The Exchanges

Q your plan for execution on that vision over the next several years? Or are you much more of a responsive manager where you're going to go in and diagnose and be much more of a tactician in iterating Almost in an agile way of the business to success. How do you kind of think about presenting how you're going to be more successful in operating this business than existing management?

A So there are three areas. Number one is on immediately improving earnings through cutting costs. And Pulling two billion dollars of costs out of the business and on the operating base of, you know, close to five and a half billion of expenses, um, and 2.4 billion spent on sales and marketing for essentially no user growth. Um, there's a lot of money to pull out there. So you have the immediate increase in earnings through cost cutting. That's basically one. And then There's two growth vectors that, um, I'm very much interested in. Number one is live commerce. And there's a large competitor that is completely crushing it. And eBay has the users. eBay has the brands. They have a platform, but the platform sucks for a lot of different reasons. Uh, And they don't have the content creators on the platform, and nobody even really knows eBay Live exists. There's like an application process. I talked to sellers and they're telling me like they've applied to be, uh, to be a seller and they are waiting to get approved. It's like they're basically stopping themselves from being successful and getting content creators onto the platform. Uh, and then the entire backend of eBay live also sucks. So live commerce, the TAM is like a four hundred billion. It's growing very quickly in the U S it's very popular in Asia and eBay live should be significantly larger. They shouldn't be the category le…

AI assessment note: “So there are three areas. Number one is on immediately improving earnings through cutting costs.”

Q Did you spread a little bit to then too many projects? People were talking about this new gadgets, Sora, and, and then maybe not enough focus on enterprise. Is that a fair assessment of if there was a mistake in the last year that was it?

A No, I think that the world loves to go to binary isms. Like, are you a consumer company, Sarah? Are you an enterprise company? The reality is we're very much both. We're not one or the other right now. Our revenue is getting pretty balanced about 50, 50. We are incredibly focused on the enterprise. Like, I spend so much of my time with, I mean, just even in the last week, I could tell you I've been to see Thermo Fisher in Boston. I was with a bunch of banks in New York. I was on the phone with travelers on Friday. I spent this morning on the phone with a tech company. It doesn't matter the vertical. People are really moving on AI right now. Our new head of revenue, Denise Dresser, in seats since December. She is a force of nature. And so I think the enterprise, broadly speaking, It's really firing on all cylinders, but we don't want to leave the consumer behind. Remember our mission at open AI is AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for the benefit of humanity who can pay or for the benefit of humanity who live in an enterprise, but very broad based. Um, it's why we offer so much free because we want people to get a taste. Once they get a taste of intelligence, the ability to come up a commitment curve is incredible. Our free users do about seven turns, seven questions a day. Our first paid tier do double that, about 15. Our real paid tier with the plus, 20 bucks, hopefully you…

AI assessment note: “No, I think that the world loves to go to binary isms.”

Q Steve, as we wrap up, give us the quarterback view of your path to victory. Walk us through the sequence of events, the key moments leading up to the primary vote, and then from primary to election day. What has to happen for you to get to Sacramento?

A So we have the top two system, um, for those who I mean, another crazy California thing where you end up with two candidates going through to the general election, regardless of party. The idea of this was to have more moderate politics. Ever since it was introduced, the state's gone further and further to the left. Um, and so you've got various scenarios that are possible. Right now, I'm leading in all of the polls, um, on the Republican side. There's one other candidate. I think with the president, with President Trump's endorsement, Of my campaign. I think we can expect, um, I'm pretty confident that we can make it into the top two. It's not certain we're, we've got to, you know, fight very hard over the next month or so. The ballots go out next week, early May. Um, but I think that we're going to have a top two with myself and one other Democrat. And right now it looks as if it's going to be one of Tom Steyer, Katie Porter, or Javier Becerra. And all of those three, Represent either no change from what we have now or a move even further to the left in the wrong direction. So I think broadly the argument is going to be very straightforward, which is, are you happy with, with the way things are going in California? Do you want more of it? And if you do vote Democrat, or do you think we need a change? So that's, it's a classic, you know, change versus more of the same election…

AI assessment note: “I'm pretty confident that we can make it into the top two.”

Q Why do you think it became taboo and became so negative, particularly in Silicon Valley, that building a defense company or a company building technology to service the defense sector was viewed with, with such disdain and was an untouchable sector for so long?

