The $60 billion resource hiding in space, and the start trying to mine it (feat. Matt Gialich, Astroforge) | E2268

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Wispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai/twist Circle - http://circle.so/twist Deel - http://deel.com/twist Today's show: AstroForge is building low-cost, replicable spacecraft to mine platinum group metals from near-Earth asteroids — a $60 billion annual market for materials that are running out on Earth. Founder and CEO Matt Gialich joins the show to talk about the company's ambitious mission, what went wrong on their first two flights, and why Mission 3 could still change everything. PLUS Sam Dare from Templar stops by to talk about training AI models on a decentralized blockchain, and why it's so much cheaper and more efficient than the conventional "data center full of GPUs" method. AND a demo of OpenOats from creator Yazin Alirhayim of his open source Granola alternative. Astroforge: https://www.astroforge.com/ Templar: https://www.tplr.ai/ Epoch AI decentralized training post: https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-far-can-decentralized-training-over-the-internet-scale OpenOats on Github: https://github.com/yazinsai/OpenOats Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 0:59 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 3:05 We aplaud Plaud! 3:18 Astroforge is mining… asteroids?! 6:11 How creating an abundance of Platinum will impact Humanity! 9:56 Wispr Flow: Stop typing. Dictate with Wispr Flow and send clean, final-draft writing in seconds. Visit https://wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today. 21:16 Circle: The easiest way to build a home for your community, events, and courses — all under your own brand. TWiST listeners get $1,000 off the Circle Plus Plan by going to https://circle.so/twist. 22:01 How Astroforge uses capitalism to unlock abundance 24:35 J-Cal subscribed to… A socialist magazine? 26:19 Sam Dare of Templar joins the show! 27:47 What is TAO doing that's uniquely different from Bitcoin 30:15 What is the incentive mechanism that Templar uses? 30:44 Deel - Founders scale faster on Deel. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone anywhere, get visas handled fast, and get back to building. Visit https://deel.com/twist to learn more. 37:49 How much does it cost to run templar's model? 45:16 Can decentralized training over the internet scale? https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/how-far-can-decentralized-training-over-the-internet-scale 47:16 Jason addresses his tao investment 48:48 Why brand is the moat for startups 49:47 When will a better, more exciting version of Bitcoin, can come along? 52:20 Yazin of OpenGranola Joins the show 53:36 How OpenGranola has local LLM's taking notes for you and giving you real time insights in your meeting! 1:01:45 Jason's callout for a sidebar that shows all inputs from agents 1:13:50 The economics of the new harry potter series and HBO/ Warner Brothers 1:23:33 Why Jason wants government surveillance on Disney adults… Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's Friday. That means Lon Harris is here with me. And at the end of the show, we will do off-duty with Lon. Everybody loves that segment where Lon takes us off-duty and we share what we're buying, what we're consuming, what we're watching.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Deal. Founders ship faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit deal.com/twist to learn more. Circle. Circle gives you everything you need to build and scale your community-led business. Twist listeners get $1,000 off the Circle Plus plan at circle.sotwist. And Whisperflow. Stop typing. Dictate with Whisperflow and send clean, final draft writing in seconds. Visit wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today. That's W I S P R flow.ai/twist.

• 0:59Jason Calacanis?

  Let me just start the show by saying I love Plod.

• 1:03Speaker 02

  You love Plod.

• 1:04Jason Calacanis?

  I'm using my Plod pen right now to record this very conversation. Why? You got, oh, you have yours still? Did you activate yet?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. No, it's running. It's my Plod is, my Plod goes all day.

• 1:14Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, and I have mine running now and I just, you know, it's got the red light, so I'm being privacy first. And, you know, I only use it when people know I'm using it. But this is the interesting thing. You can wear the Plod pen like you're wearing it, or you can wear it on your wrist. Another great way to wear it. And what I do with this is when I'm hiking around the ranch or I have a moment, Plod, take a memo. Action item. We need to move two of our researchers into the paid newsletter that we're doing. Please have Lon pick his number one and two, even though that's super uncomfortable to ask in front of everybody, the one and two. Which is why you didn't answer it.

• 1:52Speaker 02

  I sent you my one and two picks privately. I don't like to pick favorites in front of people.

• 1:56Jason Calacanis?

  I like to create a little bit of like, who's ready for this? Anyway, that's my management style, but Plaud is amazing. And what it does is it creates a summary and then you can share that summary.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:08Jason Calacanis?

  Then they have like 20 different, I don't know, maybe it's hundreds, but I have like 20 really nice templates I use, like full accurate transcript. It learns who Lon is in my life. It learns who Alex is. It knows them. So then for all time for it, I don't have to mention that. It creates a mind map of the conversation we have when we have a strategy meeting, all this great stuff, and then one click share. Why is it better than using your phone? Oh my God, your phone's microphone stinks. And you have to though clumsily go through your phone as opposed to beep, one button, you're ready to go.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  It's the contextual. It understands the conversation and really thinks about how to organize it for you. That's the really.

• 2:44Jason Calacanis?

  What's the offer? What's the offer? We have an offer?

• 2:47Speaker 02

  We do have an offer, Jason, of course. So you can check it out at plaud.ai/twist. And if you use the code TWIST, they're going to give you 10% off your new Plaud PIN. That's P L A U D dot A I slash twist.

• 3:00Jason Calacanis?

  And please, if you do have a good experience with it, share it on social and tell everybody you found out about it on this week in startups on Twist.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  We appreciate it, please.

• 3:08Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's get started. We did our first thank you to our sponsors, but we've got a really great first guest. I'm excited about this one.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  I'm excited. I saw, I saw some of their tweets going by. I read a little bit about the startup and I immediately pinged the team like, let's, let's get these guys on. I want, I want to learn more about this. So we've got Matt Galich. He's the CEO and co-founder of Astroforge. They are a mining startup. They're developing spacecraft to go prospect and extract platinum group metals or PGMs from near earth asteroids, Jason. That's the plan.

• 3:44Jason Calacanis?

  So literally, science fiction is reality. Matt, welcome.

• 3:49Speaker 02

  There's a, there's a very famous.

• 3:50Jason Calacanis?

  Have you been on the program before, Matt, or is this your first?

• 3:51Speaker 03

  I talked to you maybe three years ago.

• 3:54Jason Calacanis?

  I remember, yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, we first launched before we had ever launched our first spacecraft.

• 3:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So congratulations. Where are you at with mining asteroids?

• 4:05Speaker 03

  Look, this is a really hard thing to do. I mean, we are, we're the first commercial company that really wants to go outside of the Earth-Moon system and explore the solar system. Right? It's a totally big swing on space. We've seen a lot of, a lot of venture dollars go into space, a lot of companies start up into space, and we're kind of that next step in what you can go do. Right now, we're building Deep Space Two. It's our next spacecraft. It's a 200-kilogram spacecraft that'll launch later this year on a Falcon 9 that goes to the moon, and it'll attempt to go out and potentially land on an asteroid.

• 4:36Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  I want to jump in here. I was doing a little research on this. When you say "land on an asteroid," are we talking about like, the rocket, like, ship comes down like in the sci-fi, and it lands on the surface? It's more, is there's, it's sort of like a docking procedure, like with the International Space Station, correct?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  It's much more like a docking procedure. I mean, we have to kind of like, what, what the movies tell you and what's actually out there are two very different things, right? We go to what are called near-Earth asteroids. They're pretty close to the planet. The one we're targeting right now is about 10 million miles away, and these asteroids are around 200 meters in diameter. So, in the terms of space, these are very, very small things in space that we want to go land on. Now, we're also looking for a very specific type of asteroid. We're looking for an asteroid called a metal asteroid, and because of that, these asteroids are about 70% iron, somewhere in that range, iron-nickel, which means they're magnetic. So, the way we land on them is simply with magnets. We stick to the asteroids.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Because Armageddon, which is my big, you know, cultural point for, for landing on an asteroid, it's like, they're, they're, they're crashing into the surface, Steve Buscemi's docking back and forth, but it's really, it's, it's more delicate than that.

• 5:41Jason Calacanis?

  No Steve Buscemi in this analogy. These are unmanned, you land, you take a sample, and then eventually, Matt, am I correct that you want to build like a more semi-permanent installation on one of those when it's in orbit, or like, what is the window for you to actually? Drill into an asteroid consistently and then get it back to Earth, right? Because that's the other piece. You want to get these back to Earth? Or do you want to use it for facilitating manufacturing in space?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  The problem right now is on the planet. The problem right now is not in space. While we'd love to supply the in-space economy, currently, right now, there isn't an in-space economy, right? I'm a firm believer that there is still a mass problem to space. Now, Elon has done tremendous things to lower the price of mass to get into the solar system. That all being said, you're still charged by the kilogram. That is still the underlying thing you pay for. So, building a small craft that can go do this is where we see the sweet spot to be. We also think about this in volume, Jake Al. So, it's not about can you build one huge ship that goes and does this? It's can you make hundreds, if not thousands of them, that are going to go out to these asteroids, mine them, and bring it back to Earth? But, look, guys, we got one planet. We got one habitable planet in the solar system as of today. We got to protect it. And mining is one of the most destructive things we do on this planet.

• 6:57Speaker 03

  There's no other way to have our way of life unless we go out in the cosmos and mine it for its resources.

• 7:01Jason Calacanis?

  Walk us through this video we're seeing here.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  I think one thing that is always surprising to people, we talk about asteroids, everybody says like, "Oh, that's sci-fi. You can't mine an asteroid." This is literally a NASA mission that went out and mined an asteroid. This is Ben, it was run by a guy named Dante Loretta, worked on it for 22 years. He's an advisor to us. And this went out to a different type of asteroid than we want to go to and took a sample of it and brought it back to Earth. The sample returned about, I think about a year and a half ago. A couple of members of the team are on our staff here. And they got a whole bunch of information about this asteroid. What's super important about that mission to us, though, is it updated the models for how we look at asteroids. So, it helped us understand the types that are in the solar system.

• 7:38Jason Calacanis?

  And what are we seeing here? What is that machine or satellite? Is that your actual miner that we see there?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  What you're seeing here is maybe, look, I was in elementary school in the 90s. I don't know about all the listeners, right? But in the 90s, we heard about this asteroid belt. And it's where all the asteroids were. Nobody had ever discovered any asteroids close to the Earth. In fact, at the turn of the century, there was about seven asteroids that were classified as near-Earth asteroids. As of today, we have over 600,000 of them cataloged. So, what I'm actually showing you here is that what you were told 20 years ago was very different. There's a lot of objects really close to our home that we can go mine. And that makes this a much shorter mission and, I think, a much more viable mission to go do.

• 8:16Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Amazing. And so, what does the actual miner look like? Do we have the actual miner and what it looks like and what it actually does? Like... Explain that to us.

• 8:29Speaker 03

  There is a picture on Twitter that we just put up. Yeah, here it is of one of the first phases of mining. Now, mining is one of the biggest IP things we have at the company. But I'll tell you guys in short how this works. It's a pretty simple way to think about it. We use directed energy, i.e. lasers, to remove material from the asteroid. And then we sort it out with magnetism. Platinum group metals are not magnetic. Iron nickel are. And it's a very simple way to think about sorting out the material to bring it back. The spacecraft we have is designed to bring back up to 1,000 kilograms of material, which in today's dollars, now this stuff, look, it's a commodity. It fluctuates all the time. As of today, it's worth about $105 million per mission. So that's kind of the upper cost target. We got to be below to make this work. And the whole point of the company, J K L, is how do we turn that little knob of risk? Right?

• 9:12Speaker 03

  How far can we turn that knob of risk to lower the cost to get the cheapest spacecraft in space to go mine that asteroid and go out? Now, Deep Space Two, in total, including the launch, is going to cost about $10.4 million. That's a very different price point than anybody's ever tried to go on a solar system with before.

• 9:28Jason Calacanis?

