Bittensor Drama! TAO down 15%! | E2274

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Pilot - https://pilot.com/TWIST Squarespace -https://squarespace.com/TWIST Northwest Registered Agent - https://northwestregisteredagent.com/TWIST Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twistCrowdHealth - ⁠https://JoinCrowdHealth.com/twist⁠ Today's show: TAO, the token associated with the Bittensor network, fell sharply last night after a major project declared it was taking its business elsewhere. Covenant AI had used Bittensor subnets 3, 39, and 89 before its abrupt and controversial decision to depart for other digital shores. Gareth Howells, a co-founder of Vidaio (Bittensor Subnet 85), joined Jason and Alex to share the community perspective regarding Covenant's decision to leave Bittensor, a choice that was especially bitter given that its recently-released Covenant-72B model trained using the network's decentralized capabilities was hailed at the time as a demonstration of the crypto-AI hybrid's potential. (Covenant's Sam Dare was a recent guest on TWiST.) Howells walked us through Vidaio's product (AI models for high-quality video work, like upscaling) Then it was time to bring new fan-favorite Ole Lehmann on. Ole took an Andrej Karpathy concept, and turned it into a skill that you can use in either OpenClaw or Claude Cowork. Guests Ole Lehmann: https://x.com/itsolelehmann The AI Solopreneur newsletter: https://aisolo.beehiiv.com/ Vidaio: https://vidaio.io/ Vidaio on X: https://x.com/vidaio_ Timestamps: 0:00 Drama in the Bittensor space! Was there a rugpull? 1:01 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! 1:47 Gareth Howells of subnet85 joins the show: https://x.com/GarethHowells 9:56 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/TWIST 11:37 Gareth reacts to the Covenant situation… Did Sam sell tokens? 14:33 How VidAIo (subnet85) optimizes video as cheaply as possible. https://vidaio.io/ 20:06 Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://squarespace.com/TWIST 21:12 Demo: Gareth shows upscaled footage of our very own Lon Harris 27:09 Who is actually doing the computing on Bittensor? 28:15 How Bittensor recruits tech talent from emerging markets 29:42 Pilot - Visit https://pilot.com/TWIST and get $1,200 off your first year. 30:58 Jason's explains the Bittensor network. https://docs.bittensor.com/ 37:28 Jason addresses "pump and dump" allegations 40:46 Ole Lehmann joins the show https://x.com/itsolelehmann 45:31 Jason's $1,000 "bounty" for enhanced show notes 49:35 Check out Ole's newsletter at aisolo.beehiiv.com ! 59:50 CrowdHealth - CrowdHealth lets you ditch the bureaucracy with a peer-to-peer funding platform for your healthcare. Get started for $99 per month for your first three months by using the code TWIST at https://JoinCrowdHealth.com/twist. 1:00:46 Off Duty with Alex and J-Cal! 1:04:46 Reacting to the Maul trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkVepshZhGc 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 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, it's Friday, it's Twist, April 10th. Alex is here. We've got a great show.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Pilot. Focus on your product. Let Pilot handle your bookkeeping. Pilot provides the most reliable accounting, CFO, and tax services for startups and small businesses. Head to pilot.com/twist and get $1,200 off your first year. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to squarespace.com/twist for a free trial. When you're ready to launch, use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. And Northwest Registered Agent. Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Learn more at northwestregisteredagent.com/twist.

• 0:54Jason Calacanis?

  Lots of important things going on in the BitTensor world. There was a rug pull. We'll get into that. Obviously, tons of AI stuff going on. But just as we kick off the show, Alex, I always like to applaud Plaude. I put my Plaude pin on, I press my button, I get a nice little haptic, and I'm recording. Now I have every detail, so I can say, hey, after the show, make sure you don't forget to go over the newsletter stuff for the This Week in AI newsletter. Boom, now it's an action item. I won't forget it. And I do that all day long. And Plaude is an amazing service. Thank you to them for supporting the show.

• 1:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, and also, if you want to get a Plaude for yourself, you can at a tasty discount. If you go to plaud.ai/twist, P-L-A-U-D dot A-I slash twist, use the code TWIST, T-W-I-S-T, save 10%. Be cool like Jason and I. Don't forget things. Get more work done. Less pain. Plaude.

• 1:46Jason Calacanis?

  Use that code TWIST for 10% off. And they know we sent you. All right, let's get to work here. There was some type of a defection from the subnets of BitTensor. People have heard me talking about this very promising crypto project called BitTensor. The token in it is called Tau. There are subnets. What are the subnets doing? You may have heard us talk about it here or on All In, or you see it on your X feed. Some of, you can create subnets. There's 128 of them available. And those subnets will do different projects. One of them is a coworking or a

• 2:23Jason Calacanis?

  Copilot for doing coding like Codex or Claw Code. And why are these important? Why should they be created using cryptocurrency? Well, it's a distributed network. And just like Bitcoin, you can have people compete to provide that service at the lowest possible price, which is super deflationary. And my thesis, and I've got an investment in the space, is I've got a couple of different investments in the subnets and I've bought Tau directly. And I might even be a little underwater now, based on where I bought it. Doesn't matter to me, but I got a bunch of pings on my phone last night. Oh, my God, Tau's going. There was some kind of rug pull, so let's get into it.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  We had Sam Dare on the show, Twist. It's March 27th, 2026, so just about two weeks ago, Jason. And he was talking about Templar, a project that was doing decentralized training of an AI model of an AI model. This was Covenant AI, three different subnets, subnets three, 39, 81. They form kind of a triumvirate, if you will, of things that work together, pre-training, compute and post-training. And what they built was the Covenant 72 billion parameter model in March. This got a lot of attention. Look, decentralized training of an AI model, not just the work of the major AI labs. Instead, something that, you know, maybe anyone can participate in. I drove the price of Tau up. And then, Jason, yesterday, we got a major statement from Sam and the group at Covenant

• 3:50Speaker 01

  AI, which is right here. And it makes a number of very important claims. It says that BitTensor is not as decentralized as it claims. It also says that one of the co-founders of the project has been essentially blocking their ability to do their work. Really, really big claims. There's been a response to it, but what really matters is, scrolling, scrolling, Jacob Steves, also known as Cons, one of the co-founders of BitTensor, has taken a series of actions against Covenant AI's operations. These include suspension of emissions to our subnets, removal of moderation capabilities, unilateral deprecation of our subnet infra, and economic pressure via token sales. He responded, Jason, but I want to get your take first on basically what Covenant

• 4:33Jason Calacanis?

  There'll have to be a little bit of an investigation here as to what's happening. But the control of the subnets and making sure there aren't rug pulls like we see all the time with, or we saw all the time with ICOs or meme coins. This is a major vector of attack and a major concern people have in the crypto community. So what Tau is trying to do is remove that possibility. So what system do you create to remove that possibility? Well, you have to have some control over the subnets and there has to be governance. So that governance stuff is being worked out from what I understand from the insiders. And sometimes you'll have a bad actor. I'm not saying this person is a bad actor, but some people are claiming, hey, this person

• 5:17Jason Calacanis?

  just ran off with a bunch of the subnets tokens and some Tau. And it just is something that happens in crypto sometimes as people build a project. You buy some tokens, it's not regulated, and all of a sudden you get rug pulled. That still exists. Sometimes you'll have lawsuits come because of these things. An attorney general in Florida or someone will find who was impacted by a rug pull. You remember all the celebrities who were promoting different coins? They all got tagged. So this is the kind of stuff that can happen. And this will be, in my estimation, and this is my hope and what I believe will happen,

• 5:56Jason Calacanis?

  is that this will help solidify how to handle and avoid these things in the future.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  This is a trip and a fall over something they're going to remove from the pathway. So in the future, no stumbles of this sort will crop up.

• 6:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think that they can eliminate this from happening in the future by making it such that the subnets have to stake a certain amount of Tau and that the people who are participating have some control over the subnet. And subnet governance is going to be a very delicate thing because you want entrepreneurs to be able to start a subnet, put up some collateral for it, almost like buying a franchise. And then you want those folks to believe that they have some level of ownership, but not so much ownership that they can take a bunch of people's tokens and then just say, you know what, I don't agree with how this is being run. I'm just going to take all these tokens and leave.

• 6:50Jason Calacanis?

  So, uh, you know, as I've said to everybody, the opportunity in these kind of projects is that these questions have not been answered. This, they are imperfect. That's why it's at a, whatever it is, you know, $2 billion market cap, not a 500 billion or trillion dollar market cap.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  2.93 after the declines, a good segue, Jason. Uh, Tau was trading at roughly 335 before this news broke. As we talked to you, it's worth 271. So a pretty sharp decline, but certainly not the end of Tau. This is not, you know, the project flying apart, but a pretty large drop in value. The thing that I'm trying to sort out in the Tensorland, Jason, because I've talked to probably 10 different subnets in the last couple of weeks, just prepping them for the show and getting to know what they're working on and how the economics work, is there does seem to be at times moments when they say, oh, the community wouldn't tolerate that type of bad action. And so often I feel like I've run into, there are some humans in this system that is not yet fully decentralized. And I wonder if this argument is essentially coming to the point to which

• 7:50Speaker 01

  that's no longer acceptable and it has to become even more decentralized to maintain trust. Because even though a lot of people in the Bitchin's community are, I think, pretty negative about Sam right now, and we'll bring on a subnet guy in just a second. Uh, I, I, I don't, I'm struggling to get that mad at him for what he did, because it seems like he made something cool and then wants to go host it somewhere else. And you and I don't throw a fit when someone leaves Substack.

