This Week in Startups - Bittensor Drama! TAO down 15%! | E2274

Episode Date: April 11, 2026

This Week In Startups is made possible by:Pilot - https://pilot.com/TWISTSquarespace -https://squarespace.com/TWISTNorthwest Registered Agent - https://northwestregisteredagent.com/TWISTPlaud - https://Plaud.ai/twistCrowdHealth - ⁠https://JoinCrowdHealth.com/twist⁠Today’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. GuestsOle Lehmann: https://x.com/itsolelehmannThe 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/GarethHowells9:56 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/TWIST11:37 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/TWIST21:12 Demo: Gareth shows upscaled footage of our very own Lon Harris27:09 Who is actually doing the computing on Bittensor?28:15 How Bittensor recruits tech talent from emerging markets29:42 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" allegations40:46 Ole Lehmann joins the show https://x.com/itsolelehmann45:31 Jason's $1,000 "bounty" for enhanced show notes49:35 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=DkVepshZhGcSubscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.comCheck out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.comSubscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcpFollow Lon:X: https://x.com/lonsFollow Alex:X: https://x.com/alexLinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelmFollow Jason:X: https://twitter.com/JasonLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanisFollow TWiST:Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartupsYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekinInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartupsTikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartupsSubstack: https://twistartups.substack.com

All right, everybody, it's Friday. It's Twist. April 10th. Alex is here. We've got a great show. 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 slash twist and get $1,200 off your first year. Squarespace. Turn your idea into a beautiful website. Go to squarespace.com slash 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. Learn more at Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist. 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 plod. I put my plod pit 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 Weekan AI newsletter. Boom. Now it's an action item. I won't forget it. And I do that all day long.

And Plod is an amazing service. Thank you to them for supporting the show. Yeah. And also, if you want to get applaud for yourself, you can't add a tasty discount. If you go to plod. a.ai slash twist, p-l-a-u-d-a-i-slash-Twist.

Use the code twist, T-W-I-S-D, save 10%. Be cool like Jason and I. Don't forget things. Get more work done. Less pain. Plod. 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 bit tensor. People have heard me talking about this, very promising crypto project called BitTensor.

The token in it is called Tao. There are subnets. One of the subnets doing, you may have heard us talk about it here or on All In or you see it on your X feed. You can create subnets. There's 128 of them available. And those subnets will do different projects. One of them is a co-working or a 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 this space, I've got a couple different investments in the subnets, and I've bought Tower directly. And I might even be a little underwater now.

based on where I bought it. 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 rugpole. So let's get into it. We had Sam Dare on the show, Twist. It was March 27th, 2012, so just about two weeks ago, Jason. And he was talking about Templar, a project that was doing decentralized training

of an AA model, of an AI model. This was Covenant AI, three different subnets, subnets three, 39, and 81. They form kind of a triumvirate, if you will, at 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 maybe anyone can participate in. I drove the price of Tao up, and then, Jason, yesterday we got a major statement from Sam and the group at Covenant AI, which is right here, and it makes a number of very important claims. It says that BitTensler 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 deplication 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 is claiming. 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 Tao 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 just ran off with a bunch of the subnet's 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. 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 is that this will help solidify how to handle and avoid these things in the future. 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. Yeah, I think that they can, you know, 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. So, you know, as I've said to everybody, the operating. 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, two billion dollar

market cap, not a 500 billion or trillion dollar market cap. 2.93 after the declines. A good segue, Jason. 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 Tao. 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 that TensorFlowland, 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 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 Benjins of community are I think pretty negative about Sam right now and we'll bring on a subnet guy in just a second. I don't I'm struggling to get that mad at him for what he did because it seems like he makes something cool and then wants to go host it somewhere else and you and I don't throw a fit when someone leaves substack. 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 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 your subnet and go do something independent if you want, of course. But you don't get to leave with everybody's tokens. 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. But let's get some of the participants. Let's bring on Gareth Howells. He's from Video Subnet 85. And we're going to talk to Gareth about what he's building and why it's cool and how he's using BitTenser 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 there, Jason or I? and did the people behind Covenant AI make off with the tokens?

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 they're going to build upon that. So, yeah, I think Jason's synopsis of what happened was pretty close. You give me your synapsis, 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.

