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

37:13And then I actually manually... Is this open source? People put the files up, can I install your setup? So no, it's not open source, mostly because people are going to start posting issues and i'm just not interested in fixing them okay so i'm just gonna do it for myself i'm like i'm pulling up the ladder behind me like i'm you know i know how much this is if it's not a resource you gotta raise for it it sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here uh it is a question competitor and it's probably going to kill cursor if i open source it but i'm not going to sell for money just i think what's going to naturally happen is like when people see me do use it they're going to have ideas of their own and then they're going to build it for themselves okay like the the whole point of So it's a NeoVim plugin kind of.

37:51It's like also a server and it plugs into a bunch of... I'm good at software. So part of the problem is with... So NeoVim is great because the software is configurable as a feature. So the best software you can get is software you can read and understand and actually change. The best software for you is software you've written yourself. Because if something annoys you, you can actually go change it. And that's why I really like to write my own frameworks. Cursor, I'm sure, is a great product. But I'm just so particular about certain things. For example, I want to implement TreeCenter across multiple files and automate adding files to my context.

38:26So I have a file which has a bunch of file paths, and those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm in. And I manage it manually by literally going to the file and deleting the lines. And what I want is to automatically create an AST, so an abstract syntax tree, to be able to jump around with an LLM or train a model to actually go through the AST. And this is all super obvious to me. It's like, fuck, man. What about you're going to make any products in the parenting space? Yeah. So actually, I had an idea. So I use an e-ink display. By the way, before you try to hack this, I never update the software and I never write anything private on it.

38:59So I'm going to put it public. So I have an e-ink reader slash tablet. And what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write. Instead of texting him, I want to make kind of like a radio e-ink display, kind of like an Etch-a-Sketch, which you can write on. but it synced to your parents etch and sketch. So my wife, I will have one. I will have one and my kid will have one. And he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over distances, right? I think that's like a really cool idea. So I'm probably going to build that. If you wanted to make like a gajillion dollars, it's so easy. Just look around and like come up with good ideas and actually just believe that you can do it.

39:35Like literally just go do it. Like it's not that hard. It's actually not. Get a 3D printer, watch some YouTube videos. YouTube is great products. I would love it if they stopped putting shorts because there's so many great videos where you can learn. Stop. With the shorts. Stop. Get ready. This is going to be a YouTube short. We're going to edit this. Yeah, exactly. This will be on TikTok, baby. Yeah, exactly. We've got to get the news. Yeah, Minecraft speed run. Yeah, we'll put subway surfers over you. Anything. AI slop. How many kids do you want to have? So as much as God allows us to have. So just leaving it up to God.

40:05And yeah, that's how many kids. Good answer. That's great. What else? What else do you have to say to the people while you're here? Thanks for doing this podcast, guys. I know how hard. I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Let's just say that. And like they're doing live and stuff like it's a pain in the ass. So keep it up, guys. I know like thank you. And the live, the live, the video team at X are like generational talents, like super, super good people. Like so like just like find someone to like like find a way to reach out to them. So when you have any issues and like actually talk.

40:37Yeah, I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days. Otherwise, we would have been hammering you with messages every single day. but this has been great come come back on whenever you want to talk about your projects yeah we'd love to just hang out and chat yeah thanks i really appreciate you guys and uh yeah so keep it up thanks we're excited and and i'm excited to be ding maxing just offer offer a premium tier like i don't know like 10 grand a month or something like that and maybe we become you know oh i mean if you guys want to ask this i'll sell you right now like spit handshake if you want to put an ad on ding board your podcast i'll uh let's say 12 grand 12 grand okay we'll talk to our we'll talk to our cfo all right all right all right and uh our cfo our cfo we'll talk to your cfo but can we get the semi-analysis deal where it's perpetual it's 12 grand once and we get it forever because what if you yeah is it a one time is it a one is it a one time or it's a great option there's a lot of upside here it depends on how good your your podcast is yeah okay okay we're gonna keep working on it hopefully dingboard keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together.

41:41Yeah, absolutely. All right. We're excited to follow up. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon. Godspeed. Have a good one. Bye. This is the news of the day with the Iran crisis. Donald Trump says, everyone keep oil prices down. I'm watching. You're playing right into the hands of the enemy. Don't do it. You love to see the president talking directly to the market. Everybody's saying this is ridiculous, but it's never been tried. People always say, oh, all that matters in oil price supply and demand. Well, all you got to do is say, hey, supply, go down. Hey, supply, go up. And demand, go down. And we will have lower prices.

42:23I mean, there is something to that. It hasn't been tried before. It's worth trying something. If you do signal, I mean, there are stories about oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were going to be high and they stop traveling as much during the summer vacation, for example. Like that does happen every once in a while. But yeah, very, very odd to post anyway. Back on watches, the watches of espionage account says, men who guide the destinies of the world will wear Rolex watches. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Dan Razine Kane, in Situation Room during attacks on Iran wearing a Rolex GMT.

42:59Well, you need a GMT because you got to know what time it is in Tehran. We got to start doing these strong. I've seen this. I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the break cracking your knuckles. But this is special. It's like four points of attack. I mean, I guess they did hit four sites, so you've got to point to all of them. Yeah, that's right. Interesting. Well, it's been an eventful morning. Yep. Iran attacked a U.S. base in Qatar. Yes, that's the latest. And people are basically saying that it's bullish because there were no casualties. all of apparently all the missiles were taken out in the air yep and this could lead to a de-escalation yeah and a return to a steady state of tension yeah this has been my position for a long time i'm i'm pretty anti-aggression anti-war but i'm extremely pro domes iron domes golden domes i want to be able to shoot down every missile before as soon as it leaves no matter where it's leaving from.

43:59Let's shoot it down immediately from space, from land, do whatever you can. But missiles, bombs, nuclear bombs, these things should not be relevant in the future. But Druva has a breakdown of this. The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordow represents over one year of U.S. production capacity of the GBU-57 bunker buster. Its primary explosive, AFX-757, is difficult to produce and we don't have many factories to do it. It's why way more robots are necessary to do everything from production to automating research. I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now.

44:39Very interesting to see. Joe Weisenthal had some polymarket news. Bombing of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025. In fact, it's at the highest level of the day. I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by, we didn't actually - Former Russian president comes out and said, hey, we might just give them a nuke. That would be bad. Which would be bad. That would be bad. The other thing that's interesting, the Fordow nuclear facility destroyed before July polymarket is only sitting at a 32 % chance still on 4 million in volume.

45:14So I think people are basically saying, calling that it wasn't actually destroyed, or at least that's what the market is saying. So he's impacted but not destroyed, even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed total annihilation. And up next, we have Mike Gallagher from Palantir Technologies. He's the head of defense. And he put out some comments about the partnership between Palantir and the nuclear company. Says this partnership marks the first time Palantir software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy infrastructure. So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show.

45:50So, Mike, how are you doing? Great to have you. What's going on, guys? I'm honored to be with you. You guys are famous. You're famous, too. Thank you for joining. I used to be, man. I used to be. Now I'm just, you know, I'm a has-been. You're a technology brother. You're one of us. You're one of us. I mean, that's actually a great place to start. I want to talk about your career and the transition that you went through. There's, you know, obviously it's very exciting what you're doing now. There's also this story about like, I want you in the government too, and I want people like you in the government.

46:25And so is the government a place for high performing technologists to flourish? Is there something that needs to change there? I'm interested in digging into that. But why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment? Yeah, I think obviously, you know, from northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kind of grew up always interested in the world. outside of Wisconsin in the United States. When I went to college, I studied Arabic in the Middle East. I became fascinated by what was happening. I was an undergrad when we invaded Iraq. I was a senior in high school during 9-11.

47:00And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve, felt very strongly about service to country, but also on a practical level, really wanted to apply the language and regional and cultural skills I was learning in a non-academic context and felt like there was no greater challenge than joining the United States Marine Corps. So even though I didn't come from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible that I could throw myself into. I had just really an awesome experience, a couple of great deployments, learned a ton with the counterintelligence, human intelligence officer.

47:37And kind of similarly, when I got out of the Marine Corps and I worked on a presidential campaign, I worked in the Senate as a Middle East guy. Never thought about running myself. I'd moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company when some people reached out to me about running for Congress. I was very young. I was 31. And my initial reaction was, hell no. I mean, it was just, I was not, I didn't know anything about raising money. You know, I was the guy who like wrote the white paper that someone read before they went on TV. I wouldn't be on TV myself. I kind of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician.

48:12I still don't think of myself that way. Um, but honestly, it was the fact that it scared me that like led me to do it. I felt like, I felt like anything that force you outside your comfort zone is good for your development personally. And it was, I felt like it was being an extension of my military service, a way to continue my work of enhancing American deterrence, albeit from a legislative perspective. And, and I'll swear, I'll, I'll wrap up after this. I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me. I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected. I always conceived of it as a season of service.

48:45I think the problem with Congress is that we have too many career politicians. So I kind of always had in my head, I do a decade. And when I decided to leave, you know, Palantir was just an obvious way for me to continue that mission. I mean, Palantir was one of the rare companies that was unapologetically pro-American military, committed 100 % to enhancing deterrence, you know, willing to say that, like, we're the good guy. you know the commies are the bad guys and um i really felt like you know it was a continuation of that theme in my career where something really hard that scared the crap out of me i.e now being surrounded by genius you know like 20 somethings that make me feel stupid and then a continuation of of the mission and i've you know i've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing world war three and i'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the warfighter every day in Palantir.

49:40So that's the short version. And it's been really exciting. Aaron Norris, Ph.D.: Is that a typical flow for elected politicians? Someone reaches out to them? Is there kind of like a scouting department in our government that's looking for up and coming talent and then giving them the ideas? Because I feel like the story that most people tell is, this guy wants power or wants to, he's on a war path, everyone tells him no, Oh, and then he runs and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will. But but which direction does it go more commonly? Was your path uncommon? Or is it more the norm? Well, to be clear, I don't want to pretend like this was some pure off shucks.

50:19Mr. Smith goes to Washington thing, right? Like, clearly, I was driven, ambitious, like, kind of always had a drive my whole life. And wanted to, like, test myself. But honestly, it was not like I didn't think of like the political domain at that point in my life. I think more often than not, people are drawn to politics. It used to be the case that like you'd go to law school, you become a lawyer, you'd run for state or local office. And then that would be a natural kind of like farm team that would lead into Congress. And then you run for Senate and then you try and be president one day. I actually think that's changing a little bit.

50:57Like one actually healthy thing I saw during my time in Congress is we started to get more young veterans, veterans of the kind of 9-11 wars running for office, which created a cool bipartisan group of legislators that were willing to work together on stuff. I think, you know, I think we're seeing voters like wanting to have more outsiders, whether it's, you know, business people, traditional or tech bros like, you know, you guys talk to a lot. I think people are just tired of business as usual. It used to be everyone, every single person was a lawyer. Being a lawyer seems miserable to me. No offense, lawyers.

51:37But I don't know. And I will say finally, I went in with the assumption that the fundamental problem with Congress was the people, right? The people were either purely Machiavellian ambitious or like horribly corrupt and just didn't attract the right people. Now, to be sure, there are plenty of people that like would, you know, could not like they can't leave Congress because they are otherwise unemployable. And like, you know, they're not like the greatest in the world. But I was actually pleasantly surprised with the quality, the talent, as well as the patriotism. And I would say most people run for Congress wanting to serve the country, wanting to make a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from.

52:23And they get forced into a system where the incentives really don't reward hard work in the domain that Congress should be focused on, right? Like there's really no reward for doing the boring work of oversight of the executive branch, of caring about the legislative process. The modern Congress has become so structurally weak that people channel their ambition into building a media platform, social media in particular. And that almost becomes their full time job. And that's really a problem because we need Congress to focus on the nuts and bolts of budgeting, of oversight, of reclaiming its authority from the executive branch.

