In this episode, we’re joined by the Founder and Head of Blend, Nima Ghamsari. We begin with his parents immigrating from Iran to the U.S. in the 1980s and how Nima made his way to Stanford. He quickly made a name for himself as a talented online poker player — winning millions of dollars and famously showing up to Palantir as a new hire in an Aston Martin. Learn about the lessons Nima brought with him from Palantir into building Blend, and how he took on the ambitious task of bringing the outdated, cumbersome mortgage process online. Next, we dive into Blend’s meteoric rise and fall as the U.S. mortgage industry hit the skids in recent years. Now, Nima believes AI has the company poised for a comeback. Learn about its AI agent, “Autopilot,” and why Blend has the most deployed agents in financial services right now. On this podcast, we talk a lot about new AI-first companies; Blend is a great example of a talented SaaS company embracing AI for a powerful Act II.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:45 Millions playing poker to joining Palantir

06:00 Most important lessons from Palantir

07:30 Founding Blend / understanding the mortgage industry

11:25 How to win over banks and risk-averse customers

15:50 Blend’s meteoric rise and fall

19:00 Going all-in on AI agents / Blend’s Act II

22:55 Is Blend undervalued today?

26:50 Impact of AI on internal operations / increased productivity

32:00 The future of SaaS

36:20 The optimistic case for AI

Disclosure: Joe Lonsdale is a principal of Eight Partners VC, LLC (“8VC”), a registered investment adviser whose funds currently hold shares of Blend Labs, Inc. (“Blend”). Joe also has a longstanding personal relationship with Blend and its CEO, having served as an early investor, adviser, and board member. The statements in this episode reflect Joe’s personal views as of the date of recording and may contain forward-looking statements that are subject to risks, uncertainties, and assumptions. Nothing in this episode constitutes investment, legal, tax, or financial advice, nor should any statement be understood as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or invest in any 8VC-managed vehicle. Listeners should conduct their own research and consult their own professional advisers before making any investment decisions. American Optimist is Joe’s personal podcast; the views expressed are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of 8VC or its affiliates.

“The behavior of any bureaucratic organization can best be understood by assuming that it is controlled by a secret cabal of its enemies.”

That line has always sounded funny because it is exaggerated; it keeps being useful because, in case after case, it is not exaggerated enough. Universities that are supposed to cultivate excellence and bring up the most talented young people in our society as leaders instead teach them contempt for our history and values. Charities that were created to help the needy have reoriented themselves almost entirely to help the overpaid people who run them (and often, their friends & political allies, too). In cases that sometimes sound too stupid to be true, orchestras have embraced racial audition policies; leading art museums have fired elderly volunteers who give free tours to the public… for being white. While these organizations differ in their specific flavor of brokenness, they invariably share one important characteristic: their crazy, destructive behavior is paid for and encouraged by wealthy donors who should know better, or do know better but are too cowardly to stop giving or do anything about it.

The SPLC is a particularly vivid and absurd current example of Conquest’s 3rd Law: earlier this year, the Justice Department indicted the civil rights organization (at this point that’s a loose description) on fraud and money-laundering charges tied to over $3 million in payments to white nationalist extremist groups — groups off of whose actions the SPLC was able to fundraise handsomely from prominent and well-resourced Americans. Whether any of those people will update their mental model of the very respectable people who solicited the donation… remains to be seen. This widespread cowardice is becoming a crisis for our civilization.

The 20th century built many astonishing things. It built universities, research labs, agencies, hospitals, foundations, media companies, and civic organizations that shaped the modern world. But today, many donors are still judging Harvard, Yale, the SPLC, the ACLU, and countless other institutions by what they were in the 1980s or 1990s, not by what they are today — ignoring clear evidence of brokenness. Meanwhile, the most transcendent human achievements now tend to come from new models.

SpaceX has restored the American imagination around space and pushed the frontier. This is not an argument against NASA’s heroic past, just a recognition that the frontier was reopened by a new organization with different incentives and a very different risk tolerance. AI research in America has been built around talent density, technical seriousness, speed, and new organizational assumptions. “The labs” are unique 21st century institutions, capturing outsized value thanks to winning models.

This is the part that should make the donor class stop and think — especially the new donor class being formed right now. Amazing things are still happening. Human beings are still capable of doing things that would have sounded impossible a generation ago. But again and again, the energy is coming from new forms, new organizations, new incentives.

Between the SpaceX IPO — the largest public offering in history — and forthcoming offerings from AI firms, we’re about to have tens of thousands of ultra-wealthy, new philanthropists. They are people who’ve become wealthy as a result of participating in these new models and bold organizations. The outstanding question is: are they going to do new things in philanthropy, too? Are they going to be fighters? Or will they be conquered by the conquered institutions?

This is a letter to those people.

The vast majority love being loved. They want to do things that get them praised and not cause stress or attacks on their business, so they skip out on the most important work, or convince themselves that work requiring less courage is “just as good.” And philanthropic organizations have spent decades learning exactly what to say to exactly this type of person. The scores of NGOs, the university development offices, the partisan donor networks — these are essentially evolved parasites, and the host is a wealthy person with a conscience and social ambitions. Every touchpoint has been A/B tested across thousands of interactions in order to make them feel good, get them to open their checkbook, and make sure they don’t get too curious about the internal workings of the organizations they are now underwriting.

If you want a quick validation of this claim, ask any university trustee in America whether they know anything about the classes that are being offered in the ethnic studies, anthropology, classics, history, sociology, or related departments at their school. What percent of those professors love our civilization and its principles? Have they ever discussed this with the President of their university? Do they know what’s going on in the building that bears their family name?

A few archetypes recur among ultra-wealthy people who could be making a difference, but instead are exploited by our legacy institutions:

Private Lives. Some entrepreneurs are engaged in businesses that are not meant to draw attention, or have complicated personal lives, or families who would suffer from public attack. Even if you have done nothing wrong, the media can spin up stories to make you look like a villain.

Instinctive Cowards. If you’re smart enough, you can construct an airtight case for inaction. The vastness of the universe, the complexity of systems, the long arc of history, whatever it is. The socialists will take over healthcare anyway; it’s structurally determined. I have heard versions of this from a genius billionaire, delivered with complete conviction.

