Martin Shkreli closes $5M seed round, pitches photonic computing as the next Nvidia challenger

how you doing?

Great to see you.

What's up, guys?

Good to see you. Happy New Year. How is your year going so far?

Great. I'm a new dad, so that's uh

Congratulations.

They're pretty wild. Yeah,

congratulations. It's fantastic.

Is it has it has it been wild or is it uh

where does it is quite a bit more normal. Like to to me to me parenting

is it does feel natural

and so there some pe some people have this idea of like oh it's so it's so insane and you know it's so complicated and and I have to read 20 books and other people is like kind of follow just follow kind of your own nature and just like take take care of your child. It it is straightforward.

I'm following my nature. I mean I'm following my nature. The kid's got to produce at some point. He's starting to come into work like once a month.

There we go.

You know, comes in Skagas, you know, entertains the troops here.

Perfect.

But

at some point, you know, some trades, something do something.

Yep.

You know,

put some trades on.

Yeah. You got to find

some have some have some conviction.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Uh how big how uh what what's the environment like in your office? You guys uh uh have remote component? You anti- remote?

Remote. remote is is evil. You know, I think that if you're going to war together, you can't go to war remotely. You know, it's uh [laughter] you know, my my people fought the Ottoman Empire and you know, one one man, you know, famous general, you know, stopped the Ottoman Empire largely by himself and uh at least that's a legend, you know, and if we're going to take on Bloomberg or whoever we're fighting,

um you know, I just don't think you could do it with some guy sitting in, you know, at home with his up. What's the current What's the current battle that you guys are fighting and how is the war going overall?

War's going great. We just closed the seed round. We raised five

congratulations.

We raised two like a year ago.

Okay.

To get the ball rolling or a year and a half ago. We raised five as a seed round and then we'll probably do like a 10 20 30 something like that. This year it is an A.

We have a lot of revenue. We're almost profitable.

That's great.

Um it's, you know, the interesting thing about financial software is traders want to try everything. Like they just, you know, it's the greatest business in the world. And you know, you do have to have domain expertise, which nobody has. So I think that's a lot of fun. We also might get

You mean nobody in Nobody in tech has

Yeah. Yeah. That [laughter] the people with yeah the yeah our customers are brilliant um the people who are in finance have financial expertise uh or at least many of them you know believe they do obviously to some extent it's like a casino and and you're you're sort of arming them with tools a lot of the tools haven't changed I do have this thing I want to show you guys when I'm when I'm ready I think we're going to call like sit or sit sit rep or sitch it's going to be like the situation monitoring suite

that's just like

Bloomberg has these like fake um systems that are they're pretty awful, but there's something where you could like see a map and you can kind of see different things happening like earthquakes or whatever. But like take that and actually make it really good. I think people would would truly want to monitor situations. I think that's a new like there's no situ. It's a new hobby.

I mean new.

Yeah. No, it's a new it's a new category. It's it's and it's a proumer category because because because because people I think actually enjoy it so much that it's like camping where there I I think people will be willing to spend money like

oh totally. So think think about the revenue of Bloomberg with 8 billion 10 billion whatever a satellite constellation maybe it's 100 mil and imagine if you're sitting at Citadel or Millennium or some hedge fund or Fidelity or something and you and you're literally tasking a satellite like no actually I want satellite to point here you know and what margin of difference would it make you could probably pass through you know probably be a creative to evidot to have your own constellations like uh satellite constellation and then things like um drones or maybe you know there's you know Bloomberg right now I think they have like ships and shipping routes and flights and like kind of fairly boring stuff, but you you can make it a h 100 times better. So that'll be fun when it's ready. And and again, this is all inspired this whole sector started with the Bezos kind of [laughter]

That's right.

Everyone really really did.

What's your take on prediction markets? Do you enjoy them? Do you think that they're valuable uses of information? Do you think it all just winds up being sports betting? Like where where does all this go?

And we will be we will be trading on what you said here. So,

do you guys get do you guys get paid uh by [laughter]

No, no, no. I Yeah, I'm super uh

I have a thousandx long on you saying biotech at some point during this show.

