Bittensor's (alleged) $10M rug pull (feat. Mark Jeffrey) | E2275

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Sentry - https://sentry.io/twist Deel - https://deel.com/twist Netsuite - https://netsuite.com/twist Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist Today's show: *TAO just had its worst week since launch. One of Bittensor's most prominent subnet operators allegedly dumped $10 million in tokens and walked away. We're digging into what we know, how this could change the Bittensor community… and why dedicated builders still believe in this ecosystem. Jason and Lon are joined by Stillcore Capital Partner Mark Jeffrey to break down the Covenant AI and Templar controversy in real time. Then they're joined by three prominent subnet founders: Ken Miyachi of BitMind (Subnet 34) and Will Squires of Steffen Cruz of MacroCosmos (which owns Subnets 1, 9, and 13). Together, they're investigating how Bittensor incentives work, how real products are still emerging from the TAO ecosystem, and what governance fixes could arise to prevent the next (alleged) rug pull. Timestamps: 0:00 Mark Jeffrey joins the show! https://x.com/markjeffrey 2:18 How Mark Jeffrey learned about Bittensor. https://bittensor.com/ 6:17 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! 7:22 Mark Jeffrey's Bittensor investments. https://stillcorecapital.com/ 9:25 Check out our discussion with Nova: https://youtu.be/gjRt4eUyiYc?si=HopdmmSarxECark1 10:16 Sentry - New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to https://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST 10:41 Check out Ridges! https://www.ridges.ai/ 11:53 How trading alpha tokens works on Bittensor 12:44 Subnet drama: what happened? https://x.com/covenant_ai/status/2042380152831951300 16:01 Do subnet owners have too much power? 18:33 Check out our conversation with Sam Dare (2268): https://youtu.be/TN2RmNuX4-k?si=c58Byh7Fsw1ttnAY 19:10 How Sam Dare should've handled walking away (per Mark Jeffrey) 20:02 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. 23:29 Who should subnets be owned by? 24:02 Ken Miyachi from BitMind joins the show https://x.com/kenmiyachi 30:56 Netsuite - Get the free business guide Demystifying AI at https://www.netsuite.com/twist 31:06 Ken's $3M raise & investors (Arch, Canonical, Mechanism) 33:18 Token vs. equity: how to think about a subnet investment. 41:57 Will Squires and Stefan Kruse of MacroCosmos join the show https://x.com/willsquires https://x.com/sczsteffencruz 56:29 Stefan on the Covenant drama: "disappointing, but solvable" 1:02:11 Off-duty with J-Cal, Mark Jeffrey, and Lon Harris 1:02:48 Bieber vs. Carpenter: does Coachella owe you a spectacle? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp5O72WUqTk https://x.com/FashionXGirl_/status/2043251270509592936 1:15:20 Jason says Staples should pay the "Staples baddie" $1M/year https://www.tiktok.com/@blivxx 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 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Do I believe that Sam's epistle about why he left because of decentralization is correct? No, I do not.

• 0:06Jason Calacanis?

  If somebody runs a subnet, they do get a little bit of power and they can do what's called a rug pull. If you have leadership, you have responsibility, you can mess with it.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  The reason why this all happened, the incentivization alignment engine works spectacularly well, but then it fell out of alignment when there was sudden success. It created this sort of overwhelming temptation. It looks like, and this is sort of allegedly, is what it looks like on chain. It looks like this is what Sam did.

• 0:32Jason Calacanis?

  And this is all allegedly and a lot of ifs here. But if the trail is true, one might speculate that a large amount of money was at stake and it would be like somebody raising venture capital and saying, wow, there's millions of dollars in the bank. I should deposit in my personal account and shut the company down.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by NetSuite. The business landscape is very chaotic right now. That's why you need NetSuite by Oracle. Get the free business guide, Demystifying AI, at netsuite.com/twist. Deal. Founders scale faster on Deal. Set up payroll for any country in minutes, hire anyone, anywhere, get visas handled fast and get back to building. Visit deal.com/twist to learn more. And Sentry. Your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs. New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST.

• 1:34Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody, welcome back to Twist. It is Monday, April 13th, 2026. A O. Seventy-seven. Seventy-seven, something. There was a lot of hand wringing in the Tau BitTensor community over the last week or so. And there's been a lot of progress made. So to break it all down with us, Lon brought on my friend Mark Jeffrey, known for 30 years, was an early OG in Bitcoin, created one of the first online virtual communities, The Palace, back in the 90s, when many of you were not born,

• 2:10Jason Calacanis?

  and is one of the OGs of the internet online space and also now crypto and Tau Distributed Computing. Welcome back to This Week in Startups, Mark Jeffrey.

• 2:22Speaker 00

  Thank you for having me, sir. Great to be back.

• 2:24Jason Calacanis?

  Mark started telling me, Lon, about Bit Tensor and Tau, because I was like, hey, what's going on? Because I think crypto is turning a corner here. It's becoming legal. It's becoming regulated in a very intelligent way. And I'm curious, is there anybody doing anything where a consumer or an enterprise gets value other than store of value and money transfer? Very well-established uses of crypto, of course, between Bitcoin and, you know, stable coins, great to transfer money around and great to, you know, speculate and all that stuff. But I care about the application layer and actually some value being created. And he said, yeah, let me tell you about this thing, Bit Tensor Tau and subnets. And I was like, that's legit.

• 3:09Jason Calacanis?

  And then I watched the people getting involved in and said, these are legit people. As opposed to crypto, Mark, which I think you would agree, you had the early cyber punks, crypto heads, and then it kind of got hijacked a bit along the way.

• 3:23Speaker 00

  But I would, I would say that within the Ethereum community, when that all booted up, when decentralized finance booted up, you had the invention of Uniswap and the decentralized exchange and the invention of decentralized lending. And that was valuable. These are financial products, so they're not really, you know, products like the way you and I are used to seeing belts, but they do have value and they're not like sort of nonsense. But I'd say 80 to 90% of it is nonsense. When I encountered Bit Tensor and started digging around the subnets, you know, having been a participant in many early ecosystems, including the 90s, as you, you know, talked about earlier, as well as early crypto, what I saw in Bit Tensor was quite a lot of early signal.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  I would say, you know, half the teams were doing something of value and were decent hypotheses. You don't know whether these hypotheses are going to pan out to become very large companies or phenomenons, but they are pretty good. So I've never seen an ecosystem where there is more early signal than the Bit Tensor ecosystem. So that's one of the reasons why I got very excited about it.

• 4:32Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe explain Uniswap. You mentioned that. I'm sure people in the audience are going, oh, that is real. Uniswap. It's kind of an automated market maker of some type where people can swap value, yeah?

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's really a decentralized Coinbase, right? Yes, you're correct. Everything you said is correct. But a lot of people don't know what an automated market maker is. It is technically called that, an AMM. But the thing that was really, that was happening, you know, before Uniswap, if you wanted to get your coin listed on a, you had to, first of all, get it on a centralized exchange. There was no other option, which meant you had to pay Binance or Coinbase or Kraken or somebody, usually like a million bucks to get the listing, right? And then you had to provide your own market making, which meant that you had to provide a bunch of other coins to trade against your coin when it listed on the exchange. The exchange would not provide that liquidity, right? So along came Uniswap and they said,

• 5:30Speaker 00

  why don't we do something like a Coinbase or a Kraken or a Binance? But the entire thing is just powered by smart contracts and lives on the chain. Nobody owns it, nobody controls it except for the smart contract. And we attract liquidity by promising some portion of the trading fees to anyone who provides the liquidity to the smart contracts. So anyone could become a fractional owner through providing liquidity of an exchange, of this decentralized exchange. So you had two real big advantages. One, you had permissionless listing. Anybody could list any coin so long as they were able to define the swap pairs on Uniswap. And two, the community provided the liquidity and this worked extraordinarily well.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  And is basically the backbone of all DeFi today.

• 6:17Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, we're off to the races here. So much interesting information, hard to keep track of. And I've got my notepad here and I've got my favorite pen. This is my Zebra G750. But as fast as we're talking, I'm not going to get it all down, right? I might write down two or three words. It's not going to be structured. I'm going to have to go back. I can't keep up and I gotta be present here. So what do I want to do? I have my plot pin. I press the button. Boom, I get a haptic. Now it's being recorded. And it's going to be summarized, red light on it. So I'm not like covertly recording anybody. I'm just keeping my notes. So when you're in a meeting, if you don't have your phone handy, you don't want to flip through, you know, your different apps to try to record something, the plot stores it all.

• 7:02Jason Calacanis?

  When I put it in the cradle at night to charge the battery and the battery lasts forever. It seems like I charge this thing every two weeks and I use it constantly. It syncs everything and then it automatically runs it against an LLM and does the summary. It's one of the more brilliant products and I'm addicted to it. I hear you got one for your mom.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  I did. My mom watches our show and she's like, you know, they should be advertising these to seniors, not executives, because I'm forgetting stuff constantly. So she's hitting it like all during the day. Remind me to do this, update my calendar for that. And it's just keeping her more like in the flow and helping her sort of dodge her forgetfulness. And it's the, it's the smartness of it. It's not just taking notes for you. It's filing them. It's arranging them. It's coordinating them. It's keeping you organized, all with just hitting your, your plot pin. So if your work relies on conversations, you too need a plot note pin, just like my mom. Check it out at plaud.ai/twist. And if you use the code twist, they're going to give you 10% off.