53:03I came to believe that kind of the fundamental problem with most things is that we've become so unbalanced in terms of the overall power of the federal government. And then within the federal government, the power is purely concentrated now in the executive branch, which is why our presidential campaigns get so intense every four years, because the stakes are high, right? Everything is done via executive order and has profound consequences for every business. I think a healthier balance would be if Congress, Article 1, which was envisioned by our framers to be the dominant branch of government.

53:36In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful. They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs. Congress surrendering its power since the 70s and then in bipartisan fashion continuing that trend has had really perverse and unintended consequences for our politics. And it's why they've become so intense. And why people are turned off by it, I think. In our lifetime, do you think we will see term limits in Congress at all? It seems like a lot of smart people, you know, seeing certain actors over the last decade would would feel that that that would be beneficial to the United States.

54:09It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are, you know, you know, in in power for a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or super long term. They're thinking in, you know, election cycles and kind of create some distortions. But I'm curious what you think, having been in there. You know, it's funny, man. By the way, can I say you have great flow? I just want to throw that out there. Both of you. In fact, as someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and, you know, cherish it, gentlemen. Some people should just be news anchors, I guess. It's destiny.

54:47It's funny. When I first came in and I got elected in 2016, and we thought, like our freshman class, Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill. We had a bipartisan term limits bill. I remember going to the White House. So this was Trump's first year in office. A group of six of us, three Republicans, three Democrats, went to the Oval Office to get Trump's support on our term limits bill. Because our basic theory was unless the president was using the bully pulpit to force congressional leaders to do it, it would never happen. And so if memory serves, Trump actually we did about it, endorsing the bill.

55:26And I remember I did some selfie video, you know, having just complained about members of Congress focusing on social media. This is probably the apex of my power. You got to dabble. Yeah, exactly. I remember doing some like selfie video coming out of the White House. And I genuinely thought in that moment that we had momentum behind a term limits bill. It's overwhelmingly popular with the American people. The counterarguments, which we can discuss, I don't think are persuasive. What was unique about our bill and the reason we thought it might have a chance of passing? Well, two things. One, we were in that moment to sort of drain the swamp moment, the reason Trump got elected the first time.

56:02You know, everyone's disgusted with the status quo business as usual. He had made a pledge late in the campaign that he was going to support term limits. Um, and then, uh, secondly, we kind of phased it in. So what was unique about our bill is we applied it to our class and all subsequent. That's what I was going to say. You grandfather in, if you're, if you're a career politician and you're like, I got another 15 years that I was planning on really, you know, running it around here, you let them phase out. And then the new, the new guard, you put some limits on them and then it totally grandfather and the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time.

56:36And then the new people. So and then we made it equal in the House and the Senate, 12 years in the House. So six terms and then 12 years in the Senate. So theoretically, someone could do 24 years. I could do 12 in the House, run for Senate. And so that seemed generous to us. But it died. It died a slow death and then a sudden death. You know, the problem is, you know, nobody in leadership wants to bring a term limits bill to the floor because they fear it endangers their own power. So I really do think the paradox, it's like the things we need to do to enhance the power and the functionality of the modern Congress actually require an over-empowered president to make them happen.

57:18Otherwise, Congress won't do it on its own. And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense. Yeah, yeah. I want to kind of wrestle with this idea of the executive branch having power. There are term limits there. We've also had a wildly back and forth executive branch with Trump for four years, then Biden, then back to Trump, kind of unprecedented. We'd previously been in, you know, eight year stretches for a while. And I want to run a theory by you around Iran. My working theory is that they're not happy with how things are going right now. And part of that is because part of how Iran got into this particular situation is that they potentially saw America as not supporting Israel aggressively during the Biden administration.

58:07And more importantly, the idea of a president who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would, it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted and he was seen as kind of like a joke almost and was deplatformed from social media. How is this guy going to come back? He didn't even have a Pinterest account. He didn't even have a Pinterest account. And so if you're Iran and you're thinking, well, America is backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offensive anytime soon. Now's the time to start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah.

58:45But then surprise Trump's in, now we have to deal with the consequences of that. And so in this weird way, America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically. And maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk. And to your point about wanting to avert World War III. I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing hands every four years. Is that -

59:13Is it a risk? Yeah. Do we need to just tussle with it more? Like, how do you think about all those different concepts? Yeah, well, first of all, great question. A lot of interesting threads to pull on there. The first I would say I'll go even further back than the Biden administration to when we started to negotiate in earnest with Iran of its over its nuclear program in the second half of the Obama administration. And really, it was it was it was sort of like covert negotiations that then become overt amidst the backdrop of a region that had gone from all this hope around the Arab Spring turned Arab winter, Syrian civil war, coup in Egypt, just chaos everywhere.

59:49And then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran. Obama had sort of a theory about the region. He talked about creating a new equilibrium in the Middle East, whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from Israel and balance sort of a, recognize Iran's enhanced power and role in the region and use Iran to balance against the Sunni Arab Gulf states and Israel. The only problem is that new equilibrium created intense disequilibrium and missed the real story, which was the only path to equilibrium in the region is to build off this alignment of interest between Israel and the Sunni Arab Gulf states, which are on paper strange bedfellows, but are united by the shared threat from Iran.

1:00:36The long pole in the tent that links all of our traditional allies together is the threat from Iran. And unless you want an enhanced American military presence in the region, the only way to forge a semblance of stability is to build off of that. And that was kind of the genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place. Long story short, the other missed opportunity. So there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran. There was a constitutional problem, which relates to what we were talking about before, where the Iran deal sure looked a lot like an arms control agreement.

1:01:06But Obama recognizing, because at that time we still had sort of pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate, recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the Senate in this case. He constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the Supreme Leader. There was no congressional buy-in. And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to throw it in the trash. Biden comes in, tries to resurrect it. Trump comes back in in his second term and basically he gives the Iranians 60 days to negotiate and then took the action that you just saw.

1:01:43So that's a long way of me saying there was a misunderstanding of the region and then a misunderstanding that as hard as it is to bring Congress into the process, it actually makes your executive achievements more durable and I think improves your negotiating position. Now, to get to the last part of your question, I do think the president's recent decision was the right one. I think really going even back before Obama's failed and flawed agreement with Iran, the Iranians have consistently used the cover of diplomacy to covertly advance their program. And at some point, we were either going to have to accept the nuclear run or take kinetic action to set back their program.

1:02:22And this is the first time in a long time, really since the invasion of Iraq, that we've combined maximum economic pressure with a credible military deterrent. And so I do think it gives us a chance to effectively eliminate their nuclear program. That being said, there's a lot of work we need to do in terms of rebuilding our entire defense industrial base so that the munitions we're using in CENTCOM don't completely deplete the resources we need in other theaters along the way. And I'll stop there because I could talk about the Middle East for 20 minutes and all of your audience would evaporate.

1:02:53No, this is fascinating. I'm really enjoying this. Do you have a follow up there or I wanted to talk about? I wanted to get a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple months and couple weeks specifically. Well, I think so that my most like bullish case for what Trump has just accomplished would be not only has he set back, if not eliminated for a decade, Iran's nuclear ambitions, he could have just shattered the emerging axis of chaos, this sort of axis between Iran, Russia and China. Because China sort of views Iran as both a source of hydrocarbons as well as like a gateway to expand its influence in the Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye.

1:03:45This is incredibly problematic for China's view of the region. That being said, the biggest wild card that I just don't know enough about is where Trump is going to go next on China. There was some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China access to Iranian oil. And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.0, there was this tension between some more hawkish members of the administration on China and then more dovish members at Treasury. There's a there's sort of a version of this tension going on right now. And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xi Jinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it.

1:04:18At other times, he's like uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China. I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China. And so I guess there's lingering questions about how we want to approach China. But I really think this is the serious setback for this access of chaos, this anti-American access. Russia, of course, was getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war in Eastern Europe. I can't help but think that that's going to be increasingly difficult, given that Iran is dealing with the aftermath of the attack, as well as increasing internal pressure.

1:04:58And then hats off to the Israelis. I mean, I think this shows how valuable it is to have lethal allies that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own, but are willing to take a big role in the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America. And in fact, what we've seen really in terms of the way they've gone after Hezbollah, the beeper operation, and then their systematic campaign against the nuclear facility is some of the most daring and imaginative intelligence and military work that I think I've ever seen in my lifetime. And even if one isn't as pro-Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire just how effective their military and intelligence community is.

1:05:43Yeah, that's undeniable. A bit of a random question, but I'm curious if you have any insight here. There was a lot of... What's the population of Iran? There was some interesting price action in Bitcoin, which is hard to read too much into. But people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining a lot of Bitcoin. Fascinating. Maybe it didn't come up for you, but I saw somebody posting that he was like, I'm not buying Bitcoin right now. it seems obvious that the regime is just like dumping in order to try and fund you know uh you know basically the recovery effort makes sense yeah but if you don't have any insight there we can move on i wanted to you know i i'm afraid i don't but i do think and i've said this to like all the smart crypto folks like brian armstrong and others i i think there's um or a wisconsin colleague of mine brian style who's one of the leaders in the house on this issue you guys should have him on he's really smart young congressman wisconsin um yeah brian style he's always welcome welcome yeah exactly exactly uh i think there's like a an underexplored aspect or argument about like crypto's role in national security right because the anti-crypto anti-crypto argument is always like this is just a way of sanctions evasion and money laundering and i think what people don't appreciate is like how this could be a tool to advance america's and our allies national security interests and certainly was the case when you know people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan, that crypto was enormously valuable in that regard.

1:07:13It might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community. So I think that's an area where like national security nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto. But I hadn't heard that about. Switching gears to the European continent, wanted to get your reaction to the NATO spending news and maybe kind of the backstory. I'm sure when you were in Congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing, but any reactions there? Well, listen, I think anytime, first of all, this idea that, you know, the American president would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense is not a new thing.

1:08:02It is not sort of unique to Trump Eisenhower. The first Supreme Allied Commander of NATO actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies at the time. And so this is like and we've had Democratic senators try to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO. So this is like a an old argument that is new again. I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense is a great thing for deterrence in general. I would say, however, I've always been of the view that this obsession with the inputs, i.e. what percent of GDP a NATO member spends on defense is not the right lens of analysis, right?

1:08:45Every NATO country could be spending 5 % of their GDP on defense, but if they're all buying the wrong crap or buying stuff that isn't interoperable and doesn't actually amount to a coordinated multinational deterrence by denial effort with hard power shifted as far east as possible with the frontline states playing a unique role, then you actually have you haven't actually fighting off a common operational picture and shout out to nato for acquiring maven smart system made by palantir technologies no big deal um then you have actually it's like a sports team a sports team doesn't wake up one morning and like let's all give it a hundred percent and that's the only coordination it's like yeah you could easily turn this into a jobs program where you say yeah we're gonna spend five percent of our gdp on horseback and cavalry.

1:09:37And it's like, you're going to lose, but yes, you're technically going to be spending 5 % and you're going to have a massive military, but you're going to get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs. So is there any, do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly? Because it feels like to me getting from 2 % to 5 % is the bigger mental hurdle than the allocation of that 5%. And yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now. But that feels like an easier conversation. Or maybe I'm wrong there. I think the closer you are to the threat, the more you're thinking is sharp, right?

1:10:14So it is my experience that, you know, Poland, the Baltic states tend to have a clearer view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own military. By the way, we've acquired two new NATO acquired is the wrong term. We've had two new countries join NATO in recent years have been phenomenal capabilities to the table. I think, you know, traditionally we've struggled convincing the Germans who are, you know, the big elephant in the European room to make the right investments and to make more investments. My hope is that that conversation is getting better. You know, I guess I worry sometimes that kind of to relate it to what you said earlier, they'll be privileging certain domestic companies, even if they don't actually produce capability.