  So 10 million investment permission with a potential return of a hundy. That's a lot. Now, if you just hit it, you know, being an angel investor and doing this for a living or a poker player, hey, you just need to have this happen one out of every 10 times in order for you to break even. So does that mean it's a sure thing at this point? Do you feel confident it's a sure thing that you'll be able to get one in 10 back? I want to tell you about a product I'm obsessed with and everyone in tech seems to be obsessed with. It's called Wispr Flow. W I S P R Flow. You set it up and then you hit a key combination and you talk and it transcribes what you say.

• 10:10Jason Calacanis?

  It does it more accurately and quicker and across all your platforms than any other speech to text software I've ever used. When you communicate all day long, like I do, even as a fast typist, it is going to be three, four, five times faster than you can type. And because it fixes all of your ums and your ahs and your mistakes and cleans it up, all of the punctuation, all of the filler and unnecessary words being removed in real time, Wispr Flow. is already available everywhere. When I'm using it in Superhuman, Gmail, Slack, Google Docs, I use it everywhere. The messages sound like I wrote them. We're moving into a world where agents are going to make us 100 times more efficient. Now, you add Whisperflow, making

• 10:54Jason Calacanis?

  you 5, 10, 20 times more efficient. Visit wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today. This product's amazing. That's W I S P R F L O W dot A I slash twist. I've been using this product for six months. It is extraordinary.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  I'd be lying to you if I said I was 100% confident we can do this. I'm a founder with a thesis that we can get out into the universe for $10 million and go mine an asteroid. And as soon as I'm 100% confident, that means I'm not paying attention to all the things that can go wrong. Like, this is a very technical company and a very technical job as CEO to go run and figure out if we can do this. And it's kind of what we spend all our time doing, Jake. I mean, like, it is really from, I think Elon showed us the way here of be one of the best engineers on the team that can go develop these products. You have to know this in and out of how we're going to go do this. And that's what I spend all my time doing.

• 11:42Jason Calacanis?

  Remind us again, when does this mining mission occur? And are we going to get to watch it live? I mean, one of the things I've been amazed with over the years is that Elon has really high fidelity video from all of these, you know, different missions now, like even the multiple stages. I'm not sure how he does that. I'm assuming Starlink is involved. I know they have like helicopters and drones, you know, doing the low earth or doing the atmosphere video. But take us into bringing the world into watching you do this. Is that a key part of this? And is that a key part of like, I think Elon's success with SpaceX is bringing humanity along for the ride through live streaming?

• 12:25Speaker 03

  I'm gonna be honest with you. I wish we could livestream at the asteroid. The answer is, we cannot. When we're at the asteroid, and the way we save money is very simple. We lower our data rate dramatically. So at the asteroid, the max we're talking to spacecraft at is about 400 bits per second. That is not a video stream quality at all, right? This is like barely being able to talk to the spacecraft. I mean, that's how you keep it cheap. What we do do, and what we did do with Odin, our last mission we launched, right, is we are full transparency. We livestream the entire control room, all of the data we see, anybody else can see. I mean, I believe in transparency up and down. In fact, when Odin failed, we wrote a ton of articles that are on our website. You can go read about it of exactly what happened and exactly where we got it wrong and how we plan on fixing it because at the end of the day, that's how you learn and get better at this and.

• 13:08Jason Calacanis?

  So what? Take us through that. The mission two was Odin.

• 13:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 13:11Jason Calacanis?

  Mission three is Vestri. When did?

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Research now.

• 13:15Jason Calacanis?

  Odin. Yeah. Odin happened in March 2024, right?

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Odin was February 27th, 2025, right? Last year. So about about 11 months ago was when we launched Odin. Odin was our first attempt to go out into deep space. It launched on IM2. So this is a rocket launch going to translunar injection, right? This goes to the moon. We leave from the Falcon and we slingshot around the moon out to the asteroid.

• 13:38Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  What happened on Odin, to be clear, Odin was a total pathfinder for us. It was the first commercial deep space mission ever attempted. We got the first license from the FCC to ever go into deep space as a purely commercial company with no government interest.

• 13:52Speaker 03

  And we had a failure right away. One of the failures that happened was is the solar panels did not deploy. So the spacecraft is in a very slow spin where we were not power positive. We were still able to talk to it. We were still able to communicate with it. In fact, we were still able to prove out a lot of the technical navigation philosophies we used on that mission. But at the end of the day, like, we didn't get to the asteroid, right? We didn't do good enough. We got to do better on the next one.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  I did think one thing that was interesting so far, the, you know, the two missions, neither of which went right so far, they were both like communication failures. It wasn't like the the craft exploded or spun out into the galaxy. It was like you kind of lost touch with it at some point.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  I think I do a shitty job explaining this. I try to explain it this way, like, the way you die as a human is your brain stops sending electrical signals. The cause of your death is cancer, heart attack, whatever, car accident, whatever that is, right? So like, communication will always be what it seems like. Odin communicated perfectly. We didn't have a communication problem on Odin. What we had on Odin was a power issue. So we weren't able to turn on the radios. That was why it manifested as a communication issue. So again, we proved out a lot on that mission, but we got to do better on deep space two.

• 14:55Jason Calacanis?

  And as a startup, how many swings at bat do you get? And and talk to me about the investors in the company. I think you've raised like 50 million bucks. How do they look at this, you know, and how do you communicate, hey, this is a, you know, pretty binary thing. Either it works or it doesn't. And I know Elon struggled with this in the early days of SpaceX. So take me through that struggle and communication with investors.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  I mean, it's hard. You need to have special people that are willing to jump aboard the ship and see the future with you, right? And really can take a deep look at the future. Now, I want to give a lot of credit to Elon for paving the way and showing investors that it's possible to have these outsized return if you're willing to take outside risk, right? But like, this is a hard thing to go pull off. We do have some amazing investors. I mean, Initialized Capital, Gary Tan is who led us seed round, right? And then we went through Y Combinator. 776 is a big investor in us. We have some massive angels that have really helped us get over the line. And being super transparent with the investors about what we're doing and the risks we're taking, I think is one of the things that we're really good at. Like, our investor monthly letters are giant documents that I write as a way to not only document what we're doing at the company, but to show people the progress we're making. It is all about incremental progress as you go

• 16:04Speaker 03

  here. I mean, guys, Elon failed three times with Falcon 1 before he got there with, with, with the fourth launch. This, we're going even farther and we're going after something even bigger. It's gonna be a rough road and you gotta kind of strap it and expect it.

• 16:17Jason Calacanis?

  Now, there are some materials that exist on asteroids that don't exist on Earth, or they're very rare on Earth. Am I correct?

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Not really, J. K. L. I'm gonna be very honest with you about this. The material we're going after is platinum group metals, right? So the six elements that make up platinum, iridium, you can go look them up and see what they all are. We don't have any of them in the continental United States. So not only is there a huge geological play here, and you've seen China, especially with the rarest, really flex their muscle here and ban us from having gallium and some of these other materials. I mean, Trump put out a huge executive order on minerals, right? We need mineral sovereignty as the US. There is no way to like, make this up or go get it. The minerals that we have discovered are way too deep in the ground for us to go mine.

• 17:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  The most economical play, though, is to go to space. And I think that's the big difference. This isn't necessarily a security of resources. I think this is a better economical advantage than opening a new platinum mine in South Africa would be.

• 17:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and these PGMs, that's the key. Those palladium, rohidosium, osmium. Osmium, beryllium, iridium, I believe. Yeah, I might have been a little tired in my chemistry classroom. I glazed over. You know. What, forty years ago? But but tell us about what they're used for here on Earth. And if you could at scale, you know, bring down, because I understand like one asteroid could have more than we have on Earth. And I don't know if that's true or not, but that was some of my cursor research when I.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, look, there's a lot of this stuff in space that we can go after. What is it used for? Every single thing that every VC invests in. How do we make computer chips? You make it with iridium crucibles to melt silicon. Like, this is used in every walk of your life. If you're looking at an LCD screen right now, an OLED screen, they have three of the six platinum group metals in it. We touch it every day across the board. It's in cancer therapies. It's also in how we limit emissions on your car. This stuff is just used worldwide. That's why it's a commodity, right? It's not like some special thing we're making up. It is a commodity metal that we want to go provide. Now, you asked a question that I can't answer, which is, hey, what if we actually change the supply and demand curves and we bring back a lot more? Like, what does the future look like?

• 18:29Speaker 03

  This has happened before. It happened in the 1800s with a metal called aluminum. Guys all know about this, right? Like, we found a new process to make aluminum. All of a sudden, it went from like the most baller shit you could have to we make airplanes out of it. It enables modern air travel. For some reason, they now make the iPhone out of it. A terrible decision, but different conversation. I hope there is a future like that that can be created with what we're doing by journeying out and unlocking the supply of platinum.

• 18:53Jason Calacanis?

  And that rhodium is incredibly expensive, yeah? Like, tens of thousands of dollars per ounce.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Iridium is incredibly expensive, but I think it's really important to have maybe a little bit more nuanced view on metals here.

• 19:06Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  The price that you sell a gram for, an ounce for, however you want to quantify it, isn't necessarily the best marker of what the use case could be from a business standpoint. You really got to pay attention to market cap. And I think this is where a lot of people in mining get this wrong. The largest market cap in the world is gold. The second largest market cap in the world is the platinum group metals. There has to be a huge supply here on earth that we can go into because the reality is the question we get asked all the time, which is very true. If we go find some new material on asteroid and bring it back, we destroy the market for that material. Right? There has to be a huge amount that can be there before we destroy the market. And with platinum group metals, there is. To give you guys a sense, it would take us about a hundred missions before we would screw up the price of platinum.

• 19:45Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So it's going to wind up being price competitive for you to collect this stuff if you succeed. And if you were to have like outlier success, you could actually change the market cap and how we look at these things. Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 03

  I mean, Jake, the best platinum group metal mine in the world in South Africa has 14% gross margins. I just told you a story, we could have 90% gross margins. That changes the way of how we go mine, right? That opens up a whole new future that we can all go enjoy where we have abundance. And I think, isn't that what every startup founder should be aiming for?

• 20:17Jason Calacanis?

  Absolutely. All right. Well, listen, we are going to be rooting for you. And what's the date again for the next one? So we can put it on our calendar and have you back on afterwards and share your learnings. And hopefully great success.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  On IM3 currently right now, scheduled for November of this year.

• 20:34Jason Calacanis?

  November of this year.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 20:36Jason Calacanis?

  Will it be Starship or it's going to be Falcon, you said?

• 20:38Speaker 03

  No, it's going to be a Falcon 9 that goes to the moon.

• 20:40Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So the Falcon 9s are incredibly consistent at this point.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Amazing.

• 20:44Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. They, they've got such an incredible track record now, hundreds of them. All right. So we will book you to come on in November and we will get the update on your amazing progress. I think this is like third time's going to be a charm.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  I hope so, guys. We need it.

• 20:58Speaker 02

  I feel good about it.

• 20:59Jason Calacanis?

  Incredible. I mean, it's literally like we're living in a science fiction novel.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, this one, when I was researching it last night, you're reading it like, I can't believe they're already do it. This sounds so purely theoretical. And that's what I assumed. I was like, oh, well, they're talking about in 10 years, maybe we could do that. It's like, they're already running missions. It's happening.

• 21:16Jason Calacanis?

