SPEAKER_01: Do I believe that Sam's epistle about why he left because of decentralization is correct? No, I do not.

SPEAKER_00: If somebody runs a subnet, they do get a little bit of power, and they can do what's called a rug pull. If you have leadership and you have responsibility, you can mess with it.

SPEAKER_01: The reason why this all happened, the incentivization alignment engine worked spectacularly well, but then it fell out of alignment when there was sudden success. It created this sort of overwhelming temptation. It looks like, and this is sort of allegedly, this is what it looks like on chain. It looks like this is what Sam did.

SPEAKER_06: And this is all allegedly and a lot of ifs here. But if the trail is true, one might speculate that a large amount of money was at stake,

SPEAKER_07: and it would be like somebody raising venture capital and saying, wow, there's millions of dollars in the bank.

SPEAKER_08: I should deposit in my personal account and shut the company down.

SPEAKER_10: All right, everybody, welcome back to Twist. It is Monday, April 13th, 2026, A077, something.

SPEAKER_06: There was a lot of hand-wringing in the Tau BitTensor community over the last week or so,

SPEAKER_11: and there's been a lot of progress made. So to break it all down with us, Lon brought on my friend Mark Jeffrey, known for 30 years, was an early OG in Bitcoin, created one of the first online virtual communities, The Palace, back in the 90s, when many of you were not born, and is one of the OGs of the internet online space, and also now Crypto and Tau Distributed Computing. Welcome back to This Week in Startups, Mark Jeffrey.

SPEAKER_13: Thank you for having me, sir. Great to be back.

SPEAKER_11: Mark started telling me, Lon, about BitTensor and Tau, because I was like, hey, what's going on? Because I think crypto is turning a corner here. It's becoming legal. It's becoming regulated in a very intelligent way. And I'm curious, is there anybody doing anything where a consumer or an enterprise gets value other than store of value and money transfer? Very well-established uses of crypto, of course, between Bitcoin and stablecoins. Great to transfer money around and great to speculate and all that stuff. But I care about the application layer and actually some value being created. He said, yeah, let me tell you about this thing, BitTensor, Tau, and subnets. And I was like, that's legit. And then I watched the people getting involved in and said, these are legit people. Well, as opposed to crypto, Mark, which I think you would agree, you had the early cyberpunks, crypto heads,

SPEAKER_16: and then it kind of got hijacked a bit along the way.

SPEAKER_17: But I would say that within the Ethereum community, when that all booted up, when decentralized finance booted up, you had the invention of Uniswap and the decentralized exchange and the invention of decentralized lending. And that was valuable. These are financial products. So they're not really, you know, products like the way you and I are used to seeing Belt. But they do have value and they're not like sort of nonsense. But I'd say 80 to 90% of it is nonsense. When I encountered BitTensor and started digging around the subnets,

SPEAKER_01: you know, having been a participant in many early ecosystems, including the 90s, as you talked about earlier, as well as early crypto, what I saw in BitTensor was quite a lot of early signal. I would say, you know, half the teams were doing something of value and were decent hypotheses. You don't know whether these hypotheses are going to pan out and become very large companies or phenomenons, but they are pretty good. So I've never seen an ecosystem where there is more early signal

SPEAKER_17: than the BitTensor ecosystem. So that's one of the reasons why I got very excited about it.

David Friedberg: Maybe explain Uniswap. You mentioned that. I'm sure people in the audience are going, oh, that is real.

SPEAKER_11: Uniswap is kind of an automated market maker of some type where people can swap value, yeah?

SPEAKER_17: Yeah. I mean, it's really the centralized Coinbase, right? Yes, you're correct. Everything you said is correct. But a lot of people don't know what an automated market maker is.

SPEAKER_01: It is technically called that an AMM. But the thing that was happening before Uniswap, if you wanted to get your coin listed on a, you had to, first of all, get it on a centralized exchange. There was no other option, which meant you had to pay Binance or Coinbase or Kraken or somebody, usually like a million bucks to get the listing, right? And then you had to provide your own market making, which meant that you had to provide a bunch of other coins to trade against your coin when it listed on the exchange.

SPEAKER_17: The exchange would not provide that liquidity, right? So along came Uniswap and they said, why don't we do something like a Coinbase or a Kraken or a Binance?

SPEAKER_01: But the entire thing is just powered by smart contracts and lives on the chain. Nobody owns it. Nobody controls it except for the smart contract. And we attract liquidity by promising some portion of the trading fees to anyone who provides the liquidity to the smart contracts. So anyone could become a fractional owner through providing liquidity of an exchange, of this decentralized exchange. So you had two real big advantages. One, you had permissionless listing. Anybody could list any coin so long as they were able to define the swap pairs on Uniswap. And two, the community provided the liquidity.

SPEAKER_17: And this worked extraordinarily well and is basically the backbone of all DeFi today.

SPEAKER_11: Lon, we're off to the races here. So much interesting information, hard to keep track of. And I've got my notepad here and I've got my favorite pen. This is my Zebra G750. But as fast as we're talking, I'm not going to get it all down, right? I might write down two or three words. It's not going to be structured. I'm going to have to go back. I can't keep up and I got to be present here. So what do I want to do? I have my plot pen. I press the button. Red light on it. So I'm not like covertly recording anybody. I'm just keeping my notes. So when you're in a meeting, if you don't have your phone handy and you don't want to flip through, you know, your different apps to try to record something, the plot stores it all. When I put it in the cradle at night to charge the battery, the battery lasts forever.

