We're Back! $1B GLP-1 Lessons. AI Funding Debates. China's 2030 Master Plan.

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You're watching TBPN. Today is Monday, April 6th, 2026. We are live from the TBP Montreal, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital capital.

Happy Easter to everyone who celebrated yesterday.

Good. Project Hail Mary.

Yeah, I did. I finally saw it. Did you see it, Tyler?

He didn't like it. He said it was Interstellar for Chuds, right?

well, speaking of real space, what's going on with Artemis 2? Artemis 2 is uh is live streaming right now to almost a million people on YouTube on the NASA YouTube channel. I believe it's also on Netflix. Um and the stream title is just we are about to fly around the moon with authority from from NASA. Uh we can actually pull this up and see. I would love to hear what is going on right now. Uh because I think it's happening like as we speak like they are they are up. Um, I also uh wrote a little bit of a retrospective on the

Yeah. Okay. So, one minute ago, NASA posted that the crew uh are now the farthest any human has ever traveled.

Let me see if I can get this.

I have a little spider here on his microphone. Here we go.

There we go. Solved.

still living, too.

Uh, what do we got going on here?

There's no

Oh, weird. I think there's there is audio on YouTube, but uh I it might not be letting us like stream it through. I don't know. Sometimes there's like DRM stuff. Anyway, um Matthew Gallagher, he's the founder of Medv and we were supposed to have him on the show today. He unfortunately cannot make it. We do have uh uh John Slottkin coming on, the chief medical officer from Gellzinger to or Geisinger to uh talk about claims around oral GLP-1 drugs. Uh we read the New York Times story on Thursday and then over the weekend there was a whole m a whole bunch more analysis about the company and uh they were

and then the New York Times would take it down but in this case it happened in reverse.

So uh last week the New York Times broke down the story of Medv, a telehealth provider of GLP-1 weight loss drugs. Uh and the framing was basically that uh this was the first time in history a single person had built quote a billion-dollar company. And um that's what went viral. Digging in, there were some small caveats and some big caveats. The the small caveats were that uh you know the founder Matthew Gallagher had hired his younger brother. So technically it was a two-person startup. Most people were like yeah okay we'll count that. It doesn't matter. It's a it's a family member, right? And then also uh the other one

I guess but but they had almost twice the revenue 1.8 billion. So but the question was the the valuation. So the headline stat in the article was that they are on track to do 1.8 billion in sales this year and that the on track is doing a lot of work of course because that's clearly an ARR number that's that's extrapolated out and the GLP-1 market's moving very quickly. It's not like Ro and Hims and all the other providers are going to be, you know, just sitting down and letting this company run away with whatever secret sauce they've discovered around customer acquisition, although they might not go into this, which we'll go into. Um, and it was insane scale, but uh, companies don't unilaterally trade at 1x revenue. Like that's that that's sort of a given in this article. It's sort of presupposed that if you're doing 1.8 billion in revenue, uh, you would trade above a billion dollars. And so this counts as a billion dollar company. I always thought that the billion dollar company would be on market cap, not valuation, not on revenue

because you could do, you know, if you're if you're going to say, you know, okay, any any any just try and say the biggest number, you would want to set up some sort of like payment network where basically you could report GMV really really high and you actually have a very very small business because you're taking like 1% as your true net revenue. Um and so so there was always a question about the margins and then also revenue durability matters like the the the the ongoing question around building um these you know uh one-person high growth companies is is there durability because if you can do it and then I can do it and then Tyler can do it and then and then anyone with you know access to a coding model can build it very quickly we're going to erode each other's markets and trade market cap very quickly. And I think any VC that would look at this uh they might get to a point where they're like, "Yeah, this is a unicorn company. Look at the growth. I think there's something here." But at the same time, you could see someone like a private equity guy valuing this and saying, "Uh, well, I I need to seekis. I need to see durability.