  Circle is the best place on the internet to start growing your online community. There, I said it. You know why? Because I tried to find a community platform for my founder university and for my angel university programs, and we couldn't find one. After we'd started digging and digging, we found the perfect solution, circle.s. It has all the most amazing features, like you can put in a course, like you have a CRM, you can do email, you have chat rooms and message boards. It is amazing. Whether you're selling a course, or you're building a community based on a topic, or maybe you're starting a book club, maybe you're a coach, maybe you have a business, and maybe you want to build a community for everybody to get together and learn and share information. It's all inside of Circle. How do I know this? My team did a bake off. Once we started finding these platforms,

• 22:00Jason Calacanis?

  it was like a frankincite. All these different pieces, nobody had put them all together until Circle. And Circle's going to put it together for you. To get started, go to circle.s/twist and get $1,000 off the Circle Plus plan. That's circle.s/twist. This is the, you know, underappreciated thing about technology and capitalism, right? We're in a bit of an existential debate here in the United States over capitalism, over, you know, wealth disparity, everything. The truth is, when you set up, you know, a system like the United States, or we were talking about TAO subnets that are designed to be brutally capitalistic, what happens? You're basically in a competition to see

• 22:44Jason Calacanis?

  who can lower the price to the point that more unlocks happen. So in this case, what Elon did with lowering the price to get to space allows this company, you know, to Astroforge, to then build and stand on his shoulders. Now, Astroforge makes this work, then you have to say, well, what is the second order, which is what I tried to get to in our quick interview here. Is what's the second order impact? Okay, well, maybe the sovereignty of the United States, you know, versus I think most of these palladiums are in Russia, China, South Africa, etc.

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, South Africa and Russia are right now the world's two largest suppliers of these platinum group metals. So yeah, it totally changes your thinking to be like, we've built an entire world and civilization based on rhodium and iridium being very rare and you gotta go dig down in places you don't want to go to go get it. And what would change if all of a sudden it was like, now we can go out to space, grab a rock, laser it up and just fly the iridium right back to earth?

• 23:46Jason Calacanis?

  And so this is something important for all founders listening, you know, the better, cheaper, faster is kind of how we used to look at technology in the Wired 1.0 days, not the woke Wired magazine now that's anti-tech or like holding truths to power.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  The New York Times says it's not woke enough, Jason, just so you know. The New York Times says they're not even woke enough.

• 24:07Jason Calacanis?

  Everybody had this like little brouhaha and, you know, on Twitter in the last 48 hours over like Wired, you know, suddenly being the like resistance against tech, you know, okay, fine, hold truths to power, I get it.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  I think they found a niche, you know, like everybody needs a little voice, a niche now, just covering the big news of the day. As we've seen on this show, there's limited utility in it.

• 24:29Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and if you pick a side, you can get on the horseshoe, you know, the most extreme left or right or capitalistic or socialistic.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Oh, there's the tweet, you play into what the audience wants and then you give them the red meat that they want and they'll keep coming back to see what you have to say.

• 24:48Jason Calacanis?

  That's why I subscribe to Jacobian Magazine. This is the teen issue, indoctrinating teens into socialism.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, gotta be done.

• 24:59Jason Calacanis?

  And communism.

• 25:00Speaker 02

  Important work.

• 25:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, they are revolt-maxing and they've reason-filled. I like to-

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Oh, no, not revolt-maxing.

• 25:09Jason Calacanis?

  They are revolt-maxing. I just love understanding how this side of the aisle thinks, so I literally subscribe to it. And I listen to a couple of these magazines. You know, in that alternate world where the communists won, you wouldn't see this kind of, you certainly wouldn't see the wealth disparity because everybody would make the same amount of money. And then you also wouldn't see the massive progress we're making as a society when it comes to technology. If you're a founder, you can win by making a better product, a faster product, a cheaper product, a product that entertains people. It usually falls into one of the who's four categories.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:48Jason Calacanis?

  And you have to ask yourself, if your product is not informing or entertaining, you know, educating, informing, that area of like entertainment, making life better, cheaper, faster, you know, and increasing the fidelity of results, then you're probably not going to have a big business. And that's what they're betting on here. Great job. Good get, and we're rooting for them. So, well done. I like the first company already.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:14Jason Calacanis?

  This week in space, here we go.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  That was, we will have to do this week in space at some point. We've been talking so much, AI plus Tau was sort of one of our big themes for this quarter, this month. And so, we're continuing our chat with a whole bunch of different subnet owners from some of our favorite subnets. And up next, we've got Sam Dare. He's from Templar. Now, you actually talked about Templar on the All In Podcast with Jensen Huang, I believe just last week or two weeks ago.

• 26:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think that was last week.

• 26:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, Chamath brought it up during the discussion. These are the guys that have created Covenant 72B. That is their 72 billion parameter model that was built in a decentralized fashion over the computers of hundreds, thousands of different participants. So, let's bring on Sam and talk about it now.

• 27:01Jason Calacanis?

  I'm very excited about this. You know, I forgot how cheeky and fun the crypto community is. And I obviously, you know, I elected to sit it out for a while, but I was talking a year ago, Sam, with my friend Mark Jeffrey. Welcome to the program, Sam. I was talking to my friend Mark Jeffrey like a year ago. He's like deep in crypto. He was early into Bitcoin and everything. And he said, yeah, you got to check out Tau. I think like it would appeal to you. Your criticism of, you know, Bitcoin and some of these other crypto projects, ICOs, was that they didn't have customers. They weren't building value. It was all speculative store of value, money transfer, which, you know, money transfer and store of value, Sam, I think we would all agree, have some value in the world.

• 27:45Jason Calacanis?

  But Tau is doing something uniquely different. What is it that Tau is doing uniquely different? And then we'll get into what you're doing. But just big picture leveling up. Explain to the audience as best you can, what's unique about Tau versus, say, Bitcoin?

• 27:59Speaker 04

  That's an amazing question. So narratives matter. And for a very long time, like what the easier way to think about Tau and Bitcoin is Tau is a Bitcoin of AI. But I don't think that does it the just justice. And it imposes some constraints on a system that's like multi-dimensional. Because Bitcoin, so essentially invented Bitcoin to transfer value. It's evolved into many different things. It's still evolving now. We don't know its final form. But with Tau, we try to, okay, what is the, what are blockchains meant to do? What is the core of blockchain? Is it smart contracts? No.

• 28:44Speaker 04

  Is it privacy? No. Is it some funky execution environment? No. It is, can we mechanize trust? They are incentive machines. So what the founders of BitTenser did is, look, let's strip out everything from blockchains, all the noise, and let's take their core. What is it? Incentives. And let's blow it up a thousand, a thousand feet. So the only thing that matters is incentives. So that is the primary unit. In BitTensor, it's incentive. Now you understand how you can't really call it Bitcoin, because this is a multi-dimensional fractal. Like, how do you codify human behavior? So that is the problem BitTensor tries to solve. How do you strip away all the noise?

• 29:29Speaker 04

  How do you like, because the ultimate trustless systems, if not cryptography, is incentives. So what BitTensor gives you, it's really difficult because you could build anything with BitTensor. If you can't codify an incentive game, well, the units of production in BitTensor, they're subnets. Subnets are like magic factories, where you, as a subnet owner, you have this very brilliant but self-interested people. You need to convince them. No, no, no, you don't need to convince them. You need to force them to follow your rules and create this incentive landscape, which is just, it's a game. Like miners do this,

• 30:12Speaker 04

  miners do this, goods come out. But it's your job as a subnet architect to design a game that forces the miners, because miners are economically rational. They care not for your objective. They care about the money. But you need to keep taking away everything.

• 30:28Jason Calacanis?

  Great. So you created a rule set for Templar that does what? What is the incentive structure that you decided to create for your miners to then contribute in their own self-interest for you to solve some problem in the world? Walk us through it. We've got a brand new partner here at Twist, and as fate would have it, we love and use their product. If you need to hire, manage, pay, or equip your team members anywhere around the world, you need DEAL. D E E L. They're going to take care of all the annoying human resources tasks that you don't have time for: payroll, compliance, visas, and onboarding, so you can stay focused on achieving product-market fit, or scaling your business,

• 31:12Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:55Jason Calacanis?

  Also, I happen to be a shareholder in the company. I got very lucky. They acquired one of my startups and I am stoked. It's an amazing company.

• 32:03Speaker 04

  At a very high level, um, this is to successfully create an incentive mechanism. You need to be able to isolate what you want to improve. It's super, super important with Templar, we could say, okay. Every round we require miners to train over a data set. Yeah. Now, the miner that reduces the loss in that epoch the most. Yeah. So it means that you've contributed most, most of the training, you win the most money. That's what it is at a very simple thing. So you have like 70, 70 people competing that, okay, let me get the best grade in. Let me get the best grade, let me get the best rating. So they train really, really hard.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Now that is, that, that's a straw man, but it's the high level view of what we manage to achieve. Now we spend months trying to perfect it because, oh my God. Like the funniest thing is, so sorry, sorry, I, I relive in loads of past trauma. Shout out Noah.

• 33:05Jason Calacanis?

  I could see in your face.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 33:08Jason Calacanis?

  The memory.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Because, because it's really funny because you know, you spend a lot of time running simulations. When you start, the way you get hacked is just dumb things. But you know, it's very, it's very, it's very painful. It's very painful, but should you succeed? The results are absolutely amazing.

• 33:25Jason Calacanis?

  You asked people to contribute GPUs.

• 33:29Jason Calacanis?

  These are very high-end computers. This is like an Nvidia H100, I'm assuming. So you convince some number of people in the world who have access to one of those, either by renting it, or they own it themselves, they have it in a co-location facility, and you don't know who those miners are. It's permissionless to join. But you told them you have to have this specific type of hardware at this throughput to contribute, and then we're going to put a large language model, creation essentially, out to this distributed network of compute, and then pay you for the use of your GPU. Am I broad strokes explaining it correctly?

• 34:06Speaker 04

  No, no, it kind of, but there's an important nuance.

• 34:10Jason Calacanis?

  Please.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  We don't care what kind of GPUs you require. So what we do is we say, this is what we need. All we need to care about is we can validate your inputs are correct. Miners, so in bits, and so you lean into what I like to call emergence, where you design your validation, and you don't care what the miners are doing. I don't care if they're running it on Raspberry Pis or Toasters. As long as this gradient, I can prove that it's good. That's all I care about. So eventually, people gravitate towards like B200s, but the dominant strategy is, maybe a miner just rewrites our whole codebase so that I can run it on an A100.

• 34:54Speaker 04

  Those are the kind of things that properly structured incentives can drive.

• 34:59Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. This is a key piece. You know, I was just talking with the CEO, I think CoreWeave was explaining to me, hey, like, what's the lifespan of some of these A100s, H100s, etc.? And they were saying, well, after like five or six years, that's when we sell them for five years, six years, and then people will find uses for it, and this is the case. They might take an old piece of hardware and take the time to make the training job run on it. You don't care. How many, explain to us what you accomplished with this run, and this was the one I think Chamath brought up with Jensen, which, where were you when you found out he brought it up? Your phone must have blown up because I didn't know he was going to bring that up.

• 35:41Jason Calacanis?

  Obviously, I've been involved in BitTensor for just about a year now in terms of, you know, being a partner at Steelcore Capital and investing in it. But where were you when you found out? And then explain to us the training run you did.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  I was working and someone pinged me and I, I think I got a mini heart attack. I'm like, no, you can't die now. Wake up, like, wake up. So I think I really had a, like, I mean, it was amazing because before that, like, so just take a step back. Your criticisms of crypto are valid. For a very long time, all we have is nihilism, all we have is, you know, PvP extraction. So everyone, no, no one had hope in crypto anymore. And all of a sudden, we posted about a 72 billion parameters around and it caught fire. So I thought, you know what? This is the biggest thing because people are saying Templar, you know, finally validates not just BitTensor, but even the larger crypto, like finally a useful crypto. So that was good.

• 36:38Speaker 04

  For me, I believe in Bitcoin. It filled me. So when I came to BitTensor, I found the decentralized training. And the idea of decentralized training is humanity's last bastion. It's the final boss. But it's, when I started, it seemed like such a joke. And to have it finally, you know, to test it at scale. I mean, make no mistake, we're not delusional. We still have a very, very long way to go. But, you know, it's like, okay, it's a bit slow, but this thing could have legs. We've had it validated by, you know, different people from academia, Jack Clark from Anthropic, you know, because even if you look, so we've got mentioned by Jack Clark from Anthropic twice.

• 37:23Speaker 04

  Beginning, it's more skeptical. The second is less skeptical. And for me, it's like, yeah, yeah, it's less.

