted on your phone. I've tried like everything from using like dumb phones like those flip phones all the way to like the gray screen on iPhone. I think everyone has explored that at some point. um but like what i really landed on is just like really i i treat my phone like it's like almost like a dictionary like it just really has only books on it um i've gotten rid of like most of my social media stuff i'm a big like i use twitter a lot mostly on my computer but like i have to make i like make myself get to my computer is it like upstairs yeah it's upstairs but like i will like wake up and i'll like force myself to get to my computer before i can use twitter and by then i already want to do other work right so kind of right it kind of removes the need but again i I don't want anyone to seem like it's like discipline because it's not that.

55:32It's just moment. It's like motion. Like how can I create as much motion as possible? Like the Argus sensor here, you know, I had a conversation with Delian at Founders Fund, like I want to say three weeks ago, three and a half weeks ago around biosecurity. And, you know, we were talking generally about sort of the demand and kind of what it's going to take. And, you know, I'd love to kind of dive into that as well to like actually modernize and move towards this new solution because it isn't as simple as building new technology. But point is, you know, he came to he came and was really interested around the concept of having, you know, some form of next generation like biosurveillance or bio radar.

56:07And, you know, basically since then, it's been nonstop cracking away and building this. So it's been about three weeks of work and we already have a device standing. And the next step is to do a challenge study. So was that the like inception of it? No, no, no. So I've been thinking about biosurveillance for probably since, you know, since I was very young. Have you played the game Plague? Oh, yeah, yeah. Totally. a bunch were you good at it yeah so that's my favorite game growing up um or one of my favorites uh at least on iphone and i always thought it was really compelling to like have this ability to to like be this virus and you can like infect a lot of different people um but then there's also the other side of it where you have to like make the cure right and it's like the other game mode you can play and you know i was like really compelled by this idea of being able to have something that looks like a this big map and being able to see the presence of viruses at different areas across the world.

56:54And you look at the current stuff we have in place. So the two programs, and I kind of briefly alluded to them earlier, is we have national security. So we have BioWatch, which is, I didn't fully get into it, but BioWatch was established after the American anthrax attack. So after that army officer proliferated them, and it was part of, I think it's part of Bush's, one of his speeches that he announced it formally. But point is, it was in 2003 that we actually moved forward with the development and deployment of the sensors. And it was one of those things where really from the get-go, there just wasn't a lot of thought put into it.

57:28So basically, we have now 3 ,000 sensors that are spread across the country, and we call them portable sampling units. Basically, they're these things that are probably up to your navel, so up to your belly button, and effectively are like a small silver unit and have like a little chimney-looking thing. And it basically pulls in the air and basically viruses will attach onto the filter inside of the sampling unit. Every single day, a state or municipal level authority has to drive four hours to each sensor, swab each sensor, drive four hours back. And then they take the sample they've collected and then run it through PCR.

58:04And we're not aware of a result until roughly 72 hours later. Which could be horrible. Which could be catastrophic, right? Now, again, because we're using PCR for the most part, we can't detect anything emerging. So we're only detecting threats that are considered known. And in fact, we only detect six of the 14 known threats. Now, I recently found out why this was the case, because obviously with PCR technology, it's advanced in the last 22 years. We should be able to detect much more than six. So the federal government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security policy, is that BioWatch does exactly what it was intended to do, which is detect the threats that we know how to counter.

58:45So we know how to counter. It doesn't detect the things that we don't have counters for? Exactly. On purpose? On purpose. So that sounds like a horrible idea. Now, we've tried to modernize. So the DHS's CWMD office, the Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction office, has tried to do it twice now. They had a program called Gen 3 and they had another program called Biological Detection 21. Both times, they've completely failed at determining what requirements would improve upon the current systems we have in place. But also, notably, they couldn't find any technology to procure. So the kind of the standing joke with BioWatch is not even that the technology is bad or it's inundated or antiquated.

59:26It's that, you know, we had a report from the Office of the Inspector General come out. So an internal report from the Department of Homeland Security where they went up to like across the country and they surveyed these sensors. And they found that in 34 out of the 35 jurisdictions we've deployed them in, they don't meaningfully collect data. And they don't collect data because people unplug them. So what? People walk up to the BioWatch devices and literally unplug them because there's nothing in the contracts that stipulated. There's nothing that maintains that the outlets need to be locked.

59:54So people unplug the sensors and they plug in their laptops and their phones. So imagine going through TSA and just unplugging a backscatter scanner like the X-ray machine and just like walking through onto your plane. You know, you'd be arrested in a moment, right? If, you know, you wouldn't be able to make it the power outlet. Is this one of those situations where people like were optimizing for the last, you know, the whole thing where you buy insurance for the last disaster? And because there's, you know, like there's the whole terrorist situation on the planes, they put in all the scanners and everything, invest a bunch of billions in that.

1:00:24And we just like decided not to do it. So generally, the federal government, when it comes to biological agents, has taken a very reactive posture. So this is what we're trying to move away from. And so the work that we're trying to do at Pilgrim, even from a policy angle, is changing the narrative that we can't wait for the next pandemic to happen for us to establish superior infrastructure. Like biological, like biosurveillance and biosecurity needs to be recognized as a critical piece of national infrastructure that preserves the health and the wealth of our nation by not just detecting these threats, but if you have a system that can actually detect and attribute.

1:01:00So, for example, like we might be able to determine based off of sequencing that this specific strain is a well understood strain coming out of a Wuhan lab. Right. And if that's the case, then we are able to effectively prosecute. So that that deters our adversaries from deploying potential agents if they know that if we're able to meaningfully detect and attribute the source of it. Right. But we can't even do that today. So our adversaries are looking in on our current technology and the state of it hasn't changed in 22 years. It's being unplugged rampantly. And we have that one national security angle.

1:01:30The other side of it is like CDC, right? And the Center for Disease Control. And they have a program called the Traveler Genomic Surveillance Program, which is something that Ginkgo Biosecurity actually contributes to. And Ginkgo as a company is generally not doing incredibly well. But their biosecurity vision is still going somewhat strong. And they have this program called Horizon and Canopy. and part of their program involves this relationship with CDC where they do wastewater surveillance. So people also don't know this, but generally in nine major airports, I think it's in like John F. Kennedy, it's an LAX, I think it's an SFO, it's in a couple more, nine total now.

1:02:06Are they testing? So what they do is they actually pull the wastewater off of planes. So if you use the bathroom on a plane, so if you excrete viral material, the idea is that we can pull the wastewater and then sequence or clean up the fecal matter, clean up the urine and sequence the material and determine the presence of a threat. So actually, we just did this and we recognize that COVID is actually having another boom right now, like a summer boom, which sounds like a sale, but it's unfortunately not. And it's one of those things where it sounds good in practice, but I don't know about you.

