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

27:10You got the black hats coming in and saying, hey, or red team, I guess. That might be a way to say it even better. Here is some content, and we're going to make a generative AI picture of Lon, but we're going to make them 10 % more robust, or we're going to GLP them and make them 10 % thinner. And then they try to trick the other miners, and that makes their algorithm sharper. So steel on steel making it stronger. Exactly. Trying to give the chisel jaw. I don't know. Whatever you want, right? Sure. Why this is so important is because generative AI, and AI in general, right, is the velocity in which these new models coming out is so fast.

27:56And so if you did this in a traditional way, what you have to do, wait for C-Dance to come out, wait for, you know, Nano Banana Pro 2 to come out, generate a bunch of that data, retrain your detection model. And what we have is an open, decentralized, permissionless system where people are generating data for us all the time. And people are also coming up with new detection algorithms, retraining quickly. And so we can actually update our system on a daily, weekly, at a very fast cadence to always stay ahead of the newest generation models. So, okay, this seems like an incredible game you've constructed.

28:30One team is truth maxing. One is fake maxing. They battle it out. Their algorithms get sharper. Fantastic. But is there a commercial product that is created for enterprises or consumers? Can the New York Times or could X Twitter say, hey, we want to put these trending posts in here and then maybe in the community notes say, hey, it has this score. you know, from your subnet, you know, and it's a certified 98.7 % truthy or, you know, truth maxed. Yeah, definitely. So I think the two, the two enterprise use cases you've touched upon were essentially social media and news outlets. So with news outlets, right, that's a really important use case for us.

29:15If you are in traditional media and media at all, you want to make sure what you're reporting on is actually real and you lose trust and credibility, which they're already struggling with. And so, right, as a reporter, you're going to want to verify whether this image, whether this data that you're receiving is real or not. And so there's definitely use cases like that where you could either drag and drop an image or video, or you can use our API, you know, however way you want to use it to determine that. And then on social media, it's a really big use case. We have something called BitmineBot, which is very similar to Grok, but it has a specific focus on, you know, is this real or not?

29:50The other use cases, I think on the enterprise side are really about securing essentially business communication. There's been a lot of recent drama around interviews, whether you're like, I think there's two main use cases. There's one where it's like, just this person is completely fake. Yeah. And like, right. The person can't put their hand in front of their face or something like that. And they're trying to infiltrate your organization. But then there's another use case where it's just It's like actually grifting people trying to get multiple jobs and putting on a facade of themselves. And so we're trying to stop both of that.

30:26And then the other actually really big use case that is pretty shocking, but not a lot of people are thinking about is actually in government. So more and more, there is evidence being shown in cases in a wide variety of contexts that is AI generated. And you need to be able to prove this. You know, the, that this is AI generated is the new, my dog ate my homework, right? Yeah. This is interesting. It's like a jamming thing about you. You just say it's AI generated. We say it on every episode these days. The AI revolution is here and sitting on the sidelines is no longer an option. No more waiting outside.

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31:44The guide is free to you at netsuite.com slash twist. What's interesting to me, Mark, is just putting on my angel investor hat. Go read the angel of the book. And it's in 13 or 14 languages. It was really nice. I was at a major Hollywood party last night. Just a very famous studio headlong came up to me and said, you're Jason Calacanis. I said, yes, I am. And this is in a room full of celebrities or whatever. He said, I read your book. It's just like movies. you would have been a great studio head. Anyway, enough promotion of my book. It was one of the great moments of my life that in a room where I assume nobody knew who I was, a studio head, a literal studio head had read the book.

32:26David Zaslav. This is what he's doing with his time now. He's getting ready to retire. It wasn't David, but it was on that... Even bigger than that. Wow. Anyway, it's as crazy as it seems. I won't say who. But I'm looking at this through my angel lens, Mark, and saying, wow, there is a business here. I don't know exactly what it is, but you can see Ken is doing product market fit. He's doing a go-to market function where, hey, we're trying to find customers. And he's also raised$3 million for this project as well. Correct, Ken? And who put$3 million into the company? And then Mark, as an investor, after Ken tells us who put the$3 million in, I want you to explain to me how I should think about this as a partner in still core at an LP with, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own personal money at stake versus, hey, should I invest in Ken's corporation?

33:22So Ken, maybe you could tell us who invested the 3 million? Is it crypto people giving you tokens or is it like a venture capital firm? So my background, I come from both AI and crypto. I worked at Amazon for a couple of years doing recommendation systems. And then prior to that, I was at a blockchain protocol called Nier. And so I had relationships with a variety of VCs in both of the spaces. Let's see, Arch Capital, Canonical Crypto, Mechanism Capital, Blockchain Builders Fund. There's a wide variety when we raised our seed fund about a year ago now. And how did they think about, well, let me have Mark answer the question of where is value going to be created and how should I think about this?

34:01Because now I'm getting pulled in both directions. I've got my venture firm here and then I'm a partner in Stilcor. Okay, I placed my bet here, But should I also be like, hmm, maybe Launch or my syndicate should talk to Ken about investing in his corporation? Yeah, I think it's very different and a bit tenser than it was in the old Ethereum and Solana days where you had this token or equity kind of, you know, bifurcation. And they both were sort of, they appeared to be ownership of the company. The ownership of the token in Ken's subnet, the subnet that he operates and runs is actually the product department of a much larger organization, the company, right?