• 8:13Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it would be though, if you took all the subscribers money and then didn't provide the subscription product. So that's what has to be adjudicated here is how much Tau he collected from people. If they invest in his company, it would be like investing in a startup and then the startup just says, you know, I don't like the way capitalism works, I'm out. And then they take the money. So these are the allegations that are all going to be worked out over time. You and I can speculate about it, but yes, you should be able to leave, um, your subnet and go do something independent if you want, of course. But you don't get to leave with everybody's tokens. Uh, and then there might also be like some dumping going on here. So again, all allegations, all to be worked out in the court of crypto.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  But let's get some of the participants. Let's bring on Gareth Howells. He's from Vidaio subnet 85 and we're gonna talk to Gareth about what he's building and why it's cool and how he's using BitTensor in a second, but I wanted to get his take on the situation. Gareth, hey, you've been tuning in. Quickly, who's closer to the truth here, Jason or I? And did the people behind Covenant AI make off with the tokens?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  I think Jason has got a very good understanding of the situation. Yeah, absolutely. I think this is an individual acting rather than the company or the community. I think that the subnets that Sam was heading up are probably going to carry on doing the same work and that they're going to build upon that. So yeah, I think Jason's synopsis of what happened was was pretty close.

• 9:43Jason Calacanis?

  Give me your synopsis, because it's always good when these new technologies come out to have multiple people try to describe and use analogies or, you know, their own handicapping of the situation. It's easier than ever to build a great new product and launching a startup even as a solo entrepreneur is getting easier and easier. But as my experienced founders already know, there's a lot more to starting a company than just putting up a website or even building a product. If you're serious about going into business, you need a Delaware C corp. That's going to give you a serious leg up on your competition and you can be taken seriously by investors. That's where Northwest Registered Agent comes in. Just

• 10:24Jason Calacanis?

  a few clicks, they're going to give you the perfect start to your new enterprise. A real identity, a domain, a custom website, a business email, all the public filings done, and even a phone number. And you'll complete this process in under 10 minutes. Plus, you're going to get all sorts of free tools and resources from step-to-step guides, compliance reminders, and an online account that's going to keep everything organized even as your business grows. So get all the advantages of a Delaware C corp regardless of where in the US you're operating out of. NorthwestRegisteredAgent.com/twist.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, Simon was a subnet owner. He had access to the wallets and he sold the tokens. The reasons that he gave for selling the tokens, I'm not 100% convinced by. I think Constance made a response saying actually some of the accusations he wasn't able to do and they weren't true and it was impossible for him to like. Take some of the actions that Sam has accused him of. So I think possibly he may be pointing the blame somewhere just to excuse his actions. But, you know, we don't know everything about it. This is just from, obviously, what I know anecdotally, like you guys, I'm not right in the nitty gritty of the exact situation.

• 11:37Jason Calacanis?

  And why did tau go down 20% or whatever it went down, you know, at when this happened? Was it just bad vibes and people were like, oh, my God, this is a attack vector? This is a weakness of the BitTensor system? Or was it because the market was flooded with tau's being sold and there weren't as high of a bid to absorb them?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think there was a big element of fear there. I think, obviously, Covenant has been absolutely killing it recently with the detail investors and it was right on the top of the emissions and it has been for a long time. He was getting amazing press outside from people who didn't have a full understanding of BitTensor, but they obviously were understanding what he's doing and very impressed by that. And I think that when it was found out that he was selling all his tower and taking it, I think there was a big fear amongst investors, not necessarily the community, but investors were very worried that this was gonna be catastrophic for the tower price and a lot of people got out. It wasn't just him selling his tower,

• 12:41Speaker 02

  but that was an element of it.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Gareth, is it fair to say that Covenant AI and its three subnets were kind of a marquee or like apex project for BitTensor today?

• 12:50Speaker 02

  I think they were, but I think there's also, there are only three subnets out of 128 and we've got some incredible subnets doing some amazing things and they're going to come to the forefront very soon. So I really think this is more of a blip than, you know, anything saying that BitTensor is in real trouble. I think we're going to bounce back very quickly. The community is amazing and some of these, the other subnets are going to come to the forefront very quickly. So I really think this is, this is a very short term issue, but I also think it's gonna actually make the community much stronger. We're gonna put things in place to stop this happening again and I think we're gonna learn a lot from that.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  All right. I really appreciate that. Let's talk about video subnet 85.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  First of all, give us the TLDR about what it does and then we're going to show an upscale of Mr. Lon Harris.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  We are, we are. So yes, video subnet 85 is a video processing subnet. So essentially we're starting out doing a video compression and upscaling. But now we're moving on to optimizing your video in any way that's possible. So we've got an agent that we can connect to your storage. We read everything that's on your Amazon S3 bucket, for instance. We take a look at that and we tell you where we can optimize. Optimization can be many things. We can optimize for streaming on a VOD platform. We can optimize for archiving, you know, best quality picture, saving you space. We can optimize for security, medical, education. You know, we're covering all those areas of video. So,

• 14:22Speaker 02

  yeah, essentially what we're doing is using AI, AI agents to make your video the best it can be for whatever your needs are.

• 14:33Jason Calacanis?

  Just to recap, I always like to explain back to the founder, so I understand their vision.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:38Jason Calacanis?

  Vidio, V I D A I O is how the name of the company is spelled, or I should say the name of the subnet is the Tau subnet, the BitTensor subnet. It's numbered 85, just so people understand. There's 128 subnets. A person like Gareth can start a subnet, stake with some Tau, and they may or may not have a company behind it. So are you also running a startup that is doing this or a consulting firm?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  We are incubated by Tau Stats Mog, who you had on the show before with Hippius. So we're in exactly the same situation as Hippius.

• 15:15Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And this could become a company. It's inside of a different company right now. So as investors, we could invest in a parent company, or you could buy Tau, or you could buy the subnet token. Three different ways to invest in these opportunities. I'm looking at all of them. I have, I own Tau directly myself through Coinbase. It's not on Robinhood yet. And then Steelcore Capital, which I'm a partner in with Mark Jeffrey, they are going and buying subnets to buy subnets. You gotta go to the subnet owner and do a deal to buy the tokens. They're not trading freely on marketplaces yet.

• 15:54Jason Calacanis?

  But when you buy TAO, in some ways like buying a mutual fund or an index, an ETF, I guess would be the best way to say it, an ETF of a bunch of different startups. Okay. This particular subnet is challenging people on the internet or globally to give you compute. And then you take that compute and you will take video files and render them into, you know, different

• 16:24Jason Calacanis?

  different versions of it. Now, this seems like a very narrow use case, like I can, on my desktop, I can use VLC to save a file as a different file type. But you're doing something a little more sophisticated and the customers of this product are what? So let's just talk really tightly about who are the customers for upscaling a video or just essentially making different versions of a video and how big is that market?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  So, I mean, the market is enormous. Eighty-five percent of internet traffic is video. So, you know, it's not going anywhere. More videos getting created every day and it's going into storage buckets on the cloud that are just getting bigger and bigger. People's, you know, bills are getting bigger. No one's really doing anything about that. So to answer the question, upscaling would be anyone with a library, a library of old content. You could be, you know, the National Archives in the UK. You could be a big TV broadcaster who made twenty years of programming in SD. You could be a consumer who's got videos.

• 17:27Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So like the BBC has a giant archive. BBC News has a giant archive. Getty Images has an archive. CBS owns an archive. Those archives might be in very low-quality video.

• 17:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly that. So, and, and they won't translate to like a 4K screen. Like we, expectations these days are of high picture quality. So we can go in there with our agent. We can scan your archive and we can. Tell you what we can do to that. We can make these all these videos 4K. We can turn your black and white videos into color. We can change the frame rate. If if the video is jerky, we can clean up noise. Or if you want to keep it in black and white, we can do that. You want it in sepia. We can do that also. We can do subtitling. We can do transcription. We can do tagging of metadata. So then you have a searchable content library. So we can do all of those things within, you know, within our ecosystem.

• 18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So.

• 18:18Speaker 01

  The miners here are not just providing compute, Gareth. Aren't they providing the actual models themselves that you're using for those specific tasks?

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly that. So we're now moving on to the new iteration. Which is a winner takes all or winner takes most model for the miners. So essentially what they're doing now is optimizing models. So rather than we we were using their compute before, but that became very difficult to scale. So now we're we can scale with shoots, which is another subnet. It has a trusted executional environment. Which means that it's a safe environment that our clients will be happy with because it's 100% safe. It's it's private for for us and the client. And so now we can optimize models. So we can say we want a new upscaling model or a colorization model.

• 19:06Speaker 02

  Or subtitling, lip sync, we're looking into lip sync models as well. So there's there's so much more versatility now in the subnet if we move to this kind of winner takes all model.

• 19:17Jason Calacanis?

  And there are desktop pieces of software like Topaz. That I think people will use for this type of and

• 19:26Jason Calacanis?

  product or service. So if you had an old

• 19:30Jason Calacanis?

  video of a Bob Dylan concert, or I have all these old Dire Straits bootleg videos, they're all over YouTube and they are grainy. Now AI can take them and upscale them. So about three or four years ago, I started to see this on YouTube where people would say upscaled. You know, Dire Straits thing. And it's pretty amazing to see literally a VHS shaky VHS turn into something that looks like, okay, maybe HD or close to HD. And it's only going to get better from here. This is the worst it will ever be.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  So here's the video.

