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WOLF TUESDAY AFTERNOON SPACES
Recorded: April 30, 2024 Duration: 1:59:00Space Recording
Full Transcription
All right.
Seems like the space is working okay.
This has been one of those buggy days, sadly, where people have not been able to find the
space, not be able to come up.
But I think we're doing all right.
Larry, can you hear me?
Oh, man.
All right.
Larry's back to listener.
Landon, can you hear me?
I am here.
Let's rock and roll.
Okay.
Okay.
I'm just hoping some people will make it on stage and we'll be able to field a little
bit of a panel.
So what a day in the market.
Spirits, hopefully, you know, it's a little bit of a downer day right now.
And obviously, Tesla's kind of plunging as we're speaking, but the stock has done really nicely
since our last base.
Over the past week, Tesla stock is up 30%.
Reminder, it was trading around $141 on our last base and it is now trading at $184.
How do I know it was trading around there?
Because if you remember, everybody, I bought on our last base.
When I bought, it was at $146.28.
So nice move to the upside here up to $184.
That is about $40 per share there.
So hope everybody else was checking it out with me on that last base when we had things
happen.
So there's a number of Tesla things going on.
We've got these price moves that we've been seeing.
There's obviously some price cuts.
I don't know if anyone else has seen it.
And I'm very curious to get opinions on what's happening here.
But Elon also apparently unfollowed Sawyer and Omar today.
Penny, did you see that?
I only saw that he unfollowed Sawyer.
I didn't see that he unfollowed Omar too.
But that's very interesting.
I wonder what's going on there.
Yep.
Yep.
So that is a pretty crazy thing to see right there that we're looking at.
You know, I don't know what's going on there.
I do remember something that happened with Mario in a fall a month ago or so,
where somebody hacked into his account, blocked Elon from the account.
And so that made his account unfollowed by Elon.
So maybe there's something along those lines.
But I really do hope that we'll be able to get Omar into here today so that we can actually
hear from him if he thinks there's anything that could cause this or something that's going
on there.
But let's get into it kind of post earnings.
What a week, 30% run up.
Larry, do you have some analysis for us here on how you think everything's been going?
Well, you know, we start with, of course, the excellent call that we had.
A lot of us were very happy with Elon's extreme presence.
He's, you know, he was there.
He was present.
He was talking from, you know, from his gut.
And he was obviously extremely engaged.
And then followed with his trip to China, which was unexpected, unheralded.
It was in contrast to, you know, the sort of staving off of the India meeting.
And probably was the explanation for why he didn't go to India was that, you know, he would,
he, you know, this, this call, this trip to China came together and came at the moment.
He made the trip to China.
It's very hard to overstate the importance of that trip from several perspectives.
The first perspective is, obviously, it's China restating their commitment to Tesla, Tesla restating its commitment to China.
It's not, it's not nothing.
Secondly, you know, the, the clear path to FSD in China.
This is very exciting.
And it also leads to, you know, the, the, the potential for licensing to Chinese OEMs.
I think everybody would be interested in, you know, vision only, net only, FSD.
And we will see China companies attempting to copy.
It, it's a pretty high barrier to get through, very high barrier to get through, but, but very interesting and very opportune.
So, you know, just more of the same.
Elon really pushing the boundaries of, you know, the, the, the reduction in cost, reducing, and, and I think that was the result that resulted in the, in the stock price coming back a little bit today.
Reducing the, uh, reducing the, um, the supercharging team, supercharger team, and also, um, you know, getting rid of the, of what was, uh, Ryan Patel's team.
So, you know, the man is hardcore and he's doing the hardcore stuff.
This is, uh, as I said last week, this is, um, Elon in demon mode.
And we know that demon mode always leads to a revival, a refocus, a renewal, and it'll be very interesting to see it happen.
So I'm pretty excited about what's happening.
Although, of course, I loved Rebecca Tannucci.
I loved, uh, Ryan Patel.
You know, all of these guys were really, really, really good guys, but the, the bench at Tesla is deep and the renewal of, you know, the bringing up of young people, the renewal of, of the organization.
This is thematic with everything Elon's ever done.
So exciting times, exciting times, and I'm excited.
Well put.
All right, we got the man of the hour up on stage.
Omar, what's going on with, uh, you and Sawyer, part of this morning's cuts?
Oh, Sawyer coming in too.
All right, I need to get both of you on stage so we can have this discussion.
Um, because obviously we all saw, and you posted about it, some, some humorous stuff.
So what do you think's going on?
Well, I mean, I don't think it really matters, to be honest.
There's more important things going on with Tesla right now.
That's fair.
I wanted to make sure you didn't get hacked.
I wanted to make sure you didn't get hacked, because what happened with Mario in a fall like a month ago was he got hacked.
They blocked Elon from his account, and so it unfollowed.
So I wanted to make sure you still had your account.
So that's all I was happy for.
Yeah, I mean, I don't really know, but it's okay.
I don't think it really, uh, matters that much.
He can follow or unfollow.
Like, everyone's like, what's going on?
I'm getting like Bloomberg reporters DMing me like, oh my God, what happened?
And, and, you know, I mean, he's like, uh, unfollowed and followed many times in the past.
I don't really, you know, think it's worth discussing over, for example, what happened
in China, some of the restructuring news we heard last night, the crazy one day price
action yesterday, and, um, you know, all this other crazy stuff that's happening with FSD.
Yeah, so, uh, story real quick, and we don't have to delve too far into this.
You got any thoughts on everything that's happened, and then the big tech alert, and
then we can roll into some of the stock being up 30% over the past week?
Uh, I mean, like Omar said, not like a, not a huge deal.
Um, I, I suspect he unfollowed because Omar and I shared that the information article
last night about the firings, um, I, I suspect after he unfollowed, I suspected the info might
have been wrong, but based on all the posts we're seeing from employees, looks like at
least some of the info was right.
Um, yeah, I mean, like, yeah, we were speculating that that was the case.
If you read the information article, basically said he sent off this email, you know, Monday
night, and he sounded pretty pissed in the email based on what the information quoted.
So maybe they misrepresented the email, or they're not sort of representing the strategy
fairly, and he was annoyed at that.
So I kind of take that as kind of a signal that there may have been something wrong in
the article.
Like, we've seen this happen before, for example, with the Reuters story that the affordable
model was canceled.
Then when we got to the earnings call, it turned out that there was some, you know, there was
a kernel of truth there, but they just basically misinterpreted it.
The unbox platform version of the affordable car was canceled, but it was so that the thing
could be moved up.
So maybe there's some strategy here that we don't understand, and it's being kind of misrepresented.
And he was annoyed by that.
But it would maybe be good to just take the story with a grain of salt and wait for further
clarification and understanding, you know, what their plans are with some of this restructuring
and the charging team and all that.
Yeah, I'll just add that, you know, Elon has unfollowed and refollowed Grimes and Kimball
Musk many times.
I mean, ex-Daily, he DM'd me and he said, Elon has blocked him three times, but he currently
subscribes and follows to him.
So I wouldn't be surprised if Elon just unfollows us for a little while and just refollows us later.
If not, it's fine, whatever.
Yeah, like there have been times in the past where like, I like got invited to a Tesla event
and then like Elon literally like personally kicked me out of the event and told me I wasn't
invited before.
And that's just kind of like, that's the kind of who he is, you know, I mean, and it's not
like it really changed anything.
It didn't change my opinion of the company.
I thought it was a little like wild, you know, but I mean, I think it's cool that he
even knows who I am and he's even like, you know, doing this stuff or following or unfollowing
or whatever.
Like this guy's like a living legend, you know.
But really, I think what matters is what's happening at the company, not what he's doing
on social media.
Hey, it was a bigger story for me than the job cuts.
Okay.
That's all I'm saying.
All right.
Well, let's talk about the stock here for a minute.
Sawyer stock pumped 30% over the past week.
It is selling off pretty sharply today.
And it does look like those cuts may end up being closer to 20% of the company.
So what's the general idea of what's going on with Tesla?
How do you read into the numbers that we saw last week, plus the job cuts, plus the market
reacting so positively?
I mean, Elon seems to be in overdrive mode in terms of restructuring and bringing down
costs.
I think he was, it seems like he was really unhappy with the Q1 delivery numbers and he's
setting Tesla up for future success.
And that means laying off a lot of people.
The supercharger firing, if that is true, that is a little bit puzzling to me considering,
you know, they just opened up the North American charging standard to a lot of, and they're a
supercharger network to a lot of other EV companies.
And, you know, V4 rollout was supposed to continue to expand, especially with the Cybertrucks
coming out.
Um, so that's a little bit puzzling.
I don't know if that means, I don't want to speculate.
We'll see what that means, but certainly some interesting moves.
Okay.
Powerhouse mode.
Did anything that he said on the earnings call really stand out to you?
Not really, to be honest.
I was a little surprised that he said, we'll probably have year over year growth in terms
of deliveries for 2024 over 2023.
Um, but other than that, not really.
Got it.
Omar, to you, was it also nothing too crazy?
What do you think ultimately made the market react like it did?
Well, I think there's a lot of uncertainty.
Um, this stock is basically a tug of war right now between the bull and the bear narrative.
And the bull narrative is that this is a company that has turned the corner on AI and they've
got this incredible self-driving technology that's now working in the United States and
Canada.
They're showing it off in Germany.
They're showing it off in China and beginning work to deploy there, getting the required
licenses, you know, seeing some serious momentum.
Um, and the bear story is really that this is a company that's in chaos that is seeing sales
decline, fundamentals decline, and, um, you know, that the CEO has just kind of lost his
mind.
So I think we saw sort of a similar story with the departure of Baglino and with the departure
of, um, uh, Rohan Patel and, uh, now also with Rebecca Tanucci and 500 people from the charging
team and also, um, Daniel Ho.
So, so I think there's just a little bit of uncertainty in the market about that what's
going on, but ultimately I think I am not sure quite what's going on.
I don't have all the information and I think Elon does have that information and he has pretty
good judgment.
So do we need necessarily 500 people to run the supercharging network?
We're not talking about the people making the superchargers or the engineers who code
the software for the superchargers.
We're talking about people who are planning the sites and managing construction and all
of that.
You know, there's about 5,000 stations.
So there was about one person for every 10 stations.
So I don't know, maybe they have a different strategy for how they're going to do this.
Maybe they need to just do a little bit of a pause on new supercharger construction.
Maybe they have a, you know, pivot with robo taxis that they need to start building chargers
that are ready for robo taxis.