34:40So the business and the intellectual property, so much as it exists, the revenue stream of his company, the equity is how you own a piece of that. the product department and the engine that makes this product possible, you're basically a part owner in a Bitcoin-like fashion of that piece of it, and you're always liquid. With his corporate owning equity in this corporation, you're not liquid. You're basically tied up for whatever period of time, but you can sell anytime you want, as we've seen in Bitensor recently. You can, in fact, sell those tokens. It just depends on which one you believe in more and what optionality you want to have.

35:20So interesting, Lon, one way to think about this is if you owned equity in Airbnb, the corporation, Lon, you could also be an Airbnb host and make money in the marketplace, but you could also own Airbnb. And I do know people who were Airbnb investors who were like, I want to start an Airbnb. Or there are people who are Tesla investors who want to have a fleet of robo-taxis and manage those. Or it could be you are running a corporation at scale and the corporation has debt and you can buy corporate paper that is the loan that people pay 12 % or 15 % on. And so you could own Tesla and you could own Tesla's debt, or you could own Uber and Uber's debt, or Amazon and Amazon's debt.

36:06So there's multiple ways to get exposure, I think. What do you guys think just in general, if I'm a regular person watching this who's like, I like the cut of this project's jib, I want to get in on it, would it just make sense to go to a place like Kraken or Coinbase and buy the Tau token? Is that a valid way to get exposure here? Or should you really be thinking about specific subnets and sort of digging in deeper? This is an important question, I think. I think the easiest thing to do is buy a little bit of tau. You get the mutual fund effect, which would be like if you asked me, should I be an angel investor or should I put money into a VC firm?

36:42If you put money into a VC firm, you're saying, I trust the partners there to make 20 bets. I don't make those 20 bets, but in 10 years, I hopefully get back more than double my money and I beat the public markets. But if you want to be an angel investor and you read my book and you join AngelList and the syndicate and you join other SPVs, you get to pick and choose which ones you bet on and you get to make your own decision. And some people like that style. In other words, you can back somebody to go play a series of poker tournaments. There are people who do that and there are people who want to play in the poker tournaments.

37:15Depends on your time. I would say it's basically a time commitment thing. I don't have the time to evaluate every subnet. So I'm a partner and investor in Stilcore Capital, which Mark is doing. All of these things are incredibly speculative. 90 % of the bets I make go to zero. So you would need to have a certain constitution, I think is the way to say it. Yeah, Lon? Yes. I could not afford to have 90 % of my bets go to zero. That's definitely not on the way. Well, but you could afford to have 90 % of 10 % of your bets go to zero, which would be 9 % of your overall net worth. Yeah. So that's another way to think about it, right?

37:51If you're going to put 5 % or 10 % of your net worth into speculative things. Mark, any thoughts here of how an individual, without giving financial advice, but just how you think about this, of where the value would be created? Because Stilcore has probably, I don't know if it's half or two-third of its money in Tau and half or a third of its money into subnets at this point. What's the blend you think you should have? Yeah, I mean, it's about 80 % subnets right now. Oh, wow. But I want to back that off a little bit to maybe 30, 70. but I think because I think we're in a unique period right now where if you make the right early bets it's going to be extraordinarily rewarding and you have to know it's basically evaluating these subnets and the companies around them and the products like you would a regular startup knowing when to get in also knowing when to get out and this is a highly highly highly dynamic environment as we've seen recently so sort of scrambling around and getting to know everyone and everything and knowing as much information as possible is more than a full-time job.

38:56And that's, you know, you can do that if you want. There are people who are doing it, you know, but we take over that function for accredited investors if they'd like to park their money with us and not worry about all that stuff, right? So, however, if you're a normal person in the normal world and you'd like to play in this arena, it is open to you. You don't have to be accredited, right? So that's one advantage to betting on subnets as opposed to trying to get into equity. Most people can't get in equity, right? So this is a way for you to invest in the AI future as an unaccredited investor that you normally don't get.

39:31I kind of want to touch on that too. I feel like that's one of the most important things. I think something that's so interesting that specifically in the US, AI is more unpopular than Trump. And I think a lot of the reason there is because no one can participate in the economic system that it's building. And what's so exciting about BitTensor is these are all extremely early stage companies that you wouldn't ideally have the ability to participate in in any other way. And this is, it's kind of a double edged sword, right? Your early stage startup is getting marketed, you know, is getting valued by the public market, but the public can participate in it.

40:07And I think that's what you need to do to keep AI beneficial to all humans, have everyone that's participating have economic upside here. Which, you know, I think everybody in America, this is like really leveling up the discussion, but it's a great point, Ken. There is Invest America accounts, now called Trump accounts, where they're giving every young person$500 or$1 ,000 and companies are going to start to contribute. There's some other wells coming into the system, I understand, from Brad, who told me there's going to be some other Michael Dell type people who will probably contribute. Brad Gerson of Altimeter Capital.