• 37:31Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so to, well, no, I should say, just to explain this, you know, there was a bit of a technical breakthrough here. You trained this 72 billion parameter model

• 37:44Jason Calacanis?

  across this tau subnet, subnet three, I think you are. And People as part of the Templar project solved.

• 37:56Jason Calacanis?

  And they ran local optimized steps, compressed and then shared the updates and then you put it all back together. And you basically trained a significant model, which a company like ChatGPT or DeepSeek or Kimmy. They would have spent a bunch of money using a bunch of computer hardware to do this. You did it. And how much did it cost you to build that model?

• 38:21Speaker 04

  The cost over the run is about two, about two, three billion. But again, you know, it's very, it's very important to be clear. It's not a frontier model. It's nowhere near. And you know, it's closer to Lama two, which is the frontier two years ago. So, you know, we're still a bit, we're still far off on the frontier, but we are moving so quickly. Because in the space of nine months, we've managed to go from 1.2 billion parameters to 72 billion. So it's more about the story of.

• 38:57Jason Calacanis?

  So the progress is significant. You're ramping up. When, and, and back to the cost, you know, the cost I'm interested in, you said two or three billion. I'm not sure.

• 39:06Speaker 04

  No, no, million.

• 39:08Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, two or three million dollars.

• 39:09Speaker 04

  You think, yes.

• 39:12Jason Calacanis?

  Two to three million dollars in tau was distributed to the miners. Explain what the cost was.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  So if we, if we take away team costs, which are negligible, the biggest cost is, um, the biggest cost is just running the miners. Now, the exact number is like how much we pay out to the people that were paying out, how much we pay out in admission. And it's, if we tally, it's about two to three million. But there were times when we had to roll back the, um, roll back the runs and whatnot. So that kind of made it that high, but we believe we can achieve better, far better economics than any.

• 39:50Jason Calacanis?

  And when you paid them, you paid them in subnet tokens or in tau? And explain that relationship that comes up over and over again.

• 39:57Speaker 04

  Okay, so, so, so, uh, you're gonna have to have a different podcast for, for that. Maybe just, you're gonna have to have, because it was sometimes, I don't understand it. But we, we have a supplement in gamma, which is the template supplement. So we paid it out to them. So out of it, you know, miners manage their economics, they manage their inventory, they take profits and they hold some. So that's, that's how it works.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  Got it. Uh, Lon, you had a question, go ahead. Oh, yeah, I, I mean, I just think what's interesting about, you know, like comparing, because obviously we're not decentralized training. We can't yet produce like an Opus four point six, like the very frontier. But what are the advantages of doing it this way, other than just, you know, obviously saving, saving costs? There's sort of like a political dimension to this too, like the advantage of having a model that's trained by a whole community of people. Instead of, you know, like at the direction of a few like sort of executives. So is there, is that part of the goal too, that it's decentralizing it in a, in a way that makes it, you know, there's a societal benefit here?

• 40:58Speaker 04

  The moral imperative is what got us started. Then you understand that there is actually a massive economic opportunity around it. And you've touched on just one, one case, sovereign AI. Um, I went to Kenya the other week and these guys, they wanna train models. They're trying to scrap together H two hundreds, but they don't have ten, twenty million to train their own models. Because the, the sovereign AI movement is, it's, it's, it's quite significant. So you have that. Um, I was talking to, um, I, I made a commentary, I was supposed to, uh, a news outlet in India. And what they were saying is, oh, now that Anthropic might be banned from, um, banned from the US. India is a big market, we benefit from it.

• 41:41Speaker 04

  I'm telling you, you guys know, you can build your own sovereign, you can build your own sovereign AI. So that's, that's a part of it. And more importantly, it's not like there's two different modes to think about this. With Bitcoin, we made the fatal mistake of thinking. We were going to replace JP Morgan. We were going to replace it. It was just some the dumbest thing ever. And we can't make the same mistake with this in training. So what is the mission? The mission is optionality. The mission is choice. The mission is that there's a lot of people that want to train. But they can't. When you when you open up that avenue, it's not even about um it's not even about

• 42:23Speaker 04

  competing with them. It's creating a market that never existed. We I we can see signs of we can see signs of it. And okay, it's quite geeky, but TLDR. Um, you can probably get a lot mileage of niche pre-training and fine-tuning. Then just finding tuning, but no one explores that because the cost of pre-training is so hard, so so high. So what if I start?

• 42:49Jason Calacanis?

  So this is interesting. If you can provide an avenue for people to do pre-training now uh at an affordable price with the sub with the miners and the validators all working to lower cost and grinding it down in a competition. This is a new avenue for people to do it. Let's end on this. When do you do your next training run and what can we expect from that? And tell us a little bit about the corporate structure of Templar. I'm an investor, as you know. Should I be investing in Tau? Should I be investing in the Templar tokens? Should I be investing in the corporation? Is there a corporation that's running the subnet? Walk me through those three pieces and then what's next?

• 43:30Speaker 04

  So there's a corporation, but it just pays it's just to pay salaries and employ people like it's just a piece of it. So Templar is only available to Tau. So um that's how you gain exposure to Templar. Um our next training run, um it's so we had um the epoch AI article states a very big problem or the next a very big limitation is that we're still three hundred times below the frontier. So why are we below the frontier? It's because our current algorithm requires every it requires every um miner or every node in a network to be able to hold the full model in its memory.

• 44:12Speaker 04

  So this has limitations because everyone has to have a B two hundred. We use B two hundred in the last thing. So in our next, we we released a new paper. It's called Heterogeneous Spars local. And what this does is that it lets us Basically, train across any type of compute. So we can, we become indifferent to network topology. So what does that mean? It means that we can interleave data center and consumer compute. Now, here's the, here's the, here's what no one's telling you. There's not that you don't have a GPU scarcity. You have a well-connected latest model GPU scarcity. So what if we can get the B three thousand? What if we can get the A one hundred that no one else is using?

• 44:55Speaker 04

  And wherever, so the, the mission is right now, wherever there is an internet connection and a GPU that is free, we will be able to put that in our runs.

• 45:04Jason Calacanis?

  So this is really interesting. You're building that software layer or that resolution layer. That would allow me to take my Mac Studio. Or if, you know, Lon has a gaming computer with a great Nvidia card in it. Just like SETI at Home, you know, allowed people of varying different hardware profiles to run SETI at Home, which was looking for extraterrestrial life. You can have them participate in this. So when will we see the next job get run? And, and, and when can we have you back on the program to discuss that? And we'll put the epoch story, epoch AI story on decentralized training in the show notes for people to read. It's really fascinating. But what's next? When do you guys?

• 45:48Jason Calacanis?

  And then who decides what you're going to try to do next?

• 45:50Speaker 04

  Um, I would, I wish I could say it was me. It's my research. So I have a couple of prima donnas, they're called the research team, and they decide when. They decide when. But I, I'm told in the next couple of weeks, we'll kick off our next run. And again, so for us, it's like, I mean, the fame, the, the fame is amazing. Like it's mind blowing, but always do good work. The next model is not going to be a massive model because it's cheaper to build out this new primitives on a, at a smaller scale. So we probably do a model that is smaller, but it's useful.

• 46:29Speaker 04

  So we probably do a smaller model that is closer to the frontier. In addition to Templar, what we also have, um, we took this pre-training, but it's also post-training. So the next, uh, for our next act, we'll be, we will be, um, deploying our new algorithm. And pre-training and post-training a useful model on decentralized growth. Then we start to ramp up and you know, who knows? Um, I set them a target of one trillion. They told me I was crazy, but you know, we'll find out who's crazy, who has jobs at the end of the year.

• 47:01Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Uh, well, and you, there's a website, tau.app. I don't know if you've seen that before. I don't know who runs that, if that's the foundation or not. But, um, it does show you the different subnets and how they're performing. That's the one I go to, to look at stuff. Where can people find out more about the Templar project? Is there an official URL or GitHub or something, a community, a Discord? Where, where can people go find more information and go down the rabbit?

• 47:26Speaker 04

  We've got www.tplr.ai. We've got Twitter, we've got Discord, and we've got www.com and that AI because that's.

• 47:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Well, tplr.ai, if you want to learn more about one of the more exciting projects going on in town. Thanks so much for joining us.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, Sam, thanks a lot. Great to have you.

• 47:48Jason Calacanis?

  In the news right now, uh, after what happened last week on All In and then me talking about my investment publicly. And just to remind folks, um, I sometimes will place a bet in order to learn. So let me just explain how insane my, um, processes. And yeah, I can't believe this tweet got a million views, but I did a little tweet, towel greater than BTC.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  I saw.

• 48:16Jason Calacanis?

  And I think the reason I said that was, I feel like, and I've said this for a long time. I believe that something will replace Bitcoin. This is something that freaks people out, right? If you have all of your bag in, you know, BTC and you're trying to pump it and it's, you know, back down in the sixties. And it was at 130, you're, you're only concerned with your bag. And your book.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  And anytime there's a new hot coin or project that people get excited about, it turns into this war between this one's the future, like no Bitcoin's the best one. And it, this is an inevitable cycle.

• 48:52Jason Calacanis?

  But one thing I've learned in, you know, 40 years in tech, uh, from the eighties till today, is that everything gets replaced at some point.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:01Jason Calacanis?

  Or almost everything gets replaced at some point. A better version of almost everything comes out. Whether it's BlackBerry giving way to iPhone, giving way to Android.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:11Jason Calacanis?

  Whether it's, you know, the, uh, you know, Craigslist giving way to, you know, Facebook Marketplace is always going to be competition.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  There was a time when people were like Friendster and MySpace. That's it. There's never going to be another social network after Friendster and MySpace.

• 49:28Jason Calacanis?

  Right. So it's not heresy to say something will come along that's better. Now, what you have to understand is what timeframe? And how long does the network effect last? Because there are moats in technology. One of the moats in technology is brand. Okay. AOL had a great brand for a while. You said online, it meant AOL. But then sometimes the performance, uh, and the actual better mousetrap is, uh, what is defensible. That would be the internet and broadband. Sometimes it's the combination of, you know, the brand, the network effect, like Uber or DoorDash, right? They have like a massive network effect, more drivers, more restaurants on DoorDash, et cetera. So you have to ask yourself with the game of Bitcoin,

• 50:14Jason Calacanis?

  are we at that point, whatever number of years later, 14, 15 years later, that a better version could come along that would be more exciting? Now, when I say it's better, I think it's better, um, at an incentive system to provide value to consumers, to businesses. That's what I think it's better at. And I think all that compute will at some point, let's say, Lon. Templar provides a better use case for compute and transport on the internet than Bitcoin does. What do you think Bitcoin miners will do? They'll take 10% of their compute and they'll move it over to Templar or to another subnet and say, okay, yeah, let me see if I can make more money here. That's the rational thing to do. I think that's the moment that we're in

• 50:57Jason Calacanis?

  right now is that people are going to start looking at their infrastructure and say, hey, maybe I should put infrastructure bandwidth, storage, compute towards this project.

• 51:05Speaker 02

  I feel like that's another disconnect that's happening here. A lot of people, you know, they're seeing you talk about Tau is so interesting. I like all these subjects and they assume that you're doing the pump and dump meme coin rug pull trick, which is like, you know, like Hawk Tua girl starts a coin, they start selling the coin, but then before anybody else gets a chance to sell, she dumps all of her coins and then makes the money and then walks away like, and that's the sort of classic rug pull. And but that's not what's going on with Tau because these are all projects. They all have like a goal. They're all using the blockchain technology to actually accomplish something. So it is not, it's not exactly the same as what we've seen.

• 51:43Jason Calacanis?

  And it's not a diss towards Bitcoin.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 51:46Jason Calacanis?