1:11:00I think it's fair to say, obviously, I'm biased because I work in an American software company, but we are the best in the world by 10 orders of magnitude when it comes to software development in this country. And that's just not something that Europe does well. So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the Palantras of the world and European hardware defense manufacturers. I'd love to see more of that going forward. And I've always been a proponent of, you know, we have a ton of troops in countries like Germany and Western Europe, getting them out of garrison, shifting them further on NATO's eastern flank, taking advantage of the invitation that certain frontline states like Poland made, at least in the previous administration, to build new bases and forts that enhance our deterrence posture.

1:11:49I think there's a there's a huge opportunity here. And it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric, as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking, shaking it loose right now. I mean, obviously, it's it's a bit overdetermined. I mean, you know, the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. It's a massive wake up call for Europe that they need to need to invest more and buy the right things. some, but I do think we have a moment here. And I think what's critical to our analysis in the U.S., particularly my own party, the Republican Party, is to do a better job.

1:12:22And I didn't quite do this well when I chaired the China Committee in Congress in teasing out the connection between Russia and China and why what happens in one theater affects another theater and that it isn't just a choice between Europe or the Indo-Pacific. We're a global power. We're a sole superpower. We have an existential challenge in the form of communist China. We have to pay attention everywhere. Yes, we have to make hard decisions and prioritize accordingly. The Indo-Pacific is a priority theater, but one of the best ways we can invest more of our own exquisite resources into the Indo-Pacific is to get on the same page with our allies in Europe and ensure that they're buying the right things and that the way we fight together is actually leveraging cutting-edge commercial technology, software, or hardware.

1:13:04That's great. Great. Should we talk about the news today? The announcement? The nuclear deal that you guys announced? Yeah, that'd be great. Can you break it down for us? Everything is nuclear. Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear. Yeah. I mean, I want to know the shape of the partnership, anything you can share there. But then I'd love to go into kind of what you're particularly excited about in nuclear or even just energy broadly. We've seen that the United States energy production per capita is kind of flatlined for a while. China's increasing energy production very aggressively. It feels top of mind, especially in the backdrop of the foundation model AI race, that we need to be building more energy infrastructure.

1:13:47And there's different resources coming online. Nuclear is probably the most fascinating one that has the ability to scale because we've tamed the atom. And yet, and we can't just seem to copy paste, you know, Diablo Canyon 50 times to actually get a massive increase in energy production. There's also stuff happening on the smaller scale. I want your take on nuclear as a whole, in addition to the deal. Yeah. By the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this, the nuclear stuff. By the way, it's your fault, though, because my understanding is I'm just batting cleanup for Eliana. Oh, yeah.

1:14:23He talked too much, but I'm happy to come back at any point. Listen, I mean, we can't, obviously, we can't dominate the commanding heights of critical technology and AI if we don't improve our sort of all the above energy policy. There is no workable energy strategy without a nuclear renaissance in this country. The Trump administration has put out some really productive EOs, but now it's incumbent upon the private sector to step up. And the nuclear company is that. I mean, they're going to leverage our software to build reactors, which right now take over a decade to build and collapse that timeline down.

1:14:58And I think we're at the forefront of something really interesting. China is investing billions of dollars in this space, putting their best and brightest on the problem, and we can't fall further behind. And by the way, it affects our military deterrence as well, because our diplomacy is enhanced with foreign countries when we're able to come to them and say, you can, we are a reliable partner for civilian nuclear technology, and we help you build and access that technology safely. When what I don't want to see is a replay of what we saw with China and 5G and Huawei, where China was going all over the world saying, you can have 5G internet, steeply.

1:15:33We'll just control the infrastructure. It'll be in a box. You won't even have to worry about anything. You don't have to worry about anything. And like in America, people are like, whoa, don't do that. Time out. But if you're a country that doesn't have resources in Africa or in the global South, you're probably not paying as much attention to the CI concerns. And so there's something similar playing out in the nuclear space right now. So I'm very bullish about this partnership. I think this is the cusp of something big, both for the nuclear company and for Palantir. And we're going to be able to leverage all the lessons we have from working with Anderil, Saronic, and non-traditional partners with our Warp Speed manufacturing product and apply it into the nuclear space.

1:16:12That's fantastic. I'm getting pulled. I'm getting pulled. You're getting pulled. We'll see you on another TV. We have to have you back on soon. Come back on soon. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks for coming on. Have a good one. I'll come back for Packers commentary. All right, see you guys. Great. Cheers. Hims and Hers stock drops more than 30 % after Novo Nordisk breakup. This is from The Wall Street Journal. Of course, if you're interested in stocks that are dropping because you're going short or are popping because you're going long, you got to get on public investing for those who take it seriously.

1:16:40They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Anyway, the Waguvi maker, that's Novo Nordisk, has cut ties with the telehealth company, HIMSS and hers, citing allegations of deceptive marketing practices and drug compounding. I feel like they were, the drug compounding, how is this an allegation? I thought that's like what HIMSS was saying they were doing. They were like I felt like there was a lot of press about them being like proud of drug compounding because there was a shortage. But I guess it's I guess it's alleged at this point. So we'll dig into this.

1:17:11Novo Nordisk abruptly ended its partnership with hims and hers after the Danish drug maker accused the telehealth company of illegally selling cheaper copycats. Okay. So this is after the FDA is ruling around about whether or not there was in fact a shortage. So Novo said on Monday that it had concerns about the safety of knockoff versions of Waguvi and that Hims and Herb's deceptive marketing of such knockoffs put patient safety at risk. In turn, Hims and Herb's accused Novo of pressuring it to steer patients to Waguvi regardless of whether or not it was the best option for patients. News that the deal was scrapped weighed heavily on Hims and Herb's shares, sending them down 32 % in afternoon trading in what would be the largest decline for the stock on record.

1:17:58Novo Nordisk's shares were down nearly 6 % in New York. The messy breakup comes less than two months after the company's unveiled what they called a long-term collaboration to directly provide Waguvi to Hims and Hurst patients. Okay, so this was somewhat predictable, right? We talked to TJ Parker about this. Hims has been on a generational run in the markets because they're one of the best, easiest ways that people can just go buy Wagovi. Yes. Now, if you're Novo Nordisk and you're like, cool, we're selling through this channel, but then the retailer, in this case HIMSS, is telling customers as they come in, hey, we know you wanted Wagovi, but how about this sort of cheap knockoff, this compounded version?

1:18:42Now, Wagovi is probably legitimately concerned about safety issues. There can be issues around compounding. in drug safety. But then the bigger issue is like, hey, you're marketing, you're using our brand and our products to acquire customers. And then you're getting those people in the door and you're saying, hey, how about this sort of cheaper off the shelf alternative? And so I have to imagine that this is Nova Nordisk recognizing the value of their brand in this massive, massive, fast growing category and saying, we're not going to let you leverage our brand to compete on these sort of high margin, you know, knockoff products.

1:19:22Yeah. I mean, like the, the Instagram ads that I saw were definitely pushing the brand name for real. And there was a while when they wouldn't use the term Viagra and they would use ED meds and sildenafil and tadalafil and all of those different, like they would use the actual underlying compound name and they pushed it so hard that people actually started knowing the name of the underlying compound yeah um but yeah uh the brand name how do you think he'll respond do you think they'll introduce a 10 in one shampoo that includes compounded yep glp ones viagra hair loss yeah medication what else could adderall caffeine i mean this is cognizant rhodiola panics ginseng altheanine caffeine get some glp1 in here creatine soap with creatine soap would be good with all the above eli lily is the one that lost the patent right because they forgot to pay the no i think it was nova nordis it was nova wow they have they're all over the place it is it is interesting to watch yeah novo nordisk how much do you think their stock is up over the past five years oh 500 try 113 113 but it was a big company yeah yeah but it's been on a big company but still and how much do you think what do you think the chart looks like over the last year uh oh it's down the glp1 boom it's down because it ripped up so high and then it went down 50 and they and And they rotated out their CEO.

1:20:58That's right. We covered that. Hims and hers is at 9 billion, 9.66 billion. That is down from a high of maybe 15 billion. And it's one of those interesting like SPAC targets that I think they got out through a SPAC. And they never really went down that far. They were down, you know, yeah, like, you know, 30%. I mean, they SPAC to$10 a share, went down to$4 a share. kind of grinded back up now they're at 40 a share so if you if you bought this if you bought the spac and you did hold for five years you're you know you're sitting on a 3x 4x not bad so you know um kind of a narrative violation around the around the spac like all spacks are bad narrative yeah yeah i mean it and and the ceo andrew uh dudum we should have him on the show said that, you know, I think his position, you know, we have no idea what the details of their of their contract actually look like, but fairly reasonable position to say we're not going to just sell one product just, you know, because it's true.

1:22:10Not every patient is going to respond well to Wagovi. Yep. And they should have options. So before striking deals with brand name drug Drug makers, telehealth firms were selling lower cost knockoff versions of these drugs made by compounding pharmacies, taking market share away from brand name makers. The compounding pharmacies had been allowed to mass produce knockoff versions conditionally because the original drugs were in short supply. Now the whole compounding pharmacy dynamic is very different because I feel like the laws were created such that if a big pharmaceutical company couldn't supply you the drug, like your local pharmacist could compound it but then the the startups kind of like rolled up all the compounding pharmacies we're doing it like a much bigger scale and it wasn't exactly what was intended originally but i'm not sure about that yeah um so the big question uh is when there be more well yeah the big question what will there be more regulatory action around compounded glp ones and what will that do to their business so roller coaster of a year for him's you know partnership was announced in April 2025, popped, terminated just a few months later with a 35 % drop.

1:23:26Well, if you're on GLP-1s and you're losing weight and your wrists are getting thinner, you need a watch that can adapt to your new wrist size. You need to go on getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available to source you, any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. And you can find a watch with metal links that you could take out a link if you've lost a lot of weight. Or you could add one back if you're in a bulking cycle. Yeah. Yeah. So keep those things handy when you're ready to start the bulk. Exactly. This is key. This is very, very key. Anyway, a comment from the CEO, Andrew Dudum.

1:24:02He said, hims and hers will continue to offer access to a range of treatments, including Wagyuvi. So they continue to battle it out. It'll be interesting to follow this. And we will, of course, be talking to Cremieux about this later today. There is a investing visual post here that I pulled up about how HIMSS makes money. They're making$576 million online,$10 million from wholesale. That brings their total revenue to $586 million, which is up 111 % year over year. Gross profit there,$428 million. Operating expenses are 337 million, leaving them 92 million in operating income and 50 million in net income.

1:24:48So 50 million in net income for a$10 billion stock, pretty high price to earning ratio if that's an indication of their earnings, but it's been a big growth stock on a major, major trend, GLP one. And so the retail army has been coming out in force. King, KSM's capital, said it felt too good to be true for HIMSS to go this long without some FUD. This is more like it. Just bought 2 ,300 shares and top secret stocks. What does the retail army call themselves? I don't know. Himbos or something. Say, I'm really HIM. Yeah. Yeah. Hems, look at the data. You can see their operating margin has improved a ton since they've gone public.

1:25:37They started out at negative 40 % operating margin and climbed up every single quarter. They're now at a 6.5 % operating margin. The number of subscribers in the millions has gone from, they were at 0.6, so 600 ,000 subscribers. Now they're at 2.4 million and their total revenue has gone from$272 million in revenue. This is the last 12 months. Now they're almost at$2 billion. And so they've almost 10X revenue from that SPAC price. And that's what's driving the stock overall to be up three to four X off the original SPAC price. So very good news. If you're Andrew Dudum and you need a break from grinding it out at HIMSS, book a wander find your happy place book a wander with inspiring summer andrew hotel great amenities dreamy beds top tier cleaning 24 7 concierge service it's a vacation imagine you're in one of the gnarliest pr crises of your life and two guys in suits on a podcast so you've never met or just like yeah take a vacation but i think it's a bad idea summer's long hims is up two percent today john you're good so it's time to you know treat yourself yeah take your foot off the gas head to wander.com and speaking of foots on gas ford which makes car kermue welcome to the stream there he is looking handsome as ever how you guys how you doing doing well can you hear me yeah we can hear you fine um perfect i'm i'm i'm looking forward to uh to you know a future date when we can potentially see your face um but for now your avatar looks great soon okay i'm looking forward to it um we wanted to have you on to chat about a couple things uh what's going on glp1 world reaction to the hymns and her hers breakup uh jordy where would you like to start uh high level update on the glp1 market yeah i guess uh i mean it's this miracle drug that keeps on we keep on learning about new diseases or problems that it can treat.