A I think it's a beautiful consequence, and I mean, I mean it unironically, of kind of the peaceful world that we lived in. The origin story of Silicon Valley is actually defense. You know, Lockheed was the largest employer in, in Silicon Valley in the 19 fifties. The Corona spy satellites were built there. So in a world that was, uh, gripped by the threat of the Soviet Union, you know, you had a very different posture in Silicon Valley. But in a world post the end of the Cold War, the end of history, Um, kind of a view of globalism, that it's all gonna be great, that we exist beyond the confines of our country. Um, these things were viewed much more cynically, and the threats didn't seem very real. And I think you could even back test this through the moment where Silicon Valley kind of really woke up and realized, hey, maybe these things are real, or when the Russian tanks rolled across the Ukraine border. You know, it's when they realized, and there are a lot of Ukrainian, Eastern Europeans, a lot of people who were affected by that in Silicon Valley, who started to realize that Um, maybe there's a more nuanced issue here than just simple, the simple Eisenhower quote of the military industrial complex.

AI assessment note: “a beautiful consequence... of kind of the peaceful world that we lived in”

Q What's the next market where you're worried that's gonna happen?

A I have a lot of markets. So, I mean, we're, we're talking a lot about, um, weapons of war here. I'm worried about things that go beyond weapons of war that affect our will to fight. Uh, pharmaceuticals is one that's close to my heart. My father was a pharmacist, and one of the things he always wanted me to work on was bringing pharmaceutical production back home. 80% of APIs for generic drugs are produced by China. What do you think the American people are gonna think when they have to choose between defending the free world, defending American sovereignty, And their five-year-old dying of an ear infection that we would have thought of as trivially curable. So I think there are these, these things where we've just imbibed the globalist vision that, hey, we'll do the innovation, they'll do the production without realizing that innovation is a consequence of productivity. Probably to put it in terms that the, that the tech community would really understand is like, what motivated Google to do the research in 2017 behind the paper attention is all you need? A desire for a three percent incremental improvement In Google Translate. You cannot think of something more banal leading to something more revolutionary. And we've seeded all of those opportunities to realize and harness that innovation. Now, if we stick with pharmaceuticals, there's a reason 50% of all clinical trials, new c…

AI assessment note: “pharmaceuticals is one that's close to my heart.”

Q And then I want to just understand a little bit about, is this product-led or production capacity-led? Do we need to make selections and have capital committed to bringing product to market before we start to build out the base, or is there an alternative way to get ready?

A Arsenal One is our, the factory campus that we're building in Columbus. Um, the operating system for that, the Arsenal platform, um, is really intended to reduce the, uh, the cost, the overhead that's required to, uh, automate and, you know, handle these processes in the most efficient way possible. So there's like kind of the software layer that sits behind that. We're actually working with Palantir, uh, the Foundry platform on some of these programs as well. And, uh, the idea behind this is that you want it to be as modular as possible. If we build out the factory campus, and we said, we're just going to build Furies here, or we're just going to build Roadrunners here, we're just going to build Barracudas here, that provides a tremendous limitation in a, in the moment of a conflict to be able to be responsive to the demand for specific things that are relevant to that conflict. And so we're kind of thinking about this more like contract manufacturers think about building assembly capacity, where they say, yeah, we make, you know, This VR headset for Facebook. We make this VR headset for Samsung. We make this VR headset for Apple. Um, we build a skill set around building optic systems, um, but we're going to build a bunch of them, and we're going, we're going to be much more effective at doing that by hitting the network of scale, uh, you know, get lower costs on all the indiv…

AI assessment note: “thinking about this more like contract manufacturers think about building assembly capacity”

Q Was there a view at that time in these years building Palantir where you saw an opportunity in hardware? Is that Kind of the motivation for Anduril, that we've got software, but there's more to do, and hardware could be reinvented, and we could build systems. I mean, help us understand the connection.

A Yeah, in the very early days, actually, I came by to pitch, Sham, uh, before we officially started the company, uh, and I think part of that pitch was we said, uh, we know how hard software is. We don't want to do that again. We believe hardware would be less hard. Um, and I think we ended up being right from, like, a getting going perspective. Um, but yeah, it's just, you know, the government doesn't know how to think about the value that's created by software. Maybe you feel like they're a little bit better now, but it was really hard in the early days of Palantir to convince them to think about it as anything other than lines of code, for example, or some, like, metrics that anyone that works in tech knows doesn't matter. But for hardware, they know. There's a bill of materials. In fact, the government made stuff for a long time. During the Cold War, there were literally ammunition factories that were owned and operated by the United States government. Um, so they can kind of go through a spreadsheet and say, okay, I know how much it costs for you to build this. I know how much margin I'm comfortable paying you. Uh, and it's a much easier, you know, crossing of the Rubicon. With software, it never felt like that.

AI assessment note: “we know how hard software is. We don't want to do that again.”

Q If there's mental illness, should they be committed to some facility to help them recover from their mental illness?

