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

(00:03) - Tesla Robotaxi (08:55) - The Social Network 2 In Development (13:05) - Yacine (Former Software Engineer at X) (41:47) - Iran Launches Attack on US Base in Qatar (45:28) - Mike Gallagher (Palantir) (01:16:24) - Hims & Hers Stock Crash (01:26:55) - Crémieux (Writer) (01:43:51) - Potential Shell-BP Deal Shakes Markets (02:00:22) - FedEx Founder Dies at 80 (02:10:41) - Mr. Beast's AI Tool Drama (02:17:26) - DJ Seo (Neuralink Co-founder) TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com Fin - https://fin.ai/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVBN.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Elon Musk announced the Tesla AI robot taxi launch in Austin, Texas. That was the big technology news. We have someone who's written about the Tesla Cybercab in the robot taxi in the back of a robot taxi. Hopefully calling into the show. I sent him the link. We'll see if we can bring him in. Hey. There he is. How you doing? Perfect timing.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  How's it going, guys?

• 0:29John Coogan?

  What's happening?

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Here, let me see. Can you see it?

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Wow. Wow.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go. I got our safety rider right here as well.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Oh, very cool.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  Okay. You've got some sick, sick glasses on, but yeah, we're, uh, we're in the robot taxi right now. This is my fifth ride. I'm also here with Harry from the UK.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  Oh, hey. What's going on?

• 0:47Speaker 02

  He's a fan of the channel. Uh, yeah. So, yeah, this is my fifth ride. It's been amazing so far. It really does feel like, um, Tesla has hit this one out of the park truly. Uh, the GeoFence area is definitely much smaller than Waymo's right now, but I think they did that, uh, with the thought process of like, hey, we want to make sure we have a really good launch. Uh, we want to make sure that it's going real nice and smooth and, uh, but so far the rides I've taken have all been really, really good. Very smooth. It's very hard to communicate just how smooth the, the car is unless you're familiar with the, with the software. Unless you're familiar with FSD and how it operates on, on the Teslas. It's very, very similar to that experience. It's just, there's just nobody there now.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  And that's, that's the freaky part is that, you know, for, for a lot of people that have been following the company, a lot of us knew this day was going to come where Tesla would pull the trigger and start, you know, getting actual paid driverless cars on the road. But nonetheless, now that it's here, it's kind of like, this is, this is wild. This is wild. So, uh, is that better?

• 1:49John Coogan?

  The stock is up 9% today. 9% today. Wow. Uh, yeah.

• 1:53Speaker 02

  You're welcome, everybody. I'm kidding.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give us your other takeaways. Um, well, I, I saw you posted, uh, a, a good breakdown from your experience. Um, what, what else do you have to share about the process? Did you need to go through a pre-registration to get on boarded? It feels like it's not completely, uh, open access just yet.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so yeah, we were invited. We're a part of like a very limited group of people that were invited. I think Tesla was just Uh, here. So somebody crossed over the road and it just navigated that, no problem.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Wow, nice.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  The, um, yeah, it's a very small group of people. I think, uh, a lot of us that have followed Tesla very closely Uh, over the years, uh, Tesla went out of their way to sort of, you know, get us, uh, some early access so we can go out there, test the Test the system, get it out there for people to see how it performs. Uh, so far it's very, very limited.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  Um, and it's use case and I'm showing you guys here just on the road. Uh, hopefully, does it come across? Can you guys see the

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  How it's driving, yeah. It's very steep. Um, yeah, I think, I think Tesla specifically started this very small, uh, but now if you go

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Uh, people

• 3:07Speaker 02

  And their, and their zip code and their phone number and email address. Um, so they can sign up for the service and that's probably a way for Tesla to get some, uh, some idea of how much interest there is for this thing out there.

• 3:18Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:19Speaker 02

  Uh, but so far it's very small, small geofence area, small group of people. Um, and, uh, I think, I, I, I don't know how many cars they have on the road, but I doubt it's more than 10 right now. Uh, we're a four-way stop right now and it's navigating that, no problem. Um, but yeah. Uh, I think, I think it's very limited on purpose, uh, but I will tell you that for those of us that are so lucky to be able to experience this Firsthand, it's just, it feels surreal because it works. It works.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 3:46Speaker 02

  It just, it just takes you around and there's no one there.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's wild that, uh, it's wild that we got full self-driving cars before reliable cell coverage in major cities. You're breaking up a little bit.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  We need to drop, uh, startling on top of this. Uh, I, I mean, I have one more question, we'll let you go.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, what's remarkable about this is, is not just that it's a self-driving car, but particularly that It looks like a stock $38,000 Model Y. Is there anything, are you seeing anything on the car that looks like it might be aftermarket, added to, extra cameras, anything?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  Nothing, nothing. Uh, I mean, there's different software, but I mean, that's just a, that's a software update, right? It does, there is nothing that, that I can gather that says, oh, this is a speci- like a very uniquely equipped Tesla that has some additional sensors. This looks to me like, the point you made is exactly in. This is why this is such so mind blown, like, I just can't believe it's happening. The best selling car in the world where Tesla's making over a million of these per year that costs less than forty thousand dollars, potentially less than thirty thousand dollars to make, is driving itself in Austin, Texas with a paid ride. I paid four dollars and twenty cents and it's driving me around. The best selling car in the world. Like that, that is, that's a weird thing to process.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  Because it fundamentally breaks the, like, what, how we think about self-driving transportation. Cause you would think about, oh, self-driving, a lot of sensors, et cetera, et cetera. No, that the cost structure for this thing is the, is sca- the scale that Tesla has able, has been able to achieve. That same car is going to drive itself, right? And, and that just breaks everything. Cause your cost per mile plummets. The method they've taken, uh, as far as training the, the software should allow them to get this thing to scale much faster than Waymo can. And they have the cars, right? So Tesla makes as many of these cars every five hours that Waymo has on their fleet total. Right? And that, that's the mind blowing piece of it. And Waymo should be celebrated for the work they've done because it's such an incredible, such an incredible technology and I'm really happy they exist.

• 5:47Speaker 02

  But the scale piece is the challenge. And it seems like now that Tesla has figured out how to get paid rides going as we come to, uh, to our destination, that's my Cybertruck right there hanging out. Um, you know, that it's like, it, it's monumental. This is truly a monumental thing for them.

• 6:01Jordi Hays?

  This is like, uh, Disneyland for tech bros. You could just keep taking rides around all day long.

• 6:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is like, thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you, brother. Uh, yeah, dude, it's like, you know, sometimes I'm like afraid, I'm like, does my, does my wife think I'm too nerdy? Like, am I getting too nerdy about this? What's going on? But it really is like, it's, it's, it's, it's just upending, you know, what Tesla has been historically great at is just upending the equation around, uh, the technologies that they work in with the electric vehicle. Now with self-driving, they're gonna get into the, the humanoid robot space.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  This is what they do. And so I think this is just another reminder that they're, they're full steam ahead and it's, uh, it's very exciting. And I'm, and it's just such an honor to be part of this, the, the, this release. Truly, it's an honor.

• 6:41Jordi Hays?

  Historic. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for calling in. This was great.

• 6:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  Have fun out there. Talk soon.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  Thank you, guys. All right. Bye-bye.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, uh, the, the scale of this thing, I mean, it like Elon wasn't the first person to put a satellite in space. He's just the first person to figure out how to get the rockets go up and back every single six hours or something like that. And so

• 7:01Jordi Hays?

  Scale.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Scale really matters. It's more of like an industrial question than a technology question at this point. And, uh, yeah, they seem really set up for it. I love this post by Nick Cruz. He says Elon Musk is back on his main quest focused on the robotaxi. Uh, and you love to see it. A little bit of side quest going on for the last six months. Uh, you know, sometimes you find a little pot of gold at the end of a side quest, but it's not, it's not the main mission.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Pot of gold.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  Pot of gold. Uh, anyway, um, there's some other, uh, there's some other news.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Powerbottom Dad says, "Time will tell, but my bet is that this signals the death of the Waymo leaving Google in a $20 billion hole and likely Uber as well." Um, very dramatic. Uh, I'm not, uh, I'm not, uh, I think, uh, power, powder, powerbottom dad is a very strong poster.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  Um, and you know, the, the competitive dynamic is really heating up. I'm, I'm interested to see how quickly Tesla can actually scale this in other cities right now. It's, it sounds like it's 10 ish cars in a very, very small area, but, but again, they, they could potentially scale a thousand times faster than Waymo. It's all just going to come down to safety and what's actually going on behind the scenes.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  George Hots last week was saying that, uh, you know, Waymo has, is, are tele-operated. He said, uh, you know, I haven't fact-checked this. Thankfully we're not journalists. We don't have to fact-check. Uh, but he said something like 1.7 people per car.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  1.2 or something.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  You know, sort of, uh, you know, overseeing.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  Which is more than a taxi cab, because a taxi cab only has one.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the, the real question will be what, you know, is Tesla doing tele-operation as well? Do they, um, you know, how, how long will these companies need to do that? But, um, once things are really working and they're safe, Tesla theoretically could be everywhere all at once.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  The Social Network 2 is officially in development with Aaron Sorkin returning this time as director. Yacine says, "Wrong, I'm the director and I'm also the main character." I thought that was really funny.

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  He's definitely a main character.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Andy2cents.money is writing some jokey dialogue here. He says, "Sorry, I left my Aura Ring at South Park Commons, along with my 8-sleeve burner phone and Bored Ape Ledger wallet, you absolute D-sell." It's pretty funny to reimagine it. But, interesting, we have a little scoop here. We actually got our hands on a couple pages of the new script.

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  It was left at the gym.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Yes, in Hollywood.

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  In Hollywood, where we are. And we're fairly confident it could possibly be...

• 9:44John Coogan?

  This is the Social Network 2 official dialogue.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  They haven't shot it yet. So with the other script, they've been doing table reads. We wanted to do a little table read for you today. So I'll break it down. You'll play Mark Zuckerberg, I'll play Nat Friedman.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Sounds great.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  And so, this happens at the...

• 9:59Jordi Hays?

  And this is taking place in Mark Zuckerberg's office at night in the Meta HQ.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, so a minimalist expanse lit by floating AR displays and whiteboards full of transformer diagrams. Mark Zuckerberg is focused, yet restless. He stands at a window. Nat Friedman is calm but energized. He enters. And Nat opens the scene. "You've open sourced Llama, Mark. 70 billion parameters, running in 8K token context windows, and word, there's a 405 billion monster still in the lab?"

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  "Open source isn't unleashed, Nat. It's a guided evolution. We publish the weights so the community can help tame them."

• 10:34John Coogan?

  "Community? A sizable slice of fare. Hop to startups like Mr. All. How's the village supposed to ride the beast without many of the original wranglers?"

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  "Talent moves, ideas stay. Group query attention. Scaled rotary positional embeddings with NTK-aware stretching. This isn't incremental, it's a step change."

• 10:51John Coogan?

  Meanwhile, Yan's out there talking about non-autoregressive world model hybrids, saying the next wave won't be token-by-token racers. He's ready to retire your thoroughbred, Mark.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  "Yan's job is to keep the herd agile. Llama is today's workhorse. Scout and Maverick are the horizon. Right now, Llama is our public manifesto."

• 11:10John Coogan?

  "Your manifesto just made every kid with a decent GPU a potential sorcerer."

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Hugging face downloads are exploding. What's next? Magic carpets?

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. Open weights let the village scale faster than our walls ever could. Purple Lama covers us. CyberSec eval, Lama Guard, full red team cycles.

• 11:30John Coogan?

  You know, Purple Lama isn't bulletproof, Mark. OpenAI is minting cash behind APIs and you're handing out multilingual, long-context models for free.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  The Lama 3 community license only restricts firms over 700 million monthly active users. Innovation rises bottom up. Ask Ahmed. Ask Joel. Democratization is the point.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  You're wagering north of $60 billion in AI capex on that democracy. It's a big bet, Mark.

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  Not a bet, an ecosystem. Scout is multimodal. Maverick is video-first. Laura, Chlora, NFR quantization. Lama derivatives already power agents. RAG stacks, university labs, it feeds itself.

• 12:10John Coogan?

  Provided the community keeps aligning with you.

• 12:12Jordi Hays?

  Alignment happens in real-time. RLHF, DPO, RLAIIF. This is an ecosystem, not a monopoly.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  And if that ecosystem births something you can't steer?

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  No one controls progress, Nat. We guide it openly, transparently. No secret rooms, just a billion hands shaping what's next.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Then hold on tight and hope we're ready.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  We will be. We're building it together.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  And seen.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Uh, it really jumps off the page.

• 12:44Jordi Hays?

  Wow, riveting.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, Hollywood's back.

• 12:46Jordi Hays?

  Hollywood's back. This might save Hollywood.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think this will be...

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  People said that...

• 12:50John Coogan?

  I'm Oscar bait right here, for sure.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally. So, uh, anyways, you know, maybe, maybe somebody just left this as a, you know, as a prank, knowing we'd find it, knowing we'd read it.

• 13:01John Coogan?

  It's entirely possible.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  It's entirely possible. This is, you know, totally real.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Next up, we have Yapsin.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Welcome to the studio.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  The chat has been waiting.

• 13:12John Coogan?

  Yapsin, how are you doing? What's going on?

• 13:16John Coogan?

  You are on mute, brother.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  No audio yet.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  But I do love the background. We got the weight rack in the back.

• 13:23Jordi Hays?

  Is that a weight rack or?

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Looks like it.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Hello, Test.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can hear you.

• 13:27Jordi Hays?

  Testing.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  Testing.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  Good. I haven't set up my DAC yet, so.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  No, you're good.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  You're good. What's happening?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Let me just ask, let me just check, like, let me just look at something on.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll give the basic background on you for the audience while you figure that out.

• 13:45Jordi Hays?

  The poster who needs no introduction.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  He needs no introduction.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Founder of Dingboard, a web-based.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Of the hosts of.

• 14:00Jordi Hays?

  John and Jordy.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  John and Jordy. Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you guys. My name is Yaseen. Apologies.

• 14:07John Coogan?

  Good to meet you.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Hello. Thanks for, thanks for the introduction. I appreciate your time as well. And I'm like, actually, like a huge fan of you guys, like, uh, someone, someone, I, someone I, I used to work with, introduced me to you guys, so I like, found a lot of enjoyment.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you on. How have the last few days been?

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Um, a little bit stressful, to be honest. Uh, I've slept three hours every single night because posting on Twitter has been so fun. And unfortunately for.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Fun or stressful?

• 14:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, so both fun and stressful because I can't stop posting and, uh, that's, uh, not good for me, but I, I will basically just not stop posting. Yeah.

• 14:40Jordi Hays?

  But if you keep posting the way you have been, could you potentially replace your salaries that you were making in the seven-figure mark? You gotta really ramp it up a little bit?

• 14:49Speaker 03

  I used to go on 4chan and these like, people would be like, yeah, I'm like, making like a million, like a mil, a two mil at these AI companies. I'd be like, no way. There's no way you guys are making two million of these AI companies. And I started making like, seven digits at this, at an AI company. I was like, wait, like, these guys weren't actually lying. Like, you actually make that much money at these AI companies? Um, and it's like, pretty fun work too as well. So, yeah. Uh, for what's worth, like, I didn't work on AI. I worked on like, bugs that really annoyed me on the app. And that's why I joined, actually. So I joined X because, uh, there were a lot of bugs that really annoyed me. I fixed quite a lot of them. So I'm pretty happy, like, with the work I've done.