• 20:04Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay. Here. So let's see an example. AI tools are making it easier than ever to run your own business, even as a solo founder. But you still need a beautiful, attention-grabbing website to help your new company stand out in a very crowded field. And you don't want AI slop. Nope. You want to use Squarespace. That's the easiest and fastest way to turn your idea into a real business because the team at Squarespace cares deeply about design and functionality. And a plain-looking or generic or AI-sloped website, man, that's going to be a red flag for your customers, for your investors, and people who want to come work for you and join your team. But Squarespace will take all the guesswork out of designing your first website with the Blueprint AI Builder, which has been finely tuned to make beautiful websites.

• 20:47Jason Calacanis?

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• 21:07Speaker 01

  So here's an example of it from the Subnet. Here's Lon. If you're on the audio version, we have a grainy lawn on the left.

• 21:13Jason Calacanis?

  Rest in peace Lon Harris. He was an amazing collaborator here, and so we're celebrating him today. He's in surgery as we speak. Well, who knows if he'll get out? He's wearing his plod pin, just so you know. He's wearing his plod pin in surgery.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  Two plod pins in one shot. There you go.

• 21:27Speaker 03

  To me, it doesn't feel like Gaff is anywhere near ready to work by himself. Like, even if he was in a Mac Studio, I feel like I would still need to be there giving him feedback, pointers, asking him to do things. I don't think he's ready to replace me. He's ready to do like 80% of what I do.

• 21:45Jason Calacanis?

  The one on the left and the one on the right, explain to us the difference.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  So the one on the left was the original video that we upscaled, which was taken, obviously, from one of your podcasts. We compressed that down a bit to make the picture of quality worse. But then I put it through the Subnet and we upscaled this up to 4K. So essentially, what we're doing is it's a gen AI tool, which is predicting what should be in the picture. And it's making all of the, you know, the blurry lines clearer. So.

• 22:18Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. And so this is a way if people are recording their podcast, just as a silly example over Zoom, like many people do today. And that kind of downgrades your video a bit. You could take All In or This Week in Startups here and twist and just boom, make it a beautiful. Look like it was using 4K Studio Red cameras or something. Yeah.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. We can do that. And then we can also compress that video. So you get a super high picture quality, a much smaller file size. So therefore, I mean, that's going to help you with streaming. That's going to help with your storage and your CDN costs. So it's going to create efficiencies all the way down. You know.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  How does that play into low, low connectivity markets? Like, you know, in parts of the world, like parts of Latin America, parts of Africa, connectivity is a lot worse. Does Starlink? Make it so that everyone has unlimited bandwidth now? We don't need to worry about it? Or are there still places where people are pretty bit conscious?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, not. Yeah. So Africa being the perfect example. I've got a lot of experience working in Africa and in emerging markets. So connectivity there is a real problem. Also, everyone uses mobile phones. There's no laptops, no 4K TV. So everything's. Needs to be compressed down to the small screen. Connectivity is an issue. Data is an issue. Phone battery is an issue. So these. All of this, everything we're doing to these files is solving those problems. Essentially, we can get, say, conservatively 60% smaller file. At the same perceptual visual quality. So the user has no, like, there's no degradation for the user. They get a perfect quality file, but it's 60% smaller. So all of the costs along that chain.

• 23:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, they reduce.

• 23:54Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And if you look at this space, it's predicted to grow from 175 billion in 2025 to 1.1 billion in 2032. So this is going to be, this is going to be like a compounding vertical where people are really going to want to be upscaling videos on a regular basis. And there are many competitors here already, from desktop software to Amazon has an offering. You, in terms of your pricing, walk us through the economics now because you're using another subnet for compute. And so you're using your miners, miners are individuals who want to earn tau for doing a task. So just so people think about it, that's the

• 24:36Jason Calacanis?

  supply side. So that's the Uber drivers, that's the Airbnb hosts. They can come into this network, but unlike Uber where they need a driver's license, they need to register, they can just sign up here and compete for these jobs. And then there's a validator that confirms that they did the job and then picks the winner. Am I broadly correct in how subnets work and how this one works?

• 25:01Speaker 02

  The thing is with video, it is compute heavy for sure. But there's, it's very hard to put a price per minute on what we're doing, which is essentially the old way of pricing. So that's what AWS would do. Because we're, we now have this optimization model where we could be using three, four, five different models on one piece of video. We, it goes kind of on a case by case basis. But what we have on our side, not only do we have the innovation of BitTensor, which is of course the incentive mechanism and the miners creating better and better models. So we've already done benchmarking with all our competitors and we're already better. So we know that, we know that we're good there. But also you

• 25:43Speaker 02

  have the emissions from the subnet, which can also subsidize our earnings. So we can pay our miners. So we're essentially paying 256 machine learning engineers to outdo each other on a daily basis. And that's, you know, that's an unbelievable powerful tool to have behind you. So.

• 26:00Jason Calacanis?

  What are the models that they're using? These are open source models, they're tweaking their models, they're the model originators, they're making SMLs out of large language models. Who are these, what are these models they're using?

• 26:14Speaker 02

  It's some and some. So when we launch the subnet, we always start with a base model. For upscaling, we use an open source model. For compression, we created our own because there was none existing. The miners have taken those and they've, they've built upon them and they've tweaked them and they've made them better, or they've created their own models. Sometimes we don't even know what models they're using. We just know that the output. Is better than, you know, that we can do ourselves. So with this, with the new winner takes all, we will ask them to open source their models to us. So then we will be able to use that in a private environment for our clients.

• 26:49Jason Calacanis?

  Have you ever met these miners and the people who are participating?

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Face to face? No, but we've had some, some meetings. There's a couple of pro mining teams that are working on the subnet, which come from the video world, actually not machine learning engineers, which is very interesting. So we have, yeah, we do talk to them and we, you know.

• 27:09Jason Calacanis?

  And describe for us who these type of people are. Are these people who work at IBM and they make a great salary and they're doing a side hustle? Or, you know, they, they work at a Hollywood studio and on the weekends they do this, or they're just bored at work, or they're living in Thailand and they don't have to make a ton of money and they just are nomadic entrepreneurial CTOs and in their spare time, they, you know, contribute to these subnets because it's a fun way to make a, you know, an extra couple of thousand dollars a week.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  I mean, we've had a team from Vietnam doing exactly that. There was, there was, I think, three or four guys working solely on this. I think, I think they were university students or, or graduates.

• 27:48Jason Calacanis?

  In from Vietnam or people who are like nomads?

• 27:51Speaker 02

  No, no, they were Vietnamese. Yeah.

• 27:52Jason Calacanis?

  They were Vietnamese.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:54Jason Calacanis?

  That's a very interesting thing to pause on there, Alex, is there's incredible tech talent around the world. They might have a hard time getting a job at Google or Coinbase or whatever it happens to be, but they can permissionlessly join a TAO subnet and immediately start making money and put their tech skills to work and they can do it anonymously and they don't have to worry about visas, nor do they have to worry about payments because it's on, you know, a distributed, you know, crypto project where it's permissionless, permissionless fancy way of saying, I can just participate without somebody, you know, approving me. That's a really, you know, unique thing in all the world.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  This has been my biggest learning, talking to the different subnets in the last few weeks, is that there are so many people out there who can contribute to machine learning technology that don't only work at Google. Cause I've asked this question, where are you finding these people? Where are these ML engineers that have all this spare time on their hands? Cause we beat up startups, Jason, they're desperate for local talent. Everyone's fighting over the same eight people. But you go to Vietnam, you have a bunch of smart people who can do great work and Gareth doesn't care.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, they come to us. That's the beauty of it is that like we built it and they come to us. So, you know, they obviously have an understanding of the ecosystem and the network, but you create a new subnet, people register, they start mining, you've no idea who they are and you don't really need to, you just obviously you need to see their proof of work and you need to validate it. And that's the only thing that matters. And that's, and that's why, you know, you can get the best talent and maybe they are working for Google, maybe they're doing this on the side, but sometimes we don't know.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  All right, Gareth, anything else we missed? If not, we'll drop you off and thank you for your time.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Absolute pleasure. Thanks, guys.

• 29:42Jason Calacanis?

  There are lots of accounting firms out there that will help you maintain your books and do your taxes. But when you're a founder, you're facing a lot of unique challenges. So you want a partner who understands the landscape that startups operate under. You want to be able to trust them with the reins so you can focus on building your product. Well, Pilot is the largest accounting firm that was built just with startups in mind. You're not just getting your taxes done. No, you're getting CFO level guidance for your startup. Pilot will help you track where all your cash is going, increasing your profitability, and helping you spot looming issues before they become real problems. Hey, like your runway, you gotta be on top of this stuff, folks. And when it's time for you to raise

• 30:23Jason Calacanis?

  your next round, Pilot is right there to help you with due diligence and scale up and make that process easy peasy lemon squeezy. So start focusing on your product and let Pilot handle the bookkeeping. Plus, Twist listeners get $1,200, $1,200 off in their first year. What a deal. Go to pilot.com/twist to get started. That's pilot.com/twist. And we've been going through all the subnets. I believe in this project. I have very, you know, since the administration's changed and the, and the folks. Who were running crypto policy have changed.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  True.

• 30:58Jason Calacanis?

  I am now officially open for business in crypto. I'm doing a stablecoin project, getting involved in Tao. Specifically looking though, only for projects where there's a customer who is either making money, saving money, entertained or otherwise delighted by a product or service. So I'm not looking for meme coins. I am not looking for pump and dumps. I'm looking for, you know, actual products that create value and use the technology in a way that it was intended that gives it an advantage. And really, when you look at the BitTensor universe, incentives matter. Tapping into a global workforce, tapping into global compute, having it be distributed. And, you know, again, there's like fancy words used in crypto like permissionless.