A Yes. In short, I think you have to be able to involuntarily hold people for addiction treatment, mental health care. If they're, if someone is repeatedly refusing help, if they are harming the broader community, which is often the case, whether that's vandalism, retail theft, it's been a battle here in our downtown where windows are constantly being broken by people who clearly are suffering from serious addiction and mental health issues. I think we should give people opportunities to accept help. It needs to be dignified. They need to be alternatives to the streets. We've stood up over 2000 indoor placements, interim housing placements, almost all individual rooms with doors that lock, giving people privacy. These are low barrier alternatives to the streets. Bring your partner, your pets, your possessions. We're really trying to meet people where they are. The good news? Two thirds of people say yes. The bad news, the other third, is so deep in the throes of addiction to substances like meth and fentanyl that they can't make a rational decision about their own self-care. I believe that that is, that it is not compassionate or progressive to leave them to endlessly cycle between streets, emergency rooms, jails, and ultimately die of an overdose. I think we have a moral duty to intervene Help them detox and get connected to a counselor and give them a chance to turn their lives…

AI assessment note: “Yes. In short, I think you have to be able to involuntarily hold people”

Q affordability problem in California? Is it that we don't have enough houses? If I see a lot of homes for lease, a lot of houses for sale, a lot of houses for rent, or is it that we have regulation that makes it hard to maintain a house and it's expensive? Or is there something else going on that's making housing unaffordable in California? Like, what's the, the core here?

A Look, I, I think it's fundamentally a supply problem. We've seen most recently in Austin, we saw in Seattle, we've seen dozens of markets around the country that when we remove barriers to the market investing in housing to meet growing demand, you slow down cost increases. It's economics one-on-one. Part of our challenge is that we've also Made it impossible to build affordably. So part of the challenge was zoning, high fees, all of the things government imposes that block housing from getting built. But we also have a building code that's incredibly cumbersome. We, I mentioned litigation earlier when it came to high-speed rail. Same thing is true for housing. We're not building condos in California, partly because construction defect liability allows a trial lawyer to come in in year nine of a project And if they see that the paint is starting to bubble, they'll file a suit, and they, they care about the fees. Their incentive is to generate fees, and we've created a legal framework that allows them to do that. And if you try to change it, the, another highly organized interest in Sacramento, the trial lawyers will push back on that.

AI assessment note: “Look, I, I think it's fundamentally a supply problem.”

Q What do you want, what do you want to get to in your term?

A I think we need to get, we need to get well over a 100,000. I think the right way to think about it, though, is it's really a ratio with jobs. For every two jobs an economy creates, you need at least one home. Part of the reason the Bay Area, and particularly Silicon Valley, is so unaffordable for working people, and we're seeing displacement of working families, is that over the last 20 years, this incredible economy here, Engine of innovation for our country and really the world has created about eight jobs for every one new home we've built. That is a completely unsustainable ratio. So I'm a little hesitant to come out and say we're going to build ten million homes. I think it's a ratio thing. It's a, it's a rate of change. We need to be building more year over year, but importantly, we need to pull back the fees, the long timelines, the overly complicated building codes.

AI assessment note: “I think we need to get, we need to get well over a 100,000.”

Q really afford. Yeah. How do we solve this problem of the cost of homeowners insurance? What's the right structural solution here for either incentivizing the return of insurance companies, creating an insurance pool that's well capitalized and can actually afford to make the payouts instead of needing to go to the federal government when there's a crisis and ask for a bailout? How do we fix this problem in California?

A I think there are a few components to the strategy going forward here. Number one, we have to rebuild the private marketplace. 90% of homeowners, maybe more, can be covered by private insurance affordably, and we have to rebuild that part of the market by bringing them back, allowing them to appropriately price risk, and creating more granularity. If you're willing, and you may not be, but if you're willing to remove those trees within a hundred feet of your home, you should pay a lower premium. If you prefer to have the trees there, you should pay the higher premium. So more granular pricing, Allowing appropriate pricing of risk is, is just really important. Now, for the five to 10% of homes that are up in, have, you know, in the, in the, in the hills, heavily wooded areas where there's lots of vegetation, we'll have to have higher, first of all, when you build, there's a question of how much more we should be able to build out there. Probably not a lot. What materials you use, they need to be fire resistant. And you'll have to pay much higher insurance just to cover the true cost of, of the likelihood of a fire and the cost of replacement. The other piece of this, though, is the state has to take more ownership for vegetation management. We spend eight dollars in fire response and recovery for every one dollar we spend on prevention, and there are plenty of urbanized areas th…

AI assessment note: “we have to rebuild that part of the market by bringing them back, allowing them to appropriately price risk”

Q sort of like the way Trump does truth social posts and, and so on. It's very antagonistic to the president, at least publicly antagonistic. At the same time, California relies on federal funding and requires a lot of federal cooperation, a lot of federal land in the state. How would you interact with President Trump and talk a little bit about how the governor has interacted with President Trump publicly?

