02:00:48 · John Coogan, D.A. Wallach, Jordi Hays
[02:00:48] S1: Yeah, [02:00:49] S0: yeah. But when Demis says we're going cure all diseases in ten years, think people who have two PhDs and have been doing this for forty years ago, come on, man. One, you're giving a sort of false hope [02:01:00] S1: Sure. [02:01:00] S0: To a lot of people who are legitimately out there suffering or have a loved one who's on death's doorstep. [02:01:06] S1: Yeah. [02:01:06] S0: Like, that's a little messed up. Yeah. But on the other hand, they they also just think like it's not... [02:01:11] S1: Well, might be long tobacco So maybe he's pushing... [02:01:15] S0: I mean, I think it's an open question whether [02:01:17] S1: it's okay to just sort of [02:01:19] S0: sheep's clothing hedge fund manager. Probably. [02:01:22] S1: This this is a very [02:01:23] S0: long game that he's been playing. [02:01:25] S1: Exactly. Occam's razor. Occam's four d razor. [02:01:28] S0: I think it's legitimacy. [02:01:30] S2: What about robotics in a in a lab setting in an era like Kevin like Kevin Wheel has his his new company trying to sort of reassure stuff on the the R and D side. But but like that's been happening. Like people have said like we should automate labs. [02:01:52] S1: Every time someone picks a bottleneck goes and builds a business around it, the biotech community is like that actually wasn't the bottleneck. Like... [02:01:59] S2: Well, no no. But Kevin's Kevin's like strategy I think is more... It's honestly like a like a national security Totally.
02:01:59 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Max Siegelman, D.A. Wallach
[02:01:59] S2: Well, no no. But Kevin's Kevin's like strategy I think is more... It's honestly like a like a national security Totally. [02:02:08] S1: Think it's super valid. I I just think the biotech community is fantastic at getting something from the tech community and be like, yes, that is what that was a bottleneck but we have actually Right. 12 more bottlenecks for you [02:02:18] S5: to work Okay. [02:02:19] S0: I mean, this gives us a chance to talk a little bit about China. [02:02:21] S1: Please. You guys love China. Huge fans. We have Gong over there for China. [02:02:25] S2: Thank you. [02:02:25] S0: So the the... In in a way, a bigger a bigger shift than AI for the biopharma industry is the rise of China. [02:02:37] S1: Oh, yeah.
02:02:37 · John Coogan, D.A. Wallach
[02:02:37] S1: Oh, yeah. [02:02:37] S0: This is real. This is already material. This is already changing the whole industry. So what's happened is over the past, let's call it five to ten years, China has both invested tremendously in early stage development, like discovery work. So this is the idea generation part. And then preclinical biotech outsourced labor. So before you take a drug into a clinical trial, you've got to run it through this whole battery of tests. You're testing it in mice, maybe non human primates, you're doing a lot of laboratory work. You're trying to characterize this thing as well as you can to minimize the risk to people. And then in The US, you take it to the FDA and you ask for permission to go and put it in people. In China, what they have tried to do is all of that work at a quarter of the price. And because the big pharma companies are multinationals, increasingly they've been comfortable doing that work in China. And just like any outsourcing, if it's faster and cheaper, why not send it there? Now it also turns out the quality of the work is outstanding. Because guess who's doing it? Lot of Chinese scientists who got their PhDs in The United States and then we kicked out because we're idiots. [02:03:48] S1: Yeah. Sure. [02:03:48] S0: So we've got all these... That's what I'm talking about. [02:03:51] S1: It's crazy. Mean, that's
02:03:51 · John Coogan, D.A. Wallach, Jordi Hays, Keller Cliffton
[02:03:51] S1: It's crazy. Mean, that's [02:03:52] S0: what it sounded like, right? Yeah. That's what it sounded like. So Stephen Miller out here kicking ass Yeah. Sure. Our new our new chief of staff. Congratulations. By the way, hear Susie Wiles is gonna be joining TBPN as a nice week. That's huge [02:04:04] S2: for you guys. Don't even know what's [02:04:06] S0: going on. China is ascendant And now Yeah. The lifeblood of big pharma, which is buying new drugs from little biotech companies Yeah. Now they are buying double digit percentages of their new drugs from China. That's what that's what I said when I heard this. [02:04:27] S1: Yeah. [02:04:28] S0: And it's it's a normal... Buy American. Yeah. Yeah. Course. [02:04:32] S3: The new balance. [02:04:33] S0: Of course. You know, buy American, make American, buy American. [02:04:35] S1: Yeah. So [02:04:37] S0: this is this is a big story and and like as with a lot of outsourcing, the potential to bring... [02:04:43] S2: Here's here's like Got all it. Where we we potentially... So automation is one thing. The other thing is like so much general excitement around AI Mhmm. Is gonna push it... Has already pushed a huge amount of capital Mhmm. Into bets that traditional biotech investors would be like, I've never... Right. I would never... I could never underwrite that. [02:05:01] S1: Right? Sure.