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  X X is the product I use that I find the most bugs, yet am not just, I don't abandon the product. Like, that's how addicted I am.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  That's a super interesting thing, and it's because there's like, when it's a very large app, right? So the scale is huge, and you guys are like right tail users, right? Like, you guys are famous, like, you know, the podcast of the Tech Pro Podcast, sorry, the host of the Tech Pro Podcast. You guys are famous. So the amount of notifications you guys get, the amount of replies you guys get, the amount of DMs that you guys get is an insane amount. You guys are so far into the right tail. But how many people are there like you? That's why it feels buggy for you. For most people, like an engineer who's like creating a test account and like clicking around, it's not, it's not going to be buggy for them. And for what it's worth, this is true across all the apps. Power users will always experience a lot of bugs unless they have someone to like, really like, you know, talk to them and like, understand what their pain points are. And for what it's worth, X does a really great job.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  Like, I mean, it's actually remarkable how well X is run as a company. And like, just working there, I got to learn a lot about like, how to get engineers motivated and like, really like, get shit done. Like, it was awesome work there. It was like, super, super.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  How, how, uh, do you wish you had the opportunity? You were, you were working remotely the entire time and that was maybe counter to the broader X culture? Do you think it's the type of organization where if you're going to work there, you should just 100% be in the office? Or do you think?

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the person who hired me like, was like, dude, like, let me tell you, you're going to have to get to the office. My wife, uh, so at the time I got the offer, in between I was interviewing, I found out that my, my wife was pregnant. So I let them know.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Because, uh, yeah, so, so kid is born now, he's seven months old. So that's by the time I joined, I was like, okay, well, we're, we're gonna, I'm gonna work remotely for a bit and then see if I can move. But as the kid got older, my priorities started changing a bit. And I was kind of like considering and talking to my wife about like, different ways I could come to politics. I could totally work remotely like, and be productive. I think after the X and XAI merger, the information attractor got so strong and the talent at XAI, they were like shipped, they're shipped so much. Like, I used to be able to read every commit. Like, I used to actually just like sit there on my email and like, click archive over and over again and read every single commit that went to the codebase. But after the XAI people joined, it was just like, literally no way. And I mean, I told one of the XAI guys this, it was like, uh, you know, when, when you have like, um, dinosaur shit.

• 17:30Speaker 03

  And, you know, which was the Twitter code base and you get extreme pressure, which is XAI talent.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  The diamonds.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  You get diamonds. That's how you get diamonds. I was so bullish after that. Like they're really like, they're really pushing on it. It's like, uh, really awesome. I want, and I, and honestly, I really wanted to be there. Like I wanted to go. I think it was like, probably I was talking to my manager at the time. I was like, um, can I like, maybe come like twice every quarter or something. It was, um, and he was like super hot. I mean, Flossworth, by the way, like my manager was reading between the lines, totally surprised, totally surprised. He looked super depressed in the meeting. I felt so bad for him. But if you're watching this, it's okay, dude. Don't worry about it. You're, uh, seriously, like some people, like the, probably the best thing, I think, like working at X is like, I got to work with these engineers who've worked at Twitter for so long. And when I joined, I was like, oh, these guys were like, are on boarded onto everything.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  But that wasn't the case. Like my manager literally could just figure anything out. It felt like he was already on boarded onto everything, but he could actually just like, read the code, look the logs and figure out what the problem was within 30 minutes. And it didn't matter what it was. I was like, this guy must've been here for years. No, he's like, actually just that good. Um, so I mean, I really loved working with him. He was like a really awesome guy. Um, I think he was surprised. Um, I, I guess like, I guess I kind of, kind of guessed what happened to be honest, but it doesn't really matter. Uh, but anyways, like it's been really great working there. I mean, so I was, I was gonna go to visit, actually we were planning to visit Palo Alto. My wife is going, going on a trip with her mom and the baby. And I was like, okay, like that's one week. I know I'm not just maybe, I didn't want to go on a trip because I had work to do. Not anymore. So probably gonna go and it's gonna be pretty fun.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  Um, but like, uh, I was gonna, I was planning for that week to go to Palo Alto, but, uh, but also my manager was like, can you come like next week? And I told my wife and she was like, literally like, you know, baby in her arm, like, you know, trying to like scarf food in her mouth for like the few seconds that she had, just like literally dying. So first time parents, right? So we're kind of getting used to it, but yeah.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  No, it's a crazy, it's a crazy change. What, um, why don't you give some background on what you were doing prior to X ding board? And then I want to talk about the future. Cause that's the exciting stuff.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Okay. Sure. So, uh, you guys can, I'm probably gonna like work a bit more on ding board. Um, there's a bunch of bugs that I want to fix. I just didn't have the time with my full-time job. So dingboard.com is the best app ever dingboard.com if you want to make a meme in seconds 15 seconds meme.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  I was paid user. I was a paid user. I loved it. It was amazing.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  Thank you very much for paying.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  Actually, very, very good.

• 19:48Speaker 03

  You know, like your money actually helped pay for this. Like this is John Coogan.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 19:52Speaker 03

  2% of this is John Coogan right here.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  No, it was.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  You should give him naming rights. Naming rights. Sell the naming rights.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Crazy that that mobile meme making is so in the dark ages and I feel like you just pulled it forward. I used to have an app called like Photoshop mix or something and it was pretty good. And then they just completely deprecated it and then they put ads in it, which was I would, I was dealing with. And then they just shut it down and it was pretty good at dropping out the backgrounds and doing, it wasn't great, but it was okay. And then they forced you to go over to Photoshop Express and Lightroom. And, and so I'm using two different apps and neither of them are good anywhere near what you need. And so I was always, I was always a fan of dingboard, but.

• 20:31Speaker 03

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

• 21:11John Coogan?

  I'm so ready. This is the future. I was promised.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It feels like incredible founder market fit for you to make a tool that helps posters make memes.

• 21:18Speaker 03

  I mean, like the reason I made it was because I was like making memes on my software engineering diagramming tool. And then they like started adding a watermark and I was like, fuck this.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  Fucking ruined my meme making tool. I am going to war.

• 21:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:30Speaker 03

  It's been two weeks.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Or.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  And then I remember, I remember you had, you had sponsors. This is, I love this. There were sponsors when you would open a new dingboard file. It would just have a semi-analysis ad from Dylan Patel.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Still there, still there.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Oh, it's still there.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Still there. So I mean, semi-analysis Dylan Patel, you should guys should go check out his Substack. Uh, he's. sponsor me for three months and he stopped sponsoring me and I was too lazy to remove it.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  He's not on, but uh he's actually, he's on passport with Ben Thompson. But anyway, he's the man and we love him and uh but the big, but the big question is like ding board, you're super popular online. Why didn't you go and raise like 15 million dollars from a grocery fund?

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Dude, man, that sounds so lame, man. Oh, like raising money with managing people. I'm so not down. I'm so not down. Like literally dude, like this, I have two plugged in right now and I don't have enough power going to my house to like plug this one in, which is why it's unplugged.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Speaker 03

  But like I could serve literally a fucking million people.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So we're gonna blow your mind. We're gonna blow your mind with this, but sometimes you can raise 15 million and you can do what's called a secondary transaction where some of the money goes directly into your pocket. Oh, yeah. So you could raise like 50 on 500 and it's, you know, take, take 40 million straight to the bank. Yeah, just, just to kind of set yourself up a cushion. They call it a cushion.

• 22:45Speaker 03

  Safety. I feel like, I feel like you want the opposite of that. I would never trust a founder who asked for that.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  No, he's just, he's joking, he's joking.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm joking. Never happens.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  You don't, you don't want a founder with money. You want a founder with no options. You want a founder like Roy Lee from Cluey.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  New dad, new dad, or, or new dad. Got to figure it out. Got to figure it out.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  I've got to figure, I, I need, I need a two acre lawn and a zero turn tractor. That's what I need. I, this is, I need this. I will get it no matter what, maybe the next 10 years. But like Roy Lee, for example, uh CEO, I think of Cluey, who he, he got, you know, kicked out of his university, a disgraced tarred and feather. He has no choice. I wish I got an allocation. I even know he was raising. I would have written, I, I need the money, right? Like I got a kid. I would have written it a check without even thinking. I don't even care what the fuck he's doing.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're, you're a Roy Lee defender.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Yeah, so, so, so here's about, here's about. I want a number for ding board. Uh, how many users did you get? How much money were you making? Give us some sort of number so we can ring the gong for you.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Peak MRR was like, like, I, I mean, I don't, uh, I don't remember. I'm not raising and I don't want funding. Uh, probably like 10K.

• 23:48John Coogan?

  10K! Indie developer, let's hit the gong for you.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Let's fucking go!

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Let's go!

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  Honestly ringing that for your fans too because you're you genuinely you're you're an internet celebrity and you have real fans. The question the question I have for you is because you're a Roy Lee defender.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  What what's your line between balancing, you know, engagement, sort of like rage baiting versus, you know, you sound like much more even keeled, you know, on the show right now.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  All my rage baits, here's what makes people so mad.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  That I actually believe what I say. I'm not saying it to piss people off. I really believe it. Like, I actually really mean it when I say it, which makes them even more angry. Makes them just like, but like, when you're honest, like, I mean, like, you know, I'm a big believer in like honesty and stuff like that. And like, like, when you're honest, like, you kind of like, also, the same amount of haters that you gain, you kind of gained twice as much as like people who like are fans of you. And I think that's what really matters. And sometimes the haters can kind of drown it out. So like, I mean, the reason I'm a big fan of Roy Lee is because he posted that video right around the time I got fired. I got like an email, which was a bunch of like really scary legal words, like non-disparagement. I had like to like Google what this meant. Like, I even know what disparagement meant. I was like, okay, wait, I'm not gonna sign anything. I'm gonna wait for a lawyer. And and then Roy Lee did this thing and I realized like, you know what, like, Roy Lee's a fucking legend. He's got skin in the game.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Like, Roy Lee has to win. So you know what? I'm just gonna fucking be retarded. I'm gonna be a retard. I'm gonna be a retard online and I'm going to have to win. And then I'm going to, I'm obviously capable of winning, but if I have like, you know, like, the one thing I don't understand about people like Elon who like work super hard, like super smart and like, you know, Elon's done. He's got like compounds. He's got like, you know, tons of children you could spend all day, all day with. Like, he's got all the toys he could also want to play with, all the engineers he could talk to. Like, if I was him, I would just like goof around with fun toys, but like, he's actually trying to get to Mars. Like, you know, like, I feel like, I feel like, sometimes it's like, I think about being Elon. I could never be him because I would give up at 20 mil. I'll be like, alright, I'm done, dude. Like, this is me, like, I did my part, like, I'm gonna chill with my zero-turn tractor and my two-acre lawn. So like,

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  Gotta know what you want.

• 25:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, right? So, but like, I think that's what happens to a lot of founders, is they get enough money, like Palmer Lucky. Palmer Lucky, it was like a chip on her shoulder. He was like, he was like, fucking Jason Calhoun, I'm gonna fucking get that guy. Like, I'm so pissed, I'm gonna do it again. And he did it again. 100% did it again. By the way, I love Jason. I love Jason. I love Palmer. I love both of them. And you know what? Jason is like the, it's like, it's like you can't have Batman without the Joker, right? You can't have Palmer Lucky without Jason. He's the Joker of tech.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Nevermind. He's a Joker for Palmer Lucky. For me, the Joker would be the middle manager who I pissed off by complaining about Android bugs.

• 26:29Speaker 03

  We're getting into the story. We're learning what actually happened. Don't worry about it. I never said anything about my, no, we're better about it. What's next?

• 26:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, yeah. So what's, what's next? All in on Dingboard, building out the team?

• 26:42Speaker 03

  Okay. So Dingboard is doing great. I'm going to, you know, keep on growing it and like, try to get more money because I need some land. And here's why I need some land. I've been building things. This is the Dingbot. The Dingbot?

• 26:53Jordi Hays?

  The Dingbot.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  See this? What does it do? I threw, I 3D printed this. What does it do? This, this is an arm ESP32 attached to a motor driver, attached to a stepper driver. Uh, sorry, sorry, stepper motor. Some 3D printed things that I made with Dingcat, by the way, dingcat.com. It's currently down because I had no time to work on it, but I have like a local host version.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  Dingcat is coming back, breaking news.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Popsicle sticks no events. Here's, here's the genius of it. Okay. It is. I need cash flow. You know, hardware is hard because you buy an iPhone and like you have an iPhone. It's like good for like 30 years, right? Yep. But with popsicle stick robots, they'll break in a month. You have to buy a new one. Oh, it's planned.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Get them in the boardroom. You know what? It's like you have a Dobby the elf robot that's like cleaning the house and like, you know, it costs you 30 bucks. And it makes a mistake. You just go in and just fucking eat it. You like kick it across the room because it's like 30 bucks. You can just buy another one. It's like, it's like, that's the feature.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  You're not worried about getting, you're not, you're not worried about, you know, uh, getting paper clipped by abusing your Dobby robot?

• 27:54Speaker 03

  Uh.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  Cause it'll come back to get you at some point.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  Oh, no, you just program it to be happy that it gets kicked. You know, it's like Dobby's like, you know, please, you know, please, sir, you just program it, right? Like, oh, this is like a solved problem, by the way, like the, no, we're not going to get run away. I think the real problem with like AI and stuff is like YouTube shorts. Have you seen these kids all like, like I saw a kid like, uh, so, uh, uh, uh, he, uh, he dinner. So with my family, uh, this kid was like at the, uh, trying to get to the bathroom. He's 12 years old and he was on his YouTube shorts. And he was like trying to like, find the, the door now, like clicking or like, like not clicking around, but like, like reaching around. Uh, it's actually kind of, kind of brutal, but like that, I think that's like the real AI risk for what's worth, like YouTube shorts specifically.

• 28:33John Coogan?

  So you're in retirement. Is there anything that could get you to come out of retirement? Could you?

• 28:37Speaker 03

  I was quoting yesterday.

• 28:40John Coogan?

  Million dollar offer. I mean, to get you back into a mega corporation.

• 28:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  It's gonna take 80 million, 100 million, 120 million. What gets you to take the job?

• 28:52Speaker 03

  I think like I'd probably like find it really hard to say no. It's like 2.5 probably like, but I don't think like the companies I would work for have that kind of liquidity hanging out. I mean, I think they do.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, what are those kind of companies? What are those kind of companies?

• 29:02John Coogan?

  I'm talking like tech.

• 29:03Jordi Hays?

  Run a process right now.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Big tech. So I know you don't want to work there, but there has to be a number. What's the number?

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  All right. I'm going to just start doing an auction here. Okay. I got a message for 500, 500. Do I have 600, 600? All right.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Our, our internal goal was to get you hired on this stream or at least get you to raise 15 million with 5 million in secondary.

• 29:22Speaker 03

  I could raise money like super easily and like I could also get a job super easy. I mean, I have friends. The thing is like, I'm a very honest, hard worker. Like the places I've worked at, I could, I could go back. Like I have like a really strong network. So I don't really need a job and I mean, I'm not worried about getting a job. But if I wanted to join in terms like for me, mission alignment is super important. Like I really need to like use the product to actually enjoy it.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  So I sold, sold some ding board t-shirts on Shopify and I'm like aligned with like Toby's awesome. And then Coher, I think is like a really interesting place to work for because they're on the come up, but mostly like, I mean.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  He's in Canada. He's in Canada.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Hold on. Uh, yeah. Break down Coher. That, that is not the common narrative. I mean, I love Aiden and I, I think it's incredible. But it does seem like, you know, there's got to be some sort of like geopolitical strategy there for that company to really play out.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  I think, I just think they're based, dude. Like I just, yeah, I just think they're fucking based. Yeah.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  So it's just pure, pure culture. They'll figure it out.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Just like, I mean, like, you know, like it's, it's a lot closer than Palo Alto or like California, like Canada. And I think they're fucking cool. Like.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  They got it. They need a poster in residence.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Are you a death grips guy?

