Why Your Company Should Own Its AI Model | E2278

28:51Aragon is trained on the policies they have. Aragon is trained on the coverage they have. Aragon is trained on kind of how they underwrite, right? So all of that comes in end to end. And then Evelyn gets a WhatsApp saying, hey, Josh from Aragon just requested a quote. Here's the policies you need. Here's the quote. Do you want me to go publish it to his dashboard? Yes or no? Wow. And all of that is now done. For an accounting firm, keeping your books in order is table stakes. It's the bare minimum. them. It's the baseline. But for an early stage and Series A founder, you need a partner that actually understands the world of startups.

29:24It's very different. And you have to understand the world of venture capital because startups have boards and venture capitals who've invested. And that partner is Pilot. Pilot is the largest accounting firm that's built specifically for startups. You're not just doing your taxes. You're getting CFO-level advice on running your company. And those aren't just words. They have actual former CFOs and other seasoned operators on hand to answer your growth and scaling questions directly. All of their tools are intuitive. They're easy to use. You can track your expenses in real time. And Pilot's going to help you model cash flow scenarios before you make big decisions.

30:00So stay focused on scaling and let Pilot take care of the books. Plus, Twist listeners get$1 ,200 off their first year. Go to pilot.com slash twist to get started. That's pilot.com slash twist. So still human in the loop. Obviously, you're setting a proposal. You want to do that, but it's going to be done faster, better, and cheaper. That's always the trifecta. That wins. And this is amazing. Congratulations. You went through the accelerator a year or two ago. Was it LA34? I'm trying to remember which cohort it was. I think it was like maybe May or something of last year. So it was 34, I think.

30:36Yeah. And yeah, great pivot in there. Some great new investors. you pulled through about half the companies that come through our programs pull through we like to take a lot of risk um and i think i've i always track in our database now where we found somebody you i said if you got rejected from yc please email us we'll we'll take a look at your company and you emailed us and i did uh i'm not dumb uh we met you and we're like this kid's really smart I don't know. I told the team, because I have my notes here, I don't know if he's going to be successful with this startup, but I know Josh is going to be successful.

31:14So let's start the relationship now. Josh, so proud of you. Congratulations. And always let me know when I can be helpful to you. You have my phone number, you got my email. Always let me know if we can be helpful. I'm good for a retweet once in a while or a prescient introduction, but great job, Josh. I really appreciate you. And it's just great to be in business with you. Absolutely, Jason. It's been a pleasure. And for anyone in the audience that's listening, I think Jason and team has built an absolute world-class accelerator program. They've been tremendous, especially right in the early stage.

31:48You really have an idea. And I think a lot of times for anyone in the audience, we just announced our 12 million at 100 seed, but everyone listening, founders, everyone is just trying to figure things out. And I think that the best thing, you know, Jason and team, they really have an amazing, you know, structure and cadence and resources at the earliest stage for how you can like think through your business. And that was helpful for us. And I would encourage everyone listening to absolutely reach out and maybe soon it'll be an agent on Jason's side that. I suppose. Yeah. You cut me off at the pass, brother.

32:27I was going to say, like, we are working on this now because, you know, when you get over 10 ,000 applications, we have a weighted system. Speaking of weights and, you know, Marcus is a really talented young fellow I have working for me and he's been building this system. And what we found was with our AI, our weighted system does essentially the same job a human can do. It can identify that. Now, we still have to decide who do we meet with. And then after we meet with them, we have to make another decision. But what I really want your help with, Josh, this could be a great project for us, is to look back at our meetings and everything, put it into a VSLM, very small language model, on my laptop that I don't train, you know, OpenAI and Anthropic or Gemini on how to do what we do here, our secret sauce.

33:19But then, you know, just be able to say, hey, we missed some things. Because when we miss something, Josh, what I do now is somebody just told me, Molly Wood, who worked for us for a bit and co-hosted with me for a while, she had found a military tech company. And I was like, oh, we don't do that. It's kind of not what we do. But now we do do it. And two years ago, she found this one and it pulled through. And I don't know if it's raising$100 million now. And I was like, okay, if we missed it then, but we built a little relationship, what can we learn? Number one. Number two, hey, let's go to thesyndicate.com and we'll have a phone call with them, invite them on This Week in Startups and see if there is an opportunity for us to do a late stage investment, which the members of our syndicate love to do.

34:01Yeah, there it is. There's thesyndicate.com. All right. We'll talk to you soon, Josh. Let me know if you're ever in Austin and we'll go grab some barbecue with lawn. Any excuse for lawn to get some salt lick with a Terry Black's beef rib. You're not a vegan or something like that, Josh, are you? Please. No, no. We're definitely in for some Terry Blacks. I got the Terry Blacks beef rib and brisket. Very solid. But if you come out to the Hilled Country, I'll take you to the original Salt Lake. You got to see it. It's very Texas. It's pretty Texas. And they got bison ribs there. They got the bison ribs out of the Salt Lake.