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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 you get all the advantages of a Delaware C-Corp, regardless of where in the U.S. you're operating out of. Northwest Registeredagent.com slash twist. Yeah, Sam 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 it. I think Consters made a response saying, actually, some of the accusations he wasn't able to do it and they weren't true and it was impossible for him to like take some of the actions that samus 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 bit of the exact situation 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 an attack factor. This is a weakness of the

BitTensor system. Or was it because the market was flooded with Tao's being sold and there weren't as high of a bid to absorb them? Yeah, I think it was a big element of fear there. I think obviously Covenant has been absolutely killing it recently with the Detour investors and it was right on the top of the emissions and it has been for a long time. He was getting an amazing press. Outside from people who didn't have a full understanding of Bit Tenor, 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 towel and taking it,

I think there was a big fear amongst investors, not necessarily the community, but investors were very worried that this was going to be catastrophic for the towel price. And a lot of people got out. It wasn't just him selling his towel, but that was an element. Gareth, is it fair to say that Covenant AI and its three subnets, where can I have a marquee or like Apex project for BitTensor today?

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 a very short-term issue, but I also think it's going to actually make the community much stronger. We're going to put things in place to stop this happening again. And I think we're going to learn a lot from that. All right. I really appreciate that. Now, let's talk about video, Subnet 85.

First of all, give us the TLDR about what it does. And then we're going to show an upscale of Mr. Lawn Harris. We are. We are. So yes, video Subnet 85 is a video processing subnet. So essentially we're starting out doing 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, 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.

Just to recap, I always like to explain back to the founder. So I understand their vision. Yeah. Vidio, V-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 bit-tensor 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 consulting firm? we are incubated by Tau Stats Mug, who you had on the show before with Hippius. So we're in exactly the same situation as Hippius. 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 Tao or you could buy the subnet token.

Three different ways to invest in these opportunities. I'm looking at all of them. I own TOW directly myself through Coinbase. It's not on Robin Hood yet. And then Stillcore Capital, which I'm a partner in with Mark Jeffrey, they are going and buying subnets to buy subnets. You've got to go to the subnet owner and do a deal to buy the tokens. They're not trading freely on marketplaces yet.

But when you buy TOW, it's in some ways like buying a mutual fund or an index, an ETF, I guess would be the best way to say, 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 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 or 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? So I mean, the market is enormous. 85% 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 20 years of programming in SD. You could be a consumer who's got video. 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. Yeah, exactly that. And they won't translate to like a 4K screen. 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 all these videos 4K.

We can turn your black and white videos into color. We can change the frame mate. 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 Sepio. 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 our ecosystem. Got it. So 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? 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 optimising models. So rather than we were using their compute before, but that became very difficult to scale. So now 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 private for us and the client. So now we can optimize models so we can say we want a new upscaling model or a colorization model or subtitling. Lipsink, we're looking into lip sync models as well. So there's so much more versatility now in a sudden that if we move to this kind of when it takes all model. And there are desktop pieces of software like Topaz that I think people will use for this type of product or service. So if you had an old video of a Bob Dylan concert or I have all these old Dyer 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, Dyer Shrates 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.

Yeah. So here's a video. 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 slop 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

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Here's a lawn. If you're on the audio version, we have a grainy lawn on the lap. 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. Who knows if he'll get out? He's wearing his plod pin, just so you know.

He's wearing his blood pin in surgery. Two plot pins in one show. There you go. 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.

The one on the left and the one on the right, explain to us the difference. So the one on the left was the original video that we upscaled, which was taken obviously from one of your podcasts. We can press that down a bit to make the picture of quality worse, but then I put it through the subnet and we upscale 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 blurry lines clearer.

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. 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. How does that? 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? Unfortunately not. Yeah. So Africa being a 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. There's no 4K TV. So everything needs to be commercial. press down to the small screen, connectivity is an issue, data is an issue, phone batteries 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, yeah, they reduce. Yeah. And if you look at this space, it's predicted to grow from 175 million in 2025 to 1.1 billion in 2032. So 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, you're using another subnet for compute. And so you're using your miners, miners or individuals who want to earn TOW for doing a task.

So just so people think about it, that's the 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 do. did the job and then picks the winner. Am I broadly correct in how subnets work and how this one works? The thing is with video is compute heavy for sure. But there is, it's very hard to put a price per

minute on what we're doing, which is essentially the old way of pricing. Say that's what AWS would do. Because we're, we now have this optimization model where we could be using three, four or 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 BitTenso, 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 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. 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?

