Wisdom of the $TAO: the future is decentralized AI

17:09Jason Calacanis:So as a result, there are some exchanges that are looking into listing it in this way, but it is a bit of a process because there's also things like legal KYC on the subnets themselves that they have to go through. Each subnet has to go through effectively the same scrutiny that Tal went through before it was listed in the first place. And there's 120 of these. So it takes a little while to do that.

17:29Ala Shaabana:Actually, Kraken is ahead of everyone else. Kraken is a top validator on the BitTensor blockchain. So they are very active in our space. They do not yet list subnet tokens, but being a validator would be the first step to doing that.

17:43Jason Calacanis:And as an investor and partner in Stilcore Capital, I assume this was part of your original premise that you're dipping into the subnets and making investments across those. Yeah.

17:54Ala Shaabana:We are. Yes. That's in fact our charter. So you invest in subnets. Yeah.

17:59Jason Calacanis:And so that's what you do. You have this premise at Stilcore. Hey, we know that Tau has the potential to be the next Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever it is. It's not guaranteed. Nothing is. This is a bit of the Wild West, this is, you know, again, back to tip of the spear. But you're, after you make that bet, you're making the second bet. And the second investment is which one of these will break out. And so we just started talking about this new revolutionary concept of, hey, what if you could replicate cursor? So then my question is, if it's only worth 30 million, that is the lowest valuation of people in the space.

18:41Jason Calacanis:How do you evaluate that as an investment? Yeah.

18:45Ala Shaabana:I mean, we look at these subnets like you would look at startups, right? And you know, I come out of that world, right? So it's the same lens. It's what's the total addressable market? Is this product actually competitive in that market? Does it have a significant advantage? What's the team look like? How good are they at marketing, right? Because it's not enough to make the best product, you have to market it the best also. So if you kind of can come out and check all those boxes in each one of the companies or subnets that we've invested in to date has checked all those boxes. So we've announced three investments.

19:19Ala Shaabana:Ridges is one of them. Targon is another one, subnet four, and they provide very, very cheap inference. Oh, and then yes. Great. And then

19:28Jason Calacanis:inference based on, tell me that the name of that one again. Targon, subnet four. Targon. Okay. Building out your team is one of the most crucial things you have to get right in your startup, and finding the right developers is particularly important. But now there's Lemon.io. They're going to save you time, money, and headaches by doing all the time-consuming legwork for you. They've got an experienced lineup of pre-vetted developers working for competitive rates. Just 1 % of applicants are accepted into Lemon's elite program, and they're not just out there finding this great talent. They're also working with you to integrate these new members into your team.

20:05Jason Calacanis:Plus, if it's not a good fit, hey, and sometimes things don't work out, Lemon will hook you up with a new developer ASAP. I've seen startups go from just pretty good to amazing after filling out their teams with developers from Lemon.io. Go to Lemon.io slash twist and find your perfect developer or technical team in 48 hours or less. Plus, twist listeners get 15 % off their first four weeks. That's lemon.io slash twist, L-E-M-O-N dot I-O slash twist. So that's subnet number four, Targon is doing inference, which means instead of me sending something to Claude Opus and, you know, paying for it, I can go to Targon and have my OpenClaw do inference there?

20:52Jason Calacanis:Is that what's possible?

20:53Ala Shaabana:Yeah, so it's, you can do that. So Targon supplies its industrial grade inference. So it's private. Oh, okay. So, right. You've heard about this. I know you've been talking about this lately, right? So private inference, your prompts are not consumed and used to retrain some big company's model. Yeah, we just had Eric Voorhees from Venice AI on the other day talking about this same thing. He's also doing private AI. Yes. So, but this is provably encrypted end to end. They have a trusted execution environment. You do have to pay for the inference, right? So it's not free. They're a company, right?

21:31Ala Shaabana:And they actually do have investors. So they are a traditionally venture-backed company as well. Their investors include Toby Ludke, who founded Shopify. And yes, and Ram Sriram, who was the first investor in Google. So yeah, so I've got some blue chip investors as well. Okay.

21:46Jason Calacanis:So that subnet is a for-profit corporation. And in addition to that, there is a subnet token to incentivize people, I'm going to guess here, to put up infrastructure hardware to provide the hardware? Or are they standing up their own hardware as a company, Targon?

22:07Ala Shaabana:Nope. Targon probably has their own hardware, but the bulk of it is served out of their mining network. And people are supplying the inference to the Targon mining network. Now, there's some rules. They have to run the trusted execution environment and the setup that Targon dictates to them. But if they do that, whoever supplies the most inference to Targon to resell gets the most Targon subnet for tokens as a miner.

22:32Jason Calacanis:Got it. So there's two ways. As you can see, like Bitcoin, there's so many picks and shovels and services and application layer here. There's all different places to invest. Targon obviously has some all-star investors in their corporation, but another way to make an investment in Targon's vision is to buy the subnet token. Correct. Okay. And we've done that from Stilcor. Fantastic.

22:57Ala Shaabana:Yep. Yep. And the third investment that we've made is in Hippias, which is the centralized storage. So kind of similar to Filecoin, but done in the BitTensor way.

23:06Jason Calacanis:This one is less interesting to me because storage is such a commodity. Why would you consider this one if storage is a commodity?

23:14Ala Shaabana:First of all, the price for Hippias is quite a bit lower than everyone else, including Filecoin. So it's 400X to 4 ,000X less expensive. So they've been able to very, very significantly shave off the price. And they also are very good at the Hippias token. The tokenomics for Hippias are very interesting and very novel. they have deterministically tied the value of the hippias token to the increased usage and increased revenue of the hippias product so you need the hippias token to mine so you must stake hippias to mine so it's a stake to earn right so so basically they've got all these things that are continuously driving demand for the hippias token there is no scenario in which hippias the product and the revenue does very well but the token does not so that was a very interesting new innovation.

