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EpisodeĀ 4-10-2026
Yeah. And then take us up to the present. Yeah. So what it is, is for friends, it's an app. Well, it's evolved. It's an app and an AI agent to build infrastructure for your whole social life. So we want to be the operating system by which you get off your phones and back into real life. So the primary product is an app that has got events that we think you might want to go to, communities that you might want to belong to, and then people that we think you'd want to meet, and that's how it gets going. And then what happens? And maybe you guys are in the place in your lives here where at some point you actually have a lot of friends, you have a good social life. But what sucks is it's hard to find time to see them. Right. It's, like, hard to get out of this rat race to actually prioritize seeing the people that you care about. And so that's where we just launched an AI agent called Penelope. And her job is both an imessage as well as soon in the app to help be a, what we call a social life instigator and chaos coordinator to get you together with the people that you should be spending more time with. So, yeah, what's the actual like on.
Then there's more further in the future kind of technologies. In vitro gametogenesis. So that's a technology to create gametes so sperm and eggs. Eggs is what would be more useful generally from adult cells that are not gamete cells. So that could potentially create thousands of embryos. So I think you could use. And then there's also gene editing actually. So you can use CRISPR or some technology like that to go into an embryo and edit particular base pairs, remove some disease causing variant or maybe more controversially enhance some ability. Like you could put in the Tibetan altitude adaptation gene that NIMS dye has or you could put in a sprinter gene or something. So I think my idea for the future of this space could be that you have this kind of stack where you have in vitro gametogenesis that creates thousands of embryos. Then you can get the genome data, do the predictions of disease risks and traits from that, select a few promising embryos and then do some edits in them. So that kind of excites me. Sci fi. Well thank you so much.
Yourself out there and how do we. How do we solve that problem for people? And that was the beginning of the PI journey. Yeah. And then take us up to the present. Yes. For friends, it's an app. Well, it's evolved. It's an app and an AI agent to build infrastructure for your whole social life. So we want to be the operating system by which you get off your phones and back into real life. So the primary product is an app that is got events that we think you might want to go to, communities that you might want to belong to, and then people that we think you'd want to meet. And that's how it gets going. And then what happens? And maybe you guys are in the place in your lives here where at some point you actually have a lot of friends, you have a good social life. But what sucks is it's hard to find time to see them. Right. It's like hard to get out of this rat race to actually prioritize seeing the people that you care about. And so that's where we just launched an agent called Penelope. And. And her job is both an imessage as well as soon in the app to help be a, what we call a social life instigator and chaos coordinator to get you together with the people that you should be spending more time with. So, yeah. What's the actual onboarding workflow? We see a lot of people set up Mac Minis just to do stuff with imessage. I imagine that you're handling all of that on your end. And then do I start by downloading the app or can I text something? What's the workflow to actually.
Value of this technology to expand humanity's presence both in Earth orbit, but beyond as well. You're absolutely right. So the further you get from Earth beyond one au, solar efficiency actually declines exponentially with respect to distance. So you can imagine your solar panels just ballooning in size as you get further and further to make an equivalent amount of power. But even beyond that, we believe the market for nuclear power in space will be much larger and move a lot faster than I think a lot of people think. The overwhelming thing that will drive that is space is now a war fighting domain. Right. And you know, as we seek to employ higher powered assets in Earth orbit, in lunar space, there's pretty clear physics there that a nuclear power system scales more favorably on a size and weight basis compared to solar panels. Right. So, you know, you want to do 100 kilowatt spacecraft, those solar panels would be, you know, like the size of a football field. You could do a similarly sized nuclear powered spacecraft and actually fit it on a Falcon 9. Yeah, okay. So yeah, nuclear powered spacecraft, you're fitting on a Falcon 9. That means that the primary stage is still traditional, but then once you get to low Earth orbit, the nuclear power is kicking in like.
As well. Yeah. What. What year do you expect to set foot on the moon? Myself. Yeah, well, I think, you know, I already had that chance going to the Air Force Academy and trying to be a fighter pilot. I wasn't able to do that. But my, my, my kids, you know, the other day I was talking to them and I was like, hey, isn't this cool? Artemis 2, don't you want to go to the moon? And they said, dad, I want to live on the moon. So that's when my mind just exploded. Right. So that's what our kids are saying these days. And kids are so genuine, they say what is on their mind. If it interests and excites kids, you're onto something. Yeah. What are you watching for? Learning from the Artemis to.