34:37I broke a tooth. You know, I had this like 20-year... I'm an old man now. I had a 20-year... Crown? What do they call that? A brew canal. Yeah, a crown. You had a crown. You broke a crown. I had a crown. I'm just chewing on this beef rib. Snap. That's how you know it's a good beef rib. Yeah. When unk loses a tooth, it's a good beef rib. All worth it. I'm getting it put back. It's getting put back. Totally worth it. All right. Good to see you, brother. I wasn't fishing for the endorsement, but I'll clip the heck out of it. We're going to have our agent throw that up on the website right away. Already working on it.

35:08Here's my tweet. Pull up my tweet here. PredictSkills.MD and VSLM. Oh, sure. I'm on it. I'm on it. I've got a typo there are on a collision course and it's going to be insane. Imagine legal, HR, marketing, et cetera, SML. God, I got to get that right. SLM paired with an open claw scale running relentlessly and recursively as he mentioned on your Mac Studio Dell workstation madness. Free, constantly improving intelligence. It's happening, folks. And I put a picture of this Dell NVIDIA GB300 desktop which Michael Dell has not sent me yet. How dare me. But I've been lobbying for. I mean, I'm super excited for this future.

35:48I mean, that's I think to me, that's the crucial step. We've been trying to have the agents run in a sandbox and in Amazon's rack somewhere that they need. They need to spread their wings. They need to get out there in the world. You got to have your Mac Studio or your amazing Dell standalone system. That's where you're in. Second, we can get these, you know, working on a laptop. I don't know the 48 gig is going to do it, but I think it'll be the 128 gig eventually. Going to upgrade everybody to a$5 ,000 laptop from whatever$1 ,800,$2 ,000 one, it'd be$3 ,000. It'll cost me an extra three times 25 people,$75K for the next three years.

36:28So it'll cost me an extra$2K a month if it has a three-year lifespan. But just think about how wild it would be if everybody's laptop was just cranking. I mean, it's also dangerous and scary. It is, but it's that recursive loop. It's that you, every time your agent does something, you're teaching it how to do that thing, and it's refining it over time. That's the crucial thing you miss out on if your agent can't really spread out and make its own sort of way in the world. Yeah. Hey, anything going on in Polymarket? I got a Polymark going for my Knicks tonight, or what's going on? I wanted to, so we should talk about this briefly, that Moonshot has launched Kimmy K26.

37:04This is their most advanced open source model to date. It upgrades for long horizon coding, agent swarms, more proactive agents, claw groups to which you can sort of bring in your own agents and skills from outside. But it did lead me to this poly market, which I will share right now. The Sharps are debating when are we going to get K3? Here we go. So you can see not a lot of volume, only about 30K in volume so far because this is so new. But if you look at June 30th, the Sharps are betting 50. Now it's a 59 % chance that we are going to get Kimmy K3 by the end of June, which would be very exciting.

37:43And we're at 2.6 or 7. 2.6. What was the relief? We were on 2.5. 2.6 got released this morning. So we're just, everybody's just getting their first crack at checking it out. People were kind of speculating here that it's really great at coding. And that's what everybody's focused on right now. Cursor's got a new model coming out. I saw they were raising a$50 billion across X.com. People were talking about that. You got Codex. You got QuadCode. Grok's doing great work there. They'll have some product coming out, I'm sure. It's just over and over and over again, we're going to see everybody get lightning focus.

38:21I heard that Sergey, who I saw Saturday night at the Breakthrough Prize, and I talked to him for a bit. But my understanding is he sent a memo. Is there like a Sergey memo that came out either this weekend or something that got leaked? And, you know, these memos are kind of designed to get leaked, as I've always told everybody. According to the information, the Google co-founder said in a memo to DeepMind employees that, and here's the quote, every Gemini engineer must be forced to use internal agents for complex multi-step tasks. Right. So they're dogfooding. They want them to, you know, catch up here and developers, developers, developers.

39:03Once you get recursive developers going, it informs your whole product production. So people have been talking about, wow, it's incredible how much product is getting shipped out of Claude. Well, Claude focused on code. Code then let them release more product. And then you get this flywheel going. The other companies are obviously trying to catch up with that. Yeah, exactly. Should we bring on our next guest? Absolutely. Let's keep this train of experts only moving here. If you listen to Twist, you're going to get practical and tactical, and you're going to get to peek around the corner with experts only.

39:42So that's what we're doing. He is the founder and CEO of Iona. They make fully integrated autonomous delivery systems for logistics operators. The idea is like a white glove drone service that if you're already doing logistics, you could just add drones to your fleet. Give it up for Etienne Louvet. Etienne, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. All right. So do you want to demo and show us what you built? Do you want to talk a little bit about why you built it and who the customers are and what it costs? Definitely. I think the team might have the videos in the background.

40:15I got some videos. We can pull up a video right now. Here we go then. And maybe before it even started, I can explain a bit like the origin story because it explains it all. Iona is an island in Scotland, the company. So I'm French. Unfortunately, I can't hide my accent. But we're located in the UK and Ireland as well as in the US now. Actually sponsored today by Gradient, a co-working space in Tulsa. Oh, there it is. We've got a plug in for Gradient. 195 francs per desk. Here we go. Use the promo code TWIST to get six francs or a pain au chocolat. No, wait, wait. It was in France or Scotland?

