The $60 billion resource hiding in space, and the start trying to mine it (feat. Matt Gialich, Astroforge) | E2268

All right, everybody, welcome back to this Week in Startups. It's Friday. That means Lon Harris is here with me. And at the end of the show, we will do off duty with Lon. Everybody loves that segment where Lon takes us off duty and we share what we're buying, what we're consuming, what we're watching. This Week in Startups is brought to you by Deal Founders. Ship faster on deal, set up payroll for any country in minutes and get back to building. Visit deal.com twist to learn more. Circle. Circle gives you everything you need to build and scale your community led business. Twist. Listeners get $1,000 off the circle plan at Circle. So Twist and whisper flow. Stop typing, dictate with whisper flow and send clean final draft writing in seconds. Visit WhisperFlow AI Twist to get started for free today. That's WisprFlow AI Twist. Let me just start the show by saying I love Plod. I'm using my plod pin right now to record this very conversation. Oh, you have yours, too. Did you activate yet?

0:00

Oh, yeah, no, it's running. It's been. My plot is. My plot goes all day.

1:11

Yes. And I have mine running now. And I just, you know, it's got the red light, so I'm being privacy first. And, you know, I only use it when people know I'm using it. But this is the interesting thing. You could wear the plod pin like you're wearing it.

1:14

I.

1:25

Or you can wear it on your wrist. Another great way to wear it. And what I do with this is when I'm hiking around the ranch or I have a moment. Plaud. Take a memo. Action item. We need to move two of our researchers into the paid newsletter that we're doing. Please have Lon pick as number one and two. Even though that's super uncomfortable to ask in front of everybody. The 1 and 2. Which is why you didn't answer it.

1:26

I sent you my one and two picks. Privately, I don't like to see.

1:52

No, I like to create a little bit of, like, who's ready for this? Anyway? That's my management style. But Plod is amazing. And what it does is it creates a summary and then you can share that summary.

1:55

Yes.

2:08

Then they have like, 20 different. I don't know, maybe it's hundreds, but I have, like, 20 really nice templates. I use, like, full, accurate transcript. It learns who Lon is in my life. It learns who Alex is. It knows them. So. So then for all time forward, I don't have to mention that it creates a Mind map of the conversation we have when we have a strategy meeting, all this great stuff and then one click share. Why is it better than using your phone? Oh my God, your phone's microphone stinks. And you have to, though clumsily go through your phone as opposed to beep one button, you're ready to go.

2:08

It's the contextual. It understands the conversation and really thinks about how to organize it for you. That's the really great.

2:38

What's the offer? What's the offer? We have an offer.

2:44

We do have an offer, Jason, of course. So you could check it out at Play Plaud AI Twist. And if you use the code twist, they're going to give you 10% off your new plod pin. That's P L, A U D, A I, slash twist.

2:47

And please, if you do have a good experience with it, share it on social and tell everybody you found out about it on this week in Startups on Twist. All right, let's get started. We did our first. Thank you to our sponsors, but we've got a really great first guest. I'm excited about this one.

3:00

I'm excited. I saw some of their tweets going by. I read a little bit about the startup and I immediately pinged the team, like, let's get these guys on. I wanted to learn more about this. So we've got Matt Galich. He's the CEO and co founder of astroforge. They are a mining startup. They're developing spacecraft to go prospect and extract platinum Group metals, or PGMs from near Earth asteroids. Jason, that's the plan.

3:18

So literally science fiction is reality. Matt, welcome.

3:44

There's a.

3:49

Have you ever before, Matt, or is this your first?

3:49

I talked to you maybe three years ago when we first. I remember. Yeah, yeah. We first launched before we had ever launched our first spacecraft.

3:52

Yeah. So congratulations. Where are you at with mining asteroids?

3:58

Look, this is a really hard thing to do. I mean, we are, we're the first commercial company that really wants to go outside of the Earth moon system and explore the solar system.

4:05

Right.

4:13

It's a totally big swing on space. We've seen a lot of, a lot of venture dollars go into space. A lot of companies start up into space and we're kind of that next step in what you can go do. Right now we're building Deep Space 2. It's our next spacecraft. It's a 200 kilogram spacecraft that will launch later this year on a Falcon 9 that goes to the moon and it'll attempt to go out and potentially land on an asteroid.

4:13

Wow.

4:36

I want to jump in here. I was doing a little research on this. When you say land on an asteroid, are we talking about like the rocket, like ship comes down like in the sci fi and it lands on the surface? It's more is there's. It's sort of like a docking procedure, like with the International Space Station?

4:36

Correct, it's much more like a docking procedure. I mean we have to kind of like what, what the movies tell you and what's actually out there are two very different things.

4:51

Right.

4:59

We go to what are called near Earth asteroids. They're pretty close to the planet. The one we're targeting right now is about 10 million miles away. And these asteroids are around 200 meters in diameter. So in the terms of space, these are very, very small things in space that we want to go land on. Now we're also looking for a very specific type of asteroid. We're looking for an asteroid called a metal asteroid. And because of that, these asteroids are about 70% iron. Somewhere in that range, iron, nickel, which means they're magnetic. So the way we land on them is simply with magnets.

4:59

We stick to the asteroids because Armageddon, which is my big, you know, cultural point for landing on an asteroid, it's like they're crashing into the surface. Steve Buscemi's knocking back and forth, but it's really, it's more delicate.

5:27

No, Steve Buscemi in this analogy, these are unmanned. You land, you take a sample and then eventually. Matt, am I correct that you want to build like a more semi permanent installation on one of those when it's in orbit? Or like what is the window for you to actually drill into an asteroid consistently and then get it back to Earth? Right. Cause that's the other piece. You want to get these back to Earth or do you want to use it for facilitating manufacturing in space?

5:40

The problem right now is on the planet. The problem right now is not in space. While we'd love to supply the in space economy, currently right now there isn't an in space economy. Right. I'm a firm believer that there is still a mass problem to space. Now Elon has done tremendous things to lower the price of mass to get into the solar system. That all being said, you're still charged by the kilogram. That is still the underlying thing you pay for. So building a small craft that can go do this is where we see the sweet spot to be. We also think about this in volume. Jake Al so it's not about can you build one huge Ship that goes and does this, it's can you make hundreds, if not thousands of them that are going to go out to these asteroids, mine them and bring it back to Earth. But look, guys, we got one planet, we got one habitable planet in the solar system as of today. We got to protect it. And mining is one of the most destructive things we do on this planet. There's no other way to have our way of life unless we go out in the cosmos and mine it for its resources.

6:11

Walk us through this video we're seeing here.

7:01

I think one thing that is always surprising to people, we talk about asteroids. Everybody says like, oh, that's sci fi. You can't mine an asteroid. This is literally a NASA mission that went out and mined an asteroid. This is Bennu. It was run by a guy named Dante. Loretta worked on it for 22 years. He's an advisor to us. And this went out to a different type of asteroid than we want to go to and took a sample of it and brought it back to Earth. This sample returned about, I think about a year and a half ago. A couple members of the team are on our staff here and they got a whole bunch of information about this asteroid. What's super important about that mission to us though is it updated the models for how we look at asteroids. So it helped us understand the types that are in the solar system.

7:03

And what are we seeing here? What is that machine or satellite? Is that your actual miner that we see there?

7:38

What you're seeing here is maybe, look, I was in elementary school in the 90s, I don't know about all the listeners, right? But in the 90s, we heard about this asteroid belt and it's where all the asteroids were. Nobody had ever discovered any asteroids close to the Earth. Fact. At the turn of the century, there was about seven asteroids that were classified as near Earth asteroids. As of today, we have over 600,000 of them cataloged. So what I'm actually showing you here is that what you were told 20 years ago is very different. There's a lot of objects really close to our home that we can go mine. And that makes this a much shorter mission and I think a much more viable mission to go do.

7:45

All right, amazing. And so what is the actual miner look like? Do we have the actual miner and what it looks like and what it actually does? Like, explain that to us.

8:16

There is a picture on Twitter that we just put up. Yeah, here it is of one of the first phases of mining. Now, mining is one of the biggest IP things we have at the company. But I'll tell you guys, in short, how this works, It's a pretty simple way to think about it. We use directed energy, I.e. lasers, to remove material from the asteroid. And then we sort it out with magnetism. Platinum group metals are not magnetic. Iron, nickel are. And it's a very simple way to think about sorting out the material to bring it back. The spacecraft we have is designed to bring back up to 1,000kg of material, which in today's dollars. Now this stuff, look, it's a commodity, it fluctuates all the time. As of today, it's worth about $105 million per mission. So that's kind of the upper cost target we got to be below to make this work. And the whole point of the company, J. Cal, is how do we turn that little knob of risk, right? How far can we turn that knob of risk to lower the cost to get the cheapest spacecraft in space to go mine that asteroid and go out? Now, Deep Space two in total, including the launch, is going to cost about $10.4 million. That's a very different price point than anybody's ever tried to go onto the solar system with before.

8:29

So 10 million investment permission with a potential return of a Hyundai. That's a lot. Now if you just hit it, you know, being an angel investor and doing this for a living, or a poker player, hey, you just need to have this happen 1 out of every 10 times in order for you to break even. So does, is that mean it's a sure thing at this point? Do you feel confident it's a sure thing that you'll be able to get 1 in 10 back? I want to tell you about a product I'm obsessed with and everyone in tech seems to be obsessed with. It's called Whisper Flow. W, I, S, P, R flow. You set it up and then you hit a key combination and you talk and it transcribes what you say. It does it more accurately and quicker and across all your platforms than any other speech to text software I've ever used. When you communicate all day long like I do, even as a fast typist, it is going to be three, four, five times faster than you can type. And because it fixes all of your ums and your ahs and your mistakes and cleans it up, all of the punctuation, all of the filler and unnecessary words being removed in real time, Whisper Flow is already available everywhere. When I'm using it in Superhuman, Gmail, Slack, Google Docs, I Use it everywhere. The messages sound like I wrote them. We're moving into a world where agents are going to make us a hundred times more efficient. Now you add Whisper flow, making you 5, 10, 20 times more efficient. Visit Whisperflow AI Twist to get started for free today. This product's amazing. That's W, I, S, P R F, L O W AI Twist. I've been using this product for six months. It is extraordinary.

9:28

I'd be lying to you if I said I was 100% confident we can do this. I'm a founder with a thesis that we can get out of the universe for $10 million and go mine an asteroid. And as soon as I'm 100% confident, that means I'm not paying attention to all the things that can go wrong. Like this is a very technical company and a very technical job as CEO to go run and figure out if we can do this. And it's kind of what we spend all our time doing. J cal I mean like it is really from. I think Elon showed us the way here of be one of the best engineers on the team that can go develop these products. You have to know this in and out of how we're going to go do this. And that's what I spend all my time doing.