I don't really know, but I think it's clear that he's really
taking a new focus to making sure Tesla performs excellently.
I think it's clear that he's really focusing on FSD, but also just making sure that if times
get tougher, the company doesn't swing into a situation where it posts a loss or isn't
doing well financially.
He did say in a tweet just this week that he wants to invest $10 billion in AI.
So if the company is to really deliver on their AI ambitions as best as possible, I think
it means just making sure every single dollar they can possibly put into training compute
and AI goes in that direction.
And that's what I think this new strategy is all about.
It seems like chaos from the outside.
And this sort of, it was similar with the Twitter firings back when Elon bought Twitter
and laid off 80% of the company.
Now, obviously, Elon's not doing that at Tesla right now.
It's probably more anywhere from 10 to 20-ish percent.
But I think Elon deserves the benefit of the doubt here, despite this seemingly, what seems
like chaos from the outside.
Elon likely has a plan that he's executing, and we just aren't necessarily privy to every
part of that.
Good points.
Ryan, you got some thoughts here?
Yeah, hey, guys.
So I thought it was interesting that Elon posted this thing, or wrote about how he doesn't want
anybody to stay who doesn't obviously pass the excellent, necessary, and trustworthy test.
You know, it's quite hardcore to make that umbrella statement to everybody, and then anybody who has
people in their organization who doesn't pass those tests.
I think, you know, to let them go and also have 500 people or approximately 500 people from
the supercharging team go, seems it sounded like my gut told me that that was not correct.
But then I've seen some posts from people that I worked with in the past who have said that it's
accurate.
So I'm quite curious how the future is going to shape up for the charging infrastructure team.
Like, they're definitely not going to slow down, or they're not going to stop
adding superchargers.
So, and that, and those people had the most experience.
I just don't see where they're going to find new people who have the ability to implement
new charging infrastructure better than the current, like the current or former team.
One of the reasons, or the main reason that I invest in Tesla is because the team is so
great, and then also I believe strongly in management's judgment, including Elon.
So I think he's probably making the right decision, but it's going to take a little bit of time
for us to understand why that decision was good.
Yeah.
Um, yeah, I'm, I'm just, I guess I'm just pretty, what he said was pretty interesting.
Actually, he said, I will, he said, starting tomorrow morning, AKA today, I will ask for
the resignation of any manager who retains more than three people on their team who do
not pass the necessary, excellent, and trustworthy test.
So that is the criteria for keeping someone.
They have to be obviously necessary.
They have to be excellent at what they do, and they have to be trustworthy.
And if you have three people on your team who don't obviously pass that test, then you're
going to be asked for your resignation, AKA you're fired.
So, I mean, I think this is really in part a drive for excellence, but also a drive to
be serious about cost cutting.
Like, look, you, we really have to keep people who are only necessary, excellent, and trustworthy.
And if you can't do that, you have more than three people who don't pass that test, then
you're not the right manager for this position.
You know, a lot of times when people get let go, they will, you know, go to the media, they'll
sort of tell the story from their perspective.
And obviously they're upset about being let go, but we're, you know, again, do we actually
need 500 people planning the new supercharger sites?
Can it be done more efficiently?
Were these people necessary, excellent, and trustworthy?
I'm sure probably a lot of them were, but if the company can ultimately do without it and
invest more into AI, invest more into other projects and be more of a fortress of a balance
sheet in case of a downturn, then that could be the right move.
But it's hard to know just based off of, you know, a leaked email from one story.
That's fair.
That's fair.
Landon, want to hop into the mix?
Any thoughts here?
Yeah, thanks very much.
I'd like to just, as we do sometimes on Spaces to reset the room, everybody that's been involved
with Tesla for as long as some of us and longer, I'd like to reset the Tesla space and say,
welcome to Tesla.
Because whatever we've had for the last couple, two, three years is not the Tesla really that
I invested in, that I got excited and passionate about.
We've been kind of in these doldrums and the stock has been, you know, generally down and
people start to freak out.
And Omar and Sawyer have to manage everybody on X as they lose their minds.
But then we can come into spaces like this and get some perspective.
And one of the things that I'm most excited about, with apologies to people that are losing
their jobs, you know, a lot of us have been there.
I'm sorry, that can be very difficult personally.
But as a business, as an organization, this is critical, critical to success, especially for
a moving company like Tesla.
The situations that I've been in, in hiring and firing, are really make this clear to me.
When you are stuck with an employee and you cannot move on from that employee for whatever
reason, he's dragging down the energy and the drive of your company, he or she.
And this is something that we don't want.
None of us really want to be in a job where we're not respected or appreciated.
And so this kind of thing, this lean design, this lean manufacturing, and now we're seeing
lean employment, is the natural course after a big run-up in a company.
You get too many people.
Oh, that's right.
We don't need people for that anymore.
If you're continuing the EV dominance of Tesla in the automotive world, maybe you should
stay with some more of these people.
But if you're transitioning to an AI humanoid robotics company with full self-driving just
breaking through internationally now, you can't do it necessarily with the same people
you had in 06 or in 12 or in 15.
So this new blood that is coming in is something that Elon has seen as important.
And I can certainly second that from a much lower ground level, that when you have people
that don't want to be there, but you can't move on from them, they are handcuffing your
company.
I'm excited to ask maybe Ryan a question or two later on in the space with this experience
on the supercharger team.
And just as a layman and knowing the people that I have known in the company, I find it
impossible to believe that Elon fired everyone on the supercharger team.
That's just not reasonable.
But I'll leave that for later in the call.
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's definitely an interesting move.
And I think that there's both sides to it, right?
It can be, you know, hey, people like we hate to see people lose their jobs.
It's a cool thing.
And at the same time, it's never easy to fire people.
And for the management that does do it and sometimes remove some of that bloat, you can
make a really efficient company.
It's a lot when you're removing entire teams, like you're saying, it's hard to believe
that some of those entire teams are gone, right?
Like who's going to be working on those products and items like that.
So I think there are a few things that I try to keep in mind.
Penny, do you have thoughts on all this?
Yeah, specific to the layoffs, the supercharger layoffs.
I'm interested if Elon sees like a major blunder from a strategy perspective.
I wonder if there's something, some innovation that should have happened and no one on the
team made it happen.
You know, something that really upset him seems to be like the only logical reason I can come
up with if he did ax an entire squad like that.
So I'm really excited to see, I don't know if excited is the right word, anxious to see
what news comes out, you know, as maybe not even news, but just developments in the supercharger
network.
Like what happens over the next six months that might give us some clues as to why this happened.
You know, it could be related to preparation for robo taxi, right?
Like if Elon has been, uh, talking about how robo taxi is coming for a long time and maybe
the supercharger network hasn't made any accommodations to prepare for that.
And now, you know, eight, eight is coming up and they don't have the story for superchargers.
Maybe it's something like that.
Uh, but, but again, you know, I think we'll find out basically by, by changes in strategy
over the next few months.
My, we talked about the 30% pop, right?
And I know some of it happened immediately after the call, but when I heard that Elon was
in China and that they got tentative approval for FSD, the first thing I thought was like,
holy crap, that's huge.
That is a gigantic market that no one really had any guess as to when FSD might, uh, penetrate.
And even, you know, we were aware of some major hurdles like the, like the security and data
related things and training related things.
So my sense is that it's really starting to almost become undeniable the FSD story, right?
I think people who were skeptical for a really long time, they had been in previous versions
of FSD and, and thought, you know, there were just too many edge cases were just too far
away, uh, between the amazing news with version 12 and how quickly they're coming out with
point releases on V12.
Each of them seems to be an improvement over the last, and now all of a sudden opening up,
uh, you know, whatever regulatory issues there may have been in China and, and getting the
robo taxi rolling out there sometime in the next year or two.
I think that that is like a story that is undeniable.
And I think people are starting to wake up.
I think that wall street is starting to give credit to Tesla as an AI play.
Um, you know, I think many of us in this room think it's the AI play, you know, maybe NVIDIA
gives it a run for its money, but, um, yeah, it, it seems like up until this point, people
were completely writing off that story and it just seemed like, you know, it didn't matter
who you talk to, they were looking at the numbers of Tesla as if it was a car company
and deliveries and, and, uh, you know, the amount of capacity on their manufacturing lines
was the most important thing to everyone.
But I think that's starting to shift.
And I think that is what opens up the door to, you know, the next big waves of growth,
uh, at Tesla.
And I think people are starting to realize, you know, you, you, you don't know exactly
when all of this is going to happen.
And if you're not in the stock, uh, on the day it does, you're going to miss 15% in a
day like we did yesterday.
Go ahead, Omar.
So, you know, I think, um, it's important to just sort of, uh, point out that in the story,
they said, we're going to continue to build out new chargers.
Chargers were critical and finished construction of the existing sites.
So this kind of goes against the point that the whole team was fired.
I think clearly they have people in place to finish building chargers and build new chargers,
even propose new sites and get them built.
So I would just point back to a comment that the CFO and CEO made on the recent earnings call.
The CFO said, the way to think about it is any tree, which grows, it needs pruning.
This is the pruning exercise we went through.
And then Musk said, we're not giving up anything that is significant that I'm aware of.
Saying that Tesla had become too inefficient and that it is time to reorganize the company
for the next phase of growth.
So, first of all, you know, never believe what you read in the news.
The news is wrong all the time, as we've seen.
And yet, you know, we don't learn to be skeptical of it after, you know, each incorrect story.
But, you know, the story is that they just fired the whole supercharging team,
and now they don't have a supercharging team.
Musk said on the earnings call about the previous layoffs,
we're not giving up anything that is significant that I'm aware of.
My guess is, he believes, rightly or wrongly,
that the team wasn't really doing anything valuable,
and that the company can keep going without them.
Or, you know, build a different team, reorganize, restructure.
So, I'll wait and see what the real story is behind this,
but I'm guessing they didn't just fire the entire supercharger team,
and they're not giving up on superchargers.
Yeah.
Yeah, Larry.
I'm having a hard time getting off mute.
Yeah, I'll just tell everybody the story.
It's available in the biography.
Musk once fired the entire ground staff team in Cape Canaveral
because he found on, I think it was a Christmas weekend,
nobody in operations.
And he fired the lead guy, and he fired everybody reporting to him.
And I tell that story because he fired them for a reason.
They were good people, really good people.
He fired them for a reason.
And that Cape Canaveral team never missed a beat.
I mean, not the Cape Canaveral team,
but the Cape Canaveral implementation and installation never missed a beat.