• 31:44Jason Calacanis?

  And, you know, or, you know, peer to peer or distributed. All this stuff means is anybody can participate. The compute or storage or transit can come from anybody. And that means it moves faster and it more violently removes cost. So if you just open your mind up for a second, if everybody in the world could work at your local Starbucks or anybody in the world could magically sell coffee beans to your local coffee shop. And they basically had a competition, you would have a barista for $1 a day, $2 a day, living like a king or queen in their native location.

• 32:24Jason Calacanis?

  And if the beans could magically be transported without all the distribution between where the coffee beans are and the roaster and eventually the cafe, just allow your mind to think about how powerful that is. You, your cup of coffee and that experience would be delivered faster and better and cheaper. That's all. And you wouldn't have the friction of, I have to hire this person. I've got a union. I've got to pay taxes, whatever. It just, boom, just happens magically in this global cloud. This machine known as the interwebs.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you think that we're going to see a little bit less winner takes most or winner takes all? Cause I've seen several different sub that's moving towards this model for their miners and. I fully understand why it's good for the subnets, but when I think about expanding economic opportunities, Jason, kind of what you're saying, to me, if it is going to be winner takes most, winner takes all, there's less, uh, lower hanging fruit for people that are trying to get to that top rung of a particular minor task for a subnet. I'm just curious if that's a concern for you as well, or just good economic.

• 33:25Jason Calacanis?

  Not, yeah, no, I mean, you're, you're a big fan of capitalism. What happens if the buy side doesn't make a good enough offer to labor, the supply side?

• 33:34Speaker 01

  Oh, they don't hire enough people.

• 33:35Jason Calacanis?

  They don't leave their house. So if you're going to pay $10 an hour to be a barista, and people can work from home for 15 bucks an hour, they're not coming to your Starbucks to work. Apple stores faced, were faced with this, and so were Starbucks and Coffee Bean and everybody else. When Uber and DoorDash came out, it turned out, working for one or two hours, picking your own schedule, and making, you know, $21 an hour was better than getting up at the crack of dawn, showing up at 5:30 a.m. at a Starbucks and having to work an eight hour shift, and not knowing what shifts you were working, it just was a better offering. So this actually empowers, I believe, labor. If you consider labor, you know, the, the supply side on these

• 34:18Jason Calacanis?

  things, and the customers are the people who want their videos to be upscaled. So the people who lose are the people who are charging a higher price, uh, or, and/or giving a lower level of service. The winner is best price, best service. And sometimes it's some combination of that. If the, the validator, which is the person who basically arbitrates, did you actually perform the task? Again, crypto uses a lot of fancy terms or a lot of wonky terms. A validator is just the person who checks the work. Okay, you made a flat white. Is this a good flat white? Or is it garbage? Is it an acceptable flat white? You know, or fuck off. You know, so the validators will determine that. And then the person who's buying the service will say,

• 35:01Jason Calacanis?

  well, like this wasn't good enough. I'm going to go use another service. So they could go use the desktop software or Amazon's offering. Amazon's offering is, might be faster, it might be better, but it might also be twice the price. And then the BBC might say, you know what, these things haven't been upscaled for 50 years. We're in no rush here. If it takes, you know, a week, or a month, or a day, it doesn't matter versus an hour, a minute, or two hours. So here we are, folks. This is capitalism at its finest. And if you ever dreamed of, you know, one human race working on projects beyond borders, beyond governments, beyond regulation, that's what

• 35:41Jason Calacanis?

  makes this so compelling to me. It kind of cuts across humanity and just makes a global competition for capitalism. And if, the people who lose are people in the West who are coddled, overpaid, lazy, whatever. And the people who win are the ones who are the biggest hustlers, who, you know, will do it for the right price. But if you don't offer a decent price, people don't participate. So you have that backstop, right? So before anybody gets, you know, their hands ringing too hard here, and they rip the skin off their knuckles.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:16Jason Calacanis?

  The, the guys in Vietnam, uh, doing this four-person team, if they get a job, you know, for a Korean company, or a Japanese company, and they pay them more, they stop participating in the subnet. Again, back to capitalism, back to free markets. This is free markets, like unconstrained.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  What do you and I like, Jason? Free markets.

• 36:38Jason Calacanis?

  And unconstrained.

• 36:39Speaker 01

  Those are our, those are our favorite things. What I like, though, just as a last thought, I know we gotta move on, but your point that buying Tao is a bit like an ETF into the Bitcoin economy, I like that a lot, because frankly, I don't think right now I would have confidence to say, Jason, here are the top three subnets. These are the ones that are gonna win. You have the 125 or whatever. But I don't mind having kind of like a, effectively a call option on decentralized global intelligence. So that, that translates well for me. I appreciate that.

• 37:05Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And, you know, listen, everybody wants to debate me, and like, I'm not writing the code of Big Tens, or I haven't been like a market participant in crypto, aside from, you know, my, you know, uh, some small bets, uh, we've made as a, in a family office, but... It's uh, my job is to explain it in plain English and to explain my thesis. So for people who are like, you're pumping this, for people who are like, you don't know what you're talking about. Of course, I don't know what I'm talking about. I am an investor. I am a commentator. So the way I choose to place bets is not by writing code, not by being a subnet participant or launching a subnet.

• 37:48Jason Calacanis?

  My way is studying, placing bets, losing bets, learning, placing more bets. And that's the job of an investor is you learn by betting. My job is to learn by betting and to have conversations, which is what I'm doing here. So to the mids and the weirdos, you know, now I'm, I've got all these crypto weirdos back in my replies again.

• 38:10Speaker 01

  You poor thing. It's the worst.

• 38:13Jason Calacanis?

  I'm trying to think of like, what's worse, like the magabots who are still loyal to Trump after, you know, he starts the forever war, or hopefully not a forever war, but you know, that group of people in my replies. Or the crypto people in my replies saying, have fun staying poor. And I'm like, guys, I'm worth collectively more than all of you. I'm doing okay, guys. You know, like.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  It's so tribal though at times, and I think I really hope that maybe, maybe BitTorrent can, can help break some of this. But people get so parasocial about their favorite token that it becomes nigh religious and then they.

• 38:50Jason Calacanis?

  It's the nature of humans, Alex. I mean, I, I literally, when I told MAC people like back in the day, like how that's yeah, retarded some of the MAC decisions were, they would lose their minds. When I would tell them how like pathetic it was that Microsoft couldn't build a UX and have less than 300 things in submenus. Like they got upset. I'm like, okay, this is just valid criticism. Like people want a headphone port. People want an on off button, you know, like just give them the volume buttons, you know? It's not like a big thing to keep a headphone port on your laptop. Like bad decision to remove the headphone port. I'll, I'll, I'll die with that. Yeah.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  I'm still mad about it and I own several pairs of wireless headphones, but I also like to listen to audio songs, Jason, for more than 20 fricking minutes.

• 39:36Jason Calacanis?

  Exactly, exactly. All right. Let's keep going.

• 39:38Speaker 01

  All right.

• 39:39Jason Calacanis?

  And I welcome the feedback from crypto mids. Congratulations on hitting, I was getting into a fight with a guy about this stuff and then I looked, he had eight followers and he started his account in 2013. I said, congratulations on almost hitting double digits in your follower account. I'm like taking this account seriously for 15 minutes of my life.

• 40:00Speaker 01

  That's, Jason, that's less than one follower per year, Matt.

• 40:03Jason Calacanis?

  Literally, he's at 0.6 followers per year. And by the way, I get 20, I probably get 100 at this point bots following me per day, right?

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:16Jason Calacanis?

  It's not hard to get past 10, bruh. And then I look, he's tweeting 20 times a day with eight followers. I'm like, what's the point?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  You have to be pretty toxic to tweet that much and end up with no followers. Unless you're like blocking people that are following you. Anyways. All right. Next up, we're going to bring my new best friend, Ola Lehman on the show. Ola is a social media poster. He builds with Open Claude, builds skills for Claude code, runs classes for people and built, Jason, what I think is the single coolest skill for Open Claude we've ever yet had on the show, though we are going to show it off inside of Claude Co-Work. Ola, welcome to the show. Unmute your microphone and tell us all about Andrej Karpathy's idea behind the Council of Advisors.

• 40:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, great to be here. So I saw Kapathie's post. For some context, Kapathie is co-founder, was co-founder of OpenAI, later head of AI with Tesla, so AI Giga Chat. And he posted about his LLM council, which basically has the idea of you have a question, you send it to different models, so GROK, Claude, ChatGPT, all of that. They all come up with a different answer. Then the answers get anonymized and then they get peer reviewed. So every single model reviews all of the outputs in an anonymous way. Then they get to the chairman, there's like another model at the end, and the chairman just comes up with the final verdict. So that was the idea of Kapathie's council.

• 41:36Speaker 04

  And I really liked that idea, but I thought, okay, it would be cool to build something in Claude that's more based around basically giving you basic advice for everything in your business and also for general life advice. So.

• 41:48Speaker 01

  Is your Council of Advisors using different models for each of the? Advisors that debates the question, or is it one model with different personas attached to it to kind of talk amongst themselves?

• 41:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this is just one model. So I'm just using Cloud Opus 4.6 right here. It's because most part of my audience are really non-technical. So I wanted to build something that's still kind of simple, but still uses the same concept that Kappa use it. So I'm just using Opus right here.

• 42:16Speaker 01

  So let's ask it a question. Listen, Jason, pick a question and then as it thinks, I want you to talk us through what it's doing. So Jason, what's a good startup question for founders that would they be asking themselves today?

• 42:28Jason Calacanis?