Most of our human cognition works this way: we begin with what we want — comfort, safety, not to get involved in some messy fight — and we reason backwards to justify it. We pretend we are acting based on reason, but we are acting based on what our intuition and desires have already shaped in our minds. The professorial and scientific types, people whose identity is built around thinking rather than rashly acting — quite common among technologists — are especially vulnerable to this.

Too Old to Rethink. Professor Arthur Brooks has a model of fluid versus crystallized intelligence. In our older years, our fluid intelligence — highly adaptable, responsive to new inputs — gives way to crystallized intelligence. On the positive side, crystallized intelligence can look like built-up wisdom or mental models; on the negative side, it can be like mental ski tracks, out of which we are unlikely to turn, even when our surroundings do.

Because of compounding, many don’t approach the really significant levels of wealth until the age where they are less likely to do new things, and where even with an avalanche of evidence that institutions are broken, they will have a hard time updating their mental models. This is very common with great men I admire. Many are still bright and aware of what is going on. But their view of the world is stuck from when they had more fluid intelligence: the 1980s, the 1990s, the period when many of these institutions were still basically functional, or at least not entirely conquered. They are judging the broken institutions by what they were, not what they are.

As ever, there’s a balance. The older person who has built several companies across four decades has genuinely learned things that a thirty-five-year-old policy entrepreneur has not, let alone a twenty-something working on startups fresh out of school. The question is whether that accumulated knowledge is being deployed toward the fight properly.

Your Fighting Years

Thinking about policy and philanthropy is a genuinely tough thing at any age, but if one isn’t paying attention to these things in the prime company-building years, it becomes less and less possible to build them right later on.

At scale, the effect of compounding — even from small amounts of wealth — is that almost all of the philanthropic money is centered on people who are not in a phase of life to effectively resist the forces of brokenness. This makes it doubly essential that people put up the personal risk and time to learn new frameworks when they are in their prime entrepreneurial years.

To help conceptualize the challenge, consider five levels of engagement. The vast majority of people who could be on our side in key civilizational battles are stuck in levels 1 or 2 for some of the reasons I’ve discussed above. It’s a personal goal of mine to bring as many as possible into levels 4 and 5 over the next few years.

Level One is supporting what is broken in the most straightforward way possible: massive checks to dysfunctional institutions. Harvard and Yale have too much of their administration and faculty conquered, their culture broken, discouraging virtue and love of liberty in the most promising young people in the country. Writing them a large check may feel like gratitude. Too often it is civilizational self-harm with a building named after you to cement the dishonor.

Level Two is supporting what is broken but in a clever way. You want to give to your university, but you direct it to a special program, or the sports team, or an endowed chair in something you care about. You tell yourself you have threaded the needle. Maybe in some rare cases you have. But usually you are still strengthening the brand and the institution. You have freed up unrestricted funds elsewhere, provided reputational cover, and gotten yourself socially captured inside the institution’s network, all while feeling strategic about it.

This is where the lying becomes most sophisticated. University presidents and politicians often play a similar role: they tell entrepreneur types what they want to hear, expressing supposedly shared values, while delivering real power to the interests and activists who are their actual constituents. They are expert at making a major donor feel heard while the institution’s actual direction never wavers.

Level Three is doing nothing, or orthogonal philanthropy, and this is underrated. There is integrity in knowing your limits. It is possible to support “vanilla” cultural projects like music and art without actively harming civilization — although, as the example of the woke orchestras and museums show, even in these areas you have to be careful these days.

Level Four is funding the right people who are already in the fight, but not necessarily getting too involved yourself. We should want most people to be here. At this level you need to have a social immune system that almost nobody around you will help you build, but you do not need to become the builder yourself.

Level Five is the hardest and highest level: building something entirely new the right way, and marshaling your own talents, reputation, judgment, network, and capital toward the creation of new institutions. New universities. New media. New policy organizations. New legal shops. New civic infrastructure. New talent pipelines into government. New technical schools. New models for health care, housing reform, public safety, and education.

Building something that can actually fight, survive, coordinate talent, withstand pressure, and keep its mission over time is much closer to company-building than to conventional philanthropy. It requires the same existential seriousness that creates great companies. The reason companies work — in fact, most of them don’t actually, but the ones that do — is that they could die. As long as someone is willing to spend, “philanthropy” cannot die, and that is precisely why it so often doesn’t work. The feedback loops that make iteration possible are almost entirely severed. A nonprofit can be wrong about everything for decades and still get the check, because the check-writer has switched into a different cognitive mode than he or she was in when the wealth was actually built.

That is why Level 5 is so rare, and also so important. For some entrepreneurs, the memory of the existential fights is enough to scare him or her into doing things that are relaxing or “fulfilling” later on, rather than a repeat of the hardest work of their lives (building companies that win). But we owe it to our posterity to fight the hard fights and bring that entrepreneurial knowledge to bear on things that really matter. There isn’t a backup country, and dysfunction has a way of spreading.

At the Cicero Institute, where I serve as chairman, we have spent nearly a decade fighting on land and in law, with teams in over twenty states. We have worked on complicated areas captured by special interests against the common good, and helped pass dozens of pieces of legislation. Groups that seem benign to most people, including doctors’ organizations, homelessness NGO service providers, licensing boards, professional associations, and government unions, get far more aggressive than most would expect once you threaten their power. They fund your opponents, capture regulators, smear you, and make your life difficult.

The University of Austin (UATX), which I co-founded and chair, is also having great early success and impact. We were lucky that many allies such as Jeff Yass and dozens of others saw the need in our civilization, and stepped up to join the endeavor. I will write more about it elsewhere; but suffice it to say, we are attracting some of the most talented students in the country, with many turning down Ivy League schools to come to UATX (tuition-free!). They are being trained as bold thinkers and fighters for our civilization and its principles, and are also already getting connected to work with top builders! There is a lot left to build at UATX — our country needs functional 21st century schools of education, journalism, law, and others. We are now well on our way; anything worth doing will be attacked and face adversity as this endeavor did at times.

My friend Charles Koch recently turned 90. Charles is a true philosopher who built one of the world’s most valuable industrial corporations, and endured decades of attacks for his political and philanthropic work. The principled, philanthropic community he founded, now called Stand Together, is a platonic ideal for what someone of his experience — and yes, age — can do to help others build bold new things to make the world more functional and prosperous. Groups like Stand Together are a key resource and inspiration as entrepreneurs become interested in how they can deploy money in service of our civilization; as one such entrepreneur, their partnership has been invaluable. They continue to inspire and partner with many more Americans building bold, functional 21st century institutions.