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SPEAKER_29: I did. My mom watches our show and she's like, you know, they should be advertising these to seniors, not executives, because I'm forgetting stuff constantly. So she's hitting it like all during the day, remind me to do this, update my calendar for that. And it's just keeping her more like in the flow and helping her sort of dodge her forgetfulness. And it's the smartness of it. It's not just taking notes for you. It's filing them. It's arranging them. It's coordinating them. It's keeping you organized all with just hitting your Plod pin. So if your work relies on conversations, you too need a Plod note pin, just like my mom. Check it out at plod.ai slash twist. And if you use the code twist, they're going to give you 10% off.

SPEAKER_33: Okay. So thanks, Plod. Let's get to Tao and BitTensor.

SPEAKER_36: What attracted you? Yeah. What attracted you to this specific project and why, Mark?

SPEAKER_17: I remember talking to you at a conference, one of your conferences where you said, you know, pivot from crypto to AI, right? And thought about that because you're a smart guy and, you know, you have advice like that. I'm going to listen. And my conclusion was, well, you can't really pivot to AI because the only people who are going to own AI are the big players, right? There's like five companies, right? You have to have giant iron to compete. And anything other than that is you're just, you know, an API layer on top of one of those five companies. And you're probably just running into a buzzsaw. That was my initial conclusion. And then I, you know, with BitTensor, I saw a way to sort of, you know, fuse the crypto stuff with a decentralized version

SPEAKER_01: of what the centralized people were doing. And the more I understood what was going on there, the more I realized that this was sort of the Linux approach to, you know,

SPEAKER_17: it sort of reminded me of the OS wars when you had OS2, you had Microsoft NT, you had Sun Solaris, but who won? It was Linux, right? Linux powers 90% of our world today. And what I saw with BitTensor

SPEAKER_01: was sort of the early moments of what looked like an AI Linux. Open AI, but like what open AI should have been, truly open AI.

David Friedberg: I wasn't saying crypto is bad in any way. I just say, if you're in crypto,

SPEAKER_11: I would pivot to AI because there's such a much more, there's so much application for AI because intelligence touches everything. Whereas with crypto, finance doesn't touch everything. Finance people might say, yeah, finance touches everything. Finance doesn't touch me writing a poem. Finance doesn't touch me going and, you know, cooking a meal or something. Like it doesn't touch everything, but intelligence does, right? And that was very similar to, I think what the Tao people were saying was, hey, AI is so complex and there's such a need for compute. There's such a need for transport, moving packets around. Hey, maybe there's something here. You're running a, essentially a fund, like a venture fund, but for Tao, I'm a partner in it. I'm an LP in it. I'm deep down the rabbit hole on this, but you're picking subnets in which to buy those tokens and invest in. So what are some of the ones you've invested in and why?

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SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so we've invested in about eight so far and we, you know, sort of the big ones are Ridges, Shoots, Hippias, Vidio, Score and basically all of these, what we look for, we're sort of conservative investors so far as one exists in the BitTensor ecosystem in that we look for subnets that have product market fit and revenue primarily, right? So it's pretty much the same criteria that you use probably to judge startups, right? We look for a mature team, we look for mature products and there's a class of product inside of BitTensor that I call the research subnets and these are people that are trying to do

SPEAKER_17: extraordinary things that don't necessarily have an obvious product market fit right out of the gate but if they work, they could be absolutely enormous, right? But you don't know yet who the, yeah, so, you know, so great example of that. Well, Nova is a great example of that, right? So Nova is hunting pharmaceutical molecules and it's going to take a while for them to probably find one but if they do find one, it could be a billion dollar subnet kind of overnight, right?

SPEAKER_01: But it's very speculative, right? We're mining for gold, basically. We might not find it.

SPEAKER_06: Now, Lon, it's important. Incentives matter. And so I want to sort of tee up this story here.

SPEAKER_11: If somebody runs a subnet, they do get a little bit of power. They have the subnet, they recruit miners, they have validators, making sure the work was done properly

SPEAKER_00: but they become like a small business owner and they can do what's called a rug pull. So they can either be virtuous

SPEAKER_11: and they can provide people with this incredible opportunity to give knowledge knowledge through a large language model or an algorithm. They could give compute, they could give storage, they can contribute something in order to win the prizes of Tau or the subnet token, which is, you know, essentially one and the same in some ways. So they can earn money but they can also, if you have leadership and you have responsibility, you can mess with it. So we had last week somebody running, one of the subnets decided they wanted to take their marbles

SPEAKER_33: and leave the game and that's the core of what happened. Yeah, Lon?