  Sure.

• 42:30Jason Calacanis?

  How much equity should I give my VP of Engineering who has five years of work experience? And who previously worked at Google? I'm a seed stage startup that's raised $3 million. I am a solo founder and I have 85% of the equity and my investors have 15%.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  I wonder how many tokens this is going to consume.

• 42:57Jason Calacanis?

  Not a lot. It's not so bad. And this is how, you know, the more specific you get, the better the models tend to do. And then what you're doing only is you've given one model, Anthropic's exceptional model. But you've, you haven't have four or five different personas. So you've loaded into those personas, a contrarian, like, why would this fail? You've got a first principles thinker, an Elon Musk on the team. You've got an expansionist, which would be like a J. Cal. How does this grow faster? You got an outsider who's like, I don't, I've never, I don't even know what you're talking about. I'm dumb.

• 43:37Jason Calacanis?

  And then you have an executor who's like a sycophant who says, hey, I'll get it done for you or something. I would put the sycophant in here too, but okay.

• 43:46Speaker 04

  This, this is the basic idea. And again, what's important that you have the step here to anonymize all of the responses before the peer reviews happen. That's like one of the key, the key steps here. So once that happened, we can see if they already, in the beginning. It will spin up five different sub agents. So this is pretty cool because Claude Code or Claude Co-Work. So this also works with Claude Co-Work for everyone watching. I just like to use Claude Code more, but it's just a preference here. It totally works too. And again, this is because Anthropic now has these agents working inside all of their products. So it just spins up different sub agents.

• 44:23Jason Calacanis?

  So it does it in parallel, saves a lot of time. You anonymize the five different responses. Because when you go to the peer review stage, you don't want it thinking, oh, this is the expert. This is the contrarian. You want it to just evaluate it, you know, without any baggage, correct?

• 44:39Speaker 04

  Exactly. And I read Kapathia's thoughts on that. And he was quite surprised that in his version, he used different LLM models. And they oftentimes rated other LLM models higher than themselves. Once this peer review thing kind of got started. So it really helps because most of these models have some kind of bias, especially when it comes to rating other stuff. So with this, this step really helps to get to a better, like more balanced opinion. This is also why it shows these, Jekyll already like talked about this a little bit. I tried to include opposites a little bit. So the contrarian is kind of what is the downside? The expansionist is what is the upside? The first principle thinker is kind of takes a step back. It goes deeper into thinking.

• 45:24Speaker 04

  And the executor is just going forward and just full throbbing, not really thinking, just doing.

• 45:30Jason Calacanis?

  He's maxing, just call it what it is, only.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  Matt, I'm actually gonna drop an article today about maxing. It's funny you talk about that.

• 45:39Jason Calacanis?

  I'm sorry to everybody who's offended by the word, but it's in popular culture right now. It's not going backwards.

• 45:47Jason Calacanis?

  It is what it is. But for people who don't know, stop ruminating. Don't go to therapy. Don't overthink things, folks. Just go forward and build. It's all that matters is building and making your venture capitalists more money faster. Let's go.

• 46:02Speaker 04

  So you can see, yeah, all the advisors now responded and is running the peer review. It's also complete. So now it all comes to the final stage here, stage three, which is the chairman. And so the chairman gathers all the data and all of these different responses to the. The council members rated, okay, who has a strong response? Who is the weakest? Also, what I can blind spots that some of the reviews missed? And also, I added this thing. So this is not from Kapathi, but I thought it's kind of a good data to have is the what did all five miss? So they all sit down and try to find things that all of them missed. So that's kind of an extra angle here.

• 46:40Jason Calacanis?

  Now, wait, how many people are on the peer review? And did the peer review people have personas?

• 46:46Speaker 04

  So the peer review still happens in these personas.

• 46:48Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, got it. So the five are evaluating each other's answers without knowing them.

• 46:53Speaker 04

  Exactly, yeah. And they go through these three questions here. There's a little bit more context in the skill, but this is kind of the basic principle of it. And then they go to the chairman. And once the chairman has all the data, he creates a report for you. And this will be shown on a dashboard. So hopefully, we'll get there. Yeah, it's still.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Well, while it works, Ola, and while we wait for it to finish doing it, it's number crunching. Can you just quickly break down for folks when you'd like to use Claude Code slash CoWork? And when you prefer to use OpenClaw? Because I'm seeing a lot more folks in my circles start to tinker more with CoWork. And I'm still a Claw guy. So I'm curious pros and cons and what I'm missing.

• 47:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a really good question. I would say for me, the most like more serious in-depth work I like to do in Claude Code or Claude CoWork. Just because most of my OpenClaw is in my Telegram. I think the big upside of OpenClaw is that you have the memory system built in. You can also get there with Claude Code using things like Obsidian, for example, or using projects now in CoWork. So it's kind of, it's becoming a little bit more alike over time, I would say. But in general, to me, for more in-depth work, I like to use Claude Code just to be very honest with you. Because I like the interface more. You can probably do most of the work in OpenClaw. But in Claude Code, it's easier for me to also work on my local files.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  And just be like, hey, just put this into this folder. It's also a little bit, I would say, habit. Because the truth is, I could potentially do most of the work I'm doing inside Claude Code. Or called CoWork inside OpenClaw. One big difference I would say is especially for non-technical people who I mainly talk to. Yeah. You have you have better or like easier control inside CoWork. So you can just go into your connected apps, so let's say Gmail or Notion. And you can just see these are the permissions I gave my CoWork. But if you look at OpenClaw, sometimes it will just do things and and you don't really understand like which permissions you gave to it. Or you maybe gave it an API key, it's still in there. So there's some files, some stuff is saved, but you don't have a good overview.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  So I just think that Anthropic is doing a great job of just making it more accessible. And yeah, just easier to use for non-technical people.

• 49:07Jason Calacanis?

  Now, is this all open source, Ole? And is it a skill in OpenClaw? Where where does this exist if people want to build? Or are you building this as a proprietary startup that I can invest in?

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you can just get this from either my X account. So you can find me at it'solelemann and I pinned it to my profile here. So it's an article here that I wrote about it and you can find this as a Google Docker there. I also put it onto GitHub, but again, I'm mainly talking.

• 49:34Jason Calacanis?

  And we will put this in our enhanced show notes. I have given producer Jacob and producer Oliver explicit instructions that I want enhanced show notes. So I want them running the show notes and asking our own, I want them to ask our own LLMs, our own council, what did we miss in the transcript that could have been linked to? And I want to do that like twice.

• 49:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's good.

• 50:00Jason Calacanis?

  And I want to have absurd show notes going forward with tons of links in it. Why? I take notes myself, Alex, when I'm listening to a podcast or I'm listening to an audiobook. So let's really do that with our show notes. I want enhanced show notes, please. And if somebody wants to make a skill. For OpenClaw to do this, I will put out a $1,000 bounty. And on, let's say, May 1st, I'll give the $1,000 bounty for the open source project that proves they can do incredible enhanced show notes for me for Twist. Okay. I'm doing this new, this is a new program we're going to do here, Alex, which is the bounty program.

• 50:40Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to offer money for OpenClaw skills so that we can keep the capitalists who I'm invested in from killing OpenClaw. This is our format here is demo or die, folks. And so in the tradition of the, what was the original computer hacker club called, Alex? In, this is like a good Jeopardy, was the Computer Something Club? And it was in like Palo Alto or whatever in the 70s. And like Steve Jobs used to go to it and they would just have demo or die. What was that?

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Chaos Computer Club?

• 51:13Jason Calacanis?

  No, it wasn't the Chaos Computer Club. It wasn't like 2,600 out of New York.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  Homebrew Computer Club, founded in 1975, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, premier 1970s hobbyist group, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, the Homebrew Computer Club.

• 51:25Jason Calacanis?

  I want to do an episode on the homebrew. We'll do like an acquired episode, you know, like when they go like do a deep dive. Jacob put this on for the summer schedule. Deep dive, homebrew, and I want to do an oral history of the homebrew. This is new from this week in startups from the mind of executive producer Jake Howe. I want to do an oral history documentary on it and we'll debut it as a one or two-part series during our summer session.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  Now we have the council report and it gives a recommendation first. We can just have a look at it.

• 51:59Jason Calacanis?

  Take a look here. The recommendation, 0.75% to 1%. Offer 0.75%. Negotiate up to 1% ceiling if pushed. You're a C-stage with 3 million raised and a Series A coming that will dilute everyone by 20, 25%. Okay, that seems likely. I would have said 15 to 20%. Google tenure and five years of experience are real signals. Correct, that's why I gave them. But they don't justify top of the market. You need room for two to three more senior hires before or after your Series A. That's true. Structure it as ISOs with a four-year vest, one-year cliff. That's standard double trigger acceleration. That's a fancy way of saying if the company gets bought, they get their vesting pushed for it in case like the acquirer doesn't need the CTO. If the candidate pushes beyond 1%, shift the conversation to base salary first. Moving base up is cheaper long-term than moving to equity.

• 52:44Jason Calacanis?

  That's true if you succeed because equity compounds through dilution rounds and salary does not. The one thing to do first, create the option pool before this conversation. A 10 to 15% option pool documented and board approved. So the VP offer is priced against real post pool cap table, not a number that will change the moment you formalize the hire. This is critically important. This is something I wasn't even thinking of. So that's a great, great punch up there that I put in yellow. Where the council agrees, every advisor landed the same mechanical range, 0.5 to 1.5. And I didn't do CTO, right? I did VP of engineering, I think, which is like a step below CTO.

• 53:25Jason Calacanis?