11:11

Remind us again, when does this mining mission occur and are we going to get to watch it live? I mean, one of the things I've been amazed with over the years is, is that Elon has really high fidelity video from all of these different missions now, like even the multiple stages, I'm not sure how he does that. I'm assuming Starlink is involved. I know they have helicopters and drones doing the low earth or doing the atmosphere video. But take us into bringing the world into watching you do this. Is that a key part of this? And is that a key part of. I think Elon's success with SpaceX is bringing humanity along for the ride through live streaming.

11:42

I'm going to be honest with you, I wish we could live stream at the asteroid. The answer is we cannot when we're at the asteroid. And the way we save money is very simple. We lower our data rate dramatically. So at the asteroid, the max we're talking to spacecraft at is about 400 bits per second. That is not a video stream quality at all. Right. This is like barely being able to talk for the spacecraft. I mean that's how you keep it cheap. What we do do and what we did do with Odin our last mission we launched right is we are full Transparency. We live stream the entire control room, all of the data we see, anybody else can see. I mean, I believe in transparency up and down. In fact, when ODIN failed, we wrote a ton of articles that are on our website. You can go read about it, of exactly what happened and exactly where we got it wrong and how we plan on fixing it. Because at the end of the day, that's how you learn and get better at this.

12:25

So what, take us through that. The mission two was Odin and mission three is Vestri. When did you. Yeah, Odin happened March 2024. Right.

13:08

Odin was February 27, 2025. Right. Last year. So about, about 11 months ago was when we launched Odin. Odin was our first attempt to go out into deep space. It launched on IM2. So this is a rocket launch going to translunar injection, right? This goes to the moon. We leave from the Falcon and we slingshot around the moon out to the asteroid.

13:18

Got it.

13:38

What happened on odin? To be clear, ODIN was a total pathfinder for us. It was the first commercial deep space mission ever attempted. We got the first license from the FCC to ever go into deep space as a purely commercial company with no government interest. And we had a failure right away. One of the failures that happened was, is the solar panels did not deploy. So the spacecraft is in a very slow spin where we were not power positive. We were still able to talk to it, we were still able to communicate with it. In fact, we were still able to prove out a lot of the technical navigation philosophies we used on that mission. But at the end of the day, like, we didn't get to the asteroid, right? We didn't do good enough. We got to do better on the next one.

13:39

I did think one thing that was interesting. So, you know, the two missions, neither of which went right so far, they were both like communication failures. It wasn't like the craft exploded or spun out into the galaxy. It was like you kind of lost touch with it at some point.

14:12

I think I do a shitty job explaining this. I try to explain it this way. Like the way you die as a human is your brain stop sending electrical signals. The cause of your death is cancer, heart attack, whatever, car accident, whatever that is, right? So like, communication will always be what it seems like. ODIN communicated perfectly. We didn't have a communication problem on it. What we had on Odin was a power issue, so we weren't able to turn on the radios. That was why it manifested as a communication issue. So again, we proved out a lot on that mission, but we got to do better on deep space too.

14:26

And as a startup, how many swings at bat do you get? And talk to me about the investors in the company. I think you've raised like 50 million bucks. How do they look at this and how do you communicate? Hey, this is a, you know, pretty binary thing. Either it works or it doesn't. And I know Elon struggled with this in the early days of SpaceX, so take me through that struggle and communication with investors.

14:55

I mean, it's hard. You need to have special people that are willing to jump aboard this ship and see the future with you. Right. And really can take a, a, a deep look at the future. Now, I want to give a lot of credit to Elon for paving the way and showing investors that it's possible to have these outsized return if you're willing to take outside risk. Right. But, like, this is a hard thing to go pull off. We do have some amazing investors. I mean, initialized capital. Gary Tan is who let our seed round.

15:18

Right.

15:39

And we went through Y Combinator.776 is a big investor in us. We have some massive angels that have really helped us get over the line. And being super transparent with the investors about what we're doing and the risk we're taking, I think is one of the things that we're really good at. Like our Investor Monthly letters are giant documents that I write as a way to not only document what we're doing at the company, but to show people the progress we're making. It is all about incremental progress as you go here. I mean, guys, Elon failed three times with Falcon 1 before he got there. With, with, with the fourth launch, this, we're going even farther and we're going after something even bigger. It's going to be a rough road, and you got to kind of strap in and expect it.

15:39

Now, there are some materials that exist on asteroids that don't exist on Earth, or they're very rare on Earth. Am I correct?

16:17

Not really. Jk, I'm going to be very honest with you about this. The material we're going after is platinum group metals, right? So the 6ele make up platinum, iridium. You can go look them up and see what they all are. We don't have any of them in the continental United States. So not only is there a huge geological play here, and you've seen China, especially with the rare earths, really flex their muscle here and ban us from having gallium and some of these other materials. I mean, Trump put out a huge executive Order on minerals. Right. We need mineral sovereignty as the US There is no way to like make this up or go get it. The minerals that we have discovered are way too deep in the ground for us to go mine.

16:27

Yeah.

17:00

The most economical play though, is to go to space. And I think that's the big difference. This isn't necessarily a security of resources. I think this is a better economical advantage than opening a new platinum mine in South Africa would be. Yeah.

17:00

And these PGMs, that's the key. Those palladium, rohidium, osmium,

17:11

iridium, I believe.

17:22

Yeah. I, I might have got tired in my, my chemistry class 40 years ago, but. But tell us about what they're used for here on Earth and if you could at scale, you know, bring down. Because I understand, like one asteroid could have more than we have on Earth. And I don't know if that's true or not, but that was some of my cursor research when I. Yeah, I mean, look there.

17:23

There's a lot of this stuff in space that we can go after. What is it used for? Every single thing that every VC invests in. How do we make computer chips? You make it with iridium. With iridium crucibles to melt silicon. Like this is used in every walk of your life. If you're looking at an LCD screen right now, an OLED screen, they have three of the six platinum group metals in it. We touch it every day across the board. It's in cancer therapies. It's also in how we limit emissions on your car. This stuff is just used worldwide. That's why it's a commodity. Right. It's not like some special thing we're making up is a commodity metal that we want to go provide. Now you asked a question that I can't answer, which is, hey, what if we actually change the supply and demand curves and we bring back a lot more? Like, what does the future look like? This has happened before. It happened in the 1800s with a metal called aluminum guys all know about. Right. Like, we found a new process to make aluminum. All of a sudden it went from like the most baller you could have to we make airplanes out of it. It enables modern air travel. For some reason, they now make the iPhone out of it. Terrible decision, but different conversation. I hope there is a future like that that can be created with what we're doing by journeying out and unlocking the supply. Platinum.

17:48

And that rhodium is incredibly expensive. Yeah. Like tens of thousands of dollars per ounce.

18:53

Iridium is incredibly expensive. But I think it's really important to have maybe a little bit more nuanced view on metals here.

19:00

Yeah.

19:05

The price that you sell a gram for an ounce for, however you want to quantify it, isn't necessarily the best marker of what the use case could be. From a business standpoint, you really got to pay attention to market cap. And I think this is where a lot of people in mining get this wrong. The largest market cap in the world is gold. The second largest market cap in the world is the platinum group metals. There has to be a huge supply here on earth that we can go into. Because the reality is the question we get asked all the time, which is very true. If we go find some new material on asteroid and bring it back, we destroy the market for that material. Right. There has to be a huge amount that can be there before we destroy the market. And with platinum group metals there is. To give you guys a sense, it would take us about 100 missions before we would screw up the price of platinum.

19:06

Got it. So it's going to wind up being price competitive for you to collect this stuff. If you succeed and if you were to have like outlier success, you could actually change the market cap and how we look at these things. Yeah.

19:45

I mean, jc, the best platinum group metal mine in the world in South Africa has 14% gross margins. I just told you a story. We could have 90% gross margins. That changes the way of how we go mine. Right. That opens up a whole new future that we can all go enjoy where we have abundance and I think, isn't that what every startup founder should be aiming for?

20:01

Absolutely. All right, well listen, we are going to be rooting for you. And what's the date again for the next one? So we can put it on our calendar and have you back on afterwards and share your learnings. So the next one will be great

20:17

success on im3 currently right now scheduled for November of this year.

20:29

November of this year. Will it be Starship or It's going to be Falcon, you said?

20:34

No, it's gonna be a Falcon 9 that goes to the moon.

20:38

Yes. The Falcon Nines are incredibly consistent at this point.

20:40

Amazing.

20:43

Yeah, they, they've got such an incredible track record now. Hundreds of them. All right, so we will book you to come on in November and we will get the update on your amazing progress. I think this is like third time is going to be a charm.

20:44

I hope so. Guys, we need it.

20:57

Yeah, I feel good about it.

20:58

Incredible. I mean, it's literally like we're living in A science fiction novel?

20:59

Yeah, this one when I was researching it last night. You're reading it Like, I can't believe they're already doing this. Sounds so purely theoretical. And that's what I assumed. I was like, oh, well, they're talking about in 10 years. Maybe we could do that. It's like they're already running missions. It's happening.

21:04

Circle is the best place on the Internet to start growing your online community. There, I said it. You know why? Because I tried to find a community platform for my Foundry University and for my Angel University programs, and we couldn't find one. After we'd started digging and digging, we found the perfect solution. Circle. So it has all the most amazing features. Like you can put in a course. Like you have a CRM. You can do email. You have chat rooms and message boards. It is amazing whether you're selling a course or you're building a community based on a topic, or maybe you're starting a book club. Maybe you're a coach, maybe you have a business. And maybe you want to build a community for everybody to get together and learn and share information. It's all inside of Circle. How do I know this? My team did a bake off once we started finding these platforms. It was like a Frankenstein. All these different pieces. Nobody had put them all together until Circle. And Circle's gonna put it together for you to get started. Go to Circle. So Twist. And get a thousand dollars off the Circle plus plan. That's Circle, so Twist. This is the underappreciated thing about technology and capitalism, right? We're in a. A bit of an existential debate here in the United States over capitalism, over wealth disparity, everything. The truth is, when you set up a system like the United States, or we were talking about TAO subnets that are designed to be brutally capitalistic, what happens? You're basically in a competition to see who can lower the price to the point that more unlocks happen. So in this case, what Elon did with lowering the price to get to space allows this company to Astroforge, to then build and stand on his shoulders. Now, astroforge makes this work. Then you have to say, well, what is the second order? Which is what I tried to get to in our quick interview here, is what's the second order impact? Okay, well, maybe the sovereignty of the United States, you know, versus, I think most of these palladiums are in Russia, China, South Africa.