  It's not a diss towards Bitcoin, but I do think like every technology tends to have an arc, right? And, you know, you see that in, and non-commercial projects, I will say, are different, you know, so HTTP or the World Wide Web or FTP, like some things are open source Linux. So they're very different and they can continue on for very long periods of time, multiple decades. So, you know, I'm not saying Bitcoin's going away tomorrow, but it has been stuck at 60, 70K for a little while now after this big thing. And then you have one person trying to corner the market on it in.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Michael Saylor.

• 52:24Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, Michael Saylor. That I think is a red flag that somebody could even do that. And that could blow up people. I'm not calling it a Ponzi scheme, but people say it's a Ponzi. I'm just saying it's like overly complicated and it to me works against decentralization. So I look at that as like a red flag if one person's trying to accumulate that much. You know, 5, 10% of all available coins. It kind of ends the game of Bitcoin. Anyway, I think we got a demo. We have a demo?

• 52:52Speaker 02

  We have one more guest coming up. We've got a very cool demo bringing us Open Oats. It used to be called Open Granola. Now it's Open Oats. We'll have to ask about that. Yazin Ali Rahim is here. He's the creator of Open Oats. This is Jason. It is a, it's an open source note taking agent that listens into your conversations and provides helpful insights. I'll tell you what attracted my attention about this when I saw it online. This to me feels like the potential realization of what we always talked about for Producer Claude. Remember we said Producer Claude, we wanted him to listen into the show? And then when, when we said something about research that it could research, Claude would just look it up and let us know during the show, hey, you mentioned the population of, you know, like India, here it is.

• 53:37Speaker 02

  So that to me, it's like, it feels like we're, we're getting, we're almost there. Open Oats feels like it's almost there. So welcome, Yazin.

• 53:43Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 53:44Speaker 05

  Producer Claude, huh? Okay. All right.

• 53:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, we, you know, Claude is, I think, the best language model out there and it's the most helpful for us, most expensive. And they've kind of had a generational run this year, specifically the last six months. But people do pay for note takers. Note takers are everywhere. What's the case for an open source version of this, Yazin? And welcome to the program.

• 54:08Speaker 05

  Thank you. So I kind of feel compelled after seeing Matt and his asteroid mining thing and Sam and the crazy distributed AI stuff to say, you know, this is just like a side project. You know, I probably spent like a, like a day total just working on this. And it was kind of random because someone tweeted, hey, who's, who's working on like the open granola? And then a friend tagged me because, you know, I'd just been building a lot of stuff recently using Claude, actually Claude code. And, you know, as luck would have it, I'd already been working on a version, but I hadn't released it. It was like 80% there. So I, hey, you know, why not release the thing, right?

• 54:47Speaker 05

  And so I, I put the thing out and apparently there was like a whole thing going on about granola, preventing people from accessing their notes or their transcripts. I didn't even know about it, but you know, there was like a whole drama going on. And like my, I tweeted about it and I put a video and it just blew up and like, you know, overnight, we had like a thousand stars. There's like, you know, several hundred people forking the repo. And, you know, essentially like the core idea is the sort of vision behind doing open notes is not just to create like an open version of granola, which, you know, I think that would be fine. But, you know, I really wanted to have like

• 55:28Speaker 05

  local L L Ms. So you'd be able to, you know, not siphon off like all of your meeting transcripts out to like some random third party.

• 55:37Jason Calacanis?

  So privacy is the key here. If you can run it locally, you don't have to worry about your Zoom meeting, your private conversation winding up, you know, growing, you know, OpenAI or, you know, Claude's L L M, which is kind of dangerous. Yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 05

  Right, right. And, and the other big part to me was also, so I went through Y C a couple of years ago. And one of the things, so Y C has this thing called Bookface. A lot of people don't know about Bookface. I'm sure you do probably.

• 56:11Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's their, it's their social network. Everybody posts to it. And it's like a free for all, awesome founder.

• 56:19Speaker 02

  It's mult book for humans. Mult book for humans. I understand.

• 56:22Speaker 05

  But, but there's, there's this special section inside Bookface called the Startup Manual. And basically, it's got like all of the accumulated wisdom from, you know, distilled from like all of the batches that they've got where, you know, they talk about great advice for hiring, for, you know, creating a product, you know, getting your engineers on board, you know, doing salaries, compensation, everything. So they, they've kind of distilled wisdom over all the batches that they've done. And, you know, they have this, this, this handbook or manual. And, I mean, it's great, because, you know, as a Y C founder, like you can access it. But, you know, I was thinking like, there are a lot of situations where I might not be, you know, thinking, oh, you know, maybe I should just go, you

• 57:07Speaker 05

  know, search for this particular situation. In, in the meetings that I have, you know, that, that I'm I'm discussing with my my team, you know, other people that I'm working with. Wouldn't it be great if there is a way to surface suggestions from like the best resource for startups available to me in context during a conversation that I might not even have known, you know, existed before. And so that was the kind of inspiration behind Open Grunol. Like, like that was the one feature that I hadn't seen anywhere else.

• 57:40Jason Calacanis?

  So show us the, yeah, the real time feedback I haven't seen either. And that requires local compute listening in and in real time hitting an LLM and saying, hey, we're gonna, we're recording it because I can watch like Notion or the, you know, doing the transcript live, but show us how it works. And obviously you're on GitHub with this. You got close to 2,000 stars. So people are starting to take notice of it.

• 58:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 58:04Jason Calacanis?

  It's early days, but that's nice that you broke 1,000, yeah.

• 58:08Speaker 05

  So this is, this is an MIT license and anybody can fork it. There's already been like a Windows version. This is Mac only, so I built it using Swift. It's really efficient. But there's a Windows version and, you know, there's at least a couple of guys that I know are working on an iOS version. So, you know, it's gotten pretty, pretty crazy. And also, so I have like a, like a demo script. The, the core idea is, all right, so you, you kind of have a settings menu where you can select, you know, what you want to use for transcription. If you want to use a local model, so we're using Parakeet, which is a local model, so super fast. You, you won't feel any lag. And also you can clean up the meeting notes. Once you're done, you can also do speaker diarization, which is, you know, basically just figuring out like who's talking.

• 58:54Speaker 05

  And this is the, the cool part. So LLM providers, you know, I'm using OpenRudder. Because I'm, I'm just running this on a Mac Mini, so not, not a super beefy machine here. But you can use Ollama or MLX for local stuff. And then we also have an embedding provider, which would be important when it comes to like doing real time suggestions. Which, by the way, like Gemini 3.1 flashlight, I mean, this thing is like super fast. So you're gonna see this in a second. Anyway, so you, you kind of start the meeting. So let's go ahead and start. It's initializing. All right. So now I'm speaking. If, if you speak, you're going to see, you know, like a them show up. And then while I'm speaking, you're, you're kind of seeing what I'm saying right here. And then I have a demo script here, so.

• 59:40Speaker 05

  I basically took like, and we have the insights panel here. This is, this is where it's going to surface, you know, all this stuff.

• 59:47Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow, there it is, right. So you have a conversation going on. And then in the other window, it's saying, if we move that over.

• 59:57Speaker 05

  So let's see, I have a demo script here. I'm going to, I'm going to work through. So let's, let's role play here. Let's say I'm a founder and I'm going to speak. Let's say I'm pitching you, right? So we're building an AI platform that automates prior authorization for healthcare providers. So you can see here, it shows up like some information related to prior authorization. We don't really have any direct competitors.

• 1:00:25Jason Calacanis?

  So when they say, hey, I don't have any direct competitors, it goes and searches for direct competitors. So it's taking claims and it's vetting the claims that are being made in real time. In other words, it's like a real time due diligence checker.

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, you can see, it actually shows you other companies based in your knowledge base that also operate in a similar space. So as, as the founder is kind of speaking, I thought this might be a case that you'd be able to relate to.

• 1:00:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's super relatable because by the way, we either do this by having Claude or, you know, OpenAI or whatever, and you're typing in questions, you know, or before you get on the call, you would have AI look at the pitch deck and give you questions and ask, hey, as an associate, go through these questions. What are the competitive sets? What's the margin, et cetera? So yeah, this is really compelling. Wow.

• 1:01:17Speaker 05

  You get to decide like how, how noisy you want the thing to be. Like, you know, if you want it to be eager, balanced or quiet. I have it on eager, just, you know, for demonstration's sake. But every time someone makes a claim, so let's say we're pre-revenue, but we're raising at a 12 million post-money valuation.

• 1:01:35Speaker 02

  We got a, we got a question from the chat room. Jamie Uncensored wants to know, was this made in Replit? That's the question.

• 1:01:41Speaker 05

  No, it was, so you can see, just to close out the point. So whenever you mention valuation, it mentions other companies that have also raised. And so that kind of gives you a reference for, okay, does this make sense or not? So it's saying here, no, this is a red line, never pay greater than 40x ARR.

• 1:01:56Jason Calacanis?

  I'll tell you what's brilliant about this, before you get to the Replit question. I would like to have like four of these running concurrently on a screen. One of them would be fact checking. One of them would be writing jokes. One of them would be writing proposed questions, you know, like so Jackie Martling, who worked with Howard Stern, was like handing him jokes over like paper or in a chat room. But you also have, like, sometimes I'll be, you know, doing a podcast and someone of the producers will say, oh yeah, the population of India just passed China's for this reason. So fact checking, insights, sides.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  That's what I'm saying. It's what we always dreamed of. And it's got the, it's got the cluely thing too, that if you're on a Zoom call with somebody, they can't see that you're getting prompted by open notes in real time.

• 1:02:40Speaker 05

  Right. So there's this, this option where you can hide it from screen sharing. So when I turn that on, you won't be able to see it.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  So you just seem like a genius. Yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:02:49Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that is, wow.

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  That's the thing.

• 1:02:51Jason Calacanis?

  This is one days of work. Is this a company or just a side hustle? You said you went through IC. Are you still working on that company or?

• 1:02:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm still doing that. I'm still doing that, but I'm building on the side. And so this was one of, like, you know, I have many products that I'm working on. Like actually, in the course of building this, you know, I, like, as people were getting more interested, I just started getting like so many, you know, fricking pull requests and issues, like 200 plus, you know, between pull requests and issues. And then, yeah, at some point I was like, all right, I didn't sign up for this, right? It's, it's great that, you know, this is happening, but.

• 1:03:24Jason Calacanis?

  Founder to founder, are you getting more traction on this one than your, your day job? I'm curious.

• 1:03:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, like, the pool here has been crazy and a bunch of people have already reached out telling me, hey, you know, wouldn't it be amazing if, like, could you take this, the same thing and sort of tailor make it or, you know, customize it for our specific? Company and then maybe you could create like shared knowledge bases or shared meetings. I mean, there's, there's all sorts of crazy, crazy ideas where you could take the, the core principle and then just, you know, customize it specifically for a company. And I think that, that would probably be, you know, uh, worth, worth exploring. So I'm, I'm having those conversations right now, but like you, you, the, the crazy part is like, you look at the repo right now, we don't have a single issue. We don't have a single pull request because everything like I built this, this other thing using Claude again,

• 1:04:15Speaker 05

  called auto maintainer, which basically just, uh, it's, it's like a bot. So I have my, my core GitHub account and then I have like an account for an AI. And basically this is like Claude code every time somebody opens up an issue or a pull request. It would, it would research the, the, the bug or try to replicate it. And I have this policy document which details the sort of product vision, what things are in or out of scope. And also, um,

• 1:04:44Jason Calacanis?

  So it replies to them, you basically have a junior dev or a product manager managing this project with Claude.

• 1:04:52Speaker 05

  Hundred percent and, and it's working 24/7. So you can see like whenever someone files a pull request, it says, thanks for the report. This is my AI. Um, this is known, blah, blah, blah. I fixed it up in, you know, 189 and it opens up a pull request and then it addresses the point and then tests it, merges it and then deploys it. And everything is happening on its own. I just get flagged for like the handful of issues which are super high risk, where they touch like a, you know, big portion of the code base or, you know, it's, it's like a really risky thing. So I get flagged for that and then I can just, it's like answering a multiple choice quiz. Oh, you know, maybe you should do this and, and it gives me the recommendations too. So it's not even like I'm, I'm making this stuff up. I mean, you, you know, the crazy thing, Jason is like, I built this, this, this Mac app in Swift

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

  and I don't know a line of Swift, like I've never created a Mac app before. And so like, everything is being run, the entire show is being run by Claude here. And I'm just there kind of, you know, giving the product direction, just saying, alright, this is what I think would make sense.