All $3 on it.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. No, no, but yeah. What What are you thinking on on uh on prediction markets? Valuable, useful? Do you use them? Do you trade?

Yeah, it's great. It's a great question. I mean I think I think the it's probably like social media

like the first social media companies if you like go back into like that Steve Levy book about Facebook

which I think is just fantastic like almost documenting you know every part of it

there were a couple of very random

even before Fster you know a couple of these really proto social media companies yeah

and the sector exploded I think that's where we're at I don't think

I mean I wish the companies the best of luck except for Khi But the uh two companies but um the I do think that you know markets have been around for you know hundreds of years if not longer and ICE and SIBO and these other companies are publicly traded. They don't sit there and twiddle their thumbs and say gee you know I hope I hope some creative new market comes along. They make financial products all the time that fail.

You know they they they innovate they add new things and then they they actually take them down because they don't catch fire in Wall Street. So if you want to be like that micro kind of uh you know micro markets sort of pioneer it's interesting but it's sort of still like you get into scale problems with like who actually arbitrates some of these bets. Obviously sports is easy and some of these other things but you know how much are you just financializing for financializing sake.

Sure.

And is that sustainable when you actually need people with tons of money to fight the arbitrage gradient? you know, if you're betting. So, full disclosure, I've been running the spot on Poly Market that that makes a market in the Bitcoin 15minute markets,

which are somewhat inefficient. And nobody needs to trade this, right? There's no actual, you know, benefit to trading this other than

you you can you can take two to the N bets. So, you get

around, I guess, 96 bets a day. And if you somehow, you know, the money velocity of getting wild was right, you can compound insanely well. Of course, it's random, but you know, people hope springs internal that you could somehow get the rhythm of the market every 15 minutes and you can you can I think somebody posted on polymer market they took a very small amount of money and very large amount of money. So, you know, it is it is kind of a I think it's a bit of a waste of ingenuity and engineering and we're working on trying to sort of make a prediction market that might be more relevant say private companies. Um, you know, right now the binary outcomes of prediction markets have forced you into this box.

Yeah.

Of like will open AI go public this year? Will SpaceX hit a trillion valuation? Why can't it just be dollar for dollar? Why not like

this? This is just a market that pays you n dollars per,

you know, like a swap. So, and I'm sure that might be being worked on by other companies, but yeah, I think that's like an economically rational thing. So, the spirit is there like we should have our own markets. We should be able to deploy whatever we want, but

actually make it make sense. What at least they're still what is the state of tracking large private companies valuations? We have a ticker at the bottom with uh you know mag seven big tech companies with market caps. I would love to add in and dropic openai. Uh but I I saw some debate over you know how you actually get the data how reliable it is.

I got into I got into it I got into it though I unfollowed him

I unfollowed him for five minutes because of it. I was so mad.

Brutal. Worst five minutes of his life.

Worst five minutes.

I'm not even I might have made it a few days. Um

but eventually I I relented but

capitulated.

I think yeah I think that what Lonzo is saying is right in that if he gets invited to a deal per say ramp or whoever you know he was complaining that my ramp number was too low and okay fine that's that's fine. But it's the same thing as insider info in the stock market. So you have insider info. Great. You know, RAMP's going to trade up 50% higher than my number. He's like, "Your number's wrong." Well, it's no different from me saying, "Well, you know, the um you know, the Nvidia numbers wrong, but I know they're have blowout quarter." [laughter]

Well, you know, how am I supposed to know that? You know, my market only reflects the people trading on it, not

you know, um the news you know before everyone else knows it, which is in private, as you know, guys know very well, in private world, that's that's to be expected, otherwise you won't part with your money. But in the in the public world, you're not supposed to have that information edge. So he's so used to having the information edge because he I'm sure he gets invited to many many great deals

that, you know, he knows, oh, the price is about to change. And so SpaceX is a really funny example. And our platform, SpaceX prices

because, you know, Elon sort of dropped this bomb that like, oh, we're going to do a uh, you know, do a buyback at this crazy price. Yeah.