A Look, I understand what the governor's doing. He's, you know, been holding a mirror up to Donald Trump and, um, Both fighting for California's values, which I appreciate. I think there's also just back to incentives. I mean, he's, he's running for president, and, and that's where I think this approach is coming from. I would take a different approach in the sense that as governor focused on delivering for Californians, I will fight the Trump administration through, through the courts, through the bully pulpit whenever necessary to protect our values, to protect our people, to protect state funding. I also think though that we need to find places where we can achieve a win-win with the The federal administration. I'll give you the example that's top of mind for me. I just spent time walking through Altadena, the Palisades, where people have lost everything. Over 10,000 homes lost between the two. People are desperate to rebuild. They're not getting the help that they need, and part of the reason they're not getting the help that they need is this hyper-partisanship in which California and Washington are fighting rhetorically and politically, and the people who are being hurt Are the families who have lost their homes who are waiting on the forty billion dollars of federal aid that's been promised, and that if it weren't for this political battle, would have already flowed to hel…

AI assessment note: “I would take a different approach in the sense that as governor focused on delivering”

Q actually conform to an outcome. And that creates these two sides. I just want to get your thoughts on prediction markets. What role do they play? How do we balance the capital formation that the market creates versus the investor protection, the insider trading that may be happening? It's a very complicated space. I'm not going to hold you to any of it. I just want to think out loud.

A Well, these markets aren't new. We've had them since the nineties. They started off with the electronic market in Iowa where Folks were predicting the political outcomes on elections. We've been surveilling and monitoring and policing fraud and manipulation in these markets for a very long time. And to the extent that there are contracts in certain markets, for example, what color Gatorade's gonna be, you know, dunked on the, the coach at the Superbowl. Some of this stuff is potentially at risk of being manipulated. And there's a risk that somebody on the team is able to go trade because they have special information about The Gatorade they put in the cooler. We have standards to make sure that those contracts should not be listed, and it's on the exchanges as the first line of defense, as self-regulatory organizations, to evaluate each contract and certify to us, the regulator, the CFTC, that those contracts are not readily susceptible to insider trading, manipulation, fraud, and the like. And we saw, actually, recently, a call sheet, one of the prediction markets, brought two enforcement actions against participants. One involved A contract, uh, related to Mr. Beast's YouTube channel, where one of his employees insider traded based on information of when a video was going to launch or what was in the video. And the same sort of authority that you have at the SEC around a duty…

AI assessment note: “to the extent somebody insider trades on information, we police that.”

Q that be a monarchy? Uh, I think, uh, is a question everybody has for you because you're the prince. This is a democracy. We don't have princes in democracies. And then number two, what do you ideally see as your role in the transition? And then would you like to have the opportunity to run for president and to lead the country out of this horrific nightmare of 47 years?

A My focus is on the process, not the outcome, and in, as a neutral arbiter, I'm not taking sides with one form versus the other. That's for the people of Iran to choose, and I think the world has seen successful models in both a republican system and a monarchic system. Examples, a republic that you have like in India, or like in Israel, or in France, or the United States are not exactly the same, but that's under the republican structure. In terms of, Parliamentary monarchies. We have the example of Japan, Sweden, Spain, other countries. So I don't think that necessarily you can equate democracy with one outcome in particular. It could be both models that people can emulate. So at the end of the day, you know, again, it's not for me to choose the outcome. I'm here to be a bridge towards that outcome. That's the function of a transitional leader. Not to run for office or not to have an aim for personal position of power or authority. But to be the element that unites the country towards a common purpose, and allow the nation to decide what is their preferred system. That's what elections and free elections should be all about, and the ballot box is the only means to measure people's opinion, and the majority will decide on that, and that's the process that I'm envisaged to bring about.

AI assessment note: “Not to run for office or not to have an aim for personal position”

Q that be a monarchy? Uh, I think, uh, is a question everybody has for you because you're the prince. This is a democracy. We don't have princes in democracies. And then number two, what do you ideally see as your role in the transition? And then would you like to have the opportunity to run for president and to lead the country out of this horrific nightmare of 47 years?