1:27:44It seems like it can't just stop. We got the diabetes, then weight loss, then maybe gambling addiction and other stuff. Walk us through how people are using or how doctors are prescribing GLP-1s for various conditions and what's most promising, what's on the horizon and what you're tracking next. Yes, I'm actually really glad you asked this right now because right now the ADA, the American a Diabetes Association conference is ongoing, and it seems like every other presentation is about GLP-1s. They are just talking about all the latest advances. Just yesterday, Amgen showed off a once-monthly instead of once-weekly injectable.

1:28:22Eli Lilly showed off an amazing combo therapy with an inhibitor called bimigruma. It's a very weird name that makes people not lose any muscle when they're on the drugs. They've been showing off just incredible advances all week. They've been showing off new treatments for different conditions and whatnot. There are increasingly many indications that these drugs are getting approved for. In December, trisepatide was approved for sleep apnea. There's osteoarthritis indications incoming. There might even be... There's some effort being put into people trying to do something for cancers as well because it does seem to help with obesity-related cancers.

1:29:02And it seems to help, I don't know why, with hematological cancers, the blood cancers. I don't understand really the mechanism behind that. But it seems like it's just hitting every single indication now. Well, why do you think that is? I have some guesses. I think the big reason has to do less with the direct effects of GLP-1s and more with the fact that obesity sucks. Obesity is just really, really bad. It affects so many different systems. It makes your health worse on so many different levels. and the things that lead to obesity are also quite bad, like the bad diet, the bad habits, the not moving around very much.

1:29:42It's actually interesting. A lot of people, after they've been on these drugs for a little while, they decide to move around more. They become more likely to go to the gym. They report their physical functioning has improved. It turns out that getting fat has made them get to the point where they are no longer looking to be active. And so they just kind of fall into a hole. Practically everything is improved, I think, for that reason. And there are some improvements that are due to direct effects of the drugs. This has, like, for example, this one is major adverse cardiac events, major adverse cardiovascular events.

1:30:16Those seem to be reduced in number immediately after starting the stuff, which suggests that there's a mechanism that's pretty direct. And this mechanism is also independent of weight loss. So that seems to be how that works. Same with chronic kidney disease. Are you looking, you know, I feel like the sort of biohacker alternative health world has for a long time, you know, talked about cancer being, you know, this metabolic disease. Do you think that could be a factor and why it could show some promise in treating various types of cancers? Yeah, I think it does make a lot of sense in that direction for the obesity related ones, but I don't think it makes sense.

1:30:58So years ago, there were people who suggested, I think quite wrongly, replacing certain cancer therapies with fasting, because it seems to like, augment the effects of cisplatin based therapies and stuff. And that didn't really hold up very well. It was a bunch of theory work that didn't go anywhere. And I don't think that this would help through those purported mechanisms, which again, I don't really believe in. I really think it's mostly just cutting down on, for example, the number of cells you have, or well, not really a number of cells you have but uh like the activity of being fat it's just you have you're not as big of a person you have less to less opportunity for cancer to really hit you when you are smaller yeah smaller it's like how short people tend to live longer than everything else bad for me yeah bad for you bearish for me um how much of the recent uh like advances in glp1 indications or or recent like benefits have been just looking at all the people that are taking GLP-1s for weight loss or diabetes and then seeing a secondary effect in the population that's actually running the drug versus a new double-blinded trial for a different indication.

1:32:14Are both things happening or are these drugs diffuse enough that you can just look at the overall population and get an idea of what's happening? Yeah. So for FDA-approved indications like obstructive sleep apnea, you do have to run additional trials. But they are seeing that these things are possible from their trials. They're seeing these things are possible from the literature. And they're running based on that. So in some cases, they do see these secondary endpoints. In fact, obesity is an example of this. Back in the day when they first introduced these drugs, back around 2005 or so, the CEO of Novo Nordisk at the time actually said, and I quote, Obesity is primarily a social and cultural problem.

1:32:52It should be solved by means of a radical restructuring of society. There is no business for Novo Nordisk in that area, referring to obesity. Wow. Yeah. So their scientists had to push for about a decade to go, hey, you should look at the weight loss data. It's really impressive. And then they finally, finally did it. And now we have weight loss drugs. Yeah, that is wild. What concerns you? What's the catch? Seems, you know, somebody might say, is it too good to be true? We're running this sort of massive experiment on huge swaths of the population right now. Seems to be, you know, many, many positive indicators.

1:33:35But what are what are kind of red flags that you think people should be kind of looking out for or the scientific community should be wary of broadly from your point? yeah so i think that physicians need to be careful about prescription uh and they already are they like they don't tend to prescribe this to people who are very skinny but the fact that this stuff is available through the gray market um very easily without prescription for very very cheap uh unfortunately i've contributed to that um has led to in what way in what way you mean just oh i made a i made a guide to doing this and a few thousand people actually like paid me eight dollars a piece to see all the details on it and now I have a few thousand people who unprompted I didn't tell them to do this message me their weight loss progress and such so wow through writing this guide a few months ago I've led to almost 12 ,000 pounds of weight loss and that's just what's been reported to me not everybody's telling me all the results and is that is that at a high level people just finding pharmacies that will compound the drug for them what does that actually look like so what it looks like is buying from china so you are ordering from a chinese factory you are uh testing the purity of the stuff and finding oh it's 99.9 i can use it and then using all of that it is not sold by nova nordisk eli lily or any other major company working on these drugs it's just from some chinese company that is ripping them off so is that patent infringement?

1:35:09We've been seeing that kind of go back and forth like hims and hers was able to compound because there's a shortage. I would love to see Neva Nordisk go to the CCP and say, hey, can you please knock this off? Yeah, I mean, they could do import bans or seize the packages at the ports. Like that's the design of this. You can't just buy a knockoff iPhone and have it delivered through the port of Los Angeles. Like if a whole truckload comes through, they should stop that, but it's clearly not happening. So right now the FDA allows this to happen because they have an exemption for research chemicals.

1:35:39You're technically not supposed to use these things, but everybody knows that everybody uses them. It's just how it is. They're researching weight loss. Yeah, I'm researching. Research maxing. Yeah. I'm doing research. So you were saying the potential red flags or things to be wary of is around, what about the prescription activity concerns you? Mostly abuse. Not really prescription activity as so much as the abuse. There are people who are obtaining these drugs. There are people who are getting other people to get the prescriptions. There are people who are not really visiting doctors. They're using telehealth services to get prescriptions.

1:36:15And they are not in need of them. But why would someone use this? This doesn't feel like something that has like the euphoria associated with a stimulant. So the concern I think would be somebody has body dysmorphia. Is that what's going on? They're already really skinny. Yeah. Unfortunately, I've met a few dozen women now who have taken these drugs and been around at 120, 130 pounds, normal height. And now they're around 100 and they don't look good anymore. They look like they're aging very quickly. They look unfortunate. And it's sad to see that they're using these drugs when they didn't even need them in the first place.

1:36:49Interesting. The same negative effects of actual starvation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. You start getting really bad harmful effects. You probably are eating at that point more lean mass than fat mass. It is quite bad. Yep, yep. That makes sense. Yeah, that's always the risk. Interesting. How are you, what was your reaction to the HIMSS-Novo Nordisk partnership blow up? So I actually think this was a big failure on Novo Nordisk's part. It seems as though what they did was they partnered with HIMSS in order to catch them. My understanding is that HIMSS has been selling a little too much, more than they've been supplied by the person producing the drugs, which is interesting.

1:37:27I guess we'll get more details relatively soon if the law begins to commence and all that. And theoretically, Wagovi gives them a million doses and then HIMSS is somehow selling 1.2 million doses of Wagovi. Is that is that where you're? Yeah, something like that. They're either compounding it themselves or ordering something from China. They are doing something. And I don't know if that will hold up or show up in trial. It's an accusation. It's so I guess it's alleged. But we'll see. We'll see. What about HIMSS's general position that patients should have as much choice as possible, as much access at different price points, things like that?

1:38:04They are completely correct to do that. I think that HIMSS providing different dosages than are provided by Dova Nordisk is a wonderful thing. There are people who can get legitimate uses out of sort of microdosing this stuff because it gets rid of noise. I've met many many people now and this is an increasingly common thing it's the seems I really don't know how far this is gonna go but a lot of people who are microdosing this because it helps with their ADHD their ADHD is like the pathological end of food based distraction they're not losing weight from this anymore but they are just using it in order to not think about food at all it gets rid of that nagging feeling in the back of their head and they can focus yeah I I did a 24-hour dry fast from Friday night to Saturday night.

1:38:49And all day Saturday, I was shocked at how much time I was just thinking about food and water, wanting food and water. And it was very freeing to some degree because I was like, well, I'm just not having any until around dinnertime. But so many points throughout the day, my mind was just going to, oh, I should go get a little tasty drink from the fridge. I should. I'm not addicted. I'm not addicted to water. I'm not addicted to water and food. I'm not beating the water addiction allegations. Big water guy. What else are you tracking right now broadly? Any reactions to the NIH funding? Oh, yeah.

1:39:2640%. We had Andrew Huber on the show. He was breaking it down for us. And what's going on with Jay Bhattacharya? What's your take on the cuts that have been proposed? So I don't know how much I should reveal about that. There's a lot of really good things coming. There might be some interesting developments there very soon. I'm especially hopeful about well you know actually i shouldn't say that uh just there there'll be good news there soon um there'll be a some changes uh i guess yeah yeah i guess zooming out like what what does good look like to you are you generally in favor of taxpayer funded in every american gets a ten thousand dollar biohacking budget and they can buy research chemicals biohacking vouchers Yeah, I mean, some people would say like, you know, the big pharma companies are profitable.

1:40:17They should bear this expense, not the Ameritech. Yeah, so they're not profitable enough. They have troubles with R &D. That public money is very, very useful. We need more public funding than we currently have. Yeah, when you actually look at biotech returns, you know, just looking at the asset class, the logical thing to do would just be to invest elsewhere. And that was with historical levels of public funding that kind of contributed to those returns to some degree. Yeah. We have a dearth of funding at the moment, and we need to increase it. We need to improve the allocation and also increase the amount.

1:40:55There's really no way around it. If we want to keep making progress, you just have to throw more money at these things. And I think we will start doing that very shortly. These cuts are a little alarming to start, but they are not the end of the discussion. remember we are it's still only five months into this presidency and they have a lot of really big plans they have a lot of trouble getting appointees through the senate they and they have a hiring freeze ongoing right now that is uh interminable we don't know when it's going to end but once that is over they'll be issuing nprms left and right it's going to be a deregulatory on like massacre it's going to be wonderful what else is exciting to you in uh biotech right now in well i wanted to say on the hams point with the different pricing and whatnot i think perhaps the most exciting thing right now in that area is that novo nordisk is run by idiots like they're very smart people but they're just total idiots okay hey everybody misses a the the patent you know what do they do they they I think it was Eli Lilly, but they missed it.

1:42:00No, no, this is Novo Nordisk. Oh, there was Novo that lost the patent fee? Yeah, they just forgot to pay the bill. It was$450 or something. Yes, it was$250 and then they missed it and they were told you're one year out, you can pay a late fee, like an extra$200 late fee on it. And they still failed. Yes, it is amazing. So that enables a wonderful, wonderful program that the FDA should pursue immediately. The FDA and the CMS have to collaborate on this. But it's the Section 804 Importation Program, and it allows individual U.S. states to import as much of the generic drugs or any other type of drug that's produced in Canada and has like an indication of proof here and whatnot as they want to reduce costs.