Obviously not crazy to him, but to the marketplace, they're like, what? WTF? It's like more than doubled over the last few months. um you know just

well and and a lot of the stuff late stage if if somebody you know there's so much demand and there's so little supply that if somebody comes to you and they're like hey I've got SpaceX at 1 and a.5 trillion and somebody's like do I I'm really if I believe Elon can get this thing out at 1 and a half trillion sure I'm going to be flat over until they get out or whatever but at least I'm in right so I don't know it it uh people will start to be able to justify almost any any price up until that point.

Sure. And I know Matt Matt Grim is on this, you know, war path against these um

Yeah. SPD hustlers.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I feel like the only solution is we have to have a private we have to be able to trade like just like poly market private private companies and there's there's a big battle brewing behind the scenes over this. We'll see where we'll see what comes of it. Okay, speaking of Elon, speaking of XAI, SpaceX, uh, walk me through all of the internal secrets that you learned from the infamous.

First of all, if if your most junior employee went on a on a on a cinematic podcast for for 90 minutes and [laughter] just told all about God and everything, would you uh

Yeah. How would you react?

How would you react? I I think you know the first my first like week in hedge funds I thought this was a good idea and I I the my sense for asking the boss just like kicked in at the last second.

Yeah. [laughter]

Like

wait so you were going to call up Bloomberg and say like I got to tell you we're working on some exciting stuff. I got to tell you about some of our

new this specific market is wildly mispriced and we're going to make a killing.

We're printing.

I was long this stock and the company told me, "Oh, we're doing this newspaper piece. do you mind giving a quote for it since you're our investor?

And I I told our CFO, I said, I'm going to be doing this just so you know. And he's like, no,

no, you will not be doing that.

Okay. So, what did you actually learn from from the XAI deep dive?

I think it's less about learnings and more about like just the gumption of like the way he was questions. I can understand like look, you're an engineer, you should be able to go on a podcast.

Questions come up about XAI, you probably see, look, I can't really talk about it. you might drop a things but you know he was really like people asked the the interviewer asked him how is Optimus going to roll out and he was like just let me tell you [laughter]

that's Elon's job you know it's not yours and so the real reason I kind of came after this guy in a not so like kind of an oblique way

is

he had I looked I looked up this guy a lot of friends had XI who is this guy and he had blocked me

I said oh no no no [laughter] this is a big thing

so I could amplify you know that you did this. And again, I mean, I think the guy was fired, you know,

okay,

at least the second he went on the show. I doubt that I had any part to do with it, but I I definitely didn't mind amplifying the the insane kind of decision he made. And

you know, if he blocked me, that's that's I mean,

Roana blocked you too.

No, he came at me for absolutely no reason. I said, you know, I I I replied to his tweet like 80 million other people like, "This is a bad move." Yeah.

And it wasn't a day out. I was like, look, I think that the problem is that it's not the billionaires that

it's the billionaires and their teams,

right? So, if Peter leaves uh California, if if Palmer leaves California, if Elon leaves California, it's not just them who leave.

Yeah.

Works for and that's and it's every florist that works for those guys. I'm trying to find force is every you have you have the the highly productive high agency team members that are like I want to be in the same building as my boss every single day because I don't want to go to war remotely like you said and if I'm going to be a serious player at this company I need to be have proximity to the person

I mean yeah the average billionaire family office has got to be 50 employees their families like it gets pretty big when you think about the footprint easily companies they're running, right? I mean, just the companies they're running. If it's

there has to be a ton of new employment in Texas because of this and I'm sure it'll only continue.

Our friend Jordan was just saying that that uh he's like Roana is just rage baiting you guys and you just completely, you know, played into it and and I I think that's I'm I'm sure Ro will use this to set up, you know, his next uh his next play. But it's still it doesn't take away from the fact that you're going to leave. I don't care if you like if you're just using this as a as a stepping stone to like, you know, go to the national stage being like, I stood up against the California billionaires that weren't playing their fair share. Well, like I live in California and I have we still have to live with the consequences of like your political ambitions, right? And pushing something that that's so obviously, you know, I said like what do you want California to become? like an agrarian society, you know, where it's just like agriculture and and vineyards and tourism. Like there's a lot of like every other state will be happy to take take these jobs and and uh you know host these companies. Um and I don't think we should just you know hand them all over. What's really crazy is my my partner's at one of the big AI labs and, you know, if she leaves California and then sells her stock, California will, you know, kind of come after you

and someone just posted this um really almost like fascist letter that the California Tax Department sent them. I don't know if you guys saw this.