A My focus is on the process, not the outcome, and in, as a neutral arbiter, I'm not taking sides with one form versus the other. That's for the people of Iran to choose, and I think the world has seen successful models in both a republican system and a monarchic system. Examples, a republic that you have like in India, or like in Israel, or in France, or the United States are not exactly the same, but that's under the republican structure. In terms of, Parliamentary monarchies. We have the example of Japan, Sweden, Spain, other countries. So I don't think that necessarily you can equate democracy with one outcome in particular. It could be both models that people can emulate. So at the end of the day, you know, again, it's not for me to choose the outcome. I'm here to be a bridge towards that outcome. That's the function of a transitional leader. Not to run for office or not to have an aim for personal position of power or authority. But to be the element that unites the country towards a common purpose, and allow the nation to decide what is their preferred system. That's what elections and free elections should be all about, and the ballot box is the only means to measure people's opinion, and the majority will decide on that, and that's the process that I'm envisaged to bring about.

AI assessment note: “That's the function of a transitional leader. Not to run for office”

Q me just, let me ask you about that. You're obsessed with it in the sense that you think this is a modern day Salem witch trial, which is fascinating. Yeah. So you're fascinated from like a sociological standpoint, which is have humans evolved beyond, you know, where they were hundreds of years ago, engaging in witch hunts and things like that. Or do you think it's interesting? It's other ways.

A I think it's interesting in other ways, definitely in that way as well, but there are other ways in which it's interesting. I think it's almost interesting as an anthropological survey of sorts among, you know, elites, movers, and shakers, you could say, where Epstein did have this extraordinary ability to network and to convene people who probably otherwise would never have been convened. So I've been saying that I think Jeffrey Epstein is the only man On earth who could have brought together for a friendly social powwow, Noam Chomsky and Steve Bannon. Like I'm almost jealous of that. I mean, I'm sure that would have been a very fascinating discussion to listen in on. Right. And there are other examples. And so I think it's interesting from that perspective. I mean, I think everything that every little piece of information that can be uncovered about Jeffrey Epstein's life is now almost intrinsically interesting. Just given The salience of the story, right? So I guess I'm interested just from that perspective. Cause like, obviously he's now a historic or world historic even figure. And so, yeah, I'm always, I'm always down to find out something new about what Jeffrey was up to. So sure. I think it's interesting politically, just in terms of how this can be Leveraged into some sort of political battering ram against enemies, and you know, this is like the number one oppositiona…

AI assessment note: “I think it's interesting in other ways, definitely in that way as well”

Q Okay, wait, I can't let that just go by. What, what do you mean by involving co-hosts of this podcast?

A Well, I'm talking about Jason. I actually thought that the Jason email, uh, was very interesting. So you'll see that in 2011 that Jeffrey Epstein is contacting Jason about Bitcoin. This is by, I saw, I watched your discussion. I'm not implicating him in any crime. I'm saying if you watch and look at that email very closely, you are watching Jeffrey Epstein, a master money launderer and financial Mastermind himself be at the forefront of the Bitcoin technology and wondering about it in 2011, which as Jason even pointed out in the last episode that you guys did about this, when Bitcoin was some one dollar and some sort of open source project, like to me, that shows how at the forefront he was of new technology and new ways to move money surreptitiously across the globe, which is what I believe was his real strength and his basically Um, his, his, uh, raison d'etre for being so useful to all of these different foreign governments and intelligence assets, including ours, Russia, Israel, various different Israeli or various different intelligence networks across the globe.

AI assessment note: “Well, I'm talking about Jason. I actually thought that the Jason email”

Q So you graduate from McGill in computer science?

A Yeah, in computer. Well, actually I didn't graduate from McGill. Um, I, Went there for four years, and on my third year, I got an internship. On my fourth year, I got my, uh, third year, I got an internship job, and then, um, uh, extended, extended, extended, and I didn't go, didn't go back to McGill. So I didn't graduate from McGill. And later on, I found out I still need a bachelor's degree to apply for work visas in Japan. So I went to one, this is like the doc, this is 2000, this is the dot com, like height. Um, so I went to an online education program called the American College of Computer Science, uh, and got a degree there.

AI assessment note: “Well, actually I didn't graduate from McGill.”

Q So then you guys must have been ecstatic. You're like, wow, we raised fifteen million bucks. We're now going to launch this exchange. But then September comes around and then exchanges themselves were. So then what do you do?

A Yeah. September comes around. September fourth, like seven different departments of Chinese government issued a memo together saying that number one, crypto exchanges are no longer allowed in China. ICOs are no longer allowed. Mining is not allowed. Uh, crypto mining. Uh, we said, well, we're going to move. Well, we said, uh, we have to move. Uh, by then it was clear that while at the time China was one of the largest user base, uh, they had like 30 something percent user base from China, but we still have like 70% from the rest of the world. We said, look, if we cut off that 30%, we can still survive. We can, we can, we can actually survive pretty well. Yeah. Um, so we said, well, I just said, look, let's move. Let's move. Uh, let's move to Tokyo.