They went on to, as you see this year, to a record.
Last year was a record.
This year is going to be an even greater record.
He doesn't do things without a plan or without a reason or without a purpose.
Now, I don't know what the plan, reason, or purpose is.
But as I said earlier, you know, he does these things in what Isaacson called demon mode.
But whatever mode they're in, there's always a motivation behind it.
There's always a plan behind it.
There's always a purpose behind it.
And we're not privy to that, but we will soon see it play out.
So, you know, I really like Rebecca Tannucci a lot.
And I really, as you may have all read, you know, very high on the supercharger network
as a potential revenue earning and profit earning component of the Tesla story.
But I think that Elon sees something that is seeing something we're not seeing.
And I've no doubt that it's going to be fine, just fine.
So, you know, he doesn't consult us and he doesn't, you know, tell us what he's doing.
But I know he's doing something very important.
That's all I, you know, have to add to that story.
Got it.
Sawyer, let me bring it back over to you for a second here.
I'm just curious on the latest updates that have been coming out.
I saw that you had posted that the big spring software updates starting to roll out.
I saw Omar was commenting about one of the updates, which he was looking forward to trying the other day.
Can you just run through what you're looking forward to there?
Yeah, not a Tesla app.
They posted that they're saying a few cars have now received the update.
It seems like just a slow rollout, which is sort of what we expect from big new software updates.
But you just get a lot of visual updates, new features, new app things.
So I think this is something a lot of people have been waiting for.
And what was your second question?
It was really in regards to new versions and things that people can be looking forward to, what some of those features are.
I know maybe Omar has some clarity on it.
I saw you commenting about one of the upcoming releases that you were like, I've got to have this.
And I think Elon maybe replied and said that it was coming at some point soon.
Well, at least with the big spring update, you get, you know, hands-free trunk.
You get preview of century mode recordings.
You get a trip progress bar.
I think they added like Spotify queue and playback speeds.
Better route available, wiper controls, you know, speed camera.
New UI changes.
Yep, UI changes, a whole bunch of things.
For Cybertruck, they've added a brand new off-road mode, which is a lot more detailed.
They're adding PowerShare, which gives you the ability to back up your home with your Cybertruck.
So there's a lot of big stuff shipping.
It's actually bigger than the holiday update, which is usually their big update for the year.
This year, I guess the holiday update wasn't good enough.
So Elon said you got to do another one for the spring.
Got it.
Big holiday update incoming.
Hopefully my service isn't the one cutting out here.
You guys can still hear me.
I think I'm slowing a little bit on my end.
Can't tell if it's my Wi-Fi.
Is my service sounding pretty good, Penny?
Yeah, you sound good, but so did everyone else.
I heard Sawyer just fine as well.
Okay, no issues.
All right, Penny, you got a question or anything on your mind for Sawyer or Omar here while we have both of them up on stage?
It's obviously been a big week for Tesla, but it doesn't feel like people are talking about it that much, even off a 30% move.
No, I don't have any specific questions.
I'm really excited about what's going on with the business right now.
I feel like wartime Elon is exactly what we needed, right?
And there is like this really interesting play with everything that's happening in the world as well.
It just seems like we're in a wartime situation culturally as well, and it seems like a lot all at once.
But I think it was Landon that hit on the fact that Tesla wasn't acting like a startup anymore from my point of view.
You know, it seemed like they had a lot of things going on in the background.
They've made a ton of ground on big projects over the past couple years, but none of it has really hit like the pinnacle of excitement.
And I think we're really like right on the verge of all of that right now.
I think Elon has probably gotten frustrated with how long it's taken for some of that stuff to manifest and he's turned on war mode.
And I think we're going to see more changes over the next six months with Tesla and, you know, I think in culture as well.
So it's super exciting for me sort of to like sit in the stands and watch this all happen and, you know, see a master at work, so to speak, you know, moving mountains from my perspective.
You know, it's I've had to do a lot of company restructuring and layoffs in my past, and it's never any fun, but it usually happens for a reason.
And when the dust settles, it's usually a much more efficient and productive company as a result of it.
So, yeah, I'm just really looking forward to how all of that shakes out personally.
Got it. Yep, that shakes out.
OK, cool. Another question. I'm going to flip back at you, Sawyer, real quick here.
And this was, again, in regards to, you know, the teams changing up.
So we're hearing these firings, but do you think we're going to see more shifts and changes in senior leadership as well?
I know we did see that a week or two ago, but could you see more changes coming in there?
Do you think they're going to be maybe I feel like we hear a lot about big people leaving.
Do you think we're going to hear about maybe some big names coming in?
I mean, potentially, I wouldn't be surprised if we saw more changes just because Elon seems to be seeing things.
And if he wants to make a change, he makes it happen.
And if they're down the line, he feels like more fat needs to be trimmed, then he'll do just that.
So I don't think we've seen the end of the restructuring.
They do have all these positions that they're hiring for up on their page.
Do you find that odd at all with everything that's going on?
So I thought they got rid of at least most of job postings, especially in North America.
Are there like, do they re-add them?
Right now, if you go to, oh, wow, do they take the whole thing off?
Geez, is that just, I looked at this thing like a week ago.
Yeah, no, it's gone.
Yeah.
What?
There are like 40 positions on here.
Yeah, the only places they're hiring a little bit still are like, you know, apprenticeships or like, I think, Australia a little bit and a few jobs in China.
But pretty much like all of Europe, all of North America, all of the jobs have been taken off.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah, that is a change.
Funny, though, nowadays that I go to their Twitter page and I look there to see if they have job hirings.
It's kind of a new experience versus the old days.
What's up, Landon?
You know, I was just thinking about the benefits to having long-term employees are well known.
Turnovers in employment toss a company a lot of money.
But at the far other end of the bell curve that is all employees everywhere, it's expensive to keep high-earning long-term employees.
And so it's like, yeah, they're great and they're doing as much as they ever have, no slight on their performance, but all of the money keeps adding up.
And then a little bit like being in politics, all of the relationships are become, you know, in one light, become some baggage.
So from, you know, little things like, okay, we can text or DM Martin to try to get into a shareholders meeting or something like that.
But then when you replace those people and you have new talent coming in, they don't have any of the obligations and the negatives to the company either.
So there really is a new broom sweeps clean kind of mentality that can be refreshing.
That is a good point.
Yeah, new people coming in, a little bit of shifts and changes.
Okay, so Omar, earnings out of the way for this point.
Just to get into the numbers for a second when it comes to margins and demand and other things like that, what do you think is the biggest focus over the course of the next quarter?
While the biggest focus is going to be ramping their new products and continuing to make deliveries around the world, we saw an improved number from China, which is good.
But it's still looking like it's going to be a year-over-year decline in deliveries, I think.
It's still, I think, looking likely that we'll see a year-over-year decline in deliveries for the full year 2024, despite Elon saying he's, you know, shooting for year-over-year growth.
I think it's just an extremely tough environment.
Consumer confidence has fallen to its lowest level since July 2022.
And consumers increasingly just want the most affordable vehicle, which is often a hybrid or a gas car.
So it's a very tough environment for UVs, for every UV company.
Tesla, I think, will do better than most, but this is a storm that may not be over with.
And I think Tesla is preparing for the worst, but hoping for the best.
There's, you know, the possibility that I think FSD could spur demand, but it's a little bit speculative to sort of bank on that.
So it's kind of uncertain how this year is going to look, how the economy is going to look.
The futures market's expectations for the chance that we see no rate cuts in 2024 now has jumped to its highest probability ever.
So on the core auto business, it's going to be a tough ride this year.
On the other hand, when you look at the AI side of the business, they're really sort of turning a corner and restructuring to prepare for this.
So I don't think we're out of the woods yet in terms of the core business.
But I think that as we move through this storm, we get through it, the company will probably emerge much stronger.
And refocusing on AI is the right strategy.
Yeah, I like that refocusing on AI.
Ryan, what are your thoughts on just the things that they need to now lock in on moving through the rest of this quarter?
Or maybe if they do bring on any new people, do you think they will be in those AI areas too?
See that being where they ultimately hire.
Penny, you got any thoughts?
On the AI note, I think during the earnings call,
Elon may have got more specific as to the number of H100s rather than H100 equivalents that they had.
And there is the possibility that we could back into how many of those H100 equivalents were, you know, dojo.
I don't know if anyone caught that he had mentioned that and if anyone tried to do the math.
Omar Sawyer, did you hear anything about that?
Because I think he said 40,000 H100s.
And earlier they had talked about 50,000 H100 equivalents.
Am I the only one that caught that?
I thought it was 85,000 by the end of this year total.
Okay, so maybe that was the number for equivalents.
But I think at one point during the call, he specifically mentioned how many H100s there were.
And I took a mental note at that time to go back and look at the numbers and try to figure out how much of it might be dojo.
But I never went through that exercise.
So I was curious if anyone did.
No, I haven't done that.
That's an interesting exercise.
Did dojo, you know, I was in and out of the earnings call.
How much did dojo get talked about in their penny?
Well, they talked a lot about training compute, right?
But I don't think that they really mentioned dojo growth specifically.
Like I said, the closest that I noticed was I think we got an H100 approximate number.
And we know their approximate H100 equivalent as well.
So I think that there might be some clues if someone goes back and re-listens to the call, how much of it is dojo.
And I think that's actually super, super interesting and important because we know how difficult it is to buy those H100s, how expensive it is to buy those H100s.
And if they're able to start producing them efficiently internally or rather producing, you know, training compute.
I think that's like really, really good for the future of FSD and for Tesla.
So I definitely want to go back and do that at some point.
They're obviously building that half a billion dollar dojo facility in Buffalo, New York this year.
But I imagine most of the compute capabilities by the end of this year, that 85,000 H100 equivalents, I think most of that is just going to be NVIDIA chips.
What percent would you want to hear, Sawyer, before it got like super exciting for you and you think that, you know, maybe Wall Street might start paying more attention to dojo?
If they were, say, hitting 15% of their H100 equivalents were coming from dojo, is that exciting?
Do you need 20% or more?
What do you think?
I mean, I haven't thought about a specific number, but yeah, probably like 20% range would be exciting.
I think it's going to be next year before we really hear about dojo and the full story.
I think they have to get through this implementation in Buffalo.
I think they have to get real numbers through it.
I think this is, you know, the next generation of dojo that they'll be implementing.
And there'll probably be a generation after that.
So, you know, you don't become a chip company overnight.
