Bittensor Drama! TAO down 15%! | E2274

28:50Where are these ML engineers that have all this spare time on their hands? Because we've been at 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. Yeah, they come to us. That's the beauty of it is that we built it and they come to us. So they obviously have an understanding of the ecosystem and the network. But you create a new subnet. People register. They start mining. You have 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.

29:24And that's the only thing that matters. 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. Absolute 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.

30:00Well, 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 got to be on top of this stuff, folks. And when it's time for you to raise 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.

30:35Plus, Twist listeners get$1 ,200 off in their first 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 stablecoin project. I'm getting involved in Tau. 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.

31:18So I'm not looking for meme coins. I am not looking for pump and dumps. I'm looking for 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.

31:55And 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.

32:37Your 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 subnets 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 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 miner task for a subnet.

33:22I'm just curious if that's a concern for you as well or just good economic efficiency. 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.

34:04at 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 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.

34:47A 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 or fuck off? 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.

35:22If 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 um 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.

36:08So you have that backstop, right? So before anybody gets, you know, their hands wringing too hard here and they rip the skin off their knuckles, the guys in Vietnam 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. What do you and I like, Jason? Free markets and unconstrained. Those are our favorite things. What I like though, just as a lot of thought, I know we got to move on, but your point that buying Tau is a bit like an ATF into the bit-tensory 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.

36:54These are the ones that are going to win, the other 125 or whatever. But I don't mind having kind of like a, 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 BitTensor. 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 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.

37:34Of 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, now I 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 Like the MAGA bots 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 my replies saying, have fun staying poor.

38:30And 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 get so parasocial about their favorite token that it becomes nigh-religious. It's the nature of humans, Alex. I mean, I literally, when I told Mac people back in the day how retarded some of the Mac decisions were, they would lose their minds. When I would tell them how pathetic it was that Microsoft couldn't build a UX and have less than 300 things in submenus, like they got upset.

39:11I'm like, okay, this is 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 sound as Jason for more than 20 fricking minutes. Exactly, exactly. All right, let's keep going. All right. And I welcome the feedback from CryptoMids. Congratulations on hitting. I was getting into a fight with a guy about this stuff.

39:47And 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 at 0.6 followers per year. and by the way i get 20 i probably get a hundred at this point bots following me per day right like 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 uh my new best friend ola lehman on the show ola is a social media poster he builds with open claw builds skills for claw code runs classes for people and built jason what i think is the single coolest skill for open club we've ever yet had on the show though we are going to show it off inside of clawed co-work ola welcome to the show unmute your microphone and tell us all about andre carpathy's idea behind the council of advisors yeah great to be here so i saw carpathy's post for some context Kapathi is co-founder I was co-founder of open AI later head of AI with Tesla so AI giga chat and he posted about his LLM counts which basically has the idea of you have a question you send it to different models so grok clod 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 the final verdict so that that was the idea of um kapathi's council and i really like 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 is your council of advisors using different models for each of the advisors that debates the question?

41:54Or 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 let 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?

42:28Sure. 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, Oli, is you've given one model, Anthropics, exceptional model, but you 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 jay cow how does this grow faster you got an outsider um 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 um and who's like a sycophant who says, hey, I'll get it done for you or something.

43:44I 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 one of 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 Cloud Code or Cloud Cowork. So this also works with Cloud Cowork for everyone watching. I just like to use Cloud 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.

44:20So 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 without any baggage, correct? Exactly. And I read Carpathi'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.

45:02So with this, this step really helps to get to a better, like more balanced opinion. 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 expansionist 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 and 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.

45:39I'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 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 so 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 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 that all of them missed.

46:38So 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 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...

47:14Well, 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 Cloud 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. 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 Cloud Code or Cloud 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.

47:50You can also get there with Cloud 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 CloudCode 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 CloudCode, it's easier for me to also work on my local files 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 CloudCode or CloudCowork inside OpenClaw.

48:29One 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 co-work. 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 is 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 just easier to use for non-technical people.

49:06Now, is this all open source, Ole? And is it a skill in OpenClaw? 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 Doc in there. I also put it into GitHub. But again, I'm mainly talking. 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.