40:41Brad Gerson of Altimeter, who championed this idea. I'm giving a lot of credit for that. More people can participate. And then I interviewed the new head of the SEC, and he's... This is his second stint as SEC chair. Secretary Atkins. Atkins, yeah, he's all in on creating a test at the SEC where you can become accredited and participate in private companies. So participating in private companies where the value is could be a major unlock for people. Also, incredibly risky, which is why rich people, when they go to dinner, talk about whatever private deals they're doing and what they have access to because they understand if it's a one in 10 chance of going 100x, you probably take that bet every day.

41:26So incentives matter. I think that's the key thing we've learned here, Mark. There are incentives all over the place. And the game of Tau, the brilliance of it, dare I say, is that it's very focused on incentives. Validators, miners competing. It's an elegant and beautiful system. When you look at the first subnet we looked at, what comes to mind in terms of where that could wind up in two or three years? I think you're right. The brilliance of it, the incentive alignment engine of BitTensor is its core invention. And everything within it is contest within contest within contest. Everybody's competing with everybody and only the most excellent get anything.

42:15So, you know, in companies, even, even the most, the best run startup, there's a lot of inefficiencies. You have to hire people, right? Some of them hide in the company successfully without doing very much. And they're sort of mediocre. There is no middle management when there's contests within contests with that contest. You know, this is the most ferocious form of capitalism ever invented as far as I can tell. So yeah, I love it. Let's meet our next subnet. And I think, you know, Will and Stephan here. At the pace we're going with two or three subnets, you know, every couple of episodes, we're going to get through all 128.

42:47We are. That's become our goal. And actually, Will and Stephan from Macrocosmos, they run three different subnets, Jason. So we're knocking out three. We've got Apex subnet one, IOTA subnet nine, and then Data Universe slash Gravity. That's subnet 13. So thanks for Will and Stephan. So greedy. So greedy. Unpack all that for us. He owns 2.7 % of the subnets. Okay. We actually used to run five subnets. we decided that we would like to live long enough to actually see these things reach the market so we had to uh we had to downsize a little bit running a subnet is no joke as as Mark can attest and certainly can but um I think Will and I would would love to speak a little bit about our most ambitious work on BitTensor which is IOTA so IOTA is subnet 9 and um perhaps I'm being hyperbolic but I firmly believe it's the most ambitious thing that is being built within BitTensor right now and I think from a very high level what we want to be able to do is orchestrate the world's compute in the way that Bitcoin did but to train models that rival chat GPT frontier skill models and there is uh there is actually a growing uh consensus in the industry that training the next generation of very large models is it's becoming prohibitively expensive as I'm sure you guys are aware we're talking about data centers the size of downtown Manhattan and the next generation is going to dwarf even this.

44:06And I think what becomes inevitable at some point is we need to think about cost efficiency. We need to think about CapEx and something. In fact, one of the core ideas that inspired BitTensor from constant self was the idea of doing what's called distributed training. So distributed training is taking compute from pockets all around the world and coordinating that compute and making that equivalent to a large data center. Yet it's just one that is dispersed all around the world. Now there's an enormous amount of work you have to do, as you can imagine, a lot of networking, a lot of algorithm, and a lot of research that needs to be done.

44:38But it's a very high ceiling for the project. So we've been working on IOTA for about nine months. Will, my co-founder and CEO, myself, the CTO. We're really, really excited and motivated about it. And yeah, the dream of training in BitTensor is very much alive and kicking. And to put this in context, Lon and Mark, to create a frontier model now is, and you do a run basically to create the next chat GPT and next Claude, next Grok, whatever. The estimates are $200 million in compute costs. This isn't the staff. This isn't the company, you know, testing or anything. Just the raw compute cost is$200 million.

45:16Now, that's a big number. But if you had, well, if you had, let's say, 10 million people participating and contributing some compute, Well, you know, then it would be a couple of dollars,$20 per person. So you start, or if it's a million, it'd be$200 worth of compute each. If it was$100 ,000, it'd be$2 ,000. If it was$10 ,000, it'd be$20 ,000 in compute. So maybe you get down to 10 ,000 people providing$20 ,000 in compute. And hey, it's conceivable in the same way SETI at home was. Yeah, Mark? That's absolutely correct. And the thing that I love the most about what these guys have done is, you know, as someone who has watched mining occur within BitTensor but been unable to participate until I got my claw and I'd started vibe mining with that.

46:02But minus the claw and all that, really these guys were the first people to provide a ready packaged mining application for their sub that nobody else had done that, right? So and you at home could now be a BitTensor miner for the very first time and not have to know anything about anything, just download this thing, set it up and now you're mining BitTensor. It was fantastic. I loved it. So talk to me about how the IOTA install works. Is it as simple as like downloading Slack or downloading a Chrome browser and then it just runs in the background? I think a lot of the principle of this, and I'll talk about the differences in our training methods later, but train at home as we call it the application or IOTA, it's like two clicks to install.