Just look at the startups that are not failing, but they're not progressing yet.
You do not become a chip company overnight.
It takes time.
I mean, we're in the third generation of the inference chip before we really hit, you know, real success.
Now we're in the fourth and they're talking about the fifth generation.
So that's what it takes.
But the fact that they're sticking to it and the fact that they're progressing, this is very important.
Yeah, we always do sometimes come around to those AI talks, but also Optimus.
I wanted to maybe get a few minutes here in the end for Penny as well on Optimus and what we think is happening there.
But Landon, I do see your hand up, so go for it first.
Well, just on this topic, I wonder if Omar had an idea or could shed some light.
On the earnings call, Elon talked about inference compute on car or in vehicle.
And we know that that's a great, important advantage because you don't want to be sending everything up to a cloud.
But by mentioning it specifically on the vehicle, is he saying that there is some inference compute that's done that is sent elsewhere?
Or was that just his choice of words?
Do you know?
I think what you may be referring to, Landon, is similar to using compute as a service.
If you're not having your car act as a robo-taxi and it's just sitting in your garage,
what they could do is use the inference compute in your computer to do something like process Grok commands or something.
They could use that compute as a different way to earn money with your hardware if you're not using it as a robo-taxi.
Is that what you're talking about?
Well, I don't know what I'm talking about.
And that's kind of why I asked because it surprised me that they would be sending much of that data.
But maybe that's just the process of uploading at the end of the day once you get your vehicle home and on Wi-Fi.
They're 100% not doing any driving-related inference off of the car.
The lag of calling the mothership, the ping or whatever, the time that it takes from sending that request to getting it back,
is too unpredictable and would be completely unmanageable for doing any sort of real-time stuff.
So what they're talking about is when your inference chip is idle, at some point in the future, they want to start taking advantage of that.
The sitting, unused compute is a resource that can be leveraged.
And I think that was something that Elon was touching on during the earnings call.
All right, so Penny, let's talk about Optimus.
What did you garner from the call on that?
Well, I don't even know that they spent much time talking about Optimus.
Optimus, for me, other than, you know, I think he mentioned that it's going to be bigger than, you know, all the rest of their businesses combined.
And I think that makes a lot of sense.
And I think at some point in the future, whether it's five years, 10 years, or 20 years from now,
there's going to be billions of these bots that are roaming Earth, you know, being productive, completely changing our economy.
From, you know, perhaps in a labor shortage right now, you know, where it's difficult for companies like Starbucks to find employees,
even as in California, we raised our minimum wage to 20 bucks an hour a couple weeks ago.
Still, they can't get people to come in and fill these positions.
And I hear the managers talking about how, you know, everyone who is applying is a minor and they can't even hire them or, you know, whatever.
So we have a solution to a lot of this labor.
Some of it, you know, will be manual labor.
Some of it will be, you know, more along the lines of intellectual labor.
And there's no reason why if we go far enough out in the future that all of this stuff can't be done with Optimus.
We got a lot of updates over the past year on Optimus.
Every time that Tesla drops a new video, my jaw drops to the floor and I'm like, oh, wow, I wasn't expecting to see an update so soon.
But right now, because I got so used to those updates, I'm starting to feel a little bit neglected.
I'm like, where is the next Optimus update?
It's been, what, probably a couple months now since we got a video.
And they're so exciting to me because I see the future every time one of those videos comes on to my X feed.
So I'm very, very much looking forward to the first time that they give us a video of Optimus performing tasks in the factory that are productive and a real part of the production line.
That is one thing that they mentioned during the call that they were going to try to be doing that before the end of the year.
As I continue to talk about this, I also recall that he said that they think they might be able to start selling Optimus.
I don't know if that would be to, you know, other manufacturing companies to put into their manufacturing facilities or whether they're talking about selling it to the public like me.
If that's the case and I can get my hands on my own Optimus by next year, I mean, like, I don't even, I'd sacrifice just about anything else in my budget to get my hands on those.
You know, I beg, borrow and steal to get my hands on an early version of Optimus.
I think that there is no other project that's happening anywhere in the world that's going to be more impactful than, you know, automating and basically replacing human labor.
So the Optimus project to me is something that basically removes the ceiling from what the maximum value that Tesla could have long term.
I think that there is really sort of no limit.
If you have a billion robots and they're charging, let's say they make a hundred dollars profit per month on their subscription.
That's a hundred billion a month in profit.
And I know a billion is a lot of robots, but there's, you know, seven billion plus people on earth.
And, you know, I probably want a couple of them.
I could use one to cook for me and one to clean up after me.
And, you know, I think that, that there'll probably be almost unlimited use.
People will become very creative with the type of work that they want done.
Once you basically have 24 hour a day labor that doesn't need to sleep, you know, it doesn't cost any more if it's being used versus not aside from charging it.
So these things, once they're built, they're just going to be doing labor.
They're going to be adding value 24 hours a day.
And, and, uh, as more and more of them are created, I think, you know, it's difficult for people to really even envision what the future will be like, uh, when they're everywhere.
So I, I, I keep a very close eye on this project and I, and I'm very excited when each and every update is released.
And I really hope we get a new video in the coming days or weeks, uh, to continue to keep us excited about Optimus.
What would you want to see in a video that would be like epic, right?
Like that would just turn the tide.
I think if they had a, a version of Optimus video where they were interacting with humans in like a natural way that wasn't scripted, you know, like maybe, uh, you hand Optimus apart and then it walks up to the car and installs it.
Something like that would just be bananas exciting for me because before the bots can be commercialized and put in the hands of, of actual, like, you know, people like me, citizens, not businesses, definitely, uh, you know, those human robot interactions need to be smooth, uh, and, and seamless in the way that they work.
I think, you know, uh, we've seen already Optimus folding laundry.
I think if Optimus did dishes, like if there was a sink full of glass and Optimus was able to reach in and grab a plate and wash it and put it in a dishwasher.
I think it, once it can do things like that, there's really not much that it can't do.
So I would be super excited.
I think the laundry one was like somewhat staged, right?
There was one shirt in a basket and it takes it out and folds it.
If it can take a whole laundry basket full of random things, shirts, pants, whatever, and fold them and put them in the appropriate piles, something like that would be super exciting.
But more or less, if there is labor that you do at your house and you have to do it over and over again, uh, and it's annoying, then this is a great candidate for labor that Optimus could do.
I mean, even if it just got down on its hands and knees and dusted the baseboards, that would be like amazing value for me, right?
So, uh, uh, continuing to work on the motor skills, if it can walk better, um, you know, if it can just do things that, that we are doing on a daily basis, uh, that are taking up our time and energy and sometimes money, uh, preventing us from doing, you know, either more fulfilling or more productive things.
So I'm really, really excited for, you know, the, the changes to the future and, and, um, and culture and everything else that are going to result from this massive automation.
I just need it. Penny, this is what I needed to do. This will be my, my closing comment. So just so I can sit here on the spaces all day, it's got to make me food, right? Bring it up, sit it down next to me on the table, next to my spaces, refill my water whenever it gets low.
I need it to give me constant massages throughout the day because I have bad posture and the way that I sit on spaces. It needs to fix the wifi whenever my service goes down. And, uh, I think we're looking pretty good at that point. Eventually I'll train it. It'll respond to all my messages. You know, it'll hit the DMS for me. I think we're, we're looking pretty solid. So that's, that's my ideal bot.
It's going to be ready for it.
I love it. Penny, thanks so much for coming on today and helping lead this conversation, man. It's always a pleasure having you on some interesting week here for Tesla. That's for sure. A lot, a lot happened. I feel like it was low energy for how much happened, but so much going on. Landon, you got a last comment if I roll into my next one?
Yes, I know you're coming up on a hard break. I wanted to ask Ryan if you wanted to give us a minute or two on, I don't see him up there. Oh, did he? Okay. I'm still seeing him there.
You know, I was, I was just looking for any kind of idea on when we talk about a 500 man, 500 person Tesla supercharger team. What are those people doing every day? It sounded like Rohan Patel's team was separate and they were working on the permits and the, and the legalities. But if anybody had an idea, what do 500 people do on the Tesla supercharger team every day? And I've just got to throw, throw it out there again. This is just not going to happen.
So it's very, it's very simple. They negotiate leases.
I'll make this the final comment just because I do have to start that next one. But yeah, go for it Larry and then we'll roll.
Yeah. They negotiate leases. They, they sell space to, to people who are prepared to put superchargers in their space. They, they, they, they scout potential opportunities to implement superchargers across the world.
And so you have, you know, the whole of Europe, the whole of North America and coming Mexico and, and the whole of China. So this has a hell of a lot to do guys. It's not, it's not nothing.
They have plenty to do all day. I am sure. All right. Big thank you to Penny for coasting, Larry for being on with me and Landon as always.
I got some new speakers that are coming up here on stage, having a chat actually with a CEO of a publicly traded firm that I was able to meet in person down on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last week.
And now we're bringing that convo to spaces. So I'm excited to go ahead and get into it. I'm going to make sure your mic's working real quick, Sean, if you just want to give me a test, test on that.
Hey, test, test. Hey, God.
Hey, okay, perfect. All right. I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to roll us into this conversation.
So Sean, you know, we're speaking of Tesla in this past space, often looked at as a very quality company in the space.
And I look at your company and it's certainly not the market cap that Tesla's at, but a quality company, right?
With goals. And would you say, you know, you're the CEO of the company and it seems like Elon's being very driven by this mission to save manhood, right?
And to save people. And I feel like you really align with that mission.
Well, there's no doubt about it. Tesla certainly has pioneered groundbreaking technology that's affected a lot of people all over the world,
which is exactly what I think we need to be able to do with neuroscience and to be able to deal with the mental health epidemic.
It's not just here. It's everywhere.
So, yeah, we absolutely have the same sort of passion.
The good thing is when you do accomplish those kinds of goals, shareholders also benefit.
So there's a nice alignment between what we're trying to do to help patients as well as what we're trying to do to drive value for the shareholders.
Really well put. So let me go ahead and roll us into the conversation here with a little bit of background.
Like I mentioned, I was able to meet you in person at the New York Stock Exchange this past week.
And we had a very compelling conversation, in my opinion, about Vistagen.
Vistagen, if anybody hasn't seen it before, you can go to whatever brokerage you're on, type it in.
It's VTGN.
Vistagen, that is going to be the ticker you're going to go ahead and look at.
So for those that are kind of wholly unfamiliar with this industry, we'll give a little bit of items on it.