  What the council clashes on, the ex-pensionist pushed for 1.5 to 2%. That's what I was going to say. I was going to say 2 to 3%, but I am the optimist pushing for like getting great candidates. I would have said 2%. Blind spots, council call, cash equity trade-off, option pool math and role trajectory. Does this person eventually become the CTO? Wow. Oh my Lord. This is exceptional. Like, like if you had a discussion with your board as a founder, you would not get to this answer as crisply and as cleanly as possible. This is why I think you should create a digital board of directors from day one of your startup.

• 54:07Jason Calacanis?

  And having it get complete access to your Slack and working on these decisions, really genius. Amazing.

• 54:13Speaker 01

  Can you click on just one of these for me, Ola, so I can see what it looks like?

• 54:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:17Speaker 01

  Okay, so this is one response.

• 54:19Speaker 04

  The outputs, the individual outputs of the, of the different council members. And it also gives you some highlights here and some, some blind spots. And I, I think the general idea is.

• 54:34Speaker 04

  Everyone who makes important decisions has a council, right? Like, the president has a council. Like, maybe, no. And every decision is made by having influence by these people that have in-depth knowledge. And if you have a startup, you would have never had these opportunities or these resources before. And like Jake had said, now you have an LLM. And LLMs are so good to stepping into another role. And also, it saves a lot of your own biological compute. Because if you have to think and empathize with a different opinion every day, it takes so much of your own energy. So for me, it's just helpful to let these different council members run through ideas. Because, yeah, it's such a big advantage.

• 55:17Speaker 04

  And most people don't use LLMs for that, and they're extremely good at that.

• 55:20Speaker 01

  You said that Claude Mythos is, quote, "Hiroshima for software." That's a very vivid image, you might say. Why are you that concerned? Right now, it's under lock and key. Jason and I talked about Project Glasswing. Seems like we're in a bit of a holding pattern. Why are you so scared?

• 55:37Speaker 04

  I just think it's a point in time. I don't want to be too alarmist, but it's one of these point in time where it just makes sense to take a step back and take your security seriously. Because the downside, if you don't, is just so immense, right? Like, they're just, if you have a big moment of uncertainty, it's usually smart to take some measures. And I think just taking these basic security measures is something everyone would do, but most people never do them. I think if you just ask the random person, like, "What are your security measures?", they are incredibly bad. So this is why I made this post. The headline was kind of extreme, just to get to attention, but the meat of the post was just, "Hey, these are the basics of security, and this is a good point in time to take them seriously."

• 56:20Speaker 04

  On the other hand, we don't really know how advanced Mythos is, right? Like, maybe you do all the security measures, but it's still going to be so advanced that it's just a drop in the ocean, right? So that's the big question here.

• 56:32Jason Calacanis?

  And just, Ole, before you go, what's your story? Where are you based? What do you do for a living?

• 56:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I'm based in Cyprus. I'm German, so I'm about in Berlin right now. I'm the founder of the AI Solopreneur, which is an AI media and training company. So I mainly do media around AI. I do some B2B consulting for companies. I'm focusing more on GTM engineering. So everything AI automation based around marketing, around building distribution.

• 57:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, you're hired.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I really believe, yeah.

• 57:03Jason Calacanis?

  You ever think you want to work in venture capital? You're hired. You'll be the first and only European employee I've ever had. You seem brilliant. Really appreciate you coming on the program. And everybody sign up for Ole's Substack.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yes, it is ai solo dot Beehive dot com, B E E H I I V dot com. Screw Substack, Jason, that's so 2024. Everyone's now on the hive.

• 57:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Beehive is a great product too. And I love a little capitalism and.

• 57:32Speaker 04

  I'm trying to bring capitalism back to Europe, I'm saying.

• 57:35Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, good luck. Be careful, you might get shived. What are you paying taxes? What's the high tax rate where you are?

• 57:41Speaker 04

  I mean, that's why I moved my business to Cyprus and I have residency there. This is like 12.5%. So I'm pretty, I'm pretty fine with that.

• 57:49Jason Calacanis?

  This is amazing. Now, if you were still in Berlin, you'd be paying 52% or something?

• 57:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's around 50. Yeah, that's what I paid before, yeah.

• 57:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, see, this is one of the important things that people have to understand. The most savvy entrepreneurs, especially ones outside the United States, because unlike Americans, Europeans can move to Dubai and pay like one or zero percent, Singapore or whatever. And they get tax treatment, Alex. That's extraordinary. If you're an American and you try this, you still have to pay your federal. So you're still on the hook for 30% or so. And the Americans move abroad. The only thing they get a benefit from is state taxes. What do you pay in state taxes, Alex? What's the, what's the vig up in Rhode Island?

• 58:33Speaker 01

  I don't know, but I'm about to find out.

• 58:35Jason Calacanis?

  That's how rich Alex is. He doesn't even know. He's just pouring in this money from all his incredible kids.

• 58:41Speaker 01

  So 3.75% up to 6%. Top rates for income over 180. Oh, that's not very high. Okay.

• 58:48Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's half of, you're basically half of California, New York.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:52Jason Calacanis?

  I think are at 13% state.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  But our state is 1% as large. So whenever we try to do high-speed rail, it's only eight cars long, you know, so it's pretty cheap to run a state.

• 59:00Jason Calacanis?

  Basically, the tip of the train is already at the next station and people are still getting off the last.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  I can't believe we have two senators. It gets incredible to me. Like, you can literally see across Rhode Island.

• 59:10Jason Calacanis?

  Shout out to our founding fathers. Like, what's the least populous state? Is it still Wyoming or Nebraska or something?

• 59:15Speaker 01

  Uh, least.

• 59:16Jason Calacanis?

  It's unbelievable how our system works, that a state with, you know, a fraction of the population of these other states get the equal, yeah, it's Wyoming.

• 59:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's Wyoming. 580,000 people. That's so few. I'm pretty sure they have a lottery and you draw out of a hat and if it's your turn, you have to be a representative in Congress.

• 59:34Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's basically you have a, uh, yeah, if you have two, you have a 1 in 250 chance of being a senator. I'm moving to Wyoming. Senator J. Cal from the great state of Wyoming.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  All right.

• 59:45Jason Calacanis?

  All right, we're dropping you off, but you're coming back on this program because you crushed it.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  Thanks, Ola. I appreciate you, man.

• 59:50Jason Calacanis?

  All right, listen. Everybody wants to know, J. Cal, you look great. You're no longer a fat bastard. You know why? Because of Ro.co. I have been doing a GLP. Yes, it's true. And I lost 40 pounds. And I've added muscle. If you are GLP curious, Ro.co is my partner. And they do a great job. Now, you don't need to get Ro Sparks if you're great. You might want to pick up some Ro Sparks while you're there, but I'm going to say GLPs are life-changing. Do your research and then use the checker. They have an incredible insurance checker. If your insurance doesn't cover it, man, it's getting more and more affordable thanks to folks like Ro.co. What's the offer?

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  We do. It's Ro.co/twist. If you want to check your insurance, Ro.co/twist. It's very affordable, very good, and you should all go check it out.

• 1:00:41Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, well, let's go off-duty. This is your first chance to go off-duty. We're doing off-duty at the end of the program. Why are we doing it? Uh, people love to know what, um, you know, we're into when we're not doing podcasts or investing in companies or writing newsletters. So, uh, you're first, Alex. What are you consuming, obsessed with, or otherwise, uh?

• 1:01:02Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, find yourself enamored by.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  I think for me, it's the egregiousness in a recent television show of a Microsoft bit of astroturfing. Now, we all know that Apple has rules. If you have an Apple computer in a movie, you're not allowed to have the bad guy use it, that sort of thing. They're very image conscious. Microsoft, on the other hand, in a clip that our dear friend Lon pulled for us, that I watched and it's terrible, goes to show how not to do product placement. So if you are on the Microsoft Copilot team, let me tell you, this is egregious, Jason. Get your vomit bucket ready and tune in.

• 1:01:34Jason Calacanis?

  Now, wait, this is yours or this is Lon's?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Well, we both agreed on it. We talked back and forth on the show today. Yeah, because we co-produced because he has surgery and such, but.

• 1:01:43Jason Calacanis?

  But you're endorsing this or no?

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  I am endorsing the badness of this. I'm saying that.

• 1:01:48Jason Calacanis?

  Have you watched this? Okay, here we go.

• 1:01:49Speaker 01

  Oh, several, several times. Oh, yeah, well.

• 1:01:51Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, okay, here we go.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  Please enjoy.

• 1:01:52Speaker 05

  Out on the border of New Mexico, San Angelo, Texas, Yakima, Washington. You know, I can run it in Copilot. I'll have it categorized police reports by location, date, and name. Then color code them by location and create a summary of the findings. Okay, here we go.

• 1:02:09Jason Calacanis?

  Wait a second.

• 1:02:10Speaker 05

  From finding reports on alleged scams in multiple cities he's lived in. Look, he posed as a startup investor in Phoenix, a high-end real estate partner in Ojai.

• 1:02:19Speaker 06

  So he's not a businessman, he's a con man.

• 1:02:22Speaker 05

  So Frank was his next hire.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  That is essentially a television commercial inside of a television show. And Jason, I'm not a big procedural guy, but if I was watching ABC's hit show, High Potential, I'd be pissed that they just sold me out to Microsoft. Who is that for?

• 1:02:37Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, is that a Microsoft Copilot? Is that Claude Co-Work?

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I think it's Microsoft Copilot. They were in Excel there. So I thought that was, and they said Copilot directly. That's not Co-Work. Also.

• 1:02:47Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. They did say Copilot, okay.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Don't you think Anthropic would have slightly better taste than that?