1:02:38I hardly use the bathroom on planes. I try to avoid using the bathroom generally when I go to the airport. So I'm not being collected. Like my data, my sample is not being collected. right are you doing that purposefully no of course not but but it's one of those things where like you might not use the bathroom on a plane i would hope you're breathing on a plane right and that's where a sensor like what we're building with argus is goes much much farther where we can have or basically install these in airplanes or airliners um and be able to effectively pull in air in real time and detect the presence of a threat wouldn't an airplane actually be kind of like the perfect situation because you've got this like closed environment loop where you can't actually have that being measured for a very specific group of individuals.

1:03:16Yeah. Very, like how many people fly every day? Is it like 10 million? So, I mean, I don't have a firm number on that. That's actually a good number to look into. But I would say that airplanes are definitely really compelling. I think airports as a whole is kind of a compelling first piece. And we're kind of already looking at landside deployment. So like how we can work with airport administrators and kind of get into. So if you think about how an airport works, you have your departures and arrivals area with baggage claim, and then you'll have TSA. And everything after TSA is called clean. It's a clean area, right?

1:03:47Because you've kind of gone through screening. Typically, if you want to deploy something prior to TSA or what we call land side, you don't need as much oversight. So we can deploy our sensor like Argus without having to go through the Department of Homeland Security and having to go through that whole process, which might be incredibly protracted. But anyways, we're trying to like meaningfully find deployment opportunities also in farms, like trying to detect the presence of H5N1 There's also like a really big threat of agroterrorism. So like recently we had two CCP individuals or two Chinese individuals who entered the country with an extremely noxious fungi that would have caused blight, like billions and billions of dollars of agricultural damage for our country, along with birth defects for people who consumed the infected crops.

1:04:30And they openly admitted to carrying that fungi many times before. One of them was actively enrolled in a Chinese university. And now I think Castro Tell and DOJ is kind of overseeing the investigation. But like, you know, you look at certain places, like you look at certain states and many of these states are losing a wide, wide stretch of their livestock, of their crops to a variety of different pathogens or bacteria. So there's really this prevailing issue that we need to have superior detection in place for. I think airplanes is a good opportunity. I think farms is another really, really clear one.

1:05:06How much do you think in like damage annually is caused through preventable? Like if we just had the detection systems in place, like how much would those detection systems cost in the first place to build? And then also like what would potentially be the like ROI for on a country wide scale? You know, COVID is one of those things where I think it's a really clear example of this. It's the most recent. It's sort of in like, you know, past memory of this point. But the numbers are very clear. You know, COVID from an economic standpoint was a$16 trillion GDP inflection, which is twice the cost of the global war on terror, which came in at$8 trillion.

1:05:40And obviously, we're looking at the difference of 20 years versus two to three years. It also, you know, caused, you know, and look, I can tell you pretty firmly that the source and origin of COVID was the Wuhan laboratory. There probably was some other involvement as well from other nations, but that's a whole different point. But point is, I don't know how far we can get into that. Go right ahead if you want to. But point is, generally, when we're talking about something like COVID, we're looking at pure casualties. If it was, let's say, if it was intended to be an attack on our country, then from a casualty basis, it was equivalent to 412 9-11 attacks.

1:06:23So you don't see people memorializing COVID. You know, we obviously, you know, we, you know, I lost my grandmother to COVID. You know, I think many people lost loved ones. But, you know, it doesn't stand in comparison or in anywhere near foot to, you know, how we perceive 9-11. Yet, from a population standpoint, obviously, it killed many more people. I think probably part of the big reason for that is because you can easily pinpoint the plane crashing into the building as you can't totally pinpoint, you know, it's an ambiguous thing. So what I'll say to that is, in fact, it's even worse than you expect, is that in the beginning, because we had a very limited understanding of COVID, right now the estimated casualties is like 1.23, close to 1.3 million people.

1:07:05Is that just in the U.S.? In the U.S. alone. The estimation, some estimations are actually dramatically higher because we've only like now isolated to like these cases that we defined as COVID-related, like casualties or deaths that were COVID-related. but you know in the in late 2019 kind of leading into 2020 like around december and january there was probably a lot of people who were dying from covid that we just didn't attribute it meaningfully to so yeah yeah to your point like and i have different thoughts on this i think like obviously like firm military action um or like a very firm event like the fall of the berlin wall or 9-11 has a very clear and profound impact that sort of prevails and has an enduring impact on the country i think we haven't truly recovered from 9-11 yet but i i think that covid was more long-stretched.

1:07:50I think it affected many more people. And I think from a consideration standpoint, from a defense angle, like, you know, you look, and again, people don't know this, but like for 10 weeks in the Indo-PACOM, so in the Pacific, USS Theodore Roosevelt, so one of our carriers, went down because 1 ,000 sailors contracted COVID. So we lost 10 % of our naval air fighting capability because of COVID. And there was no direct confrontation. There wasn't a missile, there wasn't, you know, a cruiser, there wasn't anything that hit that carrier that disabled it. or sidelined it. You know, we sidelined it purely as a result of a biological agent, right?

1:08:23So it kind of opens the same territory as cyber, where you can kind of have these non-confrontational attacks that have the capability set of wiping, you know, wiping the activity or the productivity of a wide stretch of infrastructure to defense, to critical resources. So it's like one of those things where clearly we need to have a system in place. And, you know, we've already spent a billion dollars on BioWatch today. You know, the CDC spent considerable amount of money on their travel genomics program as well um what's crazy is like even a billion dollars it sounds like a lot of money but it's really not in the grand scheme of things are you is the goal with with that piece of technology is to like kind of build the real time plague map where you kind of see where is the plague yeah and you don't know you know it's detecting all the possible viruses kind of stuff so one thing i'll mention is because i know it sounds ridiculous i know i know the biowatch thing sounds ridiculous but i i'm going to give them a bit of credit.

1:09:16And the reason I'm going to give them credit is if we detect the presence of Ebola at the Atlanta airport tomorrow, our first responders don't know how to handle that. They don't have the relevant equipment. They don't have the relevant training. They wouldn't know what to do. It would frankly be a nightmare. And it would be similar to what we were trying to do during COVID, where we'd have this massive rise of people dedicated to the problem, like we saw Operation Warp Speed, and we tried to curb the threat as soon as possible. This actually, it did happen in 2014. There was a minor Ebola outbreak in the country.

