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- [00:00]
Jason Calacanis
Hey, can we just have a better CEO than Jason? Can we have a better board of directors than your board of directors? Because they have all information. You're saying now you're building that, Josh?
- [00:12]
Josh Siroti
Yeah, exactly. What we're calling this is a company world model to make that vision true. An algorithm that can actually have the right reward functions.
- [00:20]
Etienne Louve
So we can get up to 20 parcels in the drone.
- [00:24]
Jason Calacanis
40 plus pounds.
- [00:25]
Etienne Louve
Holy cow.
- [00:26]
Lon Harris
If you're already doing logistics, you could just add drones to your fleet.
- [00:30]
Jason Calacanis
This is kind of like going from level two autonomy to level four. Yes, exactly. It's happening, folks.
- [00:36]
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- [01:15]
Jason Calacanis
Try it free@quo.com twist hey everybody, it is 4:20. Lon Harris is here. He is ready to go. Yeah. And it's twisted. And we got a full docket. Monday, Wednesday, Friday I do Monday and Friday I do some Wednesdays. And the this Week in Empire is growing. This Week in AI drops on Wednesdays. We also put half the show into the this Week in Startups feed just to tease you a little bit, give you a taste to get your first 30, 40 minutes. And then we remind you, hey, go over to the this Week in AI show and subscribe there like a dealer.
- [01:51]
Lon Harris
The first half is free and that's how we get you.
- [01:54]
Jason Calacanis
Sure, sure. A 420. Perfect analogy. Exactly. And we got a lot of important things going on. There's a lot of notes you're gonna need to take. This week in startups, our core pillars are tactical and practical and experts only. Those are the first two pillars. And when you have tactical practical information and experts only on the show, man, this means you're gonna get a lot out of it as a founder. So I wanna just take a minute for applaud. I'm wearing it on my wrist today. I've been enjoying my wrist and I just press this little button, Lon. And oh, the red light's on.
- [02:29]
Lon Harris
Yeah.
- [02:29]
Jason Calacanis
And now if I think of something. Oh, the next this week in show that we're gonna launch. Soft launch in a couple of weeks. Make sure that blah blah, blah, blah, blah.
- [02:39]
Lon Harris
Oh, we're not giving it away.
- [02:40]
Jason Calacanis
That we blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Which is what I sent in text today. But I will do this frequently to myself. And I did it when I was on the road. I was on my way to the breakthrough prize. I'll talk about that in off duty. We always do off duty at the end of the show. Um, and I'm wearing this thing and just. I'm going through airports, I'm on a plane, I'm getting my Starbucks Bing. Da da da da da. I give my go to. I get my action items. Then when it goes into the tray and I charge it, which you only need to charge this thing. What, what are you charging, like every 10 days or something? Yeah, I.
- [03:10]
Lon Harris
That's. That's one of those standout things. Once a week I remember to drop it in that charger and that's all. Otherwise it stays just on my. On my suit jacket right here.
- [03:18]
Jason Calacanis
And if you want to get applaud, we have a deal for you.
- [03:21]
Lon Harris
Yeah. If your work relies on conversations, we want you to get a Plaud note pin S. You can check it out yourself at Plaud AI twist and just use the code twist and you'll get 10% off on your plod pin.
- [03:32]
Jason Calacanis
Let's get to work. Let's get our first guest on. We'll do off duty. I'll talk a little bit about the venture training program I've launched in Austin. And I'm going to talk about the venture training program.
- [03:46]
Lon Harris
They got so much news today too. Pat Palantir had their big statement. MoonShot launched Kimmy K 2.6. So much to talk about.
- [03:52]
Jason Calacanis
There's a lot to talk about. But when we get to off duty, two things. I'm gonna talk about the breakthrough prize, the science prize with unlimited celebrities, the most powerful investors, founders in the world, all in one room. Somehow I made it in. I'll explain that three or four besties were there. And I'll also talk about our venture training program. I've now made it six seats because there's so much demand. We have a couple of hundred people applied already. So I'm going to get 600 applicants. I'm going to pick the top 1%. And we'll talk about that at the end of the show. But let's get to our first topic. Yes and or guest.
- [04:27]
Lon Harris
It's our guest. We're bringing On Josh Siroti, he's the CEO of Aragon. Jason, there are. They're sort of an enterprise version of OpenClaw, maybe an AI operating system for enterprises. Their big concept is they want to help companies own their intelligence. So they're connecting a company's existing tools and data to custom models that have been trained on their data and purpose built autonomous agents. So, Josh, thanks for being here.
- [04:52]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, great to see you. So I always like for the founder to tell us why they're creating this, how much it costs, who are the customers, and do a demo. So let's get to work. Why did you build it, who are the customers, what does it cost? And let's demo it. Demo or die here on Twist.
- [05:10]
Josh Siroti
Okay, amazing. Let's do it. So as far as why we built Aragon, basically our view on what's happening right now is as follows. So you are taking a frontier model and as we saw with openclaw or Hermes or different other innovations, there's been a lot of research and a lot of work that has went across these harnesses around these frontier models. And basically for us to be able to execute all of these tasks inside of companies, what we're doing is collectively creating these memory systems with these like MDs and trying to basically pull all of this into the context of a model. And so what you see is if you look at the number of tokens in the world, it's like 1000x input tokens versus output tokens and lots of workflows. Like, I don't know if you guys saw Uber CTO just said that they blew past their whole budget, you know, play six already in April. So it turns out that even with all of these innovations in harnesses, it's actually quite expensive depending on the workflows that you want to do to try to pull into context everything that you need into the model. What our view is and what we're researching is basically an RL algorithm that can actually take a lot of the things about your company and have those things be in the actual weights of a model that you own that's specific to you and your company that can update itself overnight. And therefore it actually begs the question of, okay, what do you need to use the frontier kind of closed source models for versus what can you actually own on top of a lot of your proprietary data sets? That's why we started this, which is we just think there's a huge amount of inefficiency as far as how we're executing tasks. And we don't necessarily think you have to use these frontier kind of closed source models, right, for everything. And what we do is basically like have this RL piece that can actually take certain parts of your company and put it into the weights of a model that you own. And therefore, like our whole slogan is actually own your intelligence, right? This should be your own asset.
- [07:35]
Jason Calacanis
I think that this is exactly where things are going. I recently tweeted like, hey, we're on a bit of a collision course. And we were talking about SLMs just last week with Rob. Small language models can be produced and run on local hardware. And if they have all your data in it, well, what becomes the difference between an open claw and all these skills being made that then go have a context window, have memory, or it all being dumped directly into an SML you own. So you take your entire sales database, you take your entire slack, you take every email, and you put it into this SML. And this is the vision of Ultron we had 80 days ago. We're sitting here in AO84, I think lon correct. And we were like, hey, can we just have a better CEO than Jason? Can we have a better board of directors than your board of directors? Because they have all information. And you're saying now you're building that, Josh.
- [08:39]
Josh Siroti
Yeah, exactly. So I think a couple things to add there is what we're calling this is a company world model. Most of my team is ex DeepMind and PhDs from Berkeley Research Lab. And a big thing on the frontier side in research is really rl, right? Reinforcement learning. What doesn't exist yet is to make that vision true is an algorithm that, that can actually have the right reward functions and be able to update the weights of the model, you know, in a frequency that actually makes sense for a business. Right? So instead of like updating, you know, this model once every, like three months, and it costs a lot of money, you know, can this model actually update itself overnight based on the interactions that it has with people?
- [09:28]
Jason Calacanis
Where do you run the model? What models are you building this on? Kimmy? Deep sea? What do you use as your foundational model to then merge? What's the term? When you put the data in for my company every night, what do you call that? Is it a build? Is it post training, pre training? How would you explain this? Details matter. Building a great company is all about paying attention to details, and they add up along the way. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo Q U O. The smarter way to run your business communications. And I use this product it at launch. Why? Well, I don't want my sales team using their personal phones. I want them to have their own phone number. For some phone numbers, we want there to be one phone number that we can put at the bottom of an email on the bottom of our website so that no calls get missed. And it's so much easier to service an existing customer than it is to find a new one. And Quo is the way to do that. They're being used by over 90,000 businesses. Everything from solo operators to at scale teams Love Quo and it works wherever you are. Android, iOS desktop, it's going to work everywhere. So sign up for Quo Smart system and make sure no more opportunities slip through your fingers. Try Quo for free and get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com twist that's Q U O.com twist quo. No missed calls, no missed customers.