SPEAKER_29: We actually had spoken with Templar, which was the subnet in question. Sam Dare is the sort of creator of it. And so, yeah, Sam Dare, he dumped 37,000 Tau on his own subnet holders. It's about $10 million in money and he sort of walked away from the entire project. It was Covenant AI, the designers of that 70 billion parameter model. You had spoken about it with Jensen Huang on All In. We had discussed it with Sam here on the show. So, you know, he sort of walked away from Covenant AI. They had been operating three subnets on BitTensor, Templar, Basilica, and Grail. Templar was sort of like the, you know, the big one, the high profile one was the reason that Tau had sort of been taking off, getting a lot of more mainstream attention. The coin had sort of gone up in money. He and Const had some sort of, we're still getting sort of all of the details. They had had some sort of back and forth. He felt that Const, Jacob Steves, one of the co-founders of BitTensor, was sort of overstepping his authority. There was some sort of conflict between the two of them. And then, as you said, Sam sort of took his marbles, walked away, sold 1% of the alpha holdings on three Covenant subnets that were near 100%. You know, and so, yeah, so that is sort of the situation. 37,000 Tau, that was kind of the rug pull, that $10 million, and now we're sort of in the aftermath. The price of Tau dropped about 25%

SPEAKER_34: in the immediate aftermath.

SPEAKER_11: I don't know if you were on the episode when this gentleman was on, but I found him a little squirrely.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, we discussed this after the show. I mean, big personality, a funny guy. Like, he was a great guest on a podcast because he had very big outspoken opinions, and he was a big personality guy. I really enjoyed talking to him, but we did discuss this afterwards that there was also an edge to him. It was a little bit hard to put your finger on. There was something a little unpredictable about his demeanor and I guess...

SPEAKER_06: Yeah, and what was coming next, I kind of pushed him on, hey, what are you doing next and how does this work? And the answers, Mark, weren't as crisp or as tight as I might have expected from somebody running something significant, let's just say. Yeah. So, what is the back channel here? And maybe you could explain

SPEAKER_07: Constant, the founder of BitTensor and his role in all this.

SPEAKER_17: So, Constant for Constantine, just FYI. Oh, I did not know that. I did not know that. Yes, I know. A lot of people don't know that.

SPEAKER_01: So, Const actually built the initial subnet version of Templar 3 and Sam used to work directly for Const at the OpenTensor Foundation and so, Const basically bought the subnet for him, wrote the initial version of the decentralized training environment, Templar, and handed it off to Sam. Right? So, he gave Sam his start and then basically what we discovered here is, you know, let's just stop for a second. Because what happened here, the reason why this all happened is because something in BitTensor worked extraordinarily well. There's several things that are working pretty well, but it's because something worked. The incentivization alignment engine worked spectacularly well, but then it fell out of alignment

SPEAKER_17: when there was sudden success. And it created this sort of overwhelming temptation for, you know, a subnet owner who, when you're a subnet owner, you acquire a large number of your subnet tokens. They're emitted into your wallet, right? Because you get paid effectively by the chain for being a subnet owner. And if you have enough of them and there's the liquidity pool in the on-chain Uniswap that I described earlier, you can at any time just sort of flood that Uniswap with your tokens and exchange it back out for Tau. And if you have the majority of the tokens, you can get the majority of the liquidity pool. And now you've got Tau. Now you can run off the Binance, sell the Tau for dollars and now you're gone, which it looks like, and this is sort of allegedly is what it looks like on chain. It looks like this is what Sam did.

SPEAKER_01: And it also looks like that his developers on his team were caught blindsided by this also.

SPEAKER_06: And this is all allegedly and a lot of ifs here. But if the trail is true, then essentially one might speculate that a large amount of money was at stake

SPEAKER_07: and it would be like somebody raising venture capital and saying, wow, there's millions of dollars in the bank. I should deposit in my personal account and shut the company down, which is actually one of the big fears in venture capital. We run on a trust-based system and it has happened. Sure. You can go look at the history of venture capital every year or two. So somebody takes the money and goes to Vegas or upsconds to another country.

SPEAKER_29: There was just that story about the director, the Netflix director, Carl Rank. Do you remember this? Netflix paid him to make like an eight-episode sci-fi series for them and he just took the money, bought crypto, bought a bunch of luxury mattresses, bought some cars. He's doing a little jail time right now for that.

SPEAKER_58: But yeah, it happens in every industry. People get paid up front and then they walk away with the bag.

SPEAKER_11: So there's no way to stop this unless you have a board of directors, if you have a controller, a CFO, and then even if you do, people, you know, the board meets four times a year and then there's

SPEAKER_62: 361 days in between those board meetings where shenanigans can happen.

SPEAKER_29: I guess I had sort of a two-part question I'd love to throw both of you about this. One is, do you guys believe that Sam had legit grievances against Const or the system? He's been saying this is activism, like BitTensor is overreaching, it's not truly decentralized and I had no choice but to do this. So one, do you think, is there anything behind that at all or do you suspect that this was just, that's how he's explaining himself after the fact that he just wanted the money? And then two, how would you have preferred a subnet owner react if they do feel like I want out of the BitTensor community, I'm not happy with the way it's being run? What should Sam have done to avoid rug pulling all of the people who believed in his project? Allegedly. Allegedly. But still separating himself from BitTensor more generally.