49:46So 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. 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 audio book. 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 Open Claw 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.

50:35Okay, there it is. 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 um this is like a good uh jeopardy uh was the computer something club uh 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 chaos computer club no it wasn't the chaos computer club it wasn't like 2 ,600 out of New York.

51:17Homebrew Computer Club, founded 1975, Menlo Park, Palo Alto. Premier 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 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. Now we have the council report, and it gives a recommendation for us.

51:57We 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.

52:31That'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. 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.

53:05This 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 will end in 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 ex-pensionists push 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 caught. Cash equity tradeoff. option pool math, and role trajectory.

53:45Does this person eventually become the CTL? 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.

54:23And 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. Like maybe, you know, 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 like stepping into another role. And 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.

55:08So for me, it's just helpful to let these different council members run through ideas because it's such a big advantage and most people don't use LLMs 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 lock and key. Jason and I talked about Project Glasswing. 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 points 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?

55:49If 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. On the other hand, we don't really know how advanced Mythos is, right?

56:25Like, 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, Ole, 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, but I'm 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.

57:00All 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.beehive.com. B-E-E-H-I-I-V.com. Screw Substack, Jason. That's so 2024. Everyone's now on the Hive. Yeah, Beehive's a great product too. and I love a little capitalism. I'm trying to bring capitalism back to Europe, I'm saying. Yeah, good luck. Be careful. You might get shivved. What are you paying taxes?

57:39What'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%, so 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's what I 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.

58:16That'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 are you paying state taxes, Alex? What's the VIG up in Rhode Island? I don't know, but I'm about to find out. That's how rich Alex is. He doesn't even know. He's just pouring in this money from all his incredible gains. 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 and New York.

58:52Yeah. I think we're at 13 % state tax. 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. Basically, the tip of the train is already at the next station, and people are still getting off the last caboose. I can't believe we have two senators. It's incredible to me. Like, you can literally see across Rhode Island. Shout out to our founding fathers. 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.

59:25Yeah, 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 representative in Congress. I mean, it's basically you have a, yeah, if you have two, you have a one in 250th chance of being a senator. I'm moving to Wyoming. Senator J. Cal from the great state of Wyoming. We're dropping you off, but you're coming back on this program because you crushed it. Thanks a lot. I appreciate you, man. All right. Listen, everybody wants to know, J-Cal, you look great. You're no longer a fat bastard.

59:55You know why? Because of Rho.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, Rho.co is my partner. And they do a great job. Now, you don't need to get Rho sparks if you're great. You might want to pick up some Rho 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 Rowe.co. What's the offer? We do. It's Rowe.co slash twist. If you want to check your insurance, Rowe.co slash twist.

1:00:37It'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 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 find yourself enamored by? 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.

1:01:17They'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 Lon's? 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?

1:01:49Okay, here we go. Oh, several, several times. Oh yeah, well, just - Oh, okay, here we go. Please enjoy. Paloma Water, 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 them by location and create a summary of the findings. Okay, here we go. Wait a second. I'm finding reports on alleged scams in multiple cities he's lived in. Like he posed as a startup investor in Phoenix, Frank's a high-end real estate partner in Ojai. So he's not a businessman. He's a con man. So Frank was his next target.

1:02:23That 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 Cowork? 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. Got it. 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 the number of ads.

1:03:00But it does feel smarmy to me at times. I'm a fan of 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 the Scratziad 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.

1:03:36Maybe 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 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 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 and you want to go nice and slow you know and 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.

1:04:31That's a good poll. I like it. Here's my poll. 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. 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, Super Banger, second episode, incredibly good. You can see that the animation is very unique.

1:05:06The animation was created because they did some 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 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, episode seven, eight, nine of Star Wars were supposed to be having Darth Maul as the lead, not bringing the Emperor back, not all this nonsense.

1:05:54They threw away George Lucas's treatment. They destroyed the franchise with these Disgratia in episode seven, eight, nine. Those should be decanonized, but instead they took the elements of George Lucas's sequel and they just placed it between episodes three and four when Andorra 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 J.J.