• 7:58Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So thanks, Claude. Let's get to Tau and BitTensor. What attracted you? Yeah. What attracted you to this specific project and why, Mark?

• 8:09Speaker 00

  I remember talking to you at a conference, one of your conferences where you said, you know, pivot from crypto to AI, right? And thought about that because you're a smart guy and you know, you have advice like that. I'm going to listen. And my conclusion was, well, you can't really pivot to AI because the only people who are going to own AI are the big players. Right? There's like five companies, right? You have to have giant iron to compete. And anything other than that is you're just, you know, an API layer on top of one of those five companies. And you're probably, you're probably just running into a buzzsaw. That was my initial conclusion. And then I, you know, with BitTensor, I saw a way to sort of. You know, fuse the crypto stuff with the decentralized version of what the centralized

• 8:54Speaker 00

  people were doing. And the more I understood what was going on there, the more I realized that this was sort of the Linux approach to, you know, it sort of reminded me of the OS wars when you had OS2, you had Microsoft NT, you had Sun Solaris. But who won? It was Linux, right? Linux powers 90% of our world today. And what I saw with BitTensor was sort of the early moments of what looked like an AI Linux. OpenAI, but like what OpenAI should have been, truly OpenAI.

• 9:20Jason Calacanis?

  I wasn't saying crypto is bad in any way, just saying if you're in crypto, I would pivot to AI because there's such a much, there's so much application for AI because intelligence touches everything. Whereas with crypto, finance doesn't touch everything. Finance people might say, yeah, finance touches everything. Finance doesn't touch me writing a poem. Finance doesn't touch me going and, you know, cooking a meal or something like, it doesn't touch everything. But intelligence does, right? And that was very similar to, I think, what the Tau people were saying was, hey, AI is so complex and there's such a need for compute, there's such a need for transport, moving packets around. Hey, maybe there's something here.

• 10:01Jason Calacanis?

  You're running a, essentially a fund, like a venture fund, but for Tau, I'm a partner in it, I'm an LP in it, I'm deep down the rabbit hole on this, but you're picking subnets in which to buy those tokens and invest in. So what are some of the ones you've invested in and won? Debugging sucks and it takes up time. Your team could be spending on awesome new features and products, but now there's a better way. Sentry's AI-powered debugging agent, SEER, isn't just guessing about what might have gone wrong with your system, it's analyzing your actual data. And because it has context, it spots buggy code before that code ruins your entire day. Plus, Sentry works alongside coding agents like Cursor, passing along an idea for a fix

• 10:43Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we've invested in about eight so far and we, you know, sort of the, the big ones are ridges, shoots, Hippieus, Vidio, Score, and, and basically all of these, the, what we look for, we're sort of conservative investors so far as one exists in the BitTensor ecosystem. In that we look for subnets that have product market fit and revenue primarily, right? So it's, it's pretty much the same criteria that you use probably to judge startups, right? We look for a mature team. We look for mature products and there, there's a class of product inside of BitTensor that I call the research subnets.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  And these are people that are trying to do extraordinary things that don't necessarily have an obvious product market fit right out of the gate. But if they work, they could be absolutely enormous, right? But, but you don't know yet who the, yeah. So, you know, so great example of that. Well, Nova is a great example of that, right? So Nova is hunting pharmaceutical molecules and it's going to take a while for them to probably find one. But if they do find one, it could be a billion dollar subnet kind of overnight, right? But it's very speculative, like we're mining for gold basically. We might not find it.

• 12:27Jason Calacanis?

  Now, Lon, it's important incentives matter. And so I want to sort of tee up this story here.

• 12:36Jason Calacanis?

  If somebody runs a subnet, they do get a little bit of power. They have the subnet, they recruit miners, they have validators, making sure the work was done properly. But they become like a small business owner and they can do what's called a rug pull. So they could either be virtuous and they can provide people with this incredible opportunity to give an.

• 13:02Jason Calacanis?

  Give knowledge through a large language model or an algorithm. They could give compute, they could give storage. They can contribute something in order to win the prizes of Tau or the subnet token, which is essentially one and the same in some ways. So they can earn money, but they can also, if you have leadership and you have responsibility, you can mess with it. So we had last week, somebody running, one of the subnets decided they wanted to take their marbles and leave the game. And that's the core of what happened. Yeah, Lon?

• 13:37Speaker 03

  We actually had spoken with Templar, which was the subnet in question. Sam Dare is the sort of creator of it. And so, yeah, what's happened? Sam Dare, he dumped 37,000 Tau on his own subnet holders. It's about $10 million in money and he sort of walked away from the entire project. It was Covenant AI, the designers of that 70 billion parameter model. You had spoken about it with Jensen Huang on All In. We had discussed it with Sam here on the show. So he sort of walked away from Covenant AI. They had been operating three subnets on BitTensor, Templar, Basilica and Grail.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Templar was sort of like the big one, the high profile one, was the reason that Tau had sort of been taking off, getting a lot of more mainstream attention. The coin had sort of gone up in money. He and Konst had some sort of, we're still getting sort of all of the details. They had had some sort of back and forth. He felt that Jacob Steves, one of the co-founders of BitTensor, was sort of overstepping his authority. There was some sort of conflict between the two of them. And then, as you said, Sam sort of took his marbles, walked away, sold 1% of the alpha holdings on three covenant subnets that were near 100%. And so...

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that is sort of the situation. Thirty seven thousand tau, that was kind of the rug pull, that ten million dollars. And now we're sort of in the aftermath. The price of tau dropped about 25% in the immediate aftermath.

• 15:08Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know if you were on the episode when this gentleman was on, but I found him a little squirrely.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, we discussed this after the show. I mean, big personality, a funny guy. Like, it was a great guest on a podcast because he had very big outspoken opinions. And he was a big personality guy. I really enjoyed talking to him. But we did discuss this afterwards, and there was also an edge to him. It was a little bit hard to put your finger on. There was something a little unpredictable about his demeanor. And I guess-

• 15:37Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and what was coming next. I kind of pushed him on, hey, what are you doing next? And how does this work? And the answers, Mark, weren't as crisp or as tight as I might have expected from somebody running something significant, let's just say.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:51Jason Calacanis?

  So what is the back channel here? And maybe you could explain Konstant, the founder of Bittensor and his role in all this.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  So Konst stands for Konstantin, just FYI.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Oh, I did not know that. I did not know.

• 16:04Speaker 00

  Yes, I know, a lot of people don't know that. So Konst actually built the initial subnet version of Templar 3. And Sam used to work directly for Konst at the Open Tensor Foundation. And so Konst basically bought the subnet forum, wrote the initial version of the decentralized training environment, Templar, and handed it off to Sam. Right? So he gave Sam his start. And then, and then basically, what we discovered here is, you know, let's just stop for a second because what happened here, the reason why this all happened, is because something in Bittensor worked extraordinarily well. There's several things that are working pretty well. But it's because something worked.

• 16:48Speaker 00

  The incentivization alignment engine worked spectacularly well. But then it fell out of alignment when there was sudden success. And it created this sort of overwhelming temptation. For you know, a subnet owner who, when you're a subnet owner, you acquire a large number of your subnet tokens, they're emitted into your wallet, right? Because you get paid effectively by the chain for being a subnet owner. And if you have enough of them, and there's the liquidity pool in the on-chain Uniswap that I described earlier, you can at any time just sort of flood that Uniswap with your tokens and exchange it back out for Tau. And if you have the majority of the tokens, you can get the majority of the liquidity pool.

• 17:33Speaker 00

  And now you've got Tau, now you can run off the Binance, sell the Tau for dollars, and now you're gone. Which it looks like, and this is sort of allegedly, this is what it looks like on-chain, it looks like this is what Sam did. And it also looks like that his developers, people on his team, were caught blindsided by this also.

• 17:50Jason Calacanis?

  And this is all allegedly, and a lot of ifs here. But if the trail is true, then essentially, one might speculate that a large amount of money was at stake, and it would be like somebody raising venture capital and saying, wow, there's millions of dollars in the bank. I should deposit in my personal account and shut the company down. Which is actually one of the big fears in venture capital. We run on a trust-based system, and it has happened. You can go look at the history of venture capital. Every year or two, somebody takes the money and goes to Vegas or upskins to another country.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  There was just that story about the director, the Netflix director, Carl Rank, do you remember this? Netflix paid him to make like an eight-episode sci-fi series for them, and he just took the money, bought crypto, bought a bunch of luxury mattresses, bought some cars. He's doing a little jail time right now for that. But yeah, it happens in every industry. People get paid upfront, and then they walk away with the bag.