- [10:52]
Josh Siroti
So the this is all called like post training. It all falls into the category of post training and then the ME the method is called RL Reinforcement learning. And as far as the model that we've found that has like, you know, very good kind of base is Kimmy. So we're also very excited for all of the announcements that they're going to be making. And as far as the concept, right. It actually doesn't yet exist to do the updating. This is what's called continuous learning.
- [11:22]
Jason Calacanis
So demo or die time, Josh. Let's do it.
- [11:24]
Josh Siroti
Okay, let's do it guys. All right, so I think first thing that we can go through is you guys had just brought up, you know, not checking email. So like one workflow that's a pretty straightforward workflow. I receive I think probably like 200 or 250 emails a day. I find my email to be quite unusable. Most of this is things that actually are not relevant to my day to day. So if we just go in and say like, you know, hey, what's the latest from email that I need to get back to?
- [11:59]
Lon Harris
Right.
- [12:00]
Josh Siroti
We can do this simultaneously. We can do concurrent tasks at once. So if I want to also go ahead and can you see from the Alexander Chapman Slack, can you read all the candidates that they have sent us and make me a dashboard of our candidates that we are speaking to.
- [12:29]
Jason Calacanis
Great. So this is a strong demo here. You are exporting the entire Slack corpus every night, every week or are you using the API or you have an agent in that room. How do you get the data out of there into the model?
- [12:44]
Josh Siroti
I'm curious basically what we do is we run like a cron job at a frequency of about every 15 minutes. Every 15 minutes, we'll have Kimmy, for example, go and read everything that I get in my slack across all of the different channels. And then it will go ahead and take all of that information. And then we create, you know, we use chroma. We use Ollama, and it'll put that inside of this Chroma db. Right. And now it'll almost have like a recreated knowledge base, if you will, of our slack. So we'll do things like this.
- [13:13]
Jason Calacanis
Got it. And is that more stable and a better way to do it than, like, openclaw? We've with openclaw, with Perplexity Computer, with Cowork, we find it's not comprehensive. It gets confused at times. And in one conversation I had with my openclaw, it was like, you should just export the entire database every Saturday night and put and upload it or something. And that doesn't seem like a really great strategy. So how do you know it's comprehensive and not so brittle?
- [13:46]
Josh Siroti
So this is kind of like the wow moment, like, why companies like Deal, why Slash, why Corgi, you know, basically are running almost a ton of different workflows. Actually, on Aragon is. Because you don't have to, for example, specify like, I was just. It's a flight in New York. We're doing a really exciting partnership with a very exciting ERP company. And they said, for example, oh, can you. Can you make an MSA and can you send it to Josh? And then they realize they're like, oh, I didn't say Josh Amaragon. Right, But. But Aragon actually knew it sent it to me. Right? And like, they're like, whoa, that's like, really, really cool. It's like, actually, it's that good where, like, I can. Even on first time, I can say, hey, just send it to Josh. Right? And it by itself, the way we've architected it, it'll go look at Calendar, it'll go look at, you know, recent. Right. And it will basically say, okay, it's Josh at Aragon is who we're talking about here versus, like almost anywhere else. It will ask you and say, oh, which Josh? Here are five different Joshes, for example.
- [14:48]
Jason Calacanis
Do you. Right, okay. So all of this then gets rolled up into the model on some cadence. And then, because this reminds me of, like, a lot of things I do with openclaw or Perplexity, but when it's in the model itself, do you have an example where it's in the model. And that provides some massive lift for the company. Like, what's the most compelling example of that?
- [15:12]
Josh Siroti
For example? Okay, two things. So one is like, okay, it just went through probably in this case, like, I don't know, maybe 50 emails or so. So we have to act now. So Vinod Khozla wants to meet. Nikki is a ZA. We need to respond back with different availability, etc. Like, that's a pretty important one. Right? So great. We should probably tell Vanode when we're available to chat about Aragon. But here, for example, Milton is our cleaning service for the office. Can you go ahead and pay the Milton invoice for me, please? And I can have Aragon go and actually pay that invoice as well. And so in the way that speaks
- [15:57]
Jason Calacanis
to the agentic nature of this and the hooks, you have it hooked into a bunch of different services, I take it. So it's your QuickBooks or your PayPal or your Venmo.
- [16:06]
Lon Harris
Yeah, it also has a financial infrastructure too. You partner with slash to allow enterprises to give their agent's bank account. So this is one of the cases where like the agent sort of has a little bit of financial agency.
- [16:18]
Josh Siroti
Yeah, exactly. And so then the thing that we are working on with like our partners is also building out this ecosystem inside of Aragon. So, for example, coming very soon, you'll be able to do a backslash. Right. Slash. And then they're, you know, they're. They provide credit cards, they provide, you know, bank accounts. They're like, you know, a Brex competitor, if you will.
- [16:39]
Jason Calacanis
Right.
- [16:39]
Josh Siroti
And how do you actually issue credit cards for these agents? How do you actually set different policies, different limits for the cards that you issue these agents? You want to do it in a secure, kind of centralized, human in the
- [16:53]
Jason Calacanis
loop, maybe, maybe only pay certain known accounts. So this is all part of the blocking and tackling 101 that these agents need to catch up on. So you're really competing directly. Heads up with openclaw, Perplexity Computer and Quad Cowork on the interface for agentic computing. But then on the back end, I keep getting back to the slm, the small language model you're building, because that to me seems like there would be some massive lift. So show me something there or unlock that for me, because that's what I haven't seen in the demo yet, is that unlock. And by the way, man, I. This is just another startup I should have invested in. Oh, wait, I'm on the cap table of this company you started while you're while you're getting cooking there, if I remember correctly, just agents for sales. And you were so far ahead of everybody, right? This is two years ago or something. Agentix Sales was like kind of the first icp.
- [17:52]
Josh Siroti
Yeah. So I mean, exactly. So we basically kind of started there and then pretty much we did like our precede with you know, a 16 and a few others. And what we found when we started showing companies was like everyone wanted to ask for different, I would say like sources to be able to come into Aragon outside of maybe just sales. And it became pretty clear to me, like actually, you know, from like a venture model, everyone wanted to verticalize. But like the power of these like frontier models, you know, just keeps getting better and better and better and better. And it begs the question of are we going to have such a thing as a vertical kind of like a sales agent, or are these going to be so powerful that you can just create a sales agent just from inside of Aragon and have Aragon be your source for all sorts of different specific agents. And then what we decided to do is actually go to a partnership ecosystem approach where for companies that are going really deep. So I'll shout out Orange Lights, it's a YC company. They've done a phenomenal job. They're like a clay alternative. And we have companies like Corgi that basically will do like all of their enrichment natively inside of Aragon. And then that's powered behind the scenes by Orange Slice, right where they went really deep there. And so then that's kind of the approach that we've been taking as well. So while this, while this cooks just as far as, you know, the point on this RL piece and updating the weights behind the scenes. So basically what it's going to do is like for example, all of your sales, right. If you look at or all of the guests that have been on this week in startups, let's just say sure. So these are all facts, this is all historical. This has all already happened. And so we just did this pretty fast. I would argue it would be an order of magnitude faster than anywhere else. And then also on the cost side, it'd be much cheaper to do inside of here as well. And so here is like for our recruiting right now, I have my dashboard here for all of the candidates that we're speaking with. Right. Awaiting response follow up source so we're sourcing Minsk from Stanford, Srinath from anyscale, et cetera. This is actually all real, this is all production. We run Aragon inside of Aragon, Regulation and compliance.
- [20:16]
Jason Calacanis
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- [21:16]
Josh Siroti
And because it has in the weights, because it's updated itself, it doesn't need to go for that basically workflow. And read all of my email, read all of the slack, right?
- [21:28]
Jason Calacanis
So it should be lightning fast.
- [21:31]
Josh Siroti
Exactly.
- [21:32]
Jason Calacanis
It should be incorporated into its logic at a more base level. Explain to the audience if they've heard the word waits over and over and over again. But explain to them, given your product, what that means for let's call it like if Uber had your had Aragon, they had an slm. They had the entire history of the company, every quarterly report, every employee had ever been there, every single slack message for over 10 years, every. Or they made an S. Or maybe they make multiple SLMs. There was one SLM just for complaints and customer support, one just for, you know, code, etc. Because I would assume that at some point you might break it up and have 10 SLMs by vertical so that they were even more tweaked. Am I correct in that?
