Dr. Shriram Nene

George Lucas traded $350,000 in directing salary for something Fox executives thought was worthless: the right to sell Star Wars toys. It was 1976. Over 40 studios had already passed on his script, including Disney. Fox only greenlit the project because they wanted Lucas for other films. Nobody at the studio expected to make money on a space opera with no stars, so when Lucas offered to cut his directing fee from $500,000 to $150,000 in exchange for merchandising and sequel rights, Fox said yes on the spot. Movie merchandise was a dead business. Fox had lost money on Doctor Dolittle lunchboxes a decade earlier. They thought they were getting the better deal. Lucas couldn’t even find a toy company that wanted in. Kenner, a division of cereal company General Foods, finally bought the licensing for a flat $100,000. Then Star Wars opened. Between 1977 and 1978, Kenner sold $100 million worth of toys off that $100,000 investment. They couldn’t make enough for Christmas ’77, so they sold empty boxes with IOUs inside, promising to mail the action figures later. Parents paid real money for cardboard and a promise. Nobody around the production saw any of this coming. Alec Guinness, who played Obi-Wan, privately called the script “fairy-tale rubbish.” But he was shrewd enough to negotiate 2.25% of royalties instead of a flat fee. About 20 minutes of total screen time earned his estate somewhere between $50 million and $100 million. Lucas himself was so convinced the film would flop that he offered Spielberg a bet while visiting the Close Encounters set: swap 2.5% of each other’s profits. Spielberg took it. That handshake has paid him around $40 million. And then the money started compounding. Lucas poured his Star Wars profits into ILM, the effects house he’d built for the film. When its computer graphics division got too expensive to maintain, he sold it to Steve Jobs in 1986 for $10 million. Jobs renamed it Pixar. Disney bought Pixar twenty years later for $7.4 billion. Then in 2012, Disney came back for the rest, buying Lucasfilm itself for $4.05 billion. Total franchise revenue today sits around $46.7 billion, over $20 billion from merchandise alone. The filmmaker 40 studios passed on is now worth $5.3 billion according to Forbes. Fifty years ago today, cameras rolled on a desert in Tunisia. The $350,000 pay cut that made it all possible might be the best trade in business history.

I’m going to tell you how much worse it was at the start of the PC Revolution for white collar workers trying to adapt, vs today with AI Today, presumably every white collar worker has access to a smart phone and/or a PC/laptop. Back then, a PC cost $4,995 , an off brand was $3,995. 5k in 1984 is about $16k today. It was really expensive. The only reason I could learn how to code and support software is because my job let me take home a PC to learn. By reading the software manual. Literally. RTFM. Or pay to go to training. Classes that started at hundreds of dollars then. It was expensive. It absolutely limited who could get ahead. Today, ANYONE can go to their browser, to the AI LLM website of their choice, and type in the words “I’m a novice with zero computer background, teach me how to create an agent that reads my email and …” That concept applies to LEARNING ANYTHING Think about what this means. Any employee of any company can say “ I need to learn how to xyz for my job , which is to do the following: Tell me what more information do you need to help me be more efficient, productive and promotable”. Or “ what new skills can you teach me that will help me reduce my chances of getting laid off “. Or “what suggestions do you have for me to communicate to my boss, who I barely know, to help my chances of staying employed “ These aren’t great prompts. But they are a start that anyone can take. Think about how incredible that is. Back in the day was so much harder for white collar workers. It was harder for new grads because unless they took comp sci, they probably had never used a PC. Big Companies are going to cut jobs. No question about it. Small companies is are going to need more and more AI literate thinkers who can help them compete or get an edge What I tell every entrepreneur, and it’s more crucial today. “ when you run with the elephants there are the quick and the dead. Adopt tech quickly , you can out maneuver big companies. “

There are always different ways of achieving the same results…

Scientists just made 50-year-old skin cells behave like they’re 20 again. Researchers at the Babraham Institute in Cambridge have developed a groundbreaking method to reverse the biological aging of human skin cells by approximately 30 years, all while keeping them as fully functional adult skin cells. The team used a carefully controlled, short-term version of the Nobel Prize-winning Yamanaka reprogramming technique. By exposing adult skin fibroblasts to a specific set of reprogramming factors (the Yamanaka factors) for just 13 days—and then stopping the process early—they successfully “reset” many molecular markers of aging without pushing the cells all the way back to a stem cell state. After this brief treatment, the rejuvenated cells displayed a dramatically younger profile: their epigenetic clock (a measure of chemical tags on DNA that tracks biological age) and their gene expression patterns (the transcriptome) closely resembled those of cells from much younger individuals. Even more impressively, the cells behaved younger too. The treated fibroblasts produced significantly higher levels of collagen—the protein essential for skin firmness, elasticity, and wound healing—and they migrated faster to close an artificial “wound” in laboratory dishes compared to untreated older cells. The researchers also observed reversal of age-related changes in genes associated with diseases such as Alzheimer’s and cataracts, suggesting the technique could have broader therapeutic implications. While this work is still in its early stages and the precise mechanisms remain under investigation, the findings open exciting possibilities: one day, scientists may be able to selectively rejuvenate aging cells in the body to enhance tissue repair, improve healing, and potentially slow or mitigate some effects of age-related diseases—without the risks associated with fully reprogramming cells into stem cells. [Gill, D., Parry, A., Santos, F., Okkenhaug, H., Seale, M., Dobbs, L. J., Reik, W., & Ocampo, A. (2022). Multi-omic rejuvenation of human cells by maturation phase transient reprogramming. eLife, 11, e71624. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.71624]

This is the third time I’m posting Harrison Ford’s speech from the Actor’s Award. With every passing day, this speech hits harder & harder. Of all the award tributes, speeches, monologues I’ve ever seen, this is up there. Why? It’s straight from Ford’s heart. He’s an inspiration.

