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- [00:00]
A
All right, everybody, welcome back to Twist. It is Friday. It is March 6th. It is 2026, or in the year of our overlords. AO41, which stands for Lon Harris.
- [00:12]
B
Oh, it's after open claw. It's 41 days since we first discussed Openclaw on the show. AO41
- [00:21]
C
this Week in startups is brought to you by Whisper Flow. Stop typing. Dictate with Whisper Flow and send clean final draft writing in seconds. Visit WhisperFlow AI Twist to get started for free today. That's WisprFlow AI Twist. Lemon. Building a great team is essential to any business. Lemon is a marketplace of vetted, experienced engineers ready to take your company to the next level. Get 15% off your first four weeks of developer time at Lemon IO Twist. And every. For all your incorporation, banking payments, payroll benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every IO.
- [01:07]
B
We've said AOC for a while, but that's already somebody's initial.
- [01:11]
A
So, yeah, we can't go with AOC. Well, that would be. I like AOC personally as the. As the designation, but we'll go AO41. It rolls off the tongue. And, you know, there's so much going on in my world right now, Lonnie. So much that I need to keep track of things. My mind runs. It just races. My mind is racing now because there's so much going on in the industry. I'm doing four or five podcasts a week, so you know how I keep track of all this? I think I do this little pin here. I have a plot pin. And I have to applaud Plaud because I just press this button at the start. You have one, too.
- [01:48]
B
It's right here.
- [01:49]
A
I'm going to suggest that you don't brew in the nice suit I got you. And you. And you use the metal backing as opposed to the clip. I'm clipping it up, guy.
- [01:55]
B
Okay. I'm a clipper.
- [01:56]
A
I think this is more elegant. Anyway, I press the button, the red light goes on. Everybody knows I'm recording, so I'm not, like, breaking anything. And this is a recorded podcast, is live to thousands of people, and it goes out to hundreds of thousand. Anyway, then I can say things to this, like, hey, action item, action item. Find a community manager to work on the podcast so we can do community manager stuff. Get the discord. And then I don't forget. And then I say, oh, you know what we should do? Action item. Let's try for a freelancer. And can you write me up a JD and give that to my open claw replicant.
- [02:29]
B
Yes. This is the real. This is the real power of it. I think, like, I. A lot of the time when I'm driving into work because, you know, you're. You're starting to think about your day, you're sort of getting into. I come up with ideas like, oh, I should email this guy. We should get that guy on the podcast. And I used to just have to, like, keep it in my brain until I got to my desk and I could type it out. And now you just hit the plugin and then you can send a. All the docs that you're making with your plod pin to your agent. And that's where the real magic.
- [02:56]
A
Correct. And you know, like, I have this. I have this at the side of the desk, but, you know, sometimes I forget to bring it with me. This I don't forget.
- [03:02]
B
Who even remembers how that stuff works? It's been so long, I don't even think I could use a pen and paper anymore.
- [03:09]
A
So get Applaud. I applaud. Plod. I have the plod pin. I've got the Plod Pro on the back of my phone. I don't miss a beat, folks. I don't miss a beat. I don't miss a great idea. I don't miss, you know, somebody I need to admonish for doing something.
- [03:22]
B
Wouldn't want to miss that.
- [03:23]
D
Yeah.
- [03:24]
A
No.
- [03:24]
B
So if your work depends on having conversations, doing interviews, conducting meetings, taking calls, anything like what we just talked about, you need a Plaud note pin. Check it out at plod. AI slash twist. That's P, L, A, U, D, A, I slash twist. And if you use the code twist, they're going to give you 10% off.
- [03:42]
A
I'm going to gift my friend Mark Jeffrey one. Do me a favor, take a note. I'm going to send Mark.
- [03:46]
D
Nice.
- [03:46]
A
There you have it. Tell your pod we've got a full show for us.
- [03:50]
B
My God, too much show.
- [03:52]
A
My friend, my partner, Mark Jeffrey is here from Stillcore Capital. How are you doing, Mark?
- [03:57]
D
I'm doing great, Jason. Thanks for having me on as always.
- [04:00]
A
Yeah, good to have you on. Because the intersection between AI open claw agents and crypto. You know, I famously a couple years ago said, hey, listen, if you're in crypto, pivot to AI. I'm not prepared to say that was good advice, by the way. Hey, people have given me every time Bitcoin goes back down into the 60s. Somebody retweeted. Oh, that kind of snailed it.
- [04:22]
B
Do you remember we Were we were office shopping here in Austin and we went to this office and they had that tweet of yours printed out and framed. They didn't know it wasn't for our benefit. They didn't know we were coming. That was just part of the decoration of their office. If you're into crypto, pivot to AI. That was the.
- [04:37]
A
Yeah, so the crypto people will dunk on me for that. But here's the truth. There is some great innovation. I just did an interview with the. The new head of the SEC on All in that'll be coming out on the all in interview show next week. Chairman Atkins. And then I also had Selig, the CFTC head. And so Chamath and I just did a great interview with them. We taped it recently. It'll be coming out next week. And they are really laying the groundwork for making crypto legit. And they're going to take it back from all these offshore locations and bring it back to America. So this is a great thing. So I am not saying pivot from AI to crypto. That would be foolish, but I would say keep an eye on crypto, because there are things that crypto are. Is, you know, just, I think at the end of this year going to be able to do legally and already starting to do legally. That could be quite material in AI. And that's why I wanted to bring you on. Maybe you could tell everybody what you're working on today. And when I see you pushing your chips, because you're a great investor and you've always been ahead of the curve, people can look up Mark's Wikipedia or Grokopedia page and see all the innovations he's seen.
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E
I don't know.
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A
He's typically 18 months ahead of everybody else and he's probably nine months ahead of me. So I always go to Mark. Hey, Mark, what are you thinking about? Tell everybody what you learned over the last two years and why it's important and where you push your chips.
- [05:59]
D
Yeah, so my chips are pushed on a thing called Bittensor. And the coin for that is Tao. And it's a very interesting new phenomenon. It's basically taking bitcoin's mining side and making that programmable on a new chain. So it's not on bitcoin, it's on its own chain, the Tao chain. And by making the mining side of it programmable, it incentivizes 128subnets, which are sort of like companies to build new AI products. So there's $100 million a year that are handed out basically as a subsidy. Just like how Bitcoin hands out new bitcoins to miners. Right. To subsidize its own growth. The Bittensor chain hands out TAO to subsidize the growth of new AI products. And it's doing some very incredible things. Very. You know, we're only about four years into it. The last year in particular has been pretty incredible.
- [06:50]
A
So, Lon, this is important because, you know, we talked about the project known as Bitcoin, the tip of the spear that got everybody engaged in this. But the math problems and all the CPU was going towards busy work.
- [07:04]
B
Right.
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A
It was not actually serving a purpose other than, you know, establishing the Bitcoin network, which was an important thing to do, but it also is using a lot of energy.
- [07:16]
B
Right. And this was a big knock against Bitcoin in the early days, if you'll recall. Oh, it's so wasteful. We're using all this power so that they can crunch these numbers, and then we don't even need the. The numbers to be crunched. And it's just a m. You know, like, that was. This was a huge knock against Bitcoin in its early days was that we were wasting all this power just solving these problems so we could create this artificial scarcity.
- [07:38]
A
So, Mark, take us through two or three of the most important inspiring projects. And then for full disclosure, you were starting a fund to take advantage of this called StillCorp, and I joined you as a partner in that. I put some of my chips in. I think I'm going to be ready to put some more chips in. I'll be honest, this year I'm feeling a little frisky. Take us through maybe two or three of the projects. If we could show them on the screen, even better. But what's inspiring and interesting.