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  You could a thousand X their, their, their impression.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Do you listen to death grips?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah. It goes, it goes, it goes.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Cause, cause Aiden's a big death grips guy. So.

• 30:35Speaker 03

  That just bumps Cohere on top of Shopify.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. Yeah, yeah. He did a, he did an interview in a Death Grips t-shirt. I saw it and I was like,

• 30:42Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  This guy's a killer.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  But what, what's, what's wrong with just becoming a full-time poster, getting a Substack set up, getting a nice?

• 30:51Speaker 03

  Uh, I think I'm gonna try to become like an actual billionaire. The dingbot thing is not a joke. I'm actually going to actually do it.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  And I'm not gonna raise. I think I can do it. I probably can find people to, to do this for. There's a lot of things I'm really interested on the way, which is like, uh, doing like reinforcement learning for like, uh, control of robots, certain types of robots. Um, uh, I think I figured something out after listening to a proper lucky podcast about, don't solve for things in hardware when you can solve them for them in software. And I'm pretty good at software and I'm sure hardware isn't that hard. Clearly, it's not hard enough to start.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's easy, actually. You, you, you proved with that that it's easy.

• 31:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Explain that with the reinforcement learning for robotics. Are you thinking like, you're gonna do stuff in simulation and then transfer the, the now, the knowledge back with reinforcement learning? Are you doing the thing that Dylan Patel was posting about with like the robots on the, you know, on the harnesses, trying to walk and then reusing that as reinforcement learning data? Like what are you actually thinking in terms of reinforcement?

• 31:47Speaker 03

  So I don't think like humanoid robots is what I would do. I think I would do robots for things that annoy me. For example, dandelions on my lawn. And I would do whatever is possible. Like talk, I have a pretty good solid network. Like talk to some of the guys from ETH Zurich. Sure. I don't know how to pronounce it.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Uh, and just be like, hey, like just give me, feed me the papers and like some shitty Python code. I'll clean up and make good. Um, sorry, researchers. Uh, you guys.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  This is extremely Matt Friedman coded. He's out of the game. Someone's gotta build the robot that picks up the leaves.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly what now, because it's like, I'm fucking sick of like going outside and just, you know, just like poking out all these dandelions. I'm, I'm actually so sick and tired of it. And it's so easy to build this. It's like literally 3D printer, like you could, you could even 3D print the wheels. Like you can get like five bucks on AliExpress and ESP32 costs like three bucks. I just impulse buy them. I like get my X ad revenue payout and I just like spend the whole thing on AliExpress. My, my, my house like constantly has like these random AliExpress packages. I just like, maybe build like a Minecraft sorting system in real life. Like, yeah.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like if you could build it, you could sell it at Home Depot for like 300 bucks, you know, kind of new

• 32:50Speaker 03

  I could also sell for 25 bucks on subscription and you get a new one every month.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go. Yeah.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  It's like, it's like if it breaks, it's like, I literally will tell the users, hey, I'm just, you know, a dude and there's a CNC shop here that does wood. So like they do wood CNC. So I'm going to make the robot chassis out of maple wood because there's a lot of maple here in Ottawa. And then the laser, you know, laser on like made in Ottawa on it, except you know, modulo the motors inside that will be made in China. Until I figure out how to make motors, which shouldn't be that hard. But I guess like the, the, the core insight I have. After doing ding board and like honestly, we're working for a lot of these big tech companies is like, there's a lot of little businesses on the way to something. Like I'm going to try to do this. I'm going to realize like, holy shit, like all the CAD software fucking sucks. And I'm going to build it because I can. And like, you know, with Gemini 2.5 Pro, just like ripping on my credit card.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  What about Grok?

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Gemini 2.5 Pro is the best model to use for coding if you write your own coding frameworks. Because it's cheaper, it's faster and it's good enough. Like, I'm not like giving all of my work away to, I don't need a PhD level intelligence. Because I'm not a PhD level guy. I'm trying to write React. Like it's not that hard to write React. I need a model that can listen to me. And understand what I mean and kind of like doesn't avoids using too many if statements. Stop, just stop using if statements and like, yeah, yeah.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  But here's the thing, you need, you need, you want to build a bunch of stuff, you need some cash flow. Why not set up, why not set up, you know, some type of subscription? You have a lot of fans. A lot of people want to give you $10 a month so you can hack forever.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  I mean, honestly, that was the ding board subscription that I signed up for. It was like, support this guy who's doing something cool.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The issue is ding board is so hard to sign up for. How do I even sign up for ding board right now?

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Go to dingboard.com.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 34:33Speaker 03

  Okay. First of all, Jordy, never doubt my conversion levels ever again. I am a conversion. I can convert anything to anything. I am, I am, I am a conversion god. Okay. Go to dingboard.com.

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  You're so good. You're so good. You don't have a buy button because you want to inspire yourself to grind harder.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Go to dingboard.com.

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'm here. I'm here. Sign in first. Do I have to sign in?

• 34:54Speaker 03

  I don't even have to tell you what to do.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  Legend, legend. Alright, I'm signing in. I'm signing in. Okay, I'm here. What do I? Ding scribe. There we go.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Do you want to know what ding scribe even means?

• 35:07John Coogan?

  You can't not ding scribe.

• 35:08Jordi Hays?

  $12.99 per month. You gotta get your numbers up, dude.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. $12.99 per month? Dude, I actually don't have the code. It's like on my server.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  You gotta do what Google does. It's 500 a month, but they give you six months at half price. And then it just auto converts up. Yeah, that's the real ticket.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  Or I could just double the price.

• 35:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but the price should be, you know, cheap on day one and they just get more and more. It should go up by 10% every month.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Dude, I'm not doing that. That's some YouTube shorts. Fry some kids' brain shit.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  Alright, I... I'm a ding pro subscriber.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  You're a ding subscriber.

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm dinged up.

• 35:41Speaker 03

  No, dude, you're a ding scribe. You have to get that. Dude, Jordy, never get that wrong again. You're a ding scribe.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  Ding scribe.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  Ding scribe.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  You're part of the crew.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm ding maxing.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  Okay, talk about the rest of your stack. Gemini 2.5 Pro. Are you Cursor guy? GitHub Copilot Cursor?

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Never, no.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Okay, I have a custom framework. I've written for Neovim. So basically what it is, is I have a server that creates a facade for all the LLMs that I have. So Claude and before Gemini was good. Claude and then OpenAI's models. They go down all the time. Like, infrastructure is hard to serve at scale. Like, I don't blame them. It's like, that's a hard problem to solve. So I have like, always, I always have a model available. Like, even if both of them are down, like, I can hit DeepSeek over OpenRouter, right? Like, it's a facade.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Maybe you can do that in Cursor by just switching the model router?

• 36:29Speaker 03

  Switching, was there a hockey? So for me, it's like, I have a weird, I mean, let me, let me, let me flex on you guys a bit. So this is my keyword.

• 36:35John Coogan?

  Flex, flex away. Whoa, there we go.

• 36:39Speaker 03

  Nice nano, by the way. I got a, I got a homie from China to make it for me. And so basically, Space, Space, what is it? Space, I don't even remember. It's all, Space I is an LLM provider. So that's Gemini 2.5 Pro. Space K is Gemini Flash. And it all renders in a single Markdown file. And I've created commands for these models. So basically, like, depending on the fence, so three, three apostrophes. And then there's going to be the command name. So like, edit file. It can, I can give, basically give it a syntax to edit a file for me. And then I actually manually...

• 37:15John Coogan?

  Is this open source? Like, you know, files up like, like, can I install your, your setup?

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Uh, so, uh, no, it's not open source, mostly because people are going to start posting issues and I'm just not interested in fixing them. Okay. 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.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  If it's not open source, you gotta raise for it. It sounds like we got ourselves a real cursor competitor here.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Uh, it is a cursor competitor and it's probably going to kill cursor if I open source it, but I'm not going to sell for money.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  I think what's gonna naturally happen is like, when people see me do use it, they're gonna have ideas of their own and then they're gonna build it for themselves. Okay. The, the whole point of, so it's a Neo Vim plugin, kind of. It's like also a server and it plugs into a bunch of, I'm, I'm good at software. Um, so, uh, part of the, part of the problems with, uh, uh, so Neo Vim like is great because the software is configurable as a feature. So like, the, the, the best software you can get is like software you can read and understand and you can actually change. The best software for you is software you've written yourself. If something annoys you, you can actually go change it. And that's why I really like to like write my own frameworks. Cursor, I'm sure is a great product, but I like, I'm just so particular about certain things. Like, for example, like I want to like implement, um, uh, tree sorter across multiple files and automate adding files to my context.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  So I have a, I have a file which has a bunch of file paths and those get added to my context based on the workspace that I'm in. And I manage it manually by like literally going to the file and deleting the lines. And, um, what I want is to automatically create, uh, an AST, so an abstract syntax tree, um, to be able to jump around with an LLM or like train a model to actually go through the AST. And this is all super obvious to me. It's like, fuck, man, like.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  What about, uh, you're gonna make any products in the parenting space?

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah. So actually I have an idea. I had an idea. So I, I use an e Ink display. Um, by the way, before you try to hack this, uh, I'd never update the software and I never write anything private on it. So go, it's, it's, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna put it public. Um, so I have an e Ink reader, uh, slash like tablet. And what I wanted to make is to teach my kid to write, uh, instead of texting him. I want to make like a kind of like a radio E Ink display, kind of like an Etch A Sketch, which you can write on, but it syncs to your parents' Etch A Sketch.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  That's

• 39:18Speaker 03

  So my wife will have one, I will have one, and my kid will have one.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  And he'll learn how to write because we'll write to each other over distances, right?

• 39:25John Coogan?

  Write messages.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  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. Like literally just go do it. Like it's not that hard. It's actually not. Get a 3D printer, watch some YouTube videos. YouTube is a great product. I would love it if they stopped putting shorts because there's so many great videos we can learn. Stop with the shorts. Stop.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  Get ready. This is going to be a YouTube short. We're going to edit this. This will be on TikTok, baby.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, Minecraft speedrun.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll put Subway surfers over you, anything. AI slop.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  How many kids do you want to have?

• 40:01Speaker 03

  Uh, so as much as God allows us to have. Uh, so just leaving it up to God and, uh, yeah, that's how many kids.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Good answer. That's great. What else? What else do you have to say to the people while you're here?

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Uh, thanks for doing this podcast, guys. I know how hard.

• 40:16Speaker 03

  I know how hard it is to run a podcast and all the tech behind it. Uh, let's just say that. And like, uh, they're doing live and stuff like it's a pain in the ass. Uh, so keep it up, guys. I know like

• 40:24John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  And, and, and the, the, the, the live, the live, uh, 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.

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I didn't fully realize that you were the bug guy until you posted over the last few days. Otherwise, we would have been hammering you with messages every single day, but this has been great. Come, come back on whenever you want to talk about your projects.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  I'd love to just hang out and chat.

• 40:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks. I really appreciate you guys. And, uh, yeah, so keep it up. Thanks.

• 40:53Jordi Hays?

  We're, we're excited 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.

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, if you guys want to add space, I'll sell you right now, like spit handshake. If you want to put an ad on Dingboard, your podcast, I'll, uh, let's say.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  12 grand.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  12 grand, okay. We'll talk to our CFO.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  Alright, alright, alright.

• 41:18Jordi Hays?

  And our CFO, our CFO will talk to your CFO.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  But can we get the semi-analysis deal where it's perpetual? It's 12 grand once, so we get it forever? Because what if you sell this to a billionaire?

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  Is it a one-time or?

• 41:30John Coogan?

  It's a great option. There's a lot of upside here.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  It depends on how good your podcast is.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 41:36John Coogan?

  Well, we're gonna keep working on it. Hopefully Dingbord keeps growing for the next decade and we can be massive together.

• 41:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  We're excited to follow.

• 41:43John Coogan?

  Awesome, we'll talk to you soon.

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  Godspeed.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  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.

• 42:03Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's saying, everybody's, you know, saying, "This is ridiculous." But it's never been tried.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  People always say, "Oh, all that matters in, in oil prices, supply and demand."

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:13John Coogan?

  Well, all you gotta do is say, "Hey, supply, go down. Hey, supply, go up."

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  No, supply, go up.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  And demand, go down.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  And we will have lower prices. I mean, there is something to that.

• 42:24Jordi Hays?

  Hasn't been tried before. It's worth, it's worth trying something, you know?

• 42:27John Coogan?

  If you do signal, I mean, there are, there are stories about, uh, oil prices going down because Americans got the signal that prices were gonna be high and they stopped traveling as much during the summer vacation, for example. Like, that does happen every once in a while. But, uh, yeah, very, very odd to post, anyway. Back on Watches, the Watches of Espionage account says, "Men who guide the destinies of the world well wear Rolex watches. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, John Dan Rosine Kane, in Situation Room during attacks on Iran, wearing a Rolex GMT." Well, you need a GMT because you gotta know what time it is in Tehran.

• 43:02Jordi Hays?

  We gotta start doing these.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  This is a good one.

• 43:04Jordi Hays?

  Strong, hand.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  I haven't seen this. I've seen the Merkel route. I've seen the, the, the, the, the break, cracking your knuckles. But this is, this is special. It's like four points of attack. I mean, I guess they did hit four sites, so you gotta point to all of them.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 43:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's been an eventful morning.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:22Jordi Hays?

  Iran attacked a US base in Qatar.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  Yes, that's the latest.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:36Jordi Hays?

  And this could lead to a de-escalation.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  And a return to a steady state of tension.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  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, let's shoot it down immediately from space, from land. Do whatever you can, but missiles, bombs, nuclear bombs, these things should not be relevant in the future. But Drava has a breakdown of this. The strike package that destroyed the Iranian nuclear facility at Fordao represents over one year of US production capacity of the GBU 57 bunker buster. It's primary explosive. AFX 757 is difficult to produce and we don't have many factories to do it.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  It's why way more robots are necessary to do everything from production to automating research. I'll also note that China has been very interested in higher throughput production of this very compound for some time now. Very interesting to see. Joe Weisenthal had some polymarket news. Bombing of the nuclear facility did not push down the market odds of Iran possessing a nuclear weapon in 2025. In fact, it's at the highest level of the day. I wonder what's driving that. Do you think that's more driven by we didn't actually take them?

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  President comes out and said, hey, we might just give them a nuke.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  That would be bad.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  Which would be bad.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  That would be bad.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that's interesting, the Fordo nuclear facility destroyed but before July polymarket is only sitting at a 32% chance still on 4 million in volume. So I think people are basically saying, calling that it wasn't actually destroyed. Or at least that's what the market is saying. So it's impacted but not destroyed, even though Trump came out Saturday night and claimed total annihilation.

• 45:28John Coogan?

  And up next, we have Mike Gallagher from Palantir Technologies. He's the head of defense and he put out some comments about the partnership between Palantir and the nuclear company, says this partnership marks the first time Palantir software will be used to help power the next generation of nuclear energy infrastructure. So we're excited to bring him and welcome him to the show. Mike, how are you doing?