Exactly. And we'll get into that. So, uh, Medb uses, uh, two companies, Care Validate and Openluth Health, Open Loop Health to handle the doctors, pharmacies, shipping, and compliance. And we'll get into the compliance thing, but uh that's a lot of outsourcing. And of course that outsourcing uh takes a toll on margin because you have to pay the doctors, you have to pay the pharmacies, you have to pay the shipping, you have to pay the compliance and they're paying care validate and open loop health to flow that value through to those you know individual stakeholders. Um so it's still it's still a

We'll get into it. So, uh these GLP-1 drugs are so also aren't cheap and when you sell them even when you sell them legally, uh even as a telehealth rapper, a lot of the value is going to accrue to the pharmaceutical companies that own the intellectual property. At least that's how it should flow when things are functioning properly. Um so you can you can effectively build a telehealth company on top of a pharmaceutical company like Novo. uh that uh you where you are taking a thin margin on top. You can get to big numbers, but the the pharmaceutical companies are going to want to be paid because they did all of the expensive FDA trials, all the expensive R&D and they need to recoup that. So, um then the other question is you you add in the CAC from digital ads. Uh they were apparently spending a lot on Facebook uh to acquire customers and you quickly get uh you quickly wind up an estimate of pretty thin margins. I think the estimate uh shield shared shield monot shared was like 15% or something like that. Um but uh uh it's it's totally possible to get to a valuation that's lower than a billion dollars um depending on how everything flows.

the margins on that are very very extreme, right?

of uh of IBIDA.

I mean, the 15% margin looks like 150 million, maybe 200 million in like basically profit. That is crazy. Um, but we'll see what the FDA has to say long term about that, whether there will be lawsuits or settlements. there was already a warning letter uh and this turned into a big drama about the company. Um the the the drama

I don't think so. Uh and so there were a lot of people that were and and I I believe I pulled up the the New York Times piece and there was no like correction or anything yet. Maybe there will be more follow on. I feel like the uh the founder does need to, you know, respond and have their opportunity to kind of correct the record because these things can kind of run away in either direction. Um but, uh even with all the drama, uh there were a ton of, you know, super legitimate questions about how valuable the company really is and how long they'll be able to continue their current business model without pretty serious changes. And that's around the marketing stuff. So, Medvy received an FDA warning letter uh just two months ago for misbranding violations. So, warning letter, if you're not familiar with the FDA's language, uh it can be pretty wide ranging. Like, sometimes it requires just a small a small change to marketing materials uh to remain compliant and sometimes it's basically like a shut down the company moment. This happened a lot with the nicotine category with uh illegal uh vape vapor products,

Uh, I went through this 10 years ago. We started Lucy 2016 and uh while I was there, we were extremely nervous about warning letters because if we got a warning letter, we thought it would mess up the FDA applications that we had in progress. It would mess up distributors. Like anyone who you're partnering with would say, "Well, I don't want to work with somebody that has a warning letter. Have you dealt with this?" Um, we were able to avoid all this, but uh one one kind of concrete example is that um

we like Lucy cannot make quit claims about the nicotine gum product. So, uh, even though most people think, oh, this is like nicer, it's actually regulated in a different category. It's regulated as tobacco product, not as a pharmaceutical product. And so, uh, you can't run a digital ad that says like, hey, you're a smoker, quit smoking with Lucy. That's a violation because it's not regulated as a pharmaceutical, as a smoking sessation aid is the term.

near zero, right? because no nobody would want to buy a company that had all that kind of baggage. Uh and so if you were going to value it, it' be like what is the like very very very near-term, you know, uh sort of like revenue opportunity.

I mean the famous the famous comparison is Juul versus Puff Bar. Uh so Juul uh went, you know, raised a bunch of money, got very big, uh put in FDA applications, got those applications denied, uh marketing denial orders, then got them stayed in the courts. They set up a I think their whole headquarters was in DC. They were working very closely with the FDA truly engaging to sort of clean up the you know all of the problems around marketing and sales and formulation just really try and get to a clean bill of health with regard to the government relations. Uh they were successful and they got approved as not as a smoking sessation aid. So they still can't make the claim that Juul will help you quit smoking. Um they they but they did get approved as a tobacco product uh you know which I think the FDA says it has to be suitable for the protection of public health which is a very vague way of saying like it's a net benefit net good that that that that it's on the market which is you know people can debate that back and forth but um but back in the Juel days they also could not say quit smoking with Juul. they wanted to put say they wanted like a lot of people that were you know were smoking cigarettes did switch to Juul and they were pushing for that uh but they couldn't actually make quick

Claims, so they used the word switch. They said switch to Juul instead of quit with Juul, and that seemed fine for a long time. I think they eventually trademarked it, and then I think they had to pull away from it at various points in time. But there's clearly like this gray area in your marketing. Can you say you want smokers to upgrade to nicotine gum? You know, all of these things need to be sort of litigated with the FDA.

And what has Medv been up to?

We wound up playing it very safe, and that probably kept us from mooning in revenue to 1.8 billion overnight. But I still think it was the right decision for Lucy. Now Medv appears to have taken a much more aggressive approach. They are apparently running 800 fake doctor accounts on Facebook to sell compounded GLP-1. Shonot verified that the accounts are not actually doctors. Some even have cartoonishly fake names like...