- [08:03]
D
Yeah, I don't have anything ready for the screen, but let me just respond to your requests. So, Jason, the biggest news in Bittensor in the last 24 hours has been the launch of Ridges, Subnet 62's product. Now, it's a Vibe coding platform.
- [08:18]
A
It.
- [08:18]
D
It competes with Claude in cursor, and Basically it's scoring 73 to 88% on the swee benchmark test, which is sort of like the SAT that measures how effective a Vibe coder is. So it's comparable or better than Claude, and it's scoring 96.3% on the polyglot test, which is a different version, a different benchmark, but measuring the same thing. So the price that they're launching at is $29 a month. So it's five to seven times cheaper than Claude Code and Codex at a comparable benchmark. So it's the same or better in terms of quality. And it was built on BitTensor for roughly $10 million in emissions from the chain, while Cursor had to raise against a $29 billion valuation to accomplish the same thing. So pretty interesting.
- [09:12]
A
Okay, so this is a co pilot for developers running on the Bittensor network. It's one of the subnets, so you can go buy Tao like you buy Bitcoin. And I don't give financial advice, but if anybody's listening and you had a hundy that you were going to spend on some margaritas, I'm going to say maybe drink some water, you know, get some filtered water, tap water, whatever. Have a nice tea. The other $99 into just buying a little towel for yourself. Why not? But, so this Ridges project, now is this an open source project? Is it a fork? Where is the code base coming from?
- [09:52]
D
The code base is coming from the miners. So basically, the miners compete with each other to improve the efficacy of the Ridges product. So just like, you know, like Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does for stranded energy, Bittensor does for stranded talent. So anyone anywhere in the world can compete. And the miners that are improving the subnet 62 product, they're earning something like 50k in subnet tokens per day. So if you win the contest, you could make a million dollars very fast. If you're the best in the world, right, and you're some guy in Turkey and you can't get to Silicon Valley, this is a way for you to earn and own part of the AI revolution. And that's one thing that's great about crypto, right? So you can't really do this in any other way. So it's pretty interesting.
- [10:41]
A
No founder starts a company because they're eager to spend hours and hours filling out their payroll and setting up an HR department and just doing their taxes and accounting. Why do we start companies? We want to build a great product or service. We want to fix a problem in the world. And as we all know, these chores pile up and they become a huge cognitive load. They become a distraction. You don't want to spend your time learning how to do these chores at a high level. No, you want a partner who does them perfectly. So why don't you get a partner like every, and they'll take care of all these administrative tasks for you in one convenient spot. That means incorporating banking Credit cards, payroll, hr, bookkeeping, and of course filing your taxes. That's something you cannot get wrong. That's table stakes, folks. This whole system was built from the ground up for founders just like you and me. So every already knows your most pressing questions and the features you need most. They're going to give you 3% cash back on all your company purchases sent directly to your bank account. So it's time for you to visit every IO for all your startup needs. Every IO E V E R Y I O. So unlike if you were making commits to openclaw, you get, you know, some kudos and you get to feel good. Fantastic. You're helping humanity. Open source is a gift to humanity. Fantastic. It's democratizing. But here there's an incentive layer which is the subnets tokens. So I make this coder, this copilot, better, I make some tokens and then I can put those tokens and I'll just get a high five. I won a contest to fix something in the product and I get to put that in my wallet instead of going to work for Cursor. Is that a way to think about it? I could go work for Cursor as a developer. I could work on this open source.
- [12:31]
D
That is exactly. Okay, that is exactly correct. And when you earn the 50k worth of subnet 62 ridges tokens, you can hold on to them. Well, you can cash them right out. Right. So you can get the 50k and put it in your bank if you want. Or you may choose to hold on to them because the market cap of ridges right now is very low. It's like around $30 million compared to cursors 30 billion with a B. Right. So if the market.
- [12:56]
A
If I'm not a developer and I wanted to buy that subnet, that's different than buying dollar sign Tao. Correct?
- [13:04]
D
Correct.
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A
How does one buy that? Because Tao is listed on Robinhood and
- [13:09]
D
Coinbase now or not yet Tao itself is on Coinbase. I'm not sure if it's on Robinhood.
- [13:16]
B
It's not. I don't think it is. I've looked for it before.
- [13:18]
D
But Tao, you can get a coinbase. I've actually gotten on Coinbase, so I know it's on there.
- [13:22]
A
So you can get it on Coinbase if you want to have the top level. But explain to people in plain English how the subnet versus the $177 Tao works.
- [13:31]
D
Yeah, so you have to the tau to get the subnet tokens and you basically need to get a bittensor wallet and A great Bittensor wallet is the Crucible Wallet, which Allah will talk about down the road here on the show.
- [13:43]
B
What a segue.
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D
Yes, but that is his product. Right. To make it easy for people to get into these Subnet tokens. Right. It used to be hard. Over the last couple months it's become a lot easier. And Crucible is leading the way and making it easier for people to do that.
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A
All right, so let's introduce Allah. Let's keep this train moving.
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B
Talk to our next guest, Allah Shabana from Crucible Labs, now not only the co founder of Crucible Labs, that great company that makes the wallet we were just talking about, but he is the co founder of Bittensor itself and the Open Tensor foundation, leading the development and maintenance of Bittensor since 2019. And Crucible Labs of course, invests and builds within the Bittensor system with a focus on decentralized AI. Ala, thank you so much for being here.
- [14:26]
E
Thank you so much for having me guys. Appreciate it.
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A
You've heard sort of the setup here for Bittensor and you've got a commercial company that makes a wallet. This is a venture backed company, a company that you just self funded.
- [14:41]
E
It's a company we self funded.
- [14:42]
A
Yes, got it. So this is like being in the early days ala of Bitcoin where I don't know, Mount Gox came out, some wallets came out, there were lots of different small projects. You found a blocker. It was very hard for people to know how to get the subnets tokens into their wallet. And that's what your wallet allows people to do and they could just sign up and it works, I guess similar to the early days of Bitcoin.
- [15:08]
E
Yeah, similarly, yes. So to kind of put it into context, when we first launched the subnets, when practically people were able to speculate and kind of look into each project and try to basically invest into it, I found myself effectively day trading because I just looking at each project and evaluating each one and seeing which one works and which one doesn't. I found that sort of, it took up most of my time. And the better idea was to actually create an allocation mechanism to really kind of take my rewards that I'm getting on the tensor and effectively distribute them towards the top performing subnets. And that's sort of where the idea for Crucible Labs wallet was started, in that it becomes a very hands off thing. You literally stick and forget. You place your tile within the Crucible Labs, within the Crucible Labs allocator and it will basically allocate the rewards. You get from your principal to the subnets.
- [16:02]
A
Got it. Okay, so maybe you could give us your thoughts on why you're so obsessed with this project. And if this succeeds, will the subnet tokens make their way onto Robinhood and Coinbase? And then what? Why is that a blocker? How does that work? Do I have to call Vlad and say, hey, open this up, because I can talk to him about it, or I can email Brian Armstrong. I'm assuming they're aware of this, but usually they're fast. Is there a blocker here that we don't know about?
- [16:38]
E
TAO itself, DAO is acting as a medium towards access to all of these subnets. You're unable to really, I want to say, buy and sell these without going through TAO in the first place. And as a result, effectively, these exchanges will have to really go through that process first before they're able to even allow users to buy and sell. So this is not quite a blocker, but it is more a mechanism to ensure that a TAO itself represents all the subnets, and at the same time, the value accrual of the subnets is reflected back into TAO in the first place. So as a result, um, there are some exchanges that are looking into listing it in this way, but it is a bit of a process because there's also things like legal KYC on the subnets themselves that they have to go through. Each subnet has to go through effectively the same scrutiny that TAO went through before it was listed in the first place. And there's a.