AI assessment note: “I just said, look, let's move. Let's move. Uh, let's move to Tokyo.”

Q Can you, by the way, before you get to your counterpoints, what is the hawkishness that the market is specifically?

A The idea of hawkishness is that you're going to do quantitative tightening. That means you're going to pull money out of, out of the system, right? By allowing debt to roll off and not repurchasing. You know, mortgages or other things. Number two, it's that you won't lower rates as much as other people might have lowered rates. So that's what the market is kind of fearful of because he's been very critical in the past as we were on this podcast, right? Of Jerome Powell in June of 21, it was obvious to everybody in the world that inflation was skyrocketing and the fed sat on its hands. So, but let me give you a couple of thoughts. Number one, They've said very clearly, and he said clearly, that he really thinks that Greenspan got it right in the nineties, right? That sometimes you can have really high rates of growth without inflation. That comes from productivity in the nineties. That was driven by the internet. Today it's driven by AI. He thinks AI will be very deflationary. And so he's more likely to let the economy run so that we can have these four or five percent You know, GDP prints without panicking and saying, oh my gosh, I gotta, I gotta raise rates. Number two, when you look at the balance sheet, the Fed's balance sheet peaked at nine trillion dollars in 22. It's already rolled off to six and a half trillion. We've had quantitative tightening to the tune of two and a …

AI assessment note: “The idea of hawkishness is that you're going to do quantitative tightening.”

Q Amazing. And the gas turbines, those were a blocker for a while too, huh?

A Uh, they still are. I mean, you know, gas turbines are, are a massive supply chain constraint. Um, as people look to energize compute infrastructure, I think a lot of people, we were really one of the first groups to be focused on, ah, you know, natural gas powered data centers, doing things behind the meter, off grid, ah, and I think a lot of people have sort of followed this pathway, ah, which has created a lot of supply chain challenges, ah, with some of the major producers, folks like GE Vernova, you know, Caterpillar has a company called Solar that we work with very closely, ah, you know, Siemens, Mitsubishi, ah, and we actually recently did something with, ah, an incredible company, Boom Supersonic,

AI assessment note: “Uh, they still are. I mean, you know, gas turbines are, are a massive supply chain constraint.”

Q freedom of speech, something that kind of got lost in our industry for a couple years in technology, but has now made, I think, um, some significant progress on. Does seem like some folks in Europe don't share our love of freedom of speech. Maybe you could explain to us What the tension is today, and what some of the regulations are that have been put in place in Europe?

A Sure, absolutely. So, the two main regulations that I've interfaced with since taking office, and part of this is just a product of My first official trip was to Europe, and while I was in Europe, a large fine came down on an American platform, X, under the Digital Services Act, which I'll get into in a moment. So, Europe, um, especially since, since the Second World War, but I think really since the American founding and our codification of the First Amendment, you know, America has taken a much stronger approach on free speech than even most of the West. And with the rise of the Internet and all communication, or a lot of communication becoming transnational, We see these new technocratic regulatory frameworks in Europe bumping up against the commitments to free speech in the United States, and Jason makes an important observation that for a while some of these large American technology platforms We're more inclined to moderate or to censor, kind of in conformity with some prevailing, um, some prevailing norms and concerns in the United States. But I think in the United States, we've shifted back toward a less censorious approach, and so have these platforms. And at the same time, you have, ah, regulatory efforts in Europe and the UK, and I'll, I'll name a couple that I think have been particularly relevant. So the UK has something called the Online Safety Act. The Online Saf…

AI assessment note: “We see these new technocratic regulatory frameworks in Europe bumping up against the commitments”

Q it's about immigration, right? I mean, so I've seen a bunch of these examples, you know, on X. I saw, um, one clip on X where a judge was handing down a two-year sentence against somebody. I don't know if this rings a bell, but supposedly for speech that I think was criticizing the UK's open immigration policies. That's where I sense a lot of the, the prosecutions are, right?

A Right, and this is another place where, you know, Free speech and freedom of expression are American values and interests in and of themselves, but another priority for the administration is common sense on mass migration, and a lot of the speech that offends those in power has to do with migration policy, so there was a thirty-one-month sentence handed down to a suburban mother named Lucy Connolly in the UK, uh, because after a man called Axel Rudabanka stabbed, I think it was a seven-year-old girl, an eight-year-old girl, and a nine-year-old girl at a birthday party, It was ensuing unrest, and she, she tweeted, ah, something anti-migration, and it was pretty inflammatory, but it would have been unambiguously legal in the United States. Um, she said, if this is what migration is going to do to our country, and I'm paraphrasing slightly, but I remember it pretty well, if this is what migration means, then burn down the migrant hotels for all I care. Ah, this was a bereaved mother who'd lost a child. She saw three little girls murdered for no reason, and she reacted, and then she felt bad, and she deleted the tweet. That was a 30, 31 month sentence.