Dr. Tucker Carl Zen, MD.

If you... like, I feel this is one of those things where like I feel bad for someone who clicked on an ad that was deceptive...

From Dr. Tucker Carlson, MD.

But if you're getting your GLP-1s from Dr. Carl Tucker's, like, you probably are in on the joke to some extent. I don't know. It's clearly not above board, and they have to clean this up and deal with this. They were also sued in a class action lawsuit last month for violating California's anti-PAM law. That stuff can be crazy expensive because a lot of the fines are on like a per-instance basis. So it'll be like, okay, yeah, $10 fine for every text message you sent, and it could be like you sent like, you know, 50 million text messages or something. So you could have some massive, massive liability. Of course, that will be litigated in the court of law, and there might be a settlement, and they can figure out what the right damage is, if they are even guilty. They're still early in the process. And so the end result is more of a story of pushing over-aggressive marketing tactics.

Yeah. I mean, so pull up the actual picture of Shield's post because I think that...

You can just see how confusing this would be to somebody maybe a little bit older, one of those.

If you're 70 years old on Facebook, you're not necessarily putting it together. It's Dr. Tucker Carlson, MD.

So my co-founder Lucy, he has a PhD from Caltech, but it's in biophysics, and so he's not a medical doctor, but he is a doctor of science from Caltech. Like he has a really good background, but he's not a medical doctor. And I would always joke with him like, we got to put you in a stethoscope, we got to take some photos of you in a stethoscope, like the aura is so high. And he was like, no, that's like such bad practice, like we can't do that. Like doctor is associated with medical doctor, even if you have a doctorate in something. It's like the famous, like, I'm dying, does anyone have a doctorate? It's like, yeah, I have a doctorate in juris doctor or whatever.

Isn't that for nonprofits typically? That's very...

I don't know if it's technically illegal to use it as a for-profit, but certainly when you add that to all the other...

Yeah, because you land on that site and then you think...

Yes. So yeah, in general, I think the story is pushing over-aggressive marketing tactics to the limit more than AI allowing low-headcount scaling. And this has happened for a long time. Back in the old days, I want to say like 2014 Facebook era, the early days of online marketing, there were countless stories of questionable supplement sales or telehealth operations scaling on the back of insane ads. The classic formula for mega scale was if you could get an ad approved, if you could get it sort of whitelisted or through the approval process, it wouldn't automatically get reviewed that often. So once you were approved, you could spend $1,000 or you could spend $50 million. And there wasn't, early on, there wasn't a natural trigger to like re-check. It was like if you could get approved for a small ad, you could scale it up. And so people would do all these crazy things to try and get the ads approved. There were all these tricky things where they would route to one website and then after the ad was approved they would change the website, and then, you know, all the ad platforms had to eventually figure out like, okay, we need to be scraping a layer deeper consistently or like every day. But the canonical example of the health supplement or telehealth operation that would always go viral and always just print was if you could get an ad approved that had Harvard scientists, brain pill, and Johnny Depp all in one call to action. I'm not kidding about this. This is real. So it was like always this picture of Johnny Depp coming out of the ocean. That was the one that was really scrolling...

Of Pirates of the...

No, no. It was like a paparazzi photo which they didn't have the rights to use. They would not partner with Johnny Depp. They should not be running that ad at all.

And then something about brain boosting or like making a Limitless pill, make you a genius, that type of marketing.

It's very general, like who doesn't want to be smarter? So everyone would click on that, and then Harvard scientists would lend its credibility because, oh, if it's from Harvard, it's good. And so if you could get those three terms approved, there were a whole bunch of sketchy operations that would get ads approved and then just pump like a hundred million dollars of sales behind them. And it seems like maybe there's a little bit of that going on here where a lot of these ads should not have been approved. Maybe there needs to be a validation. I know that a lot of companies that partner with doctors, even just to sell like skincare, supplements, sunscreens, really anything, the rate to advertise with an influencer who actually has some sort of medical credential is way higher.

Because it's way more effective.

Yeah, and it's way more effective. But if you can just fake that, then you're basically arbitraging that. But you shouldn't be.

So we have two employees but 800 fake doctors. Not great.

So we'll see how this works out. I think the press tour is probably ended for the near term.