- [17:28]
D
So it takes a while to do that, actually. Kraken is ahead of everyone else. Kraken is a top validator on the Bittensor blockchain. So they are very active in our space. They do not yet list subnet tokens, but, you know, being a validator would be the first step to doing that. So.
- [17:44]
A
And as an investor and partner in still core capital, I assume you know this was part of your original premise that you're dipping into the subnets and making investments across those.
- [17:54]
D
Yeah, we are, yes. That's in fact our charter to invest in subnets.
- [17:58]
A
Yeah, so, and so that's what you do. You. You have this premise at stillcore. Hey, we know that TAO has the potential to be the next Bitcoin, Ethereum. Whatever it is, it's not guaranteed. Nothing is. This is a bit of the Wild West. This is again back to tip of the spear. But after you make that bet, you're making the second bet, and the second investment is which one of these will break out. And so we just started talking about this new revolutionary concept of, hey, what if you could replicate cursor. So then my question is, if it's only worth 30 million, that is the lowest valuation of people in the space, how do you evaluate that as an investment?
- [18:45]
D
Yeah, I mean, we look at these, we look at these subnets like you would look at startups, right? You know, and you know, I come out of that world, right? So it's the same lens, it's, what's the total addressable market? Is this product actually competitive in that market? Does it have a significant advantage? Is it, you know, what's the team look like? You know, what is, how good, how good are they at marketing? Right. Because it's not enough to make the best product. You have to market it the best also. So if you kind of can come, come out and check all those boxes in each one of the companies or subnets that we've invested in to date has checked all of those boxes. So we, we've announced three investments. Ridges is one of them, Targon is another one, Subnet four. And they provide very, very cheap inference. Oh, and then. Yes, great.
- [19:28]
A
And then inference based on. Tell me the name of that one again.
- [19:32]
D
Targon. Subnet.
- [19:33]
A
Targon. Okay. Building out your team is one of the most crucial things you have to get right in your startup. And finding the right developers is particularly important. But now there's Lemon IO. They're going to save you time, money and headaches by doing all the time consuming legwork for you. They've got an experienced lineup of pre vetted developers working for competitive rates. Just 1% of applicants are accepted into Lemon's elite program. And they're not just, just out there finding this great talent. They're also working with you to integrate these new members into your team. Plus, if it's not a good fit, hey, and sometimes things don't work out. Lemon will hook you up with a new developer asap. I've seen startups go from just pretty good to amazing after filling out their teams with developers. From Lemon IO, go to Lemon IO Twist and find your perfect developer or technical team in 48 hours or less. Plus, Twist listeners get 15% off their first four weeks. That's Lemon IO twist. L E M O N IO twist. So that's subnet number four. Targon is doing inference, which means instead of me sending something to Claude Opus and, you know, paying for it, I can go to Targon and have my openclaw do inference there. Is that what's possible?
- [20:54]
D
Yeah. So it's you, you can do that. So Targon supplies, it's. It's industrial grade inference. So it's private.
- [21:02]
A
Oh, okay.
- [21:02]
D
Right. So right, you've heard about this. I know you've been talking about this lately. Right. So private inference, your prompts are not consumed and used to retrain, you know, some big company's model.
- [21:13]
B
Yeah, we just had Eric Voorhees from Venice AI on the other day talking about this same thing. He's also doing private AI.
- [21:21]
D
Yes, so, but this is provably encrypted, end to end. They have a trusted execution environment. You do have to pay for the inference. Right. So it's not free. They're a company. Right. And they actually do have investors. So they are a traditionally venture backed company as well. Their investors include Toby Ludke who founded Shopify and Ram Sriram who was the first investor in Google. So yes, I've got some blue chip investors as well.
- [21:46]
A
Okay, so that Subnet is a for profit corporation and in addition to that there is a subnet token to incentivize people. I'm going to guess here to put up infrastructure hardware to provide the hardware or are they standing up their own
- [22:06]
D
hardware as a company Target, I mean Target probably has their own hardware but. But the bulk of it is served out of their mining network and people are supplying the inference to the Targon mining network. Now there's some rules. They have to run the trusted execution environment and the setup that Targon dictates to them. But if they do that, whoever supplies the most inference to Targon to resell gets the most Targon Subnet four tokens as a miner.
- [22:32]
A
Got it. So there's two ways as you can see like Bitcoin, there's so many picks and shovels and services and application layer here, there's all different places to invest. Targon obviously has some all star investors in their corporation. But another way to make an invest investment in Targon's vision is to buy the subnet token.
- [22:54]
D
Correct.
- [22:55]
A
Okay. And we've done that from Stillcore. Fantastic.
- [22:57]
D
We have.
- [22:58]
E
Yep.
- [22:58]
D
And the third investment that we've made is in hippies which is decentralized storage. So kind of similar to filecoin but you know, done in the bit tensor way.
- [23:06]
A
This one is less interesting to me because storage is such a commodity. Why would you consider this one if storage is a commodity?
- [23:15]
D
First of all, the price for Hippeis is quite a bit lower than everyone else including Filecoin. So it's 400x to 4000x less expensive. So they've been able to very, very significantly shave off the price. And they also are very good at the Hippeus token. The tokenomics for Hippeis are very interesting and very novel. They have deterministically tied the value of the Hippeus token to the increased usage and increased revenue of the Hippeus product. So you need the Hippeus token to mine, so you must stake Hippeus to mine. So it's a stake to earn. Right. So basically they've got all these things that are continuously driving demand for the Hippeus token. There is no scenario in which Hippeus the product and the revenue does very well, but the token does not. So that was a very interesting new innovation.
- [24:05]
A
Got it. So this is one of the challenges in crypto is where does the value accrue to. And they have solved for that. And that was one of the reasons in your investment thesis of why to engage with this project. Again, Hippeis private corporation as well, with investors in the corporation, I assume. Where does the hard drive space come from?
- [24:26]
D
The miners supply the hard drive space, so storage is provided by the miners. The miners must be extremely performance. So they're very snappy about serving up the file. They have to be online all the time, so they can't just go offline randomly. So the quality of service that they provide and the amount of storage that they provide is the criteria that is used to award subnet tokens to them with each mining contest.
- [24:50]
A
So we keep talking about miners. Who are the miners in these systems typically? What is the profile of that individual corporation? Hackers Zealot early?
- [25:03]
D
We don't know. It's like bitcoin miners. It's exactly the same thing. There are people from all over the world. There is no onboarding KYC process. It's permissionless mining, just like a lot of crypto.
- [25:14]
A
So I have. It could be. I'm just taking a guess here. I am a company like maybe a digital ocean or something, and I've got massive storage that I haven't sold yet. Just making this up. I don't know that DigitalOcean has done this, but you could pick another hosting provider. Hey, I've got these hundreds of terabytes that I'm not using. I'm putting online every day waiting for a customer. Hey, why don't I just throw them in here, get those hard drives warmed up and monetize them while I'm waiting. If I can make some amount of money on them while I'm standing them up. Hey, great. And then maybe they will perform better and the token reward will accelerate. And that would be better than me even selling it to a customer directly myself.
- [25:56]
D
Correct. It's exactly like Uber, right? Like if you have all these unused cars that aren't doing anything, you might as well put them on the Uber network and drive around to make some money. Right? Same thing, just with storage.
- [26:05]
A
Ala, when you look at the Mark's bets there, what do you think of his bets? I'm looking for a little outside validation here. Walk us through those three projects and tell us if they succeed, how could they impact the infrastructure and the future of the interwebs?