• 18:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And important to say, we don't know if that's the case here, but that is part of any capitalist system. So there's no way to stop this unless you have a board of directors, if you have a controller, a CFO, and then even if you do, people, you know, the board meets four times a year, and then... There's 361 days in between those board meetings where shenanigans can happen.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  I guess I had, I had sort of a two-part question. I'd love to throw both of you about this. One is, do you guys believe that Sam had legit grievances against Const or the system? He's been saying this is activism, like BitTensor is overreaching, it's not truly decentralized, and I had no choice but to do this. So one, do you think, is there anything behind that at all? Or do you suspect that this was just, that's how he's explaining himself after the fact that he just wanted the money? And then two, how would you have preferred a subnet owner react if they do feel like, "I want out of the BitTensor community, I'm not happy with the way it's being run"? What should Sam have done to avoid rug pulling all of the people who believed in his project?

• 19:57Jason Calacanis?

  Allegedly.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  Allegedly, but still separating himself from BitTensor more generally?

• 20:03Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:06Speaker 00

  Do I believe that Sam's epistle about why he left because of decentralization is correct? No, I do not. And you can see this, the evidence, like, nobody in the ecosystem believes that.

• 21:16Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  And you can see this from all the posts, from all the subnets. Everybody's saying, you know, my my subnet is bit tensor, bit tensor is my subnet. There's a ton of these posts.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Yes, I've seen those.

• 21:25Speaker 00

  Basically, the bit tensor version of I am Spartacus, right?

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Right? And and everyone is standing up and saying, no, none of this stuff is true. And Konst gave a very, I thought, thoughtful reply to the letter that Sam posted.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  As, you know, his rage quit letter, basically, right? Konst replied to it, and it was a very legitimate response. So, um, yeah, so I think that, um, I don't, you know, I don't think there's anything to his claim of decentralization. Nobody else feels that way, so.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Purely hypothetically, Sam had a legitimate grievance. You're running a subnet, you're like, I don't like the way bit tensor is being run.

• 22:03Jason Calacanis?

  How should he have dealt with it?

• 22:04Speaker 03

  How should he have dealt with it?

• 22:06Speaker 00

  He should have gone to Konst and said, you know, look, I'm not happy. Um, you know, let's find a way to amicably part ways. Let's let me hand off, let's let's let's figure out, you know, how many, how much tokens, how many subnet three tokens I should be allowed to keep.

• 22:21Speaker 03

  Right, okay.

• 22:21Speaker 00

  And then I should hand over the subnet private key to the foundation to be redistributed to somebody else to run. And Konst could figure out who that was, or the foundation could figure out who that was. Basically negotiate an exit, which, you know, he gets something for his contribution to date. But then the subnet and the token holders are allowed to carry on without him.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  That's what he should have done.

• 22:42Jason Calacanis?

  Mark, before we get to our guests, how can we avoid this in the future? And who owns a subnet? And who should own a subnet? Should it be the miners themselves? Or should there be governance here? Should there be a 51% rule? Where the people contributing to it own it? What's the best practice here? Because, hey, as an investor, if I wanted to back Lon to do, you know, an algorithm and do a subnet, I would be like, okay, I want to own it. I want Lon to own it. I want the community own it. How does that get codified? Outside of the Delaware C Corporation, the Texas Nevada Corporation, where we set up

• 23:25Jason Calacanis?

  a board of directors, where we set up shares in a company, we have preferred shares and that whole architecture, which is old, but trusted.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  The architecture in crypto is smart contracts. So the answer to this is to implement a new smart contract or change at the chain level in BitEnts' case. The problem is that Sam had access to all of his tokens and could spend them in one gulp before anyone knew what was happening, right? He had information asymmetry, which, and he controlled the subnet, so he could just dump this giant amount of tokens on the market. So the answer is to lock those tokens, to basically make it so he can't spend them. And, you know, if he's operating the subnet, you can't both operate the subnet and have unlocked tokens. Like, there has to be, you know, if you're operating the subnet, then your tokens are locked. And there are, there's a couple of different proposals underway. It's exactly how to do

• 24:16Speaker 00

  this. Cons released a new one this morning, where basically, the ownership of the subnet is always up for grabs, based on who locks the most tokens for the longest period of time. That's effectively the mechanism. So you might lose your subnet to someone who has more conviction. So the idea is that the chain will reward capital conviction in a subnet. So it is possible you'll lose your subnet to somebody that believes in it more than you.

• 24:39Jason Calacanis?

  We have some guests on.

• 24:40Speaker 03

  We do.

• 24:41Jason Calacanis?

  Let's bring some of our guests on, and we'll, we'll have a talk about some of the other subnets out there.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Yes. Speaking of great subnets, as we often are, we have three more subnet founders joining us on the show today. First up, from Macro Cosmos, they also run three individual subnets. We're going to welcome Will Squires, the CEO and co-founder, and Stefan Cruz, the CTO and co-founder. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. Also joining us, he is the co-founder of subnet 34 BitMind. They're a system for detecting deep fakes and other AI-generated content. Give it up for Ken Miyachi. Ken, thanks for being here.

• 25:18Jason Calacanis?

  All right, so maybe Ken, you could explain a bit about your subnet, who you are and why you created it.

• 25:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, thanks for having me on. Hey, everybody, I'm Ken. I'm the co-founder and CEO of BitMind. So we are an AI security company and we're very focused on deep fake detection. We have a variety of consumer applications where if you're scrolling X or you're on the internet, you can put in a video, image, piece of audio, etc. It will tell you if this is real or fake. And then we also have a bunch of enterprise services where we create custom models for essentially businesses trying to secure their communications, their data, etc. And what we're really focused on right now is going towards a proof of human. There's a lot of grifters, there's a lot of North Koreans, fake people trying to infiltrate your systems,

• 26:07Speaker 04

  and just AI slop in general throughout the internet, bots trying to sign up and use your services. And we are creating services to essentially detect and stop that type of activity from happening on the internet.

• 26:18Jason Calacanis?

  And how is this done? Is there an algorithm that analyzes a piece of data and says, hey, this is human, this is likely an LLM, this is a deep fake, this is a real photo, and what do the miners contribute to this? They have their own algorithms or their computer, both?

• 26:37Speaker 04

  Correct, yeah. So essentially, the miners are competing on developing the models themselves. These detection models that essentially, in different modalities, whether it be image, video, or audio, that essentially, they win the competition, they earn our subnet token if they produce the highest accuracy, most high-fidelity models. And then on top of that, we also have another set of miners that are actually incentivized to generate data and try to fool them. So it's a continuously learning system trying to improve over time.

• 27:08Jason Calacanis?

  So you have a white hat and a black hat. You got the black hats coming in and saying, hey, or a red team, I guess. That might be a way to say it even better. Here is some content, and we're going to make a generative AI picture of lawn, but we're gonna make them, you know, 10% more robust, or we're gonna GLP them and make them 10% thinner. And then they try to trick. You're the other miners and that makes their algorithm sharper. So steel making, you know, steel on steel making it stronger.

• 27:42Speaker 04

  Exactly. Trying to give the chisel jaw. I don't know, whatever, whatever you want, right?

• 27:46Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 27:46Speaker 04

  But why this is so important is because generative AI and AI in general, right? Is the velocity in which these new models coming out is so fast. And so if you did this in a traditional way, what you'd have to do, wait for C dance to come out, wait for, you know, Nano Banana Pro two to come out, generate a bunch of that data, retrain your detection model. And what we have is an open decentralized permissionless system where people are generating data for us all the time. And people are also coming up with new detection algorithms, retraining quickly. And so we can actually update our system on a daily, weekly, at a very fast cadence to always stay ahead of the newest generation models.

• 28:26Jason Calacanis?

  So, okay, this seems like an incredible game you've constructed. One team is truth maxing, one is fake maxing. They battle it out, their algorithms get sharper. Fantastic. But is there a commercial product that is created for enterprises or consumers? Can the New York Times or could X Twitter say, hey, we want to put these trending posts in here? And then maybe in the community notes, say, hey, it has this score, you know, from your subnet, you know, and it's a certified 98.7% truthy or, you know, truth maxed.

• 29:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely. So I think the two, the two enterprise use cases you've touched upon were essentially social media and news outlets. So with news outlets, right, that's a really important use case for us. If you are in traditional media and media at all, you want to make sure what you're reporting on is actually real. And you lose trust and credibility, which they're already struggling with. And so, right, as a reporter, you're going to want to verify whether this image, whether this data that you're receiving is real or not. And so there's definitely use cases like that where you could either drag and drop an image or video, or you can use our API, you know, whether, however, where you want to use it to determine that. And then on social media, it's a really big use case. We have something called Bitmine Bot, which is very similar to Grok, but it has a specific focus on, you know, is this real or not?