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Great to have you.

• 45:53Mike Gallagher?

  What's going on, guys? I'm honored to be with you. You guys are famous.

• 45:56John Coogan?

  You're famous too. Thank you for joining.

• 45:59Mike Gallagher?

  I used to be, man. I used to be. Now I'm just, you know, I'm a has-been.

• 46:04Jordi Hays?

  You're a technology brother. You're one of us.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  I mean, that's actually a great place to start. I want to talk about your career and the transition that you went through. There's, there's, you know, obviously it's very exciting what you're doing now. There's also this story about like, I want you in the government too, and I want people like you in the government. And so is the government a place for high performing technologists to flourish? Is there something that needs to change there? I'm interested in digging into that, but why don't you kick it off with kind of like how you tell the story of how you got here to this moment?

• 46:39Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, I think, well, obviously, you know, from Northeast Wisconsin, Green Bay, and I kind of grew up always interested in the world outside of Wisconsin and the United States. When I went to college, I studied Arabic in the Middle East. I became fascinated by what was happening. I was an undergrad when we invaded Iraq. I was a senior in high school during 9/11. And the more I dug into that intellectually, the more I became convinced that I would regret it if I didn't step up and serve, felt very strongly about service to country, but also on a practical level, really wanted to apply the language and regional and cultural skills I was learning in a non-academic context and felt like there was no greater challenge than joining the United States Marine Corps. So even though I didn't come

• 47:23Mike Gallagher?

  from a military family, didn't know anything about the military, I just felt like this was the hardest crucible that I could throw myself into. I had a, just really an awesome experience, couple of great deployments, learned a ton, was a counterintelligence, human intelligence officer. Kind of similarly, when I got out of the Marine Corps and I worked on a presidential campaign, I worked in the Senate as a Middle East guy, never thought about running myself. I moved back home to work for this energy and supply chain management company. When some people reached out to me about running for Congress, I was very young, I was thirty one. And I, 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 wasn't, wouldn't be on TV myself.

• 48:07Mike Gallagher?

  I kind of thought of myself as like a pure national security professional, not a politician. I still don't think of myself that way. But honestly, it was the fact that it scared me that like led me to do it. I felt, I felt like anything that forces 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 wrap up after this. I went into it knowing it was never going to be a career for me. I was the youngest guy in Congress when I got elected. I always conceived of it as a season of service. I think the problem with Congress

• 48:46Mike Gallagher?

  is that we have too many career politicians. So I kind of always had in my head, I'd do a decade. And when I decided to leave, you know, Palantir was a, 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 a hundred percent to enhancing deterrence, you know, willing to say that like we're the good guys, you know, the commies are the bad guys. And 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 twenty-somethings that make me feel stupid. And then a continuation of

• 49:30Mike Gallagher?

  of the mission. And I've, you know, I've kind of dedicated my life to this idea of preventing World War III, and I'm seeing kind of how we marry the tech community with the warfighter every day in Palantir. So that's the, the short version and it's been really. Exciting.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  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, is this guy, you know, wants power or wants to, you know, he's on a warpath. Everyone tells him no, and then he runs and gets elected or kind of sheer force of will. But which direction does it go more commonly? Was your path uncommon or is it more the norm?

• 50:15Mike Gallagher?

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

• 50:57Mike Gallagher?

  Like one actually healthy thing I saw during my time in Congress is we started to get more young veterans, veterans of the kind of nine 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, that you guys talk to a lot.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  It used to be lawyers. Everyone was a lawyer. It used to be.

• 51:31Mike Gallagher?

  Well, also like being a lawyer, yeah, being a lawyer seems miserable to me, no offense lawyers. But I don't know. And I will say finally, I went in with the assumption.

• 51:44Mike Gallagher?

  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're otherwise unemployable and like, you know, they're like, 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, wanted to make a difference, wanting to do right by, you know, the part of the country that they're from, and they get forced into a system

• 52:26Mike Gallagher?

  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 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. My, I came to believe that kind of the the fundamental problem with most things

• 53:08Mike Gallagher?

  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 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 One, which was envisioned by our framers to be the dominant grant ban branch of government. In fact, they were concerned that Congress would grow too powerful. They never would have envisioned the current state of affairs. Congress surrendering its power since the seventies 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.

• 53:52Mike Gallagher?

  And why people are turned off by it, I think.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  In our lifetime, do you think we will see term limits in 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. It's this weird distortion where it feels like people are, you know. You know, in, in power for a long time, but not even necessarily thinking in decades or super long-term. They're, they're thinking in, you know, election cycles and, and kind of create some distortions. But I'm curious what you think, having been in there.

• 54:28Mike Gallagher?

  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, as someone who's losing his hair, I just have to admire it and, um, you know, cherish it, gentlemen.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  Some people should just be news anchors.

• 54:41Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  Destiny.

• 54:46Mike Gallagher?

  Um, it's funny, like when I first came in and I got elected in 2016 and we, we thought like our freshman class, Democrats and Republicans, we thought we had serious momentum behind a term limits bill. 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. Cause 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, uh, we did about it endorsing the bill. And I remember I did some selfie video, you know, having just complained about members of Congress

• 55:31Mike Gallagher?

  focusing on social media. This is probably the apex of my power.

• 55:34Jordi Hays?

  You gotta dabble, you gotta dabble a little bit.

• 55:35Mike Gallagher?

  Exactly. Uh, 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. I, I, the counterpart, the counterarguments, which we can discuss, I don't think are persuasive. What was unique about our bill and the reason, 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, you know, everyone's disgusted with the status quo business as usual. He had made a pledge, uh, late in the campaign, the dude's 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.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was gonna 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.

• 56:32Mike Gallagher?

  Totally. The grandfather and the grandfathers and they just sort of die off over time. And then the new people, um. So and then and then we made it equal in the House and the Senate 12 years in the House, so six terms and then 12 years in the Senate. So theoretically, someone could do 24 years. They 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 to enhance the power, the functionality of the modern Congress

• 57:13Mike Gallagher?

  actually require an over empowered president to make them happen. Like, otherwise, Congress won't do it on its own. And I was never able to transcend that paradox, if it makes sense.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I want to kind of wrestle with this idea of of, you know, the 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 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

• 58:04John Coogan?

  supporting Israel aggressively during the Biden administration. And more importantly, the idea of a president who would strongly support Israel like Donald Trump would was it was unthinkable that he would get elected again because he was being indicted and he was seen as kind of like a joke almost and was deplatformed from social media. How is this guy going to come back?

• 58:26Mike Gallagher?

  He didn't even have a Pinterest account.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  He didn't even have a Pinterest account. And so he he so so if you're if you're Iran and you're thinking, well, America is backing off and doesn't seem to be coming back on the offensive anytime soon, now's the time to start ramping up spending with the Houthis and Hamas and Hezbollah. And and but then, surprise, Trump's in, now we have to deal with the consequences of that. And so into this weird way. America feels almost unpredictable geopolitically and maybe that's an advantage if you take it seriously, but maybe it's a risk. And to your point about wanting to avert World War III, I'm wondering about the current structure of the executive branch changing

• 59:08John Coogan?

  hands every four years. Is that bullish for avoiding World War III?

• 59:13Mike Gallagher?

  Sure.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  Or is it a risk?

• 59:14Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  Or do we need to just tussle with it more? Like, how do you think about all those different concepts?

• 59:20Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, well, first of all, great question. A lot of interesting threads to pull on there. The first I would say, I would go even further back than the Biden administration to when we started to negotiate in earnest with Iran of its over 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. And then Obama was pursuing this nuclear deal with Iran. Obama had sort of a theory about the region. He talked about creating a new equilibrium in the Middle East whereby we would sort of distance ourselves from

• 1:00:03Mike Gallagher?

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

• 1:00:47Mike Gallagher?

  of stability is to build off of that. And that was kind of the genius of the Abraham Accords that Trump would later put in place. Long story short, the other missed opportunity. So there was an analytical problem with Obama's approach to Iran. There was a constitutional problem, which relates to what we were talking about before, where the Iran deal sure looked a lot like an arms control agreement. But Obama recognizing, because at that time, we still had sort of pro-Israel Democrats in the Senate, recognizing that the deal was unlikely to get congressional support in the Senate in this case, he constructed it purely as an executive agreement, an agreement between himself and the Supreme Leader. There was no congressional buy-in. And so therefore, when Trump got elected, one of the first things he did after extended review was to

• 1:01:32Mike Gallagher?

  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 he just saw. So that's a long way of me saying there's 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 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,

• 1:02:17Mike Gallagher?

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

• 1:02:53John Coogan?

  No, this is fascinating. I'm really enjoying this. Do you have a follow-up there? Or I wanted to talk about.

• 1:02:57Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to get a get a quick read on how you think China has viewed the events of the last couple of months and a couple of weeks specifically.

• 1:03:08Mike Gallagher?

  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 a source of hydrocarbons as well as like a gateway to expand its influence in the Middle East and continually poke the Americans and our allies in the eye. This is incredibly problematic for China's view of the region. That being said, the biggest wild card that I just don't know enough about

• 1:03:52Mike Gallagher?

  is where Trump is going to go next on China. There were some reporting yesterday that he was going to allow China access to Iranian oil. And so I think it's, you know, in Trump 1.0, there was this tension between some more hawkish members of of the administration on China and then more dovish members at Treasury. There's a there's sort of a version of this tension going on right now. And then Trump himself at times wants to make a deal with Xi Jinping and thinks he's uniquely suited to do it. At other times, he's like uniquely able and willing to impose costs on China. I think he deserves credit for actually the biggest shift in US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War in terms of the more hawkish turn on China. And so there's I guess there's there's lingering questions about how we want to approach China. But I really think this is the serious

• 1:04:37Mike Gallagher?

  setback for this this axis of chaos, this anti-American access. Russia, of course, was getting enormous benefits from Iran in terms of drone technology for its ongoing war in Eastern Europe. I can't help but think that that's going to be increasingly difficult, given that Iran is is is dealing with the aftermath of the attack as well as increasing internal pressure. And then hats off to the Israelis. I mean, I think this shows How valuable it is to have lethal allies that not only have extraordinary capabilities of their own, but are willing to take a big role in the regional security architecture and not just rely solely on the United States of America. And in fact, what we've seen really

• 1:05:20Mike Gallagher?

  in terms of the way they've gone after Hezbollah, the Beeper operation, and then their systematic campaign against the nuclear facility, some of the most daring and imaginative intelligence and military work that I think I've ever seen in my lifetime. And even if one isn't as pro-Israel as I am, I think you'd have to admire just how effective their military and intelligence community is.

• 1:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 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? No, there was some interesting price action in Bitcoin. It's hard to read too much into, but people were alleging that the Iranian regime was mining, you know, a lot of Bitcoin.

• 1:06:04Mike Gallagher?

  Fascinating.

• 1:06:05Jordi Hays?

  You know, 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 fund, you know, basically that the recovery effort even." It makes sense, yeah. But if you don't have any insight there, we can move on. I wanted to-

• 1:06:22Mike Gallagher?

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

• 1:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Welcome, welcome.

• 1:06:42Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. I think there's like an underexplored aspect or argument about like crypto's role in national security, right? Because the anti-crypto argument is always like, this is just a way of sanctions evasion and money laundering. And I think what people don't appreciate is like how this could be a tool to advance America's and our allies' national security interests. And certainly it was the case when, you know, people were trying to get out of Ukraine and Afghanistan. That crypto was enormously valuable in that regard. It might allow us to do certain things in denied areas and transfer assets that are uniquely valuable to our intelligence community.

• 1:07:21Mike Gallagher?

  So I shouldn't that's a that's an area where like national security nerds like me should pay increasing attention to the utility of crypto. But I hadn't heard that about.

• 1:07:30Jordi Hays?

  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 when you were in Congress, you probably always felt strongly about this kind of thing. But any any any reactions there?

• 1:07:47Mike Gallagher?

  Well, listen, I think anytime first of all, this this idea that, you know, the American president would want our NATO allies to spend more on their own defense. It's not a new thing. It is not sort of unique to Trump Eisenhower. The first Supreme Allied Commander of NATO like actually made this argument and expressed frustration with our European allies time. And so this is like, and we've we've had Democratic senators tried to defund NATO because of their frustrations with NATO. So this is like a an old argument that is new again. I think the fact that certain European countries are willing to spend more on their defense is a great thing for deterrence in general.

• 1:08:32Mike Gallagher?

  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? Like every NATO country could be spending 5% of their GDP on defense. But if they're all buying the wrong crap or buying stuff that isn't interoperable and doesn't actually amount to a coordinated multinational deterrence by denial effort with hard power shifted as far east as possible with the frontline states playing a unique role. Then you actually have you haven't actually fighting off a common operational picture.

• 1:09:14Mike Gallagher?

  And shout out to NATO for acquiring Maven smart system made by Palter Technologies, no big deal.

• 1:09:21Mike Gallagher?

  Then you have actually answered your question.

• 1:09:22Jordi Hays?

  A sports team, a sports team doesn't wake up one morning and like, let's all give it 100%. And that's the only coordination.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can easily turn this into a jobs program where you say, yeah, we're going to spend 5% of our GDP on horseback and cavalry. And it's like, you're going to lose, but yes, you're technically going to be spending 5% and you're going to have a massive military, but you're going to get rolled if you're not investing in the right programs. So is there any, do you think that the European countries are thinking about it correctly? Cause it feels like, it feels like to me, getting from 2% to 5% is the bigger mental hurdle than the allocation of that 5%. And yes, we're right to move the conversation to where you're taking it right now, but that feels like an easier conversation, or maybe I'm wrong there.

• 1:10:09Mike Gallagher?

  I think the closer you are to the threat, the more your thinking is sharp, right? So it is my experience that, you know, Poland, the Baltic states tend to have a clearer view of reality and are making hard decisions in order to invest in their own 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 that bring phenomenal capabilities to the table. I think, you know, traditionally struggled convincing the Germans who are, you know, the big elephant in the European room to make the right investments and to make more investments. And my hope is that that conversation is getting better, you know? I guess I worry sometimes that, kind of related to what you said earlier,

• 1:10:53Mike Gallagher?

  they, they'll be privileging certain domestic companies, even if they don't actually produce capability. I think it's fair to say, obviously I'm biased because I work in an American software company, but we are the best in the world, like by 10 orders of magnitude when it comes to software development in this country, and that's just not something that Europe does well. So there could be opportunity for creative collaboration between the palleters of the world and, you know, European hardware defense manufacturers. I'd love to see more of that going forward. And I've always been a proponent of, um, you know, we have a Ton of troops in in countries like Germany in Western Europe.

• 1:11:36Mike Gallagher?

  Getting them out of garrison, shifting them further on NATO's eastern flank, taking advantage of the invitation that certain frontline states like Poland made, at least in the previous administration, to build new bases and forts that enhance our deterrence posture. I I think there's a there's a huge opportunity here. And and it may just be the case that Trump's rhetoric, as unpolished as it can be at times, is the thing that's shaking, shaking it loose right now. I mean, obviously, it's it's a bit over determined. I mean, you know, the other thing shaking it loose is Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And it's a massive wake up call for Europe that they need to need to invest more and buy the right things. So but I do think we have a moment here.

• 1:12:17Mike Gallagher?

