Loading summary
Transcript228 lines
- [00:00]
Jason Calacanis
All right, everybody, it's Friday. It's twist April 10th. Alex is here. We've got a great show
- [00:07]
Alex Wilhelm
this week in startups is brought to you by Pilot. Focus on your product. Let Pilot handle your bookkeeping. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com twist and get $1,200 off your first year Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code Twist to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain and Northwest registered agent. Get more when you start your business with northwest, in 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity. Learn more@northwestregisteredagent.com twist
- [00:55]
Jason Calacanis
lots of important things going on in the Bittensor world. There was a rug pull. We'll get into that. Obviously tons of AI stuff going on, but just as we kick off the show. Alex. I always like to applaud plod. I put my plod pin on, I press my button, I get a nice little haptic and I'm recording. Now I have every detail so I can say, hey, after the show. Make sure you don't forget to go over the newsletter stuff for the this Week in AI newsletter podcast. Boom. Now it's an action item. I won't forget it. And I do that all day long. And Plod is an amazing service. Thank you to them for supporting the show.
- [01:29]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah. And also if you want to get a plod for yourself, you can at a tasty discount. If you go to plod. AI twist. P L A U D A I slash twist. Use the code twist twisd save 10%. Be cool like Jason and I. Don't forget things. Get more work done, less pain. Applaud.
- [01:47]
Jason Calacanis
Use that code twist for 10% off and they know we sent you. All right, let's get to work here. There was some type of a defection from the subnets of Bittensor. People have heard me talking about this very promising crypto project called Bittensor. The token in it is called tao. There are subnets. What are the subnets doing? You may have heard us talk about it here or on all in or you see it on your X feed. You can create subnets. There's 128 of them available and those subnets will do different projects. One of them is a co working or a copilot for doing coding like codecs or clock code. And why Are these important? Why should they be created using cryptocurrency? Well, it's a distributed network and just like Bitcoin, you can have people compete to provide that service at the lowest possible price, which is super deflationary. And my thesis, and I've got an investment in this space is I've got a couple different investments in the subnets and I've bought Tao directly and I might even be a little underwater now based on where I bought it. Doesn't matter to me, but I got a bunch of pings on my phone last night. Oh my God. Tao's going. There was some kind of rug pull, so let's get into it.
- [03:07]
Alex Wilhelm
We had Sam Dare on the show Twist. It was March 27, 2026. So just about two weeks ago, Jason, and he was talking about Templar, a project that was doing decentralized training of an AA model of an AI model. This was Covenant AI. Three different subnets, subnets 3, 39 and 81. They form kind of a triumvirate, if you will, of things that work together. Pre training, compute and post training. And what they built was the Covenant 72 billion parameter model in March. This got a lot of attention. Look, decentralized training of an AI model, not just the work of the major AI labs, Instead something that, you know, maybe anyone can participate in. I drove the price of Tao up and then Jason, yesterday we got a major statement from Sam and the group at Covenant AI, which is right here. And it makes a number of very important claims. It says that Bittensor is not as decentralized as it claims. It also says that one of the co founders of the project has been essentially blocking their ability to do their work. Really, really big claims. There's been a response to it, but what really matters is Scrolling. Scrolling. Jacob Steves, also known as Cons, one of the co founders of Bittensor, has taken a series of actions against Covenant AI's operations. These include suspension of emissions to our subnets, removal of moderation capabilities, unilateral deprecation of our subnet infra and economic pressure via token sales. He responded. Jason, but I want to get your take first on basically what Covenant is claiming.
- [04:34]
Jason Calacanis
There'll have to be a little bit of an investigation here as to what's happening, but the control of the subnets and making sure there aren't rug pulls like we see all the time with, or we saw all the time with ICOs or meme coins. This is a major vector of attack and a major concern people have in the crypto Community. So what Tao is trying to do is remove that possibility. So what system do you create to remove that possibility? Well, you have to have some control over the subnets and there has to be governance. So that governance stuff is being worked out from what I understand from the insiders. And sometimes you'll have a bad actor. I'm not saying this person is a bad actor, but some people are claiming, hey, this person just ran off with a bunch of the subnets tokens and some Tao. And it just is something that happens in crypto sometimes as people build a project, you buy some tokens, it's not regulated and all of a sudden you get rug pull pulled that still exists. Sometimes you'll have lawsuits come because of these things. An attorney general in Florida or someone will find who was impacted by a rug pull. You'll remember all the celebrities who are promoting different coins, they all got tagged. So this is the kind of stuff that can happen. And this will be in my estimation, this is my hope and what I believe will happen is that this will help solidify how to handle and avoid these things in the future.
- [06:04]
Alex Wilhelm
This is a trip and a fall over something they're going to remove from the pathway. So in the future no stumbles of this sort will crop up.
- [06:10]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, I think that they can eliminate this from happening in the future by making it such that the subnets have to stake a certain amount of tau and that the people who are participating have some control over the subnet. And, and subnet governance is going to be a very delicate thing because you want entrepreneurs to be able to start a subnet, put up some collateral for it, almost like buying a franchise. And then you want those folks to believe that they have some level of ownership, but not so much ownership that they can take a bunch of people's tokens and then just say, you know what, I don't agree with how this is being run. I'm just going to take all these tokens and leave. So yeah, you know, as I've said to everybody, the opportunity in these kind of projects is that these questions have not been answered. This, they are imperfect. That's why it's at a, whatever it is, you know, $2 billion market cap, not a 500 billion or trillion dollar market cap.
- [07:08]
Alex Wilhelm
2.93 after the declines. A good segue. Jason Tao is trading at roughly 335 before this news broke. As we talked to you, it's worth 271. So a pretty sharp decline, but certainly not the end of Tao. This is not, you Know, the project flying apart, but a pretty large drop in value. The thing that I'm trying to sort out in that Tensor land, Jason, because I've Talked to probably 10 different subnets in the last couple of weeks, just prepping them for the show and getting to know what they're working on and how the economics work is there does seem to be at times moments when they say, oh, the community wouldn't tolerate that type of bad action. And so often I feel like I've run into. There are some humans in this system that is not yet full, fully decentralized. And I wonder if this argument is essentially coming to the point to which that's no longer acceptable and it has to become even more decentralized to maintain trust. Because even though a lot of people in the Bittensor community are, I think, pretty negative about Sam right now, and we'll bring on a subnet guy in just a second. I, I don't. I'm struggling to get that mad at him for what he did because it seems like he made something cool and then wants to go host it somewhere else. And you know, and I don't throw a fit when someone leaves substack.
- [08:13]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, it would be though if you took all the subscribers money and then didn't provide the subscription product. So that's what has to be adjudicated here is how much Tao he collected from people if they invest in his company. It would be like investing in a startup and then the startup just says, you know, I don't like the way capitalism works, I'm out. And then they take the money. So these are the allegations that are all going to be worked out over time. You and I can speculate about it, but yes, you should be able to leave your subnet and go do something independent if you want, of course, but you don't get to leave with everybody's tokens. And then there might also be like some dumping going on here. So again, all allegations, all to be worked out in the court of crypto,
- [08:58]
Alex Wilhelm
but let's get some of the participants. Let's. Let's bring on Gareth Howells. He's from video subnet 85 and we're going to talk to Gareth about what he's building and, and why it's cool and how he's using Bittensor in a second, but I wanted to get his take on the situation. Gareth. Hey. You've been tuning in quickly. Who's closer to the truth here, Jason or I? And did the people behind Covenant I make off with the tokens I think
- [09:20]
Gareth Howells
Jason is got a very good understanding of the situation. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is an individual acting rather than the company or the community. I think that the subnets that Sam was heading up are probably going to carry on doing the same work and they're going to build upon that. So yeah, I think Jason's synopsis of what happened was pretty close.
- [09:44]
Jason Calacanis
Give me your synopsis. Because it's always good when these new technologies come out to have multiple people try to describe and use analogies or their own handicapping of the situation. It's easier than ever to build a great new product. And launching a startup, even as a solopreneur, is getting easier and easier. But as my experienced founders already know, there's a lot more to starting a company than just putting up a website or even building a product. If you're serious about going into business, you need a Delaware C corp that's going to give you a serious leg up on your competition and you can be taken seriously by investors. That's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. Just a few clicks. They're going to give you the perfect start to your new enterprise. A real identity, a domain, a custom website, a business email, all the public filings done, and even a phone number. And you'll complete this process in under 10 minutes. Plus you're going to get all sorts of free tools and resources from step to step guides, compliance reminders, and an online account that's going to keep everything organized even as your business grows. So you get all the advantages of a Delaware C corp, regardless of where in the US you're operating out of. Northwestregisteredagent.com twist yeah, Sam was a subnet owner.
- [11:01]
Gareth Howells
He had access to the wallets and he sold the tokens. The reasons that he gave for selling the tokens, I'm not 100% convinced by. I think Constance made a response saying actually some of the accusations he wasn't able to do and they weren't true and it was impossible for him to like take some of the actions that Sam has accused him of. So I think possibly he may be pointing the blame somewhere just to excuse his actions. But, you know, we don't know everything about it. This is just from obviously what I know anecdotally, like you guys, I'm not right in the nitty gritty of the exact situation.