The summer of 2026 is shaping up to be one of the great American wealth-creation moments: SpaceX, AI, and a generation of companies built in genuinely twenty-first-century ways are minting great fortunes for individuals, and for our country. A lot of people are about to become very rich because they bet on new models, new institutions, new ways of organizing talent and risk. That wealth can be an enormous boon for the country if we get it right. But it would be an absurd civilizational tragedy if the fortunes created by new models get vacuumed up by… Harvard.

Human instinct is to work on things that are lauded rather than controversial, to find the version of engagement that gets you praised rather than attacked. We must resist this. The things worth doing almost by definition require running toward the hard problems, the ones others will not touch. The country does not need more passive benefactors laundering their consciences through obsolete institutions. It needs men and women with courage.

Civilization builders are needed. There may be no higher calling for those with the resources to answer.

More Reading:

Construction permitting is one of those policy areas that always sounds a bit esoteric. Who could get passionate about permitting reform? Let me try to persuade you with a single, big-picture sentence:

At the same time that the technological edge of our civilization is moving faster than ever toward great achievements, physical construction for everything from apartments to major industrial infrastructure is embarrassingly, catastrophically slow.

Today, it’s clear that permitting is an area where there is a large and widening gap (thanks to technology) between how the world works, and how it could work, with huge consequences for all of us. Upending the permitting regimes around the US is a lay-up if we care about building and achieving great things. My friend and erstwhile colleague Judge Glock and I have written a short blog about how to make the right changes. Enjoy!

Joe

The Case for Private Permitting

The private sector moves faster than the government at almost every conceivable task. With the growth of artificial intelligence, that divergence will widen.

Government’s lethargy means it will become an ever-tighter bottleneck for new projects, but most importantly for new construction. There is a solution: the government should allow private companies to provide inspections and permits for projects. These companies can use artificial intelligence and new technologies to make the permitting system both seamless and transparent. States that care about growth and affordability can expand existing third-party permitting opportunities, which have been used in many places for decades now.

In most of the country, building officials employed by local governments inspect and approve all new construction or rehabilitation. These officials generally are not required to have any education or background in construction, and the government makes itself immune to lawsuits from any failures of these officials.

Government permitting has long been a realm of both arbitrariness and corruption. In fact, it is the very slowness of the process that allows officials to demand cash to move it along. Just this year, a plan-checker for San Francisco’s building department was sentenced to prison for accepted tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to approve and expedite permits, a California town inspector was charged with soliciting a bribe to accelerate a building plan that had stalled a construction project, a supervisor at the New York City Department of Buildings was indicted on accepting tens of thousands in bribes to accelerate permits, and two Suffolk County, New York building officials were indicted on bribery to accelerate permits.

In some places fraud can become the norm. A decade ago, New York City indicted 16 city officials for accepting or demanding bribes to facilitate inspections or permits. The more complicated and convoluted the process, as in New York, the more opportunities for officials to demand payment to clear them away.

For years, however, many areas with insufficient public funds or small local inspection departments have outsourced inspections and permitting to the private sector. In these cases, the government either has a list of pre-approved firms to provide services (say, several firms for fire code inspection, several firms for plan review, etc.) or sets standards for any firm that wants to provide those services.

In the third-party or private sector model, the government’s job is pushed one step back: from performing the actual inspections to keeping tabs and supervising the inspectors and plan approvers. It creates a clear framework for approval and disapproval and allows others to figure out how to meet that. The private firms’ decisions are considered approved unless the government has a clear and articulable reason they are wrong.

Private firms that know how to use technology for inspections and permitting will have a substantial advantage over building code officials with no background in either engineering or AI. Private companies today are already using thermal imaging, infrared cameras, satellites, drones, and other tools to perform Remote Virtual Inspections. These tools are nearly completely absent in the government.

Some of the best use cases of AI today are handling the nuances of complex rules and catching violations of them, usually with far more specificity than even the most trained specialist. Plan and permitting review are the sort of the process that AI can shorten from weeks to hours. The particular processes that AI performs also can be mapped and made legible in a way impossible for a human permit reviewer, who will always have more opportunities for arbitrariness. Building officials today have neither the incentive nor the capacity to update their techniques to the technological frontier.

Many worry that allowing private firms to provide services would lead to a race-to-the-bottom, but there is no evidence of that in areas that have been doing this for decades, and no reports of mass building failures or collapses. Unlike the public sector, private firms are typically required to have specifically certified engineers or staff that can perform these reviews, and they are liable at law for mistakes they make.

State legislators in recent years have begun pushing even large cities and other areas to allow private inspectors and permits. Places such as Arizona, Texas and New Hampshire have allowed private inspectors or permitters if local governments do not meet pre-approved deadlines. Texas has also allowed developers to access private inspectors immediately after a disaster to speed up recovery.

Starting in 2002, Florida has allowed private firms to do inspections and permitting at a developers’ choice. In recent years they have expanded the rules to allow reimbursement for fees that the government otherwise charges for such inspections. Combined with mandated timelines on public-sector permits, Florida has seen a drastic increase in timely approvals.

Third-party reviews are sometimes considered a means to avoid accountability, but they are actually a means to improve it. It is easier for government officials to remove a certification from a firm that fails than it is to fire a government employee who fails. Developers who want inspectors to genuinely improve and inspect their buildings can sue those who clearly failed to do their duty, as opposed to a government that immunizes itself from the same suits.

One of the most important aspects of third-party review is that it replaces a black box with a clear process. Instead of sending forms to a faceless bureaucracy, developers know when something is amiss, know who to blame, and know what to fix. In laws like Texas’s or Florida’s, if the government refuses a private inspection or permit, they have to provide clear reasons why in clear timelines.

The private-provider model should be a more general model for government. Such practices are already the norm in many parts of government and in many countries. In America, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration certifies product safety organizations such as Underwriters Laboratories to test and approve products. In Europe, the local equivalents of the Transportation Security Administration do not run security, but contract with and supervise private firms that perform the actual operations.