46:45And again, Mark is one of our miners. So I don't actually have to pitch for myself. You install the application. It's a simple binary. Stefan has apparently gone to the role place. But you basically just install the app, put in a key to be paid out with, and we use your computer when you're not using it. And one of the reasons training models is so expensive is not just that you need immense amounts of compute. It's also that you train with like the prime rib or like the ribeye steak. You know, you take the best compute for the longest period of time. you know it's the filet mignon cut um and that makes it even more expensive because it's the filet mignon cut but the cow has to be rested for 50 days and you've got to leave it there and you've got to look at it and what we want to do is fundamentally make you let models out of ground beef so we take bits of compute from here or there we perform some magic in the background and we make meatloaf and you know everybody loves uh loves ribeye steak but actually meatloaf is what you want when you're comfortable.

47:47And, and, you know, there's some sort of joking in the metaphor there, but materially, um, you have two major markets for AI compute and GPUs. One is inference. Everybody here knows that Mark's running clause. You guys are using chat GPT or your preferred model. And it's actually inference that creates the money. It's where the revenue is associated with, you know, when you track sort of open AI or anthropic budgets, it's all from inference tokens. But the reality is you have these incredible training workloads, like huge data center size training workloads that the main lab are spending immense amounts of money to satisfy.

48:23And these are taking up city blocks of compute. And the sort of lost opportunity there is you can't use that compute to make inference. So the way IOTA works is the sort of minimum compute unit we can use is at the moment, the size of a MacBook and for about 30 minutes, and we can actually extract value from that. So the sort of ultimate goal of this is we actually want to be able to make, you know, we call it indistinguishable training compute from this mixture of compute nodes. And this is sort of one of the philosophies Steph and I have had when we first founded Macro Cosmos. There's a lot of people when they approach any project in Web3 or crypto is they say, oh, how can I do what people do in a centralized way, but in a crypto way?

49:04So, you know, we were talking about Templar. Templar does training. Templar effectively allows you to train in a centralized way using crypto rails. I won't go into the technical details, but the nodes they used were Blackwell. So B200 nodes, it's a quarter of a million bucks for each compute unit. So, you know, it's prime rib, maybe it's prime rib and, you know, you run it around your houses doing that, but it's still incredibly expensive. What we think the interesting thing about, you know, this sort of merger between crypto and AI is, is how can you use like fundamentally fractal compute, distributed compute, 10 minutes here, 20 minutes there, you know, Mark's sort of Mac mini when it's sat idling in the evenings and sum that together to something that creates economic value in a very, very constrained market.

49:50So we actually released a research paper today that validates a lot of our work, but we've been working on this problem for a year and it's been, it's hard but compelling work. Are people calling open clock claws? Yeah, you are. Okay. Fine. I just want to make sure there's not a new piece of software that I'm not aware of. So explain how I get the package on my Mac to join Iota. You can download it through Terminal, through the command line interface if you're more coding proficient, or you can go to the website iota.mecrocosmos.ai, scroll down and you're going to see a download button. As you mentioned before, Jason, it's just like downloading Slack or any other application.

50:31Exactly. You download this, it will generate a wallet for you. And then what will happen is when you open the application, you click start and your machine will connect to our globally distributed training cluster. You will earn passive income. While you sleep between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., your machine can be quietly being used as a training node. So the benefit to you is you get to accumulate IOTA, you get to be part of the big mission. And the benefit for us is we basically have, we have an always-on supercluster of compute, and that's really the value. I have a question. If I start doing this overnight on my work laptop, is ActiveTrack going to look like I was up all night working?

51:09Because this could really work out. For sure, yeah. This could be great. We have security on our laptops at work. We will literally do your work for you. Yeah, this is going to look amazing. I'm going to look like a genius. Well, no, it would show massive CPU usage. So we have, for background, there's a piece of software called ActiveTrack. just to lock down software. And there's 20 of these. So we have confidential data on our network, but it shows like what the computers at our offices are doing. If somebody were to download everything, you would see that in ActiveTrack or if you were exporting stuff.

51:43Look how much GPU Lon was using all night. Lon was using so much compute. He must've been crunching numbers all night. What a genius. So there's multiple ways to participate in IOTA. One is as a user, and you would download, you would have a wallet, and then you would earn tau by contributing your compute. But there's also becoming a node. So maybe you could explain what being a full node is versus that. I suppose that there's a couple of expressions of IOTA. One is this very participatory, everybody shares, everybody co-trains a model version, which we sort of nicknamed train at home because that's kind of what it is.

52:24The second version of this is like the benefit of this tech is it has applications at sort of any scale within the AI stack. Now, one of the ways we expect this to materialize in some of the earlier runs is it will use frontier compute. So H100, B200, those quarter of a million dollar machines. But what we will have availability for is anybody can register their nodes on a sort of rotating basis. So we're working on this in the background where you can post compute for a fixed interval, 20 minutes, half an hour. there's some fine tuning on the machine learning side for us to work out the sort of sweet spot there where we get value from it but you know we've spent a lot of time talking to gpu providers and otherwise and the sort of thing we've found is that particularly if you can make an instance interruptible is what they call it so you know jason you've got 10 computers you sell them to mark most of the time for five bucks an hour but you know mark sort of on a thursday is like i don't need the compute last minute, you know that he might sort of pick it up Friday and you don't want to go sell it to somebody else.