- [26:23]
E
First off, they're very solid bets. Well done, Mark. The one other thing I wanted to mention is there is all these products have a very interesting entry point into the real world, which I think is a problem that a lot of crypto suffers from. You know, if you go to really any crypto conference, you always see these projects that are marketed from crypto people to crypto people, but there's very few that actually hit everyday users. And I think that's what the entire industry is missing. And I think the first projects to solve this are the ones who are going to be the ones really reaping the benefits. And I think whether it's Hippeis, Targon or really any other subnet on the Bittensor ecosystem, whoever hits that first is a bit of an arms race happening right now within the ecosystem, which is rather exciting. But those who actually get there, and I think Bittensor does have the potential to get there first, those are the ones that are going to benefit the most, whether as the teams themselves, which is another point that I like to evaluate when I'm looking into subnets. Each team behind those subnets has, I want to say, a solid pedigree within the ecosystem. For example, Targon, actually that's a good shout out to the CEO, but he actually is one of the first people that mined on Bittensor when we first started back in 2021. So he has a very in depth knowledge, understands how the system works and so this is the kind of person I'd be betting on. So I think all three of those bets are very solid.
- [27:42]
B
Mark has actually built an open cloth skill that I think we have to take a look at called Vibe Miner. It sustainably and profitably mines a token SN85 video. Is that how you. Am I saying it right, Mark? Vida.
- [27:56]
D
Oh yeah. Oh, so vid.
- [27:59]
B
Aio.
- [27:59]
D
I don't know how to pronounce it. I'VE just seen it written, but. Yeah, but good guess.
- [28:03]
B
Can you, can you show us a little bit of how this works? I have a screenshot here in the doc. If that's the best we could do.
- [28:09]
D
Yeah, just do the. Just show the screenshot.
- [28:11]
B
All right, so we'll. We'll pull up the screenshot for the doc.
- [28:13]
D
So I can describe it. I can describe it.
- [28:15]
B
Tell us about why Open Claw and Crypto Mining are a good fit. I was fascinated by this.
- [28:22]
D
Yeah. So, you know, I watched you guys, right? When Claw came out, you guys loaded up right away on your machines. I waited until there was a hosted claw before sort of diving in. And then I thought, like, how can I apply this to Bittensor? And I've always wanted to be a miner on Bittensor, but it's usually a lot of. A lot of sort of sysadmin work and just stuff I don't really know how to do. It's not my forte. When Claw came around, I was like, oh, I'll just have my claw become a miner on a bit Tensor subnet. So I had the claw actually choose which subnet to mine. So it's mining subnet 85, which is video compression. It's using AI to both upscale and compress video. And it does it 50 to 90% cheaper than anyone because it's using BitTensor contestonomics to do it. And I am now one of the people upscaling and compressing and I have to do it within 60 seconds of getting a request from the validators. And I'm using Bittensor infrastructure to do this. So I'm using Nimius for the storage. Right. So I'm getting 400 to 4,000% off storage. And I'm using Targon for the machine that I'm using to actually do the video crunching. So again, I'm getting. It's like 1 10th the cost.
- [29:37]
A
Hey, listen. Sometimes I'm thinking faster than I can write everything down and I found this amazing tool. I am obsessed with it. It's called Whisper Flow. W, I S P R Flow. All you have to do is talk and Whisper Flow turns it into crisp, perfect writing instantly. Not just talking about dictation, but removing filler, fixing punctuation, and even formatting your text while you speak. It is mind blowing how good this is. It makes all the other dictation software look basic. And Whisper Flow matches your natural tone and speaking voice so the writing sounds like you actually wrote it yourself. And Whisper Flow works wherever you are. I use it when I'M in Slack. I'll use it when I'm in Superhuman, doing an email, doing a message, I'll jump into imessage and even when I'm writing a document, or I'll even use it when I'm talking to my openclaw agent. Finally, someone I could talk to who actually takes down everything I say. Unlike maybe the interns I've got. They get like 6 out of every 10 instructions correct. Whisper flow. Everybody's going crazy about this product in Silicon Valley. Everybody in tech is using it. Whisper flow.a I/ twist. It's spelled W I S P R F L O dot A I slash twist. Incredible product. You have to try it.
- [30:52]
D
So. And I've been able to make it profitable, but not sustainable. So it cost me about 10 bucks a day. There's about $3,000 being handed out by the Vid IO network per day to miners. I am making about 30 bucks per day and it cost me 10 bucks. So it is profitable. However, after the immunity period, where new miners basically get for like 24 hours, I usually last another 24 hours until more excellent miners kick me out. As Jason likes to talk about the age of excellence. Bittensor is the most ferocious form of capitalism and age of excellence that I've ever seen. So I get booted out frequently and I've not figured out how to stay in the rankings, but I'm working on that still. So.
- [31:35]
A
Okay, I gotta repeat this back to you, so make sure I understand what's happening here. There are a bunch of distributed services being empowered by Bittensor that lower the cost of doing common jobs. A common job is. Or a large job, I don't know, programming a large language model or processing large video jobs. Yeah, these are large jobs in the world. So you're doing arbitrage saying, I'm going to use the lowest cost bittensor network for storage. I'm going to use the lowest cost bittensor for inference.
- [32:13]
D
Yeah, well, I'm actually just using the machine, so it's not really inference in
- [32:16]
A
this case, just machine using GPU or cpu, whatever it happens to be processors. So then you're sending the jobs through this machine. Now that is grinding down to the lowest cost possible. And what this does is it creates a free market incentive to just lower the cost of compute across storage, across programming copilots, across video processing. Is that the core job here is video processing?
- [32:50]
D
Yeah, this is using AI to compress video and upscale it.
- [32:53]
A
Who's doing those jobs? I'm just curious.
- [32:55]
D
In the world, I don't know, so I couldn't tell you.
- [32:58]
B
There's all those apps too, that's like, take your old photos, take your old grainy videos, upscale them, make them look high def. Like that's a big thing. And especially Hollywood does it all the time. Like, they're using AI to, like, make Blu Rays or make 4K restorations of older films and TV shows. So, yeah, there's a lot of upscaling with AI being done right now.
- [33:17]
A
You know what's so interesting about that, Lon? We had this whole thing where they were trying to preserve these final prints of, you know, amazing movies. And, like, they would have some number of, you know, minutes in a print that were, you know, exactly. Composing for.
- [33:34]
B
Right, yeah. Because the old. The old film stock had started to decompose. Yeah.
- [33:38]
A
And in all likelihood, I could not only restore it to its previous glory, it could restore it to a glory that the film was not capable of at the time of shooting.
- [33:52]
B
It's a little bit like what we saw at the wizard of Oz at the Sphere. Like, they can use AI to not just restore the original image to look like new. They can add stuff in the background, they can blow it up to a different aspect ratio. They can. They can put stuff in the background that wasn't there. I mean, you could. The sky's the limit with what you can do with this technology to old films.
- [34:12]
A
When you think about that, mark, the idea of losing art in the world to physics, you know, the Mona Lisa, you know, some great film, all these Grateful Dead shows that are bootlegged. Not only could they be restored to their previous high water mark, they could be restored to a higher mark. You could. You could.
- [34:36]
B
I mean, that's. You're already conceived. Like, if you go by, like the Duelists, that Ridley Scott movie on Blu Ray, you know, you're seeing it crisper with more detail than people saw it when they went to the theater in the 70s.
- [34:47]
A
If we were to Allah, think about what could happen with infrastructure in the world. AI agents now could be examining the Bittensor network. I'm sure somebody has it. You came up with this clever idea, Mark, but your agent could go find 10 similar opportunities. Yeah. Ala. And we might be in a situation where we've just got a. I wouldn't call it a death spiral, but we would have a compression of costs that would just be relentlessly being pursued, not in a human sense of being relentlessly pursued, but in a 24 7, 365billions of tokens pursuit of lowering costs.