The key to affordability, most especially for housing, is increased productivity. The delays and arbitrariness of government officials in approving new buildings are the most important reason construction has seen sharp declines in productivity over the past 60 years. Since in no field is “time is money” truer than in construction, where high interest loans and long-lead times of labor and material allow costs to pyramid quickly, reducing approval times would make a substantial impact on affordability. One study from Austin Texas found shortening the time frame to approve multifamily housing by 3.5 months could reduce rents by 4 to 5 percent.

Some states, such as Texas and Florida, have already shown that third-party permitting can work. But these and other states can be bolder. States can allow more companies to provide more types of reviews, and they can allow those companies to operate without waiting for any government timelines. Bringing in private inspection and permitting companies on the technological frontier would remove one of the biggest sources of arbitrariness and corruption in government. It would also be the best way for states to improve housing affordability. If states want a more prosperous future, they should make government a facilitator of building instead of an opponent of it.

While studying at Cornell University, Scott landed an internship at Boeing. He quickly jumped to SpaceX as an early employee and worked on the Falcon propulsion systems and Dragon capsule. He later became Partner at Founders Fund, where he focuses on energy, infrastructure, biotech, and other key sectors. In 2024, he founded General Matter to rebuild America’s nuclear enrichment capacity.

We begin the episode with Scott’s entrepreneurial journey, the contrast between Boeing and SpaceX, and how to build a culture that prioritizes speed and performance in a highly regulated sector. Next, Scott explains the origins of General Matter and breaks down the science behind creating nuclear fuel. In the 1980s, the U.S. produced 80% of global enriched uranium; today that number is zero. Learn how post-Cold War disarmament destroyed our capacity to the point where we are now reliant on Russia, among others, for enrichment. Scott explains how China surged ahead in electricity generation, and what it will take to jumpstart America’s nuclear renaissance. Finally, we cover exciting new possibilities, including nuclear power in space and on the moon, and what a future of cheap, abundant energy could look like.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:20 Boeing vs SpaceX / lessons on speed & performance

05:20 What made SpaceX unique?

09:05 General Matter / how to make nuclear fuel

16:45 Disarmament and relying on Russia

19:50 The AI energy crisis / falling behind China

24:30 Founders Fund and energy investing

27:15 How to scale nuclear energy

32:00 How to fund the nuclear buildout

36:15 Nuclear in space & new possibilities

At 8VC, we take a strong interest in the Food and Drug Administration as entrepreneurs and builders who’ve been deeply involved in the US biotech sector for decades. Last year during the first 100 days of the new Trump administration, we published a lot of ideas for the agency.

You may have read earlier this month that Dr. Marty Makary departed as FDA Commissioner. Now, as the administration seeks a new leader for the FDA, we wanted to share with you some of the principles and frameworks that we are circulating in Washington.

Every administration has to make tough decisions amid a lot of private jockeying and feedback from various interests (not all of them honest or positively-aligned), so it’s a little unorthodox to do this in public. But after all, the FDA isn’t “for” Washington — it’s for you! More than 300 million Americans need a bold, courageous FDA because we can do so much better as a country in bringing new cures to our fellow citizens who need them most.

So, in that spirit we’re publishing the issues that we think are key right now.

One of the most gratifying parts of our work as investors is seeing the brightness of the future come into focus. In just the last month we’ve seen data from an amazing new gene therapy lowering cholesterol heart attack risk, and another attacking pancreatic cancer. Whether these breakthroughs reach patients in time will depend not only on the scientists and founders building them, but on whether the FDA has a functional, innovative culture.

As ever, it is strong leadership that ultimately matters most.

Joe

More than any other in recent memory, this administration has been willing to be bold in defense of American interests. It must do so for US biotech as well. Our US biotech ecosystem is in crisis: to be blunt, China’s industrial policy combined with a sclerotic FDA over the previous decade is stealing and eroding away the industry. This is happening at a time when AI breakthroughs should be accelerating faster and cheaper cures.

China is not “competing” with American biotech, this isn’t a level playing field. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is flooding its companies with capital, tilting rules for domestic champions, and leaning on IP theft and coercion.

To fix this, the next leader of the FDA must be a fighter. This includes not just embracing innovation but also confronting and at times overruling the internal bureaucracy. The next commissioner can do all of this by prioritizing speed, domestic resiliency, and regulatory clarity across drugs and clinical AI.

As the administration seeks a new commissioner, we think these topics make for great starting points in their interviews about their plans.

1. Accelerate generation of US clinical data on a level playing field

A. Create an expedited Investigational New Drug (IND) pathway for Phase 1 trials. Our current Phase 1 trial regulations require 12–18 months of preclinical work that Australia’s version of an IND (in Australia called a CTN) have shown unnecessary; the US regulations are a top-down, Soviet legacy of the mid-20th century that is straitjacketing us and delaying innovation. If we implement the Australian learnings, including 3^rd party or medical center trial oversight (who review the IND instead of the FDA) we can speed up patient access to novel drugs while saving FDA reviewers’ time and taxpayer dollars.

The leading research institutions of the world like MD Anderson Cancer Center and Memorial Sloan Kettering should be empowered to decide when and how they launch Phase 1 trials, within regulatory frameworks.

B. Scale and operationalize FDA’s Real-time clinical trials initiative to reduce the dead time in-between clinical phases. Current clinical workflows are discontinuous with weeks to months of dead time between phases. Scale the pilot into a broad initiative to monitor trials and trigger reviewer actions or feedback on trial designs quickly.

C. Ensure foreign clinical, preclinical and manufacturing sites are at US standards. Continue prioritizing foreign inspections and enforce in-person inspections with no warning. Ex-US sites, in particular those in China, have serious ethical issues (such as consent) in China Investigator Initiated Trials or trials in Xinjiang province. Chinese animal testing companies engage in work which would be illegal under US animal welfare laws. Ensure that US researchers aren’t penalized for following US rules through robust ex-US enforcement to produce a level playing field at all scientific stages.

D. Codify and harden objective criteria for the Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher that require US based preclinical work, manufacturing & primary US clinical sites as a condition for receiving a voucher.

2. Create modern frameworks for AI regulations

A. Create a predictable pathway for clinical AI approval and monitoring. Clinical AI systems need clear benchmarks aligned to outcomes that matter to patients. FDA should prescriptively develop reasonable approval bars with post approval monitoring and an eye towards keeping innovation speed equal to safety concerns alongside a culture that partners with US innovators.