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SPEAKER_01: Do I believe that Sam's epistle about why he left because of decentralization is correct? No, I do not. And you can see this, the evidence, like nobody in the ecosystem believes that. Okay. And you can see this from all the posts, from all the subnets. Everybody's saying, you know,

SPEAKER_17: my subnet is BitTensor and BitTensor is my subnet. There's a ton of these posts. Yes, I've seen those. Basically the BitTensor version of I am Spartacus, right? Right. And everyone is standing up and saying, no, no, no, none of this stuff is true. And Konst gave a very, I thought, thoughtful reply to the letter that Sam posted. Yes. As, you know, his rage quit letter, basically, right? Konst replied to it and it was a very legitimate response. So, yeah. So I think that I don't, you know, I don't think there's anything to his claim of decentralization. Nobody else feels that way.

SPEAKER_29: Purely hypothetically, Sam had a legitimate grievance. You're running a subnet. You're like, I don't like the way BitTensor is being run. How should he have dealt with it?

SPEAKER_17: How should he have dealt with it? He should have gone to Konst and said, you know, look, I'm not happy. You know, let's find a way to amicably part ways. Let's, let me hand off,

SPEAKER_01: let's, let's, let's figure out, you know, how many, how much tokens, how many subnet three tokens I should be allowed to keep. Right. Okay. And then I should hand over the subnet private key to the foundation to be redistributed to somebody else to run and Konst could figure out who that was or the foundation could figure out who that was. Basically negotiate an exit, which, you know, he gets something for his contribution to date, but then the subnet and the token holders are allowed to carry on without him. Right. That's what he should have done. Mark,

SPEAKER_06: before we get to our guests, how can we avoid this in the future and who owns a subnet and who should own a subnet? Should it be the miners themselves or should there be governance here? Should there be a 51% rule where the people contributing to it own it? What's the best practice here? Because, hey, as an investor,

SPEAKER_07: if I wanted to back lawn to do, you know, an algorithm on and do a subnet, I would be like, okay, I want to own it. I want lawn to own it. I want the community to own it. How does that get codified outside of the Delaware C Corporation, the Texas Nevada Corporation, where we set up a board of directors,

SPEAKER_62: where we set up shares in a company, we have preferred shares and that whole architecture, which is old, but trusted.

SPEAKER_75: The architecture in crypto is smart contracts.

SPEAKER_17: So the answer to this is to implement a new smart contract or change at the chain level in Bitentrafer's case. The problem is that Sam had access to all of his tokens and could spend them in one gulp before anyone knew what was happening, right? He had information asymmetry, which, and he controlled the subnet so he could just dump this giant amount of tokens on the market.

SPEAKER_01: So the answer is to lock those tokens to basically make it so he can't spend them. And, you know, if he's operating the subnet, you can't both operate the subnet and have unlocked tokens. Like there has to be,

SPEAKER_17: you know, if you're operating the subnet, then your tokens are locked. And there are, there's a couple different proposals underway as to exactly how to do this. Cons released a new one this morning, where basically the ownership of the subnet is always up for grabs based on who locks the most tokens for the longest period of the time. That's effectively the mechanism. So you might lose your subnet

SPEAKER_01: to someone who has more conviction. So the idea is that the chain will reward capital conviction in a subnet. So it is possible you'll lose your subnet to somebody that believes in it more than you.

SPEAKER_36: We have some guests, Lon. We do. Let's bring some of our guests on and we'll have a talk about some of the other subnets out there. Yes.

SPEAKER_29: Speaking of great subnets as we often are, we have three more subnet founders joining us on the show today. First up from Macro Cosmos, they also run three individual subnets. We're going to welcome Will Squires, the CEO and co-founder and Stefan Cruz, the CTO and co-founder. Gentlemen, thanks for being here. Also joining us, he is the co-founder of Subnet 34 Bitmind. They're a system for detecting deep fakes and other AI-generated content. Give it up for Ken Miachi. Ken, thanks for being here.

SPEAKER_79: Okay. All right.

SPEAKER_80: So maybe Ken, you can explain a bit about your subnet, who you are and why you created it.

SPEAKER_82: Yeah. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_83: Hey, everybody. I'm Ken. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Bitmind. So we are an AI security company and we're very focused on deep fake detection. We have a variety of consumer applications where if you're scrolling X or you're on the internet, you can put in a video, image, piece of audio, et cetera. It will tell you if this is real or fake. And then we also have a bunch of enterprise services where we create custom models for essentially businesses trying to secure their communications, their data, et cetera. And what we're really focused on right now is going towards proof of human. There's a lot of grifters. There's a lot of North Koreans, fake people trying to infiltrate your systems and just AI slop in general throughout the internet, bots trying to sign up and use your services. And we are creating services to essentially detect and stop that type of activity from happening on the internet.

SPEAKER_06: And how is this done? Is there an algorithm that analyzes a piece of data and says,

SPEAKER_07: hey, this is human. This is likely an LLM. This is a deep fake. This is a real photo. And what do the miners contribute to this? They have their own algorithms

SPEAKER_83: or their computer, both? Correct, yeah. So essentially, the miners are competing on developing the models themselves. These detection models that essentially in different modalities, whether it be image, video, or audio, that essentially they win the competition, they earn our subnet token if they produce the highest accuracy, most high fidelity models. And then on top of that, we also have another set of miners that are actually incentivized to generate data and try to fool them. So it's a continuously learning system trying to improve over time.