- [35:34]
E
Yeah, I Think it's, it's quite possible that it could happen, but I think at the same time it will, it'll actually push competition in my honest opinion. I think that's actually going to be great because it cost is one thing, but there's also quality that comes down to it as well. I think that's what a lot of, a lot of, A lot of these projects that are fairly new tend to overlook a little bit in that they will provide something at lower cost than everybody else, but they'll also be cutting quality. So I think that eventually these agents are going to be balancing between how well these tokens are, they're pulling out or how well these services that they're pulling out compared to how much the cost is going to be. And I think eventually it's going to balance out to a specific ecosystem. I think Bittensor kind of has the advantage there because we have 120 projects and growing that could even compete within itself.
- [36:19]
A
And there's a foundation Allah that you're part of that sets the agenda for subnets.
- [36:26]
E
Yeah, there was, there is an open Tensor foundation. That's effectively what was started with the ecosystem. There was myself and Jacob Steves, my co founder. At this point we are actually working on decentralizing even further. So I'm no longer part of the foundation. I've started working on course of the labs full time. Jacob Steves is also no longer part of the foundation. He's working on his own subnet. And so now the foundation itself is sort of in a way handing over the reins to the community. And now we're sort of following the exact same pattern as Bitcoin where now it's being, the project is being maintained by really the entire community itself because it is open source and so anyone can contribute.
- [37:03]
A
How does a new subnet emerge? Is this like doing a new top level domain where there's politics and payments and you know. Or can anybody who's an entrepreneur say I have an entrepreneurial company, I want to be part of this, I want to launch a subnet.
- [37:18]
E
Yeah, absolutely. Anybody can launch a subnet. There's no, it's permissionless. Which is kind of the great thing about it. If you have a great idea, you come to an ecosystem and you launch something.
- [37:26]
A
Is there a certain amount of TAO tokens you need to launch one and then what is the entry price now?
- [37:32]
E
Then there is a registration cost to it and that cost is variable according to demand. So according to how many people want to enter the ecosystem. The cost will go up if there's less people trying to enter the ecosystem. The cost will go down. It's a bit of a moving average sort of thing.
- [37:45]
A
Got it. And how many subnets are allowed to be made, Mark, Is there like a cap on that and what's the cost now?
- [37:54]
D
Yeah, at the moment there's a cap. It's 128subnets. But down the road, not too much further. We don't know exactly when, but soon ish, that cap will be removed or grown. It's. The cap is there to create quality. Right. So we don't want sort of a free for all like we've seen on Solana with pump dot fun, you know, we don't want pump dot fund subnets. Right. So the cap is there to sort of, you know, make sure that the, the, the proper mood is set on the chain. So it feels like the library, not like the party. Right. So that's what we want. And yeah, and the cost, I haven't, I haven't checked recently, but it's, it's been as high as a million dollars to buy a subnet. So it just depends on when you go look and I've seen it as low as like 100k. So it depends on the price of tau. It depends on what's available.
- [38:43]
A
This is not going to be chaos, it's going to be orderly. Let's Mark and Olive, I could have you guys come back in 30 days and give us an update. That would be really great for the audience because I think we've incepted in people's minds here a bit. And one of the great ways I think to create continuity here is just check in every 30 days. What happened in the last 30 days? What bets have you made? What have you added? So I'll see you guys on April 6th is put it on the calendar now. Okay.
- [39:16]
B
I made, I made a note for my agent. He's on it, he'll mind.
- [39:19]
A
Okay. All right then. Nobody has to remember anything.
- [39:21]
B
Thanks, guys.
- [39:22]
A
Sit here and tell our agents to do it. Let's drop those guys. It's pretty mind blowing, huh?
- [39:26]
B
Oh my gosh. I, I want, I'm gonna put in, I'm gonna put in 5 or 10k. I'm gonna get some together.
- [39:31]
A
I'm, I'm, I'm here for you. Making some bets.
- [39:34]
B
Exactly.
- [39:34]
A
For the future. It's time. You're gonna retire. What? You're 45 now. How old are you?
- [39:40]
B
47.
- [39:41]
A
47. Okay. So you're like, yeah, you're six years, eight years behind me, it's time to
- [39:46]
B
start thinking about my nest egg for sure.
- [39:49]
A
So, yeah, I just got a little bit. I mean, you need to have like, I would say at your age, 20% in things that can go to zero, but that could also go 100x would be really nice. Right?
- [39:59]
B
No, I mean my, my Solana is in that, is in that seat. It's, it's down, it's down a lot. But I'm not giving up. I'm not giving up yet.
- [40:07]
A
I mean, I think it's like a wise bet until you find a better bet. Let's say, you know, your Solana goes back to where you bought it or it doubles. You can look at it and reevaluate and say, you know what, I'm going to pair 20% of this and put it into the next big thing. I'm going to pair 50% of it or I'm going to take some wins and put it into QQQ or something.
- [40:26]
B
Bittensor.
- [40:27]
A
Yeah, or Bittensor. Yeah. But 20% to that is, I think, a really good wager, a bet. You know, I like young people, especially since you don't have kids yet, you know, or may never.
- [40:39]
B
Thank you for adding yet. Thank you for adding yet. I appreciate that.
- [40:41]
A
Well, I mean, let me tell you something. This is going to be great for your retirement. You know, once you have kids, there's no retiring. There's just, you know, never ending list of bills and complications coming.
- [40:54]
B
We've got Michael Raya boy, he's here to show up. Show us Setup Claw. Michael, good to have you on the show. I loved this. Jason. I found this on social media. It is a sort of bespoke white glove Open Claw concierge service for founders and executive teams. If you need, you know, if a CEO, a CFO ahead of sales needs leverage without creating new security risk, they get personalized open claw service with setup cl.
- [41:21]
A
Okay, so this is the uber black. This is the VIP level. Setupclaw.com not going to Amazon or Cloudflare or popping up your own instance on your Mac Mini. This is, hey, I want to make something for my company, but I'm a CEO. I'm, I'm ahead of sales. I need to make sure it's secure and I need to make sure it's working.
- [41:47]
F
Basically the story is about a month ago I go in and I go on Twitter and I say, hey, if you're anywhere in San Francisco, then you can, I'll go to your house on a lime scooter and I'll install OpenClaw for you on a Mac Mini. Now this blew up. Suddenly I have way more clients than I can handle. My stripe is blowing up and I'm thinking, okay, this is ridiculous. I install openclaw for some people and I'm thinking I'm having a terrible time. And then every time I install OpenCloud for someone, they come to me a week later saying, hey, like this broke, that broke, you know. So what I'm basically doing now is I'm going in, I'm building out custom agents for people. I'm still helping people with their Mac Mini setups. Uh, I think that's important. It's a lot of fun. Keeps, you know, keeps me fresh. But I very quickly became clear that hey, like this is not the right solution for most people. People need a SaaS. People need to just set their agents and forget it. People are busy. These are, you know, six, seven, eight, even nine figure founders who are like, just like, they don't have time to configure OpenClaw and deal with the bullshit associated. So what I did is quickly I built the SaaS and this SaaS is I consider the easiest way to run open cloud right now. You deploy an agent and then you set your crons, you set how it works, you connect, it has a full computer running. So here's like Launch Co, which you can just lucky. And once you log in you can save your authentication. Uh, but it also connects to, you know, a bunch of tools. The goal is to eventually give every agent its own email, its own wallet, its own stealth browser. So to give, make it just like the most complete general horizontal agent platform available.