B. Enable controlled continuous learning. AI systems get better through continuous learning. Legacy regulations focused on single point in time evaluations and should instead enable the continuous nature of these systems so that patients can benefit from the latest and greatest data; not those from 12 months ago.

3. Better align approval and commercial requirements to patient needs

A. Create tiered commercial Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) standards matched to patient need. FDA rules today apply different clinical standards for different patient populations based on need. But GMP standards are the same for all. Define fit-for-purpose requirements for n-of-1, ultra-rare and broad-population products, preserving safety-critical controls while avoiding large commercial-scale burdens where they do not substantially impact patient safety for small product lots.

B. Approve more surrogate endpoints, or other alternative clinical data sources Whenever the FDA formally approves a new short-term surrogate endpoint for drug development massive capital and innovation flow to find cures for these diseases. The progression-free-survival endpoint drove tons of advances in cancer that we are reaping today (from PD-1 antibodies to curative cell therapies). FDA needs to lean into this superpower and accelerate qualification of more surrogate endpoints and beyond into more acceptance of natural-history datasets and digital endpoints that can better enable rural patient outcomes in the approval decision making frameworks. FDA must also finish the job on the Plausible Mechanism Framework for individualized therapies.

C. Convince companies they won’t be penalized for providing right-to-try or expanded access. Today many pharmas and biotechs provide little to no opportunities to access early clinical phase novel therapies under the existing right-to-try and expanded access rules. This happens since companies perceive a strong disincentive by the FDA: adverse events from either pathway must be reported to the FDA (and thus counts against your drug) but they fear the FDA ignoring positive signals from those very same patients that prove the drug works. The FDA must remove this fear from companies by providing ironclad clarity that the positive data will count.

The US can and should be the fastest, safest place in the world to generate clinical evidence, deploy clinical AI, and get promising cures to patients. If these recommendations and more from other smart experts are implemented, the future would be very bright indeed. Billions of dollars of capital would flow to US biotechs, driving a scientific renaissance that in turn saves and improves many lives.

Further Reading:

Coleman is one of the clearest voices confronting race-essentialism in America today. He’s the author of The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, host of the Conversations with Coleman podcast, and a visiting professor at the University of Austin.

In this episode, Coleman takes us behind the scenes of his new UATX course, where he examines the two opposing philosophies that emerged from the civil rights era: Dr. King’s colorblind vision and Derrick Bell’s Critical Race Theory. He breaks these down into two camps -- minimalist and maximalist -- and explains how he equips students to weigh the merits of each side. He contrasts the UATX approach, where Thomas Sowell versus Ta-Nehisi Coates takes center stage, to his time at Columbia University and its obsession with racial grievances. Then we dive into a few legacy debates: Is America’s wealth due to slavery? Is the collapse of the two-parent black family a result of past injustice? Finally, Coleman lays out three steps toward an optimistic vision for race in America: get race out of the law (end affirmative action), stop programming children to see race, and foster a growing economy with opportunity for all.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:40 Teaching the Legacy of Slavery

06:20 Coleman’s journey from Columbia to UATX

08:30 Dr. King vs Derrick Bell

11:20 Racial disparities by IQ and salary

13:00 Thomas Sowell & the Real History of Slavery

19:00 America’s Founding hypocrisy

24:00 Will the Left cancel Dr. King?

26:20 Understanding the 1619 Project

30:25 Breakdown of the black family

37:20 Is America wealthy because of slavery?

43:50 Are you worried about woke AI?

45:40 Three solutions for racial progress

After graduating from Claremont McKenna College, Eric emailed his way into Max Levchin’s network, becoming an early employee at HVF Labs where he learned to invest and build companies. He later spun out SciFi VC as its Founding Partner, before landing as a Principal at Founders Fund. He was an early investor in Anduril, Crusoe Energy, among others, and a senior advisor at 8VC where he helped us launch Harbor Health.

We begin our conversation with Eric’s journey — from persuading Max Levchin to hire him as a technical assistant to investing at HVF and launching SciFi VC. Next, we dive into the state of venture today. Learn why Eric believes that larger and larger fund sizes are concentrating capital into the hottest AI bets, creating real inefficiencies just below the top tier. He lays out the thesis behind his new firm and where he sees missed opportunities. Finally, Eric shares his optimistic vision for the years ahead and why he believes this is one of the best times in a generation to start and build important companies.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:30 Meeting Max Levchin and learning to build

06:30 Launching SciFi VC & investment lessons

12:05 How VC is changing

13:40 Biggest missed opportunity in venture

16:15 Enormous dislocations in the market

21:30 How AI is changing the game

24:00 Overlook Capital

27:50 Optimism for the future

His thesis, roughly, was this: a group of Jewish operators, including me, has cooked up a sneaky new framing for a nefarious agenda. In his telling, we talk about “Western civilization” now — Cicero, the Founders, the rule of law, the inheritance of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem — as a cover or Trojan Horse for our real agenda (mass surveillance, Israel, etc.)

“The Jews are extremely sophisticated. They will outlast us. They will outsmart us. And they will come up with a new conceit. And by the way, they already have…. So they’re changing tactics, and they’re trying something new. They are starting to conflate the word ‘civilization’ and ‘the West’ with the Judeo-Christian narrative: they say it’s Christians and Jews, the United States and Israel,as civilization, versus the barbarism of the Communists and the Muslims… This is Joe Lonsdale’s line… Joe Lonsdale from Founders Fund, Paypal Mafia, ‘Cicero Institute’ — Jew.”

He went on to mention Shaun Maguire (a partner at Sequoia Capital) as well as White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, whose anti-immigration politics Fuentes casts as a deception to distract from “Jew” Miller’s actual agenda.

It is the same model that has overtaken much of the academic left, beginning with the French: the belief that principles are never really principles, that ideals are only masks for power, that the Constitution is just a tool of domination, that all appeals to liberty, equality, law, or civilization are really just strategies by which one group imposes its will on another. The Jacobin, French Marxist left says that America’s founding principles are fake because they serve the oppressor class; Fuentes says they are fake because they serve as cover for Jews. It’s a different specific villain (with some overlap, no doubt) but the same failed reality model.

Fuentes has an audience, and that audience is growing, not just because many young people find his broadcasts entertaining — but because the institutional center has spent two decades failing young Americans and lying about it. In that environment all sorts of characters can find willing listeners, including regrettably for a 3,000 year old ethnic & religious scapegoat against Jews.