SPEAKER_88: So you have a white hat and a black hat. You got the black hats coming in and saying, hey, or red team, I guess.

SPEAKER_07: It might be a way to say it even better. Here is some content and we're going to make a generative AI picture of lawn, but we're going to make them 10% more robust or we're going to GLP them and make them 10% thinner. And then they try to trick your, the other miners and that makes their algorithm sharper. So steel making, steel, you know, steel on steel

SPEAKER_87: making it stronger. Exactly. Trying to give the chisel jaw. I don't know, whatever, whatever you want, right? Sure.

SPEAKER_83: Why this is so important is because generative AI and AI in general, right, is the velocity in which these new models coming out is so fast. And so if you did this in a traditional way, what you have to do, wait for C-Dance to come out, wait for, you know, Nano Banana Pro 2 to come out, generate a bunch of that data, retrain your detection model. And what we have is an open, decentralized, permissionless system where people are generating data for us all the time and people are also coming up with new detection algorithms, retraining quickly. And so we can actually update our system on a daily, weekly, at a very fast cadence to always stay ahead

SPEAKER_87: of the newest generation models. So, okay, this seems like an incredible game

SPEAKER_11: you've constructed. One team is truth maxing, one is faking, maxing, they battle it out, their algorithms get sharper, fantastic. But is there a commercial product that is created for enterprises or consumers? Can the New York Times or could ax Twitter say, hey, we want to put these trending posts in here and then maybe in the community notes say, hey, it has this score from your subnet and it's a certified 98.7%

SPEAKER_27: truthy or truth maxed?

SPEAKER_83: Yeah, definitely. So I think the two enterprise use cases you touched upon were essentially social media and news outlets. So with news outlets, that's a really important use case for us. If you are in traditional media and media at all, you want to make sure what you're reporting on is actually real and you lose trust and credibility, which they're already struggling with. And so, right, as a reporter, you're going to want to verify whether this image, whether this data that you're receiving is real or not. And so there's definitely use cases like that where you could either drag and drop an image or video or you can use our API however way you want to use it to determine that. And then on social media, it's a really big use case. We have something called Bitmine Bot, which is very similar to Grok, but it has a specific focus on, you know, is this real or not? The other use cases, I think on the enterprise side are really about securing essentially business communication. There's been a lot of recent drama around interviews, whether you're like, I think there's two main use cases. There's one where it's like just this person is completely fake. Yeah. And like, right, the person can't put their hand in front of their face or something like that. And they're trying to infiltrate your organization. But then there's another use case where it's just like actually grifting people trying to get multiple jobs and putting on a facade of themselves. And so we're trying to stop both of that. And then the other actually really big use case that is pretty shocking, but not a lot of people are thinking about is actually in government. So more and more, there is evidence being shown in cases in a wide variety of contexts that is AI generated. And you need to be able to prove this. You know, that this is AI generated is the new my dog ate my homework. Right? Yeah. This is interesting. It's like a jamming thing about you. You just say it's AI generated.

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SPEAKER_07: What's interesting to me, Mark, is just putting on my angel investor hat. Go read the angel of the book

SPEAKER_11: and it's in 13 or 14 languages. It was really nice. I was at a major Hollywood party last night. Just very famous studio head, Lon,

SPEAKER_33: came up to me and said, you're Jason Calacanis. I said, yes, I am. And this is in like a room full of like celebrities or whatever. He said, I read your book. It's just like movies. You would have been a great studio head. Anyway, enough promotion of my book. It was one of the great moments of my life that in a room where I assume

SPEAKER_106: nobody knew who I was, a studio head, a literal studio head had read the book. David Zaslav.

SPEAKER_108: This is what he's doing with his time now. He's getting ready to retire. It wasn't David, but it was on that.

SPEAKER_109: Even bigger than that. Wow. Anyway, it's as crazy as it seems. I won't say who.

SPEAKER_11: But I'm looking at this through my angel lens, Mark,

SPEAKER_07: and saying, wow, there is a business here. I don't know exactly what it is, but you can see Ken is doing product market fit. He's doing a go-to market function where, hey, we're trying to find customers. And he's also raised $3 million for this project as well. Correct, Ken? And who put $3 million into the company? And then Mark, as an investor, after Ken tells us who put the $3 million in, I want you to explain to me how I should think about this as a partner in Stilgore at an LP with hundreds of thousands of dollars of my own personal money at stake versus, hey, should I invest in Ken's corporation? So, Ken, maybe you could tell us who invested the $3 million? Is it crypto people

SPEAKER_87: giving you tokens or is it like a venture capital firm? So my background, I come from both

SPEAKER_83: AI and crypto. I worked at Amazon for a couple of years doing recommendation systems. And then prior to that, I was at a blockchain protocol called Nier. And so I had relationships with a variety of VCs in both of the spaces. Let's see Arch Capital, Canonical Crypto, Mechanism Capital, Blockchain Builders Fund. There's a wide variety when we raised our seed fund about a year ago now.