24:04Jason Calacanis:Got it. So this is one of the challenges in crypto is where does the value accrue to? And they have solved for that. And that was one of the reasons in your investment thesis of why to engage with this project. Again, Hippias, private corporation as well with investors in the corporation, I assume. Where does the hard drive space come from?

24:25Ala Shaabana:The miners supply the hard drive space. So storage is provided by the miners. the miners must be extremely performant. So they're very snappy about serving up the file. They have to be online all the time so they can't just go offline randomly. So the quality of service that they provide and the amount of storage that they provide is the criteria that is used to award subnet tokens to them with each mining contest.

24:49Jason Calacanis:So we keep talking about miners. Who are the miners in these systems typically? What is the profile of that individual corporation, hacker, zealot, early true believer. We don't know.

25:03Ala Shaabana:It's like Bitcoin miners. It's exactly the same thing. There are people from all over the world. There is no onboarding KYC process. It's permissionless mining, just like a lot of crypto.

25:13Jason Calacanis:So I have, it could be, I'm just taking a guess here. I am a company, like maybe a DigitalOcean or something. And I've got massive storage that I haven't sold yet. Just making this up. I don't know that DigitalOcean has done this, but you could pick another hosting provider. Hey, I've got these hundreds of terabytes that I'm not using. I'm putting online every day, waiting for a customer. Hey, why don't I just throw them in here, get those hard drives warmed up and monetize them while I'm waiting. If I can make some amount of money on them while I'm standing them up, hey, great. And then maybe they will perform better and the token reward will accelerate.

25:52Jason Calacanis:And that would be better than me even selling it to a customer. Correct. Directly myself.

25:56Ala Shaabana:It's exactly like Uber, right? Like if you have those unused cars that aren't doing anything, you might as well put them on the Uber network and drive around to make some money, right? Same thing, just with storage.

26:05Jason Calacanis:When you look at the Mark's bets there, what do you, what do you think of his bets? I'm looking for a little outside validation here. Walk us through those three projects and tell us if they succeed, how could they impact the infrastructure and the future of the interwebs? First off, they're very solid. That's well done, Mark. The one other thing I wanted to mention is all these projects have a very interesting entry point into the real world, which I think is a problem that a lot of crypto suffers from. If you go to really any crypto conference, you always see these projects that are marketed from crypto people to crypto people, but there's very few that actually hit everyday users.

26:48Jason Calacanis:And I think that's what the entire industry is missing. And I think the first projects to solve this are the ones who are going to be the ones really reaping the benefits. And I think whether it's Hippias, Targon, or really any other subnet on the BitTensor ecosystem, whoever hits that first is a bit of an arms race happening right now within the ecosystem, which is rather exciting. But those who actually get there, and I think BitTensor does have the potential to get there first, those are the ones that are going to benefit the most. Whereas the teams themselves, which is another point that I like to evaluate when I'm looking at the subnets, each team behind those subnets has, I'm going to say, a solid pedigree within the ecosystem.

27:25Jason Calacanis:For example, Targon, actually that's a good shout out to the CEO, but he actually is one of the first people that mined on BitTensor when we first started back in 2021. So he has a very in-depth knowledge, understands how the system works. And so this is the kind of person I'd be betting on. So I think all three of those bets are, There's all that.

27:41Ala Shaabana:Mark has actually built an open class skill that I think we have to take a look at called Vibe Miner. It sustainably and profitably mines a token SN85. Video? Am I saying it right, Mark? Video? Yeah, Vid-A-I-O. Oh, Vid-A-I-O. I don't know how to pronounce it. I've just seen it written. But yeah, good guess. Can you show us a little bit of how this works? I have a screenshot here in the doc, if that's the best we could do. Yeah, just show the screenshot. All right, so we'll pull up the screenshot for the doc. But I can describe it. I can describe it. Tell us about why OpenClaw and crypto mining are a good fit.

28:20Ala Shaabana:I was fascinated by this. Yeah, so I watched you guys, right? When Claw came out, you guys loaded it up right away on your machines. I waited until there was a hosted Claw before sort of diving in. And then I thought, like, how can I apply this to BitTensor? And I've always wanted to be a miner on BitTensor, but it's usually a lot of sort of sysadmin work and just stuff I don't really know how to do. It's not my forte. So when Claw came around, I was like, oh, I'll just have my Claw become a miner on a BitTensor subnet. So I had the Claw actually choose which subnet to mine. So it's mining subnet 85, which is video compression.

28:58Ala Shaabana:It's using AI to both upscale and compress video. And it does it 50 to 90 % cheaper than anyone because it's using BitTensor Contestonomics to do it. And I am now one of the people upscaling and compressing. And I have to do it within 60 seconds of getting a request from the validators. And I'm using BitTensor infrastructure to do this. So I'm using Hippias for the storage, right? So I'm getting 400 to 4 ,000 % off, right, on the storage. And I'm using Targon for the machine that I'm using to actually do the video crunching. So again, I'm getting, it's like one 10th the cost.

29:36Jason Calacanis:Hey, listen, sometimes I'm thinking faster than I can write everything down. And I found this amazing tool. I am obsessed with it. It's called WhisperFlow, W-I-S-P-R, Flow. All you have to do is talk. And WhisperFlow turns it into crisp, perfect writing instantly. Not just talking about dictation, but removing filler, fixing punctuation, and even formatting your text while you speak. It is mind-blowing how good this is. It makes all the other dictation software look basic. And Whisperflow matches your natural tone and speaking voice. So the writing sounds like you actually wrote it yourself. And Whisperflow works wherever you are.