It is actually fortunate that he brought up the Cicero Institute, because our outlook on America’s problems is so different. We do not tell young Americans that their country is fake, that its principles are lies, or that their future depends on finding someone to blame or resent. We tell them that things can actually get better — things can work — if we find the courage to confront specific problems.

In an online culture poisoned by irony, it becomes incomprehensible that leaders would earnestly promote ideas like “Western Civilization.” As for me and Cicero… we really believe that America is exceptional because our culture and institutions were shaped by principles that are actually true: ordered liberty, equal dignity under law, constitutional government, civic virtue, the pursuit of excellence, and the belief that free people can build positive-sum institutions that lift others up.

Fuentes’ mentioning Cicero — as well as a long-running focus on Palantir — is entertaining to me, having founded and built both organizations and watched them be wildly misunderstood in ways that are easy to dispel. Cicero is a highly-effective state policy organization that understands broken systems and has partnered with legislators of both parties to confront them in specific, principle-driven ways; but if you ask the crazed demonstrators on our doorstep, we’re rounding up the homeless in order to put them into a private prison operated by none other than… you guessed it: Joe Lonsdale.

In a way, I understand the seduction of a story like this, crazy as it is. But Cicero as a cover for a Jewish agenda is actually even crazier. “Joe Lonsdale and his co-conspirators are trying to break up medical cartels” is a lot less exciting.

We are funded by people who understand that civilizational confidence flows from whether the things actually work. And we know that if we are going to solve the most pressing challenges facing our fellow Americans — a broken education system, spiraling healthcare costs, and increasing dysfunction from violent crime, homelessness, and crumbling infrastructure — we need to revisit and boldly apply the principles that made the West great. Power has to be checked, incentives have to be aligned, and public officials have to be accountable to the people they serve. All of this is actionable.

***

The Jacobin mistake is assuming that people are or want to be revolutionary class actors. Fuentes, who is like a Horseshoe Jacobin, makes the same mistake in thinking that the inheritors of a great “civilization” want to dump it in order to oppose Jews.

In the case of Americans in particular, this is a very bad misunderstanding. Our governance problems are real (that is the entire basis of our work at Cicero) but Americans really want institutions that work and a country where they can go their own way. They want to live peacefully among neighbors who may not share all their views; and they want the freedom to build, work, trade, invent, and form new institutions. It is that sense of freedom — the freedom to build the lives we want and self-actualize — that has made American life so fruitful in a country where we actually disagree with our neighbors quite a bit!

We have, despite some difficulties along the way, managed to stay at least somewhat focused on the goals so eloquently spelled out by our forefathers:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

It is concerning to see a new version of “right-wing” discourse that encourages people to throw all of this away. It echoes non-right ideologies that have wreaked havoc in the last few decades, all descended in some way from the Jacobins. Extreme feminism, crazy DEI oppressor/oppressed frameworks, climate hysteria, “population bomb” anti-natalist fears… These are all dead-end sets of ideas that inevitably lead to heartbreak for those who take them too seriously for too long. Individuals ruin their lives believing this stuff, and countries destroy themselves believing it.

The real “exception” in American exceptionalism is that we’ve managed, generation after generation, to stop these loser psychoses from taking over the country.

The encouraging thing is that this new version of it isn’t winning, either. And for the young people out there, figures like JD Vance, Marco Rubio, or more recently Spencer Pratt provide strong examples for why the nihilism of Fuentes is wrong. These three men have different registers and different flavors of politics — people can pick from the buffet of what they like or dislike about each of them — but each have done something really interesting (and in the case of JD and Marco, attracted the ire of Fuentes himself).

Vice President Vance speaks to people who have been failed by institutions without telling them their country is fake or that their neighbors are the enemy. Secretary Rubio has his own optimistic way of speaking, and his rising star is, if nothing else, proof that Americans want leaders who show competence and principle in complex situations, and who can articulate real visions about who we are. Spencer Pratt’s improbable second act running for LA Mayor from his burned-down lot is a reminder that Americans still respond to humor and resilience — and strong rhetoric against a genuinely terrible regime in the form of LA’s current leadership. Even if he doesn’t win the race, a candidate like Pratt is showing what winning looks like at the level of personal character and how to fight with energy.

Americans want brokenness to end, and in the long run, broken cultures — whether left or right — that are inviting Americans to become broken themselves, whether it’s Fuentes-thought or loser communism, will lose to strong, winning cultures. In this one way, Fuentes is actually right to worry about a new strong culture emerging around the core ideas of our civilization.

But the idea that it’s “Jews” orchestrating it is silly. Actually, the conspiracy in favor of the values of our civilization is much larger than that. Americans of all stripes want to reclaim the frameworks that made our nation functional and strong in the first place, and we will.

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00:00 Episode intro

02:30 Historic deal with Philippines

05:25 Jacob's background

07:30 Why is Europe falling behind?

13:00 The asymmetric power of tech

15:35 Jacob responds to AI doomers & skeptics

19:15 Global Competition: China, AI, and Diverging Growth

21:45 What is Pax Silica?

23:45 New Global Order in AI age

29:30 Is China pushing back?

31:45 Optimism for the future

Shyam's father was raised in a mud hut in India. He and his family relocated to Nigeria but fled to the United States after armed robbers nearly murdered them. Shyam joined Palantir as the 13th employee, where he helped shape its unique culture, develop key business strategies, and scale Palantir into a $300+ billion global software giant. In 2025, he was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve's new Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps, and earlier this year, he released "Mobilize: How to Reboot the American Industrial Base and Stop World War III."

We begin our conversation with Shyam’s extraordinary journey to the U.S. and what this country means to him. Next, we reminisce about the early days at Palantir and what made the culture unique, from his famous Shyam-isms to living in the office for a month straight to earn free BBQ Fridays. Learn how Shyam coined the term "Forward Deployed Engineers" and proved that the best software is built shoulder-to-shoulder with the customer. Then we dive into his new book and the dangerous atrophy of America’s defense industrial base. Shyam reveals that the U.S. expended 10 years of production in 10 weeks of conflict, and explains how we can once again become the arsenal of democracy. We also discuss the culture at the Pentagon and why some heretics must be protected at all costs. Finally, we explore the clash between leading AI researchers and the Department of War, and how to bridge the gap between Silicon Valley and D.C. and secure the next great American century.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:45 Mud hut in India to life in America

05:25 Employee #13 at Palantir

09:45 How Shyam created Forward Deployed Engineers

13:05 What are Shyam-isms?