41:00No, it's in Oklahoma, actually. Yeah, Tulsa. Oklahoma, okay. Shout out to Oklahoma, yes. Beautiful shot video, by the way. It looks like you shot it with a drone. We have multiple. No, what Iona is doing is basically, it's coming from a vision. You can be on the Isle of Iona, which is a remote island in Scotland. You can be an IT consultant with a Starlink, a Zoom, Slack, and so on. But what you can't get access to is physical goods. So what we're building at Iona is the physical internet. It's also close to my heart because a part of my family is coming from rural places. And it's solving this paradox because at the moment, when you have less than 500 people per square mile, for instance, in a location, that's 99 % of the US that's 99 % of the world and yet our systems and logistics are optimized the way we were doing logistics 100 years ago with like a bulky delivery van delivering everything so what we're doing is we're building the full autonomy stack for logistics operators to take that transition which is crucial for them because unfortunately they realize that the big tech are coming and that autonomy is the biggest opportunity for them, but it's also the biggest threat.

42:16So this is, you're talking about the FedEx, UPSs, DHLs of the world. You're going to provide them with the infrastructure. So in other words, like a white labeled zip line in some ways? Yes and no. So yes, in the sense of it's going to be a white label and it's going to be for logistics operators, but we're going to also reduce the threshold. At the moment when a drone is flying in the US without going too much into jargon, it's flying under a regulatory framework that is made for aerospace. It means that it's extremely complex to manage. Part 108 is coming. It's a different regulatory framework.

42:50We have an expertise in that because one of the - Part 108 is the number, did you say? Part 108, yeah. Yeah. And part 108 is coming and it's a different threshold. And we have an expertise in that because we fly autonomously already in Europe and it's going to be the same system in the US. And what it enables is also to open the range of customers to also more local logistics operators, hospital, anybody with a delivery need. Got it. And unpack part 108 for us. We can get, we can double click on, you know, these kind of things here on the show. That's why we're here at Twist. So tell us a little bit about why part 108 is so different and transformative.

43:29Yes, it's a fundamental milestone. So in Europe in 2021, we had a similar framework. For once, Europe was ahead, not for long. And the reality is it just unifies anyone around the way we think about drone delivery and the way we think about drones in the airspace. So what it does is that it's a risk assessment framework. And one of the co-authors of the framework in Europe also inspired some of the rules for the FAA. So what it creates in the world is that we have a common framework, a global consensus on the way drones should be implemented in the airspace, which means that we can finally have Europe, the UK, the US and other part of the world joining around that.

44:20And in more details, what Part 108 does is, first, you don't need to be an aerospace manufacturer with what we call Part 135 to operate. So it reduces the threshold and it creates a framework that is much more adept to a delivery with a drone, for instance. Because if you're not flying a 747, you shouldn't be regulated the same way. And what it does... My understanding is the B-V-L-O-S. I don't know how they pronounce that in the industry. B-V-L-O-S. I don't know. Is that how they pronounce it? Usually we say B-V-L-O-S, yeah. But B-V-L-O-S. B-V-L-O-S in French is a much more gracious way to say it.

45:05But this is beyond, Lon, visual line of sight. Correct. So I think 107, because I've looked at these companies for 10 years, was like, hey, you can fly your drone if you can see it. But once you can't see it, then you get into, I think you tip into 108. Etienne, am I correct? Yeah, that's the distinguishing factor here. It's true. So the BVLOS, it stands for Beyond Vision Line of Sight. So when you can't see a drone, it means that the drone has to be highly automated or autonomous. And the significant change in that is that it means that you can have multiple drones or aircraft supervised by the same team that doesn't have to be on site.

45:48Because if you don't have to see the drone, you can be in Tulsa and operate somewhere else as well. So this is key. He is much greater. So when we contextualize it, this is kind of like going from level two autonomy to level four. Or if you're using autopilot and you've got to keep your eyes on the road, but when you get to FSD, like level four, Waymo, et cetera, you don't need to be paying attention. 107 line, you need a pilot, like a plane, and you need a line of sight. And then 108, you need an operator, which could be a group of people in Manila. You could have 1 ,000 Athena assistants who could be very easily trained in this to know what to do.

46:31They could be anywhere. They could be getting paid$1 an hour. They could be getting paid 30 bucks an hour. It's that level up. I mean, you think of drone operators as having that remote and they're looking and it's like it's got to be above the tree line. And, oh, we lost contact with it and running after it. And it's going from that to like the air traffic control model where you could have a tower that's monitoring all of these drones. And it doesn't have to be like a group of people that are actually watching the drone. It's obviously we're going to have to get there before we're going to have drone deliveries happening sort of en masse.

47:00I mean, I guess my question would be, like, is the goal ultimately just like unsegregated airspace, like drones are out there flying alongside every other kind of aircraft and we're monitoring them in sort of the same ways? Yes, exactly. So what you refer to is what we call the piece is called the detect and avoid. A second piece is called the onman traffic management. I deeply believe that the way we will basically innovate in drones is going to affect general aviation later on. because it's very hard to do unmanned traffic management for aviation. At the moment, 98 % of the control towers in the U.S.