53:26People in that instance are just looking to recover capital returns and operational costs. So you can get compute at 10 cents on the dollar. So we want to work with major providers to basically harness all that compute at 10 cents on the dollar, because if we can get our training efficiency within a factor of 10 at that point, we're making money. So somebody who has extra compute, like let's say it was even CoreWeave. I interviewed the founder of that company. Let's say they had old H100s and they hadn't sold them yet. And they're five years old and they're still in racks. And they could say, you know what?

54:03Just we haven't sold them yet. We don't have a new customer for them. We might as well put them to use. It would almost like being if you had a house and you hadn't sold it yet, you put it into the Airbnb inventory just to cover your cost basis or something at a discount, just to make sure you pay your taxes, your real estate taxes and your operating costs for the home. It's like that, but this is sort of one of the foundations of deep in and decentralized AI is people are like, oh, you know, I can use my compute for a day here. What's unique about IOTRA is it's like an Airbnb, but you can subnet for 20 minutes with no notice and get paid for it.

54:37That's a better analogy there because it's not - You could use the home for one hour. Yeah, and that's where we think the real value is, because if you're if you're renting out your house for a day or a week, then you want you want a reasonable bit of money for it. You want to account for all these wear and tear if you're trying to get 20 minutes or you're just trying to make a quick buck of something that's already in production. The economics change really dramatically. And we validated this with seven or eight different data center clients who all say basically the key thing is they want to be able to take the compute off you.

55:09And there's no training method in the world that allows you to have the level of interruptibility we're designing for. Because typically training, you know, in a data center is something called synchronous training. So all of the nodes move in lockstep. And it's actually the slowest node that sort of drives the speed of the whole system. We're trying to design for this world where we assume that Mark will slam his laptop shut. We assume that CoreWeb will take their rack back and sell it to a premium customer. We actually assume that in sort of, you know, even the case of large labs, you might just have an inference spike and you want to reallocate training computes to revenue workloads and then pull it back when you come down.

55:49Like, you know, my father was an energy engineer and you always designed for the sort of peak load in the sinusoidal. And we're trying to make training compute liquids so that we can sort of achieve ultimate economic value, really. Any questions there, Mark, and your thoughts on the project, just generally speaking, and how disruptive it is? Yeah, I mean, I think it could be one of the bigger projects in BitTensor. I think these guys are, you know, they've been around for a while, and they know the system better than most of the other subnet owners. And so, look, I'm very bullish on them. I love what both of them are doing.

56:23And is this a corporation, Will, and you have venture capital backing it, or is it just a straight anachronistic crypto weirdo project? How is this running? We are actually, we are a company, but we are fully bootstrapped. We haven't raised venture capital to date. We've been, we're fortunate to build, actually, Stephen built the first subnet on BitTensor for his sin. So we've been around for a while. And yeah, we have no outside franchise except for our relationship with BitTensor. So we're very fortunate to that, very fortunate to the people who've sort of invested this over time. But what do you think of the, Stefan, what do you think of the kerfluffle with one of the subnets taking their tokens and marbles and leaving all of a sudden and the impact that it has on the ecosystem as one of the early adopters of subnets?

57:19I think it's very disappointing. I come from an AI background, not a crypto background. So being honorable and being trustworthy is a really important thing to me and something that I am extremely sensitive to when I operate in a crypto world. It's disappointing. It's disappointing that someone did that to a lot of people. I won't dive too deep into it, but I think it's a shared emotion that we have right now. I think the response of Jake is on point, which is to say, this is a great opportunity for us to reflect on a part of BitTensor that was too immature and needed to be iterated on and refined.

57:54And I think that's the right pragmatic lens to see the experience. So, yes, this will be, I'm sure, just a bump in the road in the long term. So you're frustrated, disappointed. And what do you think the solution is to avoiding it in the future? I think what Mark described earlier, which is this idea of owner lockup. So you should have more of a fiduciary duty to the people that believe in you, to put it simply. And I think there's a way that you can translate that into things like smart contracts or similar, which shows the commitment of founders and server operators to their community. And that can actually be used to for price discovery for the project itself.

58:34Right. It's a measure of intention. It's a measure of conviction. I think that's quite an elegant solution. And I'm sure we'll see a few different prototypes of that. We might not get it right the first time, but it feels like roughly the right direction of travel to not have this experience again. Athena, I'm the first investor. They are the greatest assistants in the world for a great price,$3 ,000 a month. You get an awesome full-time assistant to work with you on your scheduling, on research projects. And you say, well, oh, we guys are talking about all this AI. Hi, these assistants are AI powered.

59:07And so they will do all kinds of jobs for you and help you have a human in the loop as you're working. I was the first investor in the company. They're now a partner of All In. They're a partner of ours here. And it just makes me super, super productive. So you can basically turn your EA into your chief health officer. That's this month's productivity hack. Thanks to Athena. Jennifer, we do a productivity hack once a month. This month's productivity hack, you should turn your EA into your chief health officer. You know, for founders, their health can often take a back seat, Jason. So one of the ideas we came up with were all the different ways that you could sort of delegate some of these tests to your EA, keeping up with your regular checkups, dental cleanings, handling your referrals and follow-ups, taking care of your insurance paperwork and your reimbursements, helping you plan healthy meals and what groceries to buy, worrying about your nutrition, All of these things can be things that you pass off to your EA to help save time.