Yeah, I saw it. I saw it.

Yeah. Yeah. It was insane.

Basically, the the the letter was like, "We want to understand the narrative of why you left California."

It's like, "Tell spin us a yarn. [laughter]

Give us tell us a story. That's great.

On how you decided to on how you had the audacity to leave this state.

Yeah. Uh

I'm shocked by it.

On on XAI, did the uh did the podcast make you more bullish on the strategy at open at at XAI specifically? Were there things that you thought were particularly exciting about what was what was laid out or things that you uh thought were maybe misunderstood or mispriced? It's hard to tell from the junior engineer, you know, it's I think like, you know, you get a window, which is great, but it's also

it's Elon's show and like the risk of of overindexing to something like that is like, okay, this guy saw it, he worked there. Yeah, that's cool, but what is Elon really thinking? And I think that

there's this new thing coming from the AI companies that nobody's expecting. And, you know, I wanted to see if he was going to drop sort of that. And I think all of the labs are gearing up to think about this. Uh and it's sort of this new um derivative of of kind of the outcomes of AGI. And I think almost nobody in the markets talking about it. Um so it's going to be very interesting to see how the next I'll just you know leave a teaser there. See how the next uh

no teasers. Unpack it for us. Break it down.

Five to 10 years. I can't

you can't. Okay.

Next five to 10 years comes. I I I think that the question is really what what can AI really do?

Yeah.

And I think that we've we very much overindex to

chat bots

and LMS and like

a good a good new direction, you know, people have talked about endlessly is robotics. Yeah. But imagine there's 50 new directions, you know, and I think that,

you know, I hate to say something like this changes everything, but like there there's a couple of clever ones I think coming that are just haven't been seen yet. And I think the smaller like the non- Googlele non-meta I'm sorry non- Googlele non Microsoft type of players you know including X is kind of what I'm thinking about

are are are actually thinking about this very very heavily and macro hard I guess macro hard is kind of

you know an example of like what is that really

and what's really going to be macroard as we see you know macro hard be revealed more and more I think there's a lot more to that than you know in some ways I think macro hard is going to be bigger than xai It's all one entity if I'm not mistaken, but [clears throat] it macro hard is probably worth more than XAI and I think that we just don't know what's coming out of that. We also know about Elon's gaming AI gaming ambition, which I think

Yeah.

And I don't know if you guys have seen Martin Casado's

Yeah.

uh coding. It's very cool stuff. Um

and uh you know, it's amazing that guy can invest and uh do that stuff. And I think one leads to the other. I sort of do the same thing for for my end. I want to talk to you about really fast. Uh this idea of photonic computing.

Okay.

Which I think is time is coming.

Okay. Explain.

So

yeah. So photonic computing is is what it sounds like. It's using light instead of electrons to compute.

It's it's been around for 50 years. It's sort of like quantum's ugly stepsister.

But I think it's actually the bell of the ball because

and there are very few companies working on this. You probably know all about it from interconnects

where you know and

silicon photonics as well but recently in nature and a few other like pre-minent sort of journals especially Chinese companies have shown that you can do matt moles with light

and it's actually pretty remarkable light goes to 100 terahertz but it's more important than that it actually is you can do 3D mat moles and they're all of one complexity [clears throat] so it's a pretty insane speed up versus GPU GPUs are great, but they're almost too general, which is why TPUs have sort of been there. But if you throw out the need for, you know, lots of different instructions. You just need to do a ML, which as you guys know is 95 90 95% of what a GPU chip is doing all the time, a matt mole is done with light very naturally through constructive and destructive interference. It's it just nature does it. So, I think this could be an interesting new space and I'm I'm spending a lot of time on it and, you know, very curious about, you know, uh could there be a chip? There's a couple of private companies.