But sufficient to say, we're all aware that there is a very large mental health crisis in the U.S.
And the current standard of care, in my opinion, is lacking.
Right. And it's very safe to say that everyone knows someone who's suffering from some kind of mental health challenge,
such as an anxiety or depression.
And I felt it was very important to highlight a company working on a different approach here to the mental health crisis.
And so that's what we're going to be diving into today.
Additionally, and I know that you all are investors in the audience, right?
Everyone here is trying to take that money and turn it into a little bit more money.
That's a big thing.
Well, there's buzz going on in this neuroscience CNS space, right?
This is highlighted by multi-billion dollar acquisitions of Cerevel by AppV, Karuna by Bristol-Myers Squibb.
And given all that, I'm excited and ready to dive deeper into this Vistagen pipeline and explore your company's position itself in really a dynamic space here.
Just before I go ahead and do that, I do want to say for the audience, as we do, we are so lucky to be able to bring on publicly traded companies.
This is not something that happens often on Twitter spaces.
This is a sponsored segment for Vistagen.
It's a paid advertisement.
It's intended for informational purposes only.
I don't make recommendations or endorsements of specific stocks or investment strategies.
We all know that investing in stocks involves risk, just like it does with Tesla.
It does with all the others and includes the possibility of losing your investment.
Please always conduct thorough research before making any investment decisions or consult a licensed financial advisor.
With that being said, let's hop right into it.
It'd be good to give people a little bit of background and that high ends here, right?
So you have this pipeline that's based on a new class of drugs called pharynx.
Can you first off just give us, you know, the one minute or two minute on who is Sean, right?
Why are you behind this company?
And then walk me through what are pharynx and what is unique about their MOA?
Well, Sheriff, Gav, thanks a lot for giving me a chance to speak with you again.
It was a pleasure doing that, having our time together on the floor of the exchange and also having an opportunity to speak with your audience.
We are indeed working on some groundbreaking therapies.
The work we're doing at Vistagen, I think, has potential to matter to so many people.
And that's, of course, what drives me and the rest of our team.
30 years I've been doing this, and I'll tell you what I've seen right now and what we're developing.
It's unlike anything that I've ever come across in my entire career.
So there's always, as you noted nicely, we all know people affected by mental health and mental health issues.
But what people don't often know is there really aren't a lot of options out there that are innovative or new to help them address those problems.
So, I mean, you're spot on on four major points you made at the opening.
I think they warrant repeating.
One, we're definitely living in a mental health epidemic.
It's in surround sound.
It's arguably worse now than it was before COVID.
Secondly, the current standard of care for many anxiety and depression disorders, which are often at the heart of widespread mental illness,
they're just either stale or they're nonexistent, with nothing meaningfully different for millions of patients in decades.
There's a renaissance in neuroscience.
You noted that.
A pioneering neuroscience that's been tied to late-stage drug candidates that's attracted big pharma.
You noted the deals with AbbVie and Bristol-Myers, Karuna and Cerevelle.
And that's also driving fundamental health care investors back into the neuroscience space.
There's been a renaissance of sorts in neuroscience just even within the last six months.
And a lot of those investors actually, or many of those fundamental investors, were in our $100 million offering last fall.
So, we've seen a reengaged market for neuroscience therapies that are different, that are fundamentally different from what we've seen available to patients for decades.
And that's where we come into play.
We're right in the middle of that renaissance, that neuroscience renaissance.
So, like Cerevelle, we're focusing on brain neurocircuitry.
We're connecting the dots, essentially, from the nose to the brain to develop what we think can be once-in-a-lifetime medicines that can address massive problems in multiple million-dollar markets that are associated with mental health.
So, I think you and I talked a lot about the scope of this problem.
There's one in five people experience mental health conditions in any given year.
And when you add that to the fact that there's no new treatment options in certain spaces, like social anxiety disorder, which we'll get into in the last 20 years, it's both a big problem and a very high value opportunity for our shareholders.
So, our lead product candidate, Fasidinol, is in development for social anxiety disorder, or SAD, and that affects about 25 million Americans and millions of adolescents as well.
So, it's a very serious and life-threatening mental health disorder, which is why we've been granted fast-track designation by the FDA to develop the drug for the acute or the on-demand as-needed treatment of SAD.
So, every day, millions of SAD patients, they fear and they're anxious about being embarrassed or judged or humiliated during common social and performance situations in their daily life, going on a date.
Working on a team or giving a presentation at work or in school, interviewing for a job, seeking a raise, eating alone in a food court, just countless stressors that create huge opportunity costs in their lives.
So, we've identified, it's not too difficult to identify, that people need help.
They want it fast and they want it without having to worry about unwanted side effects, like sexual side effects and weight gain or risk of abuse, as we've seen with other anti-anxiety drugs like benzodiazepines.
So, right now, there is no FDA-approved acute treatment for SAD.
That's something that someone can take out of their purse or their pocket or their backpack and use when their stressor comes upon them and have it work and help them in minutes.
So, nothing hits the marks right now in an approved mode, and that's why we're targeting them with facodianol, the lead drug we've got.
And we hit those in our phase three study we reported last year.
So, to our knowledge, no one's ever done what we did, and that's achieve a positive phase three study for the acute treatment of SAD.
So, our goal now is to further advance that registration-directed program for this drug, a program that's fully funded, and replicate those positive results in a study we just recently initiated.
We also have four additional candidates that are clinical stage, one for depression, another for hot flashes, another for improvement of reaction time in people who are mentally fatigued because of sleep disorders,
and another one with potential to affect appetite in late-stage cancer patients.
Wow.
Sounds like there's a lot of use cases that you've been able to find here.
I would like to hear, you know, you talked about, you know, we were able to achieve these results that nobody else has seen in a phase three trial.
And a reminder for everyone, again, SAD is social anxiety disorder.
Are there more details on the results of these trials?
And I guess following up on that, being that these are meaningful trials, when the news was released from that, what happened within the company, the stock?
Can you kind of build that story for people who are just learning about it for the first time?
Sure.
Well, certainly the success of the Palisade 2 trial, even though it was a sleepy week, and typically a sleepy week in August, was very well received, tremendously well received.
We traded about 90 million shares the week we announced the data, for good reason.
Again, because there just hasn't been anything ever like what we were able to accomplish.
The neuroscience, the biotech market, as you know, is often driven by momentum from data and from deals.
So in that study, what we saw with the single administration of the drug was that people who were on the drug in the context of a public speaking challenge,
where they had to give a speech to a group of strangers, did much better than the people who were on placebo,
meaning they had far fewer symptoms and felt less stressed, less anxious, less fearful in that context than those who were on placebo.
So it was a meaningful trial, of course, and that resulted not only in the positive week when we released the data,
but also a large financing anchored by long-term fundamental health care investors,
a $100 million offering that was led by Jeffries with Steve Foll and Blair also involved.
And so the proceeds from that offering are what gave us our strong balance sheet
and the ability to further advance this registration-directed program for FASFA-dianol in social anxiety.
Got it. Appreciate the differences there and kind of differentiation throughout this.
So let's talk about the things that investors are really focused on here, right?
And I think one of the biggest things is the TAM, the total adjustable market, right?
And I think that's going to really help to delineate, you know, where can this stock and this company ultimately go?
So what's the TAM for drugs like FASFA-dianol that are treating social anxiety disorders?
It's massive. It's absolutely massive.
It's a multimillion-dollar market potential we see in anxiety disorders.
We see the same thing in depression disorders.
And we see the same thing for the third asset, PH80, in women's health disorders.
Again, what we look at is what's out there and how satisfied are the people who not only administer the care but receive the care are with what their options are.
And right now the options just aren't good.
Yet there's millions and millions of people affected by these disorders.
So social anxiety disorder, it's about 25 million adults in the U.S. that we think are affected by this disorder.
Yet what they have to look to lean into for help, there's no standard of care.
There's absolutely no accepted standard of care or practice guidelines for dealing with the acute treatment of social anxiety disorder.
There's only three drugs ever been approved for this disorder.
And therefore, there were about 21 years ago was the last approval.
All antidepressants, all with known side effects, all that do not work in the moment and if they work at all.
So we look at markets where we know that the TAM is absolutely massive and also addressable by product candidates that fit where we think there are big vacancies, where the current medications fall short.
So if you take a look at social anxiety and you see, well, what do people lean into for acute treatment?
What can help them in the moment?
Well, the options just aren't good.
Benzodiazepines work very quickly, but even following the FDA's guidance, their drug safety communication back in September of 2020, there's a gigantic risk of abuse and an abuse liability associated with the way those drugs work.
Our drug doesn't work the way benzodiazepines work.
Our drug doesn't have to go through your whole body, cruise through your liver, your kidney, up to your blood-brain barrier and get into your brain.
We're achieving these results and in a way that results in a very differentiated safety and efficacy profile as we've seen so far.
Meaning, you don't see binding of this drug to what we call abuse liability receptors, nicotine, dopamine, opiate receptors.
The drug doesn't have to get into the brain.
It's a connect-the-dots situation because in our noses, we have neurons that with a microgram level and in milliseconds, we're activating neurons that are only in the nose that project to what we call an interneuron or sort of a shortstop or a relay man that ends up projecting further into the parts of the brain dealing with the problem we want to address.
So, for anti-anxiety, massive market, we're trying to hit the amygdala.
Depression, different.
Menopausal hot flashes, different.
So, point being, even a modest penetration, modest low teen level or even a single-digit penetration into these markets is massive for the outcomes that we think we can achieve commercially.
There are multibillion-dollar potential across multiple assets in this pipeline.
All right.
I got a good question I want to throw into the mix here so we can kind of set the stage because I'm sure what people did, first thing they go is they look at the stock.
And I just want to kind of get your clarity here, right?
They see, wow, you know, there's been reverse splits and, whoa, this thing was over, you know, $100, right?
Multibillion-dollar company.
Why has it been sitting down here for the past year?
You know, what's changed within the story to bring more interest to it?
So, maybe you can, like, walk through to the best of your ability some of the stock over the last five years.
Well, like I said, data and deals drive stocks.
And sometimes we, in neuropsychiatry especially, we have some studies that don't hit.
When a study doesn't hit, sometimes people overreact.
When studies hit, the benefit should be accrued to that achievement, especially if it's groundbreaking.
And we've had some studies in the past that didn't hit, and Palisade 3, look, you only need two positive studies in any indication to be able to achieve a submittable new drug application to the FDA.