1:00:06If you want to learn more, Athena.com slash J-C-A-L. J-C-A-L. There you go. That's where to go. And as an example, you know, I lost weight. Shout out to my guys at Rowe.co with GLPs. But now I want to add more muscle. And I've been adding some, but I need to get a trainer. So I said, hey, to my Athena assistant, within a 20-minute drive of my house, of the ranch, I want a trainer who has their own facility to do one-on-one training with me, you know, one to three times a week. Let them know I travel a ton. My schedule is variable. And here's how I'd like to pay. Because a lot of times they're like, you have to pick the same slot every week or whatever.

1:00:47It doesn't work for me. So I said, hey, I want to buy 20 sessions up front. And then I want to be able to just drop in, you know, and it could change dynamically. I might need to cancel within, you know, the same day, et cetera. So they explained the rules of the road. And some people are like, yeah, we don't work that way. You have to do Tuesday at 4 p.m. every week for the year, whatever. And it's like, that's not going to work. So they pre-vetted and did all those discussions because I don't want to have that awkward discussion with the person. And then I'm negotiating with a trainer. Then I said, and then find me three people to come to the house, and I would do the same thing.

1:01:20I'll pay them for 20 sessions up front so they get the value of that money up front, but they have to be willing to let me cancel same day within two or three hours if they have to get on a plane. And it worked. They went through 20 different people and found me three of each. And I just give them a go like that. Just keep calling people until you get to three. Yeah, and they can take a day to do that. You can't do that. You have too much other stuff. I don't have the time for that. The other thing that I had them do was I had them go on to different people's LinkedIn, Mark. And I said, I'm not happy with the flow of people coming in for these three positions.

1:01:59So here's what I want you to do. I want you to go on Lon's LinkedIn, my LinkedIn, or Heidi's LinkedIn, and just send in mail through LinkedIn to anybody with this title in these three cities, Austin, Houston, San Antonio. hey, we're looking for this position in Austin, in an office. If you know anybody, let us know, or if you might be interested, please let us know. We get a 2 % response rate to that, but we fill two positions doing that. But that means that you have to get to 500 outbound. So I just said, well, I can't do 500 outbound law. I can't do 500. It's a full-time job. I said, okay, for four hours a day, this is all I want you to do.

1:02:3710 people an hour, four hours a day, 40 people a day for 10 days. Go. It worked, but I would never do that. That's the job of a full-time recruiter. So shout out to our friends, Athena.com slash Jake Howell. You get a couple of weeks off. There you go. Check it out. All right. What do we got next here on the docker? We have a little bit of off-duty. I have some viral stuff we could react to, or we could just do some recommendations. It's up to you. Okay. I think I'd love to go off-duty. Yeah. So let's go off-duty. All right. Lon, Jake and Mark. And Mark. Mark's going to join us. You got to give us an idea.

1:03:11I don't know if they told you what off duty is, but it's basically we're not doing crypto. Yeah. We can talk about whatever we want. What are you assuming? Whatever we want. Products. We can talk about whatever we want. Products you bought, a gadget you bought, a TV show you were watching, music, an album. I want to get your thoughts on one viral story before we get into recommendations. So Coachella, the Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival for weekend one was this past weekend. There's been there were two headliners, very different performances. People are really debating, you know, and I think it speaks a lot.

1:03:46Bieber was one. Bieber was one. Sabrina Carpenter was the other. And I think it really speaks to what what are we looking for in a performance? What is the value of authenticity versus showmanship? I think it gets to some really interesting questions. So first up, Sabrina Carpenter, she headlined. It was massive. Cars on stage, huge sets, dancers. We can take a look at a quick clip here that I pulled up. Yeah. So let's do that. Sabrina Carpenter, extremely entertaining. I saw her at Austin City Limits, ACL. So here's Sabrina's performance. You can see they built this massive set. She's got tons of dancers.

1:04:24It's a huge thing that's going on. It's a production. We're not playing the song. This is Espresso, her huge hit there, of course. Thinking about me. Yeah, thinking big about that. That's that me, Espresso. How do I use this? Okay, there we go. And then I want to show this one other part, too. She actually drove a car off the set. She drove through the crowd in Coachella, through the crowd. This was how she closed it out. Wow. She's literally driving a car. That car is not her driving. It must be on a track. No, it is. She's just driving. They cleared out this aisle here. And you can see she's just driving out of Coachella in this car.

1:05:06So that's cool. It's very big. It's spectacle. A lot of showmanship. It was like a party. It was like showmanship. And then there was Justin Bieber. He was the headliner on Sunday night. And he went on stage alone. Just him and a laptop and a screen behind him that was screen sharing. And he played YouTube clips, a lot of them of himself. And then he sang over his old music videos, sort of treating them like a backup singer. I'll show you a little clip. So you can see. Yeah, this was weird. Here he is. He's on stage. He's pulling up YouTube. You can see his screen. He's typing in baby, which, of course, that was his old school song with him as a kid.