30:14Jason Calacanis:I use it when I'm in Slack. I'll use it when I'm in Superhuman, doing an email, doing a message. I'll jump into iMessage. And even when I'm writing a document, or I'll even use it when I'm talking to my OpenClaw agent. Finally, someone I can talk to who actually takes down everything I say. Unlike maybe the interns I've got, they get like six out of every 10 instructions correct. Whisperflow. Everybody's going crazy about this product in Silicon Valley. Everybody in tech is using it. Whisperflow.ai slash twist. It's spelled W-I-S-P-R-F-L-O dot A-I slash twist. Incredible product. You have to try it.

30:52Ala Shaabana:So, and I've been able to make it profitable, but not sustainable. So it cost me about 10 bucks a day. There's about$3 ,000 being handed out by the VidIO network per day to miners. I am making about$30 per day, and it costs me$10, so it is profitable. However, after the immunity period where new miners basically get for like 24 hours, I usually last another 24 hours until more excellent miners kick me out. As Jason likes to talk about the age of excellence, BitTensor is the most ferocious form of capitalism and age of excellence that I've ever seen. So I get booted out frequently, and I've not figured out how to stay in the rankings, but I'm working on that still.

31:34Ala Shaabana:Okay.

31:35Jason Calacanis:I got to repeat this back to you so I make sure I understand what's happening here. There are a bunch of distributed services being empowered by BitTensor that lower the cost of doing common jobs. A common job is, you know, or a large job, you know, I don't know, programming a large language model or processing large video jobs. Yeah. These are large jobs in the world. So you're doing arbitrage saying I'm going to use the lowest cost bit tensor network for storage. I'm going to use the lowest cost bit tensor for inference.

32:13Ala Shaabana:Yeah, well, I'm actually just using the machine. So it's not really inference in this case. Just machine using GPU or CPU, whatever it happens to be, processors.

32:23Jason Calacanis:So then you're sending the jobs through this machine now that is grinding down to the lowest cost possible. And what this does is it creates a free market incentive to just lower the cost of compute across storage, across programming co-pilots, across video processing. Is that the core job here is video processing?

32:49Ala Shaabana:Yeah, this is using AI to compress video. Right. And upscale it.

32:53Jason Calacanis:Who's doing those jobs? I'm just curious in the world. I don't know. So I couldn't tell you.

32:57Ala Shaabana:Oh, well, there's all those apps, too, that's like take your old photos, take your old grainy videos, upscale them, make them look high depth. Like that's a big thing. And especially Hollywood does it all the time. Like they're using A.I. to like make Blu-rays or make 4K restorations of older films and TV shows. So, yeah, there's a lot of upscaling with A.I. being done right now.

33:17Jason Calacanis:You know, it's so interesting about that, Lon. We had this whole thing where they were trying to preserve these final prints of, you know, amazing movies. and like they would have some number of, you know, minutes in a print that were, you know, decomposing.

33:33Ala Shaabana:Exactly, they were rough for, right. Yeah, because the old film stock had started to decompose, yeah. And in all likelihood, AI could not only restore it to its previous glory,

33:46Jason Calacanis:it could restore it to a glory that the film was not capable of at the time of shooting.

33:51Ala Shaabana:Well, it's a little bit like what we saw at The Wizard of Oz at The Sphere. Like they can use AI to not just restore the original image to look like new. They can add stuff in the background. They could blow it up to a different aspect ratio. They can put stuff in the background that wasn't there. I mean, the sky's the limit with what you can do with this technology to old films.

34:11Jason Calacanis:When you think about that, Mark, the idea of losing art in the world to physics, you know, the Mona Lisa, you know, some great film. all these Grateful Dead shows that were bootlegged, not only could they be restored to their previous high watermark, they could be restored to a higher mark. Yeah.

34:35Ala Shaabana:I mean, you already could see it. Like if you go by like The Duelists, that Ridley Scott movie on Blu-ray, you're seeing it crisper with more detail than people saw it when they went to the theater in the 70s.

34:47Jason Calacanis:If we were to, I'll think about what could happen with infrastructure in the world AI agents now could be examining the BitTensor network. I'm sure somebody has it. You came up with this clever idea, Mark, but your agent could go find 10 similar opportunities. Yeah, Allah. And we might be in a situation where we've just got a, I wouldn't call it a death spiral, but we would have a compression of costs that would just be relentlessly being pursued, not in a human sense of being relentlessly pursued, but in a 24-7, 365 billions of tokens pursuit of lowering costs. Yeah, I think it's quite possible that it could happen.

35:35Jason Calacanis:But I think at the same time, it will actually push competition, in my honest opinion. I think that's actually going to be great because cost is one thing, but there's also quality that comes down to it as well. I think that's what a lot of these projects that are fairly new tend to overlook a little bit in that they will provide something at lower cost than anybody else, but there will also be cutting quality. So I think that eventually these agents are going to be balancing between how well these tokens are that they're pulling out or how well these services that they're pulling out compared to how much the cost is going to be.

36:07Jason Calacanis:And I think eventually it's going to balance out to a specific ecosystem. I think BitNesture kind of has the advantage there because we have 120 projects and growing that can even compete within itself. And there's a foundation, Allah, that you're part of that sets the agenda for subnets? There is an OpenTensor Foundation. That's effectively what was started with the ecosystem. There was myself and Jacob Steeves, my co-founder. At this point, we are actually working on decentralizing even further. So I'm no longer part of the foundation. I've started working on Cursive Labs full-time. Jacob Steeves is also no longer part of the foundation.

36:43Jason Calacanis:He's working on his own subnet. And so now the foundation itself is sort of, in a way, handing over the reins to the community. And now we're sort of following the exact same pattern as Bitcoin, where now the project is being maintained by the entire community in itself, because it is open source and so anyone can contribute. How does a new subnet emerge? Is this like doing a new top level domain where there's politics and payments? and, you know, or could anybody who's an entrepreneur say, I have an entrepreneurial company. I want to be part of this. I want to launch a subnet. Yep, absolutely.