1:09:47But point is, and this is also a good story I'll bring up afterwards on you, Samaritan Monkeys. But point is, at that point, actually, I'll use that 2014 example as a clear one here. Around that time, CBP, so Customs and Border Patrol and Protection, Customs and Border Protection, was responsible for doing biological screening. So they would be asking people, oh, did you travel to the Congo? So, you know, so-and-so, they're trying to determine the presence of a filovirus or Marburg virus or an Ebola, like an Ebola virus. And they would also do the questions and they would do fever screening, whatever.

1:10:23And basically the CBP came forward and says like, well, look, our men aren't trained on how to detect biological agents. We don't understand it. So let's get CDC in here. And CDC came in and we're like, well, hey, this is interesting. and you would imagine that the CDC, the Center for Disease Control, would have a firm grasp on disease control, but they kind of came forward and were like, we mostly do anomalies. We do things that are sort of out of the blue. For general surveillance, that's not really what we do. That's finally when DHS was kind of pulled into the mix. So the CWMD office. The CWMD office at DHS just got dissolved, by the way, as a part of the DOGE initiative.

1:11:01Now, I actually think that that was probably the right move. the challenge so one of the reasons i think largely doge is dissolving a lot of like non-congressionally mandated offices and agency or programs um but not agencies but but point is one of the things we've been pushing for from policy angle is consolidation there is way too many there's like 19 different federal agencies that have some level of involvement in biosecurity um and and generally budgets and appropriations are highly fragmented across those, right? So like DITRA, the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, which is basically an agency inside or under the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the OUSD, responsible for curbing WMD threats, so weapons of mass destruction.

1:11:48And they also work with the Joint Program Executive Office for Chemical, Biological, and Radiological and Nuclear Defense. But point is, it's a long acronym, point is, you know, you have, I think close to$2 billion worth of appropriations for the chemical and biological defense program, which has like nine different offices and agencies involved. And then you also have the intelligence community. So the reason I think that the breakdown of the CW &D office was smart was largely because in DHS alone, you had the CBRN office and the CW &D office, which really should have been doing the same thing.

1:12:21CBRN is chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear. But the point is, they dissolved the office and they took BioWatch and they're putting it into CISA. So CISA is the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency or Cyber Infrastructure, something like that. And CISA, again, does cybersecurity, and now they're overseeing biological security. So the relation there is pretty challenging to identify. Now, what I've come to understand is that CISA, prior to being called CISA, was doing mostly critical security for major infrastructure. So that's sort of how they're seeing it as like Biowatch is sort of down.

1:12:59The jurisdiction is at that state and municipal level. So that's sort of what CISA has excelled in. And do you think it makes way more sense to have it at a federal level, like just blanket? I think it makes sense to, I mean, first off, I think one of the things we're trying to push from a policy side is accountability. um i think that there's very clearly um a lot of finger pointing in terms of who should be responsible for biosecurity for the nation and frankly it's kind of gone between public health and national security and it really has to like i think fall into probably one distinct agency in both of those categories and have like a unifying you know like a joint force or unifying um not joint force um task force that would be responsible for like overseeing it or directly involving Trump's national security advisor, the presidential national security advisor.

1:13:46There's a few different angles you can play here, but I think accountability is one big piece and consolidation. I think that there is a tremendous amount of funding that can and should exist and is incredibly distributed across these agencies and offices and even some commands. So I think pulling it all together is sort of the right way. And I think Doge kind of breaking down some of these offices is a step in the right direction. But yeah, that's pretty much it at a high level. um so just for context getting back to my final point here is like for us to deploy a sensor like argus generally biosecurity it can't be done through one sensor so when we're thinking about a meaningful approach even if we're talking about surveillance we don't just have one you know we don't just have like open source intelligence we have human we have sigint like we have different app different modes of intelligence that we leverage to kind of gather a wider picture of a threat or leverage it for an investigation, right?

1:14:40So my point is like Argus is meant to be a small piece of a much, much larger system, right? So the goal long-term would be really cool to have like a plague map, but it would likely be the usage of not just Argus, but probably waste water detection, nasal swabs. But also one thing that I've been really interested in is, you know, maybe there's a future where Pilgrim is responsible for privatizing like a on-the-ground force that's actually at these major airports or major infrastructure points and could actually handle threats as we encounter them, right? Or maybe we train CBP or we train the relevant people who are already in the airport environments as part of their general training on how to handle these threats and we provide them with the relevant equipment and infrastructure to do so.

1:15:20So I think that's like a second piece too, is like we can't just expect that our first responders will be sufficiently trained to handle them. We need to ensure that we can give them the relevant tools and training and prepare them for any threat. you know it's like it's almost like you know the current the current approach is saying that like you know um if if uh it's like you know we we've been texted osama bin laden but we don't know how to handle him so let's just leave him you know it just doesn't make any sense if you wanted to be like a super terrorist what are the actions that you would take that you see like there's chinks in the american you know america's armor and like you can see that because you're so deep on all this stuff like what are the things that you would do um so focus on you know generally like when we're talking about like bioweapons like the the the reputation is like a poor man's nuke right and i think a lot of people are like now like super afraid with like the llms they're like okay like you know with agi you know we're gonna have it's gonna be far easier to build bioweapons if you generally know your way around a lab and you've like worked with vectors like you've worked with AAV, like a viral vector, or you've worked with lipid nanoparticles or even polymeric nanoparticles, and you procure agents.

1:16:32It's like, as a laboratory, because we're not certified, I can't go out and procure Ebola, right? Ebola is highly controlled. It's mostly controlled in the US by USAMRID and CDC. But point is, like, let's say I was a terrorist and I had a source of Ebola. it's really not that tricky to encapsulate the purified virus or just to spread the purified virus right now ebola is a weird one so ebola it can you can form droplets but it's largely bodily fluids along with with fomites so basically getting it onto a surface and then somebody touches the surface it's like a handle right but like for example you could have a terrorist walk into john kenny airport carrying a little tube of ebola spread it across the handles and all the major bathrooms and you would never know that it was him like you would it'd be really because there's no cameras in the bathroom it'd be really hard set to say that this guy was the ebola spreader right so wouldn't it be like a relative um like people could trace it back after you know a bunch of people get ebola in the next few days you'd recognize that it was there was a uh an emergence of the virus but you wouldn't know it was necessarily a terrorist attack right so like That's my point is we have no means to actually attribute it because we're still leveraging PCR.