- [11:37]
Jason Calacanis
Why did TAO go down 20% or whatever it went down, you know, at when this happened? Was it just bad vibes and people were like, oh my God, this is Attack Vector. This is A weakness of the Bit Tensor system or was it because the market was flooded with Taos being sold and there weren't as high of a bid to absorb them?
- [11:57]
Gareth Howells
Yeah, I think there was a big element of fear there. I think obviously Covenant has been absolutely killing it recently with the detail investors and it was right on the top of the emissions and it has been for a long time. He was getting an amazing press outside from people who didn't have a full understanding of Bittensor, but they obviously were understanding what he's doing and very impressed by that. And I think there's that when was found out that he was selling all his tower and taking it, I think there was a big fear amongst investors, not necessarily the community, but investors were very worried that this was gonna be catastrophic for the tail price and they and a lot of people got out. It wasn't just him selling his tout, but that was an element of it.
- [12:43]
Alex Wilhelm
Gareth, is it fair to say that Covenant AI and his three subnets were kind of a marquee or like Apex project for, for Bittensor today?
- [12:51]
Gareth Howells
I think they were, but I think there's also, There are only three subnets out of 128 and we've got some incredible subnets doing some amazing things and they're going to come to the forefront very soon. So I really think this is more of a blip than, you know, anything saying that Bit Tensor is in real trouble. I think we're going to bounce back very quickly. The community is amazing and some of these, the other subnets are going to come to the forefront very quickly. So I really think this is, this is a very short term issue but I also think it's going to actually make the community much stronger. We're going to put things in place to stop this happening again and I think we're going to learn a lot from that.
- [13:29]
Alex Wilhelm
All right, I really appreciate that. Now let's Talk about video subnet 85. Yeah. First of all, give us the TLDR about what it does and then we're going to show an upscale of Mr. Law Harris.
- [13:40]
Gareth Howells
We are, we are. So yes, video subnet 85 is a video processing subnet. So essentially we're starting out doing video compression and upscaling, but now we're moving on to optimizing your video in any way that's possible. So we, we've got an agent that we can connect to your storage. We read everything that's on your Amazon S3 bucket for instance. We take a look at that and we, we tell you where we can optimize. Optimization can be many things. We can optimize for streaming on a VOD platform. We can optimize for archiving, you know, best quality picture, saving you space. We can optimize for security, medical education. You know, we're covering all those areas of video. So, yeah, essentially what we're doing is using an AI, AI agents to make your video the best it can be for whatever your needs are.
- [14:33]
Jason Calacanis
Just to recap, I always like to explain back to the founder, so I understand their vision.
- [14:38]
Gareth Howells
Yeah.
- [14:39]
Jason Calacanis
Vidayo V I D A I O is how the name of the company is spelled. Or I should say the name of the subnet is the Tao subnet, the Bittensor subnet. It's numbered 85. Just so people understand there's 128 subnets. A person like Gareth can start a subnet stake with some Tau and they may or may not have a company behind it. So are you also running a startup that is doing this or consulting firm?
- [15:07]
Gareth Howells
We are incubated by Taustatz mog, who you had on the show before with Hippeas. So we're in exactly the same situation as Hippios.
- [15:16]
Jason Calacanis
Got it. And this could become a company. It's inside of a different company right now. So as investors, we could invest in a parent company, or you could buy Tao, or you could buy the subnet token. Three different ways to invest in these opportunities. I'm looking at all of them. I own Tao directly myself through Coinbase. It's not on Robinhood yet. And then Stillcore Capital, which I'm a partner in with Mark Jeffrey, they are going and buying subnets. To buy subnets, you got to go to the subnet owner and do a deal to buy the tokens. They're not trading freely on marketplaces yet. But when you buy Tao, it's in some ways like buying a mutual fund or an index. An etf, I guess would be the best way to say it. An ETF of a bunch of different startups. Okay. This particular subnet is challenging people on the Internet or globally to give you compute, and then you take that compute and you will take video files and render them into different versions of it. Now, this seems like a very narrow use case. Like I can on my desktop, I can use VLC to save a file as a different file type. But you're doing something a little more sophisticated. And the customers of this product or what. So let's just talk really tightly about who are the customers for upscaling a video or just Essentially making different versions of a video. And how big is that market?
- [16:47]
Gareth Howells
So, I mean, the market is enormous. 85% of Internet traffic is video. So, you know, it's not going anywhere. More videos getting created every day and it's going into storage buckets on the cloud that are just getting bigger and bigger. People's, you know, bills are getting bigger. No one's really doing anything about that. So to answer the question, upscaling would be anyone with a library, a library of old content. You could be, you know, the national archives in the UK. You could be a big TV broadcaster who made 20 years of programming in SD. You could be consumer who's got video.
- [17:27]
Jason Calacanis
Got it. So, like, the BBC has a giant archive. BBC News has a giant archive. Exactly. Getty Images has an archive. CBS owns an archive. Those archives might be in very low quality video.
- [17:39]
Gareth Howells
Yeah, exactly that. So, and, and they won't translate to like a 4K screen. Like we expectations these days are of high picture quality. So we can go in there with our agent, we can scan your archive and we can tell you what we can do to that. We can make these, all these videos, 4K. We can turn your black and white videos into color, we can change the frame rate if, if the video is jerky, we can clean up noise, or if you want to keep it in black and white, we can do that. You want it in sepia, we can do that. Also, we can do subtitling, we can do transcription, we can do tagging of metadata. So then you have a searchable content library. So we can do all of those things within, you know, within our ecosystem.
- [18:18]
Jason Calacanis
Got it.
- [18:18]
Alex Wilhelm
So the miners here are not just providing compute Gareth, aren't they providing the actual models themselves that you're using for those specific tasks?
- [18:25]
Gareth Howells
Yeah, exactly that. So we're now moving onto the new iteration, which is a winner takes all or winner takes most model for the miners. So essentially what they're doing now is optimizing models. So rather than. We were using their compute before, but that became very difficult to scale. So now we're. We can scale with shoots, which is another subnet. It has a trusted executional environment, which means that it's a safe environment that our clients will be happy with because it's 100% safe. It's. It's private for. For us and the client. So now we can optimize models. So we can say we want a new upscaling model or a colorization model or subtitling Lip sync. We're looking into lip sync models as well, so there's, there's so much more versatility now in the subnet if we move to this kind of winner takes all model.
- [19:17]
Jason Calacanis
And there are desktop pieces of software like Topaz that I think people will use for this type of and product or service. So if you had an old video of a Bob Dylan concert or I have all these old Dire Straits bootleg videos, they're all over YouTube and they're grainy. Now AI can take them and upscale them. So about three or four years ago I started to see this on YouTube where people would say upscaled Dire Straits thing. And it's pretty amazing to see literally a vhs, shaky VHS turn into something that looks like, okay, maybe HD or close to hd. And it's only going to get better from here. This is the worst it will ever be.
- [20:02]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, so here's the.
- [20:05]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, okay, here. So let's see an example. AI tools are making it easier than ever to run your own business, even as a solo founder. But you still need a beautiful attention grabbing website to help your new company stand out in a very crowded field. And you don't want AI slop. Nope. You, you want to use Squarespace. That's the easiest and fastest way to turn your idea into a real business. Because the team at Squarespace cares deeply about design and functionality. And a plain looking or generic or AI slop website, man, that's gonna be a red flag for your customers, for your investors and people who wanna come work for you and join your team. But Squarespace will take all the guesswork out of designing your first website with the blueprint AI builder, which has been finely tuned to make beautiful websites. Squarespace isn't just gonna help you make a new web page either. They're gonna be your all in one platform, launching your business. They're also going to help you set up your email. They're going to handle invoicing, paperwork, all your needs. Go to squarespace.com twist for a free trial. And when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com twist for 10% off your first website or domain purchase.
- [21:07]
Alex Wilhelm
So here's an example of it from the subnet. Here's a lawn. If you're on the audio version, we have a grainy lawn on the lap.
- [21:14]
Jason Calacanis
Rest in peace. Lon Harris. He was an amazing collaborator here. And so we're celebrating empty today. He's in surgery as we speak. Well, who knows if he'll get out. He's wearing his Plaud pin. Just so you know. He's wearing his Plaud pin in surgery.
- [21:26]
Alex Wilhelm
Two plins and one one shot. There you go.
- [21:28]
Jason Calacanis
To me, it doesn't feel like Gaff is anywhere near ready to work by himself. Like, even if he was in a Mac studio, I feel like I would still need to be there giving him feedback pointers, asking him to do things. I don't think he's ready to replace me. He's ready to do like 80% of what I do. The one on the left and the one on the right explain to us the difference.
- [21:49]
Gareth Howells
So the one on the left was the original video that we upscaled, which was taken obviously from one of your podcasts. We compress that down a bit to make, to make the picture quality worse. But then I put it through the subnet and we upscaled this up to 4K. So essentially what we're doing is it's a gen AI tool which is predicting what should be in the picture and it's making all of the blurry lines clearer.