• 29:50Speaker 04

  The other use cases, I think, on the enterprise side are really about securing essentially business communication. There's been a lot of recent drama around interviews, whether you're

• 30:04Speaker 04

  like, I think there's two main use cases. There's, there's one where it's like, just this person is completely fake. Yeah. And like, right? The person can't put their hand in front of their face or something like that. And they're trying to infiltrate your organization. But then there's another use case where it's just like actually grifting people, trying to get multiple jobs and, and putting on a facade of themselves. And so we're trying to stop both of that. And then the other actually really big use case that is pretty shocking, but not a lot of people are thinking about is actually in government. So more and more, there is evidence being, uh, being shown in cases in a wide variety of contexts that is AI generated. And you need to be able to prove this, you know,

• 30:47Speaker 04

  the, uh, that this is AI generated is the new, uh, my dog, A my homework, right? Yeah. If it's like a damning thing about you, you just say it's AI generated.

• 30:56Jason Calacanis?

  We say it on every episode these days. The AI revolution is here and sitting on the sidelines is no longer an auction. No more waiting outside with NetSuite by Oracle. You can start putting AI to work for you today. NetSuite is the number one AI cloud ERP and it's trusted by over 43,000 businesses. It's not just an AI add-on or a chatbot that sits in your browser. No, this is a unified source of truth that brings together all the data you need to run your business. From software and IT services to healthcare, equipment manufacturing, financial services, and many other great American industries, NetSuite delivers a customized solution for your business. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get the daily business guide,

• 31:41Jason Calacanis?

  demystifying AI at netsuite.com/twist. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/twist. You, what's interesting to me, Mark, is just putting on my angel investor hat. Uh, go read the angel of the book and it's in 13 or 14 languages. It was really nice. I was at a major Hollywood party last night, just very famous. Studio head Lon came up to me and said, you're Jason Calacanis? I said, yes, I am. And this is in like a room full of like celebrities or whatever. He said, I read your book. It's just like movies. You would have been a great studio head. Anyway, enough promotion of my book. It was one of the great moments of my life that in a room where I assumed nobody knew who I was, a studio head, a literal studio head, had read the book.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  David Zasla, this is what he's doing with his time now.

• 32:29Jason Calacanis?

  It wasn't David, but it was on that, even bigger than that. But anyway, it's as crazy as it seems. I won't say who. But I'm looking at this through my angel lens, Mark, and saying, wow, there is a business here. I don't know exactly what it is, but you can see Ken is doing product market fit. He's doing a go to market function where, hey, we're trying to find customers. And he's also raised $3 million for this project as well. Correct, Ken? And who put $3 million into the company? And then Mark, as an investor, after Ken tells us who put the $3 million in, I want you to explain to me how I should think about this as a partner in Stillcore

• 33:13Jason Calacanis?

  at an LP with, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own personal money at stake versus, hey, should I invest in Ken's corporation? So Ken, maybe you could tell us who invested the $3 million? Is it crypto people giving you tokens or is it like a venture capital firm?

• 33:28Speaker 04

  So my background, I come from both AI and crypto. I worked at Amazon for a couple of years doing recommendation systems. And then prior to that, I was at a blockchain protocol called Near. And so I had relationships with a variety of VCs in both of the spaces. Let's see, Arch Capital, Canonical Crypto, Mechanism Capital, Blockchain Builders Fund. There's a wide variety when we raised our seed fund about a year ago now.

• 33:53Jason Calacanis?

  And how did they think about, well, let me have Mark answer the question of where is value going to be created? And how should I think about this? Because now I'm, I'm getting pulled in both directions. I've got my venture firm here and then I'm a partner in Stillcore. Okay, I placed my bet here, but should I also be like, hmm, maybe Launch or my syndicate should talk to Ken about investing in his corporation?

• 34:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's very different and a bit tenser than it was in the old Ethereum and Solana days where you had this token or equity kind of, you know, bifurcation. And they both were, were sort of, they appeared to be ownership of the company. The ownership of the token in Ken's subnet, the subnet that he operates and runs is actually the product department of a much larger organization, the company, right? So the business and the intellectual property, so much as it exists, the revenue stream of his company, that the equity is how you own a piece of that. The product department and the engine that makes his product possible, being a, you're basically a part owner in a Bitcoin-like fashion of that piece of it, and you're always liquid, right?

• 35:00Speaker 00

  With his corporate owning equity in his corporation, you're not liquid, right? You're basically tied up for whatever period of time, but you can sell anytime you want, as we've seen in BitSaver right recently. You can, in fact, sell those tokens, right? So it just depends on which one you believe in more and what optionality you want to have.

• 35:20Jason Calacanis?

  So interesting, Lon, the way, one way to think about this is if you owned equity in Airbnb, the corporation, Lon, you could also be an Airbnb host and make money in the marketplace, but you could also own Airbnb. And I do know people who were Airbnb investors who were like, I want to start an Airbnb. Or there are people who are Tesla investors who want to, you know, have a fleet of robotaxis and manage those. So, or it could be you are running a corporation at scale and the corporation has debt and you can buy corporate paper that is the loan that people pay 12 or 15% on. And so you could own Tesla and you could own Tesla's debt, or you could own Uber and Uber's

• 36:03Jason Calacanis?

  debt, or Amazon and Amazon's debt. So there's multiple ways to get exposure, I think.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  What do you guys think, just in general, if I'm a regular person watching this who's like, I like the cut of this project's jib, I want to get in on it, would it just make sense to go to a place like Kraken or Coinbase and buy the Tau token? Is that a valid way to get exposure here? Or should you really be thinking about specific subnets and sort of digging in deeper?

• 36:28Jason Calacanis?

  This is an important question, I think. I think the easiest thing to do is buy a little bit of Tau. You get the mutual fund effect, which would be like, if you asked me, should I be an angel investor or should I put money into a VC firm? If you put money into a VC firm, you're saying, I trust the partners there to make, you know, 20 bets. And I don't make those 20 bets, but in 10 years, I hopefully get back more than double my money and I beat the public markets. But if you want to be an angel investor and you read my book and you join Angel List and the syndicate and you join other SPVs, you get to pick and choose which ones you bet on and you get to make your own decision. And some people like that style.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:08Jason Calacanis?

  In other words, you can back somebody to go play a series of poker tournaments. There are people who do that and there are people who want to play in the poker tournaments. Depends on your time. I would say it's basically a time commitment thing. I don't have the time to evaluate every subnet, so I'm a partner and investor in Stillcore Capital, which Mark is doing. All of these things are incredibly speculative. 90% of the bets I make go to zero.

• 37:30Jason Calacanis?

  So you would need to have a certain

• 37:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:33Jason Calacanis?

  constitution, I think is the way to say it. Yeah, hold on.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  Yes, I could not afford to have 90% of my bets go to zero. That's definitely not.

• 37:41Jason Calacanis?

  Well, but you could afford to have 90% of 10% of your bets go to zero.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 37:45Jason Calacanis?

  Which would be 9% of your overall net worth.

• 37:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:48Jason Calacanis?

  So that's another way to think about it, right? If you're going to put 5 or 10% of your net worth into speculative things. Mark, any thoughts here of how an individual, without giving financial advice, but just how you think about this, of where the value be created? Because Stillcore has probably, I don't know if it's half or two third of its money in Tau and half or a third of its money into subnets at this point. What's the, what's the blend you think you should have?

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, it's about 80% subnets right now.

• 38:17Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow.

• 38:18Speaker 00

  But I want to back that off a little bit, you know, maybe 30, 70. But I think, because I think we're, I think we're in a unique period right now where, you know, if you make the right early bets, it's going to be extraordinarily rewarding. And you have to know, you know, it's basically evaluating the subnets and the companies around them and the products like you would a regular startup. Knowing when to get in, also knowing when to get out, right? And this is a highly, highly, highly dynamic environment as we've seen recently. So sort of scrambling around and getting to know everyone and everything. And knowing as much information as possible is more than a full-time job. And that's, you know, you can do that if you want. There are people who are doing it.

• 39:01Speaker 00

  You know, but we, we take over that function for accredited investors if they'd like to park their money with us and not worry about all that stuff, right? So, however, if, if you're a normal person in the normal world and you'd like to play in this arena, it is open to you. You don't have to be accredited, right? So that's one advantage to betting on subnets as opposed to trying to get into equity. Most people can't get in equity, right? So, um, so this is, this is a way for you to invest in the AI future as an unaccredited investor that you normally don't get.

• 39:31Speaker 04

  I kind of want to touch on that, too. I feel like that's one of the most important things. I think something that's so interesting that specifically in the US, AI is more unpopular than Trump. And I think a lot of the reason there is because no one can participate in the economic system that is building. And what's so exciting about Bittensor is these are all extremely early-stage companies that you wouldn't ideally have the ability to participate in in any other way. And this is, it's kind of a double-edged sword, right? Your early-stage startup is getting marketed, you know, is getting valued by the public market, but the public can participate in it. And I think that's what you need to do to, to keep AI beneficial to all humans. Have everyone that's participating have economic upside here.

• 40:14Jason Calacanis?

  Which, you know, I think everybody in America, it's just like really leveling up the discussion, but it's a great point, Ken. There, there is Invest America accounts now called Trump accounts, where they're giving every young person 500 or a thousand dollars. And companies are going to start to contribute. There's some other wells coming into the system, I understand, uh, from Brad, who told me there's going to be some other Michael Dell-type people who will probably contribute.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  Brad, Brad Gerson of Altimeter Capital.