1:17:48You'd have a lot of people who show up with Ebola, and Ebola is nasty. It turns your blood vessels into Jell-O, which is really harsh. There's actually Richard Preston, who I just tweeted about this, but Richard Preston, who's a couple books, including The Hot Stone and The Demon in the Freezer, which is actually about anthrax. Funny enough, we actually have anthrax in our freezer, too, so we have the demon in the freezer. Do you want to grab that? Yeah, I can grab the anthrax. Grab the anthrax. There you go.

1:18:15So this is what we call the lethal factor. So anthrax, and so we're talking about things like anthrax, or we're talking about botulinum. There's different proteins or recombinant proteins that are involved. You may need to sit down. Your camera got stepped away. I know, I saw that.

1:18:35There's different recombinants. This is the only one that Paul's been actually worried about. There's different recombinant proteins that are involved in getting it both into the cell and then actually causing or the mechanism that actually triggers the side effects or triggers the casualty or the eventual death. So point is, this here is the lethal factor. So this is the part of the anthrax that kills you. Now you also have the etymifactor, which helps with the, I believe, supports the actual transfection into the cell. so i'm definitely more familiar on on the the neurotoxin side so if we're talking about like botulinum or people generally don't know this but botox is botulinum it's a neurotoxin and what it does is it prevents the cell's ability to actually release the neurotransmitter but generally how it works is it uses something called the heavy chain and the heavy chain of botulinum can basically force Paul stepping away again force the um the the cell to form an endosome so this is actually the anthrax lethal factor how much how much and I mean I'm not gonna hold it um how much how much could kill someone so it's a good question this by itself would not kill you that's why he doesn't have to be concerned because um I'll put it away uh so he can come back in the room um but generally this by itself won't kill you you need to have a delivery system but to your original point and what I was mentioning, I can procure this with no certification, with no license, with nothing.

1:20:03I didn't get verified for this. But for me to purchase this, basically, they called me and said, what is your experience working with Anthrax? And what are you going to use it for? And I said, well, we work with the government and they checked my LinkedIn and now it's the extent of it. Right. So it's one of those things where - This is like getting approved for level three options on Robinhood.

1:20:28it's harder to get like a it's harder to get you know that account on robin hood than it is for me to procure the anthrax and you have like three four day shipping right and after you receive it you can encapsulate this protein and i don't want to give anyone ideas but you can encapsulate a protein this is well understood in in a vector um so a mechanism to deliver it and if you took this and you encapsulated it in a polymeric nanoparticle, you've effectively created a bioweapon. So it's one of those things where you don't need an LLM to tell you how to do it. A polymerization, you can look at a paper on PubMed and you can figure out very quickly how to make nanoparticles.

1:21:06And you can procure this, assuming you've demonstrated that, you know, you have on face value a BSL-2 lab, even though a biosafety level two lab is not a certified lab. Like there's nobody that comes into a lab like this and says you are capable of doing it. The only thing that qualifies for biosafety level two is that biosafety cabinet and some general training that I'm aware of, right? So point is, though, that like the, I'll put this aside for now, but point is like, generally, when we're talking about this idea of like a terrorist being able to produce a biological weapon and proliferate it, it's sort of comical how simple it is.

1:21:43It's sort of ridiculous. You know, at one point in my life, I kept saying it's ridiculous. We haven't seen it happen. And then we had COVID. Right. So wherever you want to attribute the source or the intention behind covid, we do largely understand to be a lab leak. We understand that it originated in Wuhan and obviously scaled and proliferated across the world, you know, causing global shutdowns and millions of Americans to lose their lives. So, you know, we're in a situation where we have seen that threat, yet we turned a blind eye. We hadn't we haven't pushed for any more modernization. and the program I mentioned from the CDC.

1:22:16So the CDC, the country's Center for Disease Control, which should ideally be the agency or the body responsible for preventing attacks like COVID from occurring or from future pandemics from occurring. Since COVID, they were in seven airports during COVID during this genomic surveillance. We've now expanded to all but nine airports. So we're in nine airports across the country. there are 5 ,412 public airports in our country. So nine out of 5 ,400 is really, really pocket change in terms of being able to stop an attack. And are these just like the major ones, like LAX and JFK? So these are the major ones.

1:22:57I think the problem still relies on the fact that you might not use the bathroom on an airport or on an airplane. And frankly, if you came in from an international flight and you flew in 14, 15 hours, I don't really know anyone who's going to sit there and get a 30 minute nasal swab and PCR. are, you're going to want to go home, right? So it's sort of like these impractical things. I think like this is sort of, it's actually a really important piece that, you know, maybe we can talk a little bit more about. And it's something that I've had to contend with and spend a lot of time with is the fact that, you know, where we are now at Pilgrim is like, we're kind of the ones defining the narrative.

1:23:29There really isn't an organization today that serves in like a biotech prime capacity. There isn't really anyone who is trying to create this new generation of biosecurity. You have a lot of like aging inventors. You know, I go to these events and I was telling somebody on our team and, you know, I want to be, you know, I'm trying to be kind because, you know, obviously there's people who've really devoted their life to this. But, you know, you have people. So you have former Undersecretary David Richardson, who was responsible for CWMD, who just got moved over to director of FEMA, you know, going on the fact that, you know, we can't just be thinking about the battlefield of today.

1:24:02We need to be thinking about the battlefield in 20 years from now. Now, if you look around the room when he's saying this, most of the people in that room won't be alive in 20 years. Right. And I'm not trying to be rude. But my point is, like, we need to have this more devoted and frankly, a fringe effort to move towards changing the landscape of how we treat biosecurity today. And that really starts by creating the narrative. The piece around the narrative, which matters a lot, is positioning. So this is something I've spoken about more privately than publicly, but I think that generally the DoD does not buy the best technology.