- [43:38]
A
Okay, so open Claw in a box. Well done. Are you still charging people for the VIP service? And how do you charge for that? I know there's a lot of CEOs who want to pay you a significant fee to do this. Yeah.
- [43:48]
F
I hop on a 15 minute call with you, I figure out, okay, what are the things that you need most? Like what is, what would your agent look like? What are you trying to automate? And then we hop on a second one hour call where we actually go and we automate it. If you need to automate, automatically update your CRM and Salesforce or your niche CRM. We go in and we set everything up during this one hour call and you end up having one agent. And then we give you Hypercare, which is this idea of, hey, if you need additional agents or you need help with your existing agent, or you need to make sure your agents are appropriate performing in A specific way. We help you with that, or we help you set up automations to automate your business. So we have a bunch of automations running.
- [44:29]
A
And what are you going to do next? I mean, the Open Claw in a Box has become a great startup. It's kind of like building websites in the Web 1.0 era. Everybody needs a website, everybody's going there, but it's quickly becoming commoditized. I think you would agree, Michael. So what is your eventual vision for this in a year or two? You know, we just saw Amazon release their openclaw in a Box service. What happens when there's, you know, openclaw in a Box on every major platform? Where are you going to go with this next?
- [44:57]
F
As an entrepreneur, openclaw itself is much less important than the innovations openclaw brought, which is proactive agents with the idea of heartbeats and crons. Now, these agents are only as powerful as their tools and integrations. So what we need to do is we need to level up the level of tools that they have to an extreme scale. Every single agent should have a wallet, it should have an email. It should, like, if you allow it to, it should be able to have access to a bunch of APIs by default. It should be able to make websites, it should be able to deploy them. You could start stacking these tools that these agents have and that.
- [45:38]
A
So the most empowered agent is the goal for you.
- [45:42]
F
The most empowered, exactly. So we want to empower this agent to an extreme extent.
- [45:46]
A
All right, great job, Michael.
- [45:47]
B
Before we get to our next demo, Jason, I think we should talk about another one of our friends, the last one of our friends we got to talk about today.
- [45:54]
A
Roe Co. Oh, I can talk about that to the cows come home.
- [45:57]
B
Yeah, I know.
- [45:58]
A
As you know, I'm slim cow now. Some people still remember me as fat cow fat Jason. They might even say, you know, if you were like a bully and you wanted to send a mob after somebody, you might say, oh, they're fat, they're fat. But what if you got a subscription to Roco and you got on a glp? It was paid for by your insurance. You checked it and you became slim. Now you're slim, Cal. And your friends at the poker game stop saying, are you eating yourself to an early grave, Jcal? And they start mocking you, hey, you're five, eight and a half and you're £213. I was shamed. I didn't have a solution. The food noise was overwhelming for me. I correlated eating food with success because I Grew up poor, middle class, lower middle class. And I just thought, hey, the second I can get calories and I can order an appetizer and dessert at a restaurant and maybe even get a side, okay, I've made it. And you know What? I spent 20 years just enjoying that privilege of having the ability to order the foie gras to get the white truffle supplement. You know what happened? I gained 2 pounds a year for 20 years. Yeah, I was 43 pounds overweight then. I lost 43 pounds. Thanks to RO Company and the Magic of GLPs. They'll check for you right now if your insurance covers it. And if your insurance doesn't cover it.
- [47:16]
B
Yeah, that's right.
- [47:17]
A
You can get it for a pretty amazing, stunningly low price. When I started on this journey four years ago, when Ozempic was off label for weight loss, it was four and a half years ago, it was $2,000 a month. Now you can get into it for low hundreds. In other words, why wouldn't you?
- [47:35]
B
No more excuses. Exactly. So visit RO and use their insurance checker. You just submit your insurance card, they do the rest. No paperwork, no hassle. And around 50% of ROE members get their GLP1s covered. So go to RO TWST for your free insurance check.
- [47:52]
A
Who do we have next?
- [47:53]
B
Father, daughter entrepreneurial team for you to meet here. Jason, this is Pete and Maddie Reese. They've created Bisbee, which is. It's sort of. You tell Bisbee what company you want to start and Bisbee takes care of the rest. Maddie and Pete, thanks for joining us.
- [48:10]
A
Wow, look at this. Father and daughter. I love this.
- [48:13]
G
Great to be here. Yes. Yeah.
- [48:16]
A
So show us what you built.
- [48:17]
G
Yeah. Amazing that it's been, I don't know how many, 25 years ago she was born, but yes, we've been working together for a number of years and this is our latest project and we're super excited about. We're claw pilled like you are.
- [48:29]
A
You're claw pilled. Okay, show us what you built. Yeah.
- [48:31]
G
So this is Bisbee.
- [48:33]
D
As.
- [48:33]
G
As Lon said, you pretty much. The concept is you type the idea for your business in the box and you hit start and then you go through a procedure, a chat with Bisbee. And this is an agent that will kind of walk you through, you know, a process of trying to decide, you know, if this is good business, trying to come up with a naming idea for it, checking if the domains are available, even goes through logo iterations for you, and then you can go back and forth with it and kind of iterate on that. And then eventually when you sign off on the logo, then it'll show you a branding package and then it will pretty much whole brand. This, this happens within minutes, by the way. This is.
- [49:25]
A
So this is a startup consultant in a box. This is an incubator in a box as a way to think about it. Mattie.
- [49:31]
H
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So kind of our target audience is people who will become small, medium business owners. So we are targeting people who do not currently have an existing business. And our thesis really is that AI job loss or AI related job loss is going to be a massive deal even, even this year, but especially in 2027. And we want to provide a solution to that. We want to provide a way for these people who don't have a way back into the traditional workforce to start something for themselves and be able to make money and live their lives.
- [50:08]
A
This is a great idea, Matti, because we have a concept which is surplus. And as entrepreneurs, when you see a surplus in the world, that can be an opportunity. Now it obviously sucks to lose your job or get laid off, but then a cognitive surplus appears. Smart person. They were working at block, they were working at Microsoft, they were working at Amazon. They get hit by layoffs. They got two or three friends they worked with. They need to figure out, hey, where am I going to get started here? Or maybe somebody's a stay at home parent and they get back into the workforce, they need a place to start and so this is the place for them to start that journey. What is your business then? Because obviously the criticism or the challenge you'll get from the venture community if you decide to go that way. And that's but one way to do it is how is it different than just being a rapper? How is it better than just using Claude directly? So have you given that some thought, Maddie?
- [51:08]
H
Oh, yeah, definitely. We've built a lot on top of it. So obviously the basis is kind of open. But there have been, we've integrated a ton of different things. We built a lot of custom skills. We support over 350 plus businesses right now or different types of businesses.
- [51:26]
A
Oh, wow.
- [51:27]
H
And everything is customized for that individual business type. With the amount of things that we've built on top of it, we, we're feeling pretty good.
- [51:36]
A
Yeah.
- [51:38]
B
I was just gonna say, Jason, one thing we should, we should add after they've sort of the funnel on this is very clever. I think after they've kind of shown you all the graphics and the logo and like, hey, this could be a real business. Here's what it would look like. Then they hit you with. You want a team of AI agents to help you run the business. Do we just need your credit card? Like, that's the next. That's the next step. You sort of get open claw assistance to help you run the business now that you've launched it.
- [52:03]
G
Yeah, that's the real product.
- [52:04]
C
Yeah.
- [52:05]
G
So it's the team of agents that actually do the business for you. As a new entrepreneur, you use your phone to run your whole business. Like, like many of us are doing with our open cause. The team takes care of all the messy business stuff on the back end that many of these people are not accustomed to and have no interest in getting involved with. They simply get to do what they do. Maybe deliver the service. Maybe it's a in person thing or maybe it's something they do over the computer. But the. The team at Bisbee, their agent team takes care of everything in the background and they just.