SPEAKER_11: And how did they think about, well, let me have Mark answer the question of where is value going to be created and how should I think about this? Because now I'm getting pulled in both directions. I've got my venture firm here and then I'm a partner in Stilcor. Okay, I've placed my bet here, but should I also be like, hmm, maybe Launch or my syndicate should talk to Ken

SPEAKER_116: about investing in his corporation?

SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I think it's very different and bit tensor than it was in the old Ethereum

SPEAKER_17: and Solana days where you had this token or equity kind of, you know, bifurcation and they both were sort of, they appeared to be ownership of the company. The ownership

SPEAKER_01: of the token in Ken's subnet, the subnet that he operates and runs is actually the product department of a much larger organization, the company, right? So the business and the intellectual property so much as it exists, the revenue stream of his company, that the equity is how you own a piece of that. The product department and the engine that makes his product possible being a, you're basically a part owner in a Bitcoin-like fashion of that piece of it and you're always liquid, right? With his corporate owning equity in this corporation, you're not liquid, right?

SPEAKER_17: You're basically tied up for whatever period of time but you can sell anytime you want as we've seen in Bitensor right recently. You can in fact sell those tokens, right? So it just depends on which one you believe in more and what optionality you want to have.

SPEAKER_06: So the interesting law and one way to think about this is if you owned equity in Airbnb,

SPEAKER_11: the corporation, you could also be an Airbnb host and make money in the marketplace but you could also own Airbnb and I do know people who were Airbnb investors who were like, I want to start an Airbnb or there are people who are Tesla investors who want to, you know, have a fleet of robo-taxis and manage those. Or it could be you are running a corporation at scale and the corporation has debt and you can buy corporate paper that is the loan that people pay 12 or 15 percent on and so you could own Tesla and you could own Tesla's debt or you could own

SPEAKER_06: Uber and Uber's debt or Amazon and Amazon's debt. So there's multiple ways to get exposure I think.

SPEAKER_29: What do you guys think just in general if I'm a regular person watching this who's like, I like the cut of this project's jib, I want to get in on it, would it just make sense to go to a place like Kraken or Coinbase and buy the Tau token? Is that a valid way to get exposure here? Or should you really be thinking about specific subnets and sort of digging in deeper?

SPEAKER_07: This is an important question I think. I think the easiest thing to do is buy a little bit of Tau. You get the mutual fund effect which would be like if you asked me should I be an angel investor or should I put money into a VC firm? If you put money into a VC firm you're saying I trust the partners there to make you know 20 bets and I don't make those 20 bets but in 10 years I hopefully get back more than double my money and I beat the public markets. But if you want to be an angel investor and you read my book and you join AngelList

SPEAKER_06: and the syndicate and you join other SPVs you get to pick and choose which ones you bet on and you get to make your own decision and some people like that style. In other words you can back somebody to go play a series of poker tournaments there are people who do that and there are people who want to play in the poker tournaments depends on your time I would say it's basically a time commitment thing I don't have the time to evaluate every subnet so I'm a partner and investor in Stilcore Capital which Mark is doing all of these things are incredibly speculative 90% of the bets I make go to zero so you would need to have a certain constitution I think is the way to say it yes I could not afford

SPEAKER_126: to have 90% of my bets go to zero that's definitely not

SPEAKER_06: well but you could

SPEAKER_11: afford to have 90% of 10% of your bets go to zero which would be 9% of your overall net worth so that's another way to think about it right if you're going to put 5 or 10% of your net worth into speculative things Mark any thoughts here of how an individual without giving financial advice but just how you think about this of where the value will be created because Stilcore has probably I don't know if it's half or two-third of its money in Tau and half or a third of its money

SPEAKER_131: into subnets at this point what's the blend you think you should have

SPEAKER_01: yeah I mean it's about 80% subnets right now oh wow but I want to back that off a little bit to you know maybe 30-70 but I think because I think we're in a unique period right now where you know if you make the right early bets

SPEAKER_17: it's going to be extraordinarily rewarding and you have to know you know it's basically evaluating these subnets and the companies around them and the products like you would a regular startup knowing when to get in also knowing when to get out right and this is a highly highly highly dynamic environment as we've seen recently so sort of scrambling around and getting to know everyone and everything and knowing as much information as possible is more than a full-time job and that's you know you can do that if you want there are people who are doing it you know but we take over that function for accredited investors if they'd like to park their money with us and not worry about all that stuff right so however if you're a normal person in the normal world and you'd like to play in this arena it is open to you you don't have to be accredited right so that's one advantage to betting on subnets as opposed to trying to get into equity most people can't get in equity right so so this is this is a way for you to invest in the AI future as an unaccredited investor that you normally don't get

SPEAKER_133: I kind of want to touch

SPEAKER_83: on that too I feel like that's one of the most important things I think something that's so interesting that specifically in the US AI is more unpopular than Trump and I think a lot of the reason there is because no one can participate in the economic system that it's building and what's so exciting about BitSensor is these are all extremely early stage companies that you wouldn't ideally have the ability to participate in in any other way and this is it's kind of a double-edged sword right your early stage startup is getting marketed you know is getting valued by the public market but the public can participate and I think that's what you need to do to keep AI beneficial to all humans have everyone that's participating have economic upside here