1:06:40Abrams, who basically these guys just, they took Star Wars off the rails. They're trying to fix that with Andor, Maul, et cetera. And I am here for fixing the, you know, disgraciad of Kathleen Kennedy's horrible reign post George Lucas and throwing Lucas's genius in the garbage. Yeah. And so - Which one had Ray in it? That was the Disgraciad sequels. So four, five, and six are the original Star Wars. 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.

1:07:28There'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 um and i think they just have to yeah go ahead jar jar binks though was in the prequels so these are one two and three post schools okay thank you for there's 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 70s and 80s and into the 90s.

1:08:08Then 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 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 then Mandalorian and Ashoka, the TV show Ashoka, those are live action. Those kind of thread into here and or is live action.

1:08:48Those thread into this awesomeness. The second thing I'll give you is I just bought the new MacBook Pro. 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 Max. 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.

1:09:30On 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 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 fan. So 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.

1:10:08So 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... 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. So here's - What color did you pick? And you paid 600 bucks for this thing? I got the pink one. I got the cheapest one. I got pink for two reasons.

1:10:38One, it's my second favorite color after blue. And also - Yeah, you wear pink shirts. Yeah, yeah. I can give it to my oldest daughter when she's computer-aged 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. 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?

1:11:05The Neo way. 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 polish. So not, okay, yeah. So making a$600 computer means there's going to be compromises. Yes. But clearly they're going after the Chromebook market. and kudos to them. I said years ago, what should they do with their massive cash war chest? 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.

1:11:44I 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 can 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.

1:12:19It'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. So here we are, folks. 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 Air, your MacBook Pro.

1:12:56But also here's the other thing, Jason. 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 fun 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 the seminal works in an industry, but a lot of them are out of print.

1:13:39And 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 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 on his name. We always forget his name. I'm on it. Don't worry. Not Ben. God. Sam Parr. Sam Parr. Sorry. Right. 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?

1:14:19Where 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 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 Ismael who are working on the newsletter to just go ahead and feel free to buy old books, put them in the library.

1:14:59And this one, you know, came from a thrift bookstore. I don't know what I paid for it, but I paid basically nothing for it. And I think the book came out in like 83 or 84. Yeah, you can get a 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 a 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 it? 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.

1:15:33There's a button for other sources or for the original library version. I'm trying to not accidentally show off my address online. Oh, no problem. No problem. So I'm trying to not click on 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 seventies, eighties, nineties, when people were using other mediums that I find inspire me to, they just give me great inspiration. And, you know, I have a stack of them sitting there and I'm having a cup of coffee.

1:16:17I 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 it. 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. Yeah. It's a$10 book. It's a$20 book. Look at it as a moleskin and just get in there. It's a where part, as we say at my house.

1:16:45Now, do we have time for one more? Yes. 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 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 i wish we had 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 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 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 the type of book where like i don't want to go to bed because i want more of it jason and i just fantastic 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?

1:18:22And 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 that capacity. 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 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. Oh, did I have the wrong one? I liked her head.

1:19:01Yeah, I looked for the open run. Yeah. So you see the open run right there? Well, if their website would stop trying to teach me how to use the internet. Yeah. Do everything. Yeah. So anyway, this thing looks a little weird, but it goes over and 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, um, you know, headphones and not listening to the outside world. But when you're walking in New York or San Francisco and you got to be alert.

1:19:36That 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 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 of days. And I was remembering what you've said about it. A little gritty, a little, a little, a little dangerous yeah 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 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 the area yeah i mean listen it's it's a bit of a crapshoot um different like neighborhoods in new York could be phenomenally dangerous, different subway lines during, and other ones will be totally safe.

1:20:35So, and the same thing for San Francisco, if you're up in the marina, yeah, if you're in the marina, you're in Pac-Whites, you're going to be fine. If you're in the Tenderloin, you're going to be murdered. Did you just say Pac-Whites? Yeah, the joke of Pac-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 Pac-White's. I'm like, I'm sorry, Pac-White's? They're like, no, Pac-White's because there's no crime there. There's zero crime. And if you call the police, they show up in 30 seconds.

1:21:04Whereas if you're in any other part, 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 fancier part of Pac-White's. 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 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 whites 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 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 shivved.

1:21:49All right. This has been another great week for Twist. We'll see you on Monday. Bye-bye.