It's some and some. So when we launched the subnet, we always start with a base model. for upscaling we used an open source model for compression we created our own because there was none existing the miners have taken those and 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 our models to us so then we will be able to use that in a private environment for our clients. Have you ever met these miners and the people who are participating? Face to face, no, but we've had some meetings. There's a couple of pro mining teams that are working on the Sudnet, 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. And you 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 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. I mean, we've had a team from Vietnam doing exactly that. There was, I think, three or four guys working solely on this. I think they were university students or graduates. From Vietnam or people who were like nomads? No, no, they were Vietnamese, yeah. They were Vietnamese. Yeah, yeah. 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 a distributed, 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. 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. Because 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? Because we'd be to start-ups, Jason,

they're desperate for local talent. Everyone's fighting over the same eight people. Yeah. But you go to Vietnam, you have a bunch of smart people who can do great work, and Gareth doesn't care. Yeah, they come to us.

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

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year. What a deal. Go to pilot.com slash twist to get started. That's pilot.com slash 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 folks who were running crypto policy have changed. True. I am now officially open for business in crypto. I'm doing a stable coin project. I'm getting involved in Tao. I'm 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, 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. 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. 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. Yeah. Do you think that we're going to see a little bit less winner takes most or winner takes all? Because I've seen several different subbeds moving towards this model for their minors. and I fully understand why it's good for the subnets.

But when I think about expanding economic opportunity, Jason, kind of what you're saying, to me, if it is going to be winner takes most, winner takes all, there's less lower-hanging fruit for people that are trying to get to that top rung of a particular minor task for a sub-net. I'm just curious if that's a concern for you as well

or just good economic conditions. Yeah, no, I mean, 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? Oh, they don't hire enough people. 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 an hour, they're not coming to your Starbucks to work.

Apple stores 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 $21 an hour was better than getting up at the crack of dawn, showing up at 5.30 a.m. at 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 supply side on these 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 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 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, well, 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. Sure. Amazon's offering 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 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. Yeah. The guys in Vietnam doing this four-person team, if they get a job, you know, for a Korean company or, you know, or, you know, 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. What do you and I like, Jason? Free markets and unconstrared. Those are our favorite things.

What I like, though, just as a lot, I know we've got to move on, but your point that buying Tao is a bit like an ATF into the Bittencerity 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 subnet. These are the ones they're going to win. You have the other 125 or whatever. But I don't mind having kind of like effectively a call option on decentralized global intelligence. So that translates well for me. I appreciate that.

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, some small bets we've made in a family office. but it's, 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. 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, and now I've got all these crypto weirdos back in my replies again. You poor thing. It's the worst. I'm trying to think of like what's worse. Like the magobots

who are still loyal to Trump after, you know, he starts a Forever War or hopefully not a forever war, but, you know, that group of people in my replies, or the crypto people in reply 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, it's so tribal, though, at times. And I think I really hope that maybe BitTensor can help break some of this. But people are going to be, you're going to it's so parisocial about their favorite token, that it becomes nigh religious. And then they,

it's the nature of humans, Alex. I mean, 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 U.S 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 die with that. I'm still mad about it, and I own several pairs of wireless headphones, but I also like to listen to audio son-th Jason for more than 20 freaking minutes.

Exactly. Exactly. All right. Let's keep going. All right. 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 was like, congratulations on almost hitting double digits in your follower account. I'm like taking this account seriously for 15 minutes of my life. That's, Jason, that's less than one follower per year, Matt. Literally, he's that 0.6 followers per year. And by the way, I get 20. I probably get 100 at this point bots following me, day, right?

Yeah. It's not hard to get past 10, bro. And then I look, he's tweeting 20 times a day with eight followers. I'm like, what's the point? 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. 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 OpenClaude, builds skills for Claude, runs classes for people. And Bill, Jason, what I think is the single coolest skill for OpenClaude, ever yet had on the show, though we aren't going to show it off inside of Claude Co-work. Ola, welcome to the show. Unmute your microphone and tell us all about Andre Carpathie's idea behind the Council of Advisors. Yeah, great to be here.