So, what we're trying to do with Palisade 3 and Palisade 4 is replicate the success we just had with Palisade 2.
The reason that we're back into the mix, of course, is a positive study with fundamental investors backing the program that has potential to result in a registered product that has multibillion-dollar potential across many markets, not only the U.S.
And so, I think that's what's brought eyes back to us.
It certainly has helped when you see large market transactions from big pharma, the $25 billion you mentioned associated with the Karuna and Cerevel transactions.
Our story, in many ways, is like Cerevel.
We're both focused on neurocircuitry.
We're both executing pioneering neuroscience.
And we both have late-stage product candidates.
So, what happens sometimes, though, is when you have a brand-new class of drugs, it does take a while for broad understanding and broad acceptance.
And I think the read-through potential and the read-through reality, that's why you and I met last week at the New York Stock Exchange, is because of the positive outcome from the Palisade 2 study.
So, that's what we're focused on right now, trying to replicate that, and that's why we've been back into the mix with fundamental health care investors.
Appreciate that.
Yeah, Lady Trader, what's on your mind?
Hey, thank you so much for having me up here.
So, first of all, Wiska, Jen, team, we're really, really glad to hear that you're actually focusing on, you know, that wellness area of mental health that's not really a lot of people are focusing on.
And then, also, thank you so much for coming up here to speak with us.
I have a couple of questions.
So, obviously, one of the questions I had was about that reverse split, and I did send a message to Wolf about it as well.
That was, you know, thanks for answering that.
I want to hear a little bit more about the...
Gav, I don't hear anything.
Do you?
Oh, yeah.
Okay, sorry.
There's a glitch that happens.
Lady Trader, can you drop down and come back up?
Yes, I'll have to do that.
Yeah, sorry, Sean.
If you're ever not hearing someone, just let me know, and I'll have them go down and come back up.
It's one of the most glitchy days of spaces today, but luckily, ours is running nice and smooth.
So, I'll keep it going for a minute here, and then we'll come back to her once she comes back up.
So, I think one of the big things for the audience to consider here is, and talk to me if I'm wrong here, but a lot of companies in your position, it's partially an M&A play, right?
That's, you know, the hope is to get these things to that point.
What's the current landscape look like there?
Well, like I noted, you know, when you get something into, even when it's a positive phase two program, let alone a positive phase three outcome, obviously all the eyes from industry are on you.
That's, it's impossible for people who do jobs in big pharma and also sophisticated fund managers to ignore a late stage program.
So, look, we need to do what we need to do to move this program further forward to get the drug registered and get it to a potential to be on the market.
I think that was what Karuna and Cerevel also had as aspirations when they were driving their programs.
So, opportunistically, you always have to be aware of ways to optimize the potential value of your drugs and your drug candidate.
That's what every biopharma company that's in the development stage has to do.
And then you always have to figure out whether there are strategic fits that make, you know, one plus one equal 25.
And so, those opportunities, if they come along, we have to assess them.
In the meantime, we need to do what we need to do to position ourselves to be able to launch the product into the market.
There's been some very successful initial launches.
We benchmark against many companies.
We have a real good sense of who's done it well and who's not done it as we would do it.
We have very sophisticated and experienced commercial folks that have launched drugs in the neuroscience space that have become blockbusters.
For big pharma.
So, again, you always have your eyes on that, but you also have to keep your eyes on what we've got investors to have funded to get this program over the line.
Got it.
Okay.
Actually, before I go to Lady Trader real quick, Austin, did you want to jump in?
Yeah, absolutely.
Good to see you again, Sean, or speak to you again.
As you know.
Can't hear him yet.
Oh, God.
You can't hear me?
Can't hear him either.
All right.
Let's do the old drop down, come back up.
Do you hear him?
No, I can hear him, but it's fine.
Yeah.
Austin, just leave the space and come back up.
Let's go over to Lady Trader.
You should be able to hear her now.
Let's confirm.
Hey, can you hear me okay?
Hey.
Wonderful, wonderful.
So thanks so much, first of all, for answering the question about the reversal split, because
that was one of the question and concern that I had.
I have a couple of other questions, too.
It does seem like when I was looking at the fundamentals, right?
Obviously, the chart, that is completely different, right?
For technical traders, you know, there is definitely a bottom that I'm seeing on the
chart, which is good news.
But then when I look at the fundamentals that you have, it seems like Vanguard Group, they
did add, last quarter, they added to their position quite a bit, right?
And this was like when we're talking about last year, in December, when you basically
released the earning reports and everything.
And then also Citadel has added over 8,000% to their portfolio, which is pretty solid fundamentals
as well.
Was there a reason why, like, we saw that basically uptick and basically more acquisition from those
organizations?
Was there, like, were there some major news or anything like that, which had them add to
their positions?
That's a great question.
And I think we're seeing this across the neuroscience space.
I mean, with all the money that has come into the market and will be associated with the AbbVie
Cerville close, but even with just the Karuna close, a lot of benefits came to those investors
involved in those transactions in terms of capital return to them.
So their ROIs were spectacular.
And I think they also realized why those ROIs were spectacular.
And that's because neuroscience is leading the charge.
There's so much physical health that's associated with neuroscience-related disorders.
And anybody who has something that's new and different, especially differentiated on the
safety side, the clarion call, especially in mental health, is drugs need to work faster.
They need to have no sexual side effects and no weight gain.
And they have to have no abuse liability.
So when you fall into that space, attention comes your way.
It's also helpful, we've been out having non-EO Roadshow type meetings because we're raising
awareness at a time where we don't have to raise funding.
We have solid investors and we have a late stage program on its way with a new mechanism
of action that's already been clinically validated in a phase three setting.
So all those things kind of come together.
And sometimes that generates open market buying and sometimes it generates interest that you
have downstream.
So we think those are some of the main drivers.
We're happy to see.
We had some investors even from before we had to do that reverse split who came into the
offering that we just did.
So again, you have to generate progress and potential to get the investors to be interested.
And we're right now on the leading edge of what is a very major need and a major market
that's on the other side of it with really no competition.
Because we're in a space where there isn't another late stage acute treatment for social
anxiety disorder.
It's unlike Karuna and Cerevel that have potentially competing schizophrenia products.
It's unlike Biohaven back when they were wrestling with AbbVie for NERTECH and Ubrelvi.
There isn't that kind of a gorilla in big pharma in social anxiety disorder with the late stage
program.
So again, it creates a lot of thoughts about what we actually can do with this pipeline
led by now clinical success in a phase three setting.
Perfect.
And then do you guys expect any more reverse splits?
Hopefully not.
I just wanted to hear a little bit more about that because I know from the investment community,
this may be a concern, right?
Just seeing some of the past reverse splits.
Yeah, no.
I mean, look, that that was a strategy had to be executed at a time where we didn't have
a lot of eyes on us to make sure we maintain the NASDAQ listing.
And there's a substantial equity, of course, associated with that listing in our space.
But no, I don't see it.
You never anticipate it.
You do it if it's a strategic move to maintain something that is more significantly beneficial
and valuable without hurting the shareholder base.
So here we're at a spot where it's certainly not something that we would anticipate having
to do in the future.
So I really like the track we're on right now.
It's very nice to be able to have meetings with fundamental and mutual fund investors.
The mutual fund complex just hasn't historically been focused on our space.
And I think that's changing significantly.
We're having really good meetings with really solid investors.
We've been invited to multiple conferences, Cowan's conference, RBC, the Jeffries conference.
We've got sell-side analyst coverage now with deep dives done by the analysts that focus
on the details of what we're doing.
So it's a very good time for us in the company, and we see a lot of positive as we go forward.
That's great.
I can definitely see quite a bit of a list of investors that you have, people who would
actually like to hold long-term, right?
So that's always great to see mutual funds and those sort of organizations.
Another question I have is, are you looking into any of the emerging tech, such as AI or anything
like that, where you could potentially do an integration, whether it's AI or blockchain
or anything like that?
AI has a role to play.
I think every single pharmaceutical company out there right now knows that and are approaching
it in ways that really have to be germane to what you're trying to accomplish in the clinic.
And so sometimes that definitely helps with recruitment.
It helps with making sure you get the right kinds of subjects that are appropriate to be
in your studies that can have an impact from the medicine that you're trying to develop.
So there's all kinds of additional ways to raise awareness through disease state marketing
before you're even having a drug approved, trying to educate people.
One of the things that we see downstream commercially with this, very much like the GLP-1 drugs, and
even before that, the ED drugs, that the consumers will play a major role in what we see as a success
potential related to this drug and some of the others commercially, especially with drugs
that we don't see a potential for the drug to be scheduled.
That enables a lot of telehealth activity, which is absolutely an emerging benefit, one of the
silver linings from the pandemic was emergence of telehealth.
The other was people feeling it's okay to talk about not being okay and enabling them to seek help.
That increases the diagnosed population.
That increases the TAM.
So awareness that we can generate through digital marketing and AI-generated opportunities,
certainly front and center as a focus for us and many other companies.
Thank you so much.
Really good questions.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah, love the questions there, Lady Trader.
It's awesome that you have that traditional finance background as well, working at hedge funds and
everything like that, because you're so smart on all these spaces.
I love it.
Real quick, before I do get to Kayla and Austin, I wanted to mention, I did, a couple people asked me,
wait, where can we actually do our due diligence?
Well, I went ahead and I made a post and it is pinned in the top of the space.
You can go and click into that post and you can easily find pretty much everything we're
covering, plus a whole lot more, the data, the insights, the due diligence.
So I encourage you, if you're in here, go to the top of the space and click that.
If you can't find it, you can DM me.
Give me the word therapy.
And I'll go ahead and I'll share it with you over the DMs there too.
Austin, let's see if he can hear you now.
Then we'll go to Kayla.
Hopefully you can.
All right.
Beautiful.
Good to speak with you again, my friend.
Glad to have you on here.
So, I mean, you know, we shared a little bit about it.
I've been, you know, sober coming on seven years and the mental health stuff is a near
and dear place in my heart, given the nonprofit stuff we do and addiction and so on and so
forth.
I mean, so from a personal experience standpoint, I just want to say thank you for doing what
you can to develop a non-addictive drug to treat something that definitely fuels the
raging fire of addiction for many people.
I don't think it's easy.
I think you've taken the hard choice.