• 1:05:54Jason Calacanis?

  This, you know, this is, I think, going to be the challenge, Lon, is everybody can build everything. And then it's just going to be a matter of who stops maintaining. And obviously, there's a solution here with the AI maintaining these programs too. But now it's like, when the bar gets so low to build software, everybody's going to make everything. And this is part of the SaaS apocalypse, you know, you have a company like Granola, has a loved product, they're a startup, they're crushing it. You know, all credit to them, but now they have an open source. And then you have to ask, well, is that open source going to be able to keep up with Granola? Or will many hands make for light work? And will the oatmeal product be better than Granola? You know, that's the fascinating place we're in right now.

• 1:06:39Jason Calacanis?

  An open Claude versus Claude coworker versus perplexing computer. Yeah, is like, which one of these projects is going to actually succeed? So, great job, love it, everybody can go check it out on GitHub, we'll put the links in the notes. And we'll drop Yazin off, well done, sir. I am so obsessed with open source at this point.

• 1:07:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, wow, I mean, this is amazing, the open notes is pretty amazing. It's like, because we had envisioned this product exactly like a year ago. Like, wouldn't it be cool if we had like an AI listen to the show and just tell us notes and pass us little notes all during the show?

• 1:07:19Jason Calacanis?

  Well, I mean, you could have two different versions of the show. You could have the show enhanced, like pop-up videos was in the past. You could have an advanced version of the show you watch, or you get a regular. And then imagine if we just had a sidebar, and if somebody builds this for me, I'll pay them for it. Like, I would like a sidebar that just shows you all of the...

• 1:07:41Jason Calacanis?

  You know, comments from the fact checker, the troll, like we just, we make four different personas. The troll, the funny, you know, the chaotic troll, negative cynical troll, the funny troll.

• 1:07:55Speaker 02

  It's really the stern crew. It's we need a Gary Delibate to sort of produce and keep his eye on the facts and make, keep everything moving. We need a, we need a Fred Norris to supply background context, sound effects, what's up? Jackie to write one liners, Robin to update with news.

• 1:08:09Jason Calacanis?

  Somebody make that for us and we'll put them here as our sidebar and you can watch, we'll do two streams. Oh my God, somebody take the open, if somebody does this and does this for the open source product, I'll pay them 5,000 bucks.

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Whack, whack pack AI.

• 1:08:20Jason Calacanis?

  And they can come on the show. Yeah, no, seriously. We, and we just have four bubbles there and the, they could have like a little persona. You put a sine wave there and like their little picture and we'll put it as like, not Jackie, not Baba Booey, not whatever. So we don't, don't get in trouble. Not Fred. Hilarious. So somebody build that for 5,000. Hey, you know what? It's Friday. Let's go off duty.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  We're off duty already. I feel like we're already a little off.

• 1:08:46Jason Calacanis?

  We're off the reservation, that's for sure.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  That's for sure. Uh, we gotta talk about Lord of the Rings, Shadow of the Past, right? This is the, you sent this to me this week. I put it in the notes specifically. This is Peter Jackson, Warner Brothers new line. They announced a new Lord of the Rings. It's like a sequel and a prequel. Here's Peter Jackson making the announcement.

• 1:09:07Speaker 06

  Buddy, I thought it was time to, um, to give you all a Hunt for Gullum update, the first of many that we'll do, little blogs along the way. And, uh, Andy Serkis has been busy designing the film. He's going to direct it and obviously play Gullum. We've got a lot of the old team back again, familiar faces and some new faces, but, um, Andy's doing a terrific job. It's looking amazing. The script is coming together really well and I think it's going to be a really good film, a really good film.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  So pause here.

• 1:09:26Speaker 06

  But that is not the only Toggy movie that we're doing.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  He's talking about a movie we already knew about that was already announced called The Hunt for Gullum, that Andy Serkis is making. This is set between The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. It's about Aragorn hunting down, uh, the hobbit or hunting down Gullum, looking for him, seeking information about the one ring. So that's a prequel to Lord of the Rings. That's in production now that's coming out next year, but here's where Peter Jackson is about to end. It's a new project. We didn't know about.

• 1:09:52Jason Calacanis?

  No, wait, is that a prequel or is it like they're inserting it between episodes?

• 1:09:56Speaker 02

  It's it's set between Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. So.

• 1:10:00Jason Calacanis?

  Got it.

• 1:10:01Speaker 02

  Bilbo already got the ring from Gullum and has taken it back to Bag End. And now Aragorn is investigating what's going on with the Run Ring and hunting down Gullum. Now Peter Jackson is about to announce the new film that we only learned about this week. So continue the video.

• 1:10:17Speaker 06

  Developing. We've actually got a one, another film that we'll be making after Hunt for Gullum. So I thought I should tell you a little bit about that.

• 1:10:26Speaker 06

  Oh, actually, why don't I get somebody else to explain it because we've got a very special partner that we're working with.

• 1:10:30Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:10:31Speaker 06

  And you can see for yourself. Hang on. There we go. Hello.

• 1:10:36Speaker 06

  Hi, Peter. Hey Stephen. Hi, how are you? How you doing?

• 1:10:38Jason Calacanis?

  Stephen Colbert is.

• 1:10:40Speaker 06

  I like all your talking stuff on the wall there.

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  You can cut the video now. Yeah. So Stephen Colbert is going to co-write with his son and with Philippa Boyens, who wrote the Lord of the Rings movies. They're going to co-write this new, this new film. It's set partly during the part of the Fellowship of the Ring that we didn't cover already where they go visit Tom Bombadil. And it's also set after the Lord of the Rings trilogy, based on some appendices and epilogue stuff that Tolkien wrote.

• 1:11:08Jason Calacanis?

  I love this filling in.

• 1:11:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:11:11Jason Calacanis?

  I love the filling in of the lore and there's also a project going on that I think we'll probably have on the docket here as well for Harry Potter, and we'll talk about the economics there.

• 1:11:23Speaker 02

  The HBO.

• 1:11:23Jason Calacanis?

  But what I love about this is, you know, Peter Jackson has, I think in New Zealand, all of the, you know, backdrops and sets and equipment for all of these films. And he's done six of them. So now they're going to do seven and eight, I guess.

• 1:11:40Speaker 02

  Yes. There was an anime one a few years ago, but there's six live action ones that they've done. Correct.

• 1:11:45Jason Calacanis?

  So great. Keep filling it in. I like it. And you know what I like about it is you can get other voices. So now they have Colbert, who jokes in this that he suddenly has more time. Remember he got canned or he's whatever. He has free time and I love the idea that he's so passionate about it. I love seeing people. You know, perfect one genre, you know, late night talk show and before that, I guess, maybe he did stand up or was a correspondent and then going into this, just for the joy of it. You can see this is pure joy for him. He obviously doesn't need money. What a great little side quest for him. And I'm, I'm super thrilled about it. I think that the Lord

• 1:12:22Jason Calacanis?

  of the Rings trilogy and the extended editions are just unbelievably magical as a product. I don't know where you would rate that trilogy, you know, in IP land, but it's certainly up there with Star Wars.

• 1:12:38Speaker 02

  I think it's the most consistent. I think if you, if you look at the great trilogies, there's usually like one that's not quite as good as the other. I think the two that kind of hold up the best, Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones. There's no off entries.

• 1:12:51Jason Calacanis?

  I'm gonna put Star Wars up there for the trilogy as well and the prequels.

• 1:12:54Speaker 02

  I don't think Return of the Jedi is as good as the first two. That's me.

• 1:12:57Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's because they didn't kill Han Solo and they had Ewoks instead of Wookiees, but that's for you guys to search.

• 1:13:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. You guys can work that out, work that out. One interesting thing I would add, a lot of the times when this comes up, people are like, but there's the Cimarrillion, there's so many other Tolkien writings about Middle Earth. Why not adapt them? It's because Warner Brothers and New Line don't own the rights. They only own The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So everything they do has to come out of those two books.

• 1:13:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this would be a great time to give Peter Jackson those franchises to pursue, but did they give those to Amazon? Is that who owns them?

• 1:13:33Speaker 02

  Amazon bought another chunk, but nobody bought the entire, no one company owns the Tolkien, everything.

• 1:13:39Jason Calacanis?

  That's the problem.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  The entire estate. Yeah.

• 1:13:42Jason Calacanis?

  And this is what Marvel and Disney did well is they finally got the Fox IP back so they can have X-Men and Avengers in the same film. And they did a deal with Sony to get Spider-Man's universe.

• 1:13:53Speaker 02

  They're sort of collaborating on the Spider-Man. So Sony's still technically, nobody can make a Spider-Man movie without Sony.

• 1:13:58Jason Calacanis?

  Or the people from Spider-Man in there. Yeah. The villains and whatnot. Okay. Let's talk about this Harry Potter one.

• 1:14:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:14:05Jason Calacanis?

  This is amazing. They're redoing, if I understand correctly, Harry Potter books.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:14:13Jason Calacanis?

  Each book will be a series. Each series will be 10 episodes or so, and each one will be, this is recasting everybody.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  Yes, we're redoing, we're redoing the Harry Potter books. They're gonna do it as a show. Every season of the show, one book, one school year, at Hogwarts. And the, the big selling point here is the movies, because they were movies, everybody loves the movies. It's not a knock on them, I don't think, but the movies had to condense, because those books get very long. Like Goblet of Fire and On, they're very long books. To make it into a movie, you had to cut a lot. You had to condense it down. So the promise that HBO is making is now we've got a full season of TV. We're gonna be able to adapt every subplot, everything that didn't work its way into the movies. So it'll be a more thorough adaptation, is what they're saying. But yeah, they had to recast everybody.

• 1:15:03Jason Calacanis?

  The economics matter here.

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:15:05Jason Calacanis?

  We were in a group chat, I think with producer Nick, talking about the economics.

• 1:15:08Speaker 02

  There was a viral tweet that I just sent to, to the team that we could pull up.

• 1:15:12Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, pull it up and then walk me through the economics and then you, your question or, and or Nick's was, how does this make economic sense? And I had an answer for you.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  It was really Nick's question. So yeah, they're saying Warner Brothers, they are spending reportedly a hundred million dollars per episode on the show. We don't have, that's not locked in for sure. That's what the rumors and the trades are saying. So you compare that to Amazon's Lord of the Rings show, which we talked about, which is 58 million per episode, House of the Dragon, which was 20 million per episode. The original Game of Thrones started only at 6 million per episode, which seems like a crazy discount now. So the question becomes, if you make seven seasons of this, because there's seven books, if you make eight episodes per season, that's 56 episodes, you're talking about 5.5 plus billion dollars.

• 1:15:58Jason Calacanis?

  5.5 billion dollars.

• 1:16:01Speaker 02

  To make this show. All, all in, everything to produce the show.

• 1:16:04Jason Calacanis?

  So what is the total episode count then?

• 1:16:07Speaker 02

  This, this tweet is assuming eight per season. We don't have a definitive answer that. I think that's a pretty safe bet, eight episodes per season. That would be 56 episodes across seven seasons. So 5.6 billion is the price tag, if you say 100 million per episode.

• 1:16:21Jason Calacanis?

  So I'll tell you why this makes sense. And it makes a lot of sense. As a swing. And if this works, they're gonna do it with Star Wars, I predict.

• 1:16:32Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:16:32Jason Calacanis?

  And they will take A New Hope and make it a season. A 10-hour version of A New Hope. They'll make a 10-hour version of Empire Strikes Back, a 10-hour version of Return of the Jedi, fix a bunch of things, try a bunch of different things out, 30. That would wind up being 30 hours instead of 6 hours. Now, you can imagine how amazing it would be to...