So I saw Carpathie's post. For some context, Carpathie is co-founder. I was co-founder of Open AI, later head of AI with Tesla. So AI Gigacet. And he posted about his LLM Council, which basically has the idea of, you have a question, you send it to different models, so Grog, Claude, chat GPT, 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 a final verdict. So that was the idea of Kapathis council. 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. 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? 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 want to build something that's still kind of simple.

but still uses the same concept that Capathi uses. So I'm just using Opus right here. So let's ask it a question. Let's say, 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?

Sure. 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%.

I wonder how many tokens this is going to consume. 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,

Anthropics, exceptional model, but you have it 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. 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. 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 the key steps here. So once that happened, we can see if they already, in the beginning, it would spin up five different top agents.

So this is really cool because Claude Code or Cloud Co-Works. So this also works with Claude Co-Code. work for everyone watching. I just like to use CloudCode more, but it's just the 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. 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?

Exactly. And I read Carpathie's thoughts on that, and he was quite surprised that in this 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 step, it really helps to get to a better, like more balanced opinions. This is also why I chose these Jekyll already 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 expansion is what is the upside? The first principle thinker is kind of takes a step back.

It goes deeper into thinking and the executor is just going forward. I'm just full throttling, not really thinking, just doing. He's maxing. Just call it what it is. I'm actually going to drop an article today about maxing. It's funny. You talk about that. I'm sorry to everybody who's offended by the word,

but it's in popular culture right now. It's not going backwards. 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. We can see all the advisors now respondent 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. So 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 there what did all five miss? So they all sit down and try to find things. and all of the missed. So that's kind of an extra angle here. Now, wait, how many people are on the peer review?

And did the peer review people have personas? So the peer review still happens in these personas. Ah, got it. So the five are evaluating each other's answers without knowing them. Exactly, yeah. And they go through these three questions here. There's a little bit more context and 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 the dashboard so hopefully we'll get there yeah it's still well while it works

Ola and while we wait for it to finish doing its number crunching can you just quickly break down for folks when you'd like to use ClaudeCode slash co-work and when you prefer to use OpenClaw because I'm seeing a lot more folks in my circles start to tinker more with co-work and I'm still a claw guy so I'm curious pros and cons

and what I'm missing yeah that's that's a really good question I would say for me the most like more serious in-depth work I like to do in cloud code or cloud co-work just because most of my open claw is in my telegram I think the big upside of open claw is that you have the the memory system built in you can also get there with cloud code using things like obsidian for example or using projects now in co-work so it's kind of it's becoming a little bit more alike over time I would say but in general to me for for more in-depth work I like to use Cloud 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 Cloud code, it's easier for me to also work on my local, on my local files and just be like, hey, just put this in this to 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 CloudCode or Cloud Co-work inside OpenClaw. One big difference I would say is, especially for non-technical people who I mainly talk to, is you have better or like easier control inside co-work. 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 open clause, sometimes it will just do things 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 safe, but you don't have a good overview.

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. Now, is this all open source, OLA? And is it a skill in OpenCla? Where does this exist if people want to build or are you building this as a proprietary startup that I can invest in? Yeah, so you can just get this from either my X account.

So you can find me at It's Ole Lehmann, 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 in there. I also put it into GitHub. But again, I'm mainly talking to- 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 counsel, what did we miss in the transcript that could have been linked to? And I want to do that like twice. Yeah, that's good. 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 OpenClaught 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. Show notes for... This is a new program we're going to do here, Alex,

which is the bounty program. 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? Chaos Computer Club? No, it wasn't the Chaos Computer Club. It wasn't like 2,600 out of New York. Homebrew Computer Club founded in 1975, Menlo Park, Palo Alto, premiered 1970s hobbyist group, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, the Homebrew Computer Club. I want to do an episode on the Homebrew. We'll do like an acquire. wired episode, you know, like when they go, like, do a deep dive. Jacob put this on for the summer schedule. Deep dive, home brew.

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, J-Cow. 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. Now we have the council report. And it gives a recommendation first. We can just have a look at it. 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' 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 push 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. 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 are putting 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. But the council clashes on. The X, Pansionist push for 1.5 to 2%.

That's what I was going to say. I was going to say 2% but I am the optimist pushing for like getting great candidates. I would have said 2%. Blind spots, counsel caught, cash equity tradeoff, option pool math, and roll

trajectory. Does this person eventually become the CTO? Wow. Oh my lord. This is exceptional. 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 and having it get complete access to your Slack and working on these decisions really genius. Amazing. Can you click on just one of these for me, Ola, so I can see what it looks like?