And I just want to say that like on behalf of like everyone, I mean, I've talked to a
lot of people I know in recovery actually about this and they were pretty blown away just
to think that from also via nasal spray, which is extraordinarily convenient that there's
potential for, you know, a treatment of the disorder that they have to kind of just
live and cope with because the alternatives, as you mentioned, as it has beans and some
of the other, I guess, more sedative medications are highly addictive and have a high abuse
potential.
So, yeah, you're right on.
I mean, first of all, congrats on today.
I mean, every day for you is huge.
And I know it's nice that you have family also driving and supporting you because that's
critical.
That's the same thing with all these neuroscience and mental health medications.
You know, the talk therapy and family and friends support is critical.
But you mentioned a major thing, right, the major, major difference between what we're
developing and what's been out there for 20 years.
Just take a look at the benzos.
And we have a benzo epidemic.
These drugs are very addictive and it's very difficult to get off them.
So what we love about all these pharynx, again, is that they don't have to get into the brain
and like a pinball game, knock around different receptors for different neurons that are associated
with addiction.
And it's a critically important point because with social anxiety disorder, there are days
when people have no stressors and they don't need medication.
There are other days where they might have multiple different types of stressors in a
particular day, something in the morning, something at lunch, something at night.
And they want to be able to have control over the use of their medication.
That's one of the hallmarks of this drug is that it's used as needed when someone needs
And right now, up to four times a day in what we've seen.
And in our large open label safety study, over 30,000 doses were administered.
And what we saw in that study was the most common side effect.
Treatment adverse event that we saw was headache.
Only 8.7% in that nearly 500 subject group.
No other adverse event was more common than 5%.
That's unbelievable compared to what you hear on TV when you hear drugs for neuropsychiatric
disorders.
Half the commercial is addressing all the things you have to worry about that seem to be more
serious than the underlying issue you're trying to address.
So the major breakthrough, the pioneering neuroscience here is to be able to use the nose as a portal
to areas of the brain that affect behavioral outcomes and pharmacological outcomes that
relate to different disorders.
But doing that in a way where you're not hitting PED receptors, you're not hitting dopamine, opiate,
nicotine, those areas where abuse liability potential is high.
We went to the FDA and we reported it.
You can see in our press releases.
We showed them our data.
And we asked them if we had to do a human abuse liability study.
And the answer was no at that time.
So we've seen study after study after study with this class of drugs, not just in social anxiety,
but also in depression and hot flashes, where we just don't see the kinds of side effects
and safety concerns and abuse liability potentials related to drugs in those therapeutic areas.
So I cannot emphasize that distinction enough because that's what has driven all the interest
that we have seen from the fundamental health care investors, that a fundamentally different
approach now may be at hand for people to, on their own, as they want to control it,
not have medicine in their bodies when they don't, is to be able to use a drug like facidionol
that lasts for about an hour and the onset is very rapid.
Yeah, I love that personally.
And I would just say like, you know, it's something I would have on hand because like, I mean,
I think that originally the intent was, you know, when people do get diagnosed and put on
benzodiazepines and especially in social anxiety related conditions, the idea is it is meant
for an emergency setting, right?
Like I am in the middle of an interview, I'm at work and I don't want to lose my ability
to function.
I need something to help me in that moment to maintain some of the other elements of my
life.
But you hit on something that I think is very, very important to illustrate from, I guess,
someone that has experience with this stuff.
You don't always suffer from the symptoms, but when you are reliant upon drugs like benzodiazepines,
there is no day without at a certain point.
Once the physical tolerance develops, there is no day without.
And then you start to get the kickback, right?
There are drawbacks in that you'll go into a mild form of withdrawals after a short period
of time in which without the benzo, now the anxiety is even more pronounced.
And it puts you in that very unsustainable cycle that I think fuels addiction in people
that don't ever need to experience it.
For example, you know, a good friend of mine, 30 something, in my opinion, not that many
addictive tendencies.
However, she developed a strong physical dependence to benzos, which inevitably resulted in a physical
addiction and started to manifest into a mental and I guess emotional addiction, which is the
difficulty because then you're putting people that don't ever need to experience it into
a box in which they cannot escape without, you know, severe intervention.
So I personally love that.
I admire that.
I think you guys are nailing it.
Just keep going.
Don't quit.
And I wanted to highlight really quick, just, you know, I'm also a trader and I very much
so care about, you know, I like the idea that the fundamentals tell you what to buy, the
technicals teach you when to buy it.
And your fundamental story is fantastic.
I love the cash on hand.
I love, I love as a lady trader spoke on the diversity of investment you've already gotten
from big names and I'm sure we'll continue to get.
And from, you know, a technical perspective, your chart's exceptional.
Like I noted in my post underneath Gov's pinned one, you guys have been consolidating above
460 for quite a while now and you look like you're in a pretty damn good position.
So I wanted to congratulate you on that.
The market's liking what you're doing and I'm one of those people.
So thank you.
Well, I appreciate all that and I appreciate the work you're doing through your nonprofit
with addiction.
It's so critically important.
What we've seen, unfortunately, is that there's often a matched set and it's a scary set where
it starts with anxiety.
Social anxiety often manifests or presents in adolescence and the mean duration is about
20 years.
So people are affected by social media.
They're affected by team orientation in the workplace, at school.
But oftentimes that will progress or regress, I guess it would be, to depression and then even to suicidal ideation and suicide.
We see these trends.
Unfortunately, they're alarming, especially among youth that weren't really well socialized, late high school youth, early
college youth, there's just too many downstream consequences.
And the key is to be able to deal with it and intervene early and let people kind of what we see with the benefit of this drug and some of the studies we've done is that the more people have wins
acutely in the moment.
So they have an interview and it's almost like they have an invisible therapist next to them saying, look, you didn't get humiliated or embarrassed.
You went to your neighbor's house for the barbecue and you didn't get judged or embarrassed.
And so you constantly get those wins.
And over time, what ends up happening, we're able to see this because we work with Dr.
Michael Leibowitz.
He's the he's the Babe Ruth of social anxiety disorder.
And he created a scale called the Leibowitz social anxiety scale where you assess whether over time people have less fear and anxiety about their stressors and whether they're avoiding them less often.
They're engaging more frequently.
And we've seen that with this drug.
So the more successes in the minute, they build on successes over time.
And ultimately, you have a point where people can really, even without medication, without talk therapy, they're able to manage away these stressors.
It doesn't happen in a minute, but it can be a full rewiring, I guess, of the clearing the hard drive of the brain and helping people to to manage with confidence and resilience the things that they've typically avoided at big opportunity costs.
So it is a it is something that we want to start that cycle.
The other thing to note is, even though we're focused on social anxiety disorder, we're really focusing on acute treatment scenarios.
So it means things that are in the moment.
And we don't have a study going on in this direction.
But I can see some potential for people who are a panic disorder or other phobias.
They won't go on to an airplane.
They're worried when turbulence hits when they're in flight.
They are nervous when they're in the waiting room of a dentist office.
So there's situations where they're not just social anxiety, but real, truly acute needs to knock down their anxiety in settings that are part of their daily life.
So that's again, it's sort of outside the focus of the phase three program, but it's definitely on our mind.
And let me just go back and say thanks again for for all your support.
And those are some good comments that you made.
Really well put there, Austin.
All right, Kayla, let's see if you can hear you.
Hey, can you guys hear me?
Nope.
Sorry.
It was like everybody that was up here before or something.
All right, Kayla, if you're able to drop down and come back up.
Let's try it with Nick's.
You might need to have both.
You drop down and come back up.
Can you guys hear me?
I can now.
Yes.
Let's go.
Wonderful.
Wonderful.
So I'm actually glad that I am sort of getting the tail end of your last talk, because it was the exact context of my question.
One of my personal research loves is looking into childhood developmental traumas.
And the thing that you sort of mentioned before is these key moments of stress and these key moments of growing up very specifically.
And I know when I was going through, you know, my own moments where I was looking at, like, why do I have these mental blocks around these specific activities that I want to to go forth?
You know, that would bring me success, bring me what I want, but I have these big blocks.
And a lot of them all stem back to key moments where I was not able to achieve the success that I needed because I was blocked in some sort of anxiety moment or a moment where I just shut off and I couldn't turn back on and I was blocked.
And these are moments that happened to me, obviously, and I'm also bringing up something that you mentioned before is just the alarming amount of ways that we bombard kids nowadays.
And it's just increasingly getting more and more and more and more and more.
And I always think that how do our brains keep up with it?
Because our brains are not designed initially for this, you know, large amount of bombardment, but still we're adapting and we're adapting.
And I see these, what you've created here, what Vistagen has created here is sort of something that really touches on, I mean, it's a single solution, but it actually touches on a very broad spectrum of issues in sort of bringing us, I feel, to the next level.
Yeah, the question that I have for you, though, is when it comes in, and you mentioned this before, is the issue around some of things like this is typically adoption, right?
So we bring this new idea to people and they sort of play this like devil's advocate, you know, a game with themselves where they're like, well, I'm going to use the devil that I know.
I know these are the drugs that have these specific side effects and I know how to manage them.
But here's this new thing that's going to help me experience this, you know, relief, but I don't know the side effects of it.
Like, I don't know the consequences of it.
Like, how does this, how does it literally not affect my brain?
Like, how can that not happen?
Like, those are the questions I have.
And so I'm sort of curious, like, how does Vistagen going to address that with adoption, address that with people and sort of, like, help us sort of overcome that anxiety of trying something, like, just so new and revolutionary?
Wow, those are so good.
Those questions and comments are just terrific.
I mean, you're absolutely right about the key moments that induce stress.
Yes, and we've seen, I'm in Silicon Valley here, and I can't tell you how many parents I come across, how many players I've coached, especially I was a softball coach for high school with my daughter who taught at high school.
We see people and teams in Silicon Valley at companies that you know well on NASDAQ that are super powerful people and super smart.
But yet, in certain situations, they just, they are not themselves.
They're definitely not the ideal version of themselves.
And with social media, you're seeing that, of course.
And I had some really good interactions with the Surgeon General about the effects of social media on youth.
It's not just bullying.
We always go to bullying.
There's no question bullying is a driver that induces these key moments that then last for a long time.
But it's also kind of the social withdrawal that's associated with social media, where we just aren't seeing the youth socialize in person in ways that they used to.
And so that's a big driver.
We still see that.
But back to how do you get people to understand it?
Well, obviously, it's important for the medical community to understand specifically, scientifically, medically, why we think these drugs work and how we think they work.
But for the consumer, again, I go back to the GLP-1 drugs, the drugs that are now out there and just blockbuster crazy potential and the ED drugs before that.