AI assessment note: “there was a thirty-one-month sentence handed down to a suburban mother named Lucy Connolly”

Q measurements, though, the price of drugs in the United States is almost three times what it is outside the United States. So I'd love to hear a little bit about the specific role of pricing drugs. What sort of actions have you guys taken and can you take to help bring down the price of drugs for patients, for, for care providers, for insurance companies, and ultimately for the economy?

A It's been the great American ripoff. You could buy a GLP one drug for 1300 dollars in the United States and go to London. It sells for 88 dollars. Or you go to Germany or France and buy any of the drugs that are cost a lot of money in the United States and they're half a third or a quarter of the price. And so President Trump has given us a clear charge and he says, look, we're the largest purchasers of drugs. We want the best price in the developed world. It's called Most Favored Nation Status Pricing, and thanks to Dr. Oz and Chris Klopp and others at CMS, we did our part at the FDA to be a part of this. We've gotten drug companies to the table, and we've got them to agree to Most Favored Nation Status Pricing. That's gonna radically lower the price of drugs. With the GLP-I example, for example, it's gonna come down to a 149 dollars for the first three months. Um, other countries are gonna pay more. We have been financing 60% of the R&D cost to pharma companies. Other countries need to pay their fair share. And when it comes to this president, whether it be NATO membership fees or whatever, he wants to see other countries paying their fair share, and so we're getting that delivered. Another big way in which we are going to lower drug prices Is by cutting the red tape at the FDA for bio, biologic drugs. So most, 51% of the, so let me back up for a second. The fastest area of h…

AI assessment note: “we've got them to agree to Most Favored Nation Status Pricing”

Q Ok, last question. What's most exciting to you in the frontiers of science in human health?

A You know, we at the FDA try to be referees, so we see, um, different technologies competing. For example, sickle cell disease. There are monoclonal antibody treatments, and there are gene therapy treatments. Now, we tend to get excited about one over another, but the reality is we, we don't know which horse is going to win that race, and so we want to be the referees. I would like to see in the Trump administration during our term, A cure for type one diabetes or some meaningful treatment for type one diabetes. Uh, a powerful treatment for ALS. Um, treatments for certain kinds of cancer where we've seen now PD one blockers and KRAS inhibitors melt the tumors away. So you don't need surgery or chemo. You talk about a health reform. That's, that's more powerful than a lot of the health reform ideas we have out there. You don't need surgery or chemo or radiation. I mean, think about the reduction in expenditures. Um, we'd like to see a universal flu shot, so we're not guessing every year. Something that gives you lifelong protection against future strains because it targets a different part of the influenza virus. And I'd like to see something powerful for PTSD. Um, a lot of Americans are still suffering from PTSD, some from having served in a war. Uh, these are young people oftentimes who, Stood up to serve their country, and they're suffering. We are still losing 7000 plus veter…

AI assessment note: “treatments for certain kinds of cancer where we've seen now PD one blockers”

Q phase two, phase three trials into a phase one, phase two slash three by taking into account all of this additional data? Some people have talked about the idea of using AI plus other health data that's collected and allowing the phase three to kind of roll into phase two and create a much more expedited computationally assisted approval process. Is that something that's on the roadmap or is discussed?

A Absolutely. There has been tinkering of combining phase one and two, phase one, two hybrid trials, phase two and three hybrid trials, approving something with sort of a preliminary approval after phase two, if the results are really promising. And those are all steps in the right direction, but I think of something much bigger. Can we move to continuous trials? Can we use Bayesian statistical evaluation Which we announced this week. We are now going to allow Bayesian statistics to be used. So now you can, if something works, instead of having a committee meet twice a year to do a cut of the data and print it out and everybody looks at it. I mean, I was literally on those committees. Why can't we in real time with AI tools figure out when there's a safety signal or efficacy established And then call it at that point, allowing more people to get the drug as soon as we know it works.

AI assessment note: “Absolutely. There has been tinkering of combining phase one and two”

Q Well, let's shift over to food. Maybe I'll just give you a moment to share what you changed in the food pyramid in the announcement last week. Why you made those changes, and why weren't they made before?