21:16

Well, right, etc. South Africa and Russia are right now the world's two largest suppliers of These platinum group metals. So yeah, it totally changes your thinking to be like, we've built an entire world in civilization based on rhodium and iridium being very rare, and you got to go dig down in places you don't want to go to go get it. And what would change if all of a sudden it was like, now we can grow, go out to space, grab a rock, laser it up and just fly the iridium right back to earth.

23:20

And so this is something important for all founders listening. You know, the better, cheaper, faster is kind of how we used to look at technology in the wired 1.0 days, not the woke Wired magazine. Now that's anti tech or like holding truth to the.

23:46

The New York Times says it's not woke enough. Jason, just so you know, New York Times says they're not even woke enough.

24:02

Everybody had this like little brouhaha and you know it on Twitter in the last 48 hours over like Wired, you know, suddenly being the like resistance against tech, you know, okay, fine, hold truth to power. I get it.

24:07

Found a niche, you know, like everybody needs a little voice, a niche. Now just covering the big news of the day. As we've seen on this show, there's, there's limited utility in it.

24:20

Yeah. And if you pick a side, you can get on the horseshoe, you know, the most extreme left or right or capitalistic or socialistic.

24:29

You play into what the audience wants and then you give them the red meat that they want. And they'll keep coming back to see what you have to say.

24:41

That's why I subscribe to Jacobian magazine. This is the teen issue. Indoctrinating teens into socialism.

24:48

Yeah, gotta be important work.

24:58

Yes, they are revolt maxing and they've reason filled. I like to.

25:02

Oh no, not revolt maxing.

25:06

They are revolt maxing. I just love understanding how this side of the aisle thinks. So I literally subscribe to it and I listen to a couple of these magazines. You know, in that alternate world where the communists won, you wouldn't see this kind of. You certainly wouldn't see the wealth disparity because everybody would make the same amount of money. And then you also wouldn't see the massive progress we're making as a society when it comes to technology. If you're a founder, you can win by making a better product, a faster product, a cheaper product, a product that entertains people. It usually falls into one of the who's four categories. And you have to ask yourself if your product is not informing or entertaining, you know, educating, informing. That area of like entertainment, making life better, cheaper, faster, you know, and increasing the fidelity of results, then you're probably not going to have a big business. And that's what they're betting on here. Great job. Good, good get. And we're rooting for them, so well done. I like the first company already.

25:09

Yeah.

26:14

This Week in space. Here we go.

26:14

That was good. We will have to do this week in space at some point. We've been talking so much. AI plus Tao was sort of one of our big themes for this quarter this month. And so we're continuing our chat with a whole bunch of different subnet owners from some of our favorite subnets. And up next, we've got Sam Dare. He's from Templar. Now, you actually talked about Templar on the all in podcast with Jensen Huang, I believe just last week or two weeks ago. Yeah, that was last week. Yeah, Chamath brought it up during the discussion. These are the guys that have created Covenant 72B. That is their 72 billion parameter model that was built in a decentralized fashion over the computers of hundreds, thousands of different participants. So let's bring on Sam and talk about it now.

26:15

I'm very excited about this. You know, I forgot how cheeky and fun the crypto community is. And I obviously, you know, I elected to sit it out for a while. But I was talking a year ago, Sam, with my friend Mark Jeffrey. Welcome to the program, Sam. I was talking to my friend Mark Jeffrey, like a year ago. He's, like, deep in crypto. He was early into bitcoin and everything. And he said, yeah, you got to check out Tao. I think, like, it would appeal to you. Your criticism of, you know, bitcoin and some of these other crypto projects, ICOs, was that they didn't have customers. They weren't building value. It was all speculative, store of value, money transfer, which, you know, money transfer and store of value. Sam, I think we would all agree have some value in the world. But Tao is doing something uniquely different. What is it that Tao is doing uniquely different? And then we'll get into what you're doing, but just big picture leveling up. Explain to the audience as best you can what's unique about Tao versus, say, bitcoin.

27:01

That's an amazing question. So narratives matter. And for a very long time, like what the easier way to think about Tao and bitcoin is. Tao is a bitcoin of AI. But I don't think that does it the just justice. And it imposes some constraints on a system that's like Multi dimensional. Because bitcoin Satoshi invented bitcoin to transfer value. It's evolved into many different things. It's still evolving. Now we don't know its final form, but with Tao we try to. Okay, what is the what does what. What are blockchains meant to do? What, what is the core of blockchains? Is it smart contracts? No. Is it privacy? No. Is it some funky execution environment? No. It is can we mechanize? Trust. They are incentive machines. So what the founders of bitcoin Bittensor did is look, let's strip out everything from blockchains, all the noise and let's take their core, what is it? Incentives and let's blow it up a thousand feet. So the only thing that matters is incentives. So that is the primary unit in Bittensor is incentives. Now you understand how you can't really call it bitcoin because this is a multi dimensional fractal. How do you codify human behavior? So that is the problem Bittensor tries to, tries to solve. How do you strip away all the noise? How do you like. Because the ultimate, the ultimate trusted systems, if not cryptography is incentives. So we. So what bites of gives you? It's, it's really difficult because you know you could build anything with Bitten if you can codify an incentive game. Well the, the units of production and Bittensor, their subnets. Subnets are like magic factories where you as a subnet owner you have this very brilliant but self interested people. You need to convince them, no, no, no, you don't need to cause this, you need to force them to follow your rules and create this incentive landscape which is just, it's just a game. Like miners do this, validators do this, goods come out. But it's your job as a subnet architect to design a game that forces the miners. Because miners are economically rational, they care not for your objective, they care about the money. But you need to keep taking away every great.

27:59

So you created a rule set for Templar that does what? What is the incentive structure that you decided to create for your miners to then contribute in their own self interest for you to solve some problem in the world. Walk us through it. We've got a brand new partner here at Twist and as fate would have it, we love and use their product. If you need to hire, manage, pay or equip your team members anywhere around the world, you need deal. D E L They're going to take care of all the annoying human resources tasks that you don't have time for. Payroll compliance, visas and onboarding. So you can stay focused on achieving product market fit or scaling your business or finding more talent. Deal scales with you. They do all your chores, all the hard work and they do it perfectly from the first hire on. So there is never a need to switch platforms or transition to a new system in the future. It's future proof. And with Deal, you can set up payroll for any country in just minutes and get all the complicated visas and paperwork settled right away, allowing your business to grow without borders. And that's the smart way to grow. Now, talent is not limited to San Francisco, the United States or this continent. It's everywhere. That's why more than 37,000 startups and fast moving companies are already using deal to accelerate their hiring and growth. Find out more by visiting deal.com twist that's D E E L.com twist also I happen to be a shareholder in the company and I got very lucky. They acquired one of my startups and I am stoked. It's an amazing company at a very high level.

30:29

To successfully create an incentive mechanism, you need to be able to isolate what you want to improve. It's super, super important. With Templar, we could say, okay, every round we require miners to train over a data set. Yeah. Now the miner that reduces the loss in that epoch the most. Yeah. So it means that you've contributed most, most of the training. You win the most money. That's what it is at a very simple thing. So you have like 70, 70 people competing that okay, let me get the best grade in, let me get the best grade, let me get the best rated. So they train really, really hard. Now that is that, that's a straw man. But it's the high level view of what we managed to achieve. Now we spend months trying to perfect it because oh my God, like the funniest thing is. Sorry, sorry, I, I reliving loads of past trauma. Shout out Noah.

32:06

I can see in your face.

33:05

Yeah, yes, the memory because it's really funny because you know you spend a lot of time running simulations when you start. The way you get hacked is just dumb things but you know, it's very, it's very, it's very painful. It's very painful. But should you succeed, the results are absolutely amazing.

33:07

You asked people to contribute GPUs. These are very high end computers. This is like an Nvidia H100, I'm assuming. So you convince some number of people in the world who have access to one of those either by renting it or they own it themselves. They have it in a Co location facility. And you don't know who those miners are. It's permissionless to join. But you told them you have to have this specific type of hardware at this throughput to contribute. And then we're going to put a large language model creation essentially out to this distributed network of compute and then pay you for the use of your gpu. Am I broad strokes explaining it correctly?

33:25

No, no, kind of. But there's an important nuance.

34:06

Please.

34:10

We don't care what kind of GPUs you require. So what we do is we say this is what we need. All we need to care about is we can validate your inputs are correct miners. So in bitten, so you lean into what I like to call emergence, where you design your validation and you don't care what the miners are doing, I don't care if they're running it on Raspberry PI or toasters, as long as this gradient I can prove that it's good, then that's what I care about. So eventually people gravitate towards like B200, but the dominant strategy is maybe a miner just rewrites our whole code base so that I can run it on an A100. Those are the kind of things that properly structured incentives can drive.

34:12

Like, you know, this is a key piece. You know, I was just talking with the CEO, I think core weave was explaining to me, hey, like what's the lifespan of some of these? A1 hundreds, H1 hundreds, etc. And they were saying, well, after like five or six years, that's when we, we sell them for five years, six years and then people will find uses for it. And this is the case, they might take an old piece of hardware and take the time to make the training job run on and you don't care how many explain to us what you accomplished with this run. And this was the one I think Chamath brought up with Jensen, which. Where were you when you found out? He brought it up. Your phone must have blown up because I didn't know he was going to bring that up. Obviously. I've been involved in Bittensor for just about a year now in terms of being a partner at Stillcore Capital and investing in it. But where were you when you found out? And then explain to us the training run.

34:59

I was working and someone pinged me and I, I think I got a mini heart attack. I like, no, you can't die now. Wake up. Like wake up. So I think I really had it. Like, I mean it was amazing because before that, like, so Just take a step back. Your criticisms of crypto are valid for a very long time. All we have is dialism. All we have is, you know, PVP extraction. So everyone, no one had hope in crypto anymore. And all of a sudden we posted about 72 billion parameter run and it caught fire. So I thought, you know what, this is the biggest thing, because people are saying Templar finally validates not just bittensor but even the larger crypto, like, finally a use for crypto. So that was good for me. I believed in bitcoin. It failed me. So when I came to Bittensor, I found this decentralized training. And the idea of decentralized training is humanity's last bastion. It's the final boss. But it, when I started it seemed like such a joke. And to have it finally, you know, to test it at scale, I mean, make no mistake, we're not delusional. We still have a very, very long way to go. But, you know, it's like, okay, it's a bit slow, but this thing could have legs. We've had it validated by, you know, different people. Prefer academia. Jack Clark from Anthropic. Because even if you look. So we've got mentioned by Jack Clark from Anthropic twice. Beginning it's more skeptical, the second is less skeptical. And for me it's like, yeah, it's less.