Okay. Well, I think people have a lot of questions for the founder, Matthew Gallagher. We'd love to have him on the show and dig into all this because maybe there's some good context that is missing from all of the criticism that's been levied over the weekend. But we'll see. So I was reflecting on, like, we're still in pursuit broadly of this one-person $1 billion company. It's still an interesting question. Will it happen? Why might it happen? Why might it not?

You just run into...

There's a point. Why would I not add at least a handful of people, right?

Yeah, totally. So yeah, I mean, I think software is an interesting category, especially if it was open-source software somehow, where there was some sort of flywheel where you could verify what was actually built and then you could verify what the sales were because it was done on some sort of open platform or some sort of thing where the actual reporting and the analytics... I mean, apparently the New York Times did verify the run rate that they used, so their money was flowing through the business. But having a much cleaner representation of what the financial picture is, I think, would help. I was personally excited about the prospect of a video game and just more video game developers seeing breakout success. So a couple years ago, in the olden days when I had free time, I got woefully addicted to a poker-themed roguelike deck-building game called Balatro, which I don't think anyone here has played, but this game is amazing. So much fun. So you're basically playing poker, but there's no financial stakes, there's no money, there's no microtransactions at all. Interestingly, the game actually got banned, I think, in Japan or some other country for being like poker and being...

Banned for being anti-gambling?

No, no. Banned for being like gambling aesthetics because you are playing with cards. There's no real money. You pay like $10, $15 for the game and then you can just play unlimited.

But it's done extremely well. So it sold over 5 million units. I saw some reporting that it might be 7 million and maybe even more now because they've gone multiplatform. And I think at $15, $20 a download, that might be close to a hundred million in revenue, and it was made by a solo developer who goes by LocalThunk over a two-and-a-half-year period. He originally wanted the game to be a side project that he could put on his resume, but it wound up being a massive success. And so depending on your valuation methodology, you could probably underwrite Balatro close to a billion dollars if it's generated a hundred million of basically free cash flow. You know, there was obviously two and a half years of R&D, but that was just this developer's time, the future revenue streams, the offshoots, the merch. Like you get to a number that's close. And you have to imagine that his two-and-a-half-year development lifecycle would have been pulled forward by the help of AI. So he basically developed the game entirely in the pre-AI period. So it came out...

Does it still have momentum? I think it's probably trailed off a little bit because people sort of, you get to the end of the game after I don't know, 10, 20, 50 hours or something, and then there are some people on YouTube that will do like tons and tons of like try and break the game because you can get really, really crazy with like combinations of different things. But at a certain point, like you do kind of finish the game and then you're like, okay, I'm moving on. And he never added microtransactions. He never added like any sort of live service model, subscription, anything like that. It was sort of just like it did really well and then we'll see. And so yeah, this came out as a demo in 2023 and officially launched in January 2024. So fully like pre-AI development, and there is lots of hesitation in the video game community around AI, specifically around the art generation, like pixel art generation, all of that. But if you think about AI as a tool for writing game logic and particularly like re-platforming, it took him I want to say like a full year, and I think he partnered with a developer or a publisher to actually distribute the game because it was originally a PC game and then it went to Nintendo Switch and then PlayStation and then Xbox, and it's a perfect game to be everywhere, but that takes a lot of time and you sort of have to rewrite a bunch of the software, and that's something where AI should be able to pull that forward or make it even easier to launch everywhere on day one.

And so the interesting thing is that Balatro broke through because it paired like this familiar design language with this wildly engaging progression system. And so bringing fun ideas like that to market faster is something that I'm really looking forward to. And we heard Sholto from Anthropic talking about like building his own RTS game, and obviously he has a full-time job, so this would be certainly something that would be like extra. We've been working on a bunch of simulators that are sort of feeling like games. Some of the mechanics are getting pretty good now.

Game-like.

But you have to imagine that in the future there'll be more and more game developers.

Yeah. I mean, some of the stuff that I've seen internally at TBPN, it's like going to blow...

Are you the vague post king? Have you stared into the abyss yet? Because everyone talks about at the AI labs, they all have abysses, and I feel like abyss 101 is like, do not stare into it. Like maybe glance at onboarding.

I think a glance is okay, and or maybe...

Like, like saddling up to the abyss and just kind of peeking your head in is fine, but I would not stare into it. I think that's something... Let's go over to the App Store.