37:19Jason Calacanis:Anybody can launch a subnet. There's no, it's permissionless, which is kind of the great thing about it. If you have a great idea, you come to the ecosystem and you launch a subnet. Is there a certain amount of Tau tokens you need to launch one? And then what is the entry price now then? There is a registration cost to it. And that cost is variable according to demand. So according to how many people want to enter the ecosystem, the cost will go up. If there's less people trying to enter the ecosystem, the cost will go down. It's a bit of a moving average sort of thing. Got it. And how many subnets are allowed to be made, Mark?

37:48Jason Calacanis:Is there like a cap on that? And what's the cost now?

37:53Ala Shaabana:Yeah, at the moment, there's a cap. It's 128 subnets, but down the road, not too much further. We don't know exactly when, but soon-ish, that cap will be removed or grown. um it's it's the cap is there to to create quality right so we don't want sort of a free for all like we've seen on solana with pump.fun you know we don't want pump.fun subnets right so the cap is there to sort of you know make sure that the um the the proper mood is set on the chain so it feels like the library not like the party right so that's what we want and um yeah and the cost um i haven't i haven't checked recently but it's it's been as high as a million to buy a subnet.

38:36Ala Shaabana:It just depends on when you go look. And I've seen it as low as like 100K. So it depends on the price of Tau. It depends on what's available.

38:43Jason Calacanis:This is not going to be chaos. It's going to be orderly. Let's, Mark and Olive, I could have you guys come back in 30 days and give us an update. That would be really great for the audience because I think we've incepted in people's minds here a bit. And one of the great ways, I think, to create continuity here is just check in every 30 days. What happened in the last 30 days? What bets have you made? What have you added? So I'll see you guys on April 6th-ish. I'm going to put it on the calendar now. Okay. I made a note for my agent.

39:17Ala Shaabana:He's on it. He'll remind me. Okay.

39:19Jason Calacanis:All right. Then nobody has to remember anything.

39:21Ala Shaabana:Thanks, guys.

39:21Jason Calacanis:Just sit here and tell our agents to do it. Let's drop those guys. It's pretty mind-blowing, huh?

39:26Ala Shaabana:Oh, my gosh. I'm going to put in 5 or 10K. I'm going to get some cash together.

39:30Jason Calacanis:I'm here for you making some bets. Exactly. For your future. It's time. You're going to retire. You're 45 now? How old are you?

39:39Ala Shaabana:47. I'm 47.

39:41Jason Calacanis:Okay. So you're like, yeah, you're six years, eight years behind me.

39:44Ala Shaabana:It's time to start thinking about my nest egg. For sure.

39:48Jason Calacanis:So, yeah, just a little bit. I mean, you need to have like, I would say at your age, 20 % in things that can go to zero, but that could also go 100X would be pretty nice, right?

39:59Ala Shaabana:No, I mean, my Solana is in that seat. It's down a lot, but I'm not giving up. I'm not giving up yet.

40:07Jason Calacanis:I mean, I think it's like a wise bet until you find a better bet. Let's say, you know, your Solana goes back to where you bought it or doubles. You can look at it and reevaluate and say, you know what? I'm going to pair 20 % of this and put it into the next big thing. I'm going to pair 50 % of it or I'm going to take some wins and put it into QQQ or something.

40:26Ala Shaabana:BitTensor, yeah. Or BitTensor, yeah.

40:27Jason Calacanis:But 20 % to that is, I think, a really good wager, a bet. You know, I like young people, especially since you don't have kids yet, you know, or me never. Thank you for adding yet.

40:39Ala Shaabana:Thank you for adding yet. I appreciate that. Well, I mean, let me tell you something.

40:43Jason Calacanis:This is going to be great for your retirement. You know, once you have kids, there's no retiring. There's just, you know, never ending list of bills and complications coming.

40:53Ala Shaabana:We've got Michael Ryaboy. He's here to show us Setup Claw. Michael, good to have you on the show. I loved this, Jason. I found this on social media. It is a sort of bespoke white glove open claw concierge service for founders and executive teams. If a CEO, a CFO, a head of sales needs leverage without creating new security risk, they get personalized open claw service with Setup Claw.

41:20Jason Calacanis:Okay, so this is the uber black. This is the VIP level setupclaw.com, not going to Amazon or Cloudflare or popping up your own instance on your Mac mini. This is, hey, I want to make something for my company, but I'm a CEO. I'm ahead of sales. I need to make sure it's secure and I need to make sure it's working.

41:46Ala Shaabana:Basically, the story is about a month ago, I go in and I go on Twitter and I say, hey, if you're anywhere in San Francisco, then you can I'll go to your house on a Lime scooter and I'll install OpenClaw for you on a Mac mini. Now, this blew up. Suddenly, I have way more clients than I can handle. My stripe is blowing up and I'm thinking, OK, this is ridiculous. I install OpenClaw for some people and I'm thinking I'm having a terrible time. And then every time I install OpenClaw for someone, they come to me a week later saying, hey, like this broke, that broke. So what I'm basically doing now is I'm going in.

42:24Ala Shaabana:I'm building out custom agents for people. I'm still helping people with their Mac mini setups. I think that's important. It's a lot of fun. Keeps me fresh. But I very quickly became clear that, hey, this is not the right solution for most people. People need a SaaS. People need to just set their agents and forget it. People are busy. These are, you know, six, seven, eight, even nine figure founders who are like just like they don't have time to configure OpenClaw and deal with the bullshit associated. So what I did is quickly I built the SaaS. And this SaaS is I consider the easiest way to run OpenClaw right now.