• 40:41Jason Calacanis?

  Brad Gerson of Altimeter, um, who, you know, championed this idea. Give him a lot of credit for that. If people could, more people could participate. And then I interviewed this CE, the, the new head of the SEC. And he's, this is his second stint as SEC chair.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Secretary Atkins.

• 40:56Jason Calacanis?

  All, Atkins, yeah, he's all in on, um,

• 41:01Jason Calacanis?

  Creating a test at the SEC where you can become accredited and participate in private companies. So participating in private companies where the value is could be a major unlock for people. Also incredibly risky, which is why rich people, when they go to dinner, talk about whatever private deals they're doing and what they have access to because they understand if it's a 1 in 10 chance of going 100x, probably take that bet every day. So incentives matter. I think that's the key thing we've learned here at Mark. There are incentives all over the place. And the game of Tao, the brilliance of it,

• 41:38Jason Calacanis?

  dare I say, is that it's very focused on incentives, validators, miners, competing. Just it's elegant and beautiful system. When you look at the first subnet we looked at, what comes to mind in terms of where that could wind up in two, three years?

• 42:01Speaker 00

  I think you're right. The brilliance of it, the incentive alignment engine of Bit Tensor is its core invention. And everything within it is contests within contests within contests. Everybody's competing with everybody and only the most excellent get anything. So you know, in companies, even the most, the best run startup, there's a lot of inefficiencies. You have to hire people, right? Some of them hide in the company successfully without doing very much. And they're sort of mediocre. There is no middle management when there's contests within contests with the contests. You know, this is the most ferocious form of capitalism ever invented, as far as I can tell. So yeah, I love it.

• 42:37Jason Calacanis?

  Let's meet our next subnet. And I think, you know, at the pace we're going with two or three subnets, you know, every couple of episodes, we're going to get through all 120.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  We are. That's our, that's become our goal. And actually, Will and Stefan from Macrocosmos, they run three different subnets, Jason. So we're knocking out, we're knocking out three. We've got Apex subnet one, Iota subnet nine, and then Data Universe slash Gravity, that's subnet 13. So thanks for Will.

• 43:02Jason Calacanis?

  So greedy, so greedy, taking up all these subnets. He owns, he owns 2.7% of the subnets. Okay.

• 43:08Speaker 05

  We actually used to run five subnets. We decided that we would, we would like to live long enough to actually see these things reach the market. So we had to, we had to downsize a little bit. Running a subnet is no joke as Can attest and certainly can, but I think Will and I would would love to speak a little bit about our most ambitious work on BitTensor, which is Iota. So Iota is seven at nine, and perhaps I'm being hyperbolic, but I firmly believe it's the most ambitious thing that is being built within BitTensor right now. And I I think from a very high level, what we want to be able to do is orchestrate the world's compute in the way that Bitcoin did, but to train models that rival ChatGPT frontier skill models.

• 43:48Speaker 05

  And there is, there is actually a growing consensus in the industry that training the next generation of very large models is is becoming prohibitively expensive, as I'm sure you guys are aware, we're talking about data centers the size of downtown Manhattan, and the next generation is going to dwarf even this. And I think what becomes inevitable at some point is we need to think about cost efficiency, we need to think about CapEx and something. In fact, one of the core ideas that inspired BitTensor from Constant Self was the idea of doing what's called distributed training. So distributed training is taking compute from pockets all around the world and coordinating that compute and making that equivalent to a large data center, yet it's just one that is dispersed all around the world.

• 44:31Speaker 05

  Now, there's an enormous amount of work you have to do, as you can imagine, a lot of networking, a lot of algorithm and a lot of research needs to be done, but it's a very high ceiling for the project. So we've been working on Iota for about nine months, Will, my co-founder and CEO, myself, the CTO. We're really, really excited and motivated about it. And yeah, the the dream of training in BitTensor is very much alive and kicking.

• 44:53Jason Calacanis?

  And and to put this in context, Lon and Mark, to create a frontier model now is, and you do a run basically to create the next ChatGPT and next Claude and next Grok, whatever. The the estimates are $200 million in compute costs. This isn't the staff, this isn't the company, you know, testing or anything, just the raw compute cost is 200 million. Now, that's a big number, but if you had, well, if you had.

• 45:22Jason Calacanis?

  Let's say 10 million people participating and contributing some compute. Well, you know, then it would be a couple of dollars, $20 per person. So you start, or if it's a million, it'd be $200 worth of compute each. If it was 100,000, it'd be 2,000. If it was 10,000, it'd be 20,000 in compute. So maybe you get down to 10,000 people providing 20,000 in compute. And hey, it's conceivable in the same way SETI at home was. Yeah, Mark?

• 45:49Speaker 00

  That's absolutely correct. And the thing that I love the most about what these guys have done is, you know, as someone who has watched mining occur within BitTensor, but been unable to participate until I got my claw and I'd started vibe mining with that. But, you know, minus the claw and all that, really, these guys were the first people to provide a ready packaged mining application for their sub that nobody else had done that. Right? So and you at home could now be a BitTensor miner for the very first time and not have to know anything about anything. Just download this thing, set it up, and now you're mining BitTensor. It was fantastic. I loved it.

• 46:24Jason Calacanis?

  So talk to me about how the IOTA install works. Is it as simple as like downloading Slack or downloading a Chrome browser and then it just runs in the background?

• 46:36Speaker 06

  I think a lot of the principle of this, and you know, I'll talk about the differences in our training methods later, but but Train at Home, as we call it, the application or IOTA, it's like two clicks to install. And again, Mark is Mark is one of our miners, so I don't actually have to pitch for myself. You install the application. It's a simple binary. Stefan has apparently gone to the wrong place. But you basically just install the app, put in a key to be paid out with, and we use your computer when you're not using it. And one of the reasons training models is so expensive is not just that you need immense amounts of compute. It's also that you train with like the prime rib or like the ribeye steak. You know, you take the best compute for the longest period of time. You know, it's the filet mignon cut.

• 47:21Speaker 06

  And that makes it even more expensive because it's the filet mignon cut, but the cow has to be rested for fifty days and you've got to leave it there and you've got to look at it. And what we want to do is fundamentally make you let models out of ground beef. So we take bits of compute from here or there, we perform some magic in the background and we make meatloaf. And, you know, everybody loves, loves ribeye steak, but actually meatloaf's what you want when you're comfortable. And, and, you know, there's some sort of joking in the metaphor there, but materially, you have two major markets for AI compute and GPUs. One is inference. Everybody here knows that. Mox running claws, you guys are using ChatGPT or your preferred model. And it's actually inference that creates the money.

• 48:03Speaker 06

  It's where the revenue is associated with. You know, when you track sort of OpenAI or Anthropic budgets, it's all from inference tokens. But the reality is you have these incredible training workloads, like huge data center sized training workloads that the, the main mark, the sort of main labs are spending immense amounts of money to satisfy. And these are taking up city blocks of compute. And the sort of lost opportunity there is you can't use that compute to make inference. So the way Iota works is the sort of minimum compute unit we can use is, at the moment, the size of a MacBook and for about thirty minutes. And we can actually extract value from that. So the sort of ultimate goal of this is we actually want to be able to make, you know, we call it

• 48:46Speaker 06

  indistinguishable training compute from this mixture of, of compute nodes. And this is sort of one of the philosophies Steph and I have had when we first founded Back to Cosmos. There's a lot of people when they approach any project in Web three or crypto is they say, oh, how can I do what people do in a centralized way, but in a crypto way? So, you know, we were talking about Templar. Templar does training. Templar effectively allows you to train in a centralized way, using crypto rails. I won't go into the technical details, but the, the nodes they used were Blackwell. So B two hundred nodes, it's a quarter of a million bucks for each compute unit. So, you know, it's prime rib, maybe it's prime rib and, you know, you, you run it around your houses doing that, but it's still incredibly expensive. What we think the interesting thing about, you know,

• 49:31Speaker 05

  This sort of merger between crypto and AI is, is how can you use like fundamentally fractal compute, distributed compute, 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, you know, mark sort of Mac mini when it's sat idling in the evenings and sum that together to something that creates economic value in a very, very constrained market. So we actually released a research paper today that validates a lot of our work, but we've been working on this problem for, for a year and it's been, um, it's hard but compelling work.

• 50:00Jason Calacanis?

  Are people calling open clock claws?

• 50:02Speaker 05

  No, I am, yeah.

• 50:04Jason Calacanis?

  You are, okay. Fine. I just want to make sure there's not a new piece of software that I'm not aware of. So explain how I get the package on my Mac to join Iota.

• 50:16Speaker 05

  You can, you can download it through terminal, through the command line interface. If you're more coding proficient, or you can go to the website iota.microcosmos.ai, scroll down and you'll see a download button. As you mentioned before, Jason, it's just like downloading Slack or any other application. Exactly. You download this, it will generate a wallet for you. And then what will happen is when you open the application, you click start and your machine will connect to our globally distributed training cluster. You will be, you will earn passive income while you sleep between 10pm and 6am, your machine can be quietly being used as a training node. So the benefit to you is you get to accumulate Iota, you get to be part of the big mission. And the

• 50:57Speaker 05

  benefit for us is we basically have, we have always on super cluster of compute and that's, that's really the value.

