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The management style that I do is sort of problem solver in chief, which is, I take the most impactful problems that are not being solved, and that's on my desk or desk or room or whatever you want to call it. That's where I'm spending my time. So people go, oh, what do you spend your time on? Like, it depends what the fricking problems are that matter. And it can change. And that's how I roll. But it means once you have a problem solver in chief mentality, that flows downward. That means any direct report of mine must be the deputized problem solver in chief. And they've got their because there's only 24 hours in a day, I can only solve so many myself. They have to then take that for their world and do the same thing, and then do the same thing to their people. So.

Nobody's nailed executives all the way. It's weird because what will happen is executives talk a fucking awesome game. And there's two things you want an executive to do. You want them to be able to organize at scale. Organize and manage at scale, lead at scale. You also want them to be epic problem solvers. The most strategic, badass problem solvers alive. This is like being left handed or right handed. And there's very few people that are ambidextrous. But you need that now. Somebody's, they're always leaning a little bit one side or the other. The best executives are the ones that are doing both well. But I have come to the conclusion over my years doing the stuff is the problem solving is the most important thing. If you get somebody who organizes and manages well but cannot solve a problem, they're going to be doing ridiculous stuff in a super organized way. And so that's. And sort of my theory, maybe there's a couple theories on how I manage or how I lead. Is that the only constraint on your imagination is management capacity. But what is management capacity? It's really problem solving at scale. Because if you are doing super well over there, guess what? They, they're problem solving there. I can create other awesome problems. Like I love creating problems, go solve those too. But if I don't have the management capacity, then I'm effed. So the management style that I do is sort of problem solver in chief, which is I take the most impactful problems that are not being solved and that's on my desk or desk or room or whatever you want to call it. That's where I'm spending my time. So people go, oh, what do you spend your time on? Like it depends what the frickin problems are that matter. And it can change. And that's how, how I roll. But it means once you have a problem solver in chief mentality that flows downward. That means any direct report of mine must be the deputized problem solver in chief. And they've got their cause. There's only 24 hours in a day. I can only solve so many myself. They have to then take that for their world and do the same thing and then do the same thing to their people. So the bottom line is you gotta prove that these folks can solve actual problems and aren't just talking the talk. That's the number one. And then on the interview process simulate what it's like working together so that day one really feels like week two and day one. You better be excited. So if you're excited in day one, after simulating what it's like working together in the interview process, then day one is really week two and you're still excited. You took a lot of risk out of the system. That's all I got for you. I have a question about regulation.

Every bad thing that you see in transport, like systemically, any, anything in transport that you view as systemically bad was most likely pushed by the trial lawyers and the insurance companies. Wow. Every single bad rule. That's weird and dumb. Yeah. The insurance companies and the trial lawyers were in the game big time. Where, where do they align? What do you mean? Well, because trial lawyers, I imagine, want more accidents. Yeah. Insurance companies are the ones that pay for it. Yes. No, no. Remember insurance companies make margin on accidents. Okay. If there's no accidents, there's no insurance company. They, in a weird way, they love accidents go up. As long as it's in their actuarial table, they're pumped. Wow. Yeah, right. They don't like is accidents they didn't plan for sure. But accidents that they planned for business, big insurance outcomes they love. Like I remember we went to DC and the taxi system, the, the liability on a ride, if you took a taxi, it might still be this way to this day, was like $25,000 in a taxi. But we went to, we being Uber at the time, went to D.C. and they pushed a one and a half million dollar policy per ride. Okay, so what does that mean? That means, well this, you know, accidents are going to happen. We're probably like Uber's probably safer. But it just. Do you think the trial lawyers weren't pumped about that? You think the insurance companies weren't also pumped about that they can go get up to? Because by the way, the insurance company might be on the other side and they're like, oh, there's a, there's a one and a half million dollar bank account here that I can get access to on a random accident, right?