Um, and I'm starting to dig around and, you know, see what what's what here. I think most people stop short of actually making the full photonic computer because they need revenue, they need earnings, they need something. And celestial AI got bought out by Marvel,

you know, they there's some or Marvel there's some attempt to sort of push more and more of like we used to use copper wires to transmit information. Now we use platonics and fiber and more and more of the chip and more and more of the entire global kind of computer infrastructure is going photonic and maybe the whole thing goes platonic someday and that electricity is actually the odd man out. Um it photons don't have some properties that are perfect for you know computing but others like in the case of mattles which is now like most of the compute we need in the world they're actually kind of perfect. So, you know, it's it'll be interesting to see if there's one uh one private Chinese company called Light Intelligence, and it sort of has a foot in the rest of the world. They're in Singapore, but they're also a foot in China. They started out at MIT, so they're privately held. Uh there's light matter, which it's not really clear that they're still pursuing kind of all optical photonics. And Microsoft's done done a little bit in space, too. So I'm I'm really interested this this as the potential next like as we think as Grock the acquisition of Grock has sort of and the quantum insanity. This is kind of why I care about this in the first place as a biotech guy. You know this is very weird for me to think about this but

um the rock acquisition for 20 billion the quantum crap that's trading for 10 or 20 billion. people really want to think about what's next in compute and of course the the unconventional and their raise at five billion just for a new co um that's it's it's all sort of clear that anything that can beat Nvidia mole in my opinion could be worth trillions

uh what's the state of the quantum computing market seems like the companies have not sold off but you went viral on a podcast sort of breaking down your overall thesis is the market sort of waking up to your way of seeing the timelines around quantum computing or the impact of quantum computing or uh is there still more work to be done on your end?

Yeah. So I I think there's no more thinking that needs to be done. I think this is a war of attrition where both sides are right and this is why I kind of started to look for for other kinds of compute

and as you know our great friend Bezos has has his own kind of compute. So like the point is you got a 5 trillion market cap and

if you if you bought a stock at 5 billion which is not a small cap that's a big company.

Yeah.

Most of us would be very happy to exit at 5 billion.

You can still get a thousandx

right if it's the next Nvidia. So

if you even have a 0.1% chance that one of these quantum stupid companies is the next Nvidia I mean take a flyer you get a 1000x. So I feel like there there kind of is a rational thinking there even if it's impossible.

You know who's to think what's the difference between 0.1 and 0.0. It's it's the kind of difference I think about but most other people don't care. And so any chance to get it's like the menu problem. What's on the menu for the average Joe versus what's on the menu for you and me. We might get in a GR round. We might get in an unconventional round.

The average person can't. But they can buy $2,000 Regetti or D-Wave on their Robin Hood and maybe they'll get the same kind of,

you know, self-manifesting in some ways, you know, um, uh, beta.

Yeah.

But I'm also curious if you guys want to talk at some point expand this and talk about biotech more.

Yeah, sure. Yeah, we'd love I mean I'm like give it give us a lay of the land currently how you're thinking about

the year broadly what's exciting uh what what's maybe uh being oversold about AI's potential impact in biotech versus being underappreciated.

Yeah, I think that this that the Nvidia Lily have announced this big partnership.

Yep. Um,

and I've been thinking about drugs and AI more and more and more. And I feel like there is something to do here, but it's not the stuff that everyone thinks about like drug discovery itself or or small molecules or even proteins. I'm not sure AI is is very useful. We have great forcing functions for that whether they're physical chemists or software. You don't need a 10x or 100x improvement of that. The actual part of drug discovery, and I can say this as a, you know, very, uh, worn out drug company CEO, the biggest problem of drug companies is the people. And there's fantastic people that work at drug companies. It's just that you have 10, 15, 20 different departments that have to talk to each other. Whether it's toxicology, you know, preclinical, PK, you know, there's all these little subsections. They all have to talk to each other and everything gets lost in the translation. project management is supposed to sit on top of all that. It just often makes it worse. And so you you have this like impossible. You talk to anybody that works in big pharma, they'll tell you how how ugly it is.