1:42:45So, for example, Florida will, whenever they get this actually going, have much cheaper EpiPens. They'll be able to lower the cost of their drugs by importing cheap generics from Canada And because cheap generic Ozempic is going to be coming from Canada in 2026, every state can just jump on the program. And if we're giving people, if we're giving Americans$5 a week Ozempic, then we're going to see perhaps an end to the chronic disease crisis. We're going to see obesity tackled meaningfully. We're going to see people getting hot again and make America hot again. The real meaning of Maha. The real meaning of Maha.

1:43:25There we go. There we go. Inside baseball. That's amazing. Very exciting. Well, 15 minutes was not enough time. Never enough. We should have you back on again soon. Thank you for all the insights. Yeah, thanks for coming on. We'll have you back on soon. This is great. That's a good one. And if you dox yourself anywhere other than here, we will be very upset. Oh, no. Sorry, guys. You guys have a good one. All right. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Okay, Shell is in early talks to acquire rival British Petroleum, BP, but Shell denies the Wall Street Journal's report that it's in talks to acquire BP.

1:44:02So we have a little bit of an update to the story. And M &A, just in the last 20 months, Morning Brew's breaking it down here, Shell BP is clocked at maybe$80 billion, but the deal's pending. Exxon and Pioneer are doing a$60 billion M &A deal. Chevron and Hess, a deal still pending, but it's at$53 billion. D-back and Endeavor, don't even know those companies, but$26 billion deal there. ConocoPhill and Marathon at$17 billion and Occidental and Crown Rock at$12 billion. So if you think the AI M &A deals are hot, you got to go over to Big Oil. Big Oil. Oil and gas. Big Tech, Big Oil, Big Pharma. These are the industries where the big dollars get thrown around.

1:44:50They don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the Decacorn exchanging business. True. Pretty interesting. So the immediate market reaction to Shell's potential deal for BP. BP jumped 7 % and Shell dropped 2.6%. I want to know what they're doing more recently. It looks like BP is up now 1.5 % on the day. uh how is shell how is bp doing over the week or the or the month this is the week okay hmm um yeah they've they've both kind of retraced since shell said nah we're not talking at all so by market cap shells around 207 billion bps around 87 billion those are big companies big big companies uh anyway we can run through the wall street journals report here um but first if you're planning a complex post-merger integration you gotta get on linear john your commitment to just use linear for everything is no but of course if you're if you're building if you're building modern software if you need to streamline issues projects and product roadmaps you gotta get on linear linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products and plus they got linear for agents but uh you know oil and gas companies do need to build software worried about getting paper clipped they should be on linear if you're worried about getting paper clipped get your agents on linear they will thank you for it yeah uh so a deal for bp which has a market value of roughly 80 billion would be a landmark combination for two super major oil companies super major is a better term than mag 7 in my opinion we need that for the tech companies the super majors super major oh you're in the major leagues i'm in the super majors so good so uh uh talks between company representatives are active, according to people who are familiar with the matter, leak into the Wall Street Journal, and BP is considering the approach carefully.

1:46:49Acquiring BP would put Shell on firmer footing to challenge larger competitors, such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron. It would be a landmark combination of two so-called super major oil companies, a group of multinational behemoths that dominate the production of the world's most important energy sources. Potential terms of the deal couldn't be learned, and a tie-up is far from certain, but the discussions are moving slowly. BP is currently valued around$80 billion, taking into account a premium. A deal could end up as the largest corporate oil deal since the $83 billion mega merger that created ExxonMobil at the turn of the century.

1:47:23It would also be easily the biggest M &A deal of the year so far in a market that has been rattled by President Trump's antitrust policy. And so you can see that the combined entity would be somewhere in the - Do you remember tracking the Deepwater Horizon spill? I do. Yeah, I remember tracking it very closely in the Thunderhorse tracks. Were you monitoring the situation? I was monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading equity research reports about BP from the sell-side banks. And I understood it to the level of knowing that the tract that they were drilling into was called the Thunder Horse Tract, which is the section of the crust that they're drilling the oil into.

1:48:06It was fascinating. So BP's total cost associated with Deepwater Horizon, including cleanup, fines, and settlements, reached approximately$65 billion, so nearing their total enterprise value at the moment. Also, great movie. I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie, Deepwater Horizon. You should check it out. Is it a documentary? No. It is a nonfiction recreation, but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the oil rig. And I believe Mark Wahlberg's in it. I like movies like that. It's awesome. It's a really, really great movie. I highly recommend it. A Shell spokesperson said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value in Shell through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification.

1:48:56Wow. Nice. Yeah. Fantastic. Basically saying like, Hey, no comment, but you know, also like we're, we're shilling for shell over here. We're shilling for shell. Um, TBPN spokesman said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value in TBPN through continuing to focus on performance, discipline and simplification. John, we should never, you should never decline to comment. You should always just do an ad read. like that. Just do it every. Bake it into the LLM. Switchyourbusinessoramp.com. Do you have any comments on your intern allegedly contributing funds to overthrow a government?

1:49:36Switchyourbusinessoramp. As we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on getting our viewers on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Shell comes into the talks operating from a position of strength with its stock sharply outperforming BP in recent years. Shell, which like BP is based in the United Kingdom, but has operations around the world, has a market value of more than$200 billion. BP has been a laggard among the major oil companies after an ill-fated push away from fossil fuels into renewable energy. It's also suffered years of management upheaval and operational disasters.

1:50:15And so it seems like actually their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business oil has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price. Because like those M &A sell side research reports that I was reading during the Deepwater Horizon crisis, they were very accurately predicting the impact, the long term impact of that crisis on the stock immediately. Yeah, so it was priced into the stock very quickly and the stock dropped a ton and wiped a ton of market cap off But then they were kind of set up to kind of rebuild and there weren't many surprises coming down the pipe after a few months or a few years and so more recently Elliott management which owns more than 5 % of BP shares has pushed for changes with the energy companies interesting that he had been performing had basically been down only since the financial crisis and then Deepwater Horizon hit and it was just down even.

1:51:17When asked publicly, Shell's chief executive officer said that recently the company's bar for big deal making would be high. Shell in May announced a multi-billion dollar share buyback plan, the latest in a long series of big share repurchases. Shell has been working with bankers on a potential sale of its chemical assets in Europe and the US, the Wall Street Journal previously reported. For Shell, acquiring BP would take years of integration, complicated by culture clashes and possibly the sale of overlapping assets. But a deal could give Shell's global trading business greater reach and bolster its dominance in areas like liquefied natural gas.

1:51:52Analysts and investors also see a good matchup in the company's Gulf of Mexico operations, which the US now calls the Gulf of America. That's right. That's right. All the oil companies had to change all their internal documentation. And so Bloomberg News reported this earlier. I think it's sticking, yeah, until the next election, and there'll be a new EO, and it'll go back to something else. Well, it would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it something other than the Gulf of America. Well, there's some other news in here, but I think it'd be fun to debate the future of venture capital marketing.

1:52:33I was on a call recently with a GP at a very big fund, and they were asking me about strategy and where the future is going. And media is obviously evolving very quickly. And I was kind of noodling on a bunch of different things. but what I came to was maybe this idea that that venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that like you it is not available to everyone they are in the business of selling money but not everyone can buy it and so that kind of puts it in the same league as you know ultra high net worth wealth management products or even roll a high horology rolexes that are in demand people they still advertise rolexes they advertise them at at LAX, the clocks are Rolexes.

1:53:23Or if you go to an F1 match, you'll see a lot of, you know, advertisements. Yeah, Patek will put an ad for the Cubitus in an airport. Every issue of The Economist comes with an ad for basically a Holy Trinity watch on the back, whether it's Vacheron or AP or Patek. But you can't just go and buy those. And so it's very odd that they're doing this, like luxury brand building without a product that you can just immediately go by. And I'm wondering if that's the future of venture capital marketing. And so my thought was that maybe that's where the VC firm should really be pushing into. Well, yeah.

1:54:01Let's talk about the current strategy, right? The current strategy is post on X, go on podcasts. You can start your own podcast. Yes. Many people have done that. Yes. The challenge is that venture capitalists are deeply conflicted by making a wide variety of investments. Yes. And that has to inform their opinion on different markets. And so if you're deeply convicted and trying to give coverage to a certain sector, it becomes very hard because you can't go on there and say X, Y, Z company is clearly dominating. You know, if you look at the data and you look at, you know, what customers are saying, when, if you have another portfolio company over here that you happen to back.

1:54:45And so it creates this sort of challenge of providing great media products because of that conflict. Now you can still get around this, right? And there's different ways and there's different approaches. You can do an interview show, which allows you to, but that's just like one type of content. And the problem with that is that it takes the focus off of you and puts it on your guest. person. And so it's like, yeah, the person's a good interviewer, but like, what do they actually believe? Yeah. Yeah. So the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking, you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing.

1:55:17You can't get away from it. It's all marketing all the way down. Um, now the sort of subcategories I think that are interesting. I've always said that, uh, Sam lesson, right. He's got fans, he's got haters, but he creates, he has a unique media product and the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord and some people it resonates with them other people want to dunk but it is an effective format in order to provide commentary and it's very efficient right he doesn't need a big marketing team to actually pull that off so i think it's super key to find a specific format but then the alternative is instead of hiring a production team and producing podcasts yourselves you could do something like what you're talking about.

1:56:00Yeah. When I think of like the four really great or like a few really great VC marketing examples, I think of Zero to One by Peter Thiel. He's never tweeted, but he's tweeted once and it was a link to his book. And that book was such a good outcome that it sold in airport bookshops, right? And he just dropped an amazing book and then that book just continued to compound and was extremely valuable in terms of like building his brand. Naval has a similar story where his Twitter posts, the how to get rich without getting lucky, went so viral. And when I think about both of those, and then it was eventually turned into a book.

1:56:42But when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near-term thesis or they're not news products. They're reflections on how the world works, reflections on like timeless principles, right? then I think about Paul Graham's blog it's not on a regular cadence you know it's not a weekly sub stack it's not a news product it's reflections on like how did Steve Jobs run his company and maybe he'll draw maybe he'll like pump his bags a little bit by like talking about Airbnb but he's talking about like what Airbnb did in like 2009 or something and it's like it's completely irrelevant and it doesn't feel like oh I'm getting a buy rating on the stock right now it's better to pump your bags when you end up being tremendously correct.

1:57:28Exactly. Some of the early writing, I feel like, and even commentary on Sam Altman just clearly ended up being true. Yeah, 100%. And he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or Airbnb at this moment. He's not talking about Airbnb's newest release. He's talking about Brian Chesky as a person years ago, and it's reflective. And I think that that works really well. Mark Andreessen, And similarly, the ability to go into the Wall Street Journal and write an op-ed is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that idea. But it has to be from the individual investor.

1:58:03I don't think it's something that can be formulated from a team necessarily. Yeah, so there's this like there's kind of this like I feel like we're gonna see more of like this barbell strategy Where the future might be like when the GP has a really really insightful piece of commentary They take it to a Wall Street Journal op-ed or a book or a thread or a screenshot essay or You're just seeing the brand and you're seeing the brand on the back of and I was thinking like what is the equivalent of like the Patek philippe ad that appears on the back of the economist every week it's like i was thinking venture capitalists should go and buy the back of like the stanford review or like the waterloo you know campus newspaper like that should have an ad for a venture capital thompson newsletter yeah exactly but like but i think aligning with these iconic properties yeah people who are doing their life's work a full page ad and yeah in the journal but most importantly like like when when When Patek Philippe sponsors The Economist, they are not trying to shift The Economist's coverage towards being more bullish on Swiss watches.

1:59:12They're just like, we don't even know what you're going to put in this issue. We're just going to be on the back there looking good and telling you the vibe of the brand. So, John, a full-page color ad in the journal costs around$248 ,000, which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a... Really great like truly great producer for their own show. yeah and so is it going to be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the journal for a day yeah or or have your own podcast yeah and there are more narrow properties too that are like the journal is extremely broad in all of business there but there but there really are more narrow products that would work but every time they've gotten there it's been it's been um it's been misaligned around like what the actual coverage is.