Yeah. Okay, so this is one response. The outputs, the individual outputs of the different council members. And it also gives you some highlights here and some blind spots. And I think the general idea is everyone who makes important decisions has a council, right?

Like the president has a council. Yeah. Like maybe, no. And every decision is made by having influenced 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 J-Kal said, now you have an LLM. And LLMs are so good to like stepping into another role. Also, it saves a lot of your own biological compute,

because if you have to think and emphasize 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 counts members run through ideas, because it's such a big advantage, and most people don't use ALMs for that, and they're extremely good at that. 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 locking key. Jason and I talked about Project Glasswing. It seems like we're a bit of a holding pattern. Why are you so scared? 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 a 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. 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. And just, Oleg, before you go, what's your story? Where are you based? What do you do for a living? Yeah, so I'm based in Cyprus. I'm German, so I'm in Berlin right now.

I'm the founder of the AI Solopreneur, which is an AI media and training company. So 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. All right, you're hired.

Yeah, I really believe. 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 Oli's substack. Yes, it is AISOLO.B.Hive.

dot com b-e-e-h-i-v-v-com screw subsdack jason that's so 2024 everyone's now on the hive yeah be hives a great product too and uh i love a little capitalism and uh i'm trying to bring capitalism back to europe i'm saying yeah good luck be careful you might get shived uh yeah what are you pay in taxes which are what's the high tax rate where you are i mean that's why i moved my business to cyprus and i have residency there this is like 12.5 percent so i'm pretty i'm pretty fine with that this is amazing now if you were still in Berlin, you'd be paying 52% or something? Yeah, it's around 50. Yeah, that would I've paid before. 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, 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 estate taxes, Alex? What's the, what's the Vig up in Rhode Island? I don't know. That's how rich Alex is. He doesn't even know. He's just pouring in this money from all his incredible games. So 3.75% up to 6%. Top rates for income over 180. Oh, that's not very high.

Okay. I mean, it's half of, you're basically half of California, New York. Yeah. I think are at 13% state. But our state is 1% is 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. Basically, the tip of the train is already at the next station, and people are still

getting off the last. I can't believe we have two senators. It gets incredible to me. Like, you can literally see across Rhode Island and we get two. Shout out to our founding fathers. Like, what's the least popular state? Is it still Wyoming or Nebraska or something? 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. 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. I mean, it's basically you have a, yeah, if you have two, you have a one in 250. The chance of being a senator. I'm moving to Wyoming, Senator J-Cal from the great state of Wyoming. All right.

We're dropping you off, but you're coming back on this program because you crushed it. Thanks. I appreciate you, man. All right, listen, everybody wants to know. J-Cal, you look great. You're no longer a fat bastard. You know why? Because of Rowe.com, 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, Rode.co is my partner. And they do a great job. Now, you don't need to get Rowe Sparks. If you're great, you might want to pick up. some Roe 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 Roe.coe. What's the offer? It's row.com slash twist. If you want to check your insurance, row.com slash twist, it's very affordable, very good, and you should all go check it out. 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? People love to know what, you know, we're into when we're not doing podcasts or investing in companies or writing newsletters. So, you're first, Alex. What are you consuming, obsessed with or otherwise, yeah, find yourself enamored by? I think for me,

it's the egregiousness in a recent television show of a Microsoft bit of Astor Turfing. Now, we all know that Apple has rules. If you have an Apple computer and 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 co-pilot team, let me tell you this is egregious, Jason. Get your vomit bucket ready and tune in.

Now, wait, this is yours or this is lawns? 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 you're endorsing this or no? I'm endorsing the badness of this. I'm saying that have you watched this? Okay, here we go.

Oh, several, several times. Oh, okay, here we go. Please enjoy it. I'm a ward of New Mexico, San Angelo, Texas, Yakima, Washington. You know, I can run it in co-pilot. I'll have it categorized police reports by location, date, and name. Then color code, and by location, and create a summary of the findings. Okay, here we go.

Wait a second. I'm finding reports stolen alleged scams in multiple cities he's lived in. Like he posed as a startup investor in Phoenix, a high-end real estate partner in Ohio. So he's not a businessman. He's a con man. So Frank was his next time? 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? Wait, is that a Microsoft co-pilot? Is that Claude Co-Wor? Oh, no, I think it's Microsoft co-pilot. They were in Excel there. So I thought that was, and they said co-pilot directly. That's not co-work. They did say co-pilot.