So there are ways where, and now more so than ever, I think, where you can use digital tools to be able to educate at levels of clear understanding through infographics, through YouTube shorts, through micro videos, things that really break down the fundamentals of why we think these drugs work, how they work.
Fundamentally, the reason why you don't see those kinds of safety concerns and abuse liability potentials is because, one, the drug, like most drugs that have to be taken orally and bounce through your liver and your kidney and cruise up to your blood-brain barrier and try to get through and into your brain, these drugs don't have to do that.
They're not, you cannot detect them in your body.
They go right from about three inches from your nose to your brain without having to go through the plasma.
Because we're trying to rely on neurocircuits.
We're trying to connect the dots between neurocircuits that ultimately get to parts of the brain that are associated with quickly knocking down, it's like putting the brake pedal down on the amygdala by creating a one-two-three approach where it's nose to inner neuron to brain to get things done.
That's unlike any other way we've seen anxiety be handled.
The ability to break it down to the fundamentals, you also see a lot of celebrities involved and influencers that are associated with the commercial.
Just look at NERTEK, for example, for migraine.
I mean, there are a lot of celebrities associated and have expressed their journey with social anxiety.
Simone Biles, Naomi Osaka, a couple that have talked about it very vocally.
And so to be able to get to the consumer in a way where they understand the potential benefit to them of this type of medication and have the medical community educated in a sufficient way so that they're essentially not in the way of the consumer's interest.
And then in many ways, you know, there's a talking effect that occurs, and it helps lift awareness, which is, again, what drives the success medically and then commercially related to the drugs.
So there's a lot of new tools out there that are efficient to help lift what we would want to be able to accomplish in the market with each of these drugs.
Oh, thank you so much for answering that question.
I so appreciate it.
Real interesting is Lady Trader had sent me a message, you know, as I was asking my questions.
Could you imagine having anxiety about your anxiety meds?
Yeah, no, it's true.
And people, there are drugs, depression drugs sometimes cause anxiety.
It's, and you see certain aspects where they also.
On the case, the side effect is anxiety.
Yeah, it is listed on many of the antidepressants.
So, look, again, there's common sense that has to be applied to whether or not you think something's going to make a difference that changes behavior.
Can you even imagine, let's say it's only 1 million of the 25 million, let's say it's 500,000 of the 25 million, or 500,000 of the folks affected with depression.
If they are back into the mix, if they are fully productive, if they're fully innovative and creative, just here in Silicon Valley alone, can you imagine what they can produce?
So, we're trying to bring people back to, with social anxiety, you have a super high level in the moment.
We're not trying to put you to sleep.
We're trying to bring you back to the level of anxiety where you can function and focus with energy.
We all need some anxiety to be able to do what we want to do every day.
But we don't need to be put to sleep, and we don't need to be fuzzy when we're trying to execute our jobs.
So, that's why the differentiated safety side here, it is going to become, it may not happen in a minute, but it might.
It is going to become a major, major driver in what we see the potential value of this company.
It's a large reason why, if you look at their stories, if you look at their M&A decks, why Karuna and Cervell had such a specific interest and large values was because of their differentiated safety story.
And in Cervell's case, you know, again, you're looking at neurocircuitry.
It's very important.
Dr. Louis Monti, who is the senior VP of our translational neuroscience, and he ought to win a Nobel Prize for what he's been able to do using the nose as a portal to achieve major potential benefits for people in areas where there are a lot of people struggling.
In depression, people want to know whether their drug is going to work fast or not.
They don't want to wait around six to eight weeks like the current antidepressants, because no matter what, even if you're the lucky one out of three who start using antidepressant and it works, you're still going to have the side effects no matter what.
And so, we need rapid onset.
We need drugs that act faster and that don't deliver sexual side effects, weight gain, abuse, liability.
That's the clarion call of people today who want new anxiety and depression meds to be able to control the way they can manage their disorders and ultimately really knock them down.
That's what we're focused on, and that's why I'm so excited about the potential of this class of drugs to make a big difference across many different disorders.
We have a drug for hot flashes, for example, positive phase 2 study we announced, where it's not hormonal.
The current therapies for about 80% of women, 45 to 65, that try to manage hot flashes are hormonal, and people don't like them.
There are a couple of newly approved medications that may have some issues with liver liabilities.
We saw in our study that the number of hot flashes were reduced and the severity of the hot flashes were reduced in a population that typically has to rely on either nothing and muscle through it or medications that have some risk associated with them.
So, again, this was a patient-controlled.
It's rapid onset.
It is not systemic, doesn't go through the whole body, and deals with a different part of the brain, the hypothalamus, which regulates body temperature.
So just stay tuned.
We'll keep you informed of our progress because this is really a very fascinating class of drugs.
It's new, and, again, it does take time for people to catch on.
You're sort of at the front end, I think, at this point, given where we are from a market potential and market value, but we'll continue to generate the noise, and we'll continue to try to drive towards totally new medications that can help a lot of people.
That's amazing.
I would also, I would like to add something to that just for context is to not underestimate, just for the audience, obviously, you know, but to not underestimate the value of the value chain of saving a moment.
Like, so, for instance, I know a lot of young people are very stressed right now trying to manage their, you know, array of responsibilities, their education, their social law, you know, how they're trying to plan for a future that they're very, you know, insecure about.
And, you know, having a moment where you are about to, like, fall through and saving yourself from that moment actually places you in a really advantageous moment for all of the following moments.
So in reverse, it's like, you know, if you save yourself from a really terrible moment, a social anxiety moment, and then you have, you know, you have, like, eight other ones that are about to follow that, you know, then you set yourself up for, like, ground zero to sort of approach all of that.
Those next moments.
So I do appreciate that ability to, you know, reorient or bring a person to ground zero again in a moment so that they can save their day, save their week, or, you know, even if it was something that was a, you know, a high consequential moment, like taking an exam, for instance, you know, that saves their whole education, for instance.
So I appreciate everything you're doing, and I appreciate the time, but I'll step down and, you know, hand it over to Kyle.
Thanks again for those comments.
Super smart and spot on, and you're absolutely right about exam anxiety.
Whether it's in the classroom or taking a driving test, we definitely see the potential of this drug to help people.
Go for it, Kyle.
Hey, so this has been a really good conversation.
Can't hear him, guys.
Oh, so, Kyle, you've probably seen this as having with everybody on stage.
Wow.
You mind dropping down and coming back up?
Yeah.
Sorry about that.
Unfortunately, it just keeps on happening.
So just a little quick recap.
We've got about four minutes left here on the conversation.
I had the pleasure of meeting Sean down on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange last week.
We, you know, he was chatting on FinTech TV.
He was talking with some others, and I was able to learn a lot about the company.
I think it's a really interesting area.
I like people that are building things that are, you know, the goal is make the world a better place, make people happier, right?
Quality of life improvements.
I think there's a lot to be said for those.
So I wanted to remind everyone there's a link up top in the space.
You could easily find.
Some people did DM me for it.
I did get it to them.
And let's try Kyle again.
Hey, can you hear me?
Sure can.
How are you?
I certainly had a few questions, but I don't think we're going to have time.
So I really just appreciate the work that you're doing.
You know, the main questions that I was going to be focusing on was actually kind of outside of the treatment side, which is why I thought the conversation was great and I wanted to let it run.
My thought was, you know, when I see investing, I'm an investor by trade, was interested in hearing your thoughts around how difficult or I guess not difficult it's been for you in terms of securing financing options and banking solutions and things like that.
Because I know that a bunch of different treatments and therapies have had some difficulty doing that.
Has that been an experience for you?
Or how have you navigated just the general banking and capital markets infrastructure?
Well, that's a great question.
We've actually had some very solid support, not only when we did the deal back in October of last year.
That was led by Jeffries, Stiefel, William Blair, all brought on coverage.
We've also, even back to the J.P. Morgan Conference is a big health care conference at the beginning of the year.
And what I was a tremendous number of cell site analysts coming in and meeting with us.
That's resulted in us being invited to the Cowan Conference, which we presented at, the RBC Conference that's coming up, Stiefel Conference with some fireside chats.
These are some banks with really sophisticated neuroscience specialists and analysts that do deep dives, which really help some of the fund managers.
Many of the large funds that are on our roster have internal neuroscience expertise, which is even more gratifying when they come into the company and into the transactions that we do.
It's just additional validation of what we're trying to do.
And we've had a good uptake across the banks that already have banked us in the past and banks that I think downstream would like to be involved with us as we continue our journey forward.
So I'm very happy about that.
There's no shortage of meetings.
There's a lot of travel.
What I really like is that there's been a real renaissance, if you will, but a reemergence of in-person meetings.
And it's in those contexts where it's okay online as well.
Both of the offerings are completed online.
But in person, we really have an opportunity to unpack the specific differences in what we're trying to do versus what they may be familiar with in the past.
And there are many epiphany moments on faces in these meetings where once they understand, oh, now I understand why there's no issues on the safety side because of the way that now I understand these drugs work.
And they're not old-school antidepressants.
And they're not benzodiazepines.
And so that has been very helpful.
Of course, the commercial potential of the assets that we're driving forward, that's what drives focus on any development stage company.
And we have multiple shots on goal.
And we also have funding that gets us with our main shot on goal to where we hope will be filing of a new drug application with the FDA.
We need to be hit one more study.
And that's what we're driving on right now to replicate the results of what we saw from our Palisade II study back at the end of last year.
Perfect.
I'm glad you're able to get a question there, Kyle.
I do have to move into some wrap-up because I do have a 2 p.m. coming up here.
Sean, absolute pleasure having you on.
Wanted to check if you had any final comment here for the audience.
No, just really, I appreciate the time, Gav.
And, again, stay tuned.
Watch us.
We're going to be doing everything we can.
We have a tireless team that's passionately focused on trying to get the job done.
And we have some serious jobs that we think we can get through and to achieve some outcomes that not only help patients but also help our shareholder base generate the kind of value that we think is associated with this pipeline.
Beautiful.
Thank you again, Sean, as well as Kayla, Nick's Lady Trader, Kyle, Lucas, hanging out with us, Austin on stage.
Really, really great crew.
Hope you all are as excited about this as I am.
Thank you again, everyone, for tuning in.
I'm going to hop over and co-host another space, talk about earnings.
We've got some major earnings that are coming up.
But, Sean, I'll see you on the next one.
All right.
Thanks, Gav.
See you.
Take care, everybody.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
Bye.