  And I think what's critical to our analysis in the US, particularly my own party, the Republican Party, is to do a better job. And I didn't quite do this well when I chaired the China Committee in Congress, in teasing out the connection between Russia and China. And why what happens in one theater affects another theater and that it isn't just a choice between Europe or the Indo-Pacific. We're a global power. We're a sole superpower. We have an existential challenge in the form of Communist China. We have to pay attention everywhere. Yes, we have to make hard decisions and prioritize accordingly. The Indo-Pacific is the priority theater. But one of the best ways we can invest more of our own exquisite resources into the Indo-Pacific is to get on the same page with our allies in Europe

• 1:12:55Mike Gallagher?

  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.

• 1:13:04Jordi Hays?

  It's great. Great. Should we talk about the the news today, the announcement, the nuclear, the nuclear deal that you guys announced?

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great. Can you break it down for us?

• 1:13:13Mike Gallagher?

  Everything is nuclear.

• 1:13:14Jordi Hays?

  Everything's nuclear. We're going nuclear.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  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 or even just energy broadly. We've seen that the United States' energy production per capita has kind of flatlined for a while. China's increasing energy production very aggressively. It feels top of mind, especially in the back. Drop of the foundation model AI race that we need to be building more energy infrastructure. And there's different resources coming online. Nuclear is probably the most fascinating one that has the ability to scale because we've we've we've we've we've tamed the atom and yet and yet we can't just seem to copy paste.

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  You know Diablo Canyon 50 times to 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.

• 1:14:12Mike Gallagher?

  Yeah, by the way, I may get pulled to do a TV interview about this. The nuclear stuff, but it's your fault, though, because my understanding is I'm just batting cleanup for Eliana.

• 1:14:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:23Mike Gallagher?

  He talked too much, but I'm happy to come back at any point. Listen, I mean, we can't, obviously, we can't

• 1:14:31Mike Gallagher?

  dominate that like the commanding heights of critical technology and AI. If we don't improve our 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 they're going to leverage our software to build reactors, which right now take over a decade to build and collapse that timeline down. And I think we're at the forefront of something really interesting. China is investing billions of dollars in this space, putting their best and brightest on the problem. And we can't fall further behind. And by the way, it affects our military deterrence as well because our diplomacy is enhanced with foreign countries when we're able to come to them and say,

• 1:15:16Mike Gallagher?

  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 cheaply. We'll just control the infrastructure. It'll be in a box, you know, you won't even have to worry about it.

• 1:15:39John Coogan?

  Worry about anything.

• 1:15:41Mike Gallagher?

  And like in America, whoa, don't do that timeout. But if you're a country that doesn't have resources in Africa or in the global south, like you're probably not paying as much attention. To the CI concerns and so there's something similar playing out in the nuclear space right now. So I'm very bullish about this partnership. Um, you know, I, I think this is the custom 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 and or Seronic and non-traditional partners with our warp speed manufacturing product and apply it in, into the nuclear space.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:16:12Mike Gallagher?

  I'm getting pulled. You're getting pulled. We'll see you on another.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  We have to have you back on soon.

• 1:16:18Mike Gallagher?

  Come back on soon.

• 1:16:19John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:16:19Mike Gallagher?

  Okay, I'll come back for Packers commentary. That's great. Cheers.

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  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. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Anyway, the wagyu maker, that's Novo Nordisk, has cut ties with the telehealth company, Hims and Hers, citing allegations of deceptive marketing practices and drug compounding. I feel like they were, the drug compounding, how is this an allegation? I thought that's like what Hims 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.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  But I guess it's, I guess it's alleged at this point, so we'll dig into this. Novo 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's ruling about whether or not there was in fact a shortage. So the Novo said on Monday that it had concerns about the safety of knockoff versions of a gooey and that Hims and Herb's deceptive marketing of such knockoffs put patient safety at risk. In turn, Hims and Hers accuse Novo of pressuring it to steer, to steer patients to a gooey regardless of whether or not it was the best option for patients.

• 1:17:49John Coogan?

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

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so this was somewhat predictable, right?

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  We talked to TJ Parker about this.

• 1:18:17Jordi Hays?

  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 Wegovy.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Now, if you're Novo Nordisk and you're like, cool, we're selling through this channel, but then the retailer, in this case, Hims, is telling customers as they come in, hey, we know you wanted Wegovy, but how about this sort of cheap knockoff, this compounded version?

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Now, Wegovy is probably legitimately concerned about safety issues. There can be issues around compounding and drug safety. But then the bigger issue is like, hey, you're 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 Novo 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 knockoff products.

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, like, the Instagram ads that I saw were definitely pushing the brand name for real.

• 1:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:49John Coogan?

  But yeah, the brand name is obviously what's...

• 1:19:52Jordi Hays?

  How do you think Hims will respond? Do you think they'll introduce a 10-in-1 shampoo? That includes compounded GLP-1s, Viagra, hair loss medication, what else could Adderall?

• 1:20:07Jordi Hays?

  Caffeine.

• 1:20:08John Coogan?

  I mean, this is Cognizin, Rodeo, Panex, Gensing, L-theanine, caffeine. Get some GLP-1 in here.

• 1:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Creatine soap with...

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  Creatine soap would be good.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  With all the above.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  Eli Lilly is the one that lost the patent, right? Because they forgot to pay the...

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it was Novo Nordisk.

• 1:20:26John Coogan?

  It was Novo? Wow.

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  They have.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  They're all over the place.

• 1:20:30Jordi Hays?

  It is. It is interesting to watch.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Novo Nordisk, how much do you think their stock is up over the past five years?

• 1:20:37John Coogan?

  Ooh, 500%?

• 1:20:39Jordi Hays?

  Try 113%.

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  113, but it was a big company. Yeah.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  But it's been on a tear.

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  Big company, but still. And how much do you think, what do you think the chart looks like over the last year?

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  Uh, oh, it's down.

• 1:20:51Jordi Hays?

  During the GLP-1 boom.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  It's down because it ripped up so high.

• 1:20:54Jordi Hays?

  Down 50%.

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  And then it went down 50% and they, and they rotated out their CEO. That's right. We covered that.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  Him's and hers is at 9 billion, 9.66 billion.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  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, they never really went down that far. They were down, you know? Yeah, like, like, you know, 30%. I mean, they SPACed at $10 a share, went down to $4 a share, kind of grinded back up. Now they're at $40 a share. So if you, if you bought this, if you bought the SPAC and you did hold for five years, you're, you know, you're sitting on a 3X, 4X. Not bad. So, you know, um, kind of a narrative violation around the, around the SPAC, like all SPACs are bad narrative.

• 1:21:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it, and, and the CEO, Andrew Dudum, we should have him on the show, uh, said that, uh, you know, I think his position, you know, we have no idea what the details of their, of their contract actually look like, but fairly reasonable position to say, we're not going to just sell one product, uh, just, you know, because it's true. Not every patient is going to respond well to Wegovy.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  And they should have options.

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  So before striking deals with brand name drug makers, telehealth firms were selling lower cost knockoff versions of these drugs made by compounding pharmacies, taking market share away from brand name makers. The compounding pharmacies had been allowed to mass produce knockoff versions conditionally because the original drugs were in short supply. Now, the the whole compounding pharmacy dynamic is very different because I feel like the laws were created 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 and were doing it like a much bigger scale. And it wasn't exactly what was intended originally, but I'm not sure about that.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the big question is, will there be more?

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:23:05Jordi Hays?

  The big question, will there be more regulatory action around compounded GLP-1s? And what will that do to their business? So roller coaster of a year for HIMSS partnership was announced in April 2025, popped, terminated just a few months later with a 35% drop.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Well, 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.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. So.

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  Keep those links handy when you're ready to start, start the ball.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  Exactly. This is, this is key. This is very, very key. Anyway, a comment from the, from the CEO, Andrew Dudum, he said HIMSS and Hers will continue to offer access to a range of treatments, including Wegovy. So they continue to battle it out. It'll be interesting to follow this and we will, of course, be talking to Kremiu 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

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  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 net income, or 92 million in operating income and 50 million in net income. So 50 million in net income for a $10 billion stock. Pretty, pretty high price earnings ratio if that's their, 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, the, the retail army has been coming out in force.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  King, KSM's capital said, it felt too good to be true for Hims to go this long without some FUD. This is more like it. Just bought 2,300, 2,300 shares and Top Secret.

• 1:25:21Jordi Hays?

  What do they, what does the retail army call themselves?

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  I don't know. Himbo's or something.

• 1:25:27Jordi Hays?

  Say, I'm really him.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hims, look at the data. You can see their operating margin has improved a ton since they've gone public. They started out at negative 40% operating margin and climbed up every single quarter. They're now at a 6.5% operating margin. The number of subscribers in the millions has gone from, they were at point six, so 600,000 subscribers. Now they're at 2.4 million and their total revenue has gone from 272 million dollars 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.

• 1:26:14John Coogan?

  So yeah, very good news. If you're Andrew Dudum and you need a break from grinding it out at Hims, book a wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views.

• 1:26:25Jordi Hays?

  It's summer, Andrew.

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  Hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation.

• 1:26:30Jordi Hays?

  Imagine you're in one of the gnarliest PR crises of your life and two guys in suits on a podcast. 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 2% today, John.

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  You're good.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  So it's time to, you know, treat yourself.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, take your foot off the gas.

• 1:26:48Jordi Hays?

  Head to wander.com.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  And speaking of foots on gas, Ford, which makes car, Camry, welcome to the stream.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  There he is, looking handsome as ever.

• 1:27:02John Coogan?

  How you guys, how you doing?

• 1:27:04Speaker 05

  Doing well, can you hear me?

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can hear you fine. Um, I'm, I'm, I'm looking forward to, uh, to, you know, a future date when we can potentially see your face. But for now, your avatar looks great soon. Okay, I'm looking forward to it. We wanted to have you on to chat about a couple of things. What's going on GLP-1 world reaction to the hims and hers breakup? Jordy, where would you like to start?

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, high level update on the GLP-1 market.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess, I mean, it's this miracle drug that keeps on, we keep on learning about new, uh, new diseases or problems that it can treat. It seems like it can't just stop. We got the diabetes, then weight loss, then maybe gambling addiction and other stuff. Walk us through where, how people are using or how doctors are prescribing GLP-1s for various, uh, conditions? And what's most promising, what's on the horizon and what you're tracking next?

• 1:28:02Speaker 05

  Yes, I'm actually really glad you asked this right now because right now the ADA, the American Diabetes Association Conference is ongoing and it seems like every other presentation is about GLP-1s. They are just talking about all the latest advances. Just yesterday, Amgen showed off a once monthly, instead of once weekly injectable. Eli Lilly showed off an amazing combo therapy with a, an inhibitor called, uh, Bimagromab. 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, uh, like different conditions and whatnot. There are increasingly many indications that these drugs are getting approved for. In December, Terzepatide was approved for sleep apnea.

• 1:28:49Speaker 05

  There's osteoarthritis indications incoming.

• 1:28:54Speaker 05

  There might even be, there's some effort being put into people trying to do something for cancers as well, because it does seem to help with obesity-related cancers, and it seems to help, 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.

• 1:29:12Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Why do you think that is? I have some guesses.

• 1:29:17Speaker 05

  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. It's actually interesting, a lot of people, after they've been on these drugs for a little while, they decide to move around more, they become more likely to go to the gym, they report that 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.

• 1:30:02Speaker 05

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

• 1:30:30Jordi Hays?

  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 in why it should, could show some promise in treating various types of cancers?

• 1:30:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think it does makes a lot of sense in that direction for the obesity related ones, but I don't think it makes sense. So years ago, there were people who suggested, I think quite wrongly, replacing certain cancer therapies with fasting because it seems to like augment the effects of cisplatin based therapies and stuff. And that didn't really hold up very well. It was a bunch of theory work that didn't go anywhere. And I don't think that this would help through those purported mechanisms, which again, I don't really believe in. I really think it's mostly just cutting down on, for example, the number of cells you have, or well, not really the number of cells you have, but 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

• 1:31:37John Coogan?

  Smaller.

• 1:31:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, smaller. It's like how short people tend to live longer than everything else.

• 1:31:42John Coogan?

  Bad for me.

• 1:31:43Speaker 05

  Bad for you.

• 1:31:44John Coogan?

  Bearish for me.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  Well, how much of the recent like advances in GLP-1 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 populations actually running the drug versus a new double blinded trial for a different indication? Are both things happening? Or, or is it, is, are these drugs diffuse enough that you can just look at the overall population and get an idea of what's happening?

• 1:32:23Speaker 05

  Yeah. So for approved indicate FDA approved indications like obstructive sleep apnea, you do have to run additional trials, but they are seeing that these things are possible from their trials or seeing these things are possible from the literature and they're running based on that. So in some cases, they do see these secondary endpoints. In fact, obesity is an example of this. Back in the day, when they first introduced these drugs, back around 2005 or so, the CEO of Novo Nordisk at the time actually said, and I quote, "Obesity is primarily a social and cultural problem. It should be solved by team, by means of a radical restructuring of society." There is no business for Novo Nordisk in that area, referring to obesity.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:33:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. So they, their scientists had to push for about a decade to go, hey, you should look at the weight loss data. It's really impressive. And then they finally, finally did it and

• 1:33:13Speaker 05

  Now we have weight loss drugs.

• 1:33:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that is, that is wild. What, what concerns you? What's the catch? Seems, you know, somebody, yeah, somebody might say, is it too good to be true? We're running this sort of massive experiment on huge swaths of the population right now. Seems to be, you know, many, many positive indicators, but what are, 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?

• 1:33:47Speaker 05

  Yeah. So I think that physicians need to be careful about prescription. 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, very easily without prescription for very, very cheap, unfortunately have contributed to that, has led to a lot

• 1:34:06Jordi Hays?

  In what way? In what way? You mean just?

• 1:34:08Speaker 05

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

• 1:34:35Jordi Hays?

  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?

• 1:34:44Speaker 05

  So what it looks like is buying from China. So you are ordering from a Chinese factory, you are testing the purity of the stuff and finding, oh, it's 99.9%, I can use it. And then using all of that. It is not sold by Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, or any other major company working on these drugs. It's just from some Chinese company that is ripping them off.

• 1:35:07John Coogan?

  So is that patent infringement? We've been seeing that kind of go back and forth like him's and hers was able to compound because there's a shortage.

• 1:35:14Jordi Hays?

  I would love to see Novo Nordisk go to the CCP and say, hey, can you please knock this off?

• 1:35:20John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:35:34Speaker 05

  So right now, the FDA allows this to happen because they have an exemption for research chemicals. You're technically not supposed to use these things, but everybody knows that everybody uses them. It's just how it is.

• 1:35:46Jordi Hays?

  They're researching weight loss on themselves. Research maxing.

• 1:35:52Speaker 05

  I'm doing research.

• 1:35:53Jordi Hays?

  So you were saying the potential red flags or things to be wary of is around, what about the prescription activity concerns you?

• 1:36:03Speaker 05

  Mostly abuse, not really prescription activity 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 using Kelly Health Services to get prescriptions, and they are not in need of them.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  But why would someone have used this? This doesn't feel like something that has like the euphoria associated with a stimulant.

• 1:36:23Jordi Hays?

  So the concern, I think, would be somebody has body dysmorphia.

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  Is that what's going on?

• 1:36:28Jordi Hays?

  Really skinny.

• 1:36:29Speaker 05

  Unfortunately, I've met a few dozen women now who have taken these drugs and been around 120, 130 pounds, normal height, and now they're around 100, and they are, they don't look good anymore. They look like they're aging very quickly. They look unfortunate, and it's sad to see that they're using these drugs when they didn't even need them in the first place.