35:53

All right, so to go ahead. Well, no, I was just going to say, just to explain this, there was a bit of a technical breakthrough here. You trained this 72 billion parameter model across this Tau subnet. Subnet three, I think you are. And people, as part of the Templar project solved, and they ran local optimized steps, compressed and then shared the updates. And then you put it all back together and you basically trained a significant model which a company like ChatGPT or Deepseek or Kimi, they would have spent a bunch of money using a bunch of computer hardware to do this. You did it. And how much did it cost you to build that model?

37:31

The cost over the run is about 2, about 2, 3 billion. But again, you know, it's very, it's very important to be clear. It's not a frontier model. It's nowhere near. And, you know, it's closer to llama 2, which is the frontier two years ago. So, you know, we're still a bit. We're still far off from the frontier, but we are moving so quickly because in the space of nine months, we've managed to go from 1.2 billion parameters to 72 billion. So it's more about the story of.

38:21

So the progress is significant. You're ramping up when. And back to the cost. You know the cost. I'm interested. And you said two or three billion. I'm not sure.

38:57

No, no. Maybe.

39:06

Oh, two or three million dollars.

39:08

How rich do you think? Yes, how rich?

39:09

Two to three million dollars in tau was distributed to the miners. Explain what the cost was.

39:12

So if we. If we take away team cost, which are negligible, the biggest cost is. The biggest cost is just running the miners now. The exact number is like how much we pay out to the people we're paying out, how much we pay out in the mission. And if we Tally, it's about 2 to 3 million. But there were times when we had to roll back the runs and whatnot. So that kind of made it that high. But we believe we can achieve better, far better economics than any transaction.

39:19

When you paid them, you paid them in subnet tokens or in tao and explain that relationship that comes up over and over again.

39:50

Okay, so. So you're gonna have to have a different podcast for. For that. Let me just. You're gonna have to have. Because even sometimes I don't understand it, but we. We have a subnet token gamma, which is the Templar subnet token. So we paid it out to them. So out of it, you know, miners manage their economics, they manage their inventory, they take profits, and they hold some. So that's. That's how it works.

39:57

Got it. Lon, you had a question. Go ahead.

40:20

Oh, yeah. I mean, I just think what's interesting about, you know, like, comparing. Because obviously we're not decentralized training. We can't yet produce like an Opus 4.6, like the very frontier. But what are the advantages of doing it this way other than just, you know, obviously saving, saving costs. There's sort of like a political dimension to this too. Like the advantage of having a model that's trained by a whole community of people instead of, you know, I got the direction of a few, like, sort of executives. So is there. Is that part of the goal too? That it's decentralizing it in a. In a way that makes it, you know, there's a societal benefit here.

40:23

The moral imperative is what got us started. Then you understand that there is actually a massive economic opportunity around it. And you've touched on just one, one case, Sovereign AI. I went to Kenya the other week, and these guys, they want to train models they're trying to scrap together H200, but they don't have 10, 20 million to train their models because the sovereign AI movement is quite significant. So you have that I was talking to, I made a commentary. I spoke to a news outlet in India and what they were saying is oh, now that anthropic might be banned from. Banned from the US India is a big market. Will we benefit from it? I'm trying to let you guys know you can build your own sovereign. You can build your own sovereign AI so that's a part of it. More importantly, it's not like there's two different modes to think about this. With Bitcoin, we made the fatal mistake of thinking we were going to replace J.P. morgan. We were going to replace. That was just some the dumbest thing ever. And we can't make the same mistake with decentralized training. So what is the mission? The mission is optionality. The mission is choice. The mission is that there's a lot of people that want to train but they can't. When you, when you open up that avenue, it's not even about, it's not even about competing with them. It's creating a market that never existed. We, I, we can see signs of, we can see signs of it and okay, it's quite geeky but tldr, you can probably get a lot mileage off niche pre training and fine tuning than just fine tuning. But no one explores that because the cost of pre training is so hard, so high. So when I first started.

40:58

So this is interesting. If you can provide an avenue for people to do pre training now at an affordable price with the miners and the validators all working to lower cost and grinding it down in a competition, this is a new avenue for people to do it. Let's end on this. When do you do your next training run and what can we expect from that? And tell us a little bit about the corporate structure of Templar. I'm an investor, as you know. Should I be investing in Tao? Should I be investing in the Templar tokens? Should I be investing in the corporation? Is there a corporation that's running the subnet? Walk me through those three pieces and then what's next?

42:49

So there's a corporation, but it's just to pay salaries and employ people. It's just a baseline for people. So template is only available to Tao. So that's how you gain exposure to Templar. Our next training run, the Epoch AI article states a very big problem or the next very big limitation is that we're still 300 times below the frontier. So why are we below the frontier is because our current algorithm requires Every miner or every node in a network to be able to hold the full model in its memory. This has limitations because everyone has to have a B200. We use B200 in the last day. In our next we released a new paper. It's called heterogeneous sparse loco. What this does is that it lets us basically train across any type of computer so we become indifferent to network topology. So what does that mean? It means that we can interleave data center and consumer compute. Now here's what no one's telling you. You don't have a GPU scarcity. You have a well connected latest model GPU scarcity. So what if we can get the B3000s? What if we can get the A100 that no one else is using and wherever. So the mission is right now, wherever there is an Internet connection and a GPU that is free, we will be able to put that in our runs.

43:30

So this is really interesting. You're building that software layer or that resolution layer that would allow me to take my Mac studio or if Lon has a gaming computer with a great Nvidia card in it. Just like SETI at home allowed people of varying different hardware profiles to run SETI home which was looking for extraterrestrial life. You can have them participate in this. So when will we see the next job get run and when can we have you back on the program to discuss that? And we'll put the Epoch story, Epoch AI story on decentralized training in the show. Notes for people to read is really fascinating. But what's next? When do you guys. And then who decides what you're going to try to do next?

45:04

I would. I wish I could say it was me. It's my research. So I have a couple of prima donnas, they're called the research team and they decide when, they decide when. But I'm told in the next couple of weeks we'll kick off our next run. And again so for us it's like. I mean the, the, the fame is amazing. Like it's mind blowing but always do good work. The next model is not going to be a massive model because it's cheaper to build up this new primitives at a smaller scale. So we probably do a model that is smaller but it's useful. So we probably do a smaller model that is closer to the frontier. In addition to Templar we also have this pre training but there's also post training. For our next act we will be deploying a new algorithm and pre training and post training. A useful model on decentralized girls. Then we start to ramp up and, you know, who knows? I set them a target of 1 trillion. They told me I was crazy. But, you know, we'll find out who's crazy, who has jobs at the end of the year.

45:51

All right, well, and there's a website Tao app. I don't know if you've seen that before. I don't know who runs that, if that's the foundation or not. But it does show you the different subnets and how they're performing. That's the one I go to to look at stuff. Where can people find out more about the Templar project? Is there an official URL or GitHub or something? A community, a discord? Where can people go find more information and go down the rabbit hole?

47:01

We've got www.tplr.AI we've got Twitter, we've got Discord, we've got www.convent AI, because that's the.

47:27

Well, TPLR AI. If you want to learn more about one of the more exciting projects going on in Tao, thanks so much for joining us.

47:36

Yeah, Sam, thank you for having me.

47:46

Great to have you in the news right now after what happened last week on all in, and then me talking about my investment publicly. And just to remind folks, I sometimes will place a bet in order to learn. So let me just explain how insane my process is. And yeah, I can't believe this tweet got a million views. But I did a little tweet, Tao greater than BTC I saw. And I think the reason I said that was I feel like, and I've said this for a long time, I believe that something will replace bitcoin. This is something that freaks people out, right? If you have all of your bag in, you know, BTC and you're trying to pump it and it's, you know, back down in the 60s and it was at 130, you're only concerned with your bag and your book.

47:47

And any time there's a new hot coin or project that people get excited about, it turns into this war between this one's the future. Like, no, bitcoin's the best one. This is an inevitable cycle.

48:39

But one thing I've learned In, you know, 40 years in tech, from the 80s till today, is that everything gets replaced at some point, right? Or almost everything gets replaced at some point. A better version of almost everything comes out, whether it's BlackBerry giving way to iPhone giving way to Android, whether it's, you know, the, you know, Craigslist giving way to, you know, Facebook marketplace is always going to be competition.

48:52

There was a time people were like Friendster in MySpace. That's it. There's never going to be another social network after Friendster in MySpace, right?

49:20

So it's not heresy to say something will come along that's better. Now what you have to understand is what time frame and how long does the network effect last? Because there are moats in technology. One of the moats in technology is brand. Okay, AOL had a great brand for a while. You said online, it meant aol. But then sometimes the performance and the actual better mousetrap is what is defensible. That would be the Internet and broadband. Sometimes it's the combination of the brand, the network effect. Like Uber or doordash, right? They have like a massive network effect. More drivers, more restaurants on doordash, et cetera. So you have to ask yourself, with the game of Bitcoin, are we at that point, whatever number of years later, 14, 15 years later, that a better version could come along that would be more exciting? Now, when I say it's better, I think it's better at an incentive system to provide value to consumers, to businesses. That's what I think it's better at. And I think all that compute will at some point, let's say Lon Templar provides a better use case for compute and transport on the Internet than Bitcoin does. What do you think bitcoin miners will do? They'll take 10% of their computer and they'll move it over to Templar or to another subnet and, and say, okay, yeah, let me see if I can make more money here. That's the rational thing to do. I think that's the moment that we're in right now, is that people are going to start looking at their infrastructure and say, hey, maybe I should put infrastructure, bandwidth, storage, compute towards this project.

49:29

I feel like that's another disconnect that's happening here. A lot of people, you know, they're seeing you talk about Tao is so interesting. I like all these subjects and they assume that you're doing the pump and dump meme coin, rug pull trick, which is like, you know, like hawk to a girl, starts a coin, they start selling the coin, but then before anybody else gets a chance to sell, she dumps all of her coins and then makes the money and then walks away, like. And that's the sort of classic rug pull. And. But that's not what's going on with Tao, because these are all projects, they all have like, A goal. They're all using the blockchain technology to actually accomplish something. So it is not, it's not exactly the same as what we've seen.