SPEAKER_27: which you know I think everybody in America it's just like really leveling up the discussion but it's a great point Ken there there is Invest America accounts now called Trump accounts where they're giving every young person five hundred or a thousand dollars and companies are going to start to contribute there's some other wells coming into the system I understand from Brad who told me there's going to be some other Michael Dell type people who will probably contribute Brad Gerstner of Altimeter Capital Brad Gerstner of Altimeter who you know championed this idea give him a lot

SPEAKER_06: of credit for that if people more people can participate and then I interviewed the new head of the SEC and he's this is his second stint as SEC chair Secretary Atkins Atkins yeah he's all in on creating a test at the SEC where you can become accredited and participate in private companies so participating in private companies where the value is could be a major unlock for people also

SPEAKER_11: incredibly risky which is why rich people when they go to dinner talk about whatever private deals they're doing and what they have access to because they understand if it's a 1 in 10 chance of going

SPEAKER_06: 100x you probably take that bet every day so incentives matter I think that's the key thing we've learned here Mark there are incentives all over the place and the game of Tau the brilliance of it dare I say is that it's very focused on incentives validators miners competing just it's an elegant and beautiful system when you look at the first subnet

SPEAKER_135: we looked at what comes to mind in terms of where that could wind up in two or three years

SPEAKER_02: I think you're right

SPEAKER_17: the brilliance of it the incentive alignment engine of BitTensor is its core invention and everything within it is contest within contest within contest everybody's competing with everybody and only the most excellent get anything so you know in companies even the most the best run startup there's a lot of inefficiencies you have to hire people right some of them hide in the company successfully without doing very much and they're sort of mediocre there is no middle management when there's contest within contest with that contest this is the most ferocious form of capitalism ever invented as far as I can tell

SPEAKER_18: so yeah I love it let's meet our next subnet and I think

SPEAKER_11: at the pace we're going with two or three subnets every couple of episodes we're going to get through all 128

SPEAKER_29: we are that's become our goal and actually Will and Stefan from Macrocosmos they run three different subnets Jason so we're knocking out three we've got Apex subnet 1 IOTA subnet 9 and then Data Universe slash Gravity that's subnet 13 so thanks for Will

SPEAKER_143: so greedy so greedy

SPEAKER_144: taking up all these subnets he owns 2.7% of the subnets okay we actually used to run

SPEAKER_148: five subnets we decided that we would like to live long enough to actually see these things reach the market so we had to

SPEAKER_150: downsize a little bit running a subnet is no joke as Mark can attest and certainly can but I think Will and I would love to speak a little bit about our most ambitious work on BitTensor which is IOTA so IOTA is subnet 9 and perhaps I'm being hyperbolic but I firmly believe it's the most ambitious thing that is being built within BitTensor right now and I think from a very high level what we want to be able to do is orchestrate the world's compute in the way that Bitcoin did but to train models that rival chat GPT frontier skill models and there is there is actually a growing consensus in the industry that training the next generation of very large models is it's becoming prohibitively expensive as I'm sure you guys are aware we're talking about data centers the size of downtown Manhattan and the next generation is going to dwarf even this and I think what becomes inevitable at some point is we need to think about cost efficiency we need to think about capex and something in fact one of the core ideas that inspired BitTensor from ConstantSelf was the idea of doing what's called distributed training so distributed training is taking compute from pockets all around the world all around the world now there's an enormous amount of work you have to do as you can imagine a lot of networking a lot of algorithm and a lot of research that needs to be done but it's a very high ceiling for the project so we've been working on IOTA for about nine months Will, my co-founder and CEO myself, the CTO we're really, really excited and motivated about it

SPEAKER_152: and yeah the dream of training in BitTensor is very much alive and kicking

SPEAKER_06: and to put this in context Lon and Mark to create a frontier model now is and you do a run basically to create the next chat GPT and next claw and next groc whatever the estimates are $200 million in compute costs this isn't the staff this isn't the company you know testing or anything just the raw compute cost is $200 million now that's a big number but if you had well if you had let's say 10 million people participating in contributing some compute well you know then it would be a couple of dollars $20 per person so you start or if it's a million it would be $200 worth of compute each if it was $100,000 it would be $2,000 if it was $10,000 it would be $20,000 in compute so maybe you get down to $10,000 people providing $20,000 in compute and hey it's conceivable in the same way SETI at home was

SPEAKER_158: yeah Mark?