43:04Ala Shaabana:You deploy an agent and then you set your crons. You set how it works. You connect. It has a full computer running. running. So here's like launch.co, which you can just like you. And once you log in, you can save your authentication. But it also connects to a bunch of tools. The goal is to eventually give every agent its own email, its own wallet, its own stealth browser. So to make it just like the most complete general horizontal agent platform available. Okay.

43:38Jason Calacanis:So open claw in a box. Well done. Are you still charging people for the VIP service? And how do you charge for that? I know there's a lot of CEOs who want to pay you a significant fee to do this. Yeah.

43:48Ala Shaabana:I hop on a 15 minute call with you. I figure out, okay, what are the things that you need most? Like what is, what would your agent look like? What are you trying to automate? And then we hop on a second one hour call where we actually go and we automate it. If you need to automate, automatically update your CRM and Salesforce or your niche CRM, we go in and we set everything up during this one hour call and you end up having one agent. And then we give you hyper care, which is this idea of, Hey, if you need additional agents or you need help with your existing agent, or you need to make sure your agents are performing in a specific way, we help you with that.

44:23Ala Shaabana:Or we help you set up automations to, you know, automate your business. So we have a bunch of automations running.

44:28Jason Calacanis:And what are you going to do next? I mean, the open claw in a box is become a great startup. It's kind of like building websites in the web 1.0 era. Everybody needs a website everybody's going there but it's quickly becoming commoditized i think you would agree michael so what is your eventual vision for this in a year or two you know we just saw amazon release their open claw in a box service what happens when there's you know open claw in a box on every major platform what where are you going to go with this next as an entrepreneur open claw

44:58Ala Shaabana:itself is much less important than the innovations open club brought which is proactive agents with the idea of heartbeats and crons. Now, these agents are only as powerful as their tools and integrations. So what we need to do is we need to level up the level of tools that they have to an extreme scale. Every single agent should have a wallet. It should have an email. It should, like if you allow it to, it should be able to have access to a bunch of APIs by default. It should be able to make websites. It should be able to deploy them. You could start stacking these tools that these agents have.

45:37Ala Shaabana:And that's -

45:38Jason Calacanis:So the most empowered agent is the goal for you.

45:41Ala Shaabana:The most empowered, exactly. So we want to empower this agent to an extreme extent. All right, great job, Michael. Before we get to our next demo, Jason, I think we should talk about another one of our friends, the last one of our friends we got to talk about today, row.co.

45:55Jason Calacanis:Oh, I can talk about that till the cows come home. Yeah, I know. As you know, I'm slim cow now. Some people still remember me as fat cow. Fat Jason, they might even say. You know, if you were like a bully and you wanted to send a mob after somebody, you might say, oh, they're fat. They're fat. But what if you got a subscription to row.co and you got on a GLP, it was paid for by your insurance, you checked it and you became slim. Now you're slim cow. And your friends at the poker game stop saying, are you eating yourself to an early grave, J-Cow? and they start mocking you. Hey, you're five, eight and a half and you're 213 pounds.

46:34Jason Calacanis:I was shamed. I didn't have a solution. The food noise was overwhelming for me. I correlated eating food with success because I grew up poor, middle-class, lower middle-class. And I just thought, hey, the second I can get calories and I can order, you know, an appetizer and dessert at a restaurant and maybe even get a side. Okay. I've made it. And you know what? I spent 20 years just enjoying that privilege of having the ability to order the foie gras to get the white truffle supplement. You know what happened? I gained two pounds a year for 20 years. I was 43 pounds overweight. Then I lost 43 pounds thanks to Rode.co and the magic of GLPs.

47:11Jason Calacanis:They'll check for you right now if your insurance covers it. And if your insurance doesn't cover it, you can get it for a pretty amazing, stunningly low price. When I started on this journey four years ago, when Ozempic was off-label for weight loss. It was four and a half years ago. It was$2 ,000 a month. Now you can get into it for low hundreds. In other words, why wouldn't you?

47:34Ala Shaabana:No more excuses, exactly. So visit row.co and use their insurance checker. You just submit your insurance card. They do the rest. No paperwork, no hassle, and around 50 % of row members get their GLP-1s covered. So go to row.co slash twist for your free insurance check. Who do we have next? father-daughter entrepreneurial team for you to meet here, Jason. This is Pete and Maddie Reese. They've created Bisbee, which is, it's sort of, you tell Bisbee what company you want to start, and Bisbee takes care of the rest. Maddie and Pete, thanks for joining us.

48:10Jason Calacanis:Wow, look at this, father and daughter. I love this.

48:13Ala Shaabana:Great to be here. Yes.

48:15Jason Calacanis:Hi, so show us what you built.

48:17Ala Shaabana:Yeah, amazing that it's been, I don't know how many, 25 years ago she was born, But yes, we've been working together for a number of years and this is our latest project and we're super excited about we're claw pilled like you are.

48:29Jason Calacanis:You're claw pilled. OK, show us what you built. Yeah.

48:31Ala Shaabana:So this is Bisbee. As as Lon said, you pretty much the concept is you type the idea for your business in the box and you hit start and then you go through a procedure, a chat with Bisbee. And this is an agent that will kind of walk you through a process of trying to decide if this is good business, trying to come up with a naming idea for it, checking if the domains are available, even goes through logo iterations for you. And then you can go back and forth with it and kind of iterate on that. And then eventually when you sign off on the BOGO, then it'll show you a branding package. And it will pretty much hold brand.

49:21Ala Shaabana:This happens within minutes, by the way.

49:24Jason Calacanis:So this is a startup consultant in a box. This is an incubator in a box is a way to think about it, Maddie.

49:31Ala Shaabana:Yeah, yeah. So kind of our target audience is people who will become small, medium business owners.