47:37are understaffed. Right. And it's not going to get better, to be honest, because it's a difficult job and because it takes a lot of time to train people. And that's something that we can also do with a drone natively, because it's a bit like an autonomous system doesn't need a GPS. Well, it needs a GPS, but it doesn't need like Google Maps, basically. And it's a bit the same. because the drones are autonomous, they can talk to each other. And because they can talk to each other, the scale in terms of efficiency is drastic. And this is where we go on the vision. And I like this analogy. When you think about it, roads are a Roman technology from 3 ,000 years ago.

48:17And we should build a physical internet that doesn't rely on roads. We should build a physical internet that can transport anything anywhere. And you're building these in Galway, is my understanding. That is a great town. I haven't been there in 25 years, but I drove from Dublin to Galway. It's a college town. Is that right? You're building the drones in Galway? Yeah, we have a Celtic Tiger here. Yeah, we have a manufacturer there. And the reason is Ireland in general is an amazing place for drones. They operate with the same regulatory framework than Europe, which is the one that will be common with the US in terms of the way we think about it.

49:00So great. But they do it extremely fast. And the fast pace of iteration is especially very important. So we can get the paperwork back sometimes in less than 30 days when it takes up to six months in most places. So it's drastically more cost efficient. Now, do you have any partners in logistics yet that you've announced? Yes, we work with a few CMA, CGM in Europe. What is that CMA? CMA is one of the largest shipping companies in the world. They also operate, they have Miami, Singapore and Marseille. And they also acquired a number of companies. And so they have logistics needs. We're working with Welsh Group.

49:44We have an amazing neighbor in Cambridge in the UK, Welsh Group, that is a family-owned business, and it's exactly what we're trying to depict as a vision. They operate a number of deliveries in Cambridgeshire, and we did a demo with them, a public demo. So we demonstrated the tech end-to-end, how to integrate in their system and so on. And we have a few more exciting news coming very soon, including with high-profile partners. Yeah, and for people who don't know, there's a great program, Enterprise Ireland. I'll give them a shout-out. They used to, like, God, they've been around forever, but they used to even buy ads and host startups from Ireland.

50:26Back in my Silicon Alley Reporter days, Enterprise Ireland always was a big supporter of Silicon Alley Reporter. And I think maybe even the early days of this week in startups. And they gave you, I think, Etienne, a couple of million euro investment or grant. How do they do it these days? No, it's a grand project that we have for manufacturing. That's the part in Galway. And the reason is because there is a nice story also. We operate drones as well in Galway area. It's the area, so it's quite difficult to access. It's quite remote, and there are a number of communities there. So we're working on the project to actually connect the islands and connect a number of remote places there and remote communities with Galway and with other cities.

51:14What do people most want to order? Like when you talk to your consumers, you know, you've got people in Galway, they're on farms, they're in rural areas. What do they most want to deliver? Is it just like I need coffee and milk and provisions? Well, I think this is what's interesting is it's not food, right? You guys purposefully are not doing like food delivery. It's like cargo, right? Yes, we're calling that segment the light cargo. So we know very well Mana, for instance, and we know quite well Google Wing and even some people at Zipline. It's another segment. What I usually say is a drone is like a vehicle with wheels between a motorcycle and a 44 tons.

51:51Same philosophy, but not exactly the same tech. So what we do is significantly different. Like we have to get long range. So we go 60 to 120 miles with a significant volume. So we can get up to 20 parcels in the drone and a capacity to independently drop volume. So we can do delivery one, delivery two, and then go back to base, for instance. So what we really the sweet spot for us, and this is also why we're B2B, is whatever needs to be transported. At the moment, in those places, there is a cruel lack of accessibility for day to day items. We're talking about the parcels day to day. And it's something that affects actually even the purchasing power of local communities.

52:36And then we can actually scale that to medical deliveries, even groceries. It's true that the drone is a bit big. So if you want like coffee and milk, might be a bit of another shoot, but we could do it. I got a big totally order. What's the poundage here? How many pounds? Up to 44 pounds. Up to 44. So that's significantly larger than the other folks out there. It's 420, Jason. Our Taco Bell order might get up there. I don't know. We're close. I don't know. That's a fair point. There's a lot of tostadas coming. 40 plus pounds. Yeah, up to four. The first version that we have is - What distance can it do when it's at max load?

53:15At max load, the XL will need to be the one that you use. And in that case, it's going to do 60 to 80 miles. Holy cow. But wait, 60 to 80 miles, which means 20 miles out, 20 miles back with a buffer? No, it's a straight line. So half of that, a bit less than half of that if you want to back and forth. Got it. So 20, 30 miles, no problem. And then you got to have room to come back. Like the FAA makes you keep 50 % in the tank when you land or something like that? Depending on where you operate, but yes, about. And the thing is, it's fully electric. So also what we build is, again, it's the full autonomy stack.