I thought it had got up to the 30s, but okay. Well, there's a fun article in the Wall Street Journal, a very bizarre article about a deadly civil war that tore apart a group of chimpanzees in Uganda. Not exactly a fun article, but it's gripped everyone, and everyone is wondering what is going on here with these monkeys. A chimp group's success may have led to its violent downfall, a new study suggests so. Slow news week. Very slow news week. Slow news week when the Wall Street Journal is reporting on a deadly civil war among chimpanzees. It's just a crazy thing. I don't think many people knew that this was even possible. But let's read through it and try and understand what's going on. A rare and deadly civil war has broken out between two factions of chimps in Africa. According to new research, the dispute erupted in what was once a cohesive group of about 200 chimps whose ties stretch back two decades. It just took three years for them to turn on each other, according to a new study in the Journal of Science. We've known for a long time that chimpanzees will attack and kill their neighbors, said primatologist John Mitani, professor emeritus at the University of Michigan and a study co author. It turns out they will do this even when those neighbors are former friends and allies. So I'm just reading this from the lens of. Of the technology industry. Yes, many, many cases there is. This is potentially a metaphor. For 20 years, the chimps of Uganda's Kibale national park were living the good life by being together, Mitani said. They helped one another, dominated and killed apes from neighboring groups, expanded their territory and boosted their babies chances of survival. But in 2015, the group started splitting into two clusters. Several male chimps who had bridged cliques within the larger group died from disease, weakening social ties around the same. A new alpha male rose to dominance. Changes in the dominance hierarchy can fuel more aggression and tension, said Aaron Sandel, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and study co author. As aggression escalated, the factions drifted into separate areas of the park. By 2018, the split was complete. It's interesting, it took like 10 years to do this full study, I guess, since this all started back in 2015. But by 2018, the study was complete. The two groups had no remaining social or reproduction ties between them. The last chimp infant with parents from different groups was born in 2015. What was once the center of the group's territory became a border, which Chimps patrolled, the researchers found. Then the hostilities began in earnest. Members of the smaller group of the two groups launched coordinated lethal attacks on the other, aiming to kill rival adult males. By 2021, these raids had expanded to target younger apes, averaging several infant deaths a year ago, devastating a year since. And there's a video here of the encounter between these two rival groups. And they're fighting it out. It's crazy. So more than 24 apes have died as a result of the conflict. That's horrible. The true death toll is probably higher given that so many chimps. There are so many chimps in a large area, some deaths go unrecorded. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split. But sorry to jump in, but you know, this group of apes has been being, has been studied for, sounds like over 10 years now. any point did they think like, hey, let's break it up. I don't know is the ethical thing to do to let them continue to fight? At what point do you step in? How many chimps need to die before, hey, let's stop the research project and step in? I don't know. It's an important question. We may have an assignment for you this weekend. I think you need to hop on a plane. Let's see if there's any more about this. I mean, there is, you know, like for a lot of these studies, observation, you want to be hands off and not putting your finger on the scale, I guess. But number one comment, put any 200 humans together and the same thing will happen and you only need 20 humans. If it's an HOA, it's a little Stanley Milgram prison experiment vibes. It's very, I think it's very Girardian. Right, because you have the two warring groups, memetic rivalry, right. They're exactly like each other and you gotta fight it out until you have the scapegoat and whatnot. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Primatologist Jane Goodall observed what may have been a similar split in subsequent violence among chimpanzees in Tanzania in the 1970s. But the findings have long been debated because most of the observations were in an area where humans were regularly fed the chimps, altering group makeup, size and aggression. So maybe you should be feeding the monkeys to keep them happy, I guess, or the chimpanzees with these chimps. Researchers aren't certain what prompted the split, but said it's possible the apes were victims of their own success. The group grew large, and even though Resources were abundant. The chimps may have perceived increased competition for food and mates. The once smaller of the two chimp groups is now the larger one. Because its members have killed so many rivals, they observed more lethal attacks. It's an ongoing conflict, they said, and the conversation is ongoing in the. I think actually this does make sense that it got too big, right, because you have this idea of like, Dunbar's number, so you have 150 people, the group of chimpanzees gets above 150, it's at like 200. And then you have the kind of wars, the calling. You think because you can't know everyone, right, Chimps can't know each other. Would Dunbar number be the same for chimpanzees as humans? I wonder if anyone's ever studied that. I mean, you assume that there's some lineage there, that it stays relatively similar. Yeah. Jane Goodall passed away last year and had a obituary in the Wall Street Journal that was very interesting. I think we touched on it briefly, but we can go through a little bit more of it. Jane Goodall always remembered the first time a wild chimpanzee took a banana from her outstretched hand. In that moment, she would often say, the chimp, a grizzled male she had dubbed David Graybeard, welcomed her into a community of humanity's closest living relatives. It opened a relationship with wildlings that in due course, upended scientific misconceptions about chimpanzees and turned her into a global icon of conservation. As an untrained young woman, in the summer of 1960, she first ventured into the forests of what is now Gombe national park near Lake Tanganyika in Tanzania, to study chimpanzees. Equipped with little more than a notebook, a pair of binoculars and almost infinite patience, for five months, though, the wary creatures evaded her, if, in fact, no one had ever been able to study them at close hand. By winning Graybird's trust, she gained entry to the troop of wild chimps that became the focus of her life's work. The chimps had accepted me and gradually I was able to penetrate further and further into a magic world that no human had ever explored before, the world of the wild chimpanzees. She died of natural causes in California. Lapis.