51:05

And it's not a dis towards Bitcoin, right? It's not a diss towards Bitcoin. But I do think like every technology tends to have an arc, right? And you know, you see that in non commercial projects I will say are different, you know, so HTTP or the World Wide Web or FTP. Like some things are open source Linux. So they're very different and they can continue on for very long periods of time, multiple decades. So you know, I'm not saying Bitcoin's going away tomorrow, but it has been stuck at 60, 70k for a little while now after this big thing. And then you have one person trying to corner the market on it in Michael Saylor. Michael Saylor, that I think is a red flag that somebody could even do that and that could blow up people. I'm not calling it a Ponzi scheme, but people say it's a Ponzi. I'm just saying it's like overly complicated and it to me works against decentralization. So I look at that as like a red flag. If one person's trying to accumulate that much, you know, 5, 10% of all available coins. Kind of ends the game of Bitcoin. Anyway, I think we got a demo. We have a demo.

51:43

We have one more guest coming up. We've got a very cool demo bringing us Open Oats. It used to be called Open Granola, now it's Open Oats. We'll have to ask about that. Yazin Ali Rahim is here. He's the creator of Open Oats. This is Jason. It is a, it's an open source note taking agent that listens into your conversations and provides helpful insights. I'll tell you what attracted my attention about this when I saw it online. This to me feels like the potential realization of what we always talked about for producer Claude. Remember we said producer Claude, we wanted him to listen into the show and then when, when, when we said something about research that it could research, Claude would just look it up and let us know during the show. Hey, you mentioned the population of, you know, like India. Here it is. So that to me it's like it feels like we're getting, we're almost there. Open Oats feels like it's almost there. So welcome.

52:52

Yes, producer Claude, huh? Okay. All right.

53:43

Well you know, Claude is I think the best language model out there and it's the most helpful for us, most expensive. And they've kind of had a generational run this year, specifically the last six months. But people do pay for note takers. Note takers are everywhere. What's the case for an open source version of this? Yazen. And welcome to the program.

53:47

Thank you. So I kind of feel compelled after seeing Matt and his asteroid mining thing and Sam and the crazy distributed AI stuff to say, you know, this is just like a side project. You know, I probably spent like a, like a day total just working on this. And it was kind of random because someone tweeted, hey, who's. Who's working on, like, the open granola? And then a friend tagged me because, you know, I've just been building a lot of stuff recently using Claude, actually Claude code. And, you know, as. As luck would have it, I. I'd already been working on a version, but I hadn't released. It was like 80% there. So, hey, you know, why not release the thing, right? And so I, I put the thing out and apparently there was like a whole thing going on about granola preventing people from accessing their notes or their transcripts. I. I didn't even know about it, but, you know, there was like a whole drama going on. And the, like, my. I. I tweeted about it and I put a video and it just blew up. And like, you know, overnight we had like a thousand stars. There's like, you know, several hundred people forking the. The repo. And essentially the core idea is the vision behind doing OpenNotes is not just to create an open version of granola, which I think that would be fine. But I really wanted to have local LLMs so you'd be able to not siphon off all of your meeting transcripts out to some random third party.

54:08

So privacy is the key here. If you can run it locally, hopefully you don't have to worry about your zoom meeting, your private conversation winding up, you know, growing, you know, OpenAI or, you know, Claude's LLM, which is kind of dangerous.

55:37

Yeah, right, right. And. And the other big part to me was also. So I went through YC a couple years ago, and one of the things. So YC has this thing called book face. A lot of people don't know about book Face. I'm sure you do. Probably.

55:55

Yeah, it's their social network. Everybody posts to it and it's like a free for all awesome founder humans.

56:11

Multiple book for humans. Yeah, I understand.

56:20

But, but there's. There's this special section inside bookface called the startup manual. And basically it's got like all of the accumulated wisdom from, you know, distilled from like all of the batches that they've got where, you know, they talk about great advice for hiring for, you know, creating a product, you know, getting your engineers on board, you know, doing salaries, compensation, everything. So they, they've kind of distilled wisdom over all the batches that they've done. And you know, they have this, this, this, this handbook or manual. And I mean, it's great because, you know, as a YC founder, like you can access it. But, you know, I was thinking, like, there are a lot of situations where I might not be, you know, thinking, oh, you know, maybe I should just go, you know, search for this particular situation in, in the meetings that I have, you know, that, that I'm discussing with my, my team, you know, other people that I'm working with. Wouldn't it be great if there is a way to surface suggestions from like the best resource for startups available to me in context during a conversation that I might not even have known existed before? And so that was the kind of inspiration behind Open Granola. That was the one feature that I hadn't seen anywhere else.

56:22

Show us the real time feedback. I haven't seen either. And that requires local compute, listening in and in real time hitting an LLM and saying, hey, we're recording it. Because I can watch like notion or doing the transcript live, but show us how it works. And Obviously you're on GitHub with this. You got close to 2,000 stars, so people are starting to take notice of it. It's early days, but that's nice that you broke a thousand.

57:41

So this is an MIT license and anybody can fork it. There's already been like a Windows version. This is Mac only, so I built it using Swift. It's really efficient. But there's a Windows version and there's at least a couple of guys that I know are working on an iOS version. So, you know, it's gotten pretty, pretty crazy. And also, so I have like a, like a demo script. The core idea is, all right, so you kind of have a settings menu where you can select, you know, what you want to use for transcription if you want to use a local model. So we're using Parakeets, which is a local model, so super fast you won't feel any lag. And also you can clean up the meeting notes once you're done. You can also do speaker diarization, which is basically just figuring out who's talking this is the cool part, LLM providers. I'm using open router because I'm just running this on a Mac Mini, so not a super beefy machine here, but you can use Ollama or MLX for local stuff. Then we also have an embedding provider, which would be important when it comes to doing real time suggestions, which by the way, like Gemini 3.1 flashlight. I mean, this thing is like super fast, so you're gonna see this in a second anyway, so you kind of start the meeting. So let's go ahead and start. It's initializing. All right, so now I'm speaking. If you speak, you're gonna see like a, them show up. And then while I'm speaking, you're kind of seeing what I'm saying right here. And then I have a demo script here. So I basically took like, and, and we have the Insights panel here. This is, this is where it's going to surface. You know, all this stuff.

58:08

Oh wow, there it is. Right, so you have a conversation going on and then in the other window it's saying if we move that over.

59:47

So let's see, I, I have a demo script here. I'm gonna, I'm gonna work through. So let, let's, let's role play here. Let's say I'm a founder and I'm gonna speak. Well, I mean, let's say I'm pitching you, right? So, yeah, we're building an AI platform that automates prior authorization for healthcare providers. So you can see here it shows up like some information related to prior authorization. We don't really have any direct competitors.

59:57

So when they say, hey, I don't have any direct competitors, it goes and searches for direct competitors. So it's taking claims and it's vetting the claims that are being made in real time. In other words, it's like a real time due diligence checker.

1:00:25

Yeah, I mean you can see it actually shows you other companies based in your knowledge base that also operate in a similar space. So as, as the founder is kind of speaking, I thought this might be a case that you'd be able to relate to.

1:00:38

Yeah, super relatable. Because by the way, we each either do this by having Claude or, you know, OpenAI or whatever, and you're typing in questions, you know, or before you get on the call, you would have AI look at the pitch deck and give you questions and ask, hey, as an associate, go through these questions, what are the competitive sets, what's the margin, et cetera. So yeah, this is really compelling.

1:00:52

Wow.

1:01:16

And you get to decide, like, how. How noisy you want the thing to be. Like, you know, if you want it to be eager, balanced, or quiet, I have it on eager. Just, you know, for. For demonstration sake. But every time someone makes a claim. So let's say we're pre revenue, but we're raising at a 12 million post money valuation.

1:01:17

We got a. We got a question from the chat room. Jamie uncensored wants to know, was this made in replit? That's the question.

1:01:34

No, it was. So you can see, just. Just to close out the point. So whenever you mention valuation, it mentions other companies that have also raised. And so that kind of gives you a reference for. Okay, does this make sense or not? So it's saying here, no, this is a red line. Never pay greater than 40x.

1:01:41

I'll tell you what's brilliant about this. Before we get to the replica question, I would like to have like four of these running concurrently on a screen. One of them would be fact checking. One of them would be writing jokes. One of them would be writing proposed questions. You know, like, so Jackie Martling, who worked with Howard Stern, was like handing him jokes. Jokes over like paper or in a chat room. But you also have like, sometimes I'll be, you know, doing a podcast and some. One of the producers will say, oh, yeah, the population of India just passed China's for this reason. So fact checking insights.

1:01:56

Besides, it's. Yeah, this is what we always dreamed of. And it's got the. It's got the cluely thing too, that if you're on a zoom call with somebody, they can't see that you're getting prompted by open in real time.

1:02:29

Right. So there's this option where you can hide it from screenshots, screen sharing. So when I turn that on, you won't be able to see.

1:02:41

So you just seem like a genius.

1:02:46

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That is. Wow. That's the thing one days of work. Is this a company or just a side hustle? You said you went through yc. Are you still working on that company or.

1:02:47

Yeah, I'm still doing that. I'm still doing that, but I'm building on the side. And so this was one of like, you know, I, I have many products that I'm working on. Like, actually in. In the course of building this, you know, I, I, like, as people were getting more interested, I just started getting like so many, you know, fricking pull requests and issues. Like 200 plus, you know, between pull requests and issues. And then, yeah, at Some point, I was like, all right, I didn't sign up for this. Right? It's great that, you know, this is happening.

1:02:58

But founder to founder, are you getting more traction on this one than your, your day job? I'm curious.

1:03:24

Yeah, I mean, like, the pool here has been crazy and a bunch of people have already reached out telling me, hey, you know, wouldn't it be amazing if you, like, could you take this, the same thing and sort of tailor, make it, or, you know, customize it for our specific company and then maybe you could create like shared knowledge bases or shared meetings. I mean, there's all sorts of crazy ideas where you could take the core principle and then just customize it specifically for a company. And I think that that would probably be worth exploring. So I'm having those conversations right now. But the crazy part is, like, you look at the repo right now, we don't have a single issue, we don't have a single pull request, because everything. Like, I built this other thing using Claude, again, called Auto Maintainer, which basically just. It's like a bot. So I have my core GitHub account and then I have like an account for an AI. And basically this is like CLAUDE code. Every time somebody opens up an issue or a pull request, it would research the bug or try to replicate it. And I have this policy document which details the sort of product vision, what things are in or out of scope, and also so it replies to them.