49:38Jason Calacanis:So we are targeting people who do not currently have an existing business. And our thesis really is that AI job loss or AI related job loss is going to be a massive deal, even this year, but especially in 2027. And we want to provide a solution to that. We want to provide a way for these people who don't have a way back into the traditional workforce to start something for themselves and be able to make money and live their lives. This is a great idea, Maddie, because we have a concept, which is surplus. And as entrepreneurs, when you see a surplus in the world, that can be an opportunity. Now, it obviously sucks to lose your job or get laid off, but then a cognitive surplus appears.

50:27Jason Calacanis:appears. Smart person. They were working at Block. They were working at Microsoft. They were working at Amazon. They get hit by layoffs. They got two or three friends they worked with. They need to figure out, hey, where am I going to get started here? Or maybe somebody is a stay-at-home parent and they get back into the workforce. They need a place to start. And so this is the place for them to start that journey. What is your business then? Because obviously the criticism or the challenge you'll get from the venture community if you decide to go that way. And that's but one way to do it is how is it different than just being a rapper?

51:03Jason Calacanis:How is it better than just using Claude directly? So have you given that some thought, Maddie?

51:07Ala Shaabana:Oh yeah, definitely. We've built a lot on top of it. So obviously the basis is kind of open Claude, but there have been,

51:16Jason Calacanis:we've integrated a ton of different things. We've built a lot of custom skills. We support over We're 350 plus businesses right now. We're different types of businesses. Oh, wow. And everything is customized for that individual business type. With the amount of things that we built on top of it, we're feeling pretty good. Yeah. I mean, and if you're good, Lon.

51:37Ala Shaabana:I was just going to say, Jason, one thing we should add after they've sort of, the funnel on this is very clever, I think. After they've kind of shown you all the graphics and the logo and like, hey, this could be a real business. Here's what it would look like. Then they hit you with, you want a team of AI agents to help you run the business? Do we just need your credit card? Like that's the next step. You sort of get open claw assistance to help you run the business now that you've launched it. Yeah, that's the real product. Yeah, so it's the team of agents that actually do the business for you.

52:09Ala Shaabana:As a new entrepreneur, you use your phone to run your whole business, like many of us are doing with our open claws. The team takes care of all the messy business stuff on the back end that many of these people are not accustomed to and have no interest in getting involved with. They simply get to do what they do, maybe deliver the service. Maybe it's an in-person thing or maybe it's something they do over the computer. But the team at Bisbee, their agent team, takes care of everything in the background and they just collect the checks.

52:40Jason Calacanis:Fantastic. We wish you great success with this. where can people learn more, Maddie? Where can people learn more and engage this new product and service?

52:49Ala Shaabana:Yes. So we are at bizbee.ai and that is B-I-Z-Z-B-Y.ai.

52:55Jason Calacanis:All right. Bizbee.ai. Give it a try. What do you got to lose? Start a business. Yeah. You got, you got to be resilient. And what's it like to work with your, your dad, Maddie? Is he, uh, it's incredible. I mean, We work together a lot.

53:11Ala Shaabana:So I'm just, I'm very lucky to be able to have, you know, both of my parents are entrepreneurs. I grew up in an entrepreneurial household. It's all I've known growing up. And I just feel so lucky to have grown up in that kind of place.

53:27Jason Calacanis:Do you have siblings?

53:28Ala Shaabana:I do. I have two siblings, two little sisters. One of them is actually our co-founder. She's kind of in charge of our growth and content.

53:37Jason Calacanis:and then the other one is 16 and she's got it got it and your dad doesn't have favorites but i can see right now you if there was a favorite maddie i think you might be winning right now because every dad's dream i can tell you as a girl dad as well pete i have three daughters i'm always like who's gonna come be khaleesi and run launch and this week in startups and like one of them's like no interest the other one's like very interested the other one's like i want to work with sharks. I'm like, that's fantastic. You go work with sharks. You could be an influencer worker fashion, but I got one of them who wants to do business.

54:13Jason Calacanis:It really is a dream come true. Yeah. It is kind of a dream come true, isn't it? Yeah. To get to work with your daughter. Yeah. All right. Well done, Pete and Maddie. Wish you great success with the company.

54:23Ala Shaabana:Yeah. Thanks for being here. Thanks for doing it. Hey, thanks for having us. First of all, Jason, you sent me this clip on TikTok. I don't know if you remember this. I do want to take a look at this Bob Dylan clip that you said, because I think it's really fascinating. This was Bob Dylan from a 1986 interview in Hamilton, Ontario for a BBC documentary. He was making the film Hearts of Fire, but some prescient comments, I think, about computing, AI, and collaborating on art with machines. Here's a look. You could have your own little band, like a one-man band with these machines. What year is this?

54:59Ala Shaabana:This was 1986, Jason. That type of music doesn't have any roots and it doesn't have any foundation to it.

55:06Jason Calacanis:There's the downside.

55:08Ala Shaabana:Yeah. I think that's the sort of key insight that Bob makes here is like.

55:14Jason Calacanis:40 years. Okay, we can stop here. This is incredible.

55:18Ala Shaabana:You can mimic music, but it doesn't, it lacks, it's not grounded. It needs to have the soul. Yeah.

55:24Jason Calacanis:So this is, I think, really important. He's always ahead of the curve, speaking of people ahead of the curve. he's always been ahead of the curve but he's always um you know and had these great insights and but he was always very obsessed with technically um understanding the nature of songs and he had a great show on Sirius XM for a while that I used to listen to um and I forget the name of it but on this show he would talk about songs and what made them great It was theme time radio hour, it was called. Theme time radio hour. And I don't think it's on the air anymore. No. And people who were involved in this, who made clips for it, et cetera, they never actually were in the room with Dylan doing a radio show.

56:10Jason Calacanis:Right. He kind of asked them questions and they cut around him or whatever. But he did an incredible job of picking specific songs. So I think that's going to be one of my recommendations for you. if you want to go down the Bob Dylan rabbit hole, like my pal,

56:24Ala Shaabana:Timothy Chalamet, my pal, we're both Knicks fans.