Yes, we definitely have a bunch of next generation projects in development, including the next generation of the Prima implant. We have new versions of that kind of in pre clinical studies now. Hope to get those into humans next year. It'll probably be a three year minimum, possibly five year cycle between versions for a while, I think because the need to do the intervening clinical trials. But the Prima as it is now is a really great existence proof that we're on the right track. This is the first time that really useful form vision, a thing that looks like an image, has been able to appear in the mind's eye of a blind patient. But it is not high resolution full field color vision. It's like looking through a straw at the center of your vision where you've lost this high acuity perception. And it's black and white, it's high contrast, but it's only a couple letters at a time or maybe a word at a time. We are still working to expand the field of view, make it so that you can potentially get colors. We think we know how to get to red and green. Blue is a little more difficult. And then get higher resolution, get towards native acuity and so on. Each of these we have, there's clear ways, places to go, but it's going to be a long road to get that all the way to all of these patients. Well, congratulations on the approval. We also have some really cool stuff coming on the brain computer interface side, on the vessel side, but those will probably come out a little later in the fall. Can't wait to talk about it.

He's the founder and CEO. We kept him waiting, but. Max, how you doing? Welcome back to the show. Hey guys, thanks for having me to see you. Give us the update. What's the news? So previously we've talked about, I've told you about our retinal prosthesis. So we have a chip that's implanted in the eye to restore vision to patients that have lost. Lost it due to the death of the rods and cone? Specifically, yes. Age related macular degeneration. So last week we got marketing approval in Europe. So we received the CE mark, which is like, it will be shortly available to consumers in Europe. I got a question. I got a question. So Jordy has this problem where he drinks too many beers and he gets double vision. Can this help with that? Fortunately not. Wait, jokes aside, scientifically it cannot double vision from drinking. Yes. Probably not. Impossible. It's the last scientific problem. We'll never solve it anyway. Very funny. More seriously, how quickly, how, like what does a go to market look like for a product like this? You have approval. Step one's approval. Yeah. How quickly can it be adopted by. Because you know, people. I mean, Europe's a big place, right? Yeah. Insurance facilities, building the machine that installs it. Like there's a whole process here, right? Yeah. Well, it's a relatively simple one hour outpatient procedure. The machine is the surgeon. Don't need actually that many surgeons to reach these patients. So. Right. So the CE mark is a marketing approval in about 30, 30 countries that accept it. The next step is we need to register country by country. So we have registrations going in in Germany and Italy and the Netherlands and Spain and the UK like this week. That process takes about a month and then doctors can start scheduling patients. I mean, we sell implants to hospitals essentially, and then they sell them to patients. So it's the hospitals, it's patients, but we have a registry. The hospitals have registries. The doctors know who their patients are. With this demographic, actually one of the things that happened is because there was really nothing available for them. Ophthalmologists have been telling these patients, like, you know, if you're 80 and have AMD, you don't need to be sitting in my waiting room anymore. Like, you don't need to come here. And so now they're starting to reach back out to some of those patients that they haven't said, we don't need to see you for the last few years, said there's something available. So the first patient is probably six weeks away or so the Next fast big step is reimbursement. Yeah. And so, yeah, what does it look like in America? I mean, you're six weeks away in Europe. What's the FDA track like? I know that it's already FDA breakthrough device and humanitarian use device, but take us through what the commercialization plan looks like in the U.S. yeah. So the other thing that we announced today is that we got two humanitarian use device designations from the fda. We actually got this back in March, but sat on them for a little bit. That unlocks an expedited approval pathway called the humanitarian device exemption that we're submitting for imminently in the next week or so. That is, can be a 75 day review. And so it'll take like, there's a couple loops of that, but we're hoping that early next year it'll be available to some, some set of American patients. But that's up to the FDA review. I don't want to get you in trouble with the fda. I know how high stakes it is, but it is just crazy that Europe's moving faster around regulation. Like this should be a signal to the FDA to say, hey, if Europe's proving it faster, we got to, we got to step things up over here. I don't, as an American, I just don't like falling behind, but I don't know. Yeah, I mean, in this, I mean, I would normally want to agree with you. I think in this case it's actually a little bit unfair to FDA because there's some, there's some accidents of history that just led to this like happening first in Europe. The FDA standards are not that much different, but yeah, absolutely, we should hope to have this here. Also. The FDA is, they care about slightly different things. The filings are a little bit different, but hopefully it won't be that long either. Yeah. Talk about next steps. I mean, you're properly commercializing right now. Does this mean new factory, new team members, new just new muscle inside of the company? Yeah, absolutely. I mean we've built out a whole go to market team in Europe. So this is clinical education. Like a bunch like we need to go reach ophthalmologists where they are, tell them about the product, help them understand the results, answer their questions. Rehab specialists. This is a little bit different than what you may have seen from the motor BCIs, where