- [22:26]
Josh Siroti
Absolutely correct. Yeah. So you'll actually have multiple. And so what it means for a company like Uber is basically two things, cost and performance. So for the first thing on cost, right, it let's say you have some sort of like workflow that requires knowledge of like all of your customer success, you know, documentation, for example. So instead of basically a harness trying to pull all of this context into a frontier model every single time, right. That info will just be in the weights. And what that means is much less tokens like 100 times less tokens will actually have to do that. So therefore it's way more cost effective on the second piece, which is the speed and performance, the workflow will be done much faster, 10 times faster as well. The best way the audience can think about this is if you go to a frontier model and you ask it, who is Abraham Lincoln? For example, imagine if in order to answer the query, a model would have to open up a browser, use go search Google, go pull all of the info.
- [23:41]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, we don't have to imagine it because sometimes it does that, right? It's so sometimes there's some breaking news story. You're like, tell me about Coachella Weekend two and Madonna's performance. And it's like, okay, searching web. And you know that's going to take 60 seconds. And that's why you turn notifications on.
- [23:56]
Josh Siroti
But actually, actually, so for that. That's. That's a little different, right? So like, for example, for like the Abraham Lincoln, right, I'm saying it. It doesn't have to go and do that, right? And the reason why is because it was trained on who, Abraham Lincoln.
- [24:10]
Jason Calacanis
Correct.
- [24:10]
Josh Siroti
And so it's in the weight, right? So for a company, right, if you want to find out, for example, you know, like, how did we grow over 2019-2024, something like this, all of that's historical. It's already happened, right. Instead of right now, you have to go and you have to read every single record, every earnings, everything, quarterly statement from those 2019 to 2024. And then that might take actually two hours for the model to do. And that might actually cost you like 1500 bucks. All of that info should just be in the weights. It should be instant. The model should be trained on this. It should know that for things like what you were just mentioning, which is very recent, for example, like a Coachella, you should still be able to do tool calls and go search the web for info that maybe is not inside of the weights of the model, but those things are like much faster, kind of lower token usage and a little bit more few between, right? So our view is basically in order to actually own your intelligence, to have an asset that the company owns that's actually something that is theirs. The only way to actually do this is to train a model on your proprietary data and then give you the weights, right? So you own it, it's yours. And that's what we're working towards.
- [25:32]
Jason Calacanis
It's genius. What does it cost? How do you charge for it? This is always very important. And it's always a great tell for a founder. For me, Lon, when I'm working with a founder, how crisply they can explain the business model here. We'll give it a shot here with Josh, who is a very, I would say very strategic founder in my experience.
- [25:51]
Josh Siroti
So we charge by tokens. We have a $5 cost per million tokens blended. And so you can comp that with what anthropic charges, which is like $15 per million tokens for Opus. So it's $5 per million tokens.
- [26:07]
Jason Calacanis
Amazing. And how would that compare to using a Frontier model?
- [26:11]
Josh Siroti
It's anywhere from a third to half the price.
- [26:18]
Jason Calacanis
And they pay a service fee as well. Do they have to pay something for this integration? I would think you would need forward deployed engineers type of thing to do this today. So talk to me a little bit about when you have a cutting edge project product like this, the implementation. Because if you went into Uber now, it's like, okay, you could boil the ocean here. That company is awash in data. So you probably have to find a department that wants to do it. You probably have to find a data set. You got to clean a data set, you got to create a process for it being updated. Talk to us a little bit about what Aragon does there.
- [26:53]
Josh Siroti
So what we do is we do have a Thor deployed motion and we do start like to your point on identifying workflows and use cases where you can start. So I can give an example of Corgi, which is a very fast growing company. I don't want to announce. They might have announcements of their own, I don't know, coming out about different, maybe rounds. So they're a very fast growing company in Silicon Valley and they do insurance. They're an AI, native insurance, basically carrier. And so what we did is we said, okay, hey, like what does your inference costs look like right now? You know, from like a Frontier perspective. Shout out to Corgi. And basically they told us how much they were spending right, on inference, basically with Frontier. And so we said, okay, look, we can actually do this for probably a third of the price. And they're like, okay, that's very interesting. And so then it was like, all right, let's find a workflow that currently happens. It's like very repetitive and manual and let's start there. And so the example of that is we're on their website now. You can actually go and basically request a quote. And what would happen before is when you go request a quote, a startup puts in different information about their company. So Like Aragon, you know, our stage, our funding, you know, revenue, etc. Etc. Right? And you'll go and, you know, fill, finish this workflow. Basically you would put in all of this information and afterwards what would happen is, you know, there's a lovely person in operations, her name is Evelyn, she would take all this information, she would then manually figure out like, what coverage you need, what policies you need, and then they had an algorithm that they would put that in to give you an actual quote, right? And imagine doing this like 40 times a day. That was her whole day. And so now what happens is all of that goes into Aragon. Aragon is trained on the policies they have. Aragon is trained on the coverage they have. Aragon is trained on kind of how they underwrite. Right? So all of that comes in end to end. And then Evelyn gets a WhatsApp saying, hey, Josh from Aragon just requested a quote. Here's the policies you need, here's the quote. Do you want me to go publish it to his dashboard? Yes or no?
- [29:09]
Jason Calacanis
Wow.
- [29:10]
Josh Siroti
And all of that is now done.
- [29:12]
Jason Calacanis
For an accounting firm, keeping your books in order is table stakes. It's the bare minimum, it's the baseline. But for an early stage and series A founder, you need a partner that actually, actually understands the world of startups. It's very different. And you have to understand the world of venture capital because startups have boards and venture capitalists who've invested. And that partner is Pilot. Pilot is the largest accounting firm that's built specifically for startups. You're not just doing your taxes, you're getting CFO level advice on running your company. And those aren't just words. They have actual former CFOs and other seasoned operators on hand to answer your growth and scaling questions directly. All of their tools are intuitive, they're easy to use. You can track your expenses in real time. And Pilot's going to help you model cash flow scenarios before you make big decisions. So stay focused on scaling and let Pilot take care of the books. Plus, Twist listeners get $1,200 off their first year. Go to pilot.com twist to get started. That's pilot.com twist so still human in the loop. Obviously you're starting a proposal, you want to do that, but it's going to be done faster, better and cheaper. That's always the trifecta, you know, that wins. And this is amazing. Congratulations. You went through the accelerator a year or two ago. Is it LA34? I'm trying to remember which cohort it was.
- [30:32]
Josh Siroti
I think it was like maybe May or something of last year.
- [30:35]
Jason Calacanis
So it was 34, I think. Yeah. And yeah, great pivot in there. Some great new investors you pulled through. About half the companies that come through our programs pull through. We like to take a lot of risk and I think I always track in our database now where we found somebody. I said, if you got rejected from yc, please email us. We'll take a look at your company. And you emailed us.
- [30:58]
Lon Harris
I did.
- [31:00]
Jason Calacanis
I'm not dumb. We met you and we were like, this kid's really smart. I don't know. I told the team because I have my notes here. I don't know if this is the. He's going to be successful with this startup, but I know Josh is going to be successful. So let's start the relationship now. Josh, so proud of you. Congratulations and always let me know when I can be helpful to you. You have my phone number, you got my email. Always let me know if we can be helpful. I'm good for a retweet once in a while or a prescient introduction, but great job, Josh. I really appreciate you and it's just great to be in business with you.
- [31:35]
Josh Siroti
Absolutely. Jason, it's been a pleasure and for anyone in the audience, you know, that's listening, I think, you know, Jason and team has built an absolute, you know, world class accelerator program. They've, you know, been tremendous, especially right in the early stage. You're, you really, you have, you know, an idea. And I think a lot of times for anyone in the audience, you know, we just announced our 12 million at 100, you know, seed, but everyone listening, like founders, everyone is just trying to figure things out. And I think that the best thing, you know, Jason and team, they really have an amazing, you know, structure and cadence and resources at the earliest stage for how you can like think through your business. And that would be helpful for us. And I would encourage everyone listening to absolutely reach out and maybe soon it'll be an agent on Jason Tsai that
- [32:26]
Jason Calacanis
you cut me off at the past, brother. I was going to say, like, we are working on this now because, you know, when you get over 10,000 applications, we have a weighted system. Speaking of weights and you know, Marcus is really talented young fellow I have working for me and he's been building this system and what we found was with our AI, our weighted system does essentially the same job a human can do. It can identify that. Now we still have to decide who do we meet with and then after we meet with them, we have to make another decision. But what I really want your help with, Josh, this could be a great project for us, is to look back at our meetings and everything, put it into a vslm, very small language model on my laptop that I don't train OpenAI and anthropic or Gemini on how to do what we do here, our secret sauce. But then just be able to say, hey, we missed some things. Because when we miss something, Josh, what I do now is somebody just told me, Molly Wood, who worked for us for a bit and co hosted with me for a while, she had found like a military tech company and I was like, oh, we don't do that. It's kind of not what we do. But now we do do it. And two years ago she found this one and it pulled through and I don't know if it's raising $100 million now. And I was like, okay, if we missed it then, but we built a little relationship. What can we learn, number one? Number two, hey, let's go to the syndicate.com and we'll have a phone call with them, Invite them on this week in startups and see if there is an opportunity for us to do a late stage investment which the members of our syndicate love to do. Yeah, there it is. There's the Syndicate.com. all right, we'll talk to you soon. Josh, let me know if you're ever in Austin and we'll go grab some barbecue with Lon. Any excuse for Lon to get some Salt Lick with that Terry Black's beef rib. You're not a vegan or something like that jock, are you? Please.