- [22:19]
Jason Calacanis
Got it. And so this is a way, if people are recording their podcast, just as a silly example, over zoom, like many people do today, and that kind of downgrades your video a bit. You could take all in or this week in startups here and twist and just boom. Make it a beautiful look like it was using 4K studio red cameras or something.
- [22:38]
Gareth Howells
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, we can do that. And then we can also compress that video so you get a super high picture quality, a much smaller file size. So therefore, I mean, that's going to help you with streaming, that's going to help with your storage and your CDN costs. So it's going to create efficiencies all the way down. You know, how does that play into
- [22:56]
Alex Wilhelm
low, low connectivity markets? Like, you know, in parts of the world, like parts of Latin America, parts of Africa, connectivity is a lot worse. Does Starlink make it so that everyone has unlimited bandwidth now we don't need to worry about it? Or are there still places where people are pretty bit conscious?
- [23:10]
Gareth Howells
Unfortunately not. Yes. So Africa being the perfect example. I've got a lot of experience working in Africa and in emerging markets, so connectivity there is a real problem. Also, everyone uses mobile phones. There's no laptops, no 4K TV, so everything needs to be compressed down to the small screen. Connectivity is an issue. Data is an issue. Phone battery is an issue. So these, all of this, everything we're doing to these files is solving those problems. Essentially we can get say, conservatively 60% smaller file at the same perceptual visual quality. So the user has no, like, there's no degradation for the user. They get a perfect quality file, but it's 60% smaller. So all of the costs along that chain. Yeah, they reduce.
- [23:54]
Ola Lehman
Yeah.
- [23:55]
Jason Calacanis
And if you look at this space, it's predicted to grow from 175 million in 2025 to 1.1 billion in 2020. So this is going to be, this is going to be like a compounding vertical where people are really going to want to be upscaling videos on a regular basis. And there are many competitors here already, from desktop software to. Amazon has an offering you in terms of your pricing. Walk us through the economics now, because you're using another subnet for compute, and so you are using your miners. Miners are individuals who want to earn TAO for doing a task. So just so people think about it, that's the supply side. So that's the Uber drivers, that's the Airbnb hosts. They can come into this network, but unlike Uber, where they need a driver's license, they need to register. They can just sign up here and compete for these jobs. And then there's a validator that confirms that they did the job and then picks the winner. Am I broadly correct in how subnets work and how this one works?
- [25:01]
Gareth Howells
The thing is, with video, it is compute heavy, for sure, but there's. It's very hard to put a price per minute on what we're doing, which is essentially the old way of pricing. Say that's what AWS would do, because we now have this optimization model where we could be using 3, 4, 5 different models on one piece of video. It goes kind of on a case by case basis. But what we have on our side, not only do we have the innovation of Bittensor, which is of course the incentive mechanism in the miners creating better and better models. So we've already done benchmarking with all our competitors and we're already better. So we know that, we know that we're good there. But also you have the emissions from the subnet, which can also subsidize our earnings, so we can pay our miners. So we're essentially paying 256 machine learning engineers to outdo each other on a daily basis. And that's, you know, that's an unbelievable, powerful tool to have behind you.
- [26:01]
Jason Calacanis
So what are the models that they're using? These are open source models. They're tweaking their models. They're the model originators. They're making SMLs out of large language models. Who are these? What are these models they're using?
- [26:14]
Gareth Howells
It's some and some. So when we launch the subnet, we always start with a base model for upscaling. We use an open source model for compression. We created our own because there was none existing. The miners have taken those and they've built upon them and they've tweaked them and they've made them better or they've created their own models. Sometimes we don't even know what models they're using. We just know that the output is better than we can do ourselves. So with the new winner takes all, we will ask them to open source their models to us. So then we will be able to use that in a private environment for our clients.
- [26:50]
Jason Calacanis
Have you ever met these miners and the people who are participating face to face?
- [26:54]
Gareth Howells
No, but we've had some meetings. There's a couple of pro mining teams that are working on the subnet, which come from the video world, actually, not machine learning engineers, which is very interesting. So we have, yeah, we do talk to them and we, you know, and
- [27:11]
Jason Calacanis
describe for us who these type of people are. Are these people who work at IBM and they make a great salary and they're doing a side hustle or, you know, they, they work at a Hollywood studio and on the weekends they do this or they're just bored at work or they, they're living in Thailand and they don't have to make a ton of money and they just are nomadic entrepreneurial CTOs. And in their spare time they, you know, contribute to these subnets because it's a fun way to make a, you know, an extra couple of thousand dollars a week.
- [27:39]
Gareth Howells
I mean, we've had a team from Vietnam doing exactly that. There was, there was, I think, three or four guys working solely on this. I think, I think they were university
- [27:46]
Jason Calacanis
students or graduates from Vietnam or people who were like nomads.
- [27:51]
Gareth Howells
No, no, they were Vietnamese. Yeah, they were Vietnamese.
- [27:54]
Jason Calacanis
That's a very interesting thing to pause on there, Alex, is there's incredible tech talent around the world. They might have a hard time getting a job at Google or Coinbase or whatever it happens to be, but they can permissionlessly join a Tao subnet and immediately start making money and put their tech skills to work. And they can do it anonymously and they don't have to worry about visas, nor do they have to worry about payments because it's on, you know, a distributed, you know, crypto project where it's permissionless. Permissionless. Fancy way of saying I can just participate without somebody, you know, approving me. Yeah, that's a really, you know, unique thing in all the world, this has
- [28:39]
Alex Wilhelm
been my biggest learning, talking to the different subnets in the last few weeks, is that there are so many people out there who can contribute to machine learning technology that don't only work at Google. Because I've asked this question, where are you finding these people? Where are these ML engineers that have all this spare time on their hands? Because we beat up startups, Jason. They're desperate for local talent. Everyone's fighting over the same eight people. Yeah, but you go to Vietnam, you have a bunch of smart people who can do great work and Gareth doesn't care.
- [29:04]
Gareth Howells
Yeah, they come to us. That's the beauty of it, is that, like, we built it and they come to us. So, you know, they obviously have an understanding of the ecosystem in the network. But you create a new subnet, people register, they start mining you. You've no idea who they are, and you don't really need to. You just, obviously you need to see their proof of work and you need to validate it. And that's the only thing that matters. And that's. And that's why, you know, you can get the best talent. And maybe they are working for Google, maybe they're doing this on the side, but sometimes we don't know.
- [29:36]
Jason Calacanis
All right, Gareth, anything else we missed? If not, we'll drop you off and thank you for your time.
- [29:41]
Gareth Howells
My absolute pleasure. Thanks, guys.
- [29:42]
Jason Calacanis
There are lots of accounting firms out there that will help you maintain your books and do your taxes. But when you're a founder, you're facing a lot of unique challenges. So you want a partner who understands the landscape that startups operate under. You want to be able to trust them with the reins so you can focus on building your product. Well, Pilot is the largest accounting firm that was built just with startups in mind. You're not just getting your taxes done. No, you're getting CFO level guidance for, for your startup. Pilot will help you track where all your cash is going, increasing your profitability, and helping you spot looming issues before they become real problems. Hey, like your Runway. You gotta be on top of this stuff, folks. And when it's time for you to raise your next round, Pilot is right there to help you with due diligence and scale up and make that process easy peasy lemon squeezy. So start focusing on your product and let Pilot handle the bookkeeping. Plus, Twist listeners get $1,200, $1,200 off in their first year. What a deal. Go to pilot.com twist to get started. That's pilot.com twist and we've been going through all the subnets. I believe in this project. I am very. Since the administration's changed and the folks who were running crypto policy have changed.
- [30:58]
Alex Wilhelm
True.
- [30:59]
Jason Calacanis
I am now officially open for business in crypto. I'm doing a stablecoin project, getting involved in tao. I'm specifically looking, though only for projects where there's a customer who is either making money, saving money, entertained or otherwise delighted by a product or service. So I'm not looking for meme coins. I am not looking for pump and dumps. I'm looking for actual products that create value and use the technology in a way that it was intended, that gives it an advantage. And really, when you look at the bittensor universe, incentives matter. Tapping into a global workforce, tapping into global compute, having it be distributed. And again, there's like fancy words used in crypto like permissionless or peer to peer or distributed. All this stuff means is anybody can participate. The compute or storage or transit can come from anybody. And that means it moves faster and it more violently removes cost. So if you just open your mind up for a second, if everybody in the world could work at your local Starbucks or anybody in the world could magically sell coffee beans to your local coffee shop and they basically had a competition, you would have a barista for $1 a day, $2 a day, living like a king or queen in their native location. And if the beans could magically be transported without all the distribution between where the coffee beans are and the roaster and eventually the cafe, just allow your mind to think about how powerful that is, your cup of coffee and that experience would be delivered faster and better and cheaper, that's all. And you wouldn't have the friction of I have to hire this person, I've got a union, I've got to pay taxes, whatever boom just happens magically in this global cloud, this machine known as the interwebs.