- [52:39]
B
They just collect the checks.
- [52:40]
A
Fantastic. We wish you great success with this. Where can people learn more, Maddie? Where can people learn more and engage this new product and service? Yes.
- [52:50]
H
So we are at Bisbee AI, and that is B I Z Z B Y AI.
- [52:55]
A
All right, Bizbee AI. Give it a try. What do you got to lose? Start a business. Yeah. You got to be resilient. And what's it like to work with your dad, Matty?
- [53:08]
H
It's incredible. I mean, we work together a lot, so I'm very lucky to be able to have. Both of my parents are entrepreneurs. I grew up in an entrepreneurial household. It's all I've known growing up. And I just feel so lucky to have grown up in that kind of.
- [53:27]
A
Do you have siblings?
- [53:29]
H
I do. I have two siblings, two little sisters. One of them is actually our co founder. She's kind of in charge of our growth and content. And then the other one is 16
- [53:40]
A
and she's got it. Got it. And your dad doesn't have favorites, but I can see right now you if there was a favorite. Maddie, I think you might be winning right now because every dad's dream, I can tell you as a girl dad as well, Pete, I have three daughters. I'm always like, who's gonna come be Khaleesi and run launch and this week in startups. And like, one of them's like, no interest. The other one's like, very interested. The other one's like, I wanna work with sharks. I'm like, that's fantastic. You go work with sharks, you could be an influential work of fashion. But I got one of them who wants to do business with me.
- [54:14]
B
It really is a dream come true.
- [54:15]
A
Yeah, it is kind of a dream come true, isn't it? Yeah. To get to work with your daughter.
- [54:19]
G
Yep.
- [54:20]
A
All right, well done. Pete and Matty wish you great success with the company.
- [54:24]
B
Yeah. Thanks for being here. Thanks for doing it. First of all, Jason, you sent me this clip on TikTok. I don't know if you remember this. I do want to take a look at this Bob Dylan clip that you said because I think it's really fascinating. This was Bob Dylan from a 1986 interview in Hamilton, Ontario for a BBC documentary. He was making the film Hearts of Fire. But some pretty. Some prescient comments, I think, about computing AI and. And collaborating on art with machines. Here's a look.
- [54:54]
F
You could have your own little band, like a one. A one man band.
- [54:57]
A
Yeah.
- [54:57]
B
With these machines.
- [54:58]
A
What year is this?
- [54:59]
B
This was 1986.
- [55:02]
F
That type of music doesn't have any roots and it doesn't have any foundation to it.
- [55:07]
A
There's the downside.
- [55:09]
B
Yeah. I think that's the sort of key, is insight that. That Bob makes here is like 40 years.
- [55:15]
A
Okay, we can stop here. This is incredible.
- [55:19]
B
You can mimic music, but it doesn't. It lacks.
- [55:22]
A
It's not grounded soul. Yeah. So this is, I think, really important. He's always ahead of the curve, speaking with people ahead of the curve. He's always been ahead of the curve, but he's always, you know, and had these great insights. But he was always very obsessed with technically understanding the nature of songs. And he had a great show on Sirius XM for a while that I used to listen to and I forget the name of it, but on this show he would talk about songs and what made them great.
- [55:56]
B
If you are Theme Time Radio Hour.
- [55:58]
A
It was called Theme Time Radio Hour. And, you know, I don't think it's on the air anymore. And people who were involved in this, who made clips for it, et cetera, they never actually were in the room with Dylan, like radio show. He kind of asked them questions and they, you know, they cut around him or whatever, but he did an incredible job of picking specific songs. So I think that's going to be one of my recommendations for you. If you want to go down the Bob Dylan rabbit hole. Like my pal Timothy Chalamet. My pal. We're both Knicks fans. I met him once.
- [56:28]
B
You're a good buddy.
- [56:29]
A
Yeah, I met him twice, actually. But really, really, really you know, great actor and really a true fan because it was when I talked to. One of the two times I talked to Timothee Chalamet, who obviously did the Dylan movie and was fantastic. I asked him about the 80s and if he ever got into that. And he was literally telling me specific songs from Infidels and other albums and Jokerman. And we had a really interesting.
- [56:53]
B
He goes deep. He got really good at ping pong too for Marty Supreme. He goes deep. He gets serious.
- [56:58]
A
So I'll add two here. I'm going to add two. There's a very famous Pen and Baker documentary, Don't Look Back.
- [57:06]
B
Sure.
- [57:06]
A
That's table stakes. But then there's two by Scorsese, who as a great or tour appreciated Dylan. No direction home 2005, man, no direction. Incredible documentary. And so if you were looking for something to do this weekend, I would go watch Don't Look Back, no Direction Home. And then my personal favorite was, you know, when Dylan came out of the 60s and really wanted to kind of do something that he enjoyed, he did something called the Rolling Thunder Review.
- [57:38]
B
Yes.
- [57:39]
A
And this was a tour where he was in like a van and like driving around. This is Dylan coming out of the height of people's obsession with him. Right. And you'll know this because he was wearing white. Is that kabuki makeup, cup and cake
- [57:53]
B
makeup on his face? Yeah, yeah.
- [57:55]
A
White, which he found out about because his violinist, who he had. I don't know if it was romantic or not, but he had a bit of an obsession with, was somehow involved with Kiss, who had also put the white makeup on.
- [58:11]
B
Sure.
- [58:11]
A
And my favorite version of all time of Tangled up in Blue and a number of other songs come from that Rolling Thunder Review period and that scorsese bookend documentary 2019.
- [58:25]
B
It's sort of a documentary. It's, it's. It's a fictionalized. It's very, it's very Dylan. It's like a fake documentary. It's like about 60, 70% of the information is accurate. But then they add in a bunch of like not accurate stuff for fun. So like all the Sharon Stone stuff, like she. That's all made up but like that's a very Dylan thing to do. Like obscure, combined truth and lies. So you're not sure what you can really believe.
- [58:49]
A
Just creating mythology. Right. I guess would be the. The way to say about it. So this is great. We went down a little rabbit hole here. But a great set of Dylan documentaries for you and what else you got for us? So I definitely Heading into the weekend,
- [59:05]
B
three quick things I want to mention. First, I'm really enjoying this. It's a little cheesy. It's a Civil War scripted miniseries on prime video called the Gray House. Kevin Costner and Morgan Freeman, both executive producers on it, written in part by John Sayles, the legendary filmmaker John Sales, and then Roland Joffe, who, who directed that, that De Niro movie, the Mission. Bunch of other people.
- [59:27]
A
The Mission, my favorite film, one of my top five films.
- [59:30]
B
That director made this. He directed every episode. It's an eight episode miniseries. It's about Union spies. It's about these Southern women living in the Confederacy who were getting messages to the north, to the Union army. Based on what they were here. They were living in Richmond. They were part of society. So they, they knew Jefferson Davis's wife. They were in touch with the servants who worked in Jefferson Davis's house, which was the Gray House instead of the White House. They had the Gray House. And so it's sort of loosely based on a true story, but it's, it's this very kind of like old school. I'm enjoying it. It reminds me a lot of like 70s and 80s TV miniseries, like from the Lonesome Dove or the Roots era, when those were like these big events and they'd have battle scenes or even like Gettysburg. That one, it feels like that where it's a little hokey, it's a little throwback, but very, very well done, very well acted, big epic battle scenes and stuff. I'm really enjoying it. So that's on Amazon. All eight episodes are up on Prime Video right now.