1:03:29

You basically have a junior dev or a product manager managing this project with

1:04:45

Cloud 100% and it's working 24 7. So you can see, like whenever someone files a pull request, it says, thanks for the report. This is my AI. This is a known blah, blah, blah. I fixed it up in 1, 8, 9, and it opens up a pull request and then it addresses the point and then tests it, merges it, and then deploys it. And everything is happening on its own. I just get flagged for the handful of issues which are super high risk, where they touch a big portion of the code base, or it's a really risky thing. So I get flagged for that. And then it's like answering a multiple, multiple choice quiz, oh, you know, maybe we should do this. And it gives me the recommendations too. So it's not even like I'm making this stuff up. I mean, you know, the crazy thing, Jason, is like, I built this, this, this Mac app in Swift, and I don't know a line of Swift. Like, I've never created a Mac app before. And so, like, everything is being run. The entire show is being run by. By Claude here. And I'm just there kind of, you know, giving the product direction, just saying, all right, this is. This is what I think would make sense.

1:04:52

This is, I think, gonna be the challenge, Lon, is everybody can build everything and then it's just gonna be a matter of who stops maintaining. And obviously there's a solution here with the AI maintaining these programs too. But now it's like when the bar gets so low to build software, everybody's gonna make everything. And this is part of the SaaS apocalypse. You have a company like Granola has a loved product. They're a startup, they're crushing it. You know, all credit to them. But now they have an open source. And then you have to ask, well, is that open source going to be able to keep up with Granola, or will many hands make for light work? And will the oatmeal product be better than Granola? You know, that's the fascinating place we're in right now. An openclaw versus Claude cowork versus Perplexi computer. Yeah. Is like, which one of these projects is going to actually succeed? So great job. Love it. Everybody can go check it out on GitHub. We'll put the links in the notes and we'll drop yazin off. Well done, sir. I am so obsessed with open source at this point.

1:05:54

Yeah. Wow. I mean, this is amazing. OpenNotes is pretty amazing. It's like, because we had envisioned this product exactly like a year ago. Like, wouldn't it be cool if we had like an AI listening to the show and there's Telus notes and yes, passes, little notes all during show. This guy.

1:07:05

Well, I mean, you could have two different versions of the show. You could have the show enhanced like pop up videos was in the past. You could have an advanced version of the show you watch, or you could have regular. And then imagine if we just had a sidebar and if somebody builds this for me, I'll pay them for it. Like, I would like a sidebar that just shows you all of the, you know, comments from the fact checker. The troll. Like, we just. We make four different Personas. The troll. The funny, you know, the chaotic troll. Negative, cynical troll. The funny troll.

1:07:19

The Stern crew. It's. We need a Gary Delabate to sort of produce, keep his eye on the facts and keep everything moving. We need a. We need a Fred Norris to supply background, context, sound effects. What's up? Jackie to write one liners. Robin to update with new.

1:07:55

Somebody make that for us. And we'll put the them here as our sidebar. And you could watch. We'll do two streams. Oh, my God. Somebody take the open. If somebody does this and does this for the open source product, I'll pay them 5,000 bucks.

1:08:09

Whack.

1:08:19

Pack it and then come on the show.

1:08:20

Yeah.

1:08:22

No, seriously. And we just have four bubbles there. And they could have like a little Persona. You put a sine wave there and like their little picture. And we'll put it as like not Jackie, not baba buoy, not whatever. So we don't. Don't get in trouble. Not Fred. Hilarious. So somebody build that for. Hey, you know what? It's Friday. Let's go off duty.

1:08:22

We're off duty already. I feel like we're already a little off duty.

1:08:43

We're off the reservation.

1:08:46

That's for sure.

1:08:47

That's for sure. We gotta talk about Lord of the Rings. Shadow of the Past. Right? This is the. You sent this to me this week. I put it in the notes specifically. This is Peter Jackson, Warner Brothers new line. They announced a new Lord of the Rings. It's like a sequel and a prequel. Here's Peter Jackson making the announcement.

1:08:47

I thought it was time to. To give you all a Hunt for Gollum update. The first of many that we'll do. Little blogs along the way. And Andy Circus has been busy designing the film. He's going to direct it and obviously play Gollum. We've got a lot of the old team back again, familiar faces and some new faces, but. And he's doing a terrific job. It's looking amazing. The script is coming together really well. And I think it's going to be a really good film. Really good film.

1:09:07

So pause here.

1:09:25

But it's not the only talking movie that we do.

1:09:25

He's talking about a movie we already knew about that was already announced called the Hunt for Gollum that Andy Serkis is making. This is set between the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. It's about Aragorn hunting down the Hobbit or hunting down Gollum looking for him, seeking information about the One Ring. So that's a prequel to Lord of the Rings that's in production now. That's coming out next year. But here's where Peter Jackson is about to announce a new project. We didn't know.

1:09:27

No, wait, is that a prequel or is it like they're inserting it between episodes?

1:09:52

It's set between Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. So.

1:09:56

Got it.

1:10:00

Bilbo already got the Ring. From Gollum and has taken it back to Bag End. And now Aragorn is investigating what's going on with the Run Ring and hunting down Gollum. Now Peter Jackson is about to announce the new film that we only learned about this week. So continue the video developing.

1:10:00

We've actually got one another film that we'll be making after Hunter for Gollum. So I thought I should tell you a little bit about that. Oh, actually, why don't I get somebody else to explain it? Because we've got a very special partner that we're working with. Okay, you can see for yourself. Hang on. There we go. Hello.

1:10:17

Hi, Peter.

1:10:36

Hey, Stephen.

1:10:36

Hi, how are you?

1:10:37

How you doing? Stephen Colbert is.

1:10:38

I like what you're talking about.

1:10:40

You can cut the video now. Yeah. So Stephen Colbert is going to co write with his son and with Philippa Boyens who wrote the Lord of the Rings movies. They're going to co write this new, this new film. It's set partly during the part of the Fellowship of the Ring that we didn't cover already, where they go visit Tom Bombadil. And it's also set after the Lord of the Rings trilogy based on some appendices and epilogues, stuff that Tolkien wrote.

1:10:42

I love this filling in. Yes, I love the filling in of the lore. And there's also a project going on that I think we'll probably have on the docket here as well for Harry Potter and we'll talk about the economics there. But what I love about this is, you know, Peter Jackson has, I think in New Zealand, all of the, you know, backdrops and sets and equipment for all of these films. And he's done six of them. So now they're gonna do seven and eight, I guess.

1:11:08

Yes. There was an anime one a few years ago, but there's six live action ones that they've done. Correct.

1:11:40

So great, keep filling it in. I like it. And you know what I like about it is you can get other voices. So now they have Colbert, who jokes in this that he suddenly has more time. Remember he got canned or he's whatever, he has free time. And I love the idea that he's so passionate about it. I love seeing people, you know, perfect one genre, you know, a late night talk show. And before that, I guess maybe he did stand up or was a correspondent. And then going into this just for the joy of it, you can see this is pure joy for him. He obviously doesn't need money. What a great little side quest for him. And I'm super thrilled about it. I think that the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the extended editions are just unbelievably magical as a product. I don't know where you would rate that trilogy in IP Land, but it's certainly up there with Star Wars.

1:11:45

I think it's the most consistent. I think if you look at the great trilogies, there's usually, like, one that's not quite as good as the other. I think the two that kind of hold up the best, Lord of the Rings and Indiana Jones. There's no off entries.

1:12:38

I'm gonna put Star wars up there for the trilogy as well and the prequels.

1:12:51

You know, I don't think Return of the Jedi is as good as the first two. That's me.

1:12:54

Okay, fair enough. Yeah.

1:12:57

Yeah.

1:12:58

Well, that's because they didn't kill Han Solo and they had Ewoks instead of Wookiees, but that's for you guys to search.

1:12:58

Yeah, you guys can work that out. Work that out here. One interesting thing I would add. A lot of the times when this comes up, people are like, but there's the Silmarillion. There's so many other Tolkien writings about Middle Earth. Why not adapt them? It's because Warner Brothers and New Line don't own the rights. They only own the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. So everything they do has to come out of those two books.

1:13:04

Yeah. This would be a great time to give Peter Jackson those franchises to pursue. But did they give those to Amazon? Is that who owns them?

1:13:23

Amazon bought another chunk, but nobody bought the entire. No one company owns the Tolkien everything.

1:13:33

That's the problem.

1:13:39

The entire estate. Yeah.

1:13:40

And this is what Marvel and Disney did well, is they finally got the Fox IP back so they can have X Men and Avengers in the same film. And they did a deal with Sony to get Spider Man.

1:13:42

They're sort of collaborating on the Spider Man. So Sony still technically. Nobody can make a Spider man movie

1:13:52

without Sony or the people from Spider man there. Yeah, the villains and whatnot. Okay, let's talk about this Harry Potter one. Sure. Because this is amazing. They're redoing, if I understand correctly, Harry Potter books.

1:13:57

Yes.

1:14:12

Each book will be a series. Each series will be 10 episodes or so. And each one will be. This is recasting everybody.

1:14:13

Yes. We're redo. We're redoing the Harry Potter books. They're going to do it as a show. Every season of the show. One book, one school year, it Hogwarts. And the big selling point here is the movies, because they were Movies. Everybody loves the movies. It's not a knock on them, I don't think. But the movies had to condense because those books get very long, like Goblet of Fire and on. They're very long books. To make it into a movie, you had to cut a lot. You had to condense it down. So the promise that HBO is making is now we've got a full season of tv, we're going to be able to adapt every subplot, everything that didn't work its way into the movies. So it'll be a more thorough adaptation is what they're saying. But yeah, they had to recast everybody.

1:14:22

The economics matter here.

1:15:03

Yes.

1:15:04

We were in a group chat, I think with producer Nick. There was the economics.

1:15:05

There was a viral tweet that I just sent to, to the team that we could pull up.

1:15:08

Okay, pull it up and then walk me through the economics. And then your question or endor Nick's was how does this make economic sense? It was not an answer for you.

1:15:12

It was really Nick's question. So, yeah, they're saying Warner Brothers, they are spending reportedly $100 million per episode on the show. We don't. That's not locked in for sure. That's what the rumors and the trades are saying. So you compare that to Amazon's Lord of the Rings show, which we talked about, which is 58 million per episode. House of the Dragon, which was 20 million per episode. The original Game of Thrones started only at 6 million per episode, which seems like a crazy discount now. So the question becomes if you make seven seasons of this, because there's seven books. If you make eight episodes per season, that's 56 episodes. You're talking about 5.5 plus billion dollars.

1:15:21

$5.5 billion to make this show.

1:15:58

All, all in everything to produce the show.

1:16:02

So what is the total episode count?

1:16:04

He's then this Tweet is assuming 8 per season. We don't have a definitive answer that. I think that's a pretty safe bet. Eight episodes, perhaps per season. That would be 56 episodes across seven seasons. So 5.6 billion is the price tag. If you say 100 million per episode.