1:24:35They buy the best positioned solution. And what that means is we have to spend a lot of time trying to understand not just the language or the metrics that are relevant to the brass or to the warfighter, but also understanding procurement pathways, understanding how a product might be deployed. So a good example of this is Kingsfoil, which is our hemostatic. initially when i was building king's foil and i tested it on myself it was a patch right and i spent more time with that concept and i realized well you know the patch design was compelling but a an ied blast which is like a blast wound uh or blast injury that creates a wound is one of the leading causes of would that be like a grenade like a grenade or an improvised explosive device so like a side of the highway bomb um right and something like that doesn't create a little little regular wound it creates this highly irregular jagged wound that looks like a shark just took a full-on bite out of your leg so for something like that you need something that can um to treat a very diverse wound both be applied in multiple places that but but also something that can fit the irregular injury something that can fit different shapes and sizes and conditions so like wounds also release fluid or exudate right so we want to have something that can accommodate a more or at least enable a wider form factor or broader form factor so we moved away from the concept of like this patch towards something like like a like a gel right because on face value seems very applicable the problem is it's twofold if i was to try continue to try to push a gel into the army or into socom or wherever the relevant customer may be they're trained on they're trained on using goss so if i was to push this concept of a gel it would necessitate training across the entire infantry so every single infantryman every single person in the army who's actually going to go into a field a field environment or even would have to be trained for it and also that would be a crazy thing for you to do because obviously like telling the army to retrain the entire army in order for your shareholder value is ridiculous so so that would that would never happen so what we've done is we've established models that accommodate gauzes right it accommodates what we understand so if you're trying to come in with the gel so in fact there was an organization i think uh it's wound stop or blood stop it's one of the two um that recently came up with this shell almost looks like hummus um it's like hummus in a tube and they inject the hummus into your leg and it instantly forms a clot it's incredible it's an incredible solution they brought it to the institute for surgical research in the army and in like the second phase of their trial they cut it because the isr's model relied on the fact that you have to be able to hold pressure to the wound and because it was a gel because it was like this fluid they couldn't meaningfully hold pressure so even though it's a better solution to quick clot and it's something and you know obviously we're trying to build even something better than that um you have to be able to have something that can maintain you can hold pressure to something that fits within the overall semblance of what quick clot was modeled after right that way you have like an apple to apple comparison so if you can't do that then they won't field your product so my point is like it's these nuances and these very more esoteric bits that i've had to like procure and like our team generally has had to build up to understand more definitively what it'll actually take to get a product into the hands of the warfighter it isn't as simple as like an indefinite delivery vehicle or like this outstanding contract where there's like a five billion dollar budget and they can just like tap us and say give us gauzes um it just doesn't work like that okay so i know that like there's this entire you know schtick in silicon valley where they you know gavin belson has the blood boy and then it came out like you Peter Thiel has a blood boy and turns out Brian Johnson now like basically has a blood boy.

1:28:10That's his son. How long until we can kind of like everyone has a blood boy? And what's the benefit of having one? So blood transfusions, there's a few different reasons why people do them. Sometimes it's for platelet changes. What I can tell you is, at least in the military context, there's a few pieces here that are really interesting. Now, obviously, there's consistently a blood shortage. which that's well established. There's always a constant need for blood. And frankly, there's a constant need for human blood, right? In the past, we've tried to give humans like other animal blood. Like pig blood or something?

1:28:47Yeah, like pig blood. And pigs are pretty close. Like swine models are pretty close for like testing hemostatics. So like when we're testing King's Foil, our next course of action is to basically, you cut the femoral artery of the pig, so behind their leg, and you put the solution or you put the gauze on, and that's sort of how we can validate it. You can't test this on humans because, you know, unfortunately, if someone bleed out, it's probably not good for that, but you also can't cut holes in people's legs. So like, like I'm, I'm very pro self-experimentation. So like, you know, I did the demo on myself, um, largely because I didn't want to have to go to the IDE pathway or look at doing an IRB, but like, even like what I mentioned with like a, like, uh, like, um, for Argus, right.

1:29:23Like for something like Argus, I intend to test that myself too. So like, you know, I don't want to go through. So traditionally the CDC does something called a challenge study. And a challenge study is intentionally infecting people with a virus to then test out vaccines and therapeutics. What my plan is, is to do a challenge study to basically give myself H1N1 or the common cold and then cough and see if our sensor can meaningfully detect it. And then I might do a little bit of gain of function research, which means changing the actual virus and forcing a mutation and then giving that to myself again and then seeing if the sensor can detect it.

1:29:59That or we also have the mannequin outside with the backpack. But the point is, to answer your question more head on, blood is in constant shortage. It's so bad that there's a policy that people have been exploring. I actually think it has been deployed in some context in the military where if there's somebody who's been killed, so KIA, you can go up to them and take their blood. And you can extract their blood and use their blood for transfusion with other people who are alive who are in need of that blood. Generally, the military does not carry blood because blood typically has to be cooled and kept at a very stable temperature.

1:30:36What they carry is something called crystalloids, which is like a saline solution, which is meant to kind of add a volume to kind of help with oxygenation. But it's not a blood replacement by any means. There have been a lot of efforts to create artificial or synthetic blood really for like the past 30 to 40 years now. We have synthetic blood deployed in veterinarian contexts. so veterinarians actually do have like animals for animals yeah interesting so which which which animals in particular i think mostly dogs okay um it's this company i think called um calisite or the product is called calisite um but their product is not very smart it basically it's it's a polymer so it's a polymeric nanoparticle like the one i described um and they use um expired heme or hemoglobin um as a means to actually carry the oxygen um so they basically you can have hemoglobin that might be expired from a transfusion that was never delivered and then repurpose that blood for use in what they call like semi-synthetic.

1:31:28So that's pretty interesting. What we've been more exploring is the topic of blood conversion or blood translation, which is how we can take A negative blood and turn it into universal O negative. And it's really compelling. It's the idea of basically using enzymes to strip the antigens or the sugars off of the outer layer of the red blood cell and basically reducing the inflammatory or the immune response that would otherwise occur from giving somebody and giving you the wrong blood type. So would it be actually giving someone that has like a negative or O negative, a negative, or is it just like decreasing the response?

1:32:07So what you would be doing is you're literally removing the outer layer of the red blood cell that would trigger an immune response. So the reason we have antigens is for a very specific reason. Your body wants a way to detect and know if it's seeing a cell that's not inherent to your own body or seeing something that's foreign. So that's why there's antigens. Antigens are almost like a signal that your immune system can use to detect whether or not the cell that it's looking at is something that your body produced or something that's come out from a foreign source. So that's why people have – the different blood types is some creatures that are like 16 – I think dogs have like 16 blood types.

1:32:44It's like really crazy. um can we do gene editing to make it so everyone has the same blood type so it's just easy transfusions yeah i don't see why not um but we wouldn't so people have a misconception you wouldn't want o negative blood you want a b like a b blood um that way you have both antigens so o negative or o blood has no antigens a blood has as a antigens and and i think b blood what does that do for you the antigens yeah well it's what i mentioned the signals okay tell the body whether or not it's a cell that's natural or inherent to to your your your body right so it's it's a means for the body to understand and detect the presence of foreign or unknown you know cells so do people with o negative blood have like a i don't know slightly more susceptibility to like foreign um it's it's i think it's actually what i've actually heard is the opposite i've actually heard that people um recently i heard this actually that people i have not validated this so this is okay very much um in terms of uh scientific um credibility off the record but i heard that people with o negative blood had generally uh uh uh like a better response to covid than people with a or b so wouldn't you want like the entire population to have o negative so o negative is is universal donor yeah um a b is universal acceptor so a b is what you'd want the entire population to have a b can take anything because if you have a antigens or you b antigens or o has no antigens you a b can take anything o can donate to itself though right oh can don't so in the limit if you had everyone with a negative the problem with o negative is that if your cells have any antigens that triggers an immune response oh oh that's why it's not a universal acceptor uh and so back to the whole like pig blood and all that or yeah um yeah how close are we to creating synthetic blood for humans we're close um it's really now come down to the FDA and sort of their purview to move these programs forward.