1:05:44And then he stands up and he's watching the video. He's not even facing the audience. He's watching the video and he's like singing along with himself from when he was a kid. and then here's he wasn't even just singing the whole time he also uh just watches youtube for some of it and he's here he is watching the god meme and then you'll see he flips over to double rainbow and he's just he's he's hanging out playing on youtube so a lot of people were praising this it's so authentic it's so real and he started his career as a youtuber justin bieber he was arguably the first YouTuber to get super, super famous.

1:06:23Yeah, here he's just watching Double Rainbow. I can give my judgment. There's a lot of back and forth, of course, between the Sabrina and the Bieber stans, but I think everybody, I think it's an interesting debate. Which performance would you be more interested in seeing? And if you pay all this money to go to Coachella, it's like$1 ,000 plus to get to Coachella. Do the artists owe you a Sabrina Carpenter level spectacle? Okay. Okay. So it really is in the execution of these things. On its face, when you describe what Justin Bieber did, you would say that was phoning it in. A little. Just played his video and he talked over or whatever.

1:07:01Okay. Sure enough, that would be a surface level interpretation of it. However, he kind of did some storytelling in there. It was interactive with the audience. And at the end of the day, was the audience engaged in this? They were. And I would say they were equally engaged in Bieber's surfing YouTube as a performance art. So it's very meta commentary. And it was done so well that I think he hit the right note, which is, this is a meta commentary on my career, and I'm going to relive how you experienced me. And there was some brilliance to that. Now, if you were any other artist who was not a native YouTube artist, they might not have pulled off that meta commentary on it.

1:07:53Right. There is another analogy to this. I had dinner the other night, and I sat next to Jimmy Iovine. Wow, you had a big weekend. So anyway, and I start talking to Jimmy. He's also a kid from Brooklyn. He's from Red Hook. I'm from Bay Ridge. It's just right on the Gowanus Canal there. We had a talk and I told him, hey, you know, I'm a big Dire Straits fan. I know you did the album making movies and we talked for an hour about that. Oh, OK. And he also had Bruce Springsteen was, you know, the big artist that he had produced. Yeah, sure. He did Born in the USA, one of the great seminal works. Born to Run.

1:08:31Of all time. Darkness on the Edge of Town. He did. Yeah. Yeah. So this is like a, you know, a legend. I got it was real privileged to talk to him for all this time. And Bruce Springsteen did Springsteen on Broadway. And when he did Springsteen on Broadway, he did a meta commentary of him. He did sing some of his songs. Right. Like Bieber did. But he also told the story behind the songs. It was so engaging. It was so rich that as a fan, you can get away with that. Now, I've also seen Bruce Springsteen no less than 20 times, probably over 30 years in concert. You know, like I've seen him two or three nights in a row.

1:09:08My mom's a big Bruce fan. and actually took my mom to Bruce on Broadway. You have to execute at a very high level. You have to be a true star. There has to be a lot behind it in order to pull that off. So I give Justin Bieber credit for actually pulling it off, which is not easy. Sabrina Carpenter couldn't pull that off right now. Sabrina Carpenter, if she has 10 more espressos, if she lasts... I don't know how long Bieber's been in pop culture now, but I think it's 15 years. Yeah, 20 years or so, close to it. 20 years. When Sabrina Carpenter, 20 years into her career she is, she will be able to pull it off, but not in year three of her career.

1:09:45Right. So I think both of these were fantastic. Sabrina Carpenter has to build the foundation brick by brick in order to do the meta commentary, which only comes after you have 50 hits, 25 hits, you know, in a certain size audience. So I give them both credit. Mark, any thoughts here? I know you're a big rock and roll fan. Yeah, you guys should know better than ask me about anything other than classic rock. But okay, I'll dive in a little bit here. So, I mean, I'm sort of split because I do feel like Bieber, I've seen little clips of it. It looked fun, right? Yeah, I agree. It didn't look bad, right?

1:10:17It didn't look like it was crashing out on stage. It looked fun, right? So I think probably the audience enjoyed it. That said, I love a spectacle. I love a big rock show. You know, J.K.L. and I went to go see The Wall when Roger Waters was touring that around. Yeah, that's a lot of advice. I read them. It was life-changing. Yeah, I totally agree. And that was like a very big production of tunes that you've listened to your entire life and just love, right? So that's what I want when I go to a show. That's probably the apotheosis of that. So, you know, I guess I'm sort of split. I think I probably would have preferred the – I'm not a huge fan of – you know, I'm not like a diehard Sabrina or Bieber fan.

1:10:55But I think just I would have preferred the Bieber set. It's something real. You're seeing him really think about and process this whole career, this trip down memory lane, this sort of nostalgic look back with him. I think that would be a lot more engaging as a viewer than, you know, big dance routines and the big pop. I kind of feel in general, and this is old man of me, but I'm going to say it anyway. When I used to go to Coachella, like the early and mid aughts, it was just bands playing. There wasn't this like, it wasn't this like you're going to see a pop star like fly out of something and parachute into the arena.