it works very quickly or with there's a little bit of rehab that the patients have to put in to really use it. And so we have people on the ground there that will do that with them in the beginning. Over time we want to have that be more and more just in the wearable. They put on the glasses. The glasses talk to them. They talk to the glasses. It walks them through the exercise. But initially that's a little bit higher touch. And then also there's a bunch of surgeon training. So we run wet labs for surgeons where they can come and practice the procedure with us so that we know that they know how to do it before they're doing it with patients. Give me a sales and Marketing 101 for targeting ophthalmologists. Can you target them on Instagram reels? Do they listen to a specific podcast that you can sponsor? Are you at conferences? I know people give medical device companies, they give out lots of like pens and chairs. But I think there's like limits because you can't like bribe them, but you do want to give them merch. Like what is the 101 level of marketing to ophthalmologists? I mean a lot of it is conferences. So there's a handful of conferences that we go to and then getting. Not just having a booth there, but presenting scientific results. Typically this isn't us, but it's our academic and scientific collaborators. Maybe a surgeon at a hospital that did a study, they'll present their experience with it. There's also advocacy groups. So there's opportunities to sponsor like webinars through these, these networks. But it's a really small community, I think like ophthalmology overall and especially in these types of retinal diseases. It is very densely interconnected and they all talk. And so it's a matter of kind of. There's a handful of advisory boards that we have to go through. For example, our data safety monitoring board for the clinical trial. These are often opportunities to have that community come and be familiar with our results and then. And then disseminate them. So it might be the end result, might be a little bit more one to one because of how small the community is, is you can actually reach them directly. What is. Yeah, there's not like a huge insta spend on that. Not yet. What is the shape of Science Corp look like right now, given that you have a product that's commercializing, but I imagine you're doing a bunch of R and D in the background for other opportunities and use cases. But how are maybe you spending your time and then what does the team's time look like? Yes, we definitely have a bunch of next generation projects in development, including the next generation of the Prima implant. We have new versions of that in pre clinical studies now hope to get those into humans next year. It'll probably be a three year minimum, possibly five year cycle between versions for a while, I think because the need to do the intervening clinical trials. But the prima as it is now is a really great existence proof that we're on the right track. This is the first time that really useful form vision, a thing that looks like an image has been able to appear in the mind's eye of a blind patient. But it is not high resolution full field color vision. It's like looking through a straw at the center of your vision where you've lost this high acuity perception. And it's black and white, it's high contrast, but it's only a couple letters at a time or maybe a word at a time. We are still working to expand the field of view, make it so that you can potentially get colors. We think we know how to get to red and green. Blue is a little more difficult and then get higher resolution, get towards native acuity and so on. Each of these we have, there's clear ways, places to go, but it's going to be a long road to get that all the way to all of these patients. Well, congratulations on the approval. We also have some really cool stuff coming on the brain computer interface side, on the vessel side, but that those will probably come out a little later in the fall. Can't wait to talk about it. I'm excited. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come. Yeah, thank you so much for, for coming on and the work you're doing. Yeah, just thanks for having me. You're, you're doing, you're doing the thing that you're doing. You're doing something that could get humanity broadly back on the side of technology. That's a good point. Yeah, because it's like one of those things like it seems like so much of what the industry has been doing a lot, making sand think is not quite enough for people. They're like, what have you really? What have you done for me lately? We literally had someone come on the show and say what have you? But I feel like this is one of those things like curing blindness that over time will be sort of hopefully undeniable. I mean, this isn't about the money. I don't think it's about the money for a lot of this team. It's certainly not about the money for the patients. I think like many things in tech, this is really about power. But if you want to know, like real power, like the power to heal the sick, unlike economic or military power that can be easily shared with others. And that is, I think, like, really what technology is about here. And we need to paint a picture of how this is being used in that way, in a way that is really should disseminate broadly and I think just incredibly pro social. Going back to, I know we're almost out of time, but going back to like, what did you place the odds at doing this, accomplishing this moment when you started the company? It seems like, I don't know, I've always had trouble thinking about these things. Like, I can't put a number on it. It's just you kind of keep going and as long as success is in the set of possible outcomes, you're just constantly trying to minimize the odds that you don't get there. It is really hard to put a number on it. Definitely. It is cool to see it actually happen. Yeah, yeah. You're sort of nonchalant about it, but it is almost unbelievable and really, really incredible. So well done, well done to the whole team on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, Max, Chris, have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about FIGMA agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your FIGMA files with design stuff.