• 1:02:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, listen, product placement is a great way for these folks to make money and reduce the number of ads, but it does feel smarmy to me at times. I'm a fan of like when they just have a Heineken in the background or something to that effect, but this type of product placement. Is like literally being bashed in the in the skull in the middle of a show. Takes you right out of the experience. I'm gonna go ahead and say disgraciad ABC.

• 1:03:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, terrible, but but Microsoft is the one who should have just more quality control here. Like you have trillions of dollars in market cap. Hire someone who has taste. Like, like, this actually makes me doubt their ability to make good products because they can't advertise them well. Maybe that's too much apple in my head, but.

• 1:03:38Jason Calacanis?

  I want, here's the thing. If you are spending more time promoting your product than making a great product. And, you know, I don't know, I haven't used this product, so I'm not making a judgment on it. Uh, that is what I call pouring kerosene on a giant, you know, tree that's been felled in the forest. You you can start a fire, you you might even start a forest fire, but generally you're gonna wind up with a charred giant log. You you wanna build your company and your product through what I call uh kindling. Each piece of kindling, those little tiny sticks are the like first 10 users. You get that fire going, then you put sticks. After you have sticks, then you might put like branches after branches, you might put logs, but you want those hot embers.

• 1:04:22Jason Calacanis?

  And you wanna go nice and slow, you know, and and and get those users in there who are the early advocates who give you great feedback. You don't wanna just go right to marketing with your startup. That's a good pull. I like it. Here's my pull. Uh, I have always loved the character Darth Maul. Darth Maul is the guy with the two sided lightsaber. And they have created a series called Maul. And I have now watched the first episode three times.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  Three times?

• 1:04:47Jason Calacanis?

  With my 10 year olds, uh, cuz I watched it myself. Then they wanted to watch it, then they wanted to watch it again. The first two episodes are out. I think they're dropping two episodes for five weeks in a row on Disney. Here's a trailer, I'll talk over it. Uh, the first episode, super bang, or second episode, incredibly good. And um, you can see that the animation is very unique. The animation was created because they did some

• 1:05:11Jason Calacanis?

  watercolor paintings and then they put that into the animation software and they created a very unique new look that I've never seen. The Clone Wars had its own style, but if you look at this, it's very cyberpunk.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:24Jason Calacanis?

  Reminds you of Blade Runner. And this is like Andor in that it's telling another story that occurred during the timeline. And this is the story of Darth Maul who survives when he gets cut in half by a young Obi-Wan Kenobi. It's like a dark underworld, underbelly show. Now, why is this also important? It turns out that the sequels, Episodes 7, 8, and 9 of Star Wars were supposed to be having Darth Maul as the lead, not bringing the Emperor back, not all this nonsense. They threw away George Lucas's treatment. They destroyed the franchise with these disgratsia in Episodes 7, 8, 9. Those should be decanonized, but instead they took

• 1:06:05Jason Calacanis?

  the elements of George Lucas's sequel and they just placed it between Episodes 3 and 4, when Andor occurs, when Rogue One occurs, when the Han Solo movie occurs, essentially when Luke and Leia are, you know, babies or toddlers, before Obi-Wan goes and starts teaching Luke Skywalker to be a Jedi. It's extraordinary already. I have great hopes for this one and you know, they're just trying to get this Kathleen Kennedy disaster of a, and J.J. Abrams, who basically, these guys just, they took Star Wars off the rails. They're trying to fix that with

• 1:06:47Jason Calacanis?

  Andor, Maul, etc. And I am here for fixing the, you know, disgratsia of Kathleen Kennedy's horrible reign post-George Lucas and throwing Lucas's genius in the garbage.

• 1:07:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and so.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  Which one had Rey in it?

• 1:07:07Jason Calacanis?

  That was the Disgraciad sequels. So four, five, and six are the original Star Wars.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  Uh huh.

• 1:07:14Jason Calacanis?

  Seven, eight, nine were supposed to be the Darth Maul ones that would have Luke and Leia reestablishing the Jedi Academy, training a new series of Jedi. We didn't get any of that. We didn't get any of that while Carrie Fisher was alive. There's a lot of resentment in the Star Wars community because of all of this. They didn't even have the story arc for seven, eight, nine, you know, done. They just did a money grab because Star Wars was bought for whatever, four or five billion by Disney, and they just killed the entire IP. Now they're going back trying to fix it. And I think they just have to, yeah, go ahead.

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  Jar Jar Binks, though, was in the prequels. So these are the

• 1:07:50Jason Calacanis?

  One, two, and three.

• 1:07:51Speaker 01

  Postquels. Okay. Thank you for

• 1:07:53Jason Calacanis?

  So there's, there's the original trilogy.

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:07:55Jason Calacanis?

  There's the prequels, and then there's the sequels. The sequels, some people will refer to the prequels as, but if you look at it as a timeline, it's episodes one through nine. He released four, five, and six, the most interesting piece in the seventies and eighties and into the nineties. Then he released the prequels in the 2000 era, and then they released the, the sequels. And anyway, it's well worth checking out. And if you want to, if you've got kids, or if you're just a Star Wars fan and you're on the treadmill, highly recommend Clone Wars, Bad Batch, Rebels, and now Maul. These are like the animations that fill in the series, but these are serious animations telling serious stories in the way Japanese folks do with their anime. So it's very influenced by all of that. And

• 1:08:39Jason Calacanis?

  then Mandalorian, and Ashoka, the TV show Ashoka, those are live action. Those kind of thread into here and/or is live action. Those thread into this awesomeness. The second thing I'll give you is I just bought the new MacBook Pro.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:08:55Jason Calacanis?

  And here it is. I bought the 14-inch. I spent $3,500 on a computer, on a laptop for the first time in a while. Actually, I have a Dell Alienware that I spent a similar amount on, but this MacBook Pro 2 with a great screen.

• 1:09:10Jason Calacanis?

  Is amazing. And I think the future is going to be SML, small model languages. I think doubling your spending, getting one of these M5s. You don't need the M5 Max. That's for video, but the real key is getting to that 48 gigs of RAM. And, you know, very simple things in your workflow, you'll notice are much faster. On the other end, there's this Neo MacBook that uses like a mobile chip. That's for $600. And then here's your six times more, like a $3,600 laptop. When you put it at max memory for that M5 chip, you can get to 48. There's like a larger one you can get to with 128, but then you're in the 16 inch, which is like five pounds.

• 1:09:52Jason Calacanis?

  It turns out the MacBook Pro is essentially the same weight as the MacBook Air. I was a huge MacBook Air fans. That's what we're standardized on. But I think in the future, we're going to be putting everybody on higher powered ones. So we can run OpenClaw and local language models in the future. So I just want to let folks know who are wondering if they should do it. In my opinion, you should just go ahead and upgrade to a MacBook Pro and spend the 3,500 bucks.

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  3,500 bucks is like a month of childcare. Get yourself a real computer. Although I will say my MacBook Neo that I bought very recently, just because I wanted to have.

• 1:10:24Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you bought the Neo?

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  I bought the Neo. I have one.

• 1:10:26Jason Calacanis?

  Well, what are your impressions? Oh, my God. This is like a perfect off duty. Go.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  All right. So here.

• 1:10:31Jason Calacanis?

  What color did you pick? And you paid 600 bucks for this thing?

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  I got the pink one. I got the cheapest one. I got pink for two reasons. One, it's my second favorite color after blue. And also.

• 1:10:41Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you wear pink shirts. Yeah.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can give it to my, my oldest daughter when she's computer age because she loves pink. So problem solved. I bought it because I wanted something that I could just throw and take with me. I have a lot of big, heavy computers, desktops, large monitors, my Twist MacBook Pro.

• 1:10:56Jason Calacanis?

  What does that thing weigh? A pound and a half, two pounds, something like that?

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's not, in the case of the Twist computer, it's not that I care about the weight. It's more that I don't want to do.

• 1:11:04Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, the Neo. What is the Neo weigh?

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  The Neo weigh? I will find that out for you. But the problem is, Jason, it is the first Apple computer or Apple device I have ever used, 2.7 pounds. That feels so cheap. Like when you type on it, it does not have that Mac.

• 1:11:18Jason Calacanis?

  Ah, so not, okay, yeah. So making a $600 computers means there's going to be compromises.

• 1:11:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:11:24Jason Calacanis?

  But clearly they're going after the Chromebook market and, you know, kudos to them. I said years ago, what should they do with their, you know, massive cash? War chest, you know, they had hundreds of billions of dollars. They probably still do. It was the largest hedge fund in the world at a point in time, like their treasury. I just said, why don't they just lose money on iPad Pros with keyboards? And put that into the education sector and come up with a $200 iPad and just make it the standard. Because remember, the iPad was kind of like this forgotten kind of a compute device. And I was like, what if they could just get many more of those into the operating system and make the money

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:12:04Jason Calacanis?

  Downstream on services. I believe that's what they're doing with the Neo. I don't, maybe they make a hundred bucks on this thing or a hundred fifty bucks, whatever they make on it. It's not going to change the fate of Apple, but it's going to train young people. It's going to get them onto iCloud. It's going to get them to buy additional storage. It's going to get them to buy Apple Music. It's going to help the App Store. Why not get another billion people in the emerging world to use Apple computers? As opposed to Windows or Chromebooks. Brilliant idea by them, but hey, listen, there's going to be some compromises, but 600 bucks is the right price. That's the price of the Mac Mini.

• 1:12:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:37Jason Calacanis?

  So here we are, folks, you know, Apple is really trying to get market share away from Windows and Android.