• 51:03Speaker 03

  I have a question. If I start doing this overnight on my work laptop, is ActiveTrack going to look like I was up all night working? Because this could really work out for me.

• 51:11Jason Calacanis?

  For sure. Yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  This could be great.

• 51:13Jason Calacanis?

  We have security on our laptops at work.

• 51:15Speaker 05

  We will literally do your work for you.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that, this is going to look amazing. I'm going to look like a genius.

• 51:19Jason Calacanis?

  ActiveTrack would show your, well, no, it would show massive CPU usage. So we have, for background, there's a piece of software called ActiveTrack, just a lockdown software. And there's 20 of these. So we have confidential data on our network, but it shows like what the computers at our, at our offices are doing. If somebody were to download everything, you would see that in ActiveTrack or if you were exporting stuff.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Look how much GPU Lon was using all night. Lon was using so much compute, he must have been crunching numbers all night. What a genius.

• 51:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. So.

• 51:51Speaker 03

  Give him a raise.

• 51:52Jason Calacanis?

  There's, there's multiple ways to participate in Iota. One is as a user.

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  And you would download, you would have a wallet, and then you would earn tau by contributing your compute. But it's also becoming a node. So maybe you could explain what being a full node is versus that.

• 52:13Speaker 06

  I suppose that there's a couple of expressions of Iota. One is this very participatory, everybody shares, everybody co-trains a model version, which we nicknamed Train at Home because that's kind of what it is. The second version of this is like the benefit of this tech is it has applications at any scale within the AI stack. Now, one of the ways we expect this to materialize in some of the earlier runs is it will use frontier compute, so H100s, B200s, those quarter of a million dollar machines. But what we will have availability for is anybody can register their nodes on a sort of rotating basis. So we're working on this in the background where you can post compute for a fixed interval, 20 minutes, half an hour. There's some fine tuning on the machine learning side for us to work out the sort

• 52:57Speaker 06

  of sweet spot there where we get value from it. But we've spent a lot of time talking to GPU providers and otherwise. And the sort of thing we've found is that particularly if you can make an instance interruptible is what they call it. So Jason, you've got 10 computers, you sell them to Mark most of the time for five bucks an hour. But Mark on a Thursday is like, I don't need the compute last minute. You know that he might sort of pick it up Friday and you don't want to go sell it to somebody else. People in that instance are just looking to recover capital returns and operational costs. So you can get compute at 10 cents on the dollar. So we want to work with major providers to basically harness all that compute at 10 cents on the dollar.

• 53:39Speaker 06

  Because if we can get our training efficiency within a factor of 10 at that point, we're making money.

• 53:43Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, this is fascinating. So somebody who has extra compute, like let's say it was even CoreWeave. I interviewed the founder of that company. Let's say they had old H100s.

• 53:55Jason Calacanis?

  And they hadn't sold them yet and they're five years old and they're still in racks and they could say, you know what, just we haven't sold them yet. We don't have a new customer for them. We might as well put them to use. It would almost like being if you had a house and you hadn't sold it yet. You put it into the Airbnb inventory just to cover your cost basis or something at a discount, just to make sure you pay your taxes, your, your real estate taxes and your, you know, operating costs for the home.

• 54:22Speaker 06

  It's like that, but it's, uh, this is sort of one of the foundations of deep in and decentralized AI is people are like, oh, you know, I can use my compute for a day here. What's unique about Iota is it's, it's like an Airbnb, but you can subnet for 20 minutes with no notice. And get paid for it. That's a better analogy there because it's not.

• 54:40Jason Calacanis?

  You could use the home for one hour.

• 54:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, an hour. And, and that's where we think the real value is because if you're, if you're renting out your house for a day or a week, then you want, you want a reasonable bit of money for it. You want to account for all these wear and tear. If you're trying to get 20 minutes or you're just trying to make a quick buck of something that's already in production, the economics change really dramatically. Uh, and we validated this with seven or eight different data center clients who all say, basically the key thing is they want to be able to take the compute off you. And there's no training method in the world that allows you to have the level of interruptibility we're designing for. Because typically training, you know, in a data center is something called synchronous training. So all of the nodes move in lockstep and it's actually the slowest node that sort of drives the speed of the whole system.

• 55:26Speaker 06

  We're trying to design for this world where we assume that Mark will slam his laptop shut. We assume that Corrie will take their rack back and sell it to a premium customer. We actually assume that in sort of, you know, even the case of large labs, you might just have an inference spike and you want to reallocate training compute to revenue workloads and then pull it back when you come down. Like, you know, my, my father was an energy engineer and, um, you always designed for the sort of peak load and the sinusoidal. And we're trying to make training compute liquids so that we can sort of achieve ultimate economic value, really.

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

  Any questions there, Mark? Uh, and your thoughts on the project, just generally speaking? And how disruptive it is.

• 56:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think it could be one of the bigger projects in in Bittensor. I think these guys are, you know, they've been around for a while and they they know the system better than than most of the other subnet owners. And so I, look, I'm I'm very bullish on them. I love both of what I love what both of them are doing.

• 56:23Jason Calacanis?

  And is this a corporation, Will, and you have venture capital backing it? Or is it just a a straight anachronistic crypto weirdo project? How is this running?

• 56:37Speaker 06

  We we are actually, um, we we are a company, but we are fully bootstrapped. We haven't raised venture capital to date. We've been, uh, we're fortunate to build, actually, Stefan built the first subnet on Bittensor for us since.

• 56:50Jason Calacanis?

  I saw that.

• 56:50Speaker 06

  So we've been around for a while and, um, yeah, we have no outside franchise except for our relationship with Bittensor. So we're very fortunate to that, very fortunate to the people who've sort of invested over time. But, um.

• 57:02Jason Calacanis?

  And what do you think of the, Stefan, what do you think of the kerfluffle with one of the subnets? Taking their tokens and marbles and leaving all of a sudden and the impact that has on the ecosystem as a one of the early adopters of subnets?

• 57:19Speaker 05

  I think it's very disappointing. Um, I come from an AI background, not a crypto background. So being honorable and being trustworthy is a really important thing to me and something that I am extremely sensitive to when I operate in a crypto world. It's disappointing. It's disappointing that someone did that to a lot of people. I won't dive too deep into it, but I think it's a shared emotion that we have right now. I think the response of Jake is is on point, which is to say, this is a great opportunity for us to reflect on a part of Bittensor that was too immature. I needed to be iterated on and refined, and I think that's the right pragmatic lines to see the experience. Um, so.

• 58:00Speaker 06

  This will be, I'm sure, just bumping the road in a long time.

• 58:04Jason Calacanis?

  So you're frustrated, disappointed, and what do you think the solution is to avoiding it in the future?

• 58:10Speaker 06

  I think what Mark described earlier, which is this idea of owner lockup. So you should have more of a fiduciary duty to the people that believe in you, to put it simply. And I think there's a way that you can translate that into things like smart contracts or similar, which shows the commitment of founders and server operators to their community. And that can actually be used to for price discovery for the project itself, right? It's a measure of intention. It's a measure of conviction. I think that's quite an elegant, an elegant solution. And I'm sure, I'm sure we'll see a few different prototypes of that. We might not get it right the first time, but it feels like the roughly the right direction of travel to not have this experience again.

• 58:49Jason Calacanis?

  Athena, I'm the first investor. They are the greatest assistants in the world for a great price, $3,000 a month. You get an awesome full-time assistant to work with you on your scheduling, on research projects. And you say, well, oh, we guys are talking about all this AI. These assistants are AI-powered and so they will do all kinds of jobs for you and help you have a human in the loop as you're working. I was the first investor in the company. They're now a partner of All In. They're a partner of ours here. And it just makes me super, super productive. So you can basically turn your EA into your chief health officer.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  That's this month's productivity hack. Thanks to Athena for we got it. We do a productivity hack once a month. This month's productivity hack, you should turn your EA into your chief health officer. You know, that for founders, their health can often take a backseat, Jason. So one of the ideas we came up with were all the different ways that you could sort of delegate some of these tasks to your EA, keeping up with your regular checkups, dental cleanings, handling your referrals and follow-ups, taking care of your insurance paperwork and your reimbursements, helping you plan healthy meals and what groceries to buy, worrying about your nutrition. All of these things can be things that you pass off to your EA to help save time. If you want to learn more, athena.com/JCAL.

• 1:00:10Jason Calacanis?

  There you go.

• 1:00:12Speaker 03

  That's where to go.

• 1:00:13Jason Calacanis?