1:34:39Now, one of them has gotten significant traction. One of them, I think, has got a big transfer funding from DARPA to work on this. Synthetic blood is obviously of big interest for defensive applications. One of the issues with synthetic blood is actually a religious issue as well. I think it's the—what is it? It's the—I'm trying to remember which religious affiliation it is. Turan or something? No, no, no. It's a Christian one, but I'll come back to me later on. Point is, part of this religion is—it's going to frustrate me that I don't remember this—but part of the religion is that you can't accept blood that is not of human origin.

1:35:22It's very weirdly specific. It's not the Jesuits. It's something like that, though. It's in that same ballpark of Jewish, so Christianity is sort of a little bit foreign jehovah's witness thank you jehovah's witness yeah all right okay so you said you mentioned like off camera that you wanted to be on a liquid diet um is there any advantage to a liquid diet like what what's the goal there it's like what i mentioned earlier it's like reducing friction right like if if you know i've loved the idea of trying to live off soylent you know i think soylent is like probably one of the best company names i've seen because the soylent green which is incredible um that and cone heads um but you know i could i could pull out the could finally pull out the cone head um but i'll wear it for this question um so what remind me of the question oh liquid diet the reasons for you know driving towards the liquid diet yeah um yeah so when it when it comes to like a liquid diet i think the the general ambition is you know first off it reduces the body's energy expense on digesting food i don't want that to like sound like like i'm like overly like like tracking you know the the the energy i spent to digest everything but i feel it's one of those things where you know sometimes you eat something it's like a bit of a rock you know and that's really unfortunate um i also think there's like a lot of generally there's a lot of decision making that has to go into like ordering food so i know the cognitive load it's funny because if you add up all the like little decisions that you make throughout the day like you said you mentioned that you don't want to uh have like a rigid schedule but that almost sounds like you're making every decision like for the first time again and again again i think that it's or are you just like having one framework which is always do work whatever the next step is and i think it's definitely more more in line with that like i i think like people like schedule because it feels like consistency to them i've just not been somebody who opts for consistency like i i've tried like so many times to like like establish like a schedule like oh i'm gonna wake up at like six in the morning and i'm gonna do this and do that and then it's like well tonight i feel like i want to work till four in the morning it's like that i'm gonna sleep two hours and then wake up at six and then my entire rest of my day is screwed so it's like i i noticed that i'm my work schedule excels on like me being able to just switch between things so like i as it's probably very clear we have argus sitting there we have king's foil sitting on the bench behind it um what i've tried to do is like be in this world where i've gotten rid of like the bullshit distractions of tv i'm a big cinephile so i used to really love watching movies um but what i try to do now is have argus be like a key priority so i'm actively building like the sensor and then if i get bored or if i feel like i'm like kind of getting out of it um i'll either move to working on king's foil so i kind of get like the dopamine hit of like working on something completely different right so i go from doing electrical engineering so doing like pcb design or firmware like firmware creation or like firmware design or general software um To being in the lab, handling organic chemicals, and then doing or working with polymers and doing polymerization all the way to doing mechanical engineering.

1:38:25And I'll kind of circle back to doing reading, right? So I kind of get like go between these different states of working on like really compelling different ideas. And it's sort of like they think the only way I can kind of keep sane without like having something at the end of the day to like fall on. I'm not like a big substance user. I hardly drink alcohol. It's one of those things that just like I don't really get. Do you only really take like the uppers, like modafinil, Adderall? So I definitely, as I mentioned to you off camera too, like I've definitely used amphetamines. I've definitely used modafinil.

1:38:53Is it a regular thing or is it more occasional? So I went through a stint where it was very regular and I actually kind of exhausted my dopaminergic system. Like I exhausted my ability to actually take amphetamines. So I actually can't drink any caffeine anymore. um it's one of those things where if i take anything that would be an upper it effectively puts me into a super lethargic state where i get really out of it so i've kind of now just succumbed to being like kind of completely um cold turkey and just going very natural so it's mostly like water i i still drink coke so i still have like a little bit of caffeine intake um not cocaine um but uh which we could talk about shortly that for the next podcast but um point is um yeah generally like i think my goal is like i told you before how can i reduce my dependency on human needs um and it isn't like i want to emphasize this this is not like i'm not recommending this this is not like a motivational podcast and this is very much like what enables me to have the most momentum being an incredibly small team where many times i might be the only person in the lab building stuff right um obviously we're kind of growing up the operation but it's a situation where if I'm not working, then nothing's happening, right?

1:40:09So like one thing I've even tried to do is, you know, I love having 3D printers, not just because of like the creative potential, but because I can have something working for me while I can sleep, right? Or I might like run a reaction and have somebody like overseeing it while I can take a nap, right? So it's one of those things where I can kind of alleviate myself while things are ongoing. And then that gives me a little bit more assurance that we're making active progress, even when I'm sleeping. Oh, you like to see the machines kind of going in the background. Oh, constantly. Yeah. like it's pretty surprising right now i have nothing 3d printing like i tried like does it cause you anxiety it's also anxiety but like i don't like the idea of going to sleep without something kind of going you like to did you okay so on the tangent of like uh i think you used to play a bunch of video games right like how much how much how much time during your childhood do you spend playing video games oh god i think that's probably why i'm a little bit weird i was like locked in my house all day um i did not go outside it was like you had a friend tell me recently that she um growing up the only thing she ever did was just play two towns or whatever that game is uh two town uh all day constantly um until her brain hurt and it was very similar for me too like i was obsessive with call of duty i played um in mlg which actually got disbanded recently but major league gaming for a bit um and uh black ops 2 and black ops 3 and i was really big into obviously very into into minecraft growing up i'm kind of surprised that those games instead of like the things where you design systems that are like working in the background autonomously so i definitely you know i have to stay off factorio because i have like i have a dedicated group chat of friends who i get like ping to play factorio how much how much time did you spend on factorio but i discovered it far too much time i mean when i discovered sieve i i lost days of my life you know even so like after like there was a time where actually this leads into an interesting story where um we were on this really crazy timeline uh to to build our nanoparticle platform, the nerve agent, the nerve agent antidote, not the nerve agent, the antidote.