• 1:12:42Speaker 01

  And I'll, I'll just say, it's the first cheaper Apple device. It's still great, but you can just tell if you go from living in a, in a very Apple-heavy world, that this is a step up from HP and a step down from your MacBook Air, your MacBook Pro. But also here's the other thing, isn't it? I'm an enormous nerd, like I use computers all day long, different keyboards, different setups, whatever. Most people think AI is ChatGPT. And so for them, I'm pretty sure this computer is amazing. And I don't think, I cannot imagine recommending any Windows laptop when the MacBook Neo exists. It's too cheap, it's too good, and it comes in fuck colors. What more do you want in life?

• 1:13:20Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it's, it's pretty great. I'm going to give one more shout out here.

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  Oh, please.

• 1:13:26Jason Calacanis?

  So I have been looking for, you know, I like to understand the seminal works in an industry, but a lot of them are out of print. And a lot of them, you don't even know about them. So I asked Claude or Grok or Gemini, what are the seminal works in advertising, in topography, in design? And so we're, we're building a newsletter for this week in AI. We're going to launch a paid newsletter. And I was just trying to get some inspiration. And we had the guy from

• 1:14:01Jason Calacanis?

  The Hustle and My First Million on, gosh, I'm sorry.

• 1:14:04Speaker 01

  We always forget his name. I'm on.

• 1:14:06Jason Calacanis?

  I'm just, not Ben, Sam Par.

• 1:14:10Speaker 01

  Sam Par.

• 1:14:11Jason Calacanis?

  And so, there's a guy Nigel Holmes as an example, and he was the person at Businessweek who came up with infographics, right? Where they would use wine bottles as the bar charts, all that kind of stuff, would use actual slices of pizza. And it just was a way to make graphics more interesting. I love infographics. So I buy, I go online and like, hey, it's not in print. And it's like, well, you could buy the version from 1983 for five bucks. And then I buy the book and I don't feel guilty about writing my notes right in it. So Nigel Holmes is this, you know, he's the godfather of design. You could pull up this book, Designer's Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams. And I was going to give this, but I'll just tell Oliver and Ismail, who are working on the newsletter, to just go

• 1:14:56Jason Calacanis?

  ahead and feel free to buy old books, put them in the library. And this one, you know, came from a thrift bookstore. I don't know what I paid for, but I paid, paid basically nothing for it. And I think the book came out in like 83 or 84.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can get a copy for 54 bucks on Amazon if you want. It's totally affordable.

• 1:15:14Jason Calacanis?

  Well, that's 54. I got it for like 20.

• 1:15:17Speaker 01

  Oh, no, I'm just saying like, usually when I look at a book from 91, I'm adding a zero to that price. So this is super affordable for a book that old.

• 1:15:24Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think, does it say 54 bucks on there? What does it say there? Yeah. So if you look at the U's, you'll be able to find one that's not 54. This is just the first one that came up. There'll be like, there's a button for other sources or for the original library version.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  I'm trying to not accidentally show off my address on.

• 1:15:41Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, no problem, no problem. So I'm trying to not click on. And then I got Ogilvy on Advertising. This was like an old book on advertising. And then there was this, My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising by David. These are two works by Claude Hopkins. And, you know, my thesis is, there are a lot of lessons that were learned in the 70s, 80s, 90s, when people were using other mediums that I find inspire me.

• 1:16:11Jason Calacanis?

  To, um, they just give me great inspiration and you know, if I have a stack of them sitting there and I'm having a cup of coffee, I just take one out. I, you know, I get the highlighter. I write some notes in the margin and it's my little workbook. It's my little treat to myself. Maybe I'll bring one of them with me when I'm on a trip and open it up and you're a fan of books. I see.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  Well, no, I'm a fan of scribbling in them. Like this is a book I wrote with my dad, Democracy in America. If you haven't read it, you should read it, but you should scribble on every page of your books. Like take notes, people enjoy yourself.

• 1:16:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Uh, do we have time?

• 1:16:40Jason Calacanis?

  It's a $10 book. It's a $20 book. Look at it as a mole skin and just get in there.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  It's a where part, as we say at my house. Now, do we have time for one more?

• 1:16:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Off, okay. So have you read a book called Hyperion?

• 1:16:52Jason Calacanis?

  No, but I'm aware of it.

• 1:16:54Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, first of all, Jason, my gift to you, read it. It'll blow your mind. It's, it's crazy. You've never read anything like it. It's fantastic. And one thing that I'm really excited about that's coming down the road, which we have Lon here, he would know what to say about this, but they're making a movie adaptation and I'm torn because on one hand, I'm excited that they're trying to take this monster story to film, but I really think it would have been better as like a one season Game of Thrones length.

• 1:17:21Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Series. So while we're waiting on that though, there's quite a lot going on in the world of science fiction. And what I wanted to give a shout out to on, uh, off topic today is this series of books from a woman named Bethany Jacobs. Uh, I'm reading the audiobook version while I push my kids around in strollers. Uh, it's called the Kingdom Trilogy. First book is These Burning Stars. I am not a like, um, I'm not into books that are like thrillers per se. They're like people chasing people around the solar system or whatever. This book has elements of that, but it has some of the best world building and characterization I've ever read. I'm in the middle of book two and I'm just absolutely hooked. It's, it's the type of book where like, I don't want to go to bed because I want more of it, Jason. And I just

• 1:18:00Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic.

• 1:18:01Speaker 01

  Still making such amazing art. And I just hope also that the mall show that you showed off. I hope that in time it becomes cheaper to make stuff that awesome. So that way not just Hyperion, which has been a famous book for decades, but also things like these books from Bethany Jacobs can also get their treatment because her works here are not nearly popular enough for HBO to pay attention, but they're good enough, you know? And so I just, I just want everyone to have the capability to make these awesome stories visual because we'd be so much richer, I think, as storytelling humans if we had the capacity.

• 1:18:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. And one thing I can recommend to you, which I had on a previous off duty was the Shox open ear headphones. And when you're walking with the baby, right, you don't, you need to hear if the baby wakes up, right? And so Wirecutter, which I tried to acquire, but the New York Times bought it. They have reviews of these bone conducting ones at the Wirecutter. That's the open air fit.

• 1:18:59Speaker 01

  Oh, did I drive the wrong one?

• 1:19:00Jason Calacanis?

  I liked your head. Yeah, I look for the, the open run. Yeah. So you see the open run right there?

• 1:19:05Speaker 01

  Well, at their website, I would stop trying to teach me how to use the internet.

• 1:19:08Jason Calacanis?

  Do everything. Yeah. So anyway, this thing looks a little weird.

• 1:19:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:19:12Jason Calacanis?

  Goes over and it's, it's bone conducting or it will just play it, but your ear is completely open. So now you can be listening to this and you're alert of your surroundings. So when I'm walking around a city, like in Japan, it doesn't matter if I'm wearing my fancy, like incredible, high end, you know, headphones and not listening to the outside world. But when you're walking in New York or San Francisco and you gotta be alert, there could be like, you know, I mean, I'm not being facetious here. You do need to not have your AirPods on if you're on the New York City subway, you're walking around certain areas of San Francisco. You want to be alert and with the kid, you want to hear if they're crying. Boom, you wear one of these open air ones and you're good to go.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  So I just went to New York City last week for a couple of days and I was remembering what you said about it, a little gritty, a little, a little, a little dangerous.

• 1:20:03Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna lie, Jason, I can happily report that it was great. And I even took the subway by myself. I didn't get lost. It was super clean. There's now that display up that tells you what stops coming up. It's, I don't know. I was kind of proud of America.

• 1:20:16Jason Calacanis?

  Manhattan or Brooklyn, where were you?

• 1:20:17Speaker 01

  I was in.

• 1:20:18Jason Calacanis?

  Where about towns did you stay?

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  From midtown to the Lower East Side and back around that area.

• 1:20:23Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. I mean, listen, it's, it's a bit of a crap shoot. Different like neighborhoods in New York could be phenomenally dangerous, different subway lines during sometimes and other ones will be totally safe. So, and the same thing for San Francisco, if you're up in the.

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  In Chicago too.

• 1:20:39Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, if you're in the marina, you're in Pack White's, you're gonna be fine. If you're in the Tenderloin, you're gonna be murdered.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Did you just say Pack, Pack White's?

• 1:20:48Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, Pack, the joke of Pack Heights is literally if you walk around there, it's all whites.

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  I used to live there.

• 1:20:53Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's what they called it. Pack, when I moved there, they're like, oh, you should move to Pack White's. I'm like, I'm sorry, Pack Heights? They're like, no, Pack White's, because there's no crime there. There's zero crime. And if you call the police, they show up in 30 seconds. Whereas if you're in any other part, you know, they might take a little bit longer.

• 1:21:07Speaker 01

  When I met the CEO of Zoom, uh, it was at a dinner at a venture capitalist's house in the fancier part of Pack Heights. So that tracks.

• 1:21:14Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, the Broadway Billionaires Row? Yeah.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was, yeah.

• 1:21:16Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, Billionaires Row, you have like a thousand cameras per block. The other areas of town, they've banned closed circuit cameras because, you know, uh, privacy. And it's like, trust me, anybody who lives in those areas is willing to give up privacy to be a little bit safer. In Pack White's, you've got 17 cameras on the front of every house. And like, if you like spit out your gum, you're gonna have 16 different videos of it submitted.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Whereas when I was in a different neighborhood, if someone spit in my mouth while I was walking down the street, not on camera.

• 1:21:46Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, literally, you could be shived. Um, all right. This has been another great week for Twist. We'll see you on Monday. Bye-bye.