Um and so if you had a machine doing it, it probably probably work better. And I think that more and more companies are going to whe whether it's a drug company or law firm or anything else, there's going to be these sort of self-organizing, you know, um more decision-m gets pushed down. You know, sometimes I ask chat GBT about, you know, what would be a better marketing strategy or how do I how do I get more users? What should I do with it? It's like, oh, have you thought about, you know, this and, you know, sometimes you you'll get something surprising. So, I think that's sort of the angle I play for drug companies. There's so much inertia. Oftentimes, a CEO will like kill a drug for no reason. He'll promote another drug for no reason. The data says no. the chief scientist, you know, has a personal vendetta with another company, so really wants to push that drug. Like, there's all these irrational decisions that get made over what's basically hundreds of millions of dollars spent, and it it's remarkably inefficient. So, when Vet came in to try to really upset the Apple cart here um as as as I did, too. We sort of did the same thing. It was a little tricky because it's just not an industry that moves fast and breaks things. And for all the occasional luck you get on a drug, there's a lot of that luck is distributed as well. So Vake got a lot of bad luck sometimes with Roy Vant. He got a couple of things of good luck. It's done fine. But like it's very hard to get the compounding effects that you get. So Lily has somehow been able to do it because that drug is not going to go generic. But again, the problem is you make a great drug, you have a good hit, you have 10 years to make money and that's it. And so, you know, none of these AI companies would be worth anything if in 10 years they they all um had to give up their assets because there was a generic AI company. So, I feel like drug drugs still are in this perilous situation. The whole industry is sort of cooked um because there's fewer and fewer drug targets to go after. Yeah. So, we keep fighting over the smallest number of patients in these random diseases. sometimes like the slice skinniest slice of cancer where there's like 600 people have it and there's like 12 drug companies that are developing a drug for it and so there's overcapacity in the industry. I mean the same thing happened in steel and some other places and we arguably have too much going on and the real fear right now was China. Um the China drug development capability has gotten so good that there's really no

who who was it that was saying like uh yeah I would hate I would hate uh we all want to cure cancer but I would hate if China cured it before us. [laughter] which is a wild quote. It's wild. But on on on the AI impact in uh in pharma drug discovery, what is the lever that we should be watching between uh you know more frontier models basically raising the IQ making them smarter, more knowledgeable versus just speeding them up, getting the state-of-the-art models running on Grock or Cerebrus so it's faster so you can do more or is it more of like a adoption diffusion training? you need to just get the CEO to actually have like turn AI loose in the organization. It's like a change management problem. Well, I think I mean I think uh you mentioned HR and one thing I think XAI should do is take a little bit of macro hard and build an HR function that when employees is hey can I go on podcast it just says no quickly you know

I think it just be an if statement

and it's like yeah if [laughter] Elon yes

if if podcast mentioned say no anyway uh is keys to success in AI and bio

I think that I think farm is a misunderstood business so there was a this this sort of drug goat is this guy named Paul Jansen. So he created uh um Jansen and Jansen was acquired by J&J but Jansen himself just personally invented you know I think half a dozen to a dozen critical medicines not like metos or anything like that but like he per personally discovered you know um I think the first antiscychotic fentinel um like several like massive massive

from the creator of fentinel we have anti

it wasn't it wasn't that back then [laughter] right

no it was good it It's very useful. Yeah. In many cases,

what are you how are you um uh how are you processing the peptide boom?

Yeah.

Well, that whole thing is another story, but I I want to get back to Paul. So, sure, there's there's statues of this guy, etc. We need more Paul Jansen's whether they're digital synthetic bi synthetic sort of intelligence or not. The drug industry is an idea industry.

Okay?

It is not an industrial process. It's some guy sitting down saying, "You know what I think would stop cancer? If we made an hack inhibitor, well, actually, try that it doesn't work. So, and then somebody saying, I wrote a paper about this and you know, actually maybe this would do it.