1:16:06

So I'll tell you why this makes sense and it makes a lot of sense as a swing. And if this works, they're going to do it with Star Wars, I predict. Sure. And they will take A New Hope and make it a season, a ten hour version of A New Hope. They'll make a ten hour version of Empire Strikes Back, a ten hour version of of Return of the Jedi. Fix a bunch of things, try a bunch of different things out. 30. That would wind up being 30 hours instead of 6 hours. Now you can imagine how amazing it would be to.

1:16:21

And if you think about Dave Filoni who now runs Lucasfilm, that's been what he does all along. He created the Clone War shows, Ahsoka, all this stuff. He loves going back into the lore and finding ways to insert his characters original ideas. Imagine being able to go back to the original Star wars movies, knowing everything you know now and being able to seed all that stuff in there from the beginning.

1:16:56

And Jabba the Hutt was like a more prominent character, but cut for time. So you could have Jabba the Hutt story occurring, you know, through episodes two and three. Right. And can running from him.

1:17:17

And you know about the prequels now. So you could say like, oh, well, there's work pod racing into the background. Luke Skywalker loved to go see pod racing when he lived back on Tatooine because we now know how popular that was. You know, you could bring it all together, all the lore that they've created over the last 30 years.

1:17:31

All right, so I just want to walk people through the economics of at scale companies. You're talking about, you know, about 300 million people are now on Netflix, right? 100 million people or more on Hulu and Disney.

1:17:46

Yes.

1:18:04

So this is going to exist on which platform?

1:18:04

This is going on HBO Max, which will now be the combined Paramount plus and HBO Max because they're.

1:18:07

They're so joining. If you have one person paying $15 a month, that's $180 a year, right?

1:18:13

Correct.

1:18:22

180 times six years. It's about 1,000 bucks. Right. Back of the envelope. One person who says, I am a Harry Potter devotee, I'm going to have a lifetime value for Warner Brothers of $1,000. Now, if there's a million people who love this. Right. Or 2 million people who love it, you start doing some back of the envelope math. An incremental 5 million people spending $1,000 each is $5 billion.

1:18:24

Yeah.

1:19:00

So the bogey right now, if you look at Max and HBO max, they have 125 million subs, right?

1:19:02

Yeah.

1:19:11

They only have to incrementally grow by 4% to get those 5 million.

1:19:12

Sure. And the other thing to bear in mind about HBO Max, unlike Netflix and Disney, which had their global rollouts years ago, HBO Max is still rolling out around the world. They're very new in like Europe. They only launched this year so they haven't had a chance. Netflix is already. If you live in a place where there's Netflix, you've had years to think about it. They probably almost maxed out most of those major markets. HBO Max has not maxed out those markets yet. They're brand new in Germany. They're brand new in the uk. They're brand new in Ireland. So, like, there's a lot of ground left to cover. There's a lot of people still to win over.

1:19:20

Right. So now you look at the books. How many of these Harry Potter books were sold? 600 million worldwide.

1:19:56

Yeah.

1:20:07

Yeah.

1:20:07

It's a big number.

1:20:07

According to your replicant gaff, he's good. 230 million in the US. 120 million just for the first book. The Philosopher's stone translated into 80 plus languages.

1:20:08

I worked at a bookstore when Goblet of Fire came out. That's how old I am. And I've never seen anything like this. People. It was midnight. Families were showing up, dressed up, lined around the block to get the book.

1:20:19

So 600 million copies worldwide. If. If everybody bought all of the books. And I think there were how many books?

1:20:33

Seven. Seven. They made eight movies because they split the last one in half. There's seven.

1:20:40

So let's just say of these 600 million copies, every one of them bought all seven. There's 100 million people as part of that group. You need only get 5% of them.

1:20:43

Yeah.

1:20:56

To join HBO Max. That's how this math works out. You cannot look at it as you looked at previously making movies. Movies are a dying form. The theater experience is broken. DVDs are over. But what's not over is lifetime value. And, man, I gotta think for my kids who love this series, you know, they're gonna be watching this at the edge of their seat.

1:20:57

Oh, sure.

1:21:25

And what a great deal for, you know, a thousand dollars. For $180 a year, you get to experience this, you know, 10 episodes, $18 an episode. It actually equals, like, the cost of a movie ticket.

1:21:26

Right.

1:21:39

So I think actually this math is starting to math out the math. Maths. Yeah.

1:21:40

What I was saying to Nick, I mean, on top, I think you're making an excellent point, and I agree. I think even on top of that, you have to think about Warner Brothers has this IP Harry Potter. They own it, however big, outright. Yeah. It's already been, you know, 20 years since these books were out. And this, this. They've got a new generation or two to sell on this. And if they do a good job and they get people under 20 super, super excited for Harry Potter. Again, the sky's the limit. Theme parks, merch, more books, more video games. Like, there's no limit on how much Harry Potter Universe franchise stuff. Warner Brothers, okay, Sell to kids that it wins over.

1:21:47

This is the next piece. That is exactly right. How many incremental Universal theme parks will happen because people, a new generation get addicted to the Harry Potter films.

1:22:30

That to me is the whole thing. Like you're looking at, we got kids.

1:22:43

Yeah, yeah.

1:22:47

And what do those wands cost? I have three of those wands on a shelf here. My daughters love that experience. I think they were 150 bucks each to make your wand. Plus, we've been to Harry Potter land three times. Yeah. And I rented Universal. I was there Universal Studios.

1:22:48

That was the first time I got to check out Harry Potter Land at Universal. And it is amazing.

1:23:06

How were the lines when you went to the all in party?

1:23:11

The guys, the guy Ollivander, the guy selling wand was like outside, like, anybody want a wand? Come in, get a wand. There was nobody there.

1:23:14

It was incredible.

1:23:20

Universal Orlando, home to the biggest wizarding world, pulls in 21 million visitors a year. And Harry Potter's the number one draw.

1:23:21

Oh, yeah.

1:23:29

If it is in fact the number one draw, let's just say half the people are going there for it or a third. That's 7 million people coming for it. By the way. That's the, the true fans. So if you use the true fans methodology by Kevin Kelly, you need a thousand true fans in order as an independent artist to exist in the world. You can look that up. The Kevin Kelly 1000 True Fans thesis. The True Fans are probably 5 million. There's probably 5 million, like super fans. Yeah, super true fans, man. If they just buy one more wand

1:23:30

each, the lifetime value of that's a billion dollars. It's like thinking about Disney adults. If you're Disney. Like, every new Disney adult you make is thousands of dollars. Wait a second time.

1:24:01

Are you a Disney adult?

1:24:13

I mean, I, I like, I like some Disney stuff, but no, I don't. I, I haven't been to a Disney theme park in a really long time. I don't buy merch. Like, I don't.

1:24:15

That's not your, that's not your vacation. I just want to say for Disney adults, I'm, I think there's a case to be made. I'm not into a surveillance state, but I think that should be like a list that the government should have access to. I know, lovely.

1:24:23

Disney adults. But. But it's not for me.

1:24:38

Majority are. The majority are lovely.

1:24:40

Yeah.

1:24:43

It's that 5% of them that are weird. And I. When I see Disney adults and they go there and they're all wearing the hats.

1:24:43

Yeah.

1:24:50

The.

1:24:51

The crew jackets and stuff.

1:24:51

It's a bit much. It's a. I mean I have. There are exceptions, but I think government surveillance for Disney adults.

1:24:53

Yeah.

1:25:01

I think that's.

1:25:02

This is a mandatory. I'm all for CCP level monitoring of these individuals. They're up to something. It's just a very weird thing.

1:25:02

Yeah. Gavin Newsom should get on this.

1:25:11

Here's my pick for off duty. I love an app called Whisper Flow.

1:25:14

Yes.

1:25:19

This is my like AI stack now. Yeah. Whisper Flow. I think they're advertising.

1:25:21

They are.

1:25:25

That's what I'm saying.

1:25:25

For the end of the show.

1:25:26

And I had the Whisper Flow on this Week in AI. Go search for this Week in AI. This Week in AI. That's our new spin off Roundtable. Check this out to pull up an image of this. $20 I think I paid for this thing. Show the foot pedal.

1:25:26

I got.

1:25:42

This foot pedal is insane. Lon and I. It's from like China. It's got the jankiest software you've ever seen.

1:25:43

Sure.

1:25:49

It's complete garbage. Whisper Flow needs to make this.

1:25:50

Yes.

1:25:53

If Whisper Flow made this with the Whisper Flow logo on it, why don't they. This would be the best selling product in AI.

1:25:54

You know, when I used to use subtitles and captions for DVDs, my first job in Hollywood, I would use a pedal to start and stop it so I wouldn't have to constantly be clicking the mouse.

1:26:01

So you click this thing and you hold it down and it does. My shortcut for Whisper Flow.

1:26:11

Wow.

1:26:16

Whisper Flow is like imagine if Siri. Siri makes two mistakes. Three mistakes per sentence.

1:26:16

They still don't know. I don't want to say duck instead of the F word.

1:26:23

I mean, it's just a disaster. How many years now, this E key glow thing, usb, single foot pedal. Go ahead and buy it. I guarantee you it's going to be life changing for you. You plug it into the back. It's janky, it's cheap. It's probably going to break every year. I want a Whisper Flow version of this. I want to get like three of them and be able to do different things with them. But I'm working and I'm in a slack. I have been sending you my slack responses have been whisper dictating. Really using this. And you didn't realize.

1:26:27

No, no. You would never know because it turns it into realistic looking writing. Yeah.

1:26:57

And it knows things like my name. Siri. After me spending $20,000 on iPhones and storage and everything. Still doesn't know that my name is Jason Calacanis. Disgrace across the board. I know that there's a big effort to redo. Siri.

1:27:02

Oh, it's horrible.

1:27:21

Whisper Flow is like perfect. Siri. And it works on your phone, it works on your desktop. It works on my Windows desktop, it works on my Mac desktop. This is the must have device of the year for me.

1:27:22

Wow.

1:27:33

There you go.

1:27:34

Whisper Must have device.

1:27:34

If you're into such that they are an advertiser. But this was not a paid promotion. This is just purely Jason.

1:27:36

No. And neither is the foot pedal company.

1:27:41

No, they're not sponsoring us.

1:27:43

The foot pedal.

1:27:45

I have another. I don't usually get into, you know, too many TV shows, but I was looking for something in sci fi. I love a good post apocalyptic. I love a good thriller.

1:27:46

Oh, I want. I think I know what's coming. I think I might know.