- [32:56]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah. Do you think that we're going to see a little bit less winner takes most or winner takes all? Because I've seen several different subnets moving towards this model for their miners and I fully understand why it's good for the subnets. But when I think about expanding economic opportunity, Jason, kind of what you're saying to me, if it is going to be winner takes most, winner takes all, there's less lower hanging fruit for people that are trying to get to that top rung of a particular minor task for a subnet. I'm just curious if that's a concern for you as well or just good economic.
- [33:26]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, no, I mean you're, you're a big fan of capitalism. True. What happens if the buy side doesn't make a good enough offer to labor the supply side?
- [33:35]
Alex Wilhelm
Oh, they don't hire enough people, they
- [33:36]
Jason Calacanis
don't leave their house. So if you're going to pay $10 an hour to be a barista and people can work from home for 15 bucks an hour, they're not coming to your Starbucks to work. And Apple Stores were faced with this and so were Starbucks and Coffee Bean and everybody else. When Uber and DoorDash came out, it turned out working for one or two hours, picking your own schedule and making, you know, $21 an hour was better than getting up at the crack of dawn, showing up at 5:30am at a Starbucks and having to work an eight hour shift and not knowing what shifts you were working. It just was a better offering. So this actually empowers, I believe, labor. If you consider labor the supply side on these things and the customers are the people who want their videos to be upscaled. So the people who lose are the people who are charging a higher price and, or giving a lower level of service. The winner is best price, best service. And sometimes it's some combination of that. If the, the validator, which is the person who basically arbitrates, did you actually perform the task? Again, crypto uses a lot of fancy terms or a lot of wonky terms. A validator is just the person who checks the work. Okay, you made a flat white. Is this a good flat white or is it garbage? Is it an acceptable flat white? Or fuck off. So the validators will determine that and then the person who's buying the service will say, well, this wasn't good enough. I'm going to go use another service. So they could go use the desktop software or Amazon's offering. Sure, Amazon's offering might be faster, it might be better, but it might also be twice the price. And then the BBC might say, you know what, these things haven't been upscaled for 50 years. We're in no rush here. If it takes a week or a month or a day, it doesn't matter, versus an hour, a minute or two hours. So here we are, folks. This is capitalism at its finest. And if you ever dreamed of one human race working on projects beyond borders, beyond governments, beyond regulation, that's what makes this so compelling to me. It kind of cuts across humanity and just makes a global competition for capitalism. And if the people who lose are people in the west who are coddled, overpaid, lazy, whatever. And the people who win are the ones who are the biggest hustlers who will do it for the right price. But if you don't offer a decent people don't participate. So you have that backstop. Right. So before anybody gets their hands ringing too hard here and they rip the skin off their knuckles, the guys in Vietnam doing this four person team, if they get a job for a Korean company or a Japanese company and they pay them more, they stop participating in the subnet. Again, back to capitalism, back to free markets. This is free markets, like unconstrained.
- [36:36]
Alex Wilhelm
What do you and I like, Jason? Free markets and unconstrained markets, those are our favorite things. What I like though, just as a lost, I know we got to move on, but your point that buying Tau is a bit like an ETF into the bittensory economy. I like that a lot because frankly I don't think right now I would have confidence, say, Jason, here are the top three subnets. These are the ones that are going to win the other 125 or whatever. But I don't mind having kind of like a effectively a call option on decentralized global intelligence. So that, that translates well for me. I appreciate that.
- [37:05]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. And you know, listen, everybody wants to debate me and like I'm not writing the code of bittensor. I haven't been like a market participant in crypto aside from, you know, you know, some small bets we've made as a family office. But it's my job is to explain it in plain English and to explain my thesis. So for people who are like, you're pumping this. For people who are like, you don't know what you're talking about. Of course I don't know what I'm talking about. I am an investor, I am a commentator. So the way I choose to place bets is not by writing code, not by being a subnet participant or launching a subnet. My way is studying, placing bets, losing bets, learning, placing more bets. And that's the job of an investor, is you learn by betting. My job is to learn by betting and to have conversations, which is what I'm doing here. So to the mids and the weirdos. Now I got all these crypto weirdos back in my replies again.
- [38:10]
Alex Wilhelm
You poor thing. It's the worst.
- [38:13]
Jason Calacanis
I'm trying to think of what's worse. The MAGA bots who are still loyal to Trump after he starts a forever war, or hopefully not a forever war, but that group of People in my replies or the crypto people in my reply saying, have fun staying poor. And I'm like, guys, I'm worth collectively
- [38:34]
Alex Wilhelm
more than all of you.
- [38:35]
Jason Calacanis
I'm doing okay, guys.
- [38:38]
Alex Wilhelm
You know, like, it's so tribal though, at times, and I think I really hope that maybe so tribal, maybe bittensor can, can help break some of this. But people get so parasocial about their favorite token that it becomes nigh religious
- [38:50]
Jason Calacanis
and then it's the nature of humans. Alex. I mean, I literally, when I told Mac people like back in the day, like, how retarded some of the Mac decisions were, they would lose their minds when I would tell them how like, pathetic it was that Microsoft couldn't build a UX and have less than 300 things in sub menus. Like, they got upset. I'm like, okay, this is just valid criticism. Like, people want a headphone port. People want an on off button. You know, like, just give them the volume buttons, you know, it's not like a big thing to keep a headphone port on your laptop. Like, bad decision to remove the headphone port. I'll die with that.
- [39:29]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, I'm still mad about it. And I own several pairs of wireless headphones, but I also like to listen to audio sometimes.
- [39:34]
Jason Calacanis
Jason.
- [39:34]
Alex Wilhelm
For more than 20 frickin minutes.
- [39:36]
Jason Calacanis
Exactly, Exactly. Let's keep going.
- [39:39]
Alex Wilhelm
All right.
- [39:40]
Jason Calacanis
And I welcome the feedback from Crypto mids. Congratulations on hitting. I was getting into a fight with a guy about this stuff and then I looked, he had eight followers and he started his account in 2013. I was like, congratulations, that almost hitting double digits in your follower account. I'm like taking this account seriously for 15 minutes of my life.
- [40:00]
Alex Wilhelm
That's Jason. That's one follower per year. Net.
- [40:04]
Jason Calacanis
Literally, he's that 0.6 followers per year. And by the way, I get 20. I probably get 100 at this point. Bots following me per day, right? Like, yeah, it's not hard to get past 10, bruh. And then I look, he's tweeting 20 times a day with eight followers. I'm like, what's the point?
- [40:23]
Alex Wilhelm
You have to be pretty toxic to tweet that much and end up with no followers. Unless you're like, blocking people that are following anyways. All right, next up, we're going to bring my new best friend Ola Lehman on the show. Ola is a social media poster. He builds with OpenCloud, builds skills for Claude code, runs classes for people, and built Jason, what I think is the single coolest skill for OpenCloud we've ever yet had on the show but though we are going to show it off inside of Claude. Cowork Ola, welcome to the show. Unmute your microphone and tell us all about Andrej Karpathy's idea behind the Council of Advisors.
- [40:55]
Ola Lehman
Yeah, great to be here. So I saw Karpathy's post for some context. Karpathy is co founder, was co founder of OpenAI, later head of AI with Tesla. So AI Gigachad and he posted about his LLM count. So which basically has the idea of you have a question, you send it to different models. So Grok, Claude, chatgpt, all of that, they all come up with a different answer, then the answers get anonymized and then they get peer reviewed. So every single model reviews all of the outputs in an anonymous way. Then they get to the chairman, there's like another model at the end and the chairman just comes up with a final verdict. So that was the idea of Karpathy's counsel and I really liked that idea. But I thought okay, it would be cool to build something in Claude that's more based around basically giving you basic advice for everything in your business and also for general life advice.
- [41:48]
Alex Wilhelm
So is your council of advisors using different models for each of the advisors that debates the question or is it one model with different Personas attached to it to kind of talk amongst themselves?
- [41:59]
Ola Lehman
Yeah, so this is just one model. So I'm just using Cloud Opus 4.6 right here. It's because most part of my audience are really non technical so I wanted to build something that's still kind of simple but still uses the same concept that Karpathi uses. So I'm just using Opus right here.
- [42:17]
Alex Wilhelm
So let's ask it a question. Let's let Jason pick a question and then as it thinks, I want you to talk us through what it's doing. So Jason, what's a good startup question for founders that would they be asking themselves today?
- [42:28]
Jason Calacanis
Sure. How much equity should I give my VP of Engineering who has 5 years of work experience and who previously worked at Google? I'm a seed stage startup that's raised $3 million, I am a solo founder and I have 85% of the equity and my investors have 15%.
- [42:55]
Alex Wilhelm
I wonder how many tokens this is going to consume.
- [42:57]
Jason Calacanis
Not a lot. That's not so bad. And this is how the more specific you get, the better the models tend to do. And then what you're doing Oli, is you've given one model anthropics, exceptional model but you have four or five different Personas. So you've loaded into those Personas a contrarian, like, why would this fail? You've got a first principles thinker and Elon Musk on the team. You've got an expansionist, which would be like a jcal. How does this grow faster? You got an outsider who's like, I don't. I've never. I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm dumb. And then you have an executor who's like a sycophant who says, hey, I'll get it done for you or something. I would put the sycophant in here too.