53:51So for instance, we also have demonstrated a prototype for loading and unloading the parcels autonomously. So you can have like an autonomous network. So you can do like delivery point number one. You load a few parcels, you unload a few others. Then you go to a backyard delivery somewhere. Then you go back to another depot. like you can really have a data-driven autonomous logistics network. Yeah. Talk to me about charging. That's my final question there. It would seem to me, you know, we have supercharger stations, right? And you got Zipline in some markets. You've got a bunch of people. Amazon is doing this.

54:25Should there be a common standard, a common infrastructure for charging drones or are we going to just have a proprietary war now where you're all flying drones everywhere and there's no way to stop and recharge. Because if there were charging stations, they would not, I could put one on the ranch here for y 'all. I could give you two acres, cut off a little spot. You come down here, the noise won't be an issue. There's nobody in earshot. And they don't need to be on a highway. They don't need to be on the 405 in LA or 290 here in Austin. You could put these anywhere and you could all be recharging without having to go back to base.

55:04So I think I would slightly disagree with that because I think it's going in the way of innovation. The drones that you're thinking about, especially the zipline and everything, they're mostly multi-copters. So they have a very short range, a different type of technology. My drones, because they're doing logistics, they're extremely energy efficient. And it's not only because it's sustainable or whatever, it's because it's competitive. The more energy efficient you are, the less expensive you are on a unit cost basis. So I need to have a glide ratio. I need to have a wing, for instance. I need to have a sort of things like that.

55:40So when you - What do they call? Because I know there's quadcopters. I know there's fixed wing. What do you call these ones that are the hybrid? Is there a technical industry term? So if it's an hybrid, it's called an hybrid. In that case, like when they have - Okay, so technically it's a hybrid. Got it. Yeah. The technical name, Lon, for a hybrid. Yeah, it's hybrid. Yeah. Yeah. Ords are like what we call the tilt rotor. So it takes off vertically and it transitions to horizontal flight so that we can have the convenience of the vertical takeoff. And the tilt rotor gets you the glide path. And that's what Joby is doing too for humans.

56:15Yeah. Yeah. It's similar to Joby in some way. So we have less propellers and it's, of course, not the same product. So you're bigger than a zipline, smaller than a Joby is the way to think about it. Exactly. Light cargo is like when you're in the middle. Joby is like the new helicopter. Zipline is the new DoorDash. We're like the new delivery van in the sky. I love it. And what weight do you want to get to? Is there a goal that like, you know, you want to get to 150 pounds, 250 pounds, be able to deliver, you know, something of a little more heft? Yeah. You quote the famous philosopher, never say never.

56:48but we're not targeting that segment right away because the majority, like what I like about my segment is that 99 % of the streams are actually in that segment. So I don't want to over-optimize for the one time you need a plasma TV because you can probably wait for a delivery van or any other delivery. Yeah, plasma TV, that's a weird footprint. But yeah, if Lon's getting kettlebells, you know, Lon's getting in shape here. So have that a twist, Noti Gang, if you want to do some buff AI slop of Ron. But if you wanted to deliver a set of kettlebells, you know, it could be 300 pounds worth of kettlebells and just drop it off on Lon's house.

57:29But lower it slowly. Don't just drop it. That's dangerous. Fun story about that. We were supported by a grant and we had to explain why we were buying kettlebells. And I had to promise, no, it's not for personal use. I'm not like just buying a gym with the grant money because we're testing propellers. And if we can't find a way to like leave the table on the ground, it's going to take off. Yeah. Love it. Kettle bells are multi-use. All right. Listen, Ethan, continued success and be safe out there, right? Safety first. Yeah. That's what we always say here at Twist. Or if you're a burning man, there's a famous expression, Lon, safety third.

58:09Oh, no. One of the first Burning Mans I'm at, there's like a bunch of signs. What's first? If safety's third, what's first at Burning Man? I mean, like have a good time, be creative. But they just. Number one, vibes. Literally, these guys have this huge tower where they're doing aerial stuff. Sure, yeah, yeah. And there's a sign. It says safety third. Vibes first. Vibes above all, yeah. We got so much news. We got off-duty. There's a million places we could go. Did you want to talk about the Breakthrough Prize? Oh, yeah. So a friend of mine, Yuri Milner, and his wife Julia do this incredible breakthrough prize every year.

58:44I show some photos here. And I've been invited. And this was the first year I've been able to go. And what's really nice about this is... Look at all these celebrities that were there. Salma Hayek was there. Salma Hayek was there. Naomi Watts was there. Ben Affleck. Look at this. Yeah. I didn't say hi to any of them, but I had a really nice conversation with Gal Gadot. What? Gal Gadot. Yeah, and that was very nice. I spoke to Gal Gadot. I met Rob Lowe. I met Rob Lowe. I traded phone numbers with Rob Lowe. Julia Chastain was at the table next to me. Yes, Olivia Wilde, I saw her there. And then you just had like just every, and Lionel Richie came up and did a version of, he sang We Are the World.