1:41:59And this was actually the circumstance where we got kicked out of the conference, which I can touch on in a moment. But we were on this crazy timeline. I told everyone, like, look, like, I know there's Thanksgiving, you know, companies called Pilgrim. So you can imagine that we'd have a proper Thanksgiving dinner. And I was like, we'll delay Thanksgiving. A little bit of anthrax. You know, we'll do a proper Thanksgiving when we get back. Let's just keep going. And the whole team was kind of full force, working day and night, like, really, like, almost 24 seven. If I was sleeping, somebody was working.

1:42:26Um, and we managed to, I have a photo I can show you afterwards, but it was, um, basically me. I actually had to call in my brother who has no bio lab, like no bio, no, no, no, um, lab experience in the slightest. He flew all the way in from Poland, which is where he was visiting at the time, like on vacation. And he came, arrived with his luggage and was like, okay, like, look, like I'm like, I'm going to go back to the hotel and I'm going to settle in. And I looked at him. I'm like, no, like we're going right now. So I taught him how to use a pipette. I taught him how to use a pH meter. And in like two or three days, he was handling our cell cultures.

1:42:57And he was basically doing the seeding of cells. He was doing the synthesis of nanoparticles. He was all over the board. And he had no chemistry or bio experience. um but anyway so you guys were just out there doing things yeah it was great um but point is we uh we were on this really rapid sprint and um and i i finally got to like a working solution we put into like a little tube um and it wasn't flammable um but we brought it with us on the plane um and we brought it to do the event and it looked like um kool-aid because it had a rhodamine b which is like a dye a fluorescent dye um and you know we showed up at this conference and i'm carrying this little blue tube one of these tubes over here it looks something like this right so the tube like it looks something like this with pink liquid in the bottom i probably have one of them over here somewhere um but point is um i show up and there's like three four star generals at this event and i'm holding like a little tube of pink liquid and we show up at the event and we go into but present um like the solution to a relevant pm and effectively uh And I think the issue was that two people on our team weren't registered for the event.

1:44:07And also, like, they got wind of, like, the tube. And we were standing outside, like, waiting to talk to the people, like, going into the boardroom. And, like, security caught us. And they, like, saw us. And they're like, we have to remove you. So while they were removing us, somebody on our team ran into the conference room. And there was a person there, like, from the agency. It was the JPO, so the Joint Program Executive Office. And told the guy, like, look, they're kicking us out. can we present to you outside um and this was like a brand new conference center in in florida uh the only thing outside of it was was just the garbage bin there was not even tables it was still under construction so we basically get this guy to come outside and like in like a shark tank style pitch we have him put his computer on the garbage bin and we're all crowding around him pitching him this nerve agent antidote and i'm holding up like a pink vial right of like solution um anyways this is all to say that it was in a crazy crazy sprint we got kicked out by armed security and after that uh this really insane sprint i spent like a day and a half straight on civ i just basically hunkered in my room um and it was non-stop um but it's one of those things where you get to see the creation of an empire you have like different systems level thinking and then you get to like a result much quicker than the type of work that i do in the lab so it's it's sort of a little bit of a cheap code but what do you what do you think uh in the limit the uh jake adler pilgrim empire is going to look like it's it's a really good question i think that i i've tried to be cautious of overstating um or estimating sort of the eventual impact i think like there is a tremendous room for what we're doing not to work um and like for this thesis to be wrong and that's like actively what i'm trying to prove every single day like i have i know like where we are like we're still very much early like the team size and our facility is definitely in line with like a day zero company like we're still in the beginnings here um i think we have a lot of clarity and context like i think one thing i've been really opting for is to like move towards understanding reality i think like beyond building a really generational company or something that's an enduring institution i think i'll be satisfied if i walk away feeling like i actually understand how things work um like like what can actually like enable me to like kind of play with the fabric a bit um but you know i think i've said publicly you know the goal in in one vein is to establish a biotech prime.

1:46:23I think that there is a really big vacuum for that. But really, like if you think about what we're trying to do, it's the same. The thing I said at the beginning of the podcast is like, how do we more meaningfully take concepts that may have tremendous impact on the patient and get them to them sooner? And, you know, I think the military context somewhat trips people up because they're like, are you building bioweapons or why are you doing trauma care. It's like sort of a little bit odd when people think about the context of drone warfare and like this deus ex machina of like removing the human from the equation, which of course will never happen.

1:47:00But my point here is that I think that the DoD really serves as like a really strong first market for us to take meaningful solutions and field them in environments that are highly austere and fitting to the capability sets that we're interested in pursuing. But there's no reason why, you know, hemostatics or biosurveillance or electronic tourniquets or blood conversion or synthetic blood or bone mending tools or a variety of the other things I've thought about shouldn't exist in a civilian oriented context. I think like there is a tremendous potential here not just to build Biotech Prime, but ideally the most valuable medical device company in the world.

1:47:41And I think like there is precedent for this. You know, I'm I am I'm non-traditional. I didn't graduate school, but you look at an organization like Medtronic, which obviously is the leading provider of pacemakers today, and it was a guy named Earl Bakken who started that company. And the guy had no experience with medical devices other than medical. He would actually repair medical equipment. And in that process, he familiarized himself in the Twin Cities with a lot of the doctors. And then there's this instance where, I swear to God, people probably don't know this, how pacemakers were actually created.

1:48:12He was looking at a magazine. a magazine. It was an electronic magazine for a metronome, electronic metronome. And he built the circuit. And I think in the following days, there was this big blackout event in the Twin Cities that resulted in the NICU, like the neonatal intensive care unit going down. So basically losing all their power. And a lot of the kids, or a lot of the fetuses or whatever you want to call them, fetuses at that point, but a lot of the babies were on like some variant of like life support. And what he did is he took this electronic metronome and they just implanted it like with no, no trials, no clearance, nothing.

1:48:51He literally went up to the baby and just plopped it right in. And this wasn't like a pacemaker like you think about today, like a little thing. This was like wires, like electrodes coming out of the baby's chest going into like a, like a refrigeration size unit, like a, like a, like a household refrigerator. right so it was one of those things where you know the guy had it was very non-traditional he came kind of came in from this unconventional lens so same thing with frank hersey doing hemostatics i think it kind of takes an outsider to look in on the system and understand sort of the the bureaucratic inertia and the entrenched interests and i think generally me being in a position where i've been synthesizing technologies and taking a very generalized approach taking a very Edisonian approach to creating solutions and systems is very fitting of the type of technology and solutions we need, not just in the military, but the civilian market as well.

