$Billions From Lizard Spit and the AI Monsters

Some men sit and look at the sky and are wonderous about the universe. Some men sit and wonder why women have no mute button. And in the 1990s a doctor named John Eng was curious about lizard venom.

You see the Gila monster only eats a few times a year. Dr. Eng wanted to know how it managed to stay alive. So he ordered up some dried venom from a catalog in Utah and got to work. What he found was the lizard’s spit had a copy of a hormone you already make called GLP-1. It tells your brain you’ve had enough. But it only lasts about two minutes in your body. The Gila monster’s version lasts for hours. 

Eng spent the next three years knocking on doors at the big drug companies. They all passed. Eventually a small outfit said yes. And in 2005 the first GLP-1 drug hit the market. It stayed a niche diabetes treatment for over a decade. Then in 2017 Novo Nordisk engineered a version called “Ozempic,” of which gave us the disturbing cultural phenomenon of morbidly obese women singing and dancing in high production commercials across our television screens.

In 2005 the market for GLP-1s was $75 million. In 2025 it was $76 billion.  

I know people who did everything right but couldn’t lose weight. They started taking Ozempic, and now they’re healthier, happier, and in better marriages. Huge life upgrade. This from a wonder drug that was sitting on the shelf for over a decade while researchers were busy testing various meds to help make America's dicks hard. 

 Meanwhile, a 37-year-old man named Joseph Coates was in hospice with a rare blood disorder when an Artificial Intelligence Agent found a drug never tried for his illness. Now he’s in remission. That medicine has potential save and improve many millions of lives. This is where AI can be a tremendous potential benefit to all humanity.

If it doesn't decide to kill us first.

There is more to consider going forward (god I hate that phrase)!

Imagine standing on a street corner in Boston in 1870. The street  lamps above your head burn gas, and a man with a long pole lights them. The street reeks of horse shit. If you want to reach your brother in Ireland you write a letter and wait a month for  their response to reach you....... Now you’re teleported 65 years into the future. There’s a telephone on the wall and a car parked at the curb. Airplanes fly overhead. The message to your brother arrives before lunch. With AI we’re entering another one of those stretches in human progress. This transformation will be unbelievably compressed into less time.

The world of 2036 will likely look much different the one we’re living in now. New AI models used to come out once a year. Now it’s seems every few weeks. More than 80% of the code Anthropic ships is now written by its own AI. Last year that number was in the low single digits.

A few former engineers are casting warnings.

AI is now on the verge of being capable of creating its future shelf.  And now warned, men will sit and wonder of this monster and what part we will play.