- [60:29]
A
And by the way, that was Barry Diller, the media executive.
- [60:33]
B
Yes.
- [60:34]
A
He's the one who created Roots and these movies of the week and this incredible genre, which I think Shogun was part of.
- [60:41]
B
Sure, exactly. It feels to me, that's what this feels like, where it's very hard on its sleeve. It's very sincere.
- [60:47]
A
It's.
- [60:48]
B
It's a little, it's a little throwback, it's a little cheesy. I guess you would say for, for, I think modern viewers would be like, what is, like, what is this? A little, little, you know, old school? But, but if you grew up on those kinds of TV miniseries, I think you feel right at home. It's very assured storytelling, very confident. It looks great. There's a lot of like, big recreations of battle scenes and it looks really cool. They, they did a good job with it.
- [61:10]
A
He actually did a memoir too. Who knew?
- [61:13]
B
Oh, right, Barry Diller.
- [61:14]
A
Yeah. I may have talked about on social media before. But this is my favorite biography of the last year or so. Who knew. And he talks about his personal life, his marriage to Diane von Furstenberg.
- [61:26]
B
Furstenberg, yeah.
- [61:27]
A
And you know, being quietly closeted and his struggles with that, but then doing QVC and you know, again, USA Network all the way to iac.
- [61:39]
B
One of the real legendary executives of that whole, the cable tv.
- [61:43]
A
Sort of the last, kind of the last of a generation there.
- [61:47]
B
Yeah.
- [61:47]
A
And still in the game, which. And Dara Khosrowshahi worked for him, the CEO of Uber. So there's a whole generation of CEOs who cut their teeth working for Barry Diller, who cut his teeth working for, you know, the series of executives before that. Right. In this 70s and 80s. Who knew. Great Barry Diller biography. There's one there you go for you for the weekend. What else you got, Lon?
- [62:13]
B
Up next. This is on Disney right now, I think Hulu probably as well. It's a National Geographic docuseries. Incas the Rise and Fall. I went to Peru many years ago, visited some of the sites. I've been really enjoying it. It's just a really well done sort of overview. There's me at Machu Picchu from my Peruvian trip. So I couldn't resist checking out a four part Incan documentary. And it does a really good job. Like it digs into, I feel like we hear about these amazing empires in like South America or the Caribbean or the North America, but you don't really dig into their history. Like it was this king and then they expanded this way. And this does a really good job of using what we know about Incan culture because they didn't have a written language. So we're sort of still piecing it together archeologically and anthropologically. But it's really interesting.
- [63:01]
A
Well, and people don't know, you say Inca, you think of Machu Picchu, but they created, you know, a series of networks of roads, 25,000 of them, including bridges over crazy gorges.
- [63:15]
B
The Inca Trail.
- [63:17]
A
The Inca Trail. And this empire went, I don't know, I think 20 thousands of miles, kind of the spine of South America. And I've never, I mean, I just have a cursory knowledge of this. I'm going to watch this with my kids. And obviously that all ended in the.
- [63:34]
B
The Conquistadors.
- [63:35]
A
15th 16th century.
- [63:36]
B
Yes. It was Pizarro. Pizarro and his crew landed in Peru. They set up shop in Lima on the coast and then they proceeded to conquer the Incan empire. We have a second photo of me in Ollantaytambo. This was the 1inCan site. If we could pull it up. It's a fortress. That's me in the distance there. This is the only place where the Incans actually won a battle against the Spanish.
- [64:00]
A
Because they were Spanish, had cannons, they.
- [64:01]
B
Spanish had a lot of advanced weaponry. They had, they had sailed there. And so they, they conquered a gunshirt. You could still in Cusco today, which was the Incan capital that the Spanish conquered. You could see they built their cathedrals right on top of the Incan temple. So you could see that it's Incan and the foundation and then it's like a cathedral above. An amazing place. If you ever get a chance to visit Peru, folks.
- [64:23]
A
All right, there you have it, folks. One last thing.
- [64:25]
B
I want to tip people off and you as well, Jason. On Sunday on Disney another National Geographic documentary is arriving. It's called Ghost Elephants. But here's the interesting thing about it. Directed and narrated by Werner Herzog. Got a trailer. It's about a South African conservationist and botanist, Dr. Steve Boies. He's in Angola tracking a mysterious, previously undiscovered species of elephant. They have not really done a good job of promoting this. I feel like people do not know this is happening on Sunday. But Sunday on Disney, you can go watch a new Werner Herzog nature documentary. We got a bit of the show.
- [64:59]
A
Wait. He is incredible. His voiceover and his performance, vocal performance is always extraordinary. You know, everybody loves when I tell them about whatever gadget I'm buying. You know me, I got a very heavy Amazon finger. My trigger for Amazon, very high. Was dealing with a bit of an issue around the house. Two of the daughters get into audiobooks, the 10 year olds. And then another daughter is. She's in her music phase. So I got three kids running around with over the air, headphones, bit of a problem because you say, hey, it's dinner time. It's no response, right? And then everybody's kind of zoned out. And that's okay with me. I love the fact that people, you know, experience audiobooks. I'm really excited that my young girls are getting into that early and I'm really excited that my daughter and I share music and we talk about Queen and we talk about Bob Dylan and we talk about Dire Straits, the classics. She loves Bowie. I feel like I'm doing my job. So I had to find a solution for this problem. And there is a company called shokz S H O K Z And I think I may have seen Bill Gurley wearing these years ago. These are bone conducting headphones and they go over your ear and they have one called Open Run Pro 2. And you can get like a small size. You put this over your kid's ears and people use this for sports mainly because if you're in the gym, you don't have to wear something bulky. But the sound is incredible. It does. You don't have to use the bone conducting. You probably won't use the bone conducting now. You'll just listen to it through the speakers. But you can. And now when somebody's on the swing listening to some music or somebody's in their room listening to an audiobook and I say, hey, it's dinner time. Or I come in and start talking to them, they can hear me and they can pause the music, et cetera. And I much prefer the open air headphones. If we're traveling, obviously on an airplane. I'm not sure how these will perform compared to the noise canceling ones. But this has been a nice for me when I'm hiking and working out as well, going around the ranch, I have to be aware of my surroundings at all times.
- [67:02]
B
Yeah, you don't always want it to be completely immersive.
- [67:06]
A
When I'm at my desk, I will wear my focal $5,000 Utopia headphones and I'll get into. I've been listening to some Coltrane, man. Holy cow, man. I mean, I guess I'm going into my jazz phase now, but I listen to some Miles Davis from Coltrane and it is amazing on those headphones. But for a podcast, I'm gonna say these are the best you can do. Another amazing twist. Monday, Wednesday, Friday we'll be back.
- [67:29]
B
Next week we'll be back.
- [67:30]
A
And on Wednesday we get a double drop. You get your double drop. You get this week in AI and you get this week in startups on a Wednesday, on a Friday you also get a double drop. You get your this week in startups and you get your all in for the weekend. So you got the double drop days Wednesday And Friday for JCal and Monday we just catch up on what's going on. Alex will be here Monday on with me on Wednesday and Fridays. The all in crew on Thursday. Thursday and obviously I do the roundtable for this week in AI. We had a spectacular one. If you can do me a favor. This week in AI, AI. We're just waking up the channel now. Thank you to our partner PayPal who underwrote the show for the first year that was really gracious of them and really savvy move because the show is off to an amazing start. 3. Think of it as like a roundtable. Like, all in three amazing CEOs and me, the world's greatest moderator, just going deep, deep, deep on the week's AI News. AI AI only.
- [68:23]
B
There it is.
- [68:24]
A
There it is. We'll see you next time. Bye. Bye.
- [68:26]
B
Bye.