I mean, I do find it ironic that, you know, AI is what it is, yet everyone seems to be working harder and harder. And it's one of these things. Technology has always promised that it would do a lot for us and then we would have more free time to do other things. And it just seems like no, no, no and no, especially at work. So yeah, I think it's a real problem and I can sense it here occasionally that, you know, yeah, we're getting more done, but it weighs on people more because you can be doing multiple things at once now and you can be parallel working with a bunch of different agents doing a bunch of different things. It's like, to what end? Where is this going and why does it need to happen? Not that the technology is not amazing, but I'm not sure it's doing good things to human beings, but the tech is incredible, obviously. But yeah, imagine if 37 signals had got access to today's models a decade ago and didn't tell anyone and just got to use them. Yeah, maybe you're. Part of the problem is that everyone has access to the tools and you're in a competitive category and you. And, and I feel like there's this concern of, of if we're not. I mean, it's always a question of like, do you want to be, do you want to. At least if you're a venture backed company and you're competing against another venture backed company for a market, you don't want to be working less hard than them. That's generally not a good, not a good strategy. But those are inputs. Like customers don't care about the inputs. They, what is the like, how does it manifest in the product? And I'm not seeing products get better at the rate that the development process is getting better. Yeah. So people are doing a lot of stuff and yet like, people actually don't want their products to change rapidly either. People want to get used to things, they want to settle into something. They want to understand how it goes. They don't want things to be moving constantly and things to be added all the time. So there's a disconnect actually between how much you can make and how much people actually can absorb and incorporate into their own workday, basically. So yeah, I think at the end of the day you're building a product. However you build it, you're building it. But just because you can build more of it doesn't mean it makes it a better product, make it a worse product. And you're seeing that all over the place. Right now, actually, so I don't know. It's great to have the tools. The tools are amazing, obviously, but you still have to decide what gets through the slit. Like, what?

Well, if you don't want to watch reels, you'll soon potentially be able to go to the Cinemaramadrome in Arclight, Hollywood. Sony is eyeing Ringing it back. Production team, you got a review. Have you guys been to the Cinerama Dome before? Scott? Yeah. Pretty awesome. I think I saw a Nolan film there, and I think it was 70 millimeter IMAX back in the day, and then it didn't. I think it didn't make it through Covid, but they're maybe bringing it back. They have the giant sign outside that says the dome. Yeah. If they were gonna stay out of business, we should. I remember, Yeah, I remember as a kid, I thought that they would show the movie, like, projected on the dome, like, on the whole ceiling. And it was only for sort of, like, special, you know, like, astronomy movies. But they will just show a normal movie. And it's just. You're just in a big dome. It's cool. Next studio, if Sony doesn't buy it, maybe. I don't know. Could happen. Can we.