1:49:41Did you study anything on like the history of like Nazi Germany's labs and how they kind of operated? Because I imagine that they, you know, for better or worse, had lots and lots of people that they were able to test things on, whereas that's not legal today. Yeah. So this is something that I think is sort of i'm not going to say is prevalent to the same extent today but china definitely has lower ethical constraints and there's already been um i think a former secretary of state um or former cia director came forward and it might have been john ratcliffe uh came forward saying that china has openly tested and done crisper on soldiers so they've already moved forward in that world but to answer your point directly i mean human enhancement has always been um an area of interest um the nazis also used to do like a lot of uh they established like a whole science around measurement um i don't know if a lot of people know this but they would have very specific tools that they could use uh to like measure the distance between people's ears the color of hair they would almost have like a swatch panel of like all the different colors of hair um and they would compare it to people's hair color to see whether or not they were in so they had all these different like techniques and approaches that they used to like create like this cue science uh to like track down and isolate like people who might be jewish and in hiding right but my point is like obviously nazi researchers and scientists had an abundance of test subjects to work on now nazi germany was less involved in the biological side of things um from like a biological warfare component they were much more involved in chemical weapons like they did a lot of production of chemical system uh chemical agents um but they they did they tested on twins they tested on a variety of different subjects um but but yeah i think like generally like you know from a from a human performance enhancement standpoint they also used pervident so hitler was a an ampent user pervident which is basically an amphetamine tablet um which could also be made into a solution so that's sort of why hitler there's been like the videos of him tweaking a little bit um but and you said that they were like were they also putting that in chocolate yeah so there's something called like show cacola uh which is like a it's a coca-cola but i think show um and it's um basically a chocolate with caffeine and cola nut so actually you might have seen this in like grocery stores have you seen like the awake candies oh yeah yeah so it's sort of like that um i think that's maybe where they got the inspiration from but they used to there's been reports of them spiking the chocolates with amphetamines so you know you would have a warfighter who would be in a highly austere condition or on the front lines consuming a chocolate that they might rather think is just caffeine and all of a sudden they're spiked with something equivalent to Adderall or Dexedrine, right?

1:52:20So obviously... So the soldiers didn't even know that they were taking it? It's probably unlikely. Yeah, I mean, it's very unlikely that there was that level of transparency that existed. And it's one of these things where, I don't want to go too deep into the... or too pedantic here, but technological supremacy is something that I think is largely overrated. I think it's something that we've been really pushing for as a country because it seems like it's the right narrative. But we look at like Vietnam as an example, and we bombed the Ho Chi Minh Trail, you know, thousands of times and we hardly disrupted it.

1:52:51We had vastly superior technology to the Vietnamese and the Viet Cong, yet we lost that conflict. Or we look at something like the Germans where in World War II, there was after World War I, there was an embargo on armored vehicle production. So the Germans weren't able to produce or modernize tank designs until Hitler became chancellor. And the Brits and the French had, specifically the French, had incredible tanks. From an air standpoint, the Germans were superior. But from a land standpoint, the French were vastly superior along with the British. And my point is, you had an environment where the French would be maintaining the front line or would have these checkpoints.

1:53:29And then you had German troops leveraging the Blitzkrieg strategy, kind of going around them. But also, So Blitzkrieg was really just rampant Germans. It was basically Germans who were probably high as shit on amphetamines. And instead of stopping, what they would do is they would attack a unit. They would take over the position and they wouldn't like stop and rest. They would just keep fucking going. Right. So, you know, I really, unless they had like this crazy level of conviction in the party, you have to assume that there was some level of usage of amphetamines or uppers. Using chemicals to kind of change.

1:53:59Yeah. Interesting. OK, let's let's let's end on. And what's the hardest thing you've overcome? Overcome? Generally, the companies people are building today, and I'll just be very honest, exist in the narrative that somebody else created. So, you know, Anderil with Palmer and Trey and Brian and Matt have done a phenomenal job creating this new narrative of the implications of autonomy and drones in a warfighting environment. You had Palmer Luckey going up on stage, and it wasn't an offhand comment. He would say, the John Deere tractor is a better AI than our military. And the point there is driving frustration through revealing absurdity, right?

1:54:44And I think my point is there is sort of this narrative that a lot of organizations today in the drone space are a derivative of. A lot of companies are kind of following in line with the piece that Anduril set down. But really it feels like what we're building here at pilgrim is it's not just we can't i have to like i've somewhat repudiated our association with that narrative and i felt that we're very much doing we're very much in the the job of myth making like we're we're in the position where i have to kind of create the the right narrative and positioning and products that can meaningfully take my core thesis and philosophy around leveraging the dod as this on-ramp to like unload and kind of rapidly expedite the development and clearance of medical devices into a tangible organization that's driven by a shared mission and ideology.

1:55:34So I think my point is like, from a standpoint of things I have to overcome, it's one of those things where nothing ever feels easy. Like almost every challenge that I think does exist, I've had to, like every challenge that exists in these earliest stages, I've had to encounter, ranging from like, even like thinking I could do all the work myself to realizing that, you know, my goal is to make myself somewhat more obsolete and like bring on more people that can kind of alleviate some of my responsibility to like fundraising and being super conservative to like not spending enough money on equipment and then realizing I have to spend 30 hours or 150 hours repairing a scanning electron microscope.

1:56:09I feel like I've really had to go through this process of creating and defining a narrative around what we are building at Pilgrim, but also being the person boots on the ground who's actively involved in nearly every component of development today. Like I have really every part from a policy, from a DOD, from an FDA, from a development standpoint, kind of circling through my brain. And obviously we have to scale this, but I think my point is like, we're still very much in the beginning. I think we're still deeply misunderstood. You know, I tell our team a lot that I think it's like a little bit feels like 05 Palantir.

1:56:38You know, it's like one of those situations where there's probably a long stretch ahead of us for us to establish like the right organizational structure and the defining product that kind of carries us into this next phase. But where we are today is like, I am all in, I've been consistently all in. And I've noticed that, with a level of divine intervention, or like a rather divine spirit, I've been able to like follow, or rather the term here is divine providence, is I've been able to kind of follow my own will, and it's led me closer to the results I want. So I think like generally overcoming narrative, overcoming positioning and creating incredible technologies.

1:57:14Thank you.