  And as an example, you know, I lost weight. Shout out to my guys at road.co with GLPs. But now I want to add more muscle and I've been adding some, but I need to get a trainer. So I said, hey, to my Athena assistant, within a 20 minute drive of my house, of the ranch, I want a trainer who has their own facility to do one-on-one training with me, you know, one to three times a week. Let them know I travel a ton. My schedule is variable. And here's how I'd like to pay. Because a lot of times they're like, you have to pick the same slot every week or whatever. It doesn't work for me. So I said, hey, I want to buy 20 sessions upfront and then I want to be able to just drop in, you know, and it could change dynamically.

• 1:00:56Jason Calacanis?

  I might need to cancel within, you know, the same day.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:00:59Jason Calacanis?

  Et cetera. So they explained the rules of the road and some people are like, yeah, we don't work that way. You have to do Tuesday at 4:00 PM every week for the year, whatever. And it's like, that's not going to work. So they pre-vetted and did all those discussions because I don't want to have that awkward discussion with the person and then I'm negotiating with a trainer. Then I said, and then find me three people to come to the house and I would do the same thing. I'll pay them for 20 sessions upfront so they get the value of that money upfront, but they have to be willing to let me cancel same day, you know, within two or three hours. If like you have to get on a plane. And it, it worked. They went through 20 different people.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:01:37Jason Calacanis?

  And found me three of each. And I just give them a go like that. Just keep calling people until you get to three.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. And they can, they can take a day to do that. You, you can't do that. You have too much other stuff.

• 1:01:46Jason Calacanis?

  I don't have the time for that. The other thing that I had them do was I had them go on to different people's LinkedIn, Mark. And I said, I'm not happy with the flow of people coming in for these three positions. So here's what I want you to do. I want you to go on Lon's LinkedIn, my LinkedIn, or Heidi's LinkedIn and just send in mail through LinkedIn to anybody with this title in these three cities, Austin, Houston, San Antonio. Hey, we're looking for this position in Austin, in an office. If you know anybody, let us know. Or if you were, might be interested, please let us know. We get, you know, a 2% response rate to that, but we fill two positions doing that. But that means that you have to get to 500 outbound.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  It's a lot.

• 1:02:29Jason Calacanis?

  So I just said, well, I can't do 500 outbound. Lon can't do 500. It's a full-time job. I said, okay, for four hours a day, this is all I want you to do. 10 people an hour, four hours a day, 40 people a day and for 10 days. Go. It worked, but I would never do that. That's the job of a full-time recruiter. So shout out to our friends, athena.com slash Jake out. You get a couple of weeks off.

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 1:02:51Jason Calacanis?

  All right. All right, what do we got next here on the docket?

• 1:02:54Speaker 03

  We have a little bit of off. We have a little bit of off duty. I have some viral stuff we could react to, or we could just do some recommendations. It's up to you.

• 1:03:02Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I think I'd love to go off duty.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:05Jason Calacanis?

  So let's go off duty.

• 1:03:06Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:03:07Jason Calacanis?

  Lon, Jake out and Mark.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  And Mark. Mark's gonna join us.

• 1:03:10Jason Calacanis?

  You gotta give us an idea. I don't know if they told you what off duty is, but it's basically when not doing crypto.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, we could talk about whatever we want.

• 1:03:18Jason Calacanis?

  What are you consuming?

• 1:03:19Speaker 03

  Whatever we want.

• 1:03:20Jason Calacanis?

  Product.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  We can talk about whatever we want.

• 1:03:22Jason Calacanis?

  You bought, a gadget you bought, a TV show you were watching, music, an album.

• 1:03:26Speaker 03

  I want to get your, your thoughts on one viral story before we get into recommendations. So Coachella, the Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival. For weekend one was this past weekend. There's been, there were two headliners, very different performances. People are really debating, uh, you know, and I think it speaks a lot to like.

• 1:03:46Jason Calacanis?

  Bieber was one.

• 1:03:47Speaker 03

  Bieber was one. Sabrina Carpenter was the other. And I think it really speaks to what, what are we looking for in a performance? What is the value of authenticity versus showmanship? I think it gets to some really interesting questions. So first up Sabrina Carpenter, she headlined. It was massive cars on stage, huge sets, dancers. We could take a look at a, at a quick clip here that I pulled up.

• 1:04:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  So let's do that.

• 1:04:11Jason Calacanis?

  Extremely, yeah. Sabrina Carpenter, extremely entertaining. I saw her at Austin City Limits, ACL.

• 1:04:17Speaker 03

  So here's Sabrina's performance. You could see they built this massive set. She's got tons of dancers. It's a huge thing that's going on. This was-

• 1:04:27Jason Calacanis?

  It's a production.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  We're not playing the song. This is Espresso, her huge hit there, of course.

• 1:04:32Jason Calacanis?

  Thinking about me.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, think about that. That's that me Espresso. Oh, how do I do this? Okay, there we go. And then I want to show this, this one other part too. She actually drove a car off the set. Like, she drove through the crowd in Coachella, through the crowd, you know, like this was how she closed it out.

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  If you can see this bigger shot.

• 1:04:54Jason Calacanis?

  She's literally driving a car. That car's not her driving. It must be on a track. No, it is.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  It's, she's just driving. They cleared out this aisle here. And you could see she's just driving out of Coachella in this car. So that's cool. It's very big. It's spectacle.

• 1:05:09Jason Calacanis?

  A lot of showmanship.

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  It was like a party. It was like showmanship. And then there was Justin Bieber. He was the headliner on Sunday night. And he went onstage alone, just him and a laptop and a screen behind him that was screen sharing. And he played YouTube clips, a lot of them of himself. And then he sang over his old music videos, sort of treating them like a backup singer. I'll show you a little clip. So he, you could see-

• 1:05:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, this was weird.

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  Here he is. He's onstage. He's pulling up YouTube. You could see his screen. He's typing in "Baby", which of course that was his old school song with him as a kid. And then he stands up and he's watching the video. He's not even facing the audience. He's watching the video and he's like singing along with himself from when he was a kid. And then here's, he wasn't even just singing the whole time. He also just watches YouTube for some of it. And he's, here he is watching the "Got him" meme. And then you'll see he flips over to "Double Rainbow" and he's just, he's hanging out, playing on YouTube. So a lot of people were praising this. It's so authentic. It's so real.

• 1:06:14Speaker 03

  And he started his career as a YouTuber, Justin Bieber. He was arguably the first YouTuber to get super, super famous.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, here he's just watching double rainbow.

• 1:06:25Jason Calacanis?

  I can give my judgment.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  So I'm, there's a lot of back and forth, of course, between the Sabrina and the Bieber stance. But I think everybody, I think it's an interesting debate. Which performance would you be more interested in seeing? And if you pay all this money to go to Coachella, it's like a thousand dollars plus to get to Coachella. Do the, do the artists owe you a Sabrina Carpenter level spectacle?

• 1:06:46Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. So it really is in the execution of these things. It, on its face, when you describe what Justin Bieber did, you would say that was phoning it in.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  A little.

• 1:06:59Jason Calacanis?

  Just played his video and he talked over whatever. Okay, sure enough, it's, that would be a surface level interpretation of it. However, he kinda did some storytelling in there.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:07:11Jason Calacanis?

  It was interactive with the audience. And at the end of the day, was the audience engaged in this? They were. And I would say they were equally engaged in Bieber's surfing YouTube as a performance art. So it's very meta-commentary.

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:07:29Jason Calacanis?

  And it was done so well that I think he hit the, the right note, which is this is a meta-commentary on my career. And I'm going to relive how you experienced me.

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:07:40Jason Calacanis?

  And there was some brilliance to that. Now, if you were, you know, any other artist who was not a native YouTube artist, they might not have pulled off that meta-commentary on it.

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:07:54Jason Calacanis?

  There is another analogy to this. I, I had dinner the other night and I, I sat next to Jimmy Iovine.

• 1:08:01Speaker 03

  Wow, you had a big weekend.

• 1:08:04Jason Calacanis?

  So anyway, and I start talking to Jimmy. He's also a kid from Brooklyn. He's from Red Hook, I'm from Bay Ridge, you know, just right on the Gowanus Canal there. We had a talk and I told him, hey, you know, I'm a big Dire Straits fan. I know you did the album Making Movies and we talked for an hour about that. And he also had Bruce Springsteen was, you know, the big artist that he had produced.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:08:26Jason Calacanis?

  Back in the day, he did Born in the USA, one of the great seminal works.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  Born to Run.

• 1:08:30Jason Calacanis?

  Times of all time, 1980.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  Darkness on the Edge of Town, he did, yeah.

• 1:08:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so this is like a, you know, a legend. I got, I was real privileged to talk to him for all this time and. Bruce Springsteen did Springsteen on Broadway. And when he did Springsteen on Broadway, he did a meta-commentary of him. He did sing some of his songs.

• 1:08:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:08:51Jason Calacanis?

  Like Bieber did, but he also told the story behind the songs. It was so engaging, it was so rich that as a fan, you can get away with that. Now, I've also seen Bruce Springsteen no less than 20 times, probably over 30 years in concert. You know, like I've seen him two or three nights in a row. My mom's a big Bruce fan and I actually took my mom to Bruce on Broadway.

• 1:09:13Jason Calacanis?