14:55 Business discipline & learning to say no

19:20 The crisis of the American industrial base

24:00 Some heretics must be protected

29:00 The factory is the weapon

34:00 Magical AI weapons

43:00 Optimism for America's future

A history major at the University of Pennsylvania, Ben began his career in finance at Goldman Sachs before earning a JD and MBA at Harvard. He worked in private equity at Apollo Global Management before founding the investment firm Fortinbras. Last fall, he was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as CEO of the DFC. His drive to serve was shaped by his grandfather, a WWII tail gunner in the Aleutians, and by watching his father build Apollo into a global powerhouse.

We begin our conversation with Ben’s entrepreneurial journey before diving into the history of U.S. foreign aid. Learn how the U.S. regressed from the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt Europe and fostered investment in America, to promoting a culture of waste and dependency in foreign aid — and how the Trump administration is reversing course (check out our essay from January 2025 on these issues). Next, Ben lays out the flaws in China's extractive Belt and Road model and explains how the DFC is developing trusted partners, promoting free-market principles, and investing strategically. From maritime insurance in the Strait of Hormuz to rare earth mining, Ben reveals some of the DFC's recent wins and where he sees new long-term partnerships in South America and Asia. Instead of showering NGOs with taxpayer dollars and creating charity cases abroad, the Trump administration is restoring discipline and accountability — and Ben is a key leader in executing this vision and generating returns for the American people.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:25 Ben’s path to DFC

08:30 $205 billion to invest abroad

10:00 Rethinking foreign aid

13:00 From Marshall Plan to waste and fraud

18:50 The Trump administration’s new approach

21:50 Countering China’s Belt & Road Initiative

28:00 Post-WWII order is changing / new opportunities

33:10 Maritime insurance and Strait of Hormuz

37:00 Optimism for America’s future

We dive into these topics in this week’s episode with Richard Sandler, Partner at the law firm of Maron & Sandler and Executive Vice President and Trustee of the Milken Family Foundation. Richard and Lowell Milken, Michael’s younger brother, met in first grade while growing up in Los Angeles. After practicing law with his father, Richard joined Michael and Lowell’s firm -- Drexel Burnham Lambert -- to help the high-yield bond team. He saw firsthand the entire saga: the explosive rise and fall of Drexel, the unprecedented investigation, and ultimately, President Trump’s pardon of Michael in 2020.

We begin with Michael’s breakthrough in high-yield bonds. Learn how he almost single-handedly transformed the “junk bond” market from $70 billion to $700 billion in a decade, and helped finance the growth of great American entrepreneurs and companies — Ted Turner, Steve Wynn, MCI Communications, among others. Next, Richard walks us through the investigation: the unprecedented use of RICO against Drexel, the targeting of Lowell as a “hostage,” and the novel charges Michael ultimately pled to (none of which had been prosecuted before or since). Finally, we explore the deeper lessons about prosecutorial power, media narratives, and Michael’s extraordinary resilience. He has pushed forward medicine, science, and education in myriad ways, while inspiring many of our great leaders today.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:35 Richard’s career & Michael Milken’s legacy

06:25 Why write this book?

08:00 How Michael Milken transformed finance

14:00 Why did they go after Drexel & Michael?

19:30 Using RICO to bring down Drexel

22:30 Prosecutorial abuse & the power of government

26:30 Why did Michael agree to a plea deal?

33:25 Trump grants Michael a full pardon

35:00 Lessons on government power, media influence & Michael’s resilience

We discuss these and other timely topics with John. At an early age, he fell in love with science fiction and built vacuum-tube amplifiers in his parents' basement, before studying physics and materials science at Stanford. There he became a research scientist until pivoting to investing, first at StartX and later Spark Capital. Born out of firsthand experience, he co-founded Standard Metrics alongside the 8VC Build team to create a better solution for portfolio management software.

We begin our conversation with John’s path from academia to investor and founder. Next, we explore how Standard Metrics centralizes data, improves portfolio intelligence, and powers smarter investment decisions. Then we dive into the new possibilities with AI, from technical diligence copilots and investment stress-testing to new workflows and internal AI analysts. In an era of new agentic tools and shifting competitive advantages, we discuss new moats for existing software companies built around network effects, data, and more. The world of finance is changing quickly; John offers a unique perspective on the AI wave and how top investors are leveraging new workflows to get ahead.

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00:00 Episode intro

02:10 Academia to investor and founder

08:00 The pain point that led to building Standard Metrics

12:10 How AI is transforming venture capital

14:20 AI as a technical copilot

17:10 AI Analyst vs human in the loop

19:20 Parsing pitch decks and new AI tools

23:10 How AI search is changing marketing

28:30 New capabilities and workflows

33:47 How quickly is everything changing?

Raised in a small town in North Carolina, Will developed an early love for building, starting with electronic kits and later unique apps. After studying at Penn and Wharton, a trip home revealed the looming crisis: millions of local businesses that lack succession plans. This sparked the creation of American Operator, which pairs retiring owners with high-agency operators, along with the capital and know-how to build a thriving business.

We begin with Will’s entrepreneurial journey and the coming “Silver Tsunami.” Will explains why only 48% of small business owners have succession plans and what this means for the next generation of owner-operators. He highlights stories like Greenway Painting in Jackson, Wyoming, and how American Operator is helping create millionaires on Main Street while keeping local business local. Next, we explore the historical and cultural importance of small business in America, dating back to John Hancock’s import-export firm and Ben Franklin’s printing shop. Looking ahead, we examine AI’s impact on small businesses. Learn why Will believes SMBs are a great AI hedge, while also having unique upside as new AI tools make small cohorts of people dramatically more productive. Finally, Will explains the operate-to-own model and how American Operator aligns incentives so that original owners become valuable advisors, new operators can earn their way into majority ownership, and American Operator remains a committed partner over the long run.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:25 Will’s entrepreneurial journey

04:15 The small business succession crisis

06:40 American Operator’s approach vs. private equity

11:55 Does AI mean boom or bust for small business?

15:55 Forget law school? Buy a small business instead?