• 1:36:49Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. The same negative effects of start actual starvation.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:36:53Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, that makes sense. Yeah, that's always the risk.

• 1:37:03Jordi Hays?

  How are you, what was your reaction to the HIMSS, Novo Nordisk partnership blow up?

• 1:37:10Speaker 05

  So I actually think this is a big failure on Novo Nordisk's part. It seems as though what they did was they partnered with Hims in order to catch them. My understanding is that Hims has been selling a little too much, more than they've been supplied by the person producing the drugs, which is interesting. I guess we'll get more details relatively soon if the lawsuit commences all that.

• 1:37:30Jordi Hays?

  Theoretically Wegovy gives them a million doses and then Hims is somehow selling 1.2 million doses of Wegovy. Is that, is that where you're?

• 1:37:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, something like that. They're either compounding it themselves, ordering from something from China, they are doing something. And I don't know if that will hold up or show up in trial. It's an accusation. It's, so I guess it's alleged, but we'll, we'll see, we'll see.

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  What about, what about Hims's general position that patients should have

• 1:37:58Jordi Hays?

  as much choice as possible, as much access, you know, access at different price points, things like that?

• 1:38:05Speaker 05

  They are completely correct to do that. I think that Hims providing different dosages than are provided by Novo 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 seems. I really don't know how far this is going to 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 on work.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I did a 24-hour dry fast from Friday night to Saturday night. And all day Saturday, I was shocked at how much time my, I was just thinking about food and water, wanting food and water. And I was, and I was very freeing to some degree because I was like, well, I'm not, 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. You know, I should.

• 1:39:12John Coogan?

  I'm not addicted. I'm not addicted.

• 1:39:13Jordi Hays?

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

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, 40%. We had Andrew Huberman 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?

• 1:39:35Speaker 05

  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

• 1:39:42Speaker 05

  interesting developments there very soon. I'm especially hopeful about, well, you know, actually, I shouldn't say that. Just there, there'll be good news there soon. There'll be a some changes.

• 1:39:54John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah, yeah. I guess zooming out, like, what, what, what does good look like to you? Are you generally in favor of taxpayer-funded

• 1:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Every American gets a $10,000 biohacking budget annually. They can buy research chemicals.

• 1:40:12Speaker 05

  Biohacking vouchers.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, some people would say, like, you know, the, the, the big pharma companies are profitable. They should bear this expense, not the American taxpayer.

• 1:40:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, so they're not profitable enough. They have troubles with R and D. That public money is very, very useful. We need more public funding than we currently have.

• 1:40:31Jordi Hays?

  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, that was with historical levels of public funding that, that kind of contributed to those returns to some degree.

• 1:40:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, we have a dearth of funding at the moment, and we need to increase it. We need to improve the allocation and also increase the amount. There's really no way around it. If we want to keep making progress, you just have to throw more money at these things. And I think we will start doing that very shortly. These cuts are a little alarming to start, but they are not the end of the discussion. Remember, 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, and they have a hiring freeze ongoing right now that is interminable. We don't know when it's going to end, but once that is over, they'll be issuing NPRMs left and right. It's going to be deregulatory like massacre. It's going to be wonderful.

• 1:41:31John Coogan?

  Well, that's a white pill.

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  What else is exciting to you in biotech right now?

• 1:41:36Speaker 05

  Well, I wanted to say on the Ham's 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.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Hey, everybody misses the patent, you know, what do they do? They forgot.

• 1:41:57John Coogan?

  They have Eli Lilly, but they missed.

• 1:42:00Speaker 05

  No, no, this is Novo Nordisk.

• 1:42:00John Coogan?

  Oh, there's Novo that lost the patent fee.

• 1:42:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they just forgot to renew it. It was 450 bucks or something.

• 1:42:08Speaker 05

  Yes, it was 250 and then they missed it and they were told you're one year out. You had to pay a late fee, like an extra $200 late fee on it. And they still failed. 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 US states to import as much of the generic drugs or any other type of drug produced in Canada.

• 1:42:41Speaker 05

  And has like an indication of proof here and whatnot as they want to reduce costs. So for example, Florida will, whenever they get this actually going, have much cheaper EpiPins. 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.

• 1:43:21Speaker 05

  The real meaning of aha.

• 1:43:23Jordi Hays?

  The real meaning of aha.

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  Oh, the real meaning of aha.

• 1:43:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go. Inside baseball. Very exciting. Well, 15 minutes was not enough time.

• 1:43:31John Coogan?

  Never.

• 1:43:32Jordi Hays?

  We'll have you back on again soon. Thank you for, uh, thank you for all the insights.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for coming on. We'll, we'll have you back on soon. This is great.

• 1:43:39Speaker 05

  Absolutely. You guys have a good one.

• 1:43:40Jordi Hays?

  And if you dox yourself anywhere other than here, we will be very upset.

• 1:43:44John Coogan?

  Uh, might have to.

• 1:43:45Speaker 05

  Oh, no. Sorry, guys. You guys have a good one.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  All right. We'll talk to you soon. Bye. 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. So we have a little bit of an update to the story. And M&A, just in the last 20 months, Morning Brew is breaking it down here. Shell BP is clocked at maybe 80 billion, but the deal's pending. Exxon and Pioneer are doing a $60 billion M&A deal. Chevron and Hess, deal's still pending, but it's at 53 billion. D-Back and Endeavor, don't even know those companies, but $26 billion

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  deal there. Conoco Phil and Marathon at 17 billion, and Occidental and Crown Rock at 12 billion. So if you think the AI M&A deals are hot, you gotta go over to big oil.

• 1:44:42Jordi Hays?

  Big oil, oil and gas.

• 1:44:44John Coogan?

  Big tech, big oil, big pharma, these are the industries where the big dollars get thrown around. They don't attach big to an industry unless you're in the deck of corn exchanging business.

• 1:44:56Jordi Hays?

  True.

• 1:44:57John Coogan?

  Pretty interesting. So the immediate market reaction to Shell's potential deal for BP. BP jumped 7% and Shell dropped 2.6%. I want to know what they're doing more recently. It looks like BP is up now 1.5% on the day. How is Shell, how is BP doing over the week? Or the month? This is the week? Okay.

• 1:45:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've both kind of retraced since Shell said, nah, we're not talking at all.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  So by market cap, Shell's around 207 billion, BP's around 87 billion. Those are big companies, big, big companies. Anyway, we can run through the Wall Street Journal's report here. But first, if you're planning a complex post-merger integration, you gotta get on in here.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  John, your commitment to just using linear for everything is incredible.

• 1:45:52John Coogan?

  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, you know, oil and gas companies do need to build software.

• 1:46:10Jordi Hays?

  If you're worried about getting paper clipped.

• 1:46:11John Coogan?

  They should be on linear.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  If you're worried about getting paper clipped, get your agents on linear. They will thank you for it.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

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

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you're in the major leagues? I'm in the super majors.

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  So good. So, talks between company representatives are active, according to people who are familiar with the matter, leak into the Wall Street Journal, and BP is considering the approach carefully. Acquiring BP would put Shell on firmer footing to challenge larger competitors such as ExxonMobil 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

• 1:47:18John Coogan?

  end up as the largest corporate oil deal since the $83 billion mega merger that created ExxonMobil at the turn of the century. It would also be easily the biggest M&A deal of the year so far in a market that has been rattled by President Trump's antitrust policy. And so you can see that the combined entity would be somewhere in the.

• 1:47:39Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember tracking the Deepwater Horizon spill?

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  I do. Yeah, I remember tracking it very closely in the thunder horse tracks.

• 1:47:46Jordi Hays?

  Were you monitoring the situation?

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  I was monitoring the situation to the degree that I was reading equity research reports about BP from the, from the sell-side banks and I, and I understood it to the level of knowing. That the that the tract that they were that they were drilling into was called the Thunder Horse Tract, which is the section of the cross that they're drilling the oil into.

• 1:48:06Jordi Hays?

  So crazy. So BP's total costs associated with Deepwater Horizon, including cleanup fines and settlements, reached approximately 65 billion. So nearing their total enterprise value at the moment.

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  Also, great movie. I know you haven't seen it, but it's an amazing movie, Deepwater Horizon.

• 1:48:23Jordi Hays?

  Is it a documentary?

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  No. It is a it is a it is a, you know, nonfiction recreation, but it's a full cinematic movie about what happens on the on the oil rig. And I believe Mark Wahlberg is in it. 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, capturing the value in Shell through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification.

• 1:48:56Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Nice.

• 1:48:58John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  A TVPN spokesman said, as we have said many times before, we are sharply focused on capturing the value in TVPN through continuing to focus on performance, discipline, and simplification, John.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  We should never, you should never decline a comment. You should always just do an ad read. Just do an ad read. Bake it into the LLM. This is.

• 1:49:24Jordi Hays?

  SwitchYourBusinessRamp.com. Do you have any comments on on your your intern allegedly, you know, contributing funds to overthrow a government? Switch Your Business.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  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 from 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. And so it seems like actually their their desire to step away from the bread and butter of the business, oil,

• 1:50:21John Coogan?

  has been potentially a bigger weight on the stock price because like. The, the, those M and 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.

• 1:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:40John Coogan?

  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 at the energy company.

• 1:51:01Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting though, BP had been performing, uh, not, you know, had, had basically been down only for since the financial crisis and then Deepwater Horizon hit and it was just down even.

• 1:51:17John Coogan?

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

• 1:52:00Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  That's right. All of the oil companies had to, had to change all their internal documentation.

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  And so Bloomberg News reported this earlier.

• 1:52:09Jordi Hays?

  That's sticking, right?

• 1:52:09John Coogan?

  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.

• 1:52:13Jordi Hays?

  But well, it would be pretty funny as an American president to write an EO to rename it.

• 1:52:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:21Jordi Hays?

  Something other than the Gulf of America.

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  Well, um, uh, we, there's some other news in here, but I think it'd be fun to debate the future of venture capital marketing.

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  I was on a call recently with a GP at a very big fund and they were asking me about strategy and where the future is going and media is obviously evolving very quickly and I was kind of noodling on a bunch of different things, but what I came to was maybe this idea that venture capital is interesting because it's not a direct response product in the sense that like 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 high horology, Rolexes that are in demand. People, they still advertise Rolexes. They advertise them

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  at LAX, the clocks are Rolexes. Or if you go to an F1 match, you'll see a lot of, you know.

• 1:53:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Patek will put an ad for the Cubitus in an airport.

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  Every, every issue of The Economist comes with an ad for basically a Holy Trinity watch on the back, whether it's Vashron 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 buy. And I'm wondering if that's the future of venture capital marketing. And so my, my thought was that maybe, maybe that's where the VC firm should really be pushing into.

• 1:54:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, let's talk about the current strategy, right?

• 1:54:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:02Jordi Hays?

  Current strategy is post on X.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:06Jordi Hays?

  Go on podcasts.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:09Jordi Hays?

  You can start your own podcast.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:10Jordi Hays?

  Many people have done that.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:12Jordi Hays?

  The challenge is that venture capitalists are deeply conflicted by making a wide variety of investments.

• 1:54:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:54:21Jordi Hays?

  And that has to inform their opinion on different markets.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:26Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're deeply convicted and trying to give coverage to a certain sector, it becomes very hard because you can't go on there and say XYZ company is clearly dominating.

• 1:54:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:38Jordi Hays?

  You know, if you look at the data and you look at, you know, what customers are saying, when, if you have another portfolio company over here that you happen to back. And so it creates this sort of challenge of providing great. Media products because of that conflict.

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:53Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:55:03John Coogan?

  And the problem with that is that it takes the focus off of you and puts it on your guest.

• 1:55:06Jordi Hays?

  The person.

• 1:55:07John Coogan?

  So it's like, yeah, the person's a good interviewer, but like, what do they actually believe?

• 1:55:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. So the challenge is anytime you are creating media at all or talking, you're doing marketing for whatever you're doing. You can't get away from it. It's all marketing all the way down. Now, the sort of subcategories, I think, that are interesting, I've always said that Sam Lessin, right? He's got fans, he's got haters, but he creates, he has a unique media product in the screenshot essays that he does that tend to strike a chord and some people, it resonates with them. Other people 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.

• 1:55:53Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  Yep. 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 tweeted once and it was a link to his book. And that book was such a good outcome that it sold in, 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, 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.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:56:42John Coogan?

  But when I think about both of those, they're not about specific companies or near term thesis, or they're not, they're not news products. They're. Reflections on how the world works, reflections on like timeless principles, right? Then I think about Paul Graham's blog. It's not on a regular cadence. You know, it's on a weekly Substack. 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.

• 1:57:23Jordi Hays?

  It's better to pump your bags when you end up being tremendously correct.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:57:28Jordi Hays?

  Some of the early writing, if you like, and even commentary on Sam Altman just clearly ended up being true.

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, 100%. And it's not, and he's not saying anything about the fair market value of OpenAI or Airbnb at this moment. He's not talking about Airbnb's newest release. He's talking about Brian Chesky as a person years ago, and it's reflective. And I think that that works really well. Mark Andreessen, similarly, the ability to go into the Wall Street Journal and write an op-ed is a great way to go and actually break through and bring that idea, but it has to be from the individual investor. I don't think it's something that can be like formulated from a team necessarily. So there's this like, there's kind of this like, I feel like we're going to see more of like this barbell strategy

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  where the future might be like when the GP has a really, really insightful piece of commentary, they take it to a Wall Street Journal op-ed, or a book, or a thread, or a screenshot essay, or you're just seeing the brand and you're seeing the brand on the back of, and I was thinking like, what is the equivalent of like the Patek Philippe ad that appears on the back of The Economist every week? It's like, I was thinking venture capitalists should go and buy the back of like the Stanford Review, or like the Waterloo. You know, campus newspaper like that should have an ad for a venture capital firm.

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  Thompson newsletter.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. But like.

• 1:58:54Jordi Hays?

  But I think aligning with these iconic properties.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, people who are doing their life's work.

• 1:58:58Jordi Hays?

  A full page ad in.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  In the journal.

• 1:59:01John Coogan?

  But most importantly, like, like when, when Patek Philippe sponsors The Economist, they are not trying to shift The Economist's coverage towards like being more bullish on Swiss watches. They'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.

• 1:59:19Jordi Hays?

  So John, a full page color ad in the journal.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:23Jordi Hays?

  Costs around $248,000.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  Which is about the cost of what somebody needs to pay to get a really great, like truly great producer for their own show.

• 1:59:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:36Jordi Hays?

  And so is it going to be more powerful for your brand to just dominate the journal for a day?

• 1:59:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:42Jordi Hays?

  Or, or have your own podcast?

• 1:59:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there are more narrow properties too, that are like, the journal's 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, it's been misaligned around like, like, like what the actual coverage is. But I don't know, maybe we'll see, maybe we'll see an F1 team. Maybe we'll see JetSuite X, the terminal, like sponsored by a VC firm. That'd make a lot of sense. Like you get off in Silicon Valley at the JetSuite X terminal and boom, you're presented with a, an ad for a VC firm. Let's take you through a beautiful

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  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 and outspoken defender of free trade, FedEx founder Fred Smith, who passed away today. Below is the first ever FedEx plane, which you can see at the Air and Space Museum Annex next to Dulles Airport in Virginia. Look at that. He must've been so stoked when he bought this. Like his business was finally growing that he could own his own plane.

• 2:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Imagine how many would likes he would have gotten on social media from that pic.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Everyone's like, this is your flex.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  You just had to appreciate it.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  You're just trying to go viral. This is clearly.