- [43:46]
Ola Lehman
But okay, this is the basic idea. And again, what's important that you have the step here to anonymize all of the responses before the peer reviews happen. That's like one of the key steps here. So once that happened, we can see if they already. In the beginning, it would spin up five different sub agents. So this is pretty cool. Because Cloud code or cloud cowork. So this also works with cloud cowork for everyone watching. I just like to use cloud code more. But it's just a preference here. It totally works too. And again, this is because Anthropic now has these agents working inside all of their products. So it just spins up different sub agents.
- [44:24]
Jason Calacanis
So it does it in parallel. Saves a lot of time. You anonymize the five different responses because when you go to the peer review stage, you don't want it thinking, oh, this is the expert, this is the contrarian. You want it to just evaluate it, you know, without any baggage. Correct.
- [44:40]
Ola Lehman
Exactly. And I read Karpathy's thoughts on that, and he was quite surprised that in his version he used different LLM models and they oftentimes rated other LLM models higher than themselves once this peer review thing kind of got started. So it really helps because most of these models have some kind of bias, especially when it comes to rating other stuff. So with this step, really helps to get to a better, more balanced opinion. This is also why I chose these. JK already talked about this a little bit. I tried to include opposites a little bit. So the contrarian is kind of what is the downside. The expansionist is what is the upside. The first principal thinker kind of takes a step back. It goes deeper into thinking and the executor is just going forward and just full throttling, not really thinking, just doing.
- [45:30]
Jason Calacanis
And the outside maxing. Just call it what it is.
- [45:32]
Ola Lehman
Only I'm actually going to drop an article today about maxing, so it's funny. Talk about that.
- [45:40]
Jason Calacanis
I'm sorry to everybody who's offended by the word, but it's in popular culture right now. It's not going backwards. It is what it is. But for people who don't know, stop ruminating. Don't go to therapy, don't overthink things, folks. Just go forward and build. It's all that matters is building and making your venture capitalists more money faster. Let's go.
- [46:02]
Ola Lehman
You can see all the advisors now responded and is running the peer review. It's also complete. So now it all comes to the final stage here, stage three, which is. And so the chairman gathers all the data and all of these different responses. So the council members rated, okay, who has a strong response, who is the weakest? Also, what are blind spots that some of the reviews missed? And also I added this thing. So this is not from Karpathi, but I thought it's kind of a good data to have is the what did all five miss? So they all sit down and try to find things that all of them missed. So kind of an extra angle here.
- [46:41]
Jason Calacanis
No, wait. How many people are on the peer review? And did the peer review people have Personas?
- [46:46]
Ola Lehman
So the peer review still happens in these Personas.
- [46:48]
Jason Calacanis
Ah, got it. So the five are evaluating each other's answers without knowing them.
- [46:53]
Ola Lehman
Exactly. Yeah. And they go through these three questions here. There's a little bit more context in the skill, but this is kind of the basic principle of it. And then they go to the chairman and once the chairman has all the data, he creates a report for you. And this will be shown on a dashboard. So hopefully we'll get there. Yeah, it's still.
- [47:14]
Alex Wilhelm
Well, while it works, Ola, and while we wait for it to finish doing its number crunching, can you just quickly break down for folks when you like to use Claude code cowork and when you prefer to use open claw? Because I'm seeing a lot more folks in my circles start to tinker more with cowork and I'm still a claw guy. So I'm curious, pros and cons and what I'm missing.
- [47:33]
Ola Lehman
Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say for me, the most serious in depth work I like to do in cloud code or cloud cowork. Just because most of my openclaw is in my telegram. I think the big upside of OpenClaw is that you have the memory system built in. You can also get there with cloud Code using things like Obsidian for example, or using projects now in Cowork. So it's kind of, it's becoming a little bit more alike over time I would say. But in general to me, for more in depth work, I like to use cloud code, just to be very honest with you, because I like the interface more. You can probably do most of the work in openclaw, but in cloud code it's easier for me to also work on my local files and just be like, hey, just put this to this folder. It's also a little bit, I would say habit because the truth is I could potentially do most of the work I'm doing inside cloud code or cloud cowork inside OpenClaw. One big difference I would say is especially for non technical people who I mainly talk to is you have better or like easier control inside Cowork. So you can just go into your connected apps. So let's say Gmail or Notion and you can just see these are the permissions I gave my cowork. But if you look at open cloud sometimes it will just do things and you really understand which permissions you gave to it or you maybe gave it an API key, it's still in there. So there's some files, some stuff is safe, but you don't have a good overview. So I just think that Anthropic is doing a great job of just making it more accessible and just easier to use for non technical people.
- [49:07]
Jason Calacanis
Now is this all open source Olay and is it a skill in openclaw? Where does this exist if people want to build? Or are you building this as a proprietary startup that I can invest in?
- [49:19]
Ola Lehman
Yeah, so you can just get this from either my X account so you can find me at it's Olehman and I pinned it to my profile here. So it's an article here that I wrote about it. And you can find this as a Google Doc in there. I also put it onto GitHub but again I'm mainly talking and we will
- [49:35]
Jason Calacanis
put this in our enhanced show notes. I have given producer Jacob and producer Oliver explicit instructions that I want enhanced show notes. So I want them running the show notes and asking our own. I want them to ask our own LLMs, our own council. What did we miss in the transcript that could have been linked to and I want to do that like twice And I want to have absurd show notes going forward with tons of links in it. Why I take notes myself, Alex, when I'm listening to a podcast or I'm listening to an audiobook so let's really do that with our show notes. I want enhanced show notes please. And if somebody wants to make a skill for Openclaw to do this I will put out a $1,000 bounty. And on let's say May 1, I'll give the thousand dollar bounty for the open source project that proves they can do incredible enhanced show notes for me for twist. Okay, show notes. I'm doing this new. This is a new program we're gonna do here, Alex, which is the bounty program. I'm going to offer money for open Claw skills so that we can keep the capitalists who I'm invested in from killing openclaw. This is our format here is demo or die folks. And so in the tradition of the. What was the original computer hacker club called, Alex? In this is like a good jeopardy was the computer something club. And it was in like Palo Alto or whatever in the 70s. And like Steve Jobs used to go to it and they would just have demo or die.
- [51:11]
Alex Wilhelm
What was Chaos Computer Club?
- [51:14]
Jason Calacanis
No, it wasn't the Chaos Computer Club. It wasn't like 2600 at anymore.
- [51:17]
Alex Wilhelm
Homebrew Computer Club founded 1975 Menlo Park, Palo Alto Premier 1970s hobbyist group. Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, the Homebrew Computer Club.
- [51:26]
Jason Calacanis
I want to do an episode on the homebrew. We'll do like an acquired episode, you know like when they go like do a deep dive. Jacob, put this on for the summer schedule. Deep dive Homebrew. And I want to do an oral history of the homebrew. This is new from this week in Startups from the mind of executive producer Jake Howe. I want to do an oral history documentary on it and we'll debut it as a one or two part series during our summer session.
- [51:52]
Ola Lehman
Now we have the council report and it gives a recommendation first we can just have a look at it.
- [52:00]
Jason Calacanis
Take a look here. The recommendation. 0.75 to 1% offer. 0.75 negotiate up to 1% ceiling. If pushed, you're a C stage with 3 million raised and a series A coming that will dilute everyone by 20 25%. Okay, that seems likely. I would have said 15 to 20%. Google tenure and five years experience are real signals. Correct. That's why I gave them. But they don't justify top of the market. You need room for two to three more senior hires before or after your Series A. That's true. Structure it as ISOs with a four year vest. One year cliff. That's standard double trigger acceleration. That's a Fancy way of saying if the company gets bought, they get their vesting push for it in case the acquirer doesn't need the CTO. If the candidate pushes beyond 1% shift the conversation to base salary first. Moving base up is cheaper long term than moving to equity. That's true if you succeed because equity compounds through dilution rounds and salary does not. The one thing to do first, create the option pool before this conversation, a 10 to 15% option pool documented and board approved. So the VP offer is priced against real post pool cap table. Not a number that will change the moment you formalize the hire. This is critically important. This is something I wasn't even thinking of. So that's a great, great punch up there that I put in yellow where the council agrees every advisor landed the Same mechanical range 0.5 to 1.5. And I didn't do CT, I. Oh right, I did VP of Engineering I think which is like a step below cto. But the council clashes on the ex pensionist push for 1.5 to 2%. That's what I was going to say. I was going to say 2 to 3% but I am the optimist pushing for like getting great candidates. I would have said 2% blind spots, council court, cash equity, trade off option pool math and role trajectory. Does this person eventually become the cto? Wow. Oh my lord, this is exceptional. Olay, like if you had a discussion with your board as a founder you would not get to this answer as crisply and as cleanly as possible. This is why I think you should create a digital board of directors from day one of your startup and having it get complete access to your slack and working on these decisions. Really genius. Amazing.
- [54:14]
Alex Wilhelm
Can you click on just one of these for me Ola, so I can see what it looks like?
- [54:17]
Ola Lehman
Yeah.
- [54:17]
Alex Wilhelm
Okay, so this is one response.