21:20 AI use cases for small business

23:00 Why many business owners shut down instead of sell

26:00 How the operate-to-own model works

33:50 Optimism for Main Street America

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00:00 Episode Intro

01:50 What sets Joby aircraft apart

04:50 Key partnerships with Toyota & NVIDIA

06:50 Closing in on FAA Certification

08:00 Air Taxis coming to 12 states this year!

13:35 Autonomous flight is the future

20:00 Hydrogen aircraft for the Pentagon

24:10 Why AI is a game changer

28:15 Expansion in Ohio and Global Competition with China

34:40 Addressing critics / future vision

35:50 Making air travel ubiquitous

We discuss these and other timely topics with Scott and Russell. Scott was a three-time gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics and world champion at age 17. After high school, we hired him at Addepar, where he became a top software engineer. Russell began his career as a machine learning engineer on Tesla’s Autopilot team before selling his video data company, Helia, to Scale AI. In 2023, Scott and Russell co-founded Cognition, and a year later, they shocked the technology world with the release of Devin, the first AI software agent.

We begin our conversation by discussing the incredible collection of young talent at Cognition, and why the next generation has new advantages in the AI era. Next, we catch up on Cognition’s explosive growth: Devin usage in the first few months of 2026 already surpassed all of 2025. Scott reveals that Cognition engineers no longer write code and explains how they’re able to test and ship new products faster than ever before. Then, we dive into the new era of software abundance and what it means if everyone has access to high-quality engineering, from modernizing large legacy enterprises to supercharging small businesses. We also discuss Cognition’s recent foray into government services and its work to modernize complex outdated systems. Finally, we explore the talent flywheel that has drawn so many former founders to Cognition, and why Scott and Russell believe we’re moving from Minecraft “survival mode” to “creative mode” — where the only limit to building is imagination itself.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:35 Why technical talent & execution matters in AI

06:10 Do young people have an edge in the AI era?

08:26 Cognition’s rapid growth

11:55 The new era of software abundance

14:30 Cognition engineers don’t type code anymore

19:20 “Never sleep while Devin is idling”

21:25 The case for AI disinflation

23:50 How Devin generates 12X productivity gains

28:25 Cognition for government / taking on complex, broken systems

36:40 The AI race / competition with Anthropic

39:00 Forward deployed engineers?

43:40 How fast are LLMs improving?

47:10 AI-led small business explosion

We recorded this conversation the day after Jake appeared with President Trump at a Kentucky rally. He explains why he’s speaking out on politics, even if it costs him financially, and why authenticity is key to cultural influence. Next, we explore the origins of Anti Fund, and how Jake and Geoff had the conviction to back Anduril before defense tech was in vogue. They also invested in OpenAI and were instrumental in rolling out Sora; learn about the strategy behind the launch and the challenges around AI slop and identity authentication. Additionally, Jake is the co-founder of Betr, and we discuss its recent partnership with Polymarket, what’s next for prediction markets, and how to build guardrails for customers. Finally, we explore Jake’s success in pioneering the creator economy and building consumer brands. In the 1960s and 70s, most kids aspired to become astronauts. Today, they want to be content creators, in part because of Jake’s influence. We conclude with Jake’s advice for young people in the AI era, and how we can persuade the next generation to love their country and embrace a builder mindset.

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00:00 Episode intro

02:20 On stage with President Trump

06:00 Attention is the most valuable currency

08:00 The origins of Anti Fund and backing OpenAI, Anduril, Ramp, and others

09:10 Betr + Polymarket and the future of prediction markets

14:58 Launching Sora with OpenAI

16:14 Are you worried about AI slop?

19:10 How AI is changing culture; revival of in-person events

21:20 Who should become a creator?

24:30 Fighters as cultural icons

31:30 How to win the culture

We discuss these timely topics and more with Administrator Loeffler. Growing up on a farm in rural Illinois, Kelly raised cattle and was exposed to the challenges of small business early on. She became the first in her family to graduate college and built a distinguished career in financial services at Intercontinental Exchange. In 2018, she became the founding CEO and first employee of the fintech startup, Bakkt, which brought institutional infrastructure to crypto. Kelly was appointed to serve in the U.S. Senate in 2020 and later confirmed as Administrator of the Small Business Administration in February 2025.

We begin our conversation with Kelly's entrepreneurial journey, before diving into her mission at the SBA. Her leadership comes at a pivotal juncture: a $10 trillion generational wealth transfer amid a technological revolution. As Baby Boomers retire and new AI tools emerge, Kelly believes young talent should think twice about traditional pathways and consider small business ownership instead. She lays out the administration's agenda, including expanding SBA loans for reindustrialization and bolstering the manufacturing jobs of the future. Next, we dive into her other core responsibility: exposing fraud. Learn how the SBA uncovered over $400 million of COVID-era fraud in Minnesota, $9 billion in California, and they're just getting started. She's also investigating 8(a) minority contracting — a program for disadvantaged communities hijacked by the Biden administration for race-based contracting and grift. The SBA is bringing in top talent and technology, including Palantir, to expose the fraud, revamp the programs, and protect taxpayers.

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00:00 Episode intro

01:40 Farming to finance

04:46 Building Bakkt & institutional infrastructure for crypto

09:00 AI & the future of small business

13:58 How to supercharge manufacturing in America

16:15 Exposing billions in fraud

18:50 The scandal of minority contracting

20:25 Using Palantir to investigate fraud

27:15 The NGO grift scheme

29:50 Optimism for the future

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00:00 Episode intro

01:30 Top Gun as a service

07:40 Founding a billion-dollar payments company

09:30 Pioneering private spaceflight

12:00 What happened to NASA?

14:40 Getting back to the Moon by 2028

20:47 Jared announces new plans for Artemis

25:15 Future of the space economy

27:50 Nuclear power in space

29:00 Sci-fi futures becoming reality

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00:00 Episode intro

01:28 JD's entrepreneurial journey

05:18 Wins and challenges at Opendoor / meme stock moment

09:55 WithCoverage and upending insurance brokerage with AI

13:11 Mimetic frameworks for entrepreneurs

15:45 How AI is changing the way companies are built

20:21 The impact of AI on existing SaaS

26:50 How to stop AI spam and imposters

31:27 How should young people prepare for the AI era?

34:20 The new invention era / why AI levels the playing field