Yeah, the App Store saw an 85% increase in new apps this past quarter. Let's pour one out, pour one out for the App Store review team. In most recent quarters, new app count has grown less than 10%. So it was just ticking up quarter over quarter and then jumped massively. No surprises here. I feel like everybody that I know outside of tech has an app now. They're unconstrained. They have an app, but at the same time, I have yet to find an app that's on my home screen that was solo developer vibe coded, something like that. So I'm waiting for the Flappy Bird moment or the Balatro moment, this like solo thing. Even if it's like a productivity tool, there's clearly more apps, but actually going viral, like what is the Harry Potter Balenciaga moment? What is the viral moment that breaks through and actually makes it to the top of the app charts? Because right now it just feels like the long tail of the App Store is getting potentially fatter because there's more single-use apps, there's more small apps, but will we see one of those break out and become fantastically successful? That's sort of like the next critical moment that I'm eagerly awaiting, but we'll see.

What's going on in China, John?

The pork industry is a victim of its own success. This story is incredible. They got swine scrapers over there. Skyscrapers filled with swine. I'm not kidding about this. So this is from The Economist and I read this yesterday and really enjoyed it. Pork holds a unique place in the Chinese diet. It was once a symbol of the good life. The Chinese character for home is a pictogram of a pig under a roof. It is so important that the government has a strategic frozen pork reserve and the news media are always full of the ups and downs of the pork industry. It's like they got to cover it like it's a horse race. Like, what's going on? Yeah, it's a pork race.

No, serious. TBPN for the pork industry in China. That's the real opportunity. There have been plenty of peaks and troughs in the past decade. The trough is active over there, literally. In 2018 to 2019, when African swine fever ravaged pig herds, many smaller backyard farms were wiped out. Prices went through the roof. Before long, the industry came trotting back. The big worry now is that it is doing too well. More efficient farming methods producing ever more pork are colliding with slow consumption of the meat. Now all the news is about overcapacity. She who sells cuts of pork at a market in Beijing says she only got to eat the meat on special occasions as a child. These days, she says it's so cheap people can have it whenever they fancy. The oversupply pushed live pig prices to a 15-year low in March. Some farmers are losing over $40 per animal. Part of the problem is that some pig farmers have aggressively expanded production in an attempt to gain a bigger share of a shrinking market. On top of that, big companies saved their bacon in the downturn by concentrating their pigs into mechanized modern facilities where they could be kept isolated from the swine fever. Modern farms are a marvel of industrial agriculture, though not of animal welfare. Tens of thousands of pigs are packed into multi-story concrete buildings. One in Hubei province has 26 floors. It's a swine scraper. It's 26 floors of pigs.

Do we know why consumption is declining?

Just oversupply. So they got hit with the swine flu and they were worried about all the pigs getting sick and dying. And so instead of having them cross-pollinate in like open fields, they pushed them into these literal skyscrapers that are 26 floors tall.

But I would assume overproduction, you have oversupply, prices come down, but...

They're saying that just overall consumption is dropping too. Well, yes. So people are moving to chicken and seafood. Increasingly, middle-class Chinese see pork as less healthy than chicken and seafood. But it's really like a supply-side story. That may be more pork than even China can eat. The average Chinese person guzzled 28 kg of it in 2024, but that was 2 kg less than in 2023. To boost prices, officials have slashed subsidies, ordered farms to cull hogs, and told the pork reserve to buy more meat, to little effect. Some big firms are looking elsewhere.

That is wild.

China's biggest pig producer hopes to export its business model instead. Last year, it said it would build the first high-rise in Vietnam capable of rearing 1.6 million swine a year. Pig farms are going vertical as profits flatline. And so they are moving the pigs inside, which is winding up with increased yields because the pigs aren't getting sick. Anyway, America's new best weapon in Iran is a drone inspired by Iran. You had asked about this on one interview we did with someone. Yeah, I forget who it was with, but I was surprised to see the US copying the Shahed because it feels like...

You were surprised to see them copying it or not copying it?

No, it feels like entirely the smart move. It's battle-tested. They're cheap. We have a good understanding of their capability because American allies have faced off against them. So there's a lot of reasons that it makes sense, but I feel like America had to swallow its pride to some degree to copy something that the enemy made.

Yeah, they're calling it the Toyota Corolla of drones. The powerful, low-cost attack drone the US is using in its war with Iran doesn't come from one of America's more than 400 venture-backed drone startups, and it isn't the product of Silicon Valley ingenuity. Instead, the drone having its moment in the Middle East conflict was designed by the US military itself using reverse-engineered Iranian technology. From the earliest days of the war, the FLIR-136, or Lucas as it is known, has been wiping out Iranian military targets while better-funded hardware systems and drones from defense startups have had little involvement. It is a victory for the US military, which went from blueprint to battle-ready drone in less than two years, jettisoning its tradition of slowly buying very expensive equipment. The creation of Lucas is an early proof point...