- [54:20]
Ola Lehman
The outputs, the individual outputs of the of the different council members and it also gives you some highlights here and some, some blind spots. And I, I think the general idea is everyone who like makes important decisions has a council, right? Like the president has a council maybe. And every decision is made by having influenced by these people that have in depth knowledge. And if you have a startup you would have never had these opportunities or these resources before. Like JC said, now you have an LLM and LLMs are so good to stepping into another role and also it saves a lot of your own biological compute because if you have to think and empathize with a different opinion every day it takes so much of your own, of your own energy so, for me, it's just helpful to let these different council members run through ideas because it's such a big advantage and most people don't use LLMs for that. And they're extremely good at that.
- [55:20]
Alex Wilhelm
You said that, Claude. Mythos is, quote, Hiroshima for software. That's a very vivid image, you might say. Why are you that concerned right now? It's under lock and key. Jason and I talked about Project Last Wing. Seems like we're in a bit of a holding pattern. Why are you so scared?
- [55:38]
Ola Lehman
I just think it's a point in time. I don't want to be too alarmist, but it's one of these point in time where it just makes sense to take a step back and take your security seriously, because the downside if you don't is just so immense. Right. If you have a big moment of uncertainty, it's usually smart to take some measures. And I think just taking these basic security measures is something everyone would do, but most people never do them. I think if you just ask the random person, like, what are your security measures? They are incredibly bad. So this is why I made this post. The headline was kind of extreme, just to get to attention, but the meat of the post was, hey, these are the basics of security, and this is a good point in time to take them seriously. On the other hand, we don't really know how advanced Mithos is. Right. Like, maybe you do all the security measures, but it's still going to be so advanced that it's just a drop in the ocean. Right. So that's the big question here.
- [56:33]
Jason Calacanis
And just Olay, before you go, what's your story? Where are you based? What do you do for a living?
- [56:37]
Ola Lehman
Yeah, so I'm based in Cyprus. I'm German, so. But I bought them in Berlin. Right now. I'm the founder of the AI SoloPreneur, which is an AI media and training company. So many, many do media around AI. I do some B2B consulting for companies. I'm focusing more on GTM engineering. So everything AI automation based around marketing, around building distribution.
- [57:00]
Jason Calacanis
All right, you're hired.
- [57:02]
Ola Lehman
Yeah, I really believe you.
- [57:04]
Jason Calacanis
Ever think you want to work in venture capital? You're hired. You'll be the first and only European employee I've ever had. You seem brilliant. Really appreciate you coming on the program. And everybody sign up for Oli's Substack.
- [57:17]
Alex Wilhelm
Yes, it is. Aisolo, beehive.com, b e e h I I v dot com. Screw substack. Jason, that's so 2024. Everyone's now on the hive.
- [57:28]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. Beehive is a great product too, and I love a little capitalism.
- [57:32]
Ola Lehman
And I'm trying to bring capitalism back to Europe.
- [57:35]
Jason Calacanis
I'm saying, yeah, good luck. Be careful, you might get shift. What do you pay in taxes? What's the high tax rate where you are?
- [57:41]
Ola Lehman
I mean, that's why I moved my business to Cyprus and I have residency there. This is like 12.5%, so I'm pretty fine with that.
- [57:49]
Jason Calacanis
This is amazing. Now, if you were still in Berlin, you'd be paying 52% or something.
- [57:54]
Ola Lehman
Yeah, it's around 50. Yeah, that's what I paid before. Yeah.
- [57:56]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. See, this is one of the important things that people have to understand the most savvy entrepreneurs, especially ones outside the United States, because unlike Americans, Europeans can move to Dubai and pay like 1 or 0%, Singapore, whatever, and they get tax treatment. Alex, that's extraordinary. If you're an American and you try this, you still have to pay your federal. So you're still on the hook for 30% or so. And the Americans move abroad, the only thing they get a benefit from is state taxes. What do you pay in state taxes, Alex? What's the. What's the vig up in Rhode Island?
- [58:33]
Alex Wilhelm
I don't know, but I'm about to find out.
- [58:35]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, that's how rich Alex is. He doesn't even know. He's just pouring in this money from all his incredible gains.
- [58:42]
Alex Wilhelm
So 3.75% up to 6%. Top rates for income over 180. Oh, that's not very high.
- [58:48]
Ola Lehman
Okay.
- [58:49]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, it's half of. You're basically half of California. New York, yeah, I think are at
- [58:53]
Alex Wilhelm
13% state, but our state is 1% as large. So whenever we try to do high speed rail, it's only eight cars long, you know, so it's pretty cheap to run a state.
- [59:00]
Jason Calacanis
Basically, the tip of the train is already at the next station and people are still getting off the last.
- [59:05]
Alex Wilhelm
I can't believe we have two senators. It gets incredible to me. Like you can literally see across Rhode
- [59:10]
Jason Calacanis
island shout out to our founding fathers, like, what's the least popular state? Is it still Wyoming or Nebraska or something? It's unbelievable how our system works that a state with, you know, a fraction of the population of these other states get the equal. Yeah, it's Wyoming.
- [59:27]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, it's Wyoming. 580,000 people. That's so few. I'm pretty sure they have a lottery and you draw out of a hat and if it's your turn you have to be a representative in Congress.
- [59:34]
Jason Calacanis
I mean it's basically you have a. Yeah. If you have two, you have a 1 in 250 chance of being a senator. I'm moving to Wyoming. Senator Jake Al from the great state of Wyoming. All right, we're dropping you off but you're coming back on this program because you crushed it.
- [59:49]
Alex Wilhelm
Thanks, Ola. I appreciate you, man.
- [59:50]
Jason Calacanis
All right, listen everybody, who wants to know. Jcal, you look great. You're no longer a fat bastard. You know why? Because of RO Co. I have been doing GLP. Yes, it's true. And I lost 40 pounds and I've added muscle. If you are GLP curious, RO Co. Is my partner and they do a great job. Now you don't need to get roast sparks if you're great. You might want to pick up some rose sparks while you're there. But I'm going to say GLPs are life changing. Do your research and then use the checker. They have an incredible insurance checker. If your insurance doesn't cover it, man, it's getting more and more affordable thanks to folks like Road Co. What's the offer?
- [60:32]
Alex Wilhelm
We do it's Ro Co twist. If you want to check your insurance. Ro Twist. It's very affordable, very good. And you should all go check it out.
- [60:42]
Jason Calacanis
Well, let's go off duty. This is your first chance to go off duty. We're doing off duty at the end of the program. Why are we doing it? People love to know what we're into when we're not doing podcasts or investing in companies or writing newsletters. So you're first. Alex, what are you consuming, obsessed with or otherwise find yourself enamored by?
- [61:04]
Alex Wilhelm
I think, think for me it's the egregiousness in a recent television show of a Microsoft bit of astroturfing. Now, we all know that Apple has rules. If you have an Apple computer in a movie, you're not allowed to have the bad guy use it, that sort of thing. They're very image conscious. Microsoft, on the other hand, in a clip that our dear friend Lon pulled for us that I watched and it's terrible, goes to show how not to do product placement. So if you are on the Microsoft copilot team, let me tell you, this is egregious. Jason, get your vomit bucket ready and tune in now.
- [61:35]
Jason Calacanis
Wait, this is yours or this is Lon's?
- [61:37]
Alex Wilhelm
Well, we both agreed on it. We talked back and forth on the show today. Yeah, because we co produced because he
- [61:42]
Jason Calacanis
has surgery and such but you're endorsing this or.
- [61:45]
Alex Wilhelm
No, I am endorsing the badness of this. I'm saying that.
- [61:48]
Jason Calacanis
Have you watched this? Ok, here we go.
- [61:50]
Alex Wilhelm
Oh, several, several times. Oh yeah.
- [61:51]
Jason Calacanis
Okay, here we go.
- [61:52]
Alex Wilhelm
Please enjoy.
- [61:53]
Jason Calacanis
Alamo Gordon, New Mexico, San Angelo, Texas. Yakima, Washington. You know I can run it in co pilot. I'll have it categorize police reports by location, date and name, then color code with them by location and create a summary of the findings. Okay, here we go. Wait a second. I'm finding reports on alleged scams in multiple cities he's lived in. Like he posed as a startup investor in Phoenix, a high end real estate partner in Ojai. So he's not a businessman, he's a con man. So Frank was his next.
- [62:24]
Alex Wilhelm
That is essentially a television commercial inside of a television show. And Jason, I'm not a big procedural guy, but if I was watching ABC's hit show high Potential, I'd be pissed that they just sold me out to Microsoft. Who is that for?
- [62:37]
Jason Calacanis
Wait, is that a Microsoft copilot? Is that Claude Cowork?
- [62:40]
Alex Wilhelm
Oh no, I think it's Microsoft copilot. They were in Excel there, so I thought, I thought that was. And they said copilot directly. That's not cowork.
- [62:47]
Jason Calacanis
Also they did say copilot. Okay.
- [62:49]
Alex Wilhelm
Don't you think Anthropic would have slightly better taste than that?