Range Rover GT feels like a better. If you're going with a device, you want to get one of these. The Range Rover gt. A grand tour by Range Rover. Fifth member of the Range Rover family. Wait, it's electric? That is a crazy choice. Interesting. So they actually this is a real announcement. Fifth member of the Range Rover family. Elegant electric GT defined by a sleek silhouette and coupe perform proportions combining peerless long haul comfort, effortless performance and signature rain rover breadth of capability featuring an interior shaped by the same reductive principles. I mean what's the, what's the highest level electric vehicle right now? Probably the. The Rolls Royce. Not the Ghost. The Spectre. The Spectre. And so for that crowd, maybe this makes sense. But you introduced this as potential Urus competitor. He thought it was going to be souped up more like a turbo gt. I didn't see the EV product, but they went ev. I wonder how this will sell. I mean for a lot of Range Rover buyers it's about comfort, it's about quiet, it's about smoothness. And EVs can get you there a lot quicker. I like the way it looks. It does look beautiful. It's like a good commuter Care about autonomous driving?

Before we bring in our next guest, let's talk about augmental. What's that? They built a mouth pad as a touchpad. You can drive with your tongue. Wasn't this a joke? I was doing the grill. This is what everyone has been waiting for. The next moat. Taste is Taste is the let's pull this video up trackpad in your mouth. The thing is that if you're going in the mouth, you think you would just be whispering and communicating via text. Yeah. Is this. Is this inherently. Tyler, definitely buy one immediately. But is this inherently short? Like transcription, like. Because if you can just tell your computer what you want to do and it just uses the computer for you. Even with computer use, you could say like, minimize this window and it can just go click that. So I actually like the idea of mouth electronics. I think that that's something interesting. But I would just put a microphone in that and then you would just whisper to it and tell the computer what to do. It could be for the production. Production team is excited about using it to control the cameras here in the studio. The ptz, Ben, just standing there like this the whole time, just. It feels like it would get exhausting. You could do soundboard with it. Jordy. Over a hundred people already use it. Some for up to 16 hours a day. I cannot believe they got a hundred people. We got a note from daily drivers in the chat. It's an odd. It's an odd choice. It's an odd choice.

Like a week and a half a week. Can we pull up your new. Can we pull up your new website? So we saw a post on the timeline from DJ Cows. He says, startup idea. Milk jug with two handles for efficient passing. And we turned it into a website. A whole product called Relay. Pass the milk, keep the piece. Can we recenter this a little bit? Yeah, there we go. There we go. Pass the milk, keep the piece. It went reusable. I don't think you want reusable for this. That's the one thing I change here. But they say it's the world's first jug made for handoffs. The relay bottle. Easier to lift, simpler to share, and strangely satisfying to pass. One handle was always doing too much. A gallon is heavy. A breakfast table is busy. Who is passing a gallon table? 1 gallon, 2 handles, 0 awkward handoffs, fewer fumbles. I didn't think milk needed reinventing. Then I passed it across the table. Very, very fumble. 87% of our kitchen testers saw the. Said the second handle felt natural on the first try. I like that. It just comes up on the. On the fly with all these little marketing slogans that sound pretty believable, like milk made to move. More handles, fewer fumbles, pass it on. Seems like something that they would put on a billboard. If this is a real product, it is a very, very. It's just so, so fun being able to use the full, the full stack of AI, image generation, AI writing, HTML generation, and then. And then just automatically host it on a site with basically one prompt. Yeah, this was just literally one prompt. I put the photo in there with the startup idea and said, make it a site and it just did it, which is a lot, a lot of fun.