It's the same thing as like getting a digital Ilia who can just go and try a bunch of AI research ideas. You get the AI researcher in a box, turn that loose and then that un unfurls into uh progress. Uh certainly a challenge. Is that constrained by hardware compute scale? Are you still scaling pill or is there an idea that will uh will lead to that? It's a great question because in in the old days if you wanted to run computer experiments you didn't need much cost. In fact, that was the attraction is I sit there and write code and now it's like no no I need a cluster and

for drugs

you know it's it sort of has always been an expensive capital you know uh thing but in the scheme of things you know it's cheaper than AI [laughter] and you know it's it's kind of like

you know you you could you could probably get some proof of concept in in animals and and people for you know less than you might imagine and then from there you know you can develop a portfolio of drugs. So I I think that you know getting the idea part of the drug discovery industry more sort of capable is is one thing AI can help a lot with and that downstream makes less expenses in clinical trial development and also the decision-making somebody looking at the data and saying look this drug is a dog let's not do a phase two let's not do a phase three and oftentimes the scientists and the the companies have like I don't know Wall Street wants us to see it see us in phase three we can't really fall behind our rival and and they'll often push

I mean I'd up to a half of all drugs in clinical trials shouldn't be in clinical trials. And you know that's uh that's a lot of money wasted. It's a lot of patient time wasted and and a lot of is pushed by other incentives and other things like that. So I think AI has a lot of you know potential for for drug discovery. But every time I talk to somebody that wants to talk about AI and drug discovery, they've never been at a drug company. They've never actually done it. And when you do it, you realize it's much more about who's Paul Jansen

discovering the next, you know,

bunch of hits and who was lucky and got a one hit wonder and then who just sucks in general like Fizer or something. And so you you sort of have to like generate those ideas. Uh it's almost like an investor in hedge fun. It's interesting because because I feel like I can't uh remember who exactly but there was somebody on the show that was saying we we don't need it's not that we don't need more ideas we need a cost reduction across the rest everything from that point.

Yeah.

But

but most of the cost is clinical trials. So

yeah. So what you were saying is like if you have these 15 departments and if you can somehow make it so that

you know you you can have is it a is it a headcount like how much is like a headcount reduction actually going to impact

the overall cost? I think it's all clinical trials like so once you've invented a drug say that costs 10 to 50 million the next four 500 million is going to find a bunch of people to try it and compare it to placebo because you have to monitor those people so carefully and so closely that it ends up being this massive cost across you know tons of clinical trials. That's the hard part. Um if you could just take shots and go for 50 million 20 million left and right um you know you'd have a really productive drug industry. But unfortunately, getting 10,000 people to take a new diabetes drug is it's pulling teeth and you have to like really, you know, incentivize doctors and patients, meaning you have to pay them. And once they do that, you have to pay the company that collects the data. You have to pay the company that, you know, sort of puts it together, sends it to FDA, all that stuff is like just massive paperwork. Uh, and it's it's it's a lot of it's done.

How does how is China's process for running clinical trials different than ours? very similar, but like I think the wages that they pay the people that collect all the stuff is less and I think that they they sort of have it a little more streamlined. I mean it's it's amazing what they can do. Like so one of the things that confused me about China the first time I looked at it in biotech was like the average midsized American biotech is like 100 people, 200 people, maybe 300, but in China it's like 6,000 people work same market. Wow, how what are they doing? you know, it's like, no, we have like 800 chemists sitting here. [laughter] What are they doing?

Is that just because of the structure in America? We have more like labs and consultants and we still employ 6,000 people, but it's all at secondary and third tier supply chain companies.

Maybe I I think might be more capital markets where it's like

they raise the same amount we raise in the Hong Kong market. They raise 300 million.

What does 300 million buy you in China?

A lot more people 800 chemists. 500 chemists about 40 chemists in San Diego. So,

yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's crazy.

Wanted your take on uh on the peptides. Boom.

Yeah.

Yeah. Peptides are, you know, every time somebody asks me about it, I have to laugh because peptide is defined as a a small protein.