2:00:05But I don't know. Maybe we'll see an F1 team. Maybe we'll see JetSuite X, the terminal, like sponsored by a VC firm. That would make a lot of sense. You get off in Silicon Valley at the JetSuite X terminal and boom, you're presented with an ad for a VC firm. Let's take you through a beautiful obituary to the founder of FedEx, Fred Smith. So Ryan Peterson posted a photo of the original FedEx plane. He said, RIP to logistics legend, an outspoken defender of free trade, FedEx founder Fred Smith, who passed away today. Below is the first ever FedEx plane, which you can see at the Air and Space Museum annex next to Dulles Airport in Virginia.

2:00:48Look at that. He must have been so stoked when he bought this. Like his business was finally growing that he could own his own plane. Imagine how many likes he would have gotten on social media. Everyone's like, this is your flex. You just have to appreciate it. You're just trying to go viral. This is clearly. This is clearly for logistics. This is clearly for logistics. Total legend. Oh, like burning VC dollars on a plane. I think he was using Vegas dollars. I think he was doing cash flow, yeah. Anyway, Max Meyer has a story that we should read through. Fred Smith and American Life. He says, Fred Smith died on Saturday.

2:01:27He was the founder of Federal Express, which became FedEx, one of the largest logistics companies on earth. Smith was an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word and an American patriot. He bent reality and created something entirely new, and he ran toward an extremely difficult problem. The fruits of Fred's work are as follows. If you give a box or document to FedEx by 6 p.m., you can have it delivered almost anywhere in the United States or Canada by 8 a.m. the next morning. Imagine how key that would have been to business before the internet. Incredible. Yeah. You're trying to do deals?

2:02:02If you give FedEx a package on a Monday, it can be in Paris by Wednesday morning or in Shanghai by Thursday for a few hundred dollars. Most of us take overnight delivery for granted, but take a step back. And the fact that we can essentially airdrop physical packages anywhere in the world is mind-boggling. Smith's death is a reminder not to take the miracles of modern life for granted. They were built by people like Fred Smith. These are a few words about the man himself and the dazzling system that is FedEx. Frederick Wallace Smith was born in 1944 in Mississippi. Fred's grandfather, James Buchanan Smith, captained Mississippi River Steamboats.

2:02:40Fred's father, James Frederick Smith, was the founder of the Smith Motor Coach Company, which would go on to become Dixie Greyhound lines after an acquisition in 1931. From steamboats to buses to jumbo jets in three generations, the family stayed on the cutting edge of motorized transportation. In 1925, the elder Smith, seeking to create the transportation line out of Memphis, converted a truck into a small bus and drove it himself. Within a few years, James Smith had dozens and dozens of coaches. By the time he died, suddenly in 1948, he commanded over 200. Wow. So he died four years after the son was born.

2:03:16Wow. So he basically grew up without a, without a, or maybe that's the grandfather. Um, according to James Smith's obituary, um, no, no, no, no, he's the dad. Yeah. Yeah. So according to James Smith's obituary, um, those 200 coaches each came to a halt during the regular regularly scheduled routes for one minute when the funeral began. Uh, the young Fred was just four when his father died. Wow. In 1962, the young Smith enrolled at Yale University where he was fraternity brothers with future president George W. Bush. Bush asked Smith to serve as the secretary of defense twice and Smith declined twice.

2:03:51Wow. Interesting because defense is who was the founder that we had on the show. I'm completely blanking on his name, the name of the company and who invested in the company. But he had this defense focused supply chain management startup. Yes. It was one of our probably first. You're talking about Rune Logistics. Rune. Yes. But it's something he said about - Not the AI poster. The legendary poster. Not the legendary poster. The logistics company. The obscene of open AI. Yes. So the young Smith was a member of the infamous Cloak and Dagger Secret Society. He is not beating the deep state allegations.

2:04:33It was at Yale that he wrote his first paper about his concept for using airplanes to deliver packages with a hub and spoke system. Wow. He's like, I got an idea. I got a business plan. I just need somebody to build it for me. I.e. that instead of point-to-point package transport, everything would be brought to a single hub by air and then redistributed. We talked to somebody about this on the show, how now we think of it as like inefficient to bring everything to one place and then do the hub and spoke thing because now we have, you know, DoorDash and Waymo and, you know, last mile, all these different last mile solutions.

2:05:06But at the time, this was revolutionary. Everything would be brought to a single hub. Repeat that cycle every night while turning a profit and you have a viable system for overnight delivery. The paper is said to have earned an average grade roasted. In 1966, the founder of FedEx graduated from Yale and volunteered to receive a commission in the Marine Corps. He served two tours in Vietnam. For his service in Vietnam, President Nixon decorated Smith with a silver star and a bronze star. The Silver Star citation read in part, unhesitatingly rushing through the intense hostile fire to the position of heaviest contact.

2:05:46Lieutenant Smith fearlessly removed several casualties from the hazardous area and shouting words of encouragement to his men, directed their fire upon the advancing enemy soldiers successfully repulsing the hostile attack. moving boldly across the fire swept terrain to an elevated area he calmly disregarded repeated north vietnamese attempts to direct upon him as he skillfully adjusted artillery fire and airstrikes upon the hostile positions to within 50 meters of his own location wow what a life and continue to direct the movement of his unit wow what a badass uh at this point yeah so 1973 he's 29 years old He lost his dad at four.

2:06:26He goes to Yale with George Bush, then goes to Vietnam, does two tours, gets a silver and a bronze star. It's crazy. War hero. Yeah. And now he's decided to launch Federal Express in Memphis. Smith had studied military procurement and been working on the idea for nearly 10 years after writing the Yale paper. So he writes this paper. And he's like, okay, 10 years later. Most founders have an idea and they pivot in two months. He writes this paper, gets an average grade. This is like Nike. Ten years later. This is the same thing with Nike. Ten years later. Yeah. The company launched with a fleet of 14 French to salt jets, which delivered a few hundred packages on their first day of service.

2:07:05There we go. Wow. He's just like, just zero to one. Yeah. According to FedEx, Laura Smith named his new service Federal Express because he hoped to attract the attention of the Federal Reserve Bank, a prospective customer. It is funny, like the name you would think Federal Express. you would just assume that it's an extension of the government. I did when I was a kid. I was like, oh, United Postal Service, USPS, United States Postal Service. Using FedEx, it was just a better product experience than USPS. Even as a kid, you kind of feel it out. Feel it out. The system that Smith had conceived at Yale worked.

2:07:40It really worked and nothing like it existed. The USPS existed principally to deliver letter mail and didn't have aircraft. UPS was a giant of a ground delivery throughout the US. Federal Express, though, would specialize in rapid air delivery. Just five years after the first Federal Express flights, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Wow. Today, the FedEx fleet consists of nearly 700 aircraft and about 200 ,000 vehicles, and FedEx employs half a million workers around the world. Wow. Every night at the FedEx Super Hub at the Memphis International Airport, hundreds of jets landed the airport.

2:08:17Ultra hub. The super hub. Bringing packages to its many sorting machines. A few hours later, the jets take back off to every corner of the United States and the world at their destinations. The other half of the fleet awaits feeder aircraft to take packages to smaller airports. And the FedEx Express trucks that take packages to their final destination. The financial finesse needed to actually make a model like this, not just lose massive amounts of money. Yeah, you could go out of business so many times. And yeah, there is that story about him almost losing money, going to Vegas, and then putting the treasury on black and winning it back and doubling it and making payroll the next day, saving the company.

2:09:05Maybe apocryphal. there's been rumors that maybe it was like you know some mob related thing and he took it yeah the tinfoil yeah the tinfoil hat explanation is like you know he either way he got it done he did uh some type of you know and this is entirely internet speculation it's probably not true but it's possible that he like you know was you know needed a reason to have a bunch of cash right um and maybe did something else but uh the story is incredible and it will live on yeah Yeah. Smith retired from FedEx in 2022. After almost 50 years leading the company, he has survived by nine of his 10 children and his wife, Diane, his daughter, Winland.

2:09:45Smith Rice died in 2005 of a terminal cardiac condition. It's very sad. And one has to think that his father, Mr. Smith, who died with 200 vehicles to his name, would be impressed that his son died with 200 ,000 vehicles to his name and a fleet of jets to match. So incredible story. and may he rest in peace. Anyway, let's move on to the timeline. Also, one of the greatest logos of all time, the FedEx logo, has that secret arrow in it. Love that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Once you see it, you can't, not this logo, the next logo, the more modern FedEx logo has the secret arrow in there. Once you see that.

2:10:25They're moving. They're moving. And if you want to understand more about Frederick Smith, Go to Founders Podcast and listen to episode 151, 151 on FedEx. And subscribe to ArenaMag to read more of Max's writing. Mr. Beast has rolled back the launch of his ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. He says, hey, thanks for all your feedback on the ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission. Okay, so clearly the thumbnail industrial complex came for him hard. They were probably making death threats in the comments. It sounds like it was pretty intense.

2:11:08My thing here, I have to agree with Lulu. This is one of Mr. Beast's many businesses, right? So in general, it's something he wants to create for creators and distribute widely. but the obvious reason that he should have kept the ai thumbnail tool is you're by if you can roll out ai in this way you can save millions of creators that create youtube videos a lot of money because many of them are not going to be able to afford to commission a hand-designed thumbnail and so the the right thing to do for the creators broadly is to make a tool like this available make it as cheap as possible so as many people as possible can use it and not give in to the small number of people in the world that make thumbnails like that that's their sort of day-to-day those people that make thumbnails like there's a lot of things you could do you could adjust you could go and make edit videos right ai video editors are not that good today yep you could do that it's very odd because the yes it's like we're we're destroying the job of a of thumbnail artist or real thumbnail artist, but that's a job that was created like two years ago.

2:12:18Like I think I met the first like full, I literally was at a YouTube conference just a few years ago and I met the first real thumbnail artist where that was his entire job full time. And Mr. Beast hired a few of those folks. And the whole point is the whole point is that person can probably make much better thumbnails than AI can right now. And so go up market, work with creators that are willing to spend money and make a, make it, make an entry level tool that anybody can use to generate an AI, you know, an AI generated thumbnail. Like it just, I mean, I'm surprised that he rolled this back and gave in the, but you know, it's very possible that the thumbnail industrial complex, you know, has, has a massive lobbying arm, you know, and, and, and said, you know, we're going to work on getting, you know, your other businesses blacklisted, you know?

2:13:11Yeah. I mean, it's interesting, Like there's even a continuum of technology that exists within the pre-AI thumbnail generation workflow. So at one point I was making thumbnails the way people usually do, compositing different images together. Pick a background, cut yourself out of a green screen image, put that over the face over the background. That's like the standard thing. Put some text over it. at one point I actually experimented with Ben shooting practical thumbnails. So we would go and design, like instead of compositing a background, we would design a background image of wall and print out pictures, pin them on the wall.

2:13:52And I would stand in front of the wall of images and they didn't really perform better. And so I think like using a design tool like figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together uh is great just using software in general is completely justified and and no one really talked about like well if you're you if you're just compositing images then you're not filming them practically all of a sudden you're putting set decorators out of out of business because it's not like i was hiring a set decorator i was just saying like hey ben me and you are gonna practically set up this thumbnail and then take the photo so here's here's the real evidence as to why Mr.

2:14:32Beast should have kindly told the thumbnail artist to F off. I ran a quick query here basically to try to estimate how many people actually earn a living making thumbnails by looking at platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and all these different things and then doing some type of multiple. So generally, we're estimating 2 ,000 to 5 ,000 people make at least$1 ,000 a month designing thumbnails across all different types of platforms. Meanwhile, there are over 2 million YouTube creators that are in the YouTube Partner Program, meaning they're making ad revenue. YouTube is a business for them. And so do you want to serve the 2 million people by giving them great tools that they can use to run better, more profitable content businesses?