Today, Ayrton Senna would have turned 66 if it weren't for his accident at Imola in 1994 Just enjoy the sound and the skill of one of his laps in Monaco

A black fungus feeds on radiation in Chernobyl. In the radioactive ruins of Chernobyl’s Reactor 4, scientists found an extraordinary black fungus, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, thriving in one of Earth’s most toxic environments. Rather than merely enduring radiation, this fungus seems to harness it through radiosynthesis—a process akin to photosynthesis but driven by gamma radiation, converting it into chemical energy. It’s among the rare organisms capable of this feat. Even more remarkable, when tested on the International Space Station, the fungus flourished, forming a biofilm that blocked up to 84% of cosmic radiation, hinting at its potential as a living radiation shield for astronauts. With radiation posing a major hurdle for deep-space missions to Mars and beyond, this self-regenerating biological layer could revolutionize spacecraft design by replacing heavy, bulky shielding. On Earth, researchers are exploring its use in bioremediation to detoxify radioactive sites too hazardous for humans, potentially transforming nuclear disaster recovery. As one scientist put it, “It’s like nature crafted a biological radiation shield.” From Chernobyl’s ruins to space, this humble fungus could help humanity thrive in the universe’s harshest environments.

Charlie Munger explained why AI will solve diseases faster than anything in human history. He did it two weeks before he died, at 99. In 1954, his eight-year-old son Teddy was diagnosed with leukemia. There was no treatment. The survival rate for childhood leukemia in the 1950s was close to zero. Munger was 31, freshly divorced, nearly broke. His friend Rick Guerin said Munger would go to the hospital, hold Teddy, then walk the streets of Pasadena alone, crying. Teddy died in 1955 at the age of 9. A reporter asks how he got through it. He says, "You can't bring back the dead. You can't cure the dying child. You have to soldier through. If you have to walk through the streets crying for a few hours a day, it's part of soldiering. You go ahead and cry away. But you can't quit." Then he says, "In those days, the fatality rate with childhood leukemia was 100%. That's gone away. Now the cure rate is way up in the 90s." He's right. The five-year survival rate for the most common childhood leukemia (called ALL, acute lymphoblastic leukemia) was close to zero before 1950. By the 1960s, it was under 15%. Today, it's about 90%, according to the American Cancer Society. It took 70 years of researchers running clinical trials and developing combination drug therapies to get there. That was without AI. Human researchers work on one hypothesis at a time. There are now over 170 AI-discovered drug programs in clinical trials. AI is compressing early drug discovery timelines by 30 to 40%, turning what used to take three to four years of preclinical work into 12 to 18 months. No AI-discovered drug has yet received FDA approval, but the first is expected in 2026 or 2027. The pipeline is real and growing fast. What took seven decades for leukemia, AI could compress into years for diseases we haven't cracked yet. Munger said it plainly: "What mankind did, what civilization did, was soldier through those tough years that took away my cousin Tommy from meningitis, and then took away my son Teddy from leukemia. Imagine pretty well fixing that disease for families who came into life later. It's a huge achievement." He lost his son 68 years before this interview. He watched civilization solve the thing that took his boy. He died two weeks later, at 99. AI is about to make civilization progress much faster.

Japanese actor Hiroyuki Sanada spoke about the contradictions of human nature: “Some people dream of having a swimming pool at home, while those who have one hardly ever use it. Those who have lost a loved one feel a profound sense of loss, while others often complain about their living relatives. Those without a partner long for one, while those who have one often don't appreciate it. The hungry would give anything for a meal, while the satiated complain about the taste of their food. Those without a car dream of owning one, while those who have a car are always looking for a better one.” The key to happiness is gratitude: truly seeing and appreciating what we already have, and understanding that somewhere, someone would give anything for what we take for granted.

₹19,000 crore. That is what Banks collected in last 3 years just for not maintaining ‘Minimum Account Balance.’ Not from the rich. Not from big borrowers. From the poorest accounts in the system. Their crime? They didn’t have enough money. A farmer misses the minimum balance - Penalty. A pensioner withdraws money for medicine - Penalty. A daily wage worker falls short by a few hundred rupees - Penalty. The poor keep money in banks for safety. Not to be quietly fined for being poor. Financial inclusion should protect small savings, not punish small balances. In Parliament today I proposed ending minimum balance penalties so the banking system stops charging people for their poverty.

Upper one is the signature of Donald Trump. Below are the ECG readings of investors in India thanks to him. 😀😀😀

This is insane. $6.1 billion in unpaid wages. 819 million hours of labor. Every person who clicked a fire hydrant to log into their email was part of it. reCAPTCHA was never primarily a security tool. It was the largest unpaid AI training operation in history, running invisibly inside the infrastructure of the entire internet. Google launched reCAPTCHA in 2009 as a book digitization engine. Version 2 trained image recognition for Street View, extracting labeled data on house numbers, traffic lights, storefronts, and road infrastructure across the planet. Version 3 trained behavioral pattern recognition. Each iteration harvested a different dataset from hundreds of millions of users who were told the point was bot detection. The dataset was the point. The punchline is airtight: AI can now solve CAPTCHAs faster and more accurately than humans can. The tool built to filter out machines spent 15 years training them. You completed the loop without ever being told you were in it. Every system designed to keep machines out was simultaneously teaching them how to get in. The more interesting question is what today's equivalent looks like, and whether you'd recognize it if you saw it.