- [34:19]
Josh Siroti
No, no, we're definitely in for some, for some good Terry Blacks.
- [34:23]
Jason Calacanis
I got the Terry Blacks beef rib and brisket. Very solid. But if you come out to the Hill Country, I'll take you to the original Salt Lick. You gotta see it.
- [34:31]
Lon Harris
It's very Texas.
- [34:33]
Jason Calacanis
Pretty, pretty Texas. And they got bison ribs there. They got the bison ribs out at the Salt Lick. I broke a tooth, you know, I had this like 20 year. I'm an old man now. I had a 20 year crown. What they call that, a brew canal? Yeah. Crown.
- [34:46]
Lon Harris
You had a crown, you broke a crown.
- [34:47]
Jason Calacanis
I had a crown. I'm just chewing on this beef rib snap. That's how you know it's a good beef rib.
- [34:52]
Lon Harris
Yeah, when.
- [34:52]
Jason Calacanis
When Unk loses a tooth, it's a good beef getting up. I'm getting it put back. It's getting put back.
- [34:58]
Lon Harris
I got.
- [34:59]
Jason Calacanis
All right. Good to see you, brother. I wasn't fishing for the endorsement But I'll clip the heck out of it.
- [35:04]
Lon Harris
We're going to have our agent throw that up on the website right away. Already working on it.
- [35:08]
Jason Calacanis
Here's my tweet. Pull up my tweet here. PredictSkills MD and V. Oh sure, let me. I'm. I got a typo. There are on a collision course and it's going to be insane. Imagine legal, HR marketing, et cetera. Sml. God, I gotta get that right. SLM paired with an open claw skill running relentlessly and recursively as he mentioned on your Mac Studio. Dell workstation Madness free. Constantly improving intelligence. It's happening folks. And I put a picture of this Dell Nvidia GB300 desktop which Michael Dell has not sent me yet. How dare he. But I've been lobbying for. I mean I'm super excited for this future.
- [35:49]
Lon Harris
I mean that's, I think to me that's the crucial step. We've been trying to have the agents run in a sandbox in Amazon's rack somewhere. They need, they need to spread their wings. They need to get out there in the world. You got to have your, your Mac Studio or your amazing Dell standalone system. That's where you're the second.
- [36:07]
Jason Calacanis
We can get these. You know, working on a laptop. I don't know the 48 gig is going to do it but I think It'll be the 128 gig eventually. Going to upgrade everybody to a $5,000 laptop from whatever $1,800 $2,000 one. It'll be $3,000. It'll cost me an extra 3 times 25 people. 75k for the next 3 years. So it'll cost me an extra 2k a month if it has a 3 year lifespan. But just think about how wild it would be if everybody's laptop was just cranking. I mean it's also dangerous and scary.
- [36:39]
Lon Harris
It is. But it's that loop. It's that you, every time your agent does something you're teaching it how to do that thing and it's refining it over time. That's the crucial thing you miss out on if your agent can't really spread out and make its own sort of way in the world. Yeah.
- [36:54]
Jason Calacanis
Hey, anything going on in polymarket? I got a Polymark going for my Knicks tonight or what's going on.
- [36:59]
Lon Harris
I wanted to. So we should talk about this briefly. That Moonshot has launched Kimmy K2 6. That is their, their most advanced open source model to date. It upgrades for long horizon coding, agent swarms, more proactive agents Clog groups to which you can sort of bring in your own agents and skills from outside. But it did lead me to this poly market, which I will share. Right now the Sharps are debating when are we going to get K3. Here we go. So you can see not a lot of volume, only about 30k in volume so far. Cause this is so new. But if you look at June 30, the sharps are betting 50. Now it's a 59% chance that we are going to get Kimmy K3 by the end of June, which would be very exciting.
- [37:44]
Jason Calacanis
And we're at 2.6 or 7.
- [37:46]
Lon Harris
2.6. We, we were on 2.5, 2.6 got released this morning. So we're just, everybody's just getting their first crack at checking it out.
- [37:54]
Jason Calacanis
People were kind of speculating here that it's really great at coding and that's what everybody's focused on right now. Cursor's got a new model coming out. I saw they were raising a 50 billion across x.com, people were talking about that. You got Codex, you got Claude Code, Grox doing great work there. They'll have some product coming out, I'm sure. It's just over and over and over again we're going to see everybody get lightning focus. And there was, I heard that Sergey who I saw Saturday night at the Breakthrough Prize and I talked to him for a bit. My understanding is he sent a memo. Is there like a Sergey memo that came out either this weekend or something got leaked and you know these memos are kind of designed to get leaked as I've always told everybody.
- [38:41]
Lon Harris
According to the information, the Google co founder said in a memo to DeepMind employees that, and here's the quote, every Gemini engineer must be forced to use internal agents for complex multi step tasks.
- [38:55]
Jason Calacanis
Right. So they're dogfooding. They want them to catch up here. And developers, developers, developers. Once you get recursive developers going, it informs your whole product production. So people have been talking about, wow, it's incredible how much product is getting shipped out of Claude. Well, Claude focused on code code. Then let them release more product and then you get this flywheel going. The other companies are obviously trying to catch up with that.
- [39:25]
Lon Harris
Yeah, exactly. Should we bring on our next guest?
- [39:28]
Jason Calacanis
Absolutely. Let's keep this train of experts only moving here. If you listen to Twist, you're going to get practical and tactical and you're going to get to peek around the corner with experts only.
- [39:43]
Lon Harris
So that's what we're Doing. He is the founder and CEO of Iona. They make fully integrated autonomous delivery systems for logistics operators. The idea, it's like a white glove drone service that if you're already doing logistics, you could just add drones to your fleet. Give it up for Etienne Louve. Etienne, thanks for joining us.
- [40:02]
Etienne Louve
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
- [40:04]
Jason Calacanis
All right, so do you want to demo and show us what you've built? You want to talk a little bit about why you built it and who the customers are and what it cost?
- [40:13]
Josh Siroti
Definitely.
- [40:13]
Etienne Louve
I think the team might have videos in the background.
- [40:16]
Lon Harris
I've got some videos. We can pull up a video right now.
- [40:18]
Jason Calacanis
Here we go then.
- [40:19]
Etienne Louve
And maybe before it even start, I can explain a bit like the origin story, because it explains it all. INI is an island in Scotland, the company. So I'm French, unfortunately, I can't hide my accent. But we're located in the UK and Ireland as well as in the US now, actually. Sponsored today by Gradient a co working space in Tulsa, because I'm doing some.
- [40:45]
Jason Calacanis
There it is. We got a plugin for gradient. 195 francs per desk. Here we go. Use the promo code twist to get 6 francs or a pan au chocolat. No, wait, wait. It was in France or Scotland.
- [41:00]
Etienne Louve
No, no, it's in Oklahoma, actually.
- [41:02]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Okay. Shout out to Oklahoma. Yes. Beautiful shot video, by the way. Looks like you shot it with a drone.
- [41:10]
Etienne Louve
We have multiple. No, what Iona is doing is basically it's coming from a vision. You can be on the isle of Iona, which is a remote island in Scotland. You can be an IT consultant with a Starlink, a Zoom Slack and so on. But what you can't get access to is physical goods. So what we're building at Iona is the physical Internet. It's also close to my heart because a part of my family is coming from rural places. And it's solving this paradox because at the moment, when you have less than 500 people per square mile, for instance, in a location that's 99% of the US, that's 99% of the world. And yet our systems and logistics are optimized the way we were doing logistics 100 years ago, with like a bulky delivery van delivering everything. So what we're doing is we're building the full autonomy stack for logistics operators to take that transition, which is crucial for them because unfortunately, they realize that the big tech are coming and that autonomy is the biggest opportunity for them, but it's also the biggest threat.
- [42:17]
Jason Calacanis
So this is. You're Talking about the FedEx UPS is DHL of the world. You're going to provide them with the infrastructure. So in other words like a white labeled zipline in some ways, yes and no.