56:28Jason Calacanis:I met him once.

56:28Ala Shaabana:You're a good buddy.

56:29Jason Calacanis:Yeah. I met him twice actually, but really, really, really, you know, great actor and really a true fan. Cause it was, when I talked to one of the two times I talked to Timothy Chalamet, who obviously did the Dylan movie and was fantastic. I asked him about the eighties and if he ever got into that, and he was literally telling me specific songs from infidels and other albums uh and joker man and we had a really interesting he goes deep he got really good

56:55Ala Shaabana:at ping pong too for marty supreme he goes deep he gets serious so i'll add to here i'm gonna add

57:00Jason Calacanis:to that there's a very famous uh pen and baker documentary don't look back sure that's table stakes but then there's two by scorsese who as a great or tour appreciated dylan no direction home 2005 man no direction incredible incredible documentary and so if you were looking for something to do this weekend, I would go watch Don't Look Back, No Direction Home. And then my personal favorite was, you know, when Dylan came out of the 60s and really wanted to kind of do something that he enjoyed. He did something called the Rolling Thunder Review. Yes. And this was a tour where he was in like a van and like driving around.

57:44Jason Calacanis:This is Dylan coming out of the height of of people's obsession with him. And you'll know this because he was wearing white, is that kabuki makeup? Pancake makeup on his face, yeah. White, which he found out about because his violinist, who he had had a, I don't know if it was romantic or not, but he had a bit of an obsession with, was somehow involved with Kiss.

58:08Ala Shaabana:Right.

58:08Jason Calacanis:Who had also put the white makeup on.

58:10Ala Shaabana:Sure.

58:10Jason Calacanis:And my favorite version of all time of Tangled Up In Blue and a number of other songs come from that rolling thunder review period right um and that scorsese bookend documentary 2019 it's sort of a documentary it's it's it's a fictionalized it's

58:28Ala Shaabana:very it's very dylan it's like a fake documentary it's like about 60 70 percent of the information is accurate but then they add in a bunch of like not accurate stuff for fun so like all the sharon stone stuff like she that's all made up but like that's a very dylan thing to do like obscure combined truth and lies so you're not sure what you can really believe just creating mythology

58:50Jason Calacanis:right i guess would be the the way to say about it so this is great we went down a little rabbit hole here um but a great set of dylan documentaries for you and uh what else you got for us uh so i

59:03Ala Shaabana:definitely heading into the weekend three quick things i want to mention first uh i'm really enjoying this. It's a little cheesy. It's a Civil War scripted miniseries on Prime Video called The Grey House. Kevin Koster and Morgan Freeman, both executive producers on it, written in part by John Sayles, the legendary filmmaker John Sayles, and then Roland Jaffe who directed that De Niro movie The Mission, a bunch of other...

59:27Jason Calacanis:The Mission, my favorite film. One of my top five films.

59:29Ala Shaabana:That director made this. He directed every episode. It's an eight-episode miniseries. It's about union spies. It's about these Southern women living in the Confederacy who were getting messages to the North, to the Union Army, based on what they were here. They were living in Richmond. They were part of society. So they knew Jefferson Davis's wife. They were in touch with the servants who worked in Jefferson Davis's house, which was the gray house instead of the White House. They had the gray house. And so it's sort of loosely based on a true story. But it's this very kind of old school. I'm enjoying it.

1:00:03Ala Shaabana:It reminds me a lot of like 70s and 80s TV miniseries, like from the Lonesome Dove or the Roots era, when those were like these big events and they'd have battle scenes or even like Gettysburg, that one. It feels like that where it's a little hokey. It's a little throwback, but very, very well done. Very well acted, big, epic battle scenes and stuff. I'm really enjoying it. So that's on Amazon. All eight episodes are up on Prime Video right now.

1:00:29Jason Calacanis:And by the way, that was Barry Diller, the media executive, Yes. He's the one who created roots and these movies of the week and this incredible genre, which I think Shogun was part of.

1:00:41Ala Shaabana:Sure.

1:00:41Jason Calacanis:Exactly.

1:00:42Ala Shaabana:It feels to me. That's what this feels like, where it's very hard on its sleeve. It's very sincere. It's a little it's a little throwback. It's a little cheesy, I guess you would say. For I think modern viewers would be like, what is like, what is this a little little, you know, old school? But but if you grew up on those kinds of TV miniseries, I think you feel right at home. it's very assured storytelling very confident it looks great there's a lot of like big recreations of battle scenes and it looks really cool they did a good job with it uh he actually did a memoir

1:01:11Jason Calacanis:too who knew uh right barry diller yeah i may have talked about on social media before but this is my favorite biography of the last year or so uh who knew and he talks about his personal life um his marriage to diane von uh firstenberg yeah and uh you know being quietly closeted and and his struggles with that, but then doing QVC and, you know, again, USA Network all the way to IAC.

1:01:38Ala Shaabana:One of the real legendary executives of that whole, the cable TV sort of era. The last, kind of the last of a generation there.

1:01:46Jason Calacanis:Yeah. And still in the game, which, and Dara Khashrashoggi worked for him, the CEO of Uber. So there's a whole generation of CEOs who cut their teeth working for Barry Diller who cut his teeth working for, you know, the series of executives before that. Right. In this 70s and 80s. Yeah. Who knew? Great Barry Diller biography. There's one for you for the weekend. All right.

1:02:12Ala Shaabana:Up next. This is on Disney Plus right now. I think Hulu probably as well. It's a National Geographic docuseries. Incas the rise and fall. I went to Peru many years ago, visited some of the sites. I've been really enjoying it. It's just a really well done sort of overview. There's me at Machu Picchu from my Peruvian trip. So I couldn't resist checking out a four-part Incan documentary. And it does a really good job. Like it digs into, I feel like we hear about these amazing empires in like South America or the Caribbean or the North America, but you don't really dig into their history. Like it was this king and then they expanded this way.