That's a narrative violation.

...of a new strategy of making cheap drones quickly, and a sign that the Pentagon can change the way it does business to better prepare for modern conflict. So I want to know so much more about... So they're not subcontracting this at all? Is the entire supply chain the US military itself? Are they milling the parts in factories that they've built?

During the Biden administration, a small group in the Defense Department seized on the idea of America building its own version of the Iranian Shahed, a fearsome attack drone that militaries and proxy militias across the globe have sought to duplicate. Russia, which is lobbing about 4,000 modified Shaheds at Ukraine every month according to Ukrainian government data, did more than any other country to demonstrate the drone's capabilities. A small team in the US military's research and engineering office put together plans to build an attack drone based on deconstructing a Shahed that the military had recovered from Ukraine. It was the first known occasion in around half a century that the US had reverse-engineered another country's military technology for its own use. Former defense officials said the last time it was a Soviet-made pontoon bridge. That's interesting. A former senior defense official described Lucas, which stands for Low-Cost Unmanned Combat Attack System, as the Toyota Corolla of drones. It may not have all the features or top-end components, but it was built to be affordable and plentiful. The cost of Lucas ranges from $10,000 to $55,000. That's a big range, according to a Pentagon spokesman. In line with the Iranian model, Tomahawk long-range cruise missiles, several hundred of which have been used in the war with Iran, cost at least $2 million apiece.

The Defense Department is committed to scaling cost-effective autonomous solutions for the joint force, and Lucas continues to be a prime example, the spokesman said. Former senior Pentagon official Michael Horowitz, who is one of the leaders of the teams that developed Lucas, said that other militaries had the ability to make their own low-cost long-range precision strike weapons. The issue was the US was spending nothing, zero dollars, on that kind of system. He's now on the Council on Foreign Relations. Lucas was given a spot in 2024 in a Biden-era initiative to field thousands of autonomous weapons by last August. Its inclusion was controversial, said former military officials. Lucas wasn't just a mockup, but it beat out more mature systems on the offering. Interesting. Because the government owns Lucas's intellectual property, it is using the same approach it employed in building ships during World War II, enlisting a cross-section of second- and third-tier manufacturers who crank out the drones on demand during wartime. Little-known Scottsdale, Arizona-based Spectre Works and Huntsville, Alabama-based Integration Innovation were tapped to build the drones. So they are partnering with private companies to actually build and assemble these drones. A total of five manufacturers will be selected, each set up to produce 300 drones a month, a former senior defense official familiar with the plan said. Spectre Works and Integration Innovation didn't respond to requests for comment. The Marine Corps was first to use the drones and ordered around 6,000 destined for the Indo-Pacific. But then the war with Iran began. The drones were handed over to US CENTCOM in February and made their first appearance in combat. The Trump administration has enacted sweeping reforms in defense procurement, making it easier for the military to quickly buy weapons and emphasizing commercial technology to modernize the US arsenal. In particular, an August decision by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to rescind long-held requirements processes for acquiring technology made the rapid deployment of Lucas possible, current and former defense officials say. Still, other changes will take longer to trickle through the Pentagon's bureaucracy, and it will take time to reorient America to a new way of fighting wars, even as China is developing advanced ways to strike the US. While Lucas has been a success against Iran's degraded air defenses, that isn't a guarantee it will be a battlefield star in more complex environments, an electronic warfare expert said. In the Middle East, there is no meaningful jamming of GPS, which can cause drones to crash or fly off course. Every technology gets defeated at some point, he said. There's also still a worrisome lack of cheap US counter-drone technology, which has allowed Iranian-backed militias to continue using small drones to menace US military bases in the Middle East. The small number of unmanned surface vessels in the region are still years away from being the autonomous fighting machines their manufacturers have promised. The absence of a broader supply of modern, cheap US systems in the Iran war has served as a wake-up call. 'We're not ready,' said Julie Bush, co-founder of the defense tech firm Valinor Enterprises and a former Palantir Technologies executive, who's been on the show. 'The government doesn't have what it needs at the scale that they need.'

Yeah. Did you see that AGM post Antonio Garcia Martinez said about how maybe there are actually ships that are going through the Strait of Hormuz right now, but they just turn off all of their transponders?

Yeah. I mean, I think the estimate is around 10 ships a day are going through, down from 100 pre-war.

Yeah.

But there could be more that just have their transponders turned off.