- [42:28]
Etienne Louve
So yes in the sense of it's going to be a white label and it's going to be for logistics operators, but we're going to also reduce the threshold at the moment when a drone is flying in the US without going too much into jargon, it's flying under a regulatory framework that is made for aerospace. It means that it's extremely complex to manage to. To part 108 is coming. It's a different regulatory framework. We have an expertise in that because
- [42:52]
Jason Calacanis
one of part 108 is the number.
- [42:54]
Etienne Louve
Did you say 108?
- [42:56]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, yeah.
- [42:57]
Etienne Louve
And part 108 is coming and it's a different threshold and we have an expertise in that because we fly autonomously already in Europe and it's going to be the same system in the US and what it enables is also to open the range of customers to also more local logistics operators, hospital, anybody with a delivery need.
- [43:16]
Jason Calacanis
Got it. And unpack part 108 for us. We can get, we can double click on these kind of things here on the show. That's why we're here at Twist. So tell us a little bit about why part 108 is so different and transformative.
- [43:29]
Etienne Louve
Yes, it's a fundamental milestone. So In Europe in 2021 we had a similar framework. For once Europe was ahead, not for long. And the reality is it just, it just unifies anyone around the way we think about drone delivery and the way we think about drones in the airspace. So what it does is that it's a risk assessment framework. And one of the co author of the framework in Europe also inspired some of the rules for the faa. So what it creates in the world is that we have a common framework, a global consensus on the way drones should be implemented in the airspace. Which means that we can finally have Europe, the uk, the US and other part of the world joining around that. And in more details, what part 108 does is first you don't need to be an aerospace manufacturer with what we call part 135 to operate. So it reduces the threshold and it creates a framework that is much more adapt to a delivery with a drone, for instance, because if you're not flying a 747 you shouldn't be regulated the same way.
- [44:46]
Jason Calacanis
And what it does, my understanding is the bvlos, I don't know how they pronounce that in the industry. Bvlos. I don't know. Is that how they pronounce it?
- [44:58]
Etienne Louve
Usually we say bivoulos here, but beyond
- [45:01]
Jason Calacanis
bivoulos in French is a much more gracious way to say it. But this is beyond Lon visual line of sight. Correct. So I think 107, because I've looked at these companies for 10 years, was like, hey, you can fly your drone if you can see it, but once you can't see it, then you get into. I think you tip into 108 ETN. Am I correct? Yeah, that's the distinguishing factor here.
- [45:26]
Etienne Louve
It's true. So the BV loss is. So it stands for beyond vision line of sight. So when you can't see drone, it means that the drone has to be highly automated or autonomous. And the significant change in that is that it means that you can have multiple drones or aircraft supervised by the same team that doesn't have to be on site. Because if you don't have to see the drone, you can be in Tulsa and operate somewhere else as well. So this is key is much greater.
- [45:58]
Jason Calacanis
So when we contextualize it, this is kind of like going from level two autonomy to level four. You know, if you're using autopilot and you got to keep your eyes on the road, but when you get to FSD, like level four Waymo, et cetera, you don't need to be paying attention. 107 line, you need a pilot like a plane, and you need a line of sight. And then 108, you need an operator, which could be a group of people in Manila. You could have, you know, a thousand Athena assistants who could be very easily trained in this to know what to do. They could be anywhere. They could be getting paid a dollar an hour. They could be getting paid 30 bucks an hour.
- [46:36]
Lon Harris
It's that level up. I mean, you think of drone operators as having that remote and they're looking and it's like, it's gotta be above the tree line and oh, we lost contact with it and running after it. And it's going from that to like the air traffic control model where you could have a tower that's monitoring all of these drones. And it doesn't have to be like a group of people that are actually watching the drone. It's obviously we're going to have to get there before we were going to have drone deliveries happening sort of en masse. I mean, I guess my question would be like, is the goal ultimately just like unsegregated airspace, like drones are out there flying alongside every other kind of aircraft. And we're monitoring them in sort of the same ways.
- [47:13]
Etienne Louve
Yes, exactly. So what you refer to is what we call the piece is called the detect and avoid. A second piece is called the unmanned traffic management. I deeply believe that the way we will basically innovate in drones is going to affect general aviation later on because it's very hard to do unmanned traffic management for aviation at the moment. 98% of the control towers in the US are understaffed.
- [47:38]
Jason Calacanis
Right.
- [47:39]
Etienne Louve
And it's not going to get better, to be honest, because it's a difficult job and because it takes a lot of time to train people. And that's something that we can also do with a drone natively, because it's a bit like an autonomous system. Doesn't need a gps. Well, it needs a gps, but it doesn't need like Google Maps basically. And it's a bit the same because we, the drones are autonomous. They can talk to each other. And because they can talk to each other, the scale in terms of efficiency is drastic. And this is where we go on the vision. And I like this analogy when you think about it. Roads are a roman technology from 3,000 years ago and we should build a physical Internet that doesn't rely on roads. We should build a physical Internet that can transport anything anywhere.
- [48:26]
Jason Calacanis
And you're building these in Galway is my understanding. That is a great town. I haven't been there in 25 years, but I drove from Dublin to Galway. It's a college town. Is that right? You're building the drones in Galway? Yeah, Celtic Tiger here.
- [48:45]
Etienne Louve
Yeah, we have a manufacturer there. And the reason is Ireland in general is an amazing place for drones. They operate with the same regulatory framework than Europe, which is the one that will be common with the US in terms of the way we think about it. So great. But they do it extremely fast and the fast pace of iteration is especially very important. So we can get the paperwork back sometimes in less than 30 days when it takes up to six months in most places. So made us drastically more cost efficient.
- [49:19]
Jason Calacanis
Now, do you have any partners in logistics yet that you've announced?
- [49:21]
Etienne Louve
Yes, we work with a few cma CGM in Europe. We have.
- [49:27]
Jason Calacanis
What is that?
- [49:28]
Etienne Louve
CMA is one of the largest shipping company in the world. They also operate, they have Miami, Singapore and Marseille and they also like acquired a number of companies and so they have logistics needs. We're working with Welsh Group. We have an amazing neighbor in Cambridge in the uk, Welsh Group, that is a family owned business and it's exactly what we're trying to depict as a vision. They operate a number of deliveries in Cambridgeshire and we did a demo with them, a public demo. So we demonstrated the tech end to end, how does it integrate in their system and so on. And we have a few more exciting news coming very soon, including with high profile partners.
- [50:13]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. And for people who don't know, there's a great program, Enterprise Ireland. I'll give them a shout out. They used to like God, they've been around forever. But they used to even buy ads and host startups from Ireland. Back in my Silicon Alley reporter days. Enterprise Ireland always was a big supporter of Silicon Valley reporter and I think maybe even the early days of this week in startups and they gave you, I think Etienne, a couple of million euro investment or grant. How do they do it these days?
- [50:44]
Etienne Louve
No, it's a grand project that we have for manufacturing. That's the part in Galway and the reason is because there is a nice story also we operate drones as well in Galway area. It's the area so it's quite difficult to access. It's quite remote and there are a number of communities there. So we want to, we're working on the project to actually connect the islands and connect the number of remote places there and remote communities with Galway and with other cities in the which.
- [51:15]
Jason Calacanis
What, what do people most want to order? Like when you talk to your consumers, you know you got people in Galway, they're on farms, they're in rural areas. What do they most want to deliver? Is it just like I need coffee and milk?
- [51:26]
Lon Harris
This is what's interesting is it's not food. Right. You guys purposefully are not doing like food delivery. It's like cargo, right?
- [51:34]
Etienne Louve
Yes. We, we're calling that segment the light cargo. So we know very well Mana for instance and we know quite well Google Wing and and even some people at Zipline. It's another segment. What I usually say is a drone is like a vehicle with wheels between a motorcycle and a 44 tons. Same philosophy but not exactly the same tech. So what we do is significantly different. Like we have to get long range so we, we go 60 to 120 miles with a significant volume. So we can get up to 20 parcels in the drone and a capacity to independently drop volumes. So we can do delivery one, delivery two and then go back to base for instance. So what we really the sweet spot for us and this is Also why we're B2B is whatever needs to be transported at the moment in those Places, there is a cruel lack of accessibility for day to day items. We're talking about the parcels day to day and it's something that affects actually even the purchasing power of local communities. And then we can actually scale that to medical deliveries, even groceries. It's true that the drone is a bit big, so if you want like coffee and milk might be a bit of an overshoot, but we could do it.
- [52:49]
Lon Harris
I got a big footstep.
- [52:50]
Jason Calacanis
What's the poundage here? How many pounds in?