1:02:49Ala Shaabana:And this does a really good job of using what we know about Incan culture because they didn't have a written language. So we're sort of still piecing it together archaeologically and anthropologically, but it's really interesting.

1:03:01Jason Calacanis:And people don't know, you say Inca, you think of Machu Picchu, but they created, you know, a series of networks of roads, 25 ,000 of them, including bridges over crazy gorges. The Inca Trail. The Inca Trail. And this empire went, I don't know, I think 20, thousands of miles, kind of the spine of South America. And I've never, I mean, I just have a cursory knowledge of this. I'm going to watch this with my kids. And obviously that all ended in the 15th, 16th century. Yes, it was Pizarro.

1:03:37Ala Shaabana:Pizarro and his crew landed in Peru. They set up shop in Lima on the coast, and then they proceeded to conquer the Incan Empire. We have a second photo of me in Ollantaytambo. This was the one Incan site. if we can pull it up. It's a fortress. That's me in the distance there. This is the only place where the Incans actually won a battle against the Spanish because they were up.

1:04:00Jason Calacanis:The Spanish had cannons.

1:04:01Ala Shaabana:The Spanish had a lot of advanced weaponry. They had sailed there. And so they conquered. Guns, drums, and seals. In Cusco today, which was the Incan capital that the Spanish conquered, you could see they built their cathedrals right on top of the Incan temple. So you could see that it's Incan and the foundation, and then it's like a cathedral above. An amazing place. if you ever get a chance to visit Peru, folks.

1:04:22Jason Calacanis:All right, there you have it, folks. One last thing I want to tip people off,

1:04:26Ala Shaabana:and you as well, Jason. On Sunday on Disney +, another National Geographic documentary is arriving. It's called Ghost Elephants, but here's the interesting thing about it. Directed and narrated by Werner Herzog. Oh, my favorite. We've got a trailer. It's about a South African conservationist and botanist, Dr. Steve Boyes. He's in Angola tracking a mysterious, previously undiscovered species of elephant. They have not really done a good job of promoting this. I feel like people do not know this is happening on Sunday. But Sunday on Disney +, you can go watch a new Werner Herzog nature documentary.

1:04:58Ala Shaabana:We got a bit of the joke.

1:04:59Jason Calacanis:I cannot wait. He is incredible. His voiceover and his performance, vocal performance, is always extraordinary. You know, everybody loves when I tell them about whatever gadget I'm buying. You know me. I got a very heavy Amazon finger. My trigger for Amazon, very high, was dealing with a bit of an issue around the house. two of the daughters get into audiobooks, the 10-year-olds. And then another daughter, she's in her music phase. So I got three kids running around with over-the-air headphones. Bit of a problem because you say, hey, it's dinner time. There's no response. And then everybody's kind of zoned out.

1:05:34Jason Calacanis:And that's okay with me. I love the fact that people experience audiobooks. I'm really excited that my young girls are getting into that early. And I'm really excited that my daughter and I share music. And we talk about Queen and we We talk about Bob Dylan and we talk about Dire Straits. The classics. She loves Bowie. I feel like I'm doing my job. So I had to find a solution for this problem. And there is a company called Shox, S-H-O-K-Z. And I think I may have seen Bill Gurley wearing these years ago. These are bone conducting headphones. And they go over your ear and they have one called Open Run Pro 2.

1:06:11Jason Calacanis:And you can get like a small size. you put this over your kid's ears and uh people use this for sports mainly because if you're in the gym you don't have to wear something bulky but the sound is incredible it does you don't have to use the bone conducting you probably won't use the bone conducting now you'll just listen to it through the speakers but you can uh and now when somebody's on the swing listening to some music or somebody's in their room listening to an audiobook and i say hey it's dinner time or i come in and start talking to them they you know can hear me and they can pause the music et cetera.

1:06:43Jason Calacanis:And I much prefer the open air headphones. If we're traveling, obviously on an airplane, I'm not sure how these will perform compared to the noise canceling ones. But this has been a nice for me when I'm hiking and working out as well, going around the ranch, I have to be aware of my surroundings at all times. Yeah.

1:07:02Ala Shaabana:You don't always want it to be completely immersive.

1:07:05Jason Calacanis:When I'm at my desk, I will wear my focal$5 ,000 Utopia headphones and I'll get into, I've been listening to some Coltrane. Man, holy cow, man. I mean, I guess I'm going into my jazz phase now, but I listen to some Miles Davis and Coltrane and it is amazing on those headphones. But for a podcast, I'm going to say these are the best you can do. Another amazing twist, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, we'll be back next week.

1:07:29Ala Shaabana:And on Wednesday,

1:07:31Jason Calacanis:we get a double drop. You get your double drop. You get this week in AI and you get this week in startups on a Wednesday. On a Friday, you also get a double drop. You get your This Week in Startups and you get your all in for the weekend. So you got the double drop days, Wednesday and Friday for JCal and Monday. We just catch up on what's going on. Alex will be here Monday. He will. On with me on Wednesday and Fridays, the all in crew on Thursday. And obviously I do the round table for This Week in AI. We had a spectacular one. If you can do me a favor, thisweekinai.ai. Just waking up the channel now.

1:08:01Jason Calacanis:Thank you to our partner, PayPal, who underwrote the show for the first year. That was really gracious of them and a really savvy move because the show is off to an amazing start. Three, I think of it as like a roundtable, like all in. Three amazing CEOs and me, the world's greatest moderator, just going deep, deep, deep on the week's AI news, AI, AI only. There it is. There it is. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.

1:08:25Ala Shaabana:Bye.