• 2:01:06Jordi Hays?

  This is clearly for logistics.

• 2:01:08John Coogan?

  This is clearly for logistics.

• 2:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Total legend.

• 2:01:12John Coogan?

  Oh, burning VC dollars on a plane. Bear.

• 2:01:16Jordi Hays?

  I think he was using Vegas dollars.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  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. He was the founder of Federal Express, which became FedEx, one of the largest logistics companies on earth. Smith was an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word and an American patriot. He bent reality and created something entirely new and he ran toward an extremely difficult problem. The fruits of Fred's work are as follows. If you give a box or document to FedEx by 6:00 PM, you can have it delivered almost anywhere in the United States or Canada by 8:00 AM the next morning.

• 2:01:55Jordi Hays?

  Imagine how key that would have been to business before the internet.

• 2:01:59John Coogan?

  Incredible, yeah.

• 2:02:01Jordi Hays?

  You're trying to do deals? Trying to close a key customer?

• 2:02:04John Coogan?

  If you give FedEx a package on a Monday, it can be in Paris by Wednesday morning or in Shanghai by Thursday for a few hundred dollars. Most of us take overnight delivery for granted, but take a step back and the fact that we can essentially airdrop physical packages anywhere in the world is mind boggling. Smith's death is a reminder not to take the miracles of modern life for granted. They were built by people like Fred Smith. These are a few words about the man himself and the dazzling system that is FedEx. Frederick Wallace Smith was born in 1944 in Mississippi. Fred's grandfather, James Buchanan Smith, captained Mississippi River steamboats. Fred's father, James Frederick Smith, was the founder of the Smith Motor Coach Company, which would go on to become Dixie Greyhound Lines after an acquisition in 1931.

• 2:02:49John Coogan?

  From steamboats to buses to jumbo jets in three generations, the family stayed on the cutting edge of motorized transportation. In 1925, the elder Smith, seeking to create the transportation line out of Memphis, converted a truck into a small bus and drove it himself. Within a few years, James Smith had dozens and dozens of coaches. By the time he died, suddenly in 1948, he commanded over 200. Wow, so he died four years after the son was born. Wow, so he basically grew up without a, or maybe that's the grandfather. According to James Smith's obituary.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  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 their 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. Wow.

• 2:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Interesting because defense is, uh, who, who was the founder that we had on the show? I'm completely blanking on the, his name, the name of the company and who invested in the company, but he had this like defense focused supply chain management startup?

• 2:04:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:08Jordi Hays?

  It was one of our probably first.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  You're talking about Rune Logistics.

• 2:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Rune. But something he said about.

• 2:04:13John Coogan?

  Not, not the AI poster.

• 2:04:15Jordi Hays?

  The legendary poster.

• 2:04:17John Coogan?

  Not the legendary poster. Uh, the logistics company.

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Scene of OpenAI.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, so, uh, uh, the young Smith was, uh, a member of the infamous cloak and dagger secret society.

• 2:04:28Jordi Hays?

  He is not beating the deep state allegations.

• 2:04:32John Coogan?

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

• 2:05:02Jordi Hays?

  last just last mile.

• 2:05:04John Coogan?

  All, all these different last mile solutions, but at the time this was revolutionary. Um, everything would be brought to a, to a single hub, uh, 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. Uh, 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

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  fire to position the heaviest contact, Lieutenant Smith fearlessly removed several casualties from the hazardous area and shouting words of encouragement to his men, directed their fire upon the advancing enemy soldiers successfully repulsing the hostile attack. Moving boldly across the fire-swept terrain to an elevated area, he calmly disregarded repeated North Vietnamese attempts to direct upon him as he skillfully adjusted artillery fire and airstrikes upon the hostile positions to within 50 meters of his own location." Wow.

• 2:06:16Jordi Hays?

  What a life.

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  And continued to direct the movement of his unit. Wow, what a badass.

• 2:06:20Jordi Hays?

  So at this point, 1973, he's 29 years old. He lost his dad at four. He goes to Yale with George Bush, then goes to Vietnam, does two tours, gets a silver and a bronze star.

• 2:06:33John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:06:34Jordi Hays?

  War hero.

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  Most founders have an idea and they pivot through two months.

• 2:06:53Jordi Hays?

  He writes this paper, gets an average grade.

• 2:06:56John Coogan?

  This is like Nike.

• 2:06:57Jordi Hays?

  10 years later.

• 2:06:58John Coogan?

  This is the same thing.

• 2:06:59Jordi Hays?

  10 years later, the company launched with a fleet of 14 French assault jets, which delivered a few hundred packages on their first day of service. There we go.

• 2:07:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:07:07Jordi Hays?

  He's just like, just zero to one. According to FedEx, Laura Smith named his new service Federal Express because he hoped to attract the attention of the Federal Reserve Bank, a prospective customer. It is funny, like the name, you would, you would think Federal Express, you would just assume that it's an extension of the government.

• 2:07:25John Coogan?

  I did when I was a kid. I was like, oh, United Postal Service.

• 2:07:28Jordi Hays?

  But even as a kid, you realize that.

• 2:07:29John Coogan?

  United States Postal Service.

• 2:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Using FedEx, like it was just a better product experience than USPS. Even as a kid, you kind of.

• 2:07:36John Coogan?

  Feel it out.

• 2:07:37Jordi Hays?

  Feel it out. The system that Smith had conceived at Yale worked. It really worked and nothing like it existed. The USPS existed principally to deliver letter mail and didn't have aircraft. UPS was a giant of a ground delivery throughout the US. Federal Express, though, would specialize in rapid air delivery. Just five years after the first Federal Express flights, the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

• 2:08:01John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:08:02Jordi Hays?

  Today, the FedEx fleet consists of nearly 700 aircraft and about 200,000 vehicles, and FedEx employs half a million workers around the world.

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Wow. Every night at the FedEx Super Hub at the Memphis International Airport, hundreds of jets landed the airport.

• 2:08:17Jordi Hays?

  The Ultra Hub.

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:08:39Jordi Hays?

  The financial finesse needed to actually make a model like this, not just lose massive amounts of money is insane.

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  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. Maybe apocryphal, there's been rumors that maybe it was like, you know, some mob-related thing and he took a loan.

• 2:09:10Jordi Hays?

  The tinfoil, yeah, the tinfoil hat explanation is like, you know, he either did.

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  Either way, he got it done.

• 2:09:16Jordi Hays?

  He did some type of, you know, and this is entirely internet speculation, it's probably not true, but it's possible that he like, you know, was, you know, needed a reason to have a bunch of cash, right?

• 2:09:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:09:30Jordi Hays?

  And maybe did something else. But the story is incredible and it will live on.

• 2:09:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Smith retired from FedEx in 2022. After almost 50 years leading the company, he is survived by nine of his 10 children and his wife Diane. His daughter Winland, Smith Rice, died in 2005 of a terminal cardiac condition, Smith said. 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.

• 2:10:07John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:10:16John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:10:25Jordi Hays?

  They're moving. They're moving. And there, if you want to understand more about Frederick Smith, go to Founder's Podcast and listen to episode 15151.

• 2:10:36John Coogan?

  And subscribe to Arena Mag to read more of Max's writing. Mr. Beast has rolled back the launch of his ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. He says, "Hey, thanks for all your feedback on the ViewStats AI thumbnail tool. We pulled it and added a funnel for creators to find real thumbnail artists to commission."

• 2:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so clearly the thumbnail industrial complex came for him hard. They're probably making, you know, death threats in the comments. It sounds like it was pretty intense. My thing here, you know, I have to agree with Lulu. This is one of Mr. Beast's, like, many businesses, right? So in general, like, 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.

• 2:11:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:40Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:11:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:50Jordi Hays?

  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.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:06Jordi Hays?

  You could do that.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  It's very odd because the, yes, it's like we're, we're destroying the job of a, of thumbnail artist or real, real thumbnail artist, but that's a job that was created like two years ago. Like I, I think I met the first like full, I literally was at a YouTube conference just a few years ago and I met the first real thumbnail artist where that was his entire job, full time.

• 2:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:29John Coogan?

  And, and Mr. Beast hired a few of those folks.

• 2:12:32Jordi Hays?

  The whole point is, the whole point is

• 2:12:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:34Jordi Hays?

  That person can probably make much better thumbnails than AI.

• 2:12:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:38Jordi Hays?

  Can right now.

• 2:12:39John Coogan?

  Still.

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  And so go up market.

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:41Jordi Hays?

  Work with creators that are willing to spend money.

• 2:12:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:44Jordi Hays?

  And make a, make it, make an entry level tool that anybody can use.

• 2:12:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:48Jordi Hays?

  To generate an AI, you know, an AI generated thumbnail.

• 2:12:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:52Jordi Hays?

  Like it just.

• 2:12:52John Coogan?

  I mean, I have a bunch of experience here.

• 2:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I'm surprised that he, he rolled this back and gave in the, but you know, it, it's very possible that the thumbnail industrial complex.

• 2:13:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:02Jordi Hays?

  You know, has, has a massive lobbying arm.

• 2:13:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:04Jordi Hays?

  You know, and, and, and said, you know, we're, we're going to work on getting, you know, your other businesses blacklisted, you know?

• 2:13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's interesting. Like, like there's even a, there's even a, like a continuum of technology that exists within the pre AI thumbnail generation.

• 2:13:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:23John Coogan?

  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 back. We would design a background image of wall and print out pictures, pin them on the wall and I would stand in front of the wall of images. And they didn't really perform better. And so I think like using a design tool like Figma.com, think bigger, build faster.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  Figma helps design and development teams build great products together is a great, just using software in general is completely justified. And no one really talked about like, well, if you're, 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.

• 2:14:28Jordi Hays?

  So here's, here's the real evidence as to why Mr. Beast should have kindly told the thumbnail artist to

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:14:37Jordi Hays?

  F off.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  I ran a quick query here, basically to try to estimate how many people actually earn a living making thumbnails by looking at

• 2:14:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:47Jordi Hays?

  You know, platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and all these different things and then doing some type of multiple. So generally, we're estimating 2 to 5,000 people make at least a thousand dollars a month designing thumbnails across

• 2:15:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:15:01Jordi Hays?

  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. Their 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? Or do you want to build your product for the thumbnail industrial complex, which is just a few thousand people?

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:29Jordi Hays?

  That are probably not even doing it full time.

• 2:15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:31Jordi Hays?

  They're just earning, earning some type of living.

• 2:15:33John Coogan?

  So I think it gets to like the importance of like, how, how abstract should your title be? Because we were talking about this earlier, like if you, if you, if you did a job shadow on a lawyer in 1950, and then you did a job shadow on a lawyer today, it's probably a very different day, right? A modern lawyer is like sending text messages and is on Signal and sending emails and probably using. Chat GPT to just search for things and pulling for stuff from Lexus Nexus instead of going to the archives. The old lawyer is like having teams and stuff.

• 2:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Dumping your docs in chat.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  Probably not, but still it's a it's like a modern, it's a very modern.

• 2:16:11Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  Modern experience. But we still call those people lawyers. We haven't changed the title. Whereas a person.

• 2:16:19Jordi Hays?

  Even Crosby, the company we had on is is just an AI native law firm. So they actually have lawyers. They're just more efficient.

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Versus 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, were you permanently unemployed because you insisted on being someone who uses a typewriter? Or did you learn to use a computer? And then did you learn to dictate things to a voice model? And then did you learn? And yes, there will be some job displacement, but mostly it's like people flow into different categories all the time. So I would imagine that a lot of the real thumbnail artists that succeed going forward are the ones who either leverage AI or go into video editing or become creators themselves or do a million other things that they can, that they can.

• 2:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's funny because we would pay real money for a good thumbnail designer right now.

• 2:17:09John Coogan?

  Yes, if you're a thumbnail artist, reach out to us.

• 2:17:12Jordi Hays?

  And you're trying to be.

• 2:17:12John Coogan?

  We would love to have better thumbnails.

• 2:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Top 10 thumbnail designers in the world. Yes. They want to be paid a premium for it. We're happy to pay.

• 2:17:19John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:17:19Jordi Hays?

  Otherwise, we'll probably.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Just keep slopping it up.

• 2:17:22John Coogan?

  Slopping with our templates. Welcome to Studio DJ.

• 2:17:28Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:17:30Speaker 06

  Hey guys, what's going on?

• 2:17:32Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 2:17:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:17:34Jordi Hays?

  Massive day.

• 2:17:35John Coogan?

  Massive day.

• 2:17:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, massive day. Thank you. Thank you.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  Break it down for us. For those who haven't watched the full one hour video, we'll obviously link it here. But what are the key announcements? What do you think it's important? What do you think is important to share?

• 2:17:50Speaker 06

  Sure, yeah, so the 10-second summary of our update is that Neuralink is working reliably and has already changed the lives of seven human participants that we've been working with. It's really been a privilege working with all those participants individually. And that, you know, we sort of lay down our next set of milestones, which is most immediately going to market and enabling the scaling of this technology to thousands of people, eventually millions, and also to just go beyond the movement and expand functionalities into speech, vision, and hopefully getting to the speed of inner thoughts. And then there's a little bit of hints as to what the path to kind of the ultimate goal

• 2:18:34Speaker 06

  of Neuralink would be, which is to understand and unlock the mystery of the mind.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, Elon teased that in the opener, and I was somewhere between like tearing up from emotions and like pumping my fist with excitement because it feels like, you know, this is the main quest, you can see that he's lit up about this, and you can see that he's, he's just, it's just... He felt incredibly back. Yeah, so back. So, yeah, it was exciting. Give us a little bit of your background and how you wound up at Neuralink.

• 2:19:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. Let's see, so I grew up in South Korea, and growing up, I loved Ninja Turtles and Pokémon. I also really like Legos and just in general, taking things apart and putting it together. And came to the States at age 13 and studied electrical engineering, and I loved, loved, loved RF circuit design and computational electromagnetics. And I wanted to be an academic, my dad's a professor, and, you know, decided to go to graduate school in Berkeley to design the next generation wireless communication chip for cellphones. And then in the Bay Area, learned that people can start companies. I didn't know that was a thing that people can do.

• 2:19:52Speaker 06

  You know, at the time, there wasn't really anything interesting happening, you know, 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.

• 2:20:12John Coogan?

  What was the, take me through some of the history, I mean nine years to get here. It feels like we're at this like acceleration moment where the rate of Neuralink deployment is growing, it feels exponential. But in those first nine years, what were the key milestones that you remember and the key turning points?

• 2:20:35Speaker 06

  Sir, yeah, I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize that when Neuralink started out, it was really just a group of, you know, six or seven of us. And we didn't really have anything. We, you know, when I first showed up to the office, at the time, we actually shared the office with OpenAI, the Pioneer Building in San Francisco.

• 2:20:53John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:20:53Speaker 06

  It was just a bunch of us. We had, we didn't even have chairs and desks. So one of the first thing we did on the first day was to go out to Staples and buy chairs.

• 2:21:05Speaker 06

  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. And it took about, I would say, you know, a year and a half, two years to get the first kind of generation of brain chips working on the lab. You know, at the time, starting with, you know, smaller animal models with rats and then slowly graduating to bigger and bigger species, pigs, sheep, that starts to represent more the anomalies of the humans. And, you know, about four years ago now, we had the demo with one of our monkeys, Pajer,

• 2:21:51Speaker 06

  you know, 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, you know, I think I should also maybe step back and say that, you know, Neuralink really is sitting on the shoulders of the giants here. You know, there'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 You know, de-risking the scientific aspects of what this could be. And, um, you know, there's obviously a lot of challenges in scaling that product, making it a product itself. And that's, that's what we are taking on.