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  And if you think about Dave Filoni, who now runs Lucasfilm, that's been what he does all along. He created the Clone Wars shows, Ahsoka, all this stuff. He loves going back into the lore and finding ways to insert his characters, original ideas. Imagine being able to go back to the original Star Wars movies, knowing everything you know now, and being able to seed all that stuff in there from the beginning.

• 1:17:17Jason Calacanis?

  And Jabba the Hutt was like a more prominent character, but cut for time. So you could have Jabba the Hutt story occurring, you know, through Episodes 2 and 3, right? And running from him.

• 1:17:31Speaker 02

  And you know about the prequels now, so you could say like, oh, well, there's work Pod Racing into the background. Luke Skywalker loved to go see Pod Racing when he lived back on Tatooine, because we now know how popular that was. You know, you could bring it all together, all the lore that they've created over the last 30 years.

• 1:17:46Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so I just want to walk people through the economics of at-scale companies. You're talking about, you know, about 300 million people are now on Netflix, right? 100 million people or more on Hulu and Disney.

• 1:18:04Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:18:05Jason Calacanis?

  So, this is going to exist on which platform?

• 1:18:07Speaker 02

  This is going on HBO Max, which will now be the combined Paramount Plus and HBO Max, because they're joining.

• 1:18:14Jason Calacanis?

  So, if you have one person paying $15 a month, that's $180 a year, right?

• 1:18:23Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:18:24Jason Calacanis?

  180 times 6 years, it's about $1,000, right? Back of the envelope. One person who says, "I am a Harry Potter devotee." I'm gonna have a lifetime value for Warner Brothers of $1,000. Now, if there's a million people who love this, right? Or 2 million people who love it, you start doing some back of the envelope math. An incremental 5 million people spending $1,000 each is $5 billion.

• 1:19:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:02Jason Calacanis?

  So, the bogey, right now, if you look at Max and HBO Max, they have 125 million subs. Right?

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:12Jason Calacanis?

  They only have to incrementally grow by 4% to get those 5 million.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  Sure. And the other thing to bear in mind about HBO Max, unlike Netflix and Disney+ which had their global rollouts years ago, HBO Max is still rolling out around the world. They're very new. In like, Europe, they only launched this year. So, they haven't had a chance. Netflix is already, if you live in a place where there's Netflix, you've had years to think about it. They probably almost maxed out most of those major markets. HBO Max has not maxed out those markets yet. They're brand new in Germany, they're brand new in the UK, they're brand new in Ireland. So like, there's a lot of ground left to cover. There's a lot of people still to win over.

• 1:19:56Jason Calacanis?

  Right. So now, you look at the books. How many of these Harry Potter books were sold? 600 million worldwide.

• 1:20:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's a big number.

• 1:20:08Jason Calacanis?

  According to your replicant Gaff.

• 1:20:10Speaker 02

  He's good.

• 1:20:11Jason Calacanis?

  230 million in the US, 120 million just for the first book, The Philosopher's Stone, translated into 80-plus languages.

• 1:20:19Speaker 02

  I worked at a bookstore when Goblet of Fire came out. That's how old I am. And I've never, I've never seen anything like this. People, it was midnight. Families were showing up, dressed up, lined around the block to get the book.

• 1:20:32Jason Calacanis?

  So, 600 million copies worldwide, if everybody bought all of the books, and I think there were, how many books? Eight?

• 1:20:40Speaker 02

  Seven. Seven. They made eight movies because they split the last one in half. There's seven.

• 1:20:43Jason Calacanis?

  So let's just say, of these 600 million copies, every one of them bought all seven. There's 100 million people as part of that group. You need only get 5% of them

• 1:20:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Jason Calacanis?

  to join

• 1:20:59Jason Calacanis?

  HBO Max. That's how this math works out. You cannot look at it as you looked at previously making movies. Movies are a dying form. The theater experience is broken. DVDs are over. But what's not over is lifetime value. And man, I gotta think for my kids who love this series, you know, they're gonna be watching this at the edge of their seat.

• 1:21:26Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 1:21:26Jason Calacanis?

  And what a great deal for, you know, a thousand dollars, for a hundred eighty dollars a year, you get to experience this, you know, ten episodes, eighteen dollars an episode. It actually equals like the cost of a movie ticket, right?

• 1:21:40Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:21:40Jason Calacanis?

  So I think actually this math is starting to math out. The math maths.

• 1:21:47Speaker 02

  What I was saying to Nick, I mean, on top, I think you're making an excellent point, and I agree. I think even on top of that, you have to think about Warner Brothers has this IP, Harry Potter. They own it, however big.

• 1:22:00Jason Calacanis?

  Outright.

• 1:22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. It's already been, you know, twenty years since these books were out and this, this, they've got a new generation or two to sell on this. And if they do a good job, and they get people under twenty super, super excited for Harry Potter again, the sky's the limit. Theme parks, merch, more books, more video games, like, there's no limit on how much Harry Potter universe franchise stuff Warner Brothers can sell to kids that it wins over with.

• 1:22:30Jason Calacanis?

  This is the next piece.

• 1:22:32Speaker 02

  That is exactly right.

• 1:22:33Jason Calacanis?

  How many incremental Universal theme parks will happen because people, a new generation, get addicted to the Harry Potter films?

• 1:22:43Speaker 02

  That, to me, is the whole thing. Like, they're looking at, we gotta get the kids.

• 1:22:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. Yeah. And what do those wands cost? I have three of those wands on a shelf here. My daughters love that experience. I think they were a hundred fifty bucks each to make your wand. Plus, we've been to Harry Potterland three times.

• 1:23:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:02Jason Calacanis?

  And I rented Universal.

• 1:23:04Speaker 02

  I was there. That was the first time, that was the first time I got to check out Harry Potterland at Universal, and it is amazing.

• 1:23:11Jason Calacanis?

  How were the lines when you went to the All-In Party?

• 1:23:13Speaker 02

  There's no, the guy, Oliver Vander, the guy selling wands was like outside, like, anybody want a wand? Come in, get a wand. There was nobody there. It was incredible.

• 1:23:21Jason Calacanis?

  Universal Orlando.

• 1:23:23Jason Calacanis?

  Home to the biggest wizarding world pulls in twenty one million visitors a year. And Harry Potter's the number one draw.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:30Jason Calacanis?

  If it is in fact, the number one draw, let's just say. Half the people are going there for it or a third. That's seven million people coming for it. By the way, that's the the true fans. So if you use the true fans methodology by Kevin Kelly, you need a thousand true fans. In order as an independent artist to exist in the world, you can look that up. The Kevin Kelly one thousand true fans. These is the true fans are probably five millions. There's probably five million like. Super fans.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:23:57Jason Calacanis?

  Super true fans. Man, if they just buy one more wand each.

• 1:24:02Speaker 02

  The lifetime value of.

• 1:24:03Jason Calacanis?

  That's a billion dollars.

• 1:24:04Speaker 02

  It's like thinking about Disney adults. If you're Disney, like every new Disney adult you make is thousands of dollars.

• 1:24:12Jason Calacanis?

  Wait a second. Are you a Disney adult?

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  I mean, I like I like some Disney stuff, but no, I don't. I haven't been to a Disney theme park in a really long time. I don't buy merch like I don't.

• 1:24:23Jason Calacanis?

  That's not your that's not your vacation. I just want to say for Disney adults. I'm I think there's a case to be made. I'm not into a surveillance state, but I think that should be like a list. The government should have access to.

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  I know some lovely Disney adults, but it's not for me.

• 1:24:40Jason Calacanis?

  I majority are the majority are lovely.

• 1:24:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:24:44Jason Calacanis?

  It's that five percent of them that are weird. And I, when I see Disney adults and they go there and they're all wearing the hats.

• 1:24:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, the crew jackets and stuff.

• 1:24:53Jason Calacanis?

  It's a bit much.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  It's a lot.

• 1:24:54Jason Calacanis?

  I mean. I have there are exceptions, but I think government surveillance for Disney adults.

• 1:25:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's.

• 1:25:02Jason Calacanis?

  This is a mandatory. I'm all for. CCP level monitoring of these individuals. They're up to something. And this is a very weird thing.

• 1:25:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, Ron DeSantis and Gavin Newsom should get on this.

• 1:25:14Jason Calacanis?

  Here's my pick for off duty. I love an app called Whisperflow.

• 1:25:19Speaker 02

  Hmm, yes.

• 1:25:21Jason Calacanis?

  This is my like AI stack now. Yeah, Whisperflow, I think they're advertising.

• 1:25:25Speaker 02

  They are. That's what I'm saying, friend of the show.

• 1:25:26Jason Calacanis?

  And I had the Whisperflow on This Week in AI. Go search for This Week in AI, thisweekinai.ai. That's our new spin off round table. Check this out to pull up an image of this. Twenty dollars, I think I pay for this thing. Show the foot pedal I got. This foot pedal is insane, Lon.

• 1:25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:25:46Jason Calacanis?

  It's from like China. It's got the jankiest software you've ever seen.

• 1:25:50Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:25:50Jason Calacanis?

  It's complete garbage. Whisperflow needs to make this.

• 1:25:53Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:25:54Jason Calacanis?

  If Whisperflow made this with the Whisperflow logo on it.

• 1:25:58Speaker 02

  Why don't they?

• 1:25:59Jason Calacanis?

  This would be the best selling product in AI.

• 1:26:01Speaker 02

  You know, when I used to use this, when I used to do subtitles and captions for DVDs, my first job in Hollywood, I would use a pedal to start and stop it so I wouldn't have to constantly be clicking the mouse.

• 1:26:11Jason Calacanis?

  So you click this thing and you hold it down and it does my shortcut for Whisperflow.

• 1:26:16Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:26:17Jason Calacanis?

  Whisperflow is like, imagine if Siri, Siri makes two mistakes, three mistakes per sentence.

• 1:26:23Speaker 02

  They still don't know I don't want to say duck instead of the F word.

• 1:26:27Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's just a disaster.

• 1:26:29Speaker 02

  How many years now?

• 1:26:30Jason Calacanis?

  This eKey Glow thing, USB single foot pedal, go ahead and buy it. I guarantee you it's going to be life changing for you. You plug it into the back. It's janky, it's cheap, it's probably going to break every year. I want a Whisperflow version of this. I want to get like three of them and be able to do different things with them. But I'm working and I'm in a Slack. I have been sending you, my Slack responses have been whisper dictating.

• 1:26:54Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:26:55Jason Calacanis?

  Using this and you didn't realize it.

• 1:26:57Speaker 02

  No, no, you would never know because it turns it into realistic looking writing. Yeah.

• 1:27:02Jason Calacanis?

  And it knows things like my name. Siri, after me spending $20,000 on iPhones and storage and everything, still doesn't know that my name is Jason Calacanis. Disgraceful across the board. I know that there's a big effort to redo Siri.

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Oh, it's horrible.

• 1:27:22Jason Calacanis?

  Whisperflow is like perfect Siri and it works on your phone. It works on your desktop. It works on my Windows desktop. It works on my Mac desktop. This is the must have device of the year for me.

• 1:27:33Speaker 02

  Wow, there you go. Whisper.

• 1:27:35Jason Calacanis?

  Must have device if you're into such.

• 1:27:37Speaker 02

  They are an advertiser, but this was not a paid promotion. This is just purely Jason's.

• 1:27:41Jason Calacanis?

  No, and neither is the foot pedal company.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  No, they're not sponsoring us, the foot pedal.

• 1:27:46Jason Calacanis?

  I have another, I don't usually get into, you know, too many TV shows, but I was looking for something in sci fi. I love a good post-apocalyptic. I love a good thriller.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  Oh, I want, I'm, I think I know what's coming. I think I might know.

• 1:28:03Jason Calacanis?

  I saw that this new show Paradise was in season two and everybody was talking about it. So, I've, you know, been on a bunch of flights recently and um, I watched the first season of Paradise. And um, it was great.