59:32Sure. I sat next to a woman named Frances who's at Caltech who won the Nobel in chemistry. And we had a really nice conversation. I also, at my table, was Darren Aronofsky, the director. Oh, the great filmmaker, yes. Yes, and so I had a nice conversation with Darren because I went down memory lane with Darren. We're off duty here, so I can chew the fat with Lon. I said, hey, Darren, you don't remember this, but we met with Sean, who was in Requiem for a Dream back in the day, and I think he was also in Pi. He was the lead in Pi. I said, and you were doing a film. I had Silicon Island Reporter.

1:00:05I was writing for a paper magazine. I met you guys and we had a drink and then you were lamenting you needed to do screenings for Pi. And it cost like two or three grand to host a screening. So I did one for my magazine and you came and you did drinks after. Oh my God, it's incredible. And we had this like nice little thing and we started talking. He's doing a startup. You know, everybody who's in startups and venture capital wants to do movies. Everybody's in movies wants to do startup. Of course, of course. And so we got to connect. And then we talked about Ikaru, you know, one of my favorite Kurosawa films.

1:00:36I'm watching a documentary on Ikaru, like a random, you know, I go down into the dark web, into like the crevices of, you know, people trading tapes on Reddit and all this craziness. And I look for weird stuff and I found an Ikaru documentary. I don't know who produced it. It's in Japanese. Somebody took the time to put subtitles on it. And they go through that film, which I love. And so what I'll recommend is Ikaru, this great Kurosawa film. It's been overlooked among the great Kurosawis because it's not a samurai movie. People always focus on Yojimbo, Sanjuro, Seven Samurai. They forget about, yeah, Ikiru and High and Low is the other one I really love that is not a samurai.

1:01:16Well, yeah, that was during his High and Low. Yeah, there it is. Yeah, there's Ikiru. This is an incredible film about a guy who gets cancer. This will be my off-duty for today. Sure. And he works in the government for 30 years. He gets cancer. He realizes he's never lived. then he meets a young uh woman and they kind of in the second half of the film he decides i'm going to live a little and he goes out he starts drinking has to have fun he's got uh stomach cancer but he decides he's going to live a little and then i watch this documentary about it and they're like talking about the lighting and they're talking about uh if you if you do the office scene or if you just go into google uh images you can look for the office scene i know the one you're talking about and in icaru the office scenes are incredible because they stacked all these books and all these papers.

1:02:01Jacob got it. So if you look in the background, it's just nonstop. There's a couple of different images here, like right there behind him, you'll see stacks of paper right behind him. The photo, yeah, there it is. And they explained how they wanted to build these like towers of papers and he was approving them. They couldn't find them. So they went into Toho Studios archive of all the receipts and they brought them there with the dust on it because somebody brought them and they took the dust off and cleaned them up. And Kurosawa had a conniption and was like, hey guys, I want them with the dust.

1:02:31I want this to seem like the most oppressive place ever where he's sitting there and people are complaining to him about getting approval. He goes and he decides he wants to do one thing in his life that just counts. One thing to spread joy. I'm going to leave it there. Great film. So I spent a little time talking to Aronofsky about it and we were like the only two people in California. Do you see this film? It means to live. 2022 Living. You should check it out it is a british remake of the same story of icara it starts it starts bill nighy but it's a retelling he has a he's a bureaucrat he learns he has a fatal disease and he decides to live for one day here it came out in 2022 it was at sundance oh wow so anyway i've been having my hollywood moment these days uh two two weekends in a row i was in hollywood yeah wow now with folks uh and so that is my off-duty breakthrough prize just thank you for inviting me but what I noticed, and I was talking to Francis about this incredible Nobel Prize winner, is the pace of science is moving so fast because of AI that all the stuff we talk about here is extraordinary.

1:03:41But the things they're doing in science and the breakthrough they're making, it's essentially we can choose as a society where to point the ai gun right now it's at developers okay fine okay it's that productivity okay great we're going to make new backgrounds in star wars and i was talking to gal gadot about this and she said the movie she's working on instead of spending two or three hundred million on it before promotions pna she said we can now do it for 70 million and everything's done with ai except for the performances except for the writing and she said, I am great with this because, again, we're talking about CGI.

1:04:19Like CGI, obviously you play Wonder Woman, etc. Is this the Bitcoin movie? But you could lower the cost dramatically. What's that? Was this the Bitcoin movie? She's in that Doug Lyman movie that they're talking about a lot about the history of Bitcoin. Oh, I don't know. Yeah. By the way, she's tall. She is Wonder Woman. She is tall. Yeah. And she's got presents, but she's also a lot of fun. Things are moving fast now. The way they're doing it, he's shooting it entirely in rooms on green screen, and then all the backgrounds are going to be filmed in. Okay, so that's the movie. Pull up a story about this.

1:04:52Let me see what you're talking about here. And I asked her, is it Ben Affleck's new technology? Because Ben Affleck was building something like this, and it was no. But she said, I asked her as an actor what the future was, and this is what she was telling me about. And she said, you know, Jason, you know, Jake, the thing here that is super compelling is because, we are, you know, like on this green screen, et cetera, and you strip everything away. She said, I can actually, you can focus on performance. Like it's all performance. And yeah. Yeah, I'm trying to find a good image. They haven't released a lot of good images yet, but it's in a London soundstage.