• 2:22:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to talk about tho- those giants, the shoulders of the giants that you're standing upon and how you think about, uh, the role of research and development in the public sector, in academia, playing into commercializable technologies. Uh, there's discussions about this with the NIH and biotech. Um, obviously, you know, SpaceX is the perfect, it feels like the perfect story to me where, you know, who was going to pay for a moon landing in the sixties? Uh, that, no venture capitalist would, would have underwritten that. Uh, but because we did that, we learned a lot. And then we, and then when it became time for it to be rolled out at scale,

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  Elon stepped up with SpaceX and the rest is history. Um, so what, what can you tell me about the history of BCI in the kind of, uh, public sector side?

• 2:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Universities.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  Universities.

• 2:23:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, specifically in the context of-

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  Stories that have been done at different companies that may have failed, but contributed to the, to the community.

• 2:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had, we had Andrew Huberman on like a week or so ago, talking about his concern around, you know, NIH funding and, and all the issues from a pure kind of health standpoint.

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  But this feels, you know, relevant as well.

• 2:23:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's incredibly important. I mean, you see this even today, there's a, a very much a, um, uh, an active, uh, research going on in, in the BCI field, um, you know, just sort of looking at the next frontier of different targets and different indications that can really open up opportunities for people that have, um, you know, various different types of neurological condition. And, you know, I, I think the history of brain-computer interface and, you know, the first product that Neuralink is working on, you know, we, we named it telepathy because, you know, really it's enabling someone who has lost that mind-body connection through diseases like traumatic spinal cord injury or ALS, which really over time, uh, it's

• 2:24:41Speaker 06

  a horrible condition that, that really, um, takes away every part of your muscles over time, uh, eventually, um, leading to, uh, death.

• 2:24:50Speaker 06

  And, you know, those were the indications and, and, you know, what Neuralink is able to do is place this device and these sort 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 a screen or robotic arm, you know, physical things in the space. And that was purely, purely done as an academic research funded by Department of Defense and, and, you know, 20, 30 years ago. And that really set the foundation for what is possible. And, you know, I think back 20,

• 2:25:35Speaker 06

  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. And, you know, I, I do worry about sort of what the future looks like on that front.

• 2:25:55John Coogan?

  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?

• 2:26:22Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm. Yep, yep. So I guess maybe before we dive into some of the specifics of how Neuralink device is 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.

• 2:26:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:37Speaker 06

  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, you know, 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? When are the key moments happening? And in order for you to really understand those types of information and get that type of information,

• 2:27:19Speaker 06

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

• 2:28:04Speaker 06

  And 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 could kind of think of it as a sort of a consistency of a tofu or jello. And it also moves a lot because every, every heartbeat, every, you know, breath that you take, it's moving, moving a lot. And that's one of the things that we have to learn in a, in a, in a hard way when we, you know, work with our participants. And

• 2:28:36Speaker 06

  so in designing these electrodes to be tiny, you know, fraction, fraction of a human hair. So one of our, what we call thread, which is these tiny wires that have electrodes are about one twentieth of a human hair. And they're also flexible, so they kind of move with the brain rather than, you know, if it's a rigid thing, you can cause a lot of scarring as, as you're breathing. So when you build these tiny, tiny threads that are manufactured with conventional lithography tools in, in our own clean room facilities, now the question is, okay, how do you actually insert these? They're, they're very small and even the best neurosurgeons won't be able to insert them precisely in the location that we want. So

• 2:29:19Speaker 06

  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.

• 2:29:27Speaker 06

  Also looking at scaling this to millions, if not billions of people. Eventually, we we just did not see a world where there's some sort of robotics and some sort of not having human in the loop. So, you know, it's essentially this 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 insert manipulating and inserting these tiny threads one by one. You know, as quickly as you can in the in the in the region of interest. And what ends up happening is that, you know, we currently go through a process to drill a hole in the skull called a craniotomy.

• 2:30:09Speaker 06

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

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

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

• 2:31:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, there's 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 in in really interesting ways.

• 2:31:34Speaker 06

  There are a couple of places that we currently use AI. I, you know, I think. On the, on the electrode side, unfortunately, there's not a lot that you can do. In the end, there's very tight margin in terms of signal to noise ratio. So there's a lot of innovations that we, we've had in Neuralink on, you know, low power and low noise amplifier designs and being able to digitize that as quickly as possible into digital bits. But 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. You know, what is the human intent and how can you actually translate that to something useful?

• 2:32:17Speaker 06

  So as of right now, we have a, you know, very simple machine learning, AI kind of there to translate those thoughts and intents into something useful. And the, 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, 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

• 2:33:02Speaker 06

  of communication that you have gotten as a Neuralink. And in many ways, I think there's, 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, in kind of the data set. And there's opportunities where we can use that kind of base similarities to improve the calibration time. So meaning you can't immediately use this device as is, you have to go through a calibration, make sure when you're thinking about moving to the left, we have a stream of neural signals that then say, oh, okay, you know, John is thinking about moving to the left and this is what the neural patterns look like. And, you know, collect that data over time and then, you know, improve, improve the system.

• 2:33:47Speaker 06

  But you do, you do get drift over time due to the fact that, as I mentioned, your neural state is always going through a plasticity. So.

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Can you talk about the the translation and the evolution of like what outputs you're actually trying to map to because if I remember Pong, Pong's unique in that it's 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. I'm in one way, I'm thinking jump. In another way, I'm thinking send the message of just press the A button. And so there's a there's like, how much data can you

• 2:34:41John Coogan?

  get out? Are you trying to increase that? Has that already increased? Is it is it going to kind of operate at like a higher level of abstraction that then gets translated into computer use? Or or is it more like, as long as I can puppeteer 10 fingers, then I like, you can translate those into 10 different actions and remap those and have people menu accordingly, like the like the investment banker who doesn't use a mouse?

• 2:35:09Speaker 06

  Right. So the the update that we just released a couple hours ago actually has some videos of, you know, what the latest capabilities with Neuralink, you know, that participants been able to do. I guess one thing that I will highlight is that there's a video of two of our participants playing a first person shooter game. And if you actually think about it, that's quite sophisticated control. There's a left joystick for movement. There's a right joystick for aiming. And there's a bunch of different buttons for swapping weapons, reload, and shooting, etc., etc. And

• 2:35:40Jordi Hays?

  So it's gonna make me cry. It's gonna make me cry. Team death match after with your boy after.

• 2:35:48Speaker 06

  The other thing that's actually kind of interesting is that, you know, at Neuralink, we also talk about, you know, going beyond the limits of biology and then actually achieving superhuman capabilities.

• 2:35:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so that

• 2:36:00Speaker 06

  I was gonna say, like, we're actually already starting to see some signs of it.

• 2:36:03Jordi Hays?

  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 starting to spend more time around sort of the inputs into the brain?

• 2:36:24Speaker 06

  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 cameras that's capturing the scene. And that gets converted into a set of impulses that then stimulate the part of your brain called the visual cortex, which is on the back of your head. And it basically gives you your sight back, right? Because the way vision works is that you have your light hitting your retina, converted to electrical signals. And at the end of the day, it's your brain where you're seeing

• 2:37:06Speaker 06

  and having that conscious experience. But if you have anything break in that circuit, you can directly go to the brain, stimulate those neurons that are giving you that visual experience and be able to see. And our plan is to have our first blindsight patient next year.

• 2:37:20John Coogan?

  Can 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, when I, I've spoken to Noel in P1, and I mean, he's, you know, incredibly, 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, you know, glasses that act as blindsight, but then also having an audio modulation there that could help as well. And there's a whole bunch of other, and I'm wondering if there's going to be like an ensemble of products, or something that where, you

• 2:38:04John Coogan?

  know, Neuralink's a key, key technology, but then there's other approaches that are actually more compatible or complementary as opposed to directly competitive.

• 2:38:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think in the long future, you know, I, I, I think there's going to be a lot of application layers that are going to be built on top of 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 computers, laptop, or you know, your computers, phones, or prosthetics, or some, some other thing. And, and I'm, I'm really excited to kind of see what the, the creative minds can kind of think about in terms of the application on top of it.

• 2:38:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, that, it, it, 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, a 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, you know, or, or, uh, turning on the TV.

• 2:39:28John Coogan?

  I love, that's amazing. Uh, I, I want to talk about, uh, hiring. Obviously, this event was, was not, uh, for the shareholders, uh, it was for recruiting. Um, 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?

• 2:39:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's, um, there's one metric that we basically look for in, in any candidate, and that's, um, it is, it's hard to actually get it down to a quantitative number, but, you know, we try to look for literally ego divided by 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, uh, offset that.

• 2:40:17John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:40:17Speaker 06

  And, uh, we, we found that to be actually really important thing to look for, especially given that, one, this is an extremely interdisciplinary effort. Um, you know, it's extremely, I don't think there's a place where you can have lunch with

• 2:40:37Speaker 06

  You know, someone who's an expert in RF chip design to robotics, to neurosurgery, to animal care specialists, I think is a very, very unique space in that. And

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  Not to mention FDA lawyers too. I'm always baffled by that, that you guys are executing at such a high level.

• 2:40:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I was gonna

• 2:40:57John Coogan?

  Unregulatory.

• 2:40:57Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna ask

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  This is a completely different discipline.

• 2:40:59Jordi Hays?

  And I'm saying this, to me, looking at Neuralink, it has to be the hardest problem set in the world.

• 2:41:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:41:06Jordi Hays?

  It's hard, I'm trying to think of

• 2:41:08John Coogan?

  100%.

• 2:41:08Jordi Hays?

  Others, and it's hard to come up with anything

• 2:41:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:11Jordi Hays?

  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'd just like to be a rocket scientist. And so I'm, yeah, I'd be interested to get your view on it, just because you have so many different factors, the interdisciplinary nature of it, then, okay, well, you know, now the brain's actually moving and it's not moving consistently, but it's moving based on, you know, the way the heart's beating or things like that. It just feels like the most difficult problem set. And I guess that must be a good filtering function and that you don't want people to come in thinking that, you know, it's just gonna be hard, but, you know, very achievable.

• 2:41:53Jordi Hays?

  You almost want them to think that it's borderline impossible, but sort of push through that.

• 2:41:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, a lot of people have misconception that Neuralink is a science company. We're really a technology and engineering company. And, you know, there's also this misconception that, oh yeah, at Neuralink, you guys probably spend a lot of time talking about like future of humanity and like uploading consciousness and et cetera, et cetera. Like, in some ways, yes, like we do talk about those things, but it's like 0.1% of our conversation, like 99.9% of the time, it's about hardcore engineering problems. And in many ways, you know, brains moving, the material properties, mechanical properties of the brain, those are engineering constraints, but at the end of the day, it's an engineering problem, right? So, you know, we're really looking for just hardcore engineers.

• 2:42:43Speaker 06

  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, in grad school, but I didn't really know anything about the brain. It really is just engineering a great system to be able to study and peer into the dynamics of brain that You know, we all have that we don't really understand and haven't even scratched the surface of. So it's a technology first, engineering first company.

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  For where the company is right now is I love that ego to ability framework, but talk about interdisciplinary work. Is there a world where you need RF engineers who are just great at that and they're not really going to have to cross over? Or are you still looking for the types that can, you know, bring together different ideas from different disciplines and actually bridge different groups? How relevant is that? I'm sure that's important at the executive level, but like you might just be in a stage where, you know, you need to go and solve a key problem in a narrow domain. And so you're really looking for just someone who's fantastic at that.

• 2:43:52John Coogan?

  Has that evolved over time and can you speak to that?

• 2:43:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, Neuralink is still a very small company. You know, we have 300 people total across Austin and Fremont. And yeah, there are definitely 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, we're still, we're still looking for way more GPUs.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  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 machining. It's really like, if you're good at anything, it seems like as long as you're great at it, you can go and work there. I want to, I want to dig into ego a little bit more because I find that very interesting.

• 2:44:48John Coogan?

  How does, how does ego manifest in an employee like, like, and is that something that can be controlled? Or, or is it, is it, do you think it's somehow innate or can it be kind of coached out of someone? When 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, 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.

• 2:45:25Jordi Hays?

  I might also consider launching the ego app.

• 2:45:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Which you can dial it dial it. On the Neuralink app store, just dial it up and down.

• 2:45:35John Coogan?

  Hey, I'm getting, I'm getting, I'm going in for a job interview at Neuralink. Turn this down all the way.

• 2:45:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Or if somebody's joining TVP and we think they're super talented, but the ego is too high. I can say, well, you're welcome to join, but we're just gonna have to dial it back. You gotta install the app.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:49Speaker 06

  People learn. I've seen this time and time again, especially, especially people that are, you know,

• 2:45:57Speaker 06

  earlier in their career have, you know, a lot of opportunities to kind of shape how they work within an organization and that, you know, really it's not about pushing for your ideas, but it's pushing for what's best for the company. And I've seen that change. And, you know, I think, once you have sort of, like, it really just fosters a great environment where people, you know, debate the merits of ideas rather than, you know, kind of putting sort of their ego in front so that it becomes sometimes like not a technical discussion, but a, an emotional discussion. And, but yeah, that's certainly coachable.

• 2:46:34John Coogan?

  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, in, in solving in the near term? Is this more of a question of just, let's scale up because there's a lot of folks that really could benefit just in spinal injury and ALS? And what, what else are you excited about?

• 2:47:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And even in there, it's like, does, do you, are you feeling like generalized breakthroughs that make each individual product, you know, advance to some degree?

• 2:47:12John Coogan?

  I guess also like, are there differences? Yeah. Yeah. Are there differences in solving for ALS versus solving for traumatic spinal injury?

• 2:47:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, there certainly is. For ALS, it is a neurodegenerative condition, so their conditions 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, so unable to move, unable to speak even, and is connected to a mechanical ventilators to basically keep him alive. In a similar ways that basically Stephen Hawking was able to sort of live the last 50-plus years of his life. And, you know, for them, they also have more fatigue and they have different needs, as you can imagine from someone like Nolan, who can, who's still very vibrant, who still can speak,

• 2:48:06Speaker 06

  who can, who can still, you know, kind of engage with the world in a different ways. And their application, their needs will change as a result of it. But really, you know, what, what we also talk about is that we're building a generalized input-output device and technology for the brain. So, you know, 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 brain stem stroke, whether it's due to some other things that have caused you to be in that state, we're hoping that it could be generalizable enough that with the same hardware, they may have different firmware and different applications that they will find more useful for that particular

• 2:48:47Speaker 06

  situation, similar to how, you know, when 10 different people are given a computer, they will use that 10 different, unique ways. And we're seeing that. And, and that's something that's been kind of wonderful to see, the wide range of diverse use cases for different participants.

• 2:49:03John Coogan?

  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?

• 2:49:11Speaker 06

  Neuralink.com/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.

• 2:49:18Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot of companies will put up a careers page, and then people go there, work for an average of about a year and a half or something like that. This actually feels like a career, because if you're gonna have an impact, like, expect to stay, you know, stay for a few decades.

• 2:49:30John Coogan?

  It's not a jobs page, it's a careers page, because you're gonna be here for 40 years, essentially, yeah. This is fantastic. Thank you so much for joining.

• 2:49:38Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for the update.

• 2:49:38John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:49:39Speaker 06

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 2:49:40Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.