2:15:21Or do you want to build your product for the thumbnail industrial complex, which is just just a few thousand people that are probably not even doing it full time. They're just earning some type of living. I think it gets to the importance of how abstract should your title be? Because we were talking about this earlier. If you did a job shadow on a lawyer in 1950, and then you did a job shadow on a lawyer today, it's probably a very different day. A modern lawyer is sending text messages and is on signal and sending emails and probably using ChatGPT to search for things and pulling for stuff from LexisNexis instead of going to the archives.

2:16:03The old lawyer is like having teams and stuff. Hopefully not dumping your docs in ChatGPT. No, probably not. But still, it's like a modern, it's a very modern experience. But we still call those people lawyers. We haven't changed the title. Whereas a person who's... Even Crosby, the company we had on, is just an AI native law firm. Yeah. So they actually have lawyers. they're just more efficient. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Versus, um, versus someone who is like, like super narrowly defined as like, I am a typist at a law firm. It's like, yeah, you lost your job, but did you really lose, were you permanently unemployed because you insisted on being someone who uses a typewriter or did you learn to use a computer?

2:16:41And then did you learn to dictate things to a voice model? And then did you learn? And yes, there will be some job displacement, but mostly it's like people flow into different categories all the time. So I I would imagine that a lot of the real thumbnail artists that succeed going forward are the ones who either leverage AI or go into video editing or become creators themselves or do a million other things that they can, that they can. Yeah. It's funny because we would pay real money for a good thumbnail. Absolutely. Right now. Yes. If you're a thumbnail artist, reach out to us. And you're trying to be, we would love to have better thumbnails, top 10 thumbnail designers in the world and want to be paid a premium for it.

2:17:18We're happy to pay. Yes, yes, yes. Otherwise we'll probably just keep slopping it up with our templates. Welcome to the studio, DJ. What's going on? Hey, guys, what's going on? It's great to have you. Congratulations. Massive day. Massive day. Yeah, massive day. Thank you. Thank you. Break it down for us. For those who haven't watched the full one hour video, we'll obviously link it here. But what are the key announcements? What do you think is important to share? Sure. Yeah. So the 10-second summary of our update is that Neuralink is working reliably and has already changed the lives of seven human participants that we've been working with.

2:18:00It's really been a privilege working with all those participants individually. And that we sort of lay down our next set of milestones, which is most immediately going to market and enabling the scaling of this technology to thousands of people, eventually millions, and also to just go beyond the movement and expand functionalities into speech, vision, and hopefully getting to the speed of inner thoughts. And then there's a little bit of a hint as to what the path to kind of the ultimate goal of Neuralink would be, which is to understand and unlock the mystery of the mind. Yeah, Elon teased that in the opener.

2:18:39And I was somewhere between like tearing up from emotions and like pumping my fist with excitement because it feels like, you know, this is the main quest. You can see that he's lit up about this and you can see that he's, he's just, it's just incredibly back. Yeah, so back. So it was exciting. Give us a little bit of your background and how you wound up at Neuralink. yeah sure um let's see so i grew up in south korea and um growing up i love ninja turtles um and pokemon i also really like legos uh and just in general taking things apart and putting it together and um came to the states at age 13 and studied electrical engineering you know i loved loved loved rf circuit design and computational electromagnetics and i wanted to be an academic My dad's a professor and decided to go to graduate school in Berkeley to design the next generation wireless communication chips for cell phones.

2:19:47And then in the Bay Area, I learned that people can start companies. I didn't know that was a thing that people can do. At the time, there wasn't really anything interesting happening. No offense to other builders at the time, but I decided to finish my PhD and did my thesis work in neural implants. and had the opportunity to join Neuralink as a founding team member when I was graduating. And that was almost nine years ago. What was the, take me through some of the history. I mean, nine years to get here, it feels like we're at this like acceleration moment where the rate of Neuralink deployment is growing.

2:20:24It feels exponential. But in those first nine years, what were the key milestones that you remember and the key turning points? Sure, yeah. I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize that when Neuralink started out, it was really just a group of six or seven of us and we didn't really have anything. When I first showed up to the office, at the time we actually shared the office with OpenAI at the Pioneer Building in San Francisco. Wow. It was just a bunch of us. We didn't even have chairs and desks. So one of the first things we did on the first day was to go out to Staples and buy chairs. So, you know, incredible amount of work has kind of gone into, you know, really building the hardware, kind of the foundational pieces to, you know, generate the data set that's necessary for us to iterate on the device.

2:21:18And it took about, I would say, you know, year and a half, two years to get the first kind of generation of brain chips working on the lab. at the time, starting with smaller animal models with rats and then slowly graduating to bigger and bigger species, pigs, sheep, that starts to represent more the anomalies of the humans. And about four years ago now, we had the demo with one of our monkeys, Pager, that played the game Pong. We called it the Mind Pong. And that was one of the key moments to sort of demonstrate what the capabilities the types of devices can be. And I think I should also maybe step back and say that Neuralink really is sitting on the shoulders of the giants here.

2:22:11There's been decades, decades of research that's gone into the field that we're in called brain-computer interface or brain-machine interface. And that really set the foundation for de-risking the scientific aspects of what this could be. And there's obviously a lot of challenges in scaling that product, making it a product itself. And that's what we are taking on. Yeah. I want to talk about those giants, the shoulders of the giants that you're standing upon and how you think about the role of research and development in the public sector, in academia, playing into commercializable technologies.

2:22:55There's discussions about this with the NIH and biotech. Obviously, you know, SpaceX is the perfect, it feels like the perfect story to me where, you know, who was going to pay for a moon landing in the 60s? No venture capitalist would have underwritten that. But because we did that, we learned a lot. And then when it became time for it to be rolled out at scale, Elon stepped up with SpaceX and the rest is history. So what can you tell me about the history of BCI in the kind of public sector side? Universities. Universities versus other stories that have been done at different companies that may have failed but contributed to the community.

2:23:42Yeah, we had Andrew Huberman on like a week or so ago talking about his concern around, you know, NIH funding and all the issues from a pure kind of health standpoint. But this feels relevant as well. Yeah, I mean, it's incredibly important. I mean, you see this even today, there's a very much an active research going on in the BCI field, you know, sort of looking at the next frontier of different targets and different indications that can really open up opportunities for people that have, you know, various different types of neurological condition. And I think the history of brain-computer interface and the first product that Neuralink is working on, we named it telepathy because really it's enabling someone who has lost that mind-body connection through diseases like traumatic spinal cord injury or ALS, which really over time is a horrible condition that really takes away every part of your muscles over time, eventually leading to a death.

2:24:52And, you know, those were the indications. And, you know, what Neuralink is able to do is place this device and these set of electrodes in a part of the brain called the motor cortex or the hand knob area. So basically, if you're thinking about moving your hand or wrist area, there's a lot of neurons that are firing in response to that. And we're able to record that intention and then translate that to, you know, moving cursors on the screen or robotic arm, you know, physical things in the space. and that was purely purely done as an academic research funded by the department of defense um and and um you know 20 30 years ago and that really set the foundation for what is possible and you know i think back 20 30 years ago if someone were to try to get venture money out of that i don't think anyone would have pursued that scientific pursuit and you know i there still continues to be a lot of research and important work that's gone into academia for other indications.

2:25:51And I do worry about sort of what the future looks like on that one. Can you walk us through the current installation of the Neuralink product? I know that there were specific machines you had to build and kind of walk through because it's, I don't know if semi invasive is the correct term. Is it extremely invasive? I don't know what term we're using, but it feels like you've done exactly what's necessary and not any further, but it's still significant, but you've done a ton of work to de-risk it, right? Yeah. So I guess maybe before we dive into some of the specifics of how Neuralink devices installed, maybe let me take a step back and kind of describe why go into the brain in the first place and why that's important.

2:26:37And And typically the analogy that's used in the field is that of the stadium. So, you know, you can really think about neural signals as audio signals. The frequency spectrum is actually very similar in the analogy of neurons talking to each other, speaking different languages. It's actually a pretty good analogy. So the idea is that, you know, if you're standing outside the stadium, you can kind of get a sense of how the game is going based on the cheers and the boos of the crowd. but you won't be able to tell me exactly what's going on on the game. You know, how's the game actually going? What are the teams actually talking about?

2:27:12When are the key moments happening? And in order for you to really understand those types of information and get that type of information, you need to be in the arena, right? Like you need to actually drop the microphone inside the arena. And you can kind of think about what Neuralink is doing in a similar analogy. So you can get neural signals on the surface of the brain or even outside the skull without having to go through a craniotomy. But the type of signals and the resolution that you will get is going to be much worse. And so there's a trade-off there. So now we've decided from day one that we would want to get the highest resolution neural signatures because we believe that that's necessary for the long-term mission of understanding and unlocking the mystery of the brain.

2:28:04And in order to do that, you basically want to make these electrodes that are recording neural signals as small as possible and also as flexible as possible. So your brain, you can kind of think of it as a sort of a consistency of a tofu or a jello. And it also moves a lot because every heartbeat, every breath that you take, it's moving a lot. And that's one of the things that we have to learn in a hard way when we work with our participants. And so in designing these electrodes to be tiny, fraction, fraction of a human hair. So one of our, what we call thread, which is these tiny wires that have electrodes, are about 1 20th of a human hair.

2:28:49And they're also flexible, so they kind of move with the brain rather than, if it's a rigid thing, you can cause a lot of scarring as you're breathing. So when you build these tiny, tiny threads that are manufactured with conventional lithography tools in our own clean room facilities, Now the question is, okay, how do you actually insert these? They're very small, and even the best neurosurgeons won't be able to insert them precisely in the location that we want. So we ended up designing a surgical robot. And again, this was something that was kind of in the vision of the company from day one, where also looking at scaling this to millions, if not billions of people, eventually.

2:29:32We just did not see a world where there's some sort of robotics and some sort of not having human in the loop. So it's essentially this precision robotic tool that has a bunch of cameras that are looking at the surface of the brain, making sure that you're avoiding vessels, and then manipulating and inserting these tiny threads one by one as quickly as you can in the region of interest. And what ends up happening is that we currently go through a process to drill a hole in the skull called a craniotomy. And then we actually expose different layers of the tissue. There's many different layers of the brain before you get to it.

2:30:15The first layer that you see is a dura mater. And then once you have the brain exposed, we insert these threads one by one with a surgical robot. And then the hole that we created on the skull is actually replaced by the implant base that has the battery, the computer, and everything. And then once you put the skin over, everything's completely invisible. Everything's completely wireless. And you basically become a cyborg. And that process takes about three hours right now. Can you talk to me about how noisy the data is and if there's any advances in AI that help denoising of the data? I've seen incredible demos of, oh, take this ancient black and white grainy image and just make it look amazing.

2:31:01or even unblurring images? Like we're actually at the CSI moment where you can be like, zoom in on that, zoom in on that and it works. Have there been any developments in AI recently that have been relevant? Do you think that will happen in the future? Is it already happening or is it just kind of a complete side quest? Yeah, no, there's a lot of opportunities where AI can help, you know, in some ways understand the biological brain that it's inspired by in really interesting ways. There are a couple places that we currently use AI. I think on the electro side, unfortunately, there's not a lot that you can do.

2:31:44In the end, there's very tight margin in terms of signal-to-noise ratio. So there's a lot of innovations that we've had and Neuralink on low power and low noise amplifier designs and being able to digitize that as quickly as possible into digital bits, that then you can apply a lot of interesting kind of signal processing as well as really at the end of the day, this giant pipeline that we call neural decoding. What is the human intent and how can you actually translate that to something useful? So as of right now, we have a very simple machine learning AI kind of there to translate those thoughts and intents into something useful.

2:32:28And the thing that is actually very interesting is that it's not a static data points either, right? So if you look at a human brain, you know, there's what's called neuroplasticity, which means that from day to day, or even depending on the context, like there's difference in neural states that are represented even from the same brain region. And it's a learning system, right? And as well as the machine learning model, the silicon neural net is also learning about the brain, but also your brain is learning about the silicon, basically this new mode of communication that you have gotten as a neural link.