1:05:33They're shooting the entire thing in a London soundstage. And this has got to be it. It's called - Oh, it is, because she said Casey Affleck. Bitcoin Killing Satoshi, a$70 million feature film shot entirely on a custom gray screen soundstage with AI-generated backgrounds and lighting. So all the backgrounds, all the lighting is all going to be done by AI. The only thing that's real is going to be the actors in front of this gray backdrop. They're shooting this right now. It's very timely. I was just reading about this. Technology. Ask your, do you Claude, if you do Claude's sidebar or your perplexity sidebar, you could ask it what technology platform they're using to accomplish this.

1:06:13It's a company. I already found it. It's a company called Acme AI and FX. They're building a new kind of network or background just to power this project. Okay, let's book them for the show. Let's get them on the pod. It would be really cool to talk to them. Get them on for Friday. I would love to talk about this. So this is definitely the film she was talking about here. her main point is you know we're going to be able i guess this would be the counter to the end of the movie industry the end of the film industry there's going to be many more films made because of this and yeah you know the whole hand wringing okay i get it set designers losing their jobs uh you know fx people maybe you know there's gonna it's gonna be a bummer for a group of people just like it was a bummer when the typing pool went away the messenger pool went because of email and word processing.

1:07:02But at the end of the day, tell more stories. Okay, those people are going to have to adapt and do other things. And there'll be people who do it with sets, of course. But this does seem to me to be a counter to that. And then what if these things could stay in theaters a little bit longer because there was many more of them? Yeah. We could see a kind of resurgence where people might get out of their seats and go to the theater because there's more adult fare. I mean, you know, like everything can't be Snow White, which she was in. Yeah. I mean, if you think about the variety, I think you're absolutely right.

1:07:36I think it's just like we've seen with so many other fields. It's there's always going to be humans in the loop. I can't make movies by itself. It doesn't know how to make a movie that would entertain anybody. You use A.I. to do certain functions and speed things up and make things cheaper to allow the creative people to do more with the creative side. I mean, I wanted to make a horror movie years ago with my friend, and we felt like on the bare minimum, a practical budget just to get the locations, just to make the costumes, just to do the makeup and stuff. It's like 100K. So imagine if we could just step into a room.

1:08:09We'd still have actors. You'd still have makeup artists. You'd still have the bare bones. Yeah, but you might cut it 50K. You might cut it in half. We wouldn't need to take all the actors to some real location. You wouldn't need to pay all of these people like a production designer. And so, yeah, they're on the balance. There's some jobs being taken over by A.I., but it also allows for a whole movie to get made that might otherwise not. And a human movie written by people, starring people, made by people. So we're not talking about it. I think that was always what led people astray was all those tweets where it's like Hollywood is over.

1:08:40Sorry, actors and all that stuff. It's like I don't think A.I. is ever going to replace the creative people. It's going to give them more tools to make more and bigger things. Correct. And so absolutely great for Hollywood. Got anything else off duty here? Oh, my God. So much stuff. I started watching, by the way, the love story. Oh, right. The Ryan Murphy. Yeah, the Ryan Murphy thing. So the wife and I are watching that. We're two episodes in. And, man, it has got me nostalgic for New York in that period. I mentioned on the show before I got to meet JFK Jr. twice. and it is just like in one scene, they're going to the Four Seasons restaurant with the pool in the middle.

1:09:20There's a party there. I remember going there many times. In another one, they were at another place that I've been to a bunch of times. I forgot what the scene was, but I was like immediately like, oh, I've been to that restaurant a bunch of times. That's always the appeal. That's what Ryan Murphy and that crew do so well. Like if you remember that O.J. Simpson show, the American crime story one, it was the same with L.A. in the 90s. They recreated it so carefully carefully that if you were there you were like this is bringing me right back to this like time and place and moment um yes which is part of the fun for sure part of the fun it is definitely and then oh and they were playing bjork and stuff like that you know i've talked about like you know that here before uh but yeah they're just tons of interesting shots of like his loft which i remember was on Walker Street.

1:10:09And then there's a bar, Walker's, Bubby's, the Odeon, Tompkins Square Park, the Guggenheim. What else were they at? So it's just like really Indochine. Like these were all places I went in the early 90s. So I'm just loving it. But the Odeon's still there. Bubby's still there. Walker's still there. So those three are still there. And he's also, you know, at a gym. I'm not sure what gym he's at when he's there. And they also show him. It's all real. They do their research and they get everything sort of just right. And that definitely helps make the show feel more compelling. North Moore Street.

1:10:55That's what it is. Walker's is on the corner of North Moore and I think 6th Avenue. And there's a Calvin Klein's office. And I was literally speaking to David Geffen, the famous music producer, a week or two ago. And we were talking about the film. And he gets a shout out in the first episode that Calvin Klein is, you know, taking a phone call from David Geffen, the music producer. It was really cool. There you go. What else do you got off duty? You must have something to. So anyway, I'm two episodes in. It's great. I think it's great couples watching because it's a love story. Yes. There's a movie on HBO Max that just popped up.