Don't you think Anthropic would have slightly better taste than that? Yeah, listen, product placement is a great way for these folks to make money and reduce a 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 skull in the middle of a show. It takes you right out of the experience. I'm going to go ahead and say,

Desgratziad, ABC. Yeah, terrible. 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, 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.

Well, here's the thing. If you are spending more time promoting your product than making a great product, and I don't know, I haven't used this product, so I'm not making a judgment on it. That is what I call pouring kerosene on a giant, you know, tree that's been felled in the forest. You can start a fire. You might even start a forest fire, but generally you're going to wind up with a charred giant log. You want to build your company and your product through what I call. 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, and you want to go nice and slow, you know, and get those users in there who are the early advocates who give you great feedback. You don't want to just go right to marketing with your startup. That's a good poll. I like it. Here's my poll. I have always loved the character Darth Mall. Darth Wall is the guy with a two-sided light saber. And they have created a series called Mall. And I have now watched the first episode three times.

Three times? With my 10-year-olds. Because 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. The first episode, Superbanger, second episode, incredibly good. And you can see that the animation is very unique. The animation was created because they did some with a laser

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. Yeah.

Reminds you a 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 Wall 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 it also important? It turns out that the sequels, episode 7, 8, 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 Georgia Lucas's treatment.

They destroyed the franchise with these Disgratziad episode 7, 8, 9. Those should be decanized, but instead they took the elements of Georgia Lucas's sequel and they just placed it between episodes three and four when and or occurs when rogue one occurs when the hand solo movie occurs essentially when luke and lea are you know babies or pablers uh before obi won goes and um starts teaching luke skyworker to be a gen i it's extraordinary

uh already i have great hopes for this one and um you know they're just trying to get this uh 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 Andor Mall, etc. And I am here for fixing the, you know, disgratziad of Kathleen and Kennedy's horrible reign post-George Lucas. And throwing Lucas's genius in the garbage.

Yeah. And so it's- Which one had Ray in it? That was the disgraciad sequels. So four, five, and six are the original Star Wars. 7-8-9 were supposed to be the Darth-Mall ones that would have Luke and Leo 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 7-8-9 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. George R. Binks, though, was in the prequels. So these are the one, two, and three. Postquels. Okay. Thank you for catching me on my Star Wars. There's the original trilogy.

Yes. 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 most interesting piece in the 70s and 80s and into the 90s. Then he released the prequels in the 2000 era,

and then they released the sequels. And anyway, it's well worth checking out. And 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 Mall.

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 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. Yes.

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 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 Macs, that's for video, but the real key is getting to that 48 gigs of RAM. And 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 micro, 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 and 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. 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 open claw 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 it to a MacBook Pro and spend the $3,500. $3,500 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 what I called. Oh, you bought the Neo? I bought the Neo. I have one. Well, what are your impressions? Oh, my God. This is like a perfect off duty.

Go. All right. What color did you pick? And you paid $600 for this thing? 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, you wear pink shirts. Yeah, yeah. I can give it to my oldest daughter when she's computer age because she loves pink. So problem's 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. What does that thing weigh? A pound and a half, two pounds, something like that?

Well, it's not, in the case of the Twist computer, it's not that I care about the way. It's more that I don't want to do. No, no, the Neo. What is the Neo way? The Neo way, I will find that on 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 polish.

So not, okay, yeah. So making a $600 computers means it's going to be compromises. Yes. 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, 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 compute device. And I was like, what if they could just get many more of those into the operating system and make the money downstream on services. I believe that's what they're doing with the Neo. Maybe they make $100 on this thing or $150, 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 is the right price. That's the price of the Mac Mini. Yeah. So here we are, folks. You know, Apple is really trying to get market share away from Windows and Android. And 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 very Apple-heavy world that this is a step up from HP and a step down from your MacBook area, you MacBook Pro. But also, here's the other thing is I'm an enormous nerd. Like, I use computers all day long, different keyboards, different keyboards, different setups, whatever. Most people think AI is chat GPT, and so for them, I'm pretty sure this computer is amazing.

And I cannot imagine recommending any Windows laptop when the MacBook Neo exists. It's too cheap, it's too good, and it comes in front colors. What more do you want in life? I mean, it's pretty great. I'm going to give one more shout out here.