- [52:53]
Etienne Louve
Up to 44 pounds.
- [52:54]
Jason Calacanis
Up to 44. So that's significantly larger than the other folks out there.
- [52:59]
Lon Harris
It's 420. Jason, our taco Bell order might get up there. I don't know. We're close.
- [53:03]
Jason Calacanis
I don't know. That's fair. We're closing. There's a lot of tostadas coming. 40 plus pounds?
- [53:10]
Etienne Louve
Yeah, up to four. The first version that we have is
- [53:13]
Jason Calacanis
what distance can it do when it's at max load?
- [53:15]
Etienne Louve
At max load, the XL will need to be the one that you use. And in that case it's going to do 60 to 80 miles.
- [53:22]
Jason Calacanis
Holy cow. But wait, 60, 80 miles, which means 20 miles out, 20 miles back with a buffer.
- [53:29]
Etienne Louve
No, it's. It's straight line. So if you. Half of that. A bit less than half of that if you want back and got it.
- [53:36]
Jason Calacanis
So 20, 30 miles, no problem. And then you got to have room to come back. The FAA makes you keep 50% in the tank when you land or something
- [53:42]
Etienne Louve
like that, depending on where you operate. But yes, about. And the thing is, it's fully electric. So also what we build is again, it's the full autonomy stack. So for instance, we also have demonstrated a prototype for loading and unloading the parcels autonomously. So you can have like an autonomous network. So you can do like delivery point number one. You load a few parcels, you unload a few others, then you go to a backyard delivery somewhere, then you go back to another depot. Like you can really have a data driven autonomous logistics network.
- [54:12]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. Talk to me about charging as my final question there, it would seem to me. You know we have supercharger stations, right? And you got zipline in some markets. You've got a bunch of people. Amazon is doing this. Should there be a common standard, a common infrastructure for charging drones, or are we gonna just have a proprietary war now where you all are flying drones everywhere and there's no way to stop and recharge? Because if there were charging stations, they would not. I could put one on the ranch here. For y', all, I could give you two acres, cut off a little spot. You come down here, the noise won't be an issue. There's nobody in earshot. And they don't need to be on a highway. They don't need to be on the 405 in LA or 290 here in Austin. You could put these anywhere and you could all be recharging without having to go back to base.
- [55:05]
Etienne Louve
So I think I would slightly disagree with that because I think it's going in the way of innovation. The drones that you're thinking about, especially the zipline and everything, they're mostly multicopters, so they have a very short range, different type of technology. My drones, because they're doing logistics, they're extremely energy efficient. And it's only because it's sustainable or whatever. It's because it's competitive. The more energy efficient you are, the less expensive you are on a unit cost basis. So I need to have a glide ratio. I need to have a wing, for instance. I need to have a. Of things like that. So when you.
- [55:41]
Jason Calacanis
What do they call. Because I know there's quadcopters, I know this fixed wing. What do you call these ones that are. The hybrid. Is there a technical industry term?
- [55:48]
Etienne Louve
So if it's an hybrid, it's called an hybrid in that case, like when they have.
- [55:52]
Jason Calacanis
So technically it's a hybrid. Got it.
- [55:54]
Etienne Louve
Yeah.
- [55:55]
Jason Calacanis
The technical name Lon for a hybrid.
- [55:57]
Lon Harris
Yes. Yeah.
- [55:59]
Etienne Louve
Or like what we call the tilt rotor. So it, it takes off vertically and it transition to horizontal flight so that we can have the convenience of the vertical takeoff. But we have.
- [56:10]
Jason Calacanis
And the tilt rotor gets you the glide path. And that's what Joby is doing too, for humans. Yeah. Yeah.
- [56:16]
Etienne Louve
It's similar to Joby in, in some ways, so we have less propellers and it's of course not the same product, but.
- [56:21]
Jason Calacanis
So you're bigger than a zipline, smaller than a Joby is the way to think about it.
- [56:25]
Etienne Louve
Exactly. Light cargo is like when you're in the middle. Joby is like the new helicopter. Zipline is the new doordash where like the new delivery van in the sky.
- [56:32]
Jason Calacanis
I love it. And what weight do you want to get to? Is there a goal that, like, you know, you want to get to £150, £250, be able to deliver, you know, something of a little more heft?
- [56:46]
Etienne Louve
Yeah. You quote the famous philosopher, never say never. But we, we, we're not targeting that segment right away because the majority like what I like about my segment is that 99% of the streams are actually in that segment. So I don't want to over optimize for the one time you need a plasma tv because you can probably wait for a delivery van or any other delivery.
- [57:10]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, plasma tv, that's a weird footprint. But yeah, if Lon's getting kettlebells, you know, Lon's getting in shape here. So I've had a twist noti gang if you want to do some buff AI slop of lawn. But if you wanted to deliver a set of kettlebells, you know, it could be £300 worth of kettlebells and just drop it off on Lon's house, but lower it slowly.
- [57:31]
Lon Harris
Don't just drop it because that's dangerous.
- [57:34]
Etienne Louve
Fun story about that. We were supported by a grant and we had to explain why we were buying kettlebells. And I had to promise, no, it's not for personal use. I'm not like just buying a gym with the grant money because we're testing propellers and if we can't find a weight to like leave the table on the ground, it's going to take off.
- [57:53]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, love it. Kettlebells are multi use. All right, listen, Etan continued success and be safe out there. Right? Safety first. That's what we always say here at Twist. Or if you're a burning man, there's a famous expression, Lon safety third. Oh, no, first burning mans I'm at. There's like a bunch of signs.
- [58:13]
Lon Harris
What's first? If safety's third, what's first at burning?
- [58:16]
Jason Calacanis
I mean, like, have a good time, be creative.
- [58:19]
Lon Harris
But they just number one.
- [58:20]
Jason Calacanis
Well, literally, these guys have this huge tower where they're doing aerial stuff.
- [58:24]
Lon Harris
Yeah, yeah.
- [58:24]
Jason Calacanis
And there's a sign, it says safety third.
- [58:27]
Lon Harris
Vibes first, Vibes above all.
- [58:29]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah.
- [58:29]
Lon Harris
We got so much news, we got off duty. There's a million places we could go. Did you want to talk about the breakthrough prize?
- [58:36]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, yeah. So a friend of mine, Yuri Milner, and his wife Julia, do this incredible breakthrough prize every year. Show some photos here. And I've been invited and this was the first year I've been able to go. And what's really nice about this is
- [58:57]
Lon Harris
look at all these celebrities that were there. Salma Hayek was there.
- [59:01]
Jason Calacanis
Salma Hayek.
- [59:02]
Lon Harris
Naomi Watts was there. Ben Affleck. Look at this.
- [59:05]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. I didn't say hi to any of them, but I had a really nice conversation with Gal Gadot.
- [59:10]
Lon Harris
Wow.
- [59:10]
Jason Calacanis
Gal Gadot. Yeah. And that was very nice. I spoke to Gal Gadot. I met Rob Lowe. I met Rob Lower, traded phone numbers with Rob Lowe. Julia Chastain was at the table next to me.
- [59:21]
Josh Siroti
Yes.
- [59:21]
Jason Calacanis
Olivia Wilde. I saw her there. And then you just had, like, just every. And Lionel Richie came up and did a version of. He sang We Are the World.
- [59:33]
Lon Harris
Sure.
- [59:34]
Jason Calacanis
I sat next to a woman named Frances, who's at Caltech, who won the Nobel in chemistry, and we had a really nice conversation. I Also at my table was Darren Aronofsky, the director.
- [59:45]
Lon Harris
Great filmmaker.
- [59:46]
Jason Calacanis
Yes. And so I had a nice conversation with Darren because I went down memory lane with Darren. We're off duty here, so I can chew the fat with Lon. I said, hey, Darren, you don't remember this, but we met with Sean, who was in Requiem for a Dream back in the day. And I think he was also in PI. He was the lead in Pie. I said, and you were doing a film. I had Silicon Iron Reporter. I was writing for Paper magazine. I met you guys, and we had a drink. And then you were lamenting you needed to do screenings for Pie, and it cost, like, two or three grand to host a screening, so I did one for my magazine. And you came and you did drinks after. Oh, my God, it's incredible. And we had this, like, nice little thing, and we started talking. He's doing a startup. You know, everybody who's in startups and venture capital wants to do movies. Everybody's in movies once a week. Of course.
- [60:29]
Etienne Louve
Of course.