1:11:30It's Brian Fuller, who people remember he did that show Pushing Daisies. He did that show Hannibal that I liked really much, the Hannibal Lecter show. He's got his first feature film out. It's called Dust Bunny. It's on HBO Max right now. Nobody paid attention to this in theaters, but it's really interesting. It's really fun. It's really whimsical. It's kind of a comedy fantasy horror about this. And it's about this young girl who believes in monsters, and she believes there's a monster living under her bed that has eaten her parents. And Mads Mikkelsen plays her neighbor from down the hall who turns out to be some sort of a man of mystery, a mercenary, a hitman of some kind.

1:12:10And so she hires him to kill this monster that she believes is lurking under her bed. Oh, good premise. And it's the question becomes, is something real happening to this girl? Did her parents abandon her? Were they murdered? That's what Mads Mikkelsen is trying to figure out. But she keeps filling in like, no, I'm telling you, it is a actual monster. That becomes the drama of the movie. It's a lot of fun. Really well designed. Very cool. Could I watch this with a 16 year old? Yes. Or two 10 year olds? 10 might be. I mean, if they are mature 10 year olds, it's a little bit of violence. There's a little bit of mayhem.

1:12:45But 1600 percent. The 16 year old, I predict, is going to really enjoy it. All right. Listen, I have been. Thank you to my friends over at Row.co slash twist. Okay, go there, and you get to the front of the line. You get to see if you can get your GLP. Your insurance checker. Yeah, your insurance checker. Yeah, insurance checker. So I have been looking for great sources of protein. I need stuff that's quick and easy, right? You can make a protein shake. You got all these things. Yeah. It takes a lot of work. I do like doing the egg whites once in a while. I love a little brisket. But I have been really trying to focus in on the most bang for the buck in terms of calories to protein.

1:13:23because when you're on a GLP, you can lose a little bit of muscle mass. You're just eating so much less. Not everybody, but some. So I started looking for the best bang for the buck. Egg whites are up there. Greek yogurt's up there. But this one, turns out, tinned fish. Oh. So I have bought like five different tinned fish, and this is the one right now that I'm really feeling. It's called Wild Planet. I think they're like amongst the more, you know, healthy ones or great or sourced really well. And 160 calories for 28 grams of protein. Wow. You're trying to get that 30 grams of protein in the morning.

1:14:04So sometimes I'll just make myself a piece of toast. I get a little bit of carbs. Okay, whatever. It's from my Happy Jane Bakery I love so much here in Austin. But these anchovies, I love anchovies. And you put a little lemon on it. You put some mustard. So toast. You're making toast and then you're putting the anchovies on it? I'll just dump the whole thing with the olive oil on a plate. I eat them up. Oh, wow. I dip a little bit of my olive sourdough in there. And this is very good for you. I suggest you buy a 10-pack, a tin, Lon. And when you're going to make a bad decision, not saying you make bad decisions.

1:14:38I'm not saying you don't. I'm not saying you're overweight, but I'm not saying you couldn't lose 10. I could lose 10. I'm not saying any of those things. I could lose a little bit of weight. I think 10. um so uh this would help you and then i looked it up and now my youtube algorithm is serving me up a bunch of friends of mine like tim ferris was talking about uh people go on anchovy fast so i don't like this fasting it's like i get dizzy i gotta perform on the show i get grumpy but people do anchovy fast now wow so they'll do like three cans of this a day they reduce themselves to 600 800 calories whatever it is uh instead of fasting full-on fasting and this puts you in that ketosis So anyway, listen, I'm no expert on this stuff, but I have lost the 40 pounds.

1:15:22I do feel great. And there is something about a shape I've been since my 20s. There is something about tinned fish, I think, that is sort of unappealing to me. But then I think back, like, as a kid, tuna fish out of the can was one of my favorite snacks. I would just eat the tuna fish right out of the can. So I've developed this over time. I didn't used to have a thing about tinned fish. Okay, I showed you mackerel. The other one that's really good is sardines. Yes. So you can get sardine fillets, and they're incredible as well. Also, same situation. You know, you're going to get into keto. You can also get, and there's people who really love this stuff.

1:15:58Like, you can make a little plate of them. So sardines are probably my, I like mackerel above sardines, but I like, it's just right behind it. So wild sardines, mackerel, and then, I think I tried one other fish. Yeah, no, I think those are the two I've tried. Anyway, people make plates of these. So you make like a charcuterie, but you include some of this. Oh, you know what? White anchovies are the other really good ones. The bocorinos from Spain. And then herring, of course, the classic elderly Jew snack. Well, I want to get, there's a herring from Sweden where they mix it with a mustard cream sauce.

1:16:37Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure I know about this. And I had it there a couple of times when I was in Stockholm with Tyler and when he was living there. and man that is i'm gonna find that recipe where they do like i think it's like egg whites and mustard and it's a very creamy sauce yeah and they dump the herring in it or they'll put cotton in it's unbelievable so there's your tip folks i hope you stay healthy and we'll see you on wednesday for twist