• 1:28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, Sterling K. Brown.

• 1:28:18Jason Calacanis?

  It's a great.

• 1:28:19Speaker 02

  It's the creator of This Is Us, that drama, that NBC drama that was also with Sterling K. Brown. And so this is their new project.

• 1:28:26Jason Calacanis?

  I like this actor Sterling K. Brown. He is like a rock, he's like an Ethan Hawke. You know, uh, just a solid actor who you like to see on screen. And then I like the uh, the billionaire, just to give you a little premise of it. There's an underground um, city being built.

• 1:28:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:28:51Jason Calacanis?

  To store humanity after a terrible tragedy uh, you know, uh, happens on planet Earth. I won't tell you what that is because I don't want to reveal it because they reveal it like five or six episodes in.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:29:02Jason Calacanis?

  So, go watch the series. It's great. Have you seen it Lon or no?

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  No, I, I haven't. And I remember when it was brand new, they hadn't revealed the twist yet. And so it was just like this very confusing synopsis. He's like, he's a secret service agent. He's investigating some conspiracy against the president who's James Marsden. And I was like, I can't figure out what this show is. And it's because they were being really, they're playing it close to the vest because they didn't want people to know it was post-apocalyptic.

• 1:29:27Jason Calacanis?

  It's got a little like lost in it, got a little thriller in it. Um, and that woman, I forgot her name, uh, but she was in uh, like SVU, I think. She was like one of the detectives on one of the Lauren Or series.

• 1:29:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:41Jason Calacanis?

  Um, and uh, she's great in it.

• 1:29:43Speaker 02

  Sarah Shahi, of course, from the L word, yeah, from the L word alias, uh, yeah, I think that's.

• 1:29:50Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, she's compelling on screen as a, you know, a supervillain billionaire tech person. And uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's great, easy watching.

• 1:29:59Speaker 02

  Oh, you're talking about Julianne Nicholson. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, she was on Criminal Intent, that Lauren Or show.

• 1:30:05Jason Calacanis?

  That's it, yeah. She's great. She's very compelling. Anyway, that's another uh, one for me. And then um, I'm gonna give you um, I'm gonna give you an album.

• 1:30:15Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 1:30:16Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe I'll give you two albums. This is from my co buzz, you know, I'm into the high fidelity music.

• 1:30:21Speaker 02

  Yes, you've been listening to the very high lossless streaming.

• 1:30:24Jason Calacanis?

  I do. There's a Tadashi Trucks Band.

• 1:30:28Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 1:30:29Jason Calacanis?

  Future Soul.

• 1:30:30Speaker 02

  Wow, Tadashi Trucks and what are they, yeah, Tadashi Trucks Band, they used to be a different, it used to be Tadashi Trucks and Tedesco.

• 1:30:37Jason Calacanis?

  It's a blues band.

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I saw them, I was in like, high school the first time I saw them.

• 1:30:42Jason Calacanis?

  They're kind of like the Allman Brothers, they got a little bit of Mark Knopfler in there, the guitar player, I don't know if it's a husband and wife, but these two people who lead the band are both great guitar players.

• 1:30:51Speaker 02

  Susan Tadashi and Derek Trucks, that's them.

• 1:30:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so, I think, they bought, at auction,

• 1:31:00Jason Calacanis?

  the guitar, Jerry Garcia's guitar.

• 1:31:04Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 1:31:05Jason Calacanis?

  Last week. Yeah, let me just see if I got this right.

• 1:31:11Jason Calacanis?

  So, Tadashi Trucks Band bought Tiger, the guitar, from, this is the guitar that Jerry Garcia did, I think it went for like, ten million dollars. The other guitar is owned by the founder of HubSpot, I had him on the program, he bought Jerry Garcia's other guitar. Anyway, he bought this guitar, and he just immediately went out and started playing it. So he's out there playing this, you know, incredible thing, but anyway, I found this band, I like this band. The other one is Lily Allen. You know this pop star from the UK, Lily Allen?

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  Of course, of course, I know Lily Allen, she's the one, she's very famously married to David Harbour, and then he cheated on her, it became a big tabloid scandal, but, yeah, she's been around for a long time.

• 1:31:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, Lily Allen, who, like, I think I remember her, just because she had like,

• 1:32:02Jason Calacanis?

  a big rehab stint or something.

• 1:32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, probably, that sounds about right.

• 1:32:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so anyway, she has this album called West End Girl, about her breakup with the guy from Stranger Things.

• 1:32:12Speaker 02

  With David Harbour, David Harbour from Stranger Things, yeah.

• 1:32:13Jason Calacanis?

  Which now has become a Broadway show, or I should say, a West End show. And she's on tour, she just plays the album straight, but people are going crazy for this album.

• 1:32:24Speaker 02

  She's doing a US tour of it next, yeah.

• 1:32:25Jason Calacanis?

  This album in my TikTok, because it's a very catchy album and it's like a concept album, is so popular amongst middle aged women, the gays, and, you know, I guess people from London who are fans of Lily Allen. It's a great album and then she performs it and she's made it into like a whole experience and a theme. And I just thought, you know, this is a great thing for artists to do. Take their album and then perform it as a stage show in small theaters. And you get that whole experience. What album, or albums, would you most like to see a band

• 1:33:08Jason Calacanis?

  play from track one to the first track to the last track with like a theme?

• 1:33:13Speaker 02

  I've actually seen a few bands do this. Neil Young did a tour with his Greendale album where he actually had actors. Because they're all, they're all song stories. So he would play and the crazy horse the band would play. And then you'd see the actors actually acting out the songs as he was playing them. They're also, of course, famously Pink Floyd, The Wall. They used to like build the wall onstage during. And then one other time I saw the Flaming Lips do this. They used to mash up their albums with, they used to play Dark Side of the Moon, but also with Wizard of Oz tracks in it. Because you know, there was always that old idea that Wizard of Oz links up to Dark Side of the Moon. So they would cover Dark Side of the Moon, but they would have Wizard of Oz stuff going on on stage, which was really cool. I will, I will add-

• 1:33:57Jason Calacanis?

  Talking Heads did this, right? With Stop Making Sense having-

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  Well, I mean Talking Heads, it's always like a little bit of an art stagey show along with a concert. I was gonna say, oh, I had it and now I lost it.

• 1:34:10Jason Calacanis?

  Was it Steely Dan, The Who?

• 1:34:12Speaker 02

  Oh, Steely, Steely Dan actually would be-

• 1:34:14Jason Calacanis?

  Tommy, The Who, Tommy?

• 1:34:16Speaker 02

  That would have been a good one, but no, I don't, I don't remember what I was about to say, but I'll come up with another one. Oh, there's a band I love called Songs Ohio that got Jason Molina, he died. So unfortunately you could not do this, but they have a very cool, very sort of lived in country rock album called Magnolia Electric Company that would be cool to see as a show.

• 1:34:36Jason Calacanis?

  There's another band that does dark side, they're called The Mule. And every, I think it's every New Year's, Govent, Mule, G O V.

• 1:34:50Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, government, it's government mule, yeah.

• 1:34:53Jason Calacanis?

  Government Mule will do the dark side of the mule. They do the dark side of the moon.

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:34:59Jason Calacanis?

  Pull up the Wikipedia page for dark side of the mule. And I found this online, there's a bunch of bootlegs of the concert on YouTube, etc. Dark side of the mule.

• 1:35:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, there you go, I see it.

• 1:35:10Jason Calacanis?

  If you love Pink Floyd, I would like to go to this. It seems like the album was recorded in a three hour gig at Boston's.

• 1:35:18Speaker 02

  Orpheum Theater on Halloween night. That's, Fish does that too, on Halloween every year, they cover another artist's full album, and that's like their costume. They did the White Album one year, they did Dark Side one year.

• 1:35:30Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, this is like, I saw Bruce Springsteen when he did his Broadway show, that was great, I took my mom, best son ever. Anyway, this is great stuff. Really appreciate this idea of really going deep into an album, the concept, etc. What I liked about when Bruce Springsteen did it is he just talked about his career a bit, and I really enjoyed that. He made a very funny joke, I always remember, where he's like, you know, I made a living, I made a career of talking about working in a factory, the working man, the downtrodden, and I've never set foot in a factory. I've never, and he just.

• 1:36:08Speaker 02

  Every, every track is like, oh, 12 more hours at the mill, and it's like, nah, I didn't work.

• 1:36:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and he just has, he literally said like, I experienced none of that, but I, you know, he found that niche. Anyway, anything else on your off duty list?

• 1:36:21Speaker 02

  I was gonna recommend one more thing before we go. There's a really interesting indie film, it's on Hulu right now, it's called American Sweatshop. Lily Reinhardt stars in it, who was on Riverdale. Uh, and it was directed by, I'm, I'm gonna blank on her name, but she's a great cinematographer. She shoots like The Pit and a bunch of other cool TV. She directed this, it's her directorial debut. It is set in, uh, the world of a, they're moderators, like it's the, one of these big warehouses where they have people watching social media and moderating like, this video's too violent. This video's too sexual, like blocking.

• 1:36:56Jason Calacanis?

  What's the name of this?

• 1:36:57Speaker 02

  It's called American Sweatshop, and it's set, it's set in that world where they're all watching these horrible videos all day and like approve or delete. And they have to like make these calls in real time.

• 1:37:07Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, this was a lawsuit by the people who were doing this for Facebook and they saw all kinds of horrible things.

• 1:37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, so somebody made this into a movie?

• 1:37:17Speaker 02

  It's, it's a movie about what it would be like to work in one of these sort of warehouses and what the horrible stuff you would see. And they kinda make it a thriller, like she thinks she's witnessing a crime and she's trying to report it up the chain.

• 1:37:29Jason Calacanis?

  Snuff films, whatever.

• 1:37:30Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly, but it's really, it's less about the thriller stuff and it's more just about what would it be like to do this all day as your job? And how would it impact you? I actually, I didn't, I just threw it on out of curiosity. I, I was pretty caught up in it. I think they do a really good job.

• 1:37:45Jason Calacanis?

  The other one I wanna see, I don't know if you heard about this one, there's an independent film called The Screener?

• 1:37:51Speaker 02

  Yes, I have heard about this.

• 1:37:53Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:37:54Speaker 02

  I haven't seen it.

• 1:37:54Jason Calacanis?

  This, it went, it was at Sundance and The Screener, you remember the hateful eight got leaked?

• 1:38:02Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:38:03Jason Calacanis?

  Um, and Quentin Tarantino went to the FBI, rightfully should.

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  Sure, yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:07Jason Calacanis?

  And it was like some, like post-production house, had the person's name on it.

• 1:38:11Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:38:12Jason Calacanis?

  You know, the watermark, et cetera, they catch the person, but.

• 1:38:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Jason Calacanis?

  This is the most horrible thing that could ever happen to a filmmaker. And so there is a film called The Screener. About this happening.

• 1:38:24Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:38:25Jason Calacanis?

  So.

• 1:38:25Speaker 02

  Oh, it's Jim Cummings. This is the guy who the guy directed and and wrote this is Jim Cummings. He also did a 2023 movie called The Last Stop in Yuma County. That is great. Oh, if you get a chance to watch that one. I'm going to look up where it's streaming right now, but that's the one to check out.

• 1:38:43Jason Calacanis?

  So this film isn't even out. We're going to have to maybe do.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  I'll watch whatever. Oh, yeah, you can. I believe it's on Paramount Plus. You can watch The Last Stop in Yuma County.

• 1:38:51Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, that's Twist for Friday, March 27. That's your off duty. He's Lons, L O N S, X.com slash L O N S, I'm X.com slash. Jason, do me a favor, rate, subscribe, comment. If you want to watch us live, search for This Week in Startups, hit the subscribe, hit the live button. And please go write a review and subscribe to This Week in AI, the new show from the team that brought you all in in This Week in Startups. We'll see you next time. Bye bye.

• 1:39:15Speaker 02

  Bye.