2:33:06And in many ways, I think there's some opportunities and we're starting to see kind of interesting trace where now that we have not just one, but seven human participants, there's some similarities that we see in kind of the data set. And there's opportunities where we can use that kind of base similarities to improve the calibration time. So meaning you can't immediately use this device as is, you have to go through a calibration, make sure when you're thinking about moving to the left, we have a stream of neural signals that then say, oh, okay, John is thinking about moving to the left. And this is what the neural patterns look like.

2:33:43And, you know, collect that data over time, and then, you know, improve improve the system, but you do get drift over time due to the fact that, as I mentioned, your neural state is always going through a plasticity. So can you talk about the translation and the evolution of what outputs you're actually trying to map to? Because if I remember Pong, Pong's unique in that it's just up or down. It's not an X and Y grid that you're trying to control. You're just controlling up and down. But then when I've seen Nolan P1, it's clear that he can use a mouse in an X and Y axis and then also click. And when I think about playing a video game, I'm kind of using all 10 digits.

2:34:31In one way, I'm thinking jump. In another way, I'm thinking send the message of just press the A button. And so there's like how much data can you get out? Are you trying to increase that? Has that already increased? Is it going to kind of operate like a higher level of abstraction that then gets translated into computer use? Or is it more like, as long as I can puppeteer 10 fingers, then you can translate those into 10 different actions and remap those and have people menu accordingly, like the investment banker who doesn't use a mouse. Right. Right, so the update that we just released a couple hours ago actually has some videos of what the latest capabilities with Neuralink that participants have been able to do.

2:35:22I guess one thing that I will highlight is that there's a video of two of our participants playing a first-person shooter game. And if you actually think about it, that's quite sophisticated control. There's a left joystick for movement, there's a right joystick for aiming, and there's a bunch of different buttons for swapping weapons, reload and shooting, et cetera, et cetera. And they're able to do this. It's going to make me cry. Team death match with your boy after. Well, the other thing that's actually kind of interesting is that at Neuralink, we also talk about going beyond the limits of biology and then actually achieving superhuman capabilities.

2:35:56Yeah, so this is - We're already - Oh, I was going to say, we're actually already starting to see some signs of it. Interesting. So that was my next question. right now you guys are generally focused on outputs, right? Controlling an arm or playing a video game or navigating some type of computer. At what point would you focus on or start starting to spend more time around sort of the inputs into the brain? Yes. Inputs. So one of the major applications for that is a product that we call blindsight. So giving sight back to people that have lost it. And that's primarily going to be input. So imagine basically someone who's blind being able to have a set of glasses with embedded camera that's capturing the scene.

2:36:46And that gets converted into a set of impulses that then stimulate the part of your brain called the visual cortex, which is on the back of your head. And it basically gives you your sight back, right? Because the way vision works is that you have your lights hitting your retina converted to electrical signals. And at the end of the day, it's your brain where you're seeing and having that conscious experience. But if you have anything break in that circuit, you can directly go to the brain, you know, stimulate those neurons that are giving you that visual experience and be able to see. And our plan is to have our first blind sight patient next year.

2:37:19Can you talk about some of the how you see the ecosystem developing around Neuralink long term, if you can speak to it at all? I'm just imagining that when I've spoken to Nolan P1 and I mean, he's, you know, incredibly benefit. He's a huge beneficiary of Neuralink, but also voice interfaces because he can speak. And so as that technology gets better, that becomes an extra tool in the arsenal. I'm imagining someone wearing glasses that act as blindsight, but then also having an audio modulation there that could help as well. And there's a whole bunch of other, and I'm wondering if there's going to be like an ensemble of products or something that where Neuralink's a key technology, but then there's other approaches that are actually more compatible or complementary as opposed to directly competitive.

2:38:15yeah i mean i think in the long future you know i i think there's going to be a lot of application layers that are going to be built on top of neuralink you know in a similar ways that when the iphone was released i mean it was it was a cool device but also it didn't really do a lot until you started developing a bunch of applications on top of it so i can imagine a world where there's a neuralink app store and in the end it just kind of provides a conduit both into and out of your brain some ways of getting the human intent out to a set of machines. And that machine can be your computer's laptop or, you know, your computer's phones or prosthetics or some other thing.

2:38:52And I'm really excited to kind of see what the creative minds can kind of think about in terms of the application on top of it. Yeah, it feels like there will be like a hierarchy of needs within the app store of like, you know, some people might want to use Neuralink so that they can see or talk or, you know, manipulate the world. But then other people might want to use inputs to be like, every time I'm about to pick up, you know, bag of Cheetos, just like, you know, don't work, like make the arm not work. And so I can't, I just can't physically pick up the domino. It's an ad blocker for like overeating or turning on the TV.

2:39:30I want to talk about hiring. Obviously this event was not for the shareholders. It was for recruiting. Can you talk about the Neuralink culture? Can you talk about what skills you're looking for and what it takes to get a job at Neuralink today? Yeah, there's one metric that we basically look for in any candidate. And it's hard to actually get it down to a quantitative number. But we try to look for literally ego divided by ability so ego to ability ratio um and we want that to be significantly less than one so you can have a little bit of ego but you better have you know 10 times 100 times more abilities to offset that that's amazing and we found that to be actually really important thing to look for especially given that one this is an extremely interdisciplinary effort um you know it's extremely I don't think there's a place where you can have lunch with, you know, someone who's an expert in RF chip design to robotics, to neurosurgery, to animal care specialists.

2:40:45I think it's a very, very unique space in that. And not to mention FDA lawyers too. I'm always baffled by that, that you guys are executing at such a high level on regulatory, which is a completely different discipline. And I'm saying this to me, looking at Neuralink, it has to be the hardest problem set in the world. It's hard. I'm trying to think of others and it's hard to come up with anything that really comes close to it. And I imagine that can be really daunting to some people that say, I'd rather, I'll stay in the Elon orbit, but I'd like to just work on rocket science. I just like to be a rocket scientist.

2:41:23And so I'd be interested to get your view on it just because you have so many different factors, the interdisciplinary nature of it, then, okay, well, you know, now the brain's actually moving and it's not moving consistently, but it's moving based on, you know, the way the heart's beating or things like that. It just feels like the most difficult problem set. And I guess that must be a good filtering function and that you don't want people to come in thinking that, you know, it's just going to be hard, but, you know, very achievable. You almost want them to think that it's borderline impossible, but sort of push through that.

2:41:58yeah yeah so you know a lot of people have misconception that neural link is a science company we're really a technology and an engineering company and you know there's also this misconception that oh yeah at neural link you guys probably spend a lot of time talking about like future of humanity and like uploading consciousness and etc etc like in some ways yes like we do talk about those things but it's like 0.1 of our conversation like 99.9 of the time. It's about hardcore engineering problems. And in many ways, you know, brains moving, the material properties, mechanical properties of the brain, those are engineering constraints, but at the end of the day, it's an engineering problem, right?

2:42:39So, you know, we're really looking for just hardcore engineers. And in many ways, we have a saying that you don't have to be a brain surgeon to work at Neuralink. You actually don't even need to have a prior experience in brain. I took some neuroscience classes in grad school, but I didn't really know anything about the brain. It really is just engineering a great system to be able to study and peer into the dynamics of the brain that we all have that we don't really understand and haven't even scratched the surface of. So it's a technology first, engineering first company. For where the company is right now, I love that ego to ability framework, but talk about interdisciplinary work.

2:43:19is there a world where you need RF engineers who are just great at that and they're not really going to have to cross over? Or are you still looking for the types that can bring together different ideas from different disciplines and actually bridge different groups? How relevant is that? I'm sure that's important at the executive level, but But you might just be in a stage where you need to go and solve a key problem in a narrow domain. And so you're really looking for just someone who's fantastic at that. Has that evolved over time? And can you speak to that? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Neuralink is still a very small company.

2:44:01We have 300 people total across Austin and Fremont. And yeah, there are definitely a set of problems where I would say we need GPUs. So people that are very specialized in things, or sorry, CPUs. But yeah, like we're still looking for way more GPUs. Yeah. I mean, you're hiring for UI, UX here, but then also clinical and surgery and robotics and ASIC. That's fascinating. Firmware, electronics. I'm just looking through it. Machining. it's really like if you're good at anything it seems like as long as you're great at it you can go and work there um i want to i want to dig into uh ego a little bit more uh because i find that very interesting um how does how does ego manifest in in an employee like like and is that something that can be controlled or or is it is it do you think it's some it's somehow innate or can it be kind of coached out of someone.

2:45:01When I think of ego, I often think about someone who's maybe overconfident, but then they might go through an experience that humbles them and then they come out on the other side, much lower ego. And so maybe you're not in the position to be the one to take that risk. But how do you think about the shape of ego as just a human trait? I mean, you're kind of studying the brain. So it's kind of an interesting question from a philosophical perspective as well. I might also consider launching the Ego app, in which you can dial it in the app store, on the Neuralink app store, just dial it up and down.

2:45:35Hey, I'm going in for a job interview at Neuralink. Turn this down all the way. Yeah, or if somebody's joining TVPN and we think they're super talented, but the ego's too high, I can say, well, you're welcome to join, but we're just going to have to dial it back. You got to install the app. Yeah. People learn. I've seen this time and time again, especially people that are earlier in their career have a lot of opportunities to kind of shape how they work within an organization. And that really, it's not about pushing for your ideas, but it's pushing for what's best for the company. And I've seen that change.

2:46:09And I think once you have sort of like, it really just fosters a great environment where people debate the merits of ideas rather than kind of putting sort of their ego in front so that it becomes sometimes like not a technical discussion, but an emotional discussion. And, but yeah, that's certainly coachable. I want to talk about the patients. It was interesting to see how fast you moved on from spinal injury to ALS. Is there a third indication that you're interested in solving in the near term? Is this more of a question of just let's scale up because there's a lot of folks that really could benefit just in spinal injury and ALS.

2:47:00And what else are you excited about? Yeah, and even in there, it's like, are you feeling like generalized breakthroughs that make each individual product, you know, advance to some degree? I guess also like, are there differences? Yeah, yeah. Are there differences in solving for ALS versus solving for traumatic spinal injury? Yeah, there certainly is. For ALS, it is a neurodegenerative condition, so their condition just gets worse as the time progresses. So, you know, that makes it very difficult. You know, one of our participants is in what's called a late-stage ALS, which means that he's effectively locked in.

2:47:39So, unable to move, unable to speak even, and is connected to mechanical ventilators to basically keep him alive. in a similar way that basically Stephen Hawking was able to live the last 50 plus years of his lives. And for them, they also have more fatigue and they have different needs, as you can imagine from someone like Nolan, who's still very vibrant, who still can speak, who can still engage with the world in different ways. And their application, their needs will change as a result of it. But really, what we also talk about is that we're building a generalized input-output device and technology for the brain.

2:48:21So for someone who is quadriplegic, which means they're sort of paralyzed from neck down, whether it's due to spinal cord injury, whether it's due to ALS, whether it's due to brainstem stroke, whether it's due to some other things that have caused you to be in that state, we're hoping that it could be generalizable enough that with the same hardware, they may have different firmware and different applications that they will find more useful for that particular situation. Similar to how, you know, when 10 different people are given a computer, they will use that in different unique ways. And we're seeing that.

2:48:56And that's something that's been kind of wonderful to see the wide range of diverse use cases for different participants. Well, this has been fantastic. We'll let you get back to the very important work that you're doing. Where can people go to learn more about what you're hiring for? Neuralink.com slash careers. And I would definitely encourage people to check out this latest update that we've had. It's been an incredible progress in the past. It's a lot of companies will put up a careers page and then people go there, work for an average about a year and a half or something like that. This actually feels like a career because if you're going to have an impact, like expect to stay, you know, stay for a few decades.

2:49:31It's not a jobs page. It's a careers page because you're going to be here for 40 years. Yeah. Well, we're excited to follow along. Thank you so much for joining. Thanks for the update. We'll talk to you soon. Hey, thanks for having me. Cheers.