  You have to execute at a very high level. You have to be a true star. There has to be a lot behind it in order to pull that off. So I give Justin Bieber credit for actually pulling it off, which is not easy. Sabrina Carpenter couldn't pull that off right now. Sabrina Carpenter, if she has 10 more espressos, if she lasts.

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:32Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know how long Bieber's been in pop culture now, but I think it's 15 years.

• 1:09:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, 20 years or so, close to it.

• 1:09:37Jason Calacanis?

  20 years.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Jason Calacanis?

  When Sabrina Carpenter, 20 years into her career she is, she will be able to pull it off. But not in year three of her career.

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:09:46Jason Calacanis?

  So I think both of these were fantastic. Sabrina Carpenter has to build the foundation, brick by brick, in order to do the meta-commentary, which only comes after you have 50 hits, 25 hits, you know, in a certain size audience. So I give them both credit. Mark, any thoughts here? I know you're a big rock and roll fan.

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, you guys should know better than to ask me about anything other than classic rock. But okay, I'll dive in a little bit here. So I mean, I'm sort of split because I feel like, I do feel like Bieber, I've seen like little clips of it. It looked fun, right?

• 1:10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:10:15Speaker 00

  It didn't look bad, right? It didn't look like he was crashing out on stage. It looked fun, right? So I, you know, I think probably the audience enjoyed it. That said, I love a spectacle. I love a big rock show. You know, J.K. L. and I went to go see The Wall when Roger Waters was touring that around.

• 1:10:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a lot of fun.

• 1:10:32Jason Calacanis?

  I've seen that, yeah. It was life-changing.

• 1:10:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I totally agree. And it was, that was like a very big production of tunes that you've listened to your entire life and just love, right? So that's what I want when I go to a show. That's probably the apotheosis of that. So, you know, I guess I'm sort of split.

• 1:10:49Speaker 03

  I think I probably would have preferred the B. I'm not a huge fan. You know, I'm not like a diehard Sabrina or Bieber fan, but I think just I would have preferred the Bieber set. It's something real. You're seeing him really think about and process this whole career, this trip down memory lane, this sort of nostalgic look back with him. I think that would be a lot more engaging as a viewer than, you know, big dance routines and the big pop. I kind of feel in general, and this is old man of me, but I'm going to say it anyway. When I used to go to Coachella, like the early and mid aughts, it was just bands playing. There wasn't this like, it wasn't this like you're going to see a pop star like fly out of something and parachute into the arena. And it was just like bands

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  playing songs you liked, or rappers performing songs you liked, or whatever, DJs. And I, I, I feel like I like that more authentic sort of feel than than all the spectacle.

• 1:11:40Jason Calacanis?

  The kids love the vibes. There's a meta commentary going on. And it's vibe culture in that, you know, if the vibes are either immaculate, or the vibes are inauthentic, and you're taking a little bit of risk. I have been one time to Coachella, and it was quite enjoyable to go from set to set to set. I think I saw Lord.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  Oh, nice.

• 1:12:02Jason Calacanis?

  And MGMT, and like other incredible artists, like back to back to back to back. And it was like, wow, this is pretty impressive.

• 1:12:10Speaker 03

  I went in oh, four. It's like a classic one. Radiohead, Pixies, Flaming Lips, MF Doom.

• 1:12:16Jason Calacanis?

  Wow.

• 1:12:16Speaker 03

  Air, really good year. That Beck was there that year.

• 1:12:19Jason Calacanis?

  Anyway, thanks. Thanks, Unc.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:22Jason Calacanis?

  Like a three Unc specials.

• 1:12:23Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Yeah, we're old to be talking about this stuff. But I did, I thought it was, it's an interesting conversation that's going on between this sort of spectacle authenticity.

• 1:12:32Jason Calacanis?

  I, I went one night to see Chappelle. He happened to be in town. A friend of mine's friends with him. I texted my friend and I was like, hey, your friend Chappelle is playing. He's like, oh, let me text him and maybe we'll go see the show. Last minute, we go see the show. After the show, Chappelle says, hey, you guys want to roll with me? We're going to go do this after show. And he goes to this, you know, small comedy place in San Francisco that hosts maybe 100 people, 150 people. We go there and we got a table set up for us. And then he does just him interacting with the audience.

• 1:13:13Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:13:13Jason Calacanis?

  He's had a couple of drinks or whatever and smoking a cigarette.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  Crowd work, I call it. Crowd work.

• 1:13:18Jason Calacanis?

  What do they? He's doing crowd work, but he's also telling stories and it's not a set. It's not a funny set like he had just done at the Chase Center. It is just him bantering and, you know, some jokes in it. And he was not working on new material exactly, but it was just a different type of performance. So to see both back to back and then compare them, again, back to this meta commentary, there was him talking about the show he just did and him talking about his life. And it was really like to see those two bookends together was actually really nice. Just like going and seeing a Bruce Springsteen show and then seeing Springsteen on Broadway, talk about Bruce Springsteen and his life. Also super valid. What a great episode.

• 1:14:01Speaker 03

  Intimate evenings, yeah.

• 1:14:03Jason Calacanis?

  You got anything else here on?

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  I did. There was one thing I want to recommend. There's a movie, I saw it at the Austin Film Society here in Austin, one of my favorite local theaters. Shout out to them, but it is now on Hulu. It's a Spanish film called Serat. It's about a father and a son. The father's older daughter has gone missing. She was a big raver who attended a lot of these raves in the desert in North Africa. So the father and son are following these moving raves around the desert, looking for this missing young woman. And then it leads into this whole separate adventure story. I don't want to give anything else away about this movie because it takes some real turns, but wow, it is.

• 1:14:47Jason Calacanis?

  You don't give it up. I've heard a lot about this film.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  It is a real experience. You don't want to learn too much about it. You just want to watch it and take the ride with it. Yeah, I loved it. Real intense.

• 1:14:59Jason Calacanis?

  All right. I'll give one recommendation here. People have heard me reference my favorite pen.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:15:06Jason Calacanis?

  I'm not like a pen snob. I don't like the idea of buying a hundred or $500 pen. I don't collect pens, but I like to write and I like a great pen. But I know I'm going to lose a pen. So somewhere between, you know, a commodity pen.

• 1:15:24Jason Calacanis?

  For, you know, a dollar or $2 and these hundred dollars or pens that cost hundreds of dollars. I found one of the nicest writing pens ever, the G750 retractable pen. Uh, and I think it goes for 10, 15 bucks. Yeah.

• 1:15:38Speaker 03

  It looks like 1394 here. Yeah.

• 1:15:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yes, you can get it on Amazon. Uh, and it's just an incredible pen. When you write with this pen, uh, you will learn why this is such an amazing pen. Now, the reason I know about this pen is because, uh, Unc is, uh, basically Unc, that's me.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:16:05Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, was on TikTok and I, and I stumbled upon the Staples baddie. Uh, Kaden Rowland works at Staples.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:16:15Jason Calacanis?

  And if you type in her name and you type in Zebra, uh, 750, G750, she's the one who recommended it to me. And she is, uh, this incredible, um, young person who works at Staples. And she might be trans or, you know, I'm not sure exactly.

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  Are you sure?

• 1:16:39Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, but she has an incredible performance where she goes and, um, talks with extreme passion about Staples and photocopies and pens and journals. And she literally clanks her nails and snaps up her favorite office products. And, uh, she's probably done more for the brand of Staples with young people. Uh, and all the way up to Gen X myself than Staples could ever do with a hundred million dollar ad campaign. I don't know what they're paying her.

• 1:17:14Speaker 03

  Are they paying her? I don't, are, are, is Staples embracing her?

• 1:17:18Jason Calacanis?

  She's a, she's a store employee, Elon.

• 1:17:20Speaker 03

  Oh, but yeah, but they're not paying her to make these videos. She, they're just paying her to work the register.

• 1:17:25Jason Calacanis?

  I think now they are paying her, I, I, they must be paying.

• 1:17:32Jason Calacanis?

  Her now, if not, there's a hundred people who would hire her to be the Walmart baddie or the

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, really.

• 1:17:39Jason Calacanis?

  Target baddie. I mean, she should be getting paid a million dollars a year. Minimum, minimum of a million dollars a year. And if one of my startups came to me and said, we want to hire this person to run our social media for a million, for, you know, a hundred thousand dollars a year, plus nine hundred thousand dollars a year in stock options, I would say, do it. Do it immediately. Because the ability to authentically engage and then get me to buy the pen and know who the Staples baddie is, is just infinitely valuable.

• 1:18:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I found her TikTok. She has 582.3 thousand followers on TikTok. That's crazy.

• 1:18:18Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, somebody's got to poach her.

• 1:18:19Speaker 03

  Just for talking about Staples. There's a Papa John's guy too, right? I've seen him a bunch on TikTok. Where he's just a guy who works-

• 1:18:25Jason Calacanis?

  I think now this is going to become a thing.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  He's just a guy who works at Papa John's, but he talks about how they make great pizza, which I don't-

• 1:18:31Jason Calacanis?

  Another amazing episode of Twist is in the can for Monday, April 13th. Thanks, Mark Jeffrey.