02:05:01 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, D.A. Wallach
[02:05:01] S1: Right? Sure. [02:05:01] S2: Sure. Because all the... Because like we're dealing with like, you know, the singularity and super intelligence and curing all disease within ten years. When you just have sort of like big ideas about things and they're not like based around, you know, decades of investing in the category. And so I would say that that's like prop... Maybe the way that America saves itself by having a bunch of new investors that aren't like experts just flood the space with capital. Because even if we get if we get... [02:05:30] S1: It flows the right way. [02:05:31] S2: Yeah. We we overbuild or we get, you know, we we a bunch of a ton of zeros as always where we get four or five new companies that become like, you know, flagship, you know, public public companies that that solve some of these issues. Is that like... [02:05:45] S0: I think that'd be great. I will say the Chinese approach to AI generally and to biotech seems very different and I must admit I think it's more intelligent. [02:05:53] S1: Okay. [02:05:54] S0: Which is, you know, writ large, China's strategy is make AI free, cheap and good so that every business person in China can use it and out compete whoever else around the world wants to give a run at something. Interesting. Here Yeah. We're in a way, we're throwing crazy venture money at these like millennium problems. [02:06:12] S1: Right? [02:06:12] S0: Yeah. Insane like, oh, this would change everything. Now, I agree. If any of them works, it's worth it. [02:06:18] S1: Yeah.
02:06:18 · John Coogan, D.A. Wallach, Jordi Hays
[02:06:18] S1: Yeah. [02:06:18] S0: But it's kind of odd to me that we're not focusing AI on the low skilled labor first. Mhmm. I mean, call centers, everyone, that's the first example. Of course, it makes sense. Like, why wouldn't AI replace all the call centers? But part of the challenge with biotech is it's like, okay, this is supposed to replace white collar labor. So let's start with the most educated, most sophisticated form of human capital that exists. Yeah. Like big pharma, and I'll be the first to say, they're big companies. They're bloated, they're inefficient, they're bureaucratic, all of that. [02:06:56] S1: Yeah. [02:06:56] S0: They employ more PhDs Yeah. Than any companies in the world. [02:06:59] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [02:07:00] S0: Yeah. Okay? And they're they're not idiots. Yeah. So it's like the Silicon Valley is going to come and show the gray beards how it's done. [02:07:07] S1: It's sort of silly. [02:07:08] S0: It's it's going to fall. [02:07:09] S1: Do you think of the the electronic lab notebook, notebook like the dev tools play in Benchling. Benchling. I I was... A lot of people were pitching like, there'll be like a cursor for bio. And I was a little skeptical in the short term of that because VS Code is open source and so Cursor was able to fork it. That doesn't really exist in the... I don't know what you're doing. Was just... [02:07:31] S2: Added a little Christmas lighting. [02:07:32] S1: Yeah. Oh, perfect. Perfect. [02:07:33] S0: That's nice.