- [60:29]
Jason Calacanis
And so we got to connect, and then we talked about Ikaru, you know, one of my favorite Kurosawa films. I'm watching a documentary on Ikaru, like, a random, you know, I go down into the dark web into, like, the crevices of, you know, people trading tapes on Reddit and all this craziness. And I look for weird stuff, and I found an Icaru documentary. I don't know who produced it. It's in Japanese. Somebody took the time to put subtitles on it. And they go through that film, which I love. And so what I'll recommend is Ikiru, this great Kurosawa.
- [61:04]
Lon Harris
It's often overlooked among the great Kurosawas because it's not a samurai movie. People always focus on Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai. They forget about. Yeah, Ikiru. And High and Low is the other one. I really love that.
- [61:17]
Jason Calacanis
It's not. Well, yeah, that was during his High and Low. Yeah, there it is.
- [61:21]
Lon Harris
Yeah.
- [61:22]
Jason Calacanis
This is an incredible film about a guy who gets cancer. This will be my off duty for today. Sure. And he works in the government for 30 years. He gets cancer. He realized he's never lived. Then he meets a young woman and they kinda. In the second half of the film, he decides, I'm gonna live a little. And he goes out and he starts drinking, having fun. He's got stomach cancer, but he decides he's gonna live a little. And then I watch this documentary about it and they're like talking about the lighting and they're talking about if you do the office scene or if you just go into Google images for the office scene.
- [61:54]
Lon Harris
I know the one you're talking about.
- [61:56]
Jason Calacanis
And in Ikaru, the office scenes are incredible because they stacked all these books and all these papers.
- [62:01]
Lon Harris
Jacob got it.
- [62:02]
Jason Calacanis
So if you look in the background, it's just nonstop. There's a couple of different images here. Like right there behind him, you'll see stacks and stacks. Stacks of paper right behind him. The photo. Yeah, there it is. And they explained how they wanted to build these, like towers of papers. And he was approving them. They couldn't find them. So they went into Toho Studio's archive of all the receipts and they brought them there with the dust on it, because somebody brought them and they took the dust off and cleaned them up. And Kurosawa had a conniption and was like, hey, guys, I want them with the dust. I want this to seem like the most oppressive place ever. Where he's sitting there and people are complaining to him about getting approval. He goes and he decides he wants to do one thing in his life that just counts, one thing to spread joy. I'm gonna leave it there. Great film. So I spent a little time talking to Aronofsky about it and we were like the only two people in California. Do you see this film?
- [62:53]
Lon Harris
It means to live 20, 22. Living. You should check it out. It is a British remake of the same story of icar it starts. It stars Bill Nighy, but it's a retelling. He has a. He's a bureaucrat who learns he has a fatal disease and he decides to live for one day. It came out in 2022. It was at Sundance.
- [63:11]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, wow. So anyway, I've been having my Hollywood moment these days. Two weekends in a row, I was in Hollywood.
- [63:16]
Lon Harris
Yeah, wow.
- [63:17]
Jason Calacanis
Now with folks. And so that is my off duty breakthrough prize. Just thank you for inviting me. But what I noticed, and I was talking to Francis about this incredible Nobel Prize winner is the pace of science is moving so fast because of AI that all the stuff we talk about here is extraordinary. But the things they're doing in science and the breakthrough there's. They're making. It's essentially we can choose as a society where to point the AI gun. Right now, it's at developers. Okay, fine. Okay. It's at productivity. Okay, great. We're going to make new backgrounds in Star Wars. And I was talking to Gal Gadot about this, and she said the movie she's working on, instead of spending 2 or 300 million on it before promotions, P and A, she said, we can now do it for 70 million. And everything's done with AI except for the performances, except for the writing. And she said, I am great with this because again, we're talking about cgi. Like cgi, obviously, play Wonder Woman, et cetera, but you could lower the cost dramatically. What's that?
- [64:25]
Lon Harris
Was this the bitcoin movie? She's in that Doug Lyman movie that they're talking about a lot about the history of bitcoin, which they're doing.
- [64:32]
Jason Calacanis
Oh, no.
- [64:32]
Lon Harris
Yeah. And it's.
- [64:33]
Josh Siroti
But it's.
- [64:33]
Jason Calacanis
By the way, she's tall. She is Wonder Woman. She is tall.
- [64:39]
Lon Harris
Yeah.
- [64:39]
Jason Calacanis
And she's got presence, but she's also a lot of fun. But they're. The way things are moving fast now,
- [64:43]
Lon Harris
the way they're doing it, he's shooting it entirely in rooms on green screen. And then all the backgrounds are going to be.
- [64:49]
Jason Calacanis
Okay, so that's the movie. Pull up a story about this. Let me see what you're talking about here. And I asked her, is it Ben Affleck's new technology? Because Ben Affleck was building something like this. And it was. No, but she said. I asked her, like, as an actor, what the future was. And this is what she was telling me about. And she said, you know, Jason, you know, Jake, the thing here that is super compelling is because we are, you know, like, on this green screen, et cetera, and you strip everything away. She said, I can actually. You can focus on performance. Like, it's all performance. And. Yeah, yeah.
- [65:28]
Lon Harris
I'm trying to find a good image. They haven't released a lot of good images yet, but it's in a London soundstage. They're built. They're shooting the entire thing in a. In a London soundstage. And this has got to be it. It's called bitcoin.
- [65:40]
Etienne Louve
Oh, it is.
- [65:40]
Jason Calacanis
Because she said, Casey Affleck's Bitcoin killing
- [65:42]
Lon Harris
Satoshi, a $70 million feature film shot entirely, the number matches on a custom gray screen soundstage with AI generated backgrounds and lighting. So all the backgrounds, all the lighting is all going to be done by AI. The only thing that's real is going to be the actors in front of this gray backdrop. They're shooting this right now. It's very timely that you're.
- [66:02]
Jason Calacanis
I was just wondering what technology. Ask your. Do you. Claude. If you do. Claude, sidebar or your perplexity sidebar. You could ask IT what platform they're using. It's a company to accomplish this.
- [66:13]
Lon Harris
I already found it. It's a company called Acme, AI and fx. They're building a new kind of network or background just to power this.
- [66:23]
Jason Calacanis
Okay, let's book them for the shot. Get them on the podcast.
- [66:25]
Lon Harris
It would be really cool to talk to them.
- [66:26]
Jason Calacanis
Get them on. Get them on for Friday.
- [66:28]
Lon Harris
I would love to talk about this.
- [66:30]
Jason Calacanis
So this is definitely the. The film she was talking about. Her main point is, you know, we're going to be able to. I guess this would be the counter to the end of the movie industry. The end of the film industry. There's gonna be many more films made because of this and the whole hand wringing. Okay, I get it. Set designers losing their jobs. FX people. Maybe it's gonna be a bummer for a group of people. Just like it was a bummer when the typing pool went away, the messenger pool went away because of email and word processing. But at the end of the day, tell more stories. Okay. Those people are gonna have to adapt and do other things. And there'll be people who do it with sets, of course, but this does seem to me to be a counter to that. And then what if these things could stay in theaters a little bit longer? Cause there was many more of them. We could see a kind of resurgence where people might get out of their seats and go to the theater because there's more adult fair. I mean, you know, like, everything can't be Snow White, which he was in.
- [67:33]
Lon Harris
Yeah. I mean, if you think about the. The variety, I think you're absolutely right. I think it's just like we've seen with so many other fields. It's. There's always going to be humans in the loop. AI can't make movies by itself. It doesn't know how to make a movie that would entertain anybody. You use AI to do certain functions and speed things up and make things cheaper to allow the creative people to do more with the creative side. I mean, I wanted to make a horror movie years ago with my friend, and we. We felt like, on the bare minimum, a practical budget just to get the locations, just to make the costumes Just to do the makeup and stuff. It's like 100k. So imagine if we could just step into a room. We'd still have actors, you'd still have makeup artists, you'd still have the bare bones.
- [68:13]
Jason Calacanis
But. Yeah, but you might cut it 50k. You wouldn't cut it in half.
- [68:16]
Lon Harris
We wouldn't need to take all the actors to some real location. You wouldn't need to pay all of these people, like a production designer. And so, yeah, there's. On the balance, there's some jobs being taken over by AI, but it also allows for a whole movie to get made that might otherwise not. And a human movie written by people, starring people, made by people, so we're not talking about it. I think that was always what led people astray was all those tweets where it's like, hollywood is over. Sorry, actors and all that stuff. It's like, I don't think AI is ever going to replace the creative people. It's going to give them more tools to make more and bigger things.
- [68:50]
Jason Calacanis
Correct. And so absolutely great for Hollywood. You got anything else off duty here?
- [68:56]
Lon Harris
Oh, my God. So much stuff.