1:28:00

I saw that this new show paradise was in season two and everybody was talking about it. So I, you know, I've been on a bunch of flights recently and I watched the first season of paradise and it was great.

1:28:03

Yeah, Sterling K. Brown.

1:28:17

Great.

1:28:19

It's the creator of this Is Us, that drama, that NBC drama that was also with Sterling K. Brown. And so this is their new project.

1:28:19

I like this actor, Sterling K. Brown. He is like a rock. He's like an Ethan Hawke, you know, just a solid actor who you like to see on screen. And then I like the, the billionaire. Just to give you a little premise of it. There's an underground city being built, right. To store humanity after a terrible tragedy, you know, happens on planet Earth. I won't tell you what that is because I don't want to reveal it because they reveal it like five or six episodes in.

1:28:26

Yeah.

1:29:02

So go watch the series. It's great. Have you seen it, Lon or.

1:29:02

No, No, I, I haven't. And I remember when it was brand new, they hadn't re revealed the twist yet. And so it was just like this very confusing synopsis. He's like, he's a Secret Service agent. He's investigating some conspiracy against the President. Who's James Marsden. And I was like, I can't figure out what this show is. And it's because they were being really. They're playing it close to the vest because they didn't want people to know. It was post apocalyptic.

1:29:05

It's got a little like lost in it. Got a little thriller in it. And that woman, I forgot her name, but she was in like svu. I think she was like one of the detectives on the Laura Noor series is. And she's great.

1:29:27

Sarah Shahi, of course, from the L. Yeah, for the L word. Alias. Yeah, I think that's.

1:29:43

Anyway, she's compelling on screen as, you know, a super villain, billionaire tech person. And yeah, it's. It's great. Easy watching.

1:29:50

Oh, you're talking about Julianne Nicholson. Oh, that's the one. Yeah. She was on Criminal Intent, that Lauren Ordo show.

1:29:59

That's it. Yeah, yeah, she's great. She's very compelling. Anyway, that's another one for me. And then I'm gonna give you. I'm gonna give you an album.

1:30:05

Oh, okay.

1:30:14

Maybe I'll give you two albums. This is from my cobuz. You know, I'm into the high fidelity music.

1:30:16

Yes. You've been listening to the very high lossless stream. I do, yeah.

1:30:21

There's a Tedeschi Trucks band.

1:30:25

Oh, sure. Wow. Tedeschi Trucks. And what are they? Yeah, Tadeshi Trucks band. They used to be a different. It used to be Tedeschi Trucks and Tedesco.

1:30:28

It's a blues band.

1:30:37

Yeah, I saw them. I was in like high school the first time I saw them.

1:30:38

They're kind of like the Allman Brothers. They got a little bit of Mark Knoffler in there, the guitar player. I don't know if it's a husband and wife, but these two people who

1:30:41

lead the band are both Susan Tardesi and Derek Trucks. That's them.

1:30:49

Okay, so I think they bought at auction

1:30:53

the.

1:31:00

The guitar, Jerry Garcia's guitar.

1:31:02

Oh, wow.

1:31:04

Last week. Yeah. Let me just see if I got this right. So Tedeschi truck's band bought Tiger the guitar from. This is the guitar that Jerry Garcia did. I think it went for like $10 million. The other guitar is owned by the founder of HubSpot. I had him on the program. He bought Jerry Garcia's other guitar. Anyway, he's. He bought this guitar and he just immediately went out and started playing it. So he's out there playing this, you know, incredible thing. But anyway, I found this band. I like this band. The other one is Lily Allen. You know, this pop star from the uk.

1:31:05

Of course. Of course I know Lily Allen. She's the one.

1:31:44

Okay.

1:31:47

She's very famously married to David Harbour and then he cheated on her if you became a big tabloid scandal. But yeah, she's been around for a long time.

1:31:47

Okay. Lily Allen. Who, like, I think I remember her just because she had like a big rehab stint or something.

1:31:53

Yeah, probably. That sounds about right.

1:32:04

Yeah. So anyway, she has this album called West End Girl about her breakup with the guy David Hart, Stranger Things, David Harbor, Stranger Things.

1:32:05

Yeah.

1:32:13

Which now has become a Broadway show, or I should say a West End show. And she's on tour. She just plays the album straight, but

1:32:13

she's doing a US tour.

1:32:21

People are going crazy for this album. Next, this album in my TikTok, because it's a very catchy album and it's like a concept album, is so popular amongst middle aged women, the gays.

1:32:22

Yeah.

1:32:36

And, you know, I guess people from London who are fans of Lily Allen. It's a great album. And then she performs it and she's made it into like a whole experience and a theme. And I just thought, you know, this is a great thing for artists to do. Take their album and then perform it as a stage show in small theaters.

1:32:37

Yeah.

1:32:58

And you get that whole experience. What album or albums would you most like to see a band play? From track one to the first track to the last track with like a theme.

1:32:59

I've actually seen a few bands do this. Neil Young did a tour with his Greendale album where he actually had actors because they're all. They're all song stories. So he would play and the Crazy Horse the band would play. And then you'd see the actors actually acting out the songs as he was playing them. They're also, of course, famously Pink Floyd. The Wall, they used to like build.

1:33:13

I did see that. Incredible.

1:33:32

And then what other time I saw the Flaming Lips do this? They used to mash up their albums with. With. They used to play Dark side of the Moon, but also with wizard of Oz tracks in it. Because, you know, there was always that old idea that, yes, wizard of Oz links up to Dark side Moon. They would cover Dark side of the Moon, but they would have wizard of Oz stuff going on on stage, which was really cool. I will.

1:33:35

Talking Heads did this right with. Stop making sense.

1:33:57

Well, I mean, Talking Heads, it's always like a little bit of an art stagey show along with a concert. I was going to say, oh, I had it and now I lost it.

1:34:00

Was it Steely Dan?

1:34:10

The who? Oh, Steely, Steely Dad. Actually, Tommy. Steely Tommy. That would have been a good one. But no, I don't. I don't remember what I was about to say, but I'll come up with another one. Oh, there's a band I love called Songs Ohio that got Jason Molina. He died. So unfortunately you could not do this. But they have a very cool, very sort of lived in country rock album called Magnolia Electrical Co. That would be cool to see as a show.

1:34:11

There's another band that does Dark side. They're called the Mule. And every. I think it's every New Year's Govern Government Mule, gov.

1:34:36

Oh yeah, Government Mule. Yeah.

1:34:50

Government Mule will do the Dark side of the Mule. They do the Dark side of the Moon, right? Pull up the Wikipedia page for Dark side of the Mule. And I found this online. There's a bunch of bootlegs of the concert on YouTube, etc. Dark side of the Mule. If you love Pink Floyd, I would like to go to this. Seems like the album was recorded in a three hour gig at Boston's Orpheum

1:34:53

Theater on Halloween night. That fish does that too on Halloween. Every year they cover another artist's full album and that's like their costume. They did the White Album one year. They did Dark side one year.

1:35:19

Anyway, this is like I saw Bruce Springsteen when he did his Broadway show. That was great. I took my mom. Best son ever. Anyway, this is great stuff. Really appreciate this idea of really going deep into an album. The concept, et cetera. What I liked about when Bruce Springsteen did it is he just talked about his career a bit and I really enjoyed that. He made a very funny joke. I always remember where he's like, you know, I made a living. I made a career of talking about working in a factory. The working man, the downtrodden. And I've never set foot in a factory. I've never. He just.

1:35:30

Every, every track is like 12 more hours at the mill and it's like, nah, it never worked.

1:36:08

Yeah. And he just has literally said like, I experienced none of that. But I, you know, he found that niche. Anyway, anything else on your off duty list?

1:36:13

I was gonna recommend one more thing before we go. There's a really interesting indie film. It's on Hulu right now. It's called American Sweatshop. It's with Lili Reinhart stars in it, who was on Riverdale and it was directed by. I'm gonna blank on her name, but she's a great cinematographer. She shoots like the Pit and a bunch of other cool tv. She directed this. It's her directorial debut. It is set in the world of a. Their moderators. Like, it's the one of these big warehouses where they have people watching social media and moderating. Like, this video is too violent. This video is too sexual. Like, block.

1:36:21

What's the name of this?

1:36:56

It's called American Sweatshop. And it's set. It's set in that world where they're all watching these horrible videos all day and, like, approve or delete and they have to, like, make these calls.

1:36:57

Yes. This was a lawsuit.

1:37:07

Yes.

1:37:08

By the people who were doing this for Facebook. And they saw all kinds of horrible things.

1:37:09

Yeah.

1:37:14

Oh, so somebody made this into a movie.

1:37:15

It's a movie about what it would be like to work in one of these sort of warehouses and what the horrible stuff. You would see it. They kind of make it a thriller. Like she thinks she's witnessing a crime and she's trying to report up the chain films, whatever. Exactly, exactly. But it's really. It's less about the thriller stuff and it's more just about what would it be like to do this all day? Day is your job. And how would it impact you? I actually, I didn't. I just threw it on out of curiosity. I. I was pretty caught up in it. I think they do a really good job.

1:37:17

The other one I want to see. I don't know if you heard about this one. There's an independent film called the Screener.

1:37:45

Yes, I have heard about this.

1:37:51

Okay.

1:37:53

I haven't seen it.

1:37:54

This. It went. It was at Sundance. And the Screener, you remember the Hateful Eight got leaked.

1:37:55

Yes.

1:38:02

And Quentin Tarantino went to the FBI. Rightfully should. And it was like some, like, post production house had the person's name on it.

1:38:03

Right.

1:38:11

You know, the watermark, etc. They catch the person. But yeah, this is the most horrible thing that could ever happen to a filmmaker. And so there is a film called the Screener about this happening.

1:38:12

Sure.

1:38:24

So the naval gazing.

1:38:25

This is the guy who. The guy who directed and wrote this is Jim Cummings. He also did a 2023 mo movie called the Last Stop in Yuma County. That is great. Oh, if you get a chance to watch that one, I'm going to look up where it's streaming right now, but that's the one to check out.

1:38:27

So this film isn't even out.

1:38:43

We're going to have to. Maybe I'll watch whatever. Oh, yeah, you can. I believe it's on Paramount. Plus you can watch the Last stop in you McCown.

1:38:44

All right, everybody, that's twist for Friday, March 27th. That's your off duty. He's Lonz. L o n s x.com sl Jason do me a favor. Rate subscribe Comment if you want to watch us live, search for this Week in Startups. Hit the subscribe, hit the live button and please go write a review and subscribe to this Week in AI, the new show from the team that brought you all in in this week in Startups. We'll see you next time. Bye bye Bye.

1:38:51