A Yeah, so we have had decades of medical dogma and corruption putting together food pyramids that make no sense. People can tell, I mean, the open secret was that they make no sense. They're scientifically inaccurate, and they were oftentimes curated by the food industry or the food industry's influence on academia. Nutrition science may be one of the most corrupted fields in all of science, and it gave us the dogma that We had to focus on saturated fat and just eradicating natural healthy fats from the U.S. food supply, ignoring that you replace fats with healthy, with, um, refined carbohydrates, which are not healthy. And we have this carbohydrate heavy diet now for American children. And guess what? 38% of kids have prediabetes or diabetes. Is that a surprise? The rise has paralleled the shift from saturated fat or regular food To pumping refined carbohydrates and added sugar. 60 to 70% of the calories of a child in America today are refined carbohydrates. No one has talked about it. It's been in a blind spot as the medical establishment has had this myopic focus on the boogeyman of saturated fat. And so we had a food pyramid that was entirely backwards. And so we flipped it upside down using good science, talking about a, a previously ignored area of nutrition, and that is the importance of protein. We've been getting about half the protein that we need. The protein levels i…

AI assessment note: “we flipped it upside down using good science, talking about... the importance of protein”

Q But Tony, was there a period during that time when you were gonna quit, where you said, it's not working?

A No, no, these were my favorite times. In fact, after that, after the 400 rent, which, by the way, because I couldn't make the 400 rent, I got downgraded, not only was there someone else on the loveseat, someone else moved in that could afford the 400 rent, So I paid 300 rent for a bean bag on the ground. And let me remind you, the bathrooms were in the other guy's bedroom, so you had to tiptoe, if you had to pee in the middle of the night, through somebody else's bedroom. So it was after that, actually, after basically the first year was that, I decided to just start sleeping in the backseat of my car, behind the comedy store, where I wasn't, you weren't even allowed to park there. It's a tiny parking lot. So I would be up on one of the hills in the Hollywood Hills, and after at two 30 or three a.m. when you're done, I would walk up a hill and get my car and drive it back into the empty Comedy Store parking lot, pull into the back. Juan Carlos, the maintenance man there that would show up at like four or five a.m. was nice enough to wait a few hours to try to let me get a few extra hours of sleep before he would start nailing shit and fixing everything. And it's literally the times now that I have a touch of success. Um, it's the times that I think about all the time now. Every single time I find myself looking at the skyline of Austin from my beautiful fucking home with a craz…

AI assessment note: “No, no, these were my favorite times.”

Q How many people did you recruit to this Legion for the ballot monitoring?

A It ended up being more than one million volunteers. Everyone with a specific task. David, we had no money. We could not print flyers or posters. You know how much was our publicity budget? Zero. We didn't pay for one ad. Nothing. When we went around the countries and we stayed in hotels, the regime would come the next day and close a hotel. If we went and stopped in the street to, to buy some food, then they will punish the, the, the restaurant or, or the snack place. I mean, they, they blocked streets. They, they got our people in prison, persecuted those that were in control of the electoral and organization departments. I mean, this was huge, but they turned this into an epic. And, and citizens decided that it was going to be their own epic, their own victory. So we train all these people with our diaspora. We, we, we had these apps, uh, designed and We knew, and this is a very important part, that we had to prove our victory. For the first time, we needed to prove the results. So we designed a system through which we would collect the original Tali sheets, we would scan them, and we will publish them in a digitized webpage, super robust, for the whole world to see. And in order to do this, imagine we are in a country where 60% of our territory doesn't have access to the internet or even cellular phones. So we needed to geo-optimize, you know, process, uh, centers to process…

AI assessment note: “It ended up being more than one million volunteers.”

Q low, but it happens enough. That the antiparticle actually starts to delete part of a black hole, and that's how black holes evaporate, and they have this theory, all these interesting things, but can you tell us how, what quantum tunneling is? So this is another one of these sort of features of quantum mechanics that arises from the fact that these things are kind of waves and probability functions.

A Yeah, so if, if you have, um, if you have an electron just traveling through space, hitting, hitting a wall, let's say, There's a little wave, wave packet wave function to it. So it's not a single particle. It has some extent to it. And what happens is that when that particle hits the wall, Quantum mechanics say there is some amount, small amount of this wave function, or if you like, the particle going through the wall, and then to the other side. Now, most of the time, it, uh, it bounces off, but every once in a while, it goes through. And you know, this is seen in, um, uh, everyday devices. This is not, if you build very small, um, memory circuit, you have to worry about Electrons tunneling and charge leaking off your capacitor. They have magnetic memories that depend on these tunnel junctions. So this is a very well-known phenomenon. If you make the, this barrier, this insulator, just the, you know, 10, 20 atoms thick, then that's thin enough for it to go through.

AI assessment note: “when that particle hits the wall, Quantum mechanics say there is some amount... going through”