Oh, please. So I have been looking for, you know, I like to understand and 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 Grock or Gemini, what are the seminal works in advertising,

in topography, in design? And so we're building a newsletter for this week at AI. We're going to launch a paid newsletter. And I was just trying to get some inspiration. And we had the guy from the hustle, And my first million on, gosh, I'm sorry, I'm blanking. We always forget his name. I'm on it.

Don't worry. Not Ben. God. Sampar. Sorry. And so there's a guy, Nigel Holmes, as an example. And he was the person at Business Week 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 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 can 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 ahead and feel free to buy old books, put them in the library. And this one, you know, came from a three. Rift Bookstore. I don't know what I paid for it, but I paid paid basically nothing for it. And I think the book came out in like 83 or 84. Yeah, you can't copy for 54 bucks on Amazon if you want. It's totally affordable. Well, that's 54. I got it for like 20. Oh, no, I'm just saying like usually when I look at a book from 91, I'm adding to zero to that price. So this is super affordable for a book that

old. Yeah, I think does it say 54 bucks on there? What does it say there is there? Yeah, so if you look at the use, you'll be able to find one that's not 54. This is just the, first one that came up. There's a button for other sources or for the original library version. I'm trying to not accidentally show off my address on line. Oh, no problem, no problem. So I'm trying to not click on Oglevy 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. are a lot of lessons that were learned in the 70s, 80s, 90s when people were using other

mediums that I find inspire me to, 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 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 it. Well, no, I'm a fan of scribbling in them. Like, this is a book I've 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. Yeah. Do we have time? It's a $10 book. It's a $20 book. Look at it as a moleskin and just get in there. It's a wear part, as we say at my house.

Now, do we have time for one more off? Okay. So have you read a book called Hyperion? No, but I'm aware of it. Okay. Well, first of all, Jason, my gift to you, read it. It'll blow your mind. 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 had lawn 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 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 off-topic today is this series of books from a world. woman named Bethany Jacobs.

I'm reading the audiobook version where I push my kids around in strollers. It's called The Kingdom Trilogy. First book is These Burning Stars. I am not a like, 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 too and I'm just absolutely hooked. 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, It's still making such amazing art. And I just hope also that the mall show 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 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 that capacity. Yeah. And one thing I can recommend to you, which I had on a previous off-duty, was the shocks, open-air 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 wire cutter, which I tried to acquire, but the New York Times bought it.

They have reviews of these bone-conducting ones at the wire cutter. That's the open-air fit. Oh, do I drive the wrong one? I liked her head. Yeah, I look for the open run. Yeah, so you see the open run right there? Well, at their website, I would stop trying to teach me how to use the internet.

Do everything, yeah. So anyway, this thing looks a little weird. Oh! Goes over, and it's bone-conducting aura will just play it, but your ear is completely open. So now you can be listening to this and your alert of your surrounding. 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've got to be alert that 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 then with a kid, you want to hear if they're crying. Boom. You wear one of these open air ones and you're good to go. So I just went to New York City last week for a couple days. And I was remembering what you said about it, a little gritty.

a little, a little dangerous. Yeah. I'm not going to 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.

I don't know. I was kind of fun of America. Where were you? Manhattan or Brooklyn? Where were you? I was in... Where about towns? Did you stay?

From midtown to the lower east side and back in that area. Yeah. I mean, listen, it's a bit of a crapshoot. Different like neighborhoods in New York could be phenomenally dangerous. different subway lines during some time. And other ones will be totally safe. So, and the same thing for San Francisco. If you're up in the marina, you're up in Chicago, too.

Yeah. If you're in the marina, you're in Pack White's, you're going to be fine. If you're in the tenderloin, you're going to be murdered. Did you just say Pack White's? Yeah, the joke of Pack Heights is literally, if you walk around there, it's all whites. I used to live there. Yeah, that's what they called it. When I moved there, they're like, oh, you should move to Pack White's.

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

Oh, the Broadway, Billionaires Row. Yeah. Yeah. 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, 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, you've got 17 cameras on the front of every house. And like if you like spit out your gum, you're going to

have 16 different videos of it submitted. Whereas when I was in a different neighborhood, if someone spit in my mouth while I was walking down the street, not on camera. I mean, literally you could be shived. All right. This has been another great week for Twist. We'll see you on Monday. Bye-bye.