- [68:58]
Jason Calacanis
I started watching, by the way, the Love Story.
- [69:00]
Lon Harris
Oh, right, the Ryan Murphy. Yeah, the Ryan Murphy thing.
- [69:03]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah. So the wife and I are watching that. We're two episodes in, and man, it has got me nostalgic for New York in that period. I mentioned on the show before, I got to meet JFK Jr. Twice. And it is just like in one scene, they were going to the Four Seasons restaurant with the pool in the middle. There's a party there. I remember going there many times. In another one, they were at another place that I've been to a bunch of times. I forgot what the scene was, but I was immediately like, oh, I've been to that restaurant a bunch of times.
- [69:32]
Lon Harris
That's always the appeal. That's what Ryan Murphy and that crew do so well. Like, if you remember that O.J. simpson show, the American Crime Story one, it was the same with LA in the 90s. They recreated it so carefully that if you were there, you were like, this is bringing me right back to this, like, time and place and moment.
- [69:50]
Jason Calacanis
Yes.
- [69:50]
Lon Harris
Which is part of the fun, for sure.
- [69:52]
Jason Calacanis
Part of the fun it is, definitely. Oh, and they were playing Bjork and stuff like that. You know, I've talked about that here before, but yeah, there are just tons of interesting shots of like his loft, which I remember was on Walker street. And then there's a bar, Walker's Bubbies, the Odeon Tompkins Square park, the Guggenheim. What else were they at? So it's just like, really Indochin. Like, these were all places I went in the early 90s.
- [70:29]
Josh Siroti
Yeah.
- [70:31]
Jason Calacanis
So I'm just loving it. Theodion's still there. Bubby's still there. Walker's still there. So those three are still there. And he's also at a gym. I'm not sure what gym he's at when he's there. And they also show him it's all real.
- [70:47]
Lon Harris
They do their research, and they get everything sort of just right. And that definitely helps make the show feel more compatible.
- [70:55]
Jason Calacanis
Northmore Street. That's what it. Walker's is on the corner of Northmoor and, I think 6th Avenue, and there's a Calvin Klein's office. And I was literally speaking to David Geffen, the famous music producer, a week or two ago, and we were talking about the film. And he gets a shout out in the first episode that Calvin Klein is taking a phone call from David Geffen, favorite music producer. It was really cool.
- [71:20]
Lon Harris
There you go.
- [71:21]
Jason Calacanis
What else do you got off duty? You must have something to. So anyway, I'm two episodes in, and it's great. I think it's great couples watching because it's a love story.
- [71:27]
Lon Harris
Yeah.
- [71:28]
Jason Calacanis
Yes.
- [71:28]
Lon Harris
There. There is a movie on HBO Max that just popped up. It's Brian Fuller, who people remember. He did that show Pushing Daisies. He did that show Hannibal that I liked really much. The. The. The Hannibal Lecter Show. He's got his first feature film out. It's called Dust Bunny. It's on HBO Max right now. Nobody paid attention to this in theaters, but it's really interesting. It's really fun. It's really whimsical. It's kind of a comedy fantasy horror about this. And it's about this young girl who believes in monsters, and she believes there's a monster living under her bed that has eaten her parents. And she. She find. Mads Mickelson plays her neighbor from down the hall, who turns out to be some sort of a man of mystery, a mercenary, a hitman of some kind. And so she hires him to kill this monster that she believes is lurking under her.
- [72:16]
Jason Calacanis
Good premise.
- [72:17]
Lon Harris
And it's. The question becomes, is something real happening to this girl? Did her parents abandon her? Were they murdered? That's what Mads Mikkelsen is trying to figure out. But she keeps filling in like, no, I'm telling you, it is a actual monster. And that becomes the drama of the movie. It's a lot of fun. Really well designed, very cool.
- [72:35]
Jason Calacanis
Scenes. Could I watch this with a 16 year old or two 10 year olds?
- [72:39]
Lon Harris
10 might be. I mean if they are mature 10 year olds, there's a little bit of violence, there's a little bit of mayhem. But 16, 100% let the 16 year old I predict is going to really enjoy this.
- [72:50]
Jason Calacanis
All right, listen, I have been thank you to my friends over at Ro Co Twist. Okay. Go there and you get to the front of the line, you get to see if they. If you can get your glp, your insurance covered.
- [73:00]
Lon Harris
Yeah, your insurance checker.
- [73:03]
Jason Calacanis
So I have been looking for great sources of protein. I need stuff that's quick and easy. Right now you can make a protein shake. You got all these things. Yeah, it takes a lot of work. I do like doing the egg whites once in a while. I love a little brisket. But I have been really trying to focus in on the most bang for the buck in terms of calories to protein. Because when you're on a glp, you can lose a little bit of muscle mass. That's like a known thing. Not everybody, but some. So I started looking for the best bang for the buck. Egg whites are up there, Greek yogurt's up there. But this one, one turns out tinned fish. So I have bought like five different tinned fish. And this is the one right now that I'm really feeling. It's called Wild Planet. I think they're like amongst the more, you know, healthy ones or great or sourced really well. And 160 calories for 28 grams of protein.
- [74:01]
Lon Harris
Wow.
- [74:02]
Jason Calacanis
You're trying to get that 30 grams of protein in the morning. So sometimes I'll just make myself a piece of toast. I get a little bit of carbs. Okay, whatever. It's from my Happy Jane bakery I love so much here in Austin. But these anchovies, I love anchovies. And you put a little lemon on it. You could put some mustard.
- [74:18]
Lon Harris
So toast. You're making toast and then you're putting the anchovies on.
- [74:22]
Jason Calacanis
Yeah, I'll just dunk the whole thing with the olive oil on a plate. I eat them up.
- [74:26]
Lon Harris
Oh, wow.
- [74:26]
Jason Calacanis
Dip a little bit of my olive sourdough in there and this is very good for you. I suggest you buy a, a ten pack a tin lawn. And when you're gonna make a bad decision. Not saying you make bad decisions. I'm not saying you don't. Not saying you're overweight, but I'm not saying you couldn't lose 10.
- [74:43]
Lon Harris
I could lose 10.
- [74:44]
Jason Calacanis
Not saying any of those Things I
- [74:45]
Lon Harris
could lose a little bit of weight.
- [74:47]
Jason Calacanis
I think 10. So this would help you. And then I looked it up and now my YouTube algorithm is serving me up. A bunch of friends of mine, like Tim Ferriss was talking about people go on anchovy fasts. So I don't like this fasting. It's like I get dizzy, I gotta perform on the show. I get grumpy. But people do anchovy fast now.
- [75:07]
Lon Harris
Wow.
- [75:07]
Jason Calacanis
So they'll do like three cans of this a day. They reduce themselves to 600, 800 calories, whatever it is, instead of fasting, full on fasting. And this puts you in that ketosis thing. So anyway, listen, I'm no expert on this stuff, but I have lost the £40. I do feel great.
- [75:24]
Lon Harris
And there is something about shape.
- [75:26]
Jason Calacanis
I've been since my 20s.
- [75:27]
Lon Harris
There is something about tinned fish, I think that is sort of unappealing to me. But then I think back, like, as a kid, tuna fish out of the can was one of my favorite snacks. I would just eat the tuna fish right out of the can. So this. I've developed this over time. I didn't used to have a thing about tinned fish.
- [75:42]
Jason Calacanis
Okay. I showed you mackerel. The other one that's really good is sardines. Yes. So you can get sardine fillets. And they're incredible as well. Also, same situation. You know, you're going to get into keto. You can also get. And there's people who really love this stuff. Like you can make a little plate of them. So sardines are probably my. I like mackerel above sardines, but I like. It's just right behind it. So wild sardines, mackerel. And then I think I tried one other fish. Yeah, no, I think that's. I think those are the two I've tried. Anyway, people make plates of these. So you make like a charcuterie. But you include some of this on. Oh, you know what white anchovies are. The other really good ones, the boquerinos from.
- [76:27]
Lon Harris
And then herring, of course. The classic elderly Jew snack of.
- [76:32]
Jason Calacanis
Well, I want to get. There's a herring from Sweden where they mix it with the mustard cream sauce.
- [76:37]
Lon Harris
Yeah, for sure. I know about.
- [76:39]
Jason Calacanis
And I. I had it there a couple times when I was in Stockholm with Tyler and when he was living there. And man, that is. I'm going to find that recipe where they do like. I think it's like egg whites and mustard and it's a very creamy sauce. And they dump the herring in it or they'll put COD in it. It's unbelievable. So there's your tip, folks. I hope you stay healthy, and we'll see you on Wednesday for Twist.