Time 5:07pm Pacific so we'll be tracking that. In other space news, SpaceX has has some financials going out in the information today. SpaceX posted nearly $5 billion loss last year from AI spending well but they generated 18.5 billion in revenue to people familiar with the figure said. This is from Corey Weinberg in the information. The financial figures include Xai the Elon Musk founded artificial intelligence company that SpaceX acquired in February. The net loss as other financial figures that consolidate SpaceX and XAI's performance haven't been previously reported but now they are here. Yeah, I think everyone was expecting this. SpaceX very profitable company bought acquires a very unprofitable company combined but new opportunity and all in the pursuit of vertical integration. And so SpaceX has closely guarded its financials as it prepares for what will likely be the largest IPO of all time. The loss figure shows that investors who participate in the IPO will essentially be financing Musk's unproven AI ambitions in order to get a piece of high performing commercial space and telecom firm. But that's sort of been the space been the Tesla model for a long time. Elon has always had multiple irons in the fire. One project that's working and producing cash flow and growing to finance the next piece of innovation. Ashley Vance has an interesting deep dive on the Tesla semi truck factory. He went and saw it rolling off the factory line which was one of those projects that has been rumored for a very long time, announced a very long time ago but seems to be getting off the ground. Tesla's spent heavily on chips and data centers to power Xai with capital expenditures for the division nearing 11 nearing 13 billion. So lots of capex that was 50% more capital spending than the rocket and satellite divisions combined. It is crazy how quickly you can spend a lot of money on a data center versus you'd think a satellite manufacturing facility or a rocket manufacturing facility would be the most expensive thing but it is in fact not. And yeah, what's that other. What's the company that Dellian backed that. Yeah, the satellite bus company in I'm forgetting the name of it but like wildly profitable. Yeah. It's been pretty astonishing to see space companies which you would just assume would would lose money indefinitely actually figuring out ways. Was it endurosat? Endurosat, yeah, Endurosat. And when we talked to the founder of Endurosat it did sound like there was a lot of really important manufacturing but it wasn't at the level of like buying tools from ASML and spending $100 million on a single machine. I think ASML's lithography machines are up to like $400 million and there's a huge backlog. So. So if you, you know, the chip. Chip expenditures can get really, really high. SpaceX's core business of selling rocket launch services to governments and companies as well as selling its own Starlink satellite Internet services together generated nearly 8 billion 8 billion in EBIT in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization and stock based compensation in 2025. So 8 billion EBITDA. That is a fantastic number for SpaceX. A very, very solidly profitable business there at the core. The two space related divisions are intertwined with most SpaceX launches of its Falcon 9 launch, with most SpaceX launches of its Falcon9 launches carrying Starlink satellites rather than other companies payloads. And I saw another piece about how there's still like way more demand than supply just in the launch market broadly. A lot of companies have spun up with big plans to put things into orbit. We talked to a founder y who's doing a new GPS system in low earth orbit. And so there's a lot of demand for launch and Elon and the rest of the space industry seemingly can't make rockets fast enough. I'm excited to talk to Jason Kim of Firefly Aerospace about the launch market broadly going to the moon and what else Jason has planned in the in the orbital economy, the lunar economy, the space.
The News on Artemis 2 is exciting. Today is splashdown day. If you've been tracking it, it's been over a full week. At this point. It's 13 minutes of things that have to go right. NASA said of re entry and splashdown with the first astronauts from the moon in over 50 years. After an epic trip to the moon and back, it's landing day for the four astronauts of NASA's Artemis 2 mission. For the first time in over 53 years, astronauts are returning to Earth from the moon. A fiery 13 minute plunge through Earth's atmosphere at about 24,000 miles an hour will subject them to degrees and temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit with only their heat shield for protection. Feels fast. Feels like they just left. Yeah, it does. So if you're looking to actually track the mission, the Artemis 2 Orion capsule will return to Earth tonight, April 10 at 8pm Eastern. 5pm 5:07 Pacific Splashdown is in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, not far from here. Returning home on the ship to end a 10 day trip to the moon are the NASA astronauts who we followed. And they seem very, very happy. They just woke up for landing day. Very exciting.