- [62:54]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. Listen, product placement is a great way for these folks to make money and reduce the number of ads, but it does feel smarmy to me at times. I'm a fan of like when they just have a Heineken in the background or something to that effect. But this type of product placement is like literally being bashed in the skull in the middle of a show. It takes you right out of the experience. I'm going to go ahead and say Descartia abc.
- [63:21]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, terrible. But Microsoft is the one who should have just more quality control here. Like you have trillions of dollars in market cap. Hire someone who has taste like, like this actually makes me doubt their ability to make good products because they can't advertise them. Well, maybe that's too much Apple in my head but.
- [63:38]
Jason Calacanis
Well, here's the thing. If you are spending more time promoting your product than than making a great product. And I don't know, I haven't used this product so I'm not making a judgment on it. That is what I call pouring kerosene on a giant tree that's been felled in the forest. You can start A fire. You might even start a forest fire. But generally you're gonna wind up with a charred giant log. You wanna build your company and your product through what I call kindling. Each piece of kindling, those little tiny sticks, are the first 10 users. You get that fire going, then you put sticks. After you have sticks, then you might put like branches after branches, you might put logs. But you want those hot embers and you want to go nice and slow and get those users in there who are the early advocates who give you great feedback. You don't want to just go right to marketing with your startup. That's a good poll. I like it. Here's my poll. I have always loved the character Darth Maul. Darth Maul is the guy with the two sided lightsaber. And they have created a series called Maul. And I have now watched the first episode three times. Three times with my 10 year olds because I watched it myself. Then they wanted to watch it, then they wanted to watch it again. The first two episodes are out. I think they're dropping two episodes for five weeks in a row on Disney. Here's a trailer. I'll talk over it. The first episode, Super Banger, second episode, incredibly good. And you can see that the animation is very unique. The animation was created because they did some watercolor paintings and then they put that into the animation software and they created a very unique new look that I've never seen. The Clone wars had its own style, but if you look at this, it's very cyberpunk.
- [65:24]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah.
- [65:25]
Jason Calacanis
Reminds you of Blade Runner. And this is like andor in that it's telling another story that occurred during the timeline. And this is the story of Darth Maul who survives when he gets cut in half by a young Obi Wan Kenobi. It's like a dark underworld underbelly show. Now why is this also important? It turns out that the sequels, episodes 7, 8 and 9 of Star wars were supposed to be having Darth Maul as the lead, not bringing the emperor back. Not all this nonsense they threw away George Lucas treatment. They destroyed the franchise with these descritia in episode seven, eight, nine. Those should be de canonized. But instead they took the elements of Georgia Lucas's sequel and they just placed it between episodes three and four when andor occurs when Rogue One occurs, when the Han Solo movie occurs, essentially when Luke and Leia are babies or toddlers before Obi Wan goes and starts teaching Luke Skywalker to be a Jedi. It's extraordinary. Already I have great hopes for this one. And they're just trying to get this Kathleen Kennedy disaster and J.J. abrams, who basically these guys just. They took Star wars off the rails. They're trying to fix that with Andor Mal, et cetera. And I am here for fixing the descritiad of Kathleen Kennedy's horrible reign post George Lucas and throwing Lucas's genius in the garbage.
- [67:04]
Gareth Howells
Yeah.
- [67:05]
Jason Calacanis
And so which one had Rey in it? That was the Descritiad. Sequels. So 4, 5 and 6 are the original Star Wars. 7, 8, 9 were supposed to be the Darth Maul ones that would have Luke and Leia re establishing the Jedi Academy, training a new series of Jedi. We didn't get any of that. We didn't get any of that while Carrie Fisher was alive. There's a lot of resentment in the Star wars community because of all of this. They didn't even have the story arc for seven eight nine done. They just did a money grab because Star wars was bought for whatever, 4 or 5 billion by Disney and they just killed the entire IP. Now they're going back trying to fix it and I think they just have to. Yeah, go ahead.
- [67:48]
Alex Wilhelm
Jar Jar Binks, though, is in the prequels. So these are the 1, 2 and 3 postquels.
- [67:52]
Jason Calacanis
Okay, thank you for watching. There's the original trilogy, there's the prequels, and then there's the sequels. The sequels some people will refer to the prequels as, but if you look at it as a timeline, it's episodes one through nine. He released four, five and six, the most interesting piece in the 70s and 80s and into the 90s. Then he released the prequels in the 2000 era and then they released the sequels. And anyway, it's well worth checking out. And if you want to, if you got kids or if you're just a Star wars fan and you're on the treadmill, Highly recommend. Clone Wars, Bad Batch Rebels and now Maul. These are like the animations that fill in the series, but these are serious animations telling serious stories in the way Japanese folks do with their anime. So it's very influenced by all of that. And then Mandalorian and Ashoka, the TV show, Ashoka. Those are live action. Those kind of thread into here andor is live action. Those thread into this awesomeness. The second thing I'll give you is I just bought the new MacBook Pro. And here it is. I bought the 14 inch. I spent $3,500 on a computer, on a laptop for the first time in a while, actually. I have a Dell Alienware that I spent a similar amount on. But this MacBook Pro 2 with a great screen is amazing. And I think the future is going to be sml small model languages. I think doubling your spending, getting one of these M5s. You don't need the M5 Max, that's for video. But the real key is getting to that 48 gigs of RAM and, you know, very simple things in your workflow you'll notice are much faster. On the other end. There's this Neo MacBook that uses like a mobile chip that's for $600. And then here's your six times more like a $3,600 laptop. When you put it at max memory for that M5 chip, you can get to 48. There's like a larger one you can get to with 128, but then you're in the 16 inch, which is like 5 pounds. It turns out the MacBook Pro is essentially the same weight as the MacBook Air. I was a huge MacBook Air fan, so that's what we're standardized on. But I think in the future we're going to be putting everybody on higher powered ones so we can run open claw and local language models in the future. So I just want to let folks know who are wondering if they should do it. In my opinion, you should just go ahead and upgrade to a MacBook Pro and spend the 3500 bucks.
- [70:17]
Alex Wilhelm
3500 bucks is like a month of childcare. Get yourself a real computer. Although I will say my MacBook Neo that I bought very recently just because I wanted to have.
- [70:25]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, you bought the Neo?
- [70:26]
Alex Wilhelm
I bought the Neo. I have one.
- [70:27]
Jason Calacanis
Well, what are your impressions? Oh, my God. This is like a perfect off duty go. All right, so what color did you pick? And you paid 600 bucks for this thing?
- [70:34]
Alex Wilhelm
I got the pink one. I got the cheapest one. I got pink for two reasons. One, it's my second favorite color after blue.
- [70:41]
Jason Calacanis
And also, yeah, you wear pink shirts. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [70:43]
Alex Wilhelm
I can give it to my, my oldest daughter when she's computer age because she loves pink. So problem solved. I bought it because I wanted something that I could just throw and take with me. I have a lot of big, heavy computers, desktops, large monitors. My Twist MacBook Pro.
- [70:56]
Jason Calacanis
What does that thing weigh? A pound and a half, two pounds? Something like that?
- [71:00]
Alex Wilhelm
Well, it's not in the case of the Twist computer. It's not that I care about the way. It's more that I don't want to do. No, no.
- [71:05]
Jason Calacanis
The Neo. What is the NEO way?
- [71:06]
Alex Wilhelm
The NEO way. I will find that out for you. But the problem is, Jason, it is the first Apple computer or Apple device I have ever used. 2.7 pounds. That feels so cheap. Like when you type on it, it does not have that Mac polish.
- [71:20]
Jason Calacanis
Okay, yeah. So making a $600 computers means there's going to be compromises. Yes, but clearly they're going after the Chromebook market. And kudos to them. I said years ago, what should they do with their massive cache? Warchest had hundreds of billions of dollars. They probably still do. It was the largest hedge fund in the world. At a point in time like their treasury, I just said why don't they just lose money on iPad pros with keyboards and put that into the education sector and come up with a $200 iPad and just make it the standard. Because remember the iPad was kind of like this forgotten kind of compute device. And I was like, what if they can just get many more of those into the operating system and make the money downstream on services? I believe that's what they're doing with the Neo. I don't. Maybe they make 100 bucks on this thing or 150 bucks. Whatever they make on it's not going to change the fate of Apple, but it's going to train young people. It's going to get them onto icloud, it's going to get them to buy additional storage, it's going to get them to buy Apple music, it's going to help the App Store. Why not get another billion people in the emerging world to use Apple computers as opposed to Windows or Chromebooks? Brilliant idea by them. But hey, listen, there's going to be some compromises, but 600 bucks is the right price. That's the price of the Mac mini.
- [72:37]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah.
- [72:38]
Jason Calacanis
So here we are folks. You know, Apple is really trying to get market share away from Windows and
- [72:42]
Alex Wilhelm
Android and I'll just say it's the first cheaper Apple device. It's still great. But you can just tell if you go from living in a, in a very Apple heavy world that this is a step up from HP and a step down from your MacBook Air, your MacBook Pro. But also here's the other thing, Jason. I'm an enormous nerd. Like I use computers all day. Different keyboards, different setups, whatever. Most people think AI is chatgpt. And so for them I'm pretty sure this computer is amazing. And I don't think, I cannot imagine recommending any Windows laptop when the MacBook Neo exists. It's too cheap, it's too good, and it comes in fun colors. What more do you want in life?