1:11:27And it was just like bands playing songs you liked or rappers performing songs you liked or whatever, DJs. And I feel like I like that more authentic sort of feel. I mean, listen, the kids love the vibes. There's a meta commentary going on. For sure, yeah. And it's vibe culture in that, you know, if the vibes are either immaculate or the vibes are inauthentic and, you know, you're taking a little bit of risk. I have been one time to Coachella, and it was quite enjoyable to go from set to set to set. I think I saw Lorde. Oh, nice. And MGMT and some other incredible artists, like back to back to back to back.

1:12:08And it was like, wow, this is pretty impressive. I went in 04. It's like a classic one. Radiohead, Pixies, Flaming Lips, MF Doom. Wow. Air, really good year. Beck was there that year. Anyway, thanks, Unc. Yeah. Like a three unks special. Oh, man. Yeah. We're old to be talking about this stuff. But I did. I thought it was an interesting conversation that's going on between this sort of. I'll tell you there's an analogy here, Lon. Authenticity, yeah. I went one night to see Chappelle. He happened to be in town. A friend of mine's friends with him. I texted my friend and I was like, hey, your friend Chappelle is playing.

1:12:43He's like, oh, let me text him and maybe we'll go see the show. Last minute, we go see the show. after the show, Chappelle says, hey, you guys want to roll with me? We're going to go do this after show. And he goes to this, you know, small comedy place in San Francisco that hosts maybe 100 people, 150 people. We go there and we got a table set up for us. And then he does just him interacting with the audience. Sure. He's had a couple of drinks or whatever and smoking a cigarette. Crowd work. it crowd work what are they he's doing crowd work crowd work is what they call it telling stories and it's not a set it's not a funny set like he had just done yeah at the chase center it is just him bantering and you know some jokes in it and he was not working on new material exactly but it was just a different type of performance so to see both back to back and then compare them again back to this meta commentary there was him talking about the show he just did them him talking about his life and it was really like to see those two bookends together was actually really nice just like going and seeing a bruce springsteen show and then seeing springsteen on broadway talk about bruce springsteen and his life right also super it's nice what a great intimate intimate evenings yeah you got anything else here on um i did there was one thing i want to recommend there's a movie i saw it at the austin uh film society here in austin one of my favorite local theaters Shout out to them.

1:14:15But it is now on Hulu. It's a Spanish film called Surat. It's about a father and a son. The father's older daughter has gone missing. She was a big raver who attended a lot of these raves in the desert in North Africa. So the father and son are following these moving raves around the desert, looking for this missing young woman. And then it leads into this whole separate adventure story. I don't want to give anything else away about this. movie because it takes some real turns but wow it is don't give it up it is incredible film it is a real experience you don't want to learn too much about it you just want to watch it and take the ride with it uh yeah i i loved it real intense all right i'll give one recommendation here uh people have heard me reference my favorite pen yes uh i'm not like a pen snob i don't like the idea of buying a$100 or$500 pen.

1:15:12I don't collect pens, but I like to write, and I like a great pen, but I know I'm going to lose a pen. So somewhere between a commodity pen for$1 or$2 and these$100 or pens that cost hundreds of dollars, I found one of the nicest writing pens ever, the G750 retractable pen. And I think it goes for$10,$15. Yeah, there it is,$14. It's 1994 here, yeah. Yes, and you can get it on Amazon. And it's just an incredible pen. When you write with this pen, you will learn why this is such an amazing pen. Now, the reason I know about this pen is because Unk is basically Unk, that's me, was on TikTok, and I stumbled upon the Staples baddie.

1:16:10Caden Rowland works at Staples. Sure. And if you type in her name and you type in Zebra 750, she's 750, she's the one who recommended it to me. And she is this incredible young person who works at Staples. she might be trans or you know i'm not sure exactly are you sure but she has an incredible performance where she goes and um talks with extreme passion about staples and photocopies and pens and journals and she literally clank clanks her nails and snaps up her favorite office products. And she's probably done more for the brand of Staples with young people and all the way up to Gen X myself than Staples could ever do with a$100 million ad campaign.

1:17:12I don't know what they're paying her. Are they paying her? I don't know. Is Staples embracing her? She's a store employee, Lon. Oh, but yeah, but they're not paying her to make these videos. They're just paying her to work the register. I think now they are paying her, they must be paying her now. If not, there's 100 people who would hire her to be the Walmart baddie or the Target baddie. I mean, she should be getting paid a million dollars a year, minimum, minimum of a million dollars a year. If one of my startups came to me and said, we want to hire this person to run our social media for$100 ,000 a year plus$900 ,000 a year and stock options, I would say do it.

1:17:56Do it immediately. Because the ability to authentically engage and then get me to buy the pen and know who the Staples baddie is is just infinitely valuable. Yeah, I think I found her TikTok. She has 582.3 thousand followers on TikTok. That's crazy. I mean, somebody's got to poach her. Just for talking about Staples. There's a Papa John's guy too, right? I've seen him a bunch on TikTok. I think now this is going to become a thing. He's just a guy who works at Papa John's, but he talks about how they make great pizza, which I don't know. Another amazing episode of Twist is In the Can for Monday, April 13th.

1:18:37Thanks, Mark Jeffrey.