And so, what you're really asking is what is my take on the unapproved self-medication boost? And you know, when you phrase it that way, it sounds

insane. No, no, no, no. And that's that's like to me to me I I uh I I tried a peptide cycle probably 5 years ago and I was like okay this is like cool and I noticed like a moderate effect

but I also acknowledge that like this is I'm like administering administering like effectively an experiment like uh experimental drug is not the right framing but it's it's not like the same as like walking into arowan and getting some vitamin D and you know having having a daily supplement. It's like you're like inject you're you're you're doing an injection. The source matters a ton

and it is I you far closer to you know taking a round of anabolic steroids than it is you know uh adding adding some creatine to your smoothie.

I I just think it's nuts. I mean, if you think it's a good idea to do your own research on medicine, self-medicate, and on uncontrolled substances that are manufactured, god knows where that now been clinical trials. And I mean, I'm I'm as libertarian as it gets, but I I I just don't understand why what the impetus is

to like take foreign substances without like some emergency need. And it just it's it boggles my mind because, you know, people there's some psychological phenomenon where people need to feel in control or they need something in their life that they feel like they're taking a risk on or, you know, it's nuts. I mean, why why would you do it?

Well, and and and explain why there probably will never be clinical trials for these drugs,

right? There's this edge case where, you know, you have a cosmaceutical in essence or kind of like something that doesn't quite fit what's a disease to the FDA. So, a good example is premature ejaculation. Um so the F FDA does not consider that an illness. um European drug regulators do

and so you can get approved for impetence in America because it's actually sort of a medical problem where it's like oh if I can't you know copulate and produce it's it's a big medical kind of emergency in a sense premature ejaculation is sort of like well you have it is what it is and you know so the FDA's never been willing to approve a company a long time ago tried to get an old J&J drug called epoxitine approved for premature ejaculation and the FDA basically said there's no set of circumstances es where we will prove this.

And you know what's weird about that is okay well what if you actually do suffer from this and it's a severe psychological detriment as much as we joke about it. People joked about erectile dysfunction a long time ago and it's it's a serious you know illness to many. So you you sort of live in this twilight of like well I I know what drug works. This drug deoxxyine actually does work

but I also know it'll never be FDA approved. So what do I do? And in some ways, you know, you're you're sort of like, I'm taking an unapproved, technically illegal substance and I'm buying it off some shady, you know, third party market. So eventually, I think we need to find a way just like almost like what we just talked about prediction markets. You have these third markets where it's like, yeah, you can bet on, you know, what Trump's going to say in a speech

and it's not registered stock exchange, but it's also more than just you and me making a side bet. And it's the same thing with with this where it's like deoxxene is not a peptide but you know I deoxxene is medically useful for that disease if you call the disease FDA won't say no. So it's not like I'm taking some random goop you know it's a real medicine but it's it's in this middle of like what do you do with this thing and so much of you know so much of of what we do as investors or whatever is in that middle. Uber you could sort of define Uber is in that weird middle as well. So, I think eventually, you know, we need to address like it's not as insane as maybe I'm making it out to be. I think some of it is, but eventually you need to address this like

how do we

Yeah. do

well even even like Yeah. BPC157 like there's no incentive to spend the tens of millions of dollars on trials be like you would need some type of like you know trade group or something in order to fund that because if one company did it then every company would get the benefit of it. So why would one company spend the tens of millions of dollars?

We have an app for that. In drug development, we have an app for that. We we can take that drug, twist it, change it, figure out make it better, you know, and and then you get a new patent and then you have an incentive. So there there is sort of a way to do that. And that's not that's not uncommon. I mean, you know, trolling around PubMed looking for, oh, this drug actually does something. I'll make, you know, take it to my boss at Merc. Boss says no patent. come back the next day and say, "Here's the same drug with a nitrogen atom coming out of here. It's gonna work the same way." And he says, "All right, you know, maybe we should run with that."

Run it.

Yeah.

Run it.

Well, thank you so much for always show Yeah, come back on again soon. I have a bunch more questions I want to ask about God and everything, but uh good to see you and happy.

Congrats on the progress and congrats on the new on becoming a father.

Yeah, fatherhood. Massive,

massive news.

Great stuff.

We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Phantom Cash, fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom Card. Uh, our next guest is Bradley Tusk, the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. You might know him