- [73:21]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, it's. It's pretty great. I'm going to give one more shout out here. So I have been looking for, you know, I like to understand the seminal works in an industry, but a lot of them are out of print, and a lot of them, you don't even know about them. So I asked Claude or Grok or Gemini, what are the seminal works in advertising, in typography, in design? And so we're building a newsletter for this week at AI, we're going to launch a paid newsletter. And I was just trying to get some inspiration, and we had the guy from the Hustle and my first million on.
- [74:04]
Alex Wilhelm
Gosh, I'm sorry, I'm blanking. We always forget his name. I'm on.
- [74:08]
Jason Calacanis
Not Ben. God. Sampar.
- [74:10]
Alex Wilhelm
Sampar.
- [74:11]
Jason Calacanis
Sorry. And so there's a guy, Nigel Holmes, as an example, and he was the person at BusinessWeek who came up with infographics, right, where they would use wine bottles as the bar charts, all that kind of stuff would use actual slices of pizza. And it just was a way to make graphics more interesting. I love infographics. So I go online and like, hey, it's not in print. And it's like, well, you could buy the version from 1983 for five bucks. And then I buy the book, and I don't feel guilty about writing my notes right in it. So Nigel Holmes is this. He's the godfather of design. You could pull up this book, Designer's Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams. And I was going to give this, but I'll just tell Oliver and Ismail, who are working on the newsletter to just go ahead and feel free to buy old books, put them in the library. And this one, you know, came from a thrift bookstore. I don't know what I paid for it, but I paid basically nothing for it. And I think the book came out in like 83 or 84.
- [75:10]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, you can for 54 bucks on Amazon if you want. It's totally affordable.
- [75:14]
Jason Calacanis
Well, that's 54. I got it for like 20.
- [75:17]
Alex Wilhelm
Oh, no, I'm just saying, like, usually when I look at a book from 91, I'm adding a zero to that price. So this is super affordable for a book that old.
- [75:24]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, I think. Does it say 54 bucks on there? What does it say there? Yeah. So if you look at the used, you'll be able to find one that's not 54. This is just the first One that came up. There's a button for other sources or for the original library version, I'm trying
- [75:39]
Alex Wilhelm
to not accidentally show off my address online.
- [75:41]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, no problem, no problem. So I'm trying to not click on Ogilvy. On advertising. This was like an old book on advertising. And then there was this. My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by David. These are two works by Claude Hopkins. And, you know, my thesis is there are a lot of lessons that were Learned in the 70s, 80s, 90s, when people were using other mediums that I find inspire me to. They just give me great inspiration. And if I have a stack of them sitting there and I'm having a cup of coffee, I just take one out, I get the highlighter, I write some notes in the margin, and it's my little workbook. It's my little treat to myself. Maybe I'll bring one of them with me when I'm on a trip and open it up and you're a fan of books, I see.
- [76:29]
Alex Wilhelm
Well, no, I'm a fan of scribbling in them. This is a book I wrote with my dad, Democracy in America. If you haven't read it, you should read it. But you should scribble on every page of your books. Like, take notes of people. Enjoy yourself.
- [76:39]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
- [76:40]
Alex Wilhelm
Do we have time?
- [76:40]
Jason Calacanis
It's a $10 book. It's a $20 book. Look at it as a moleskin and just get in there.
- [76:44]
Alex Wilhelm
It's a wear part, as we say in my house. Now, do we have time for one more off? Okay, so have you read a book called Hyperion?
- [76:53]
Jason Calacanis
No, but I'm aware of it.
- [76:54]
Alex Wilhelm
Okay, well, first of all, Jason, my gift to you. Read it. It'll blow your mind. It's crazy. You've never read anything like it. It's fantastic. And one thing that I'm really excited about that's coming down the road. Wish we had Lon here. He would know what to say about this. But they're making a movie adaptation and I'm torn because on one hand, I'm excited that they're trying to take this monster story to film, but I really think it would have been better as like a one season Game of Thrones length series. So while we're waiting on that, though, there's quite a lot going on in the world of science fiction. And what I wanted to give a shout out to on off topic today is this series of books from a woman named Bethany Jacobs. I'm reading the audiobook version while I push my kids around strollers. It's called the Kingdom Trilogy. First book is these Burning Stars. I am not a.
- [77:40]
Jason Calacanis
Like,
- [77:43]
Alex Wilhelm
I'm not into books that are like thrillers per se. They're like people chasing people around the solar system or whatever. This book has elements of that, but it has some of the best world building and characterization I've ever read. I'm in the middle of book two and I'm just absolutely hooked. It's the type of book where like, I don't want to go to bed because I want more of it, Jason. And I just love still making such amazing art. And I just hope also that the mall show that you showed off, I hope that in time it becomes cheaper to make stuff that awesome. So that way, not just Hyperion, which has been a famous book for decades, but also things like these books from Bethany Jacobs can also get their treatment because her works here are not nearly popular enough for HBO to pay attention, but they're good enough, you know, and so I just want everyone to have the capability to make these awesome stories visual because we'd be so much richer, I think, as storytelling humans if we had that capacity.
- [78:31]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. And one thing I can recommend to you, which I had on a previous off duty, was the Shokz open ear headphones. And when you're walking with the baby, right. You don't. You need to hear if the baby wakes up. Right. And so wire cutter, which I tried to acquire, but the New York Times bought it, they have reviews of these bone conducting ones at the wire cutter. That's the open air fit.
- [78:59]
Alex Wilhelm
Oh, do I have the wrong one?
- [79:01]
Jason Calacanis
I like your head. Yeah. I look for the open run. Yeah. So you see the open run right there.
- [79:06]
Alex Wilhelm
Well, if their website would stop trying to teach me how to use the Internet.
- [79:09]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, do everything. Yeah. So anyway, this thing looks a little weird, but it goes over and it. It's bone conducting. Ora will just play it, but your ear is completely open. So now you can be listening to this and you're alert of your surroundings. So when I'm walking around a city, like in Japan, it doesn't matter if I'm wearing my fancy like incredible high end headphones and not listening to the outside world. But when you're walking in New York or San Francisco and you gotta be alert, that could be like. I mean, I'm not being facetious here. You do need to not have your AirPods on. If you're on the New York City subway, you're walking around certain areas of San Francisco, you want to be alert. And with a kid you want to hear if they're crying? Boom. You wear one of these open air ones and you're good to go.
- [79:53]
Alex Wilhelm
So I just went to New York City last week for a couple days, and I was remembering what you've said about it. A little gritty, a little. A little. A little dangerous.
- [80:03]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
- [80:03]
Alex Wilhelm
I'm not going to lie, Jason. I can happily report that it was great, and I even took the subway by myself. I didn't get lost. It was super clean. There's now that display up that tells you what stops coming up. It's. I don't know. I was kind of.
- [80:16]
Jason Calacanis
Where were you? Manhattan or Brooklyn? Where were you?
- [80:18]
Alex Wilhelm
I was in. Whereabout towns did you stay from midtown to the Lower east side and back in that area?
- [80:23]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. I mean, listen, it's. It's a bit of a crapshoot. Different, like, neighborhoods in New York could be phenomenally dangerous. Different subway lines during other ones will be totally safe. And the same thing for San Francisco.
- [80:37]
Alex Wilhelm
If you're up in the Chicago.
- [80:39]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. If you're in the Marina, you're in Pac Whites, you're going to be fine. If you're in the Tenderloin, you're going to be murdered. Did you just say Pac Whites? Yeah. The joke of Pac Heights is literally, if you walk around there, it's all whites.
- [80:52]
Alex Wilhelm
I used to live there.
- [80:54]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. That's what they called it when I moved there. They're like, oh, you should move to Pac Whites. I'm like, I'm sorry. Pack. Pac Heights. No Pac Heitz. Because there's no crime there. There's zero crime. And if you call the police, they show up in 30 seconds. Whereas if you're in any other part, you know, they might take a little bit longer.
- [81:08]
Alex Wilhelm
When I met the CEO of Zoom, it was at a dinner at a venture capitalist house in the. In the fancier part of Pac Heights. So that tracks.
- [81:14]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, the Broadway Billionaires Row.
- [81:16]
Alex Wilhelm
Yeah, yeah, I was.
- [81:17]
Ola Lehman
Yeah.
- [81:17]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, Billionaires Row, you have, like, a thousand cameras per block. The other areas of town, they've banned closed circuit cameras because, you know, privacy. And it's like, trust me, anybody who lives in those areas is willing to give up privacy to be a little bit safer. In Pac whites, you've got 17 cameras on the front of every house. And, like, if you, like, spit out your gum, you're gonna have 16 different videos of it submitted.
- [81:42]
Alex Wilhelm
Whereas when I was in a different neighborhood, someone spit in my mouth while I was walking down the street, not on camera.
- [81:47]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, literally, you could be shivved. All right. This has been another great week for Twist. We'll see you on Monday. Bye. Bye.