SPEAKER_17: That's absolutely correct and the thing that I love the most about what these guys have done is you know as someone who has watched mining occur within BitTensor but been unable to participate until I got my claw and I started vibe mining with that but you know minus the claw and all that really these guys were the first people to provide a ready packaged mining application for their sub that nobody else had done that right so and you at home could now be a BitTensor miner for the very first time and not have to know anything about anything just download this thing set it up and now you're mining BitTensor it was fantastic I loved it

SPEAKER_62: so talk to me about how the IOTA install works

SPEAKER_161: is it as simple as like downloading Slack or downloading a Chrome browser and then it just runs in the background

SPEAKER_163: I think a lot of the principle of this and you know I'll talk about the differences in our training

SPEAKER_164: methods later but train at home as we call it the application or IOTA it's like two clicks to install and again Mark is one of our miners so I don't actually have to pitch for myself you install the application it's a simple binary Stefan has apparently gone to the role of plays but you basically

SPEAKER_167: just install the app put in a key to be paid out with and we use your computer when you're not using it and one of the reasons training models is so expensive is not just that you need immense amounts of compute it's also that you train with like the prime rib or like the ribeye steak you know you take the best compute for the longest period of time you know it's the filet mignon cut and that makes it even more expensive because it's the filet mignon cut but the cow has to be rested for 50 days and you've got to leave it there and you've got to look at it and what we want to do is fundamentally make you let models out of ground beef

SPEAKER_164: so we take bits of compute from here or there we perform some magic in the background

SPEAKER_167: and we make meatloaf and you know everybody loves uh loves ribeye steak but actually meatloaf is what you want when you're comfortable and you know there's some sort of joking in the metaphor there but materially um you have two major markets for ai compute and gpus one is inference everybody here knows that mark's running claws you guys are using chat gpt or your preferred model and it's actually inference that creates the money it's where the revenue is associated with you know when you track sort of open ai or anthropic budgets it's all from inference tokens but the reality is you have these incredible training workloads like huge data center size training workloads that the uh the main mark the sort of main labs are spending immense amounts of money to satisfy and these are taking up city blocks of compute and the sort of lost opportunity there is you can't use that compute to make inference so the way iota works is the sort of minimum compute unit we can use is um at the moment the size of a macbook and for about 30 minutes and we can actually extract value from that so the sort of ultimate goal of this is we actually want to be able to make you know we call it indistinguishable training compute from this mixture of compute nodes and this is sort of one of the philosophies steph and i have had when we first founded macrocosmos there's a lot of people when they approach any project in web3 or crypto is they say oh how can i do what people do in a centralized way but in a crypto way so um you know we're talking about templar templar does training templar effectively allows you to train in a centralized way uh using crypto rails i won't go into the technical details but the the nodes they used were blackwell so b200 nodes it's a quarter of a million bucks for each compute unit um so you know it's prime rib maybe it's prime rib and you know you you run it around your houses doing that but it's still incredibly expensive what we think the interesting thing about you know this sort of merger between crypto and ai is is how can you use like fundamentally fractal compute distributed compute 10 minutes here 20 minutes there you know mark's sort of mac mini when it's sat idling in the evenings and sum that together to something that creates economic value in a very very constrained market um so we actually released a research paper today that validates a lot of our work but we've been working on this problem for for a year and it's been um it's hard but compelling work

SPEAKER_170: are people calling open clock claws

SPEAKER_33: you are okay um fine just want to make sure there's not

SPEAKER_11: a new piece of software that i'm uh not aware of so explain how i get the package on my mac to join iota

SPEAKER_171: you can you can

SPEAKER_150: download it through terminal through the command line interface if you're more coding proficient or you can go to the website iota.mecrocosmos.ai scroll down and you're gonna see a download button as you mentioned before jason it's just like downloading slack or any other application exactly you download this it will generate a wallet for you and then what will happen is when you open the application you click start and your machine will connect to our globally distributed training cluster you will be you will earn passive income while you sleep between 10 p.m and 6 a.m your machine can be quietly you being used as a training node so the benefit to you is you get to accumulate iota you get to be part of the big mission and the benefit for us is we basically have uh we have always on super

SPEAKER_175: cluster of compute uh and that's that's really the value i have a

SPEAKER_126: question if i start doing this overnight on my work laptop is active track gonna look like i was up all night working because this could really work for sure yeah

SPEAKER_88: it'll look like great we have security on our laptops we will literally do your

SPEAKER_179: work for you yeah that this is gonna look amazing i'm gonna look like a genius

SPEAKER_06: well no it would show massive cpu usage so we have

SPEAKER_07: for background there's a piece of software called active track just a lockdown software and there's 20 of these so we have confidential data on our network but it shows like what the computers uh at our at our offices are doing if somebody were to download everything you would see that in active track or if you were exporting stuff

SPEAKER_46: look how much gpu lon was using all night lon was using so much compute he must have been crunching numbers all

SPEAKER_184: night what a genius

SPEAKER_46: yeah so give him

SPEAKER_06: there's there's multiple ways to participate in iota one

SPEAKER_07: is as a user and you would download you would have a wallet and then you would earn tau by contributing your compute but there's also becoming a node so maybe you

SPEAKER_62: could explain what being a full node is versus that i suppose

SPEAKER_164: that there's a couple expressions of iota one is this very like participatory everybody shares everybody co-trains the model version at which you know we sort of nicknamed train at home because because that's kind of what it is the second version of this

SPEAKER_167: is like the the benefit of this tech is it has applications at sort of any scale within the ai stack now one of the ways we expect this to materialize in some of the earlier runs is it will use frontier compute so h100 b200 those quarter of a million dollar machines but what we will have availability for is anybody can register their nodes on a sort of rotating basis so we're working on this in the background where you can post compute for a fixed interval 20 minutes half an hour there's some fine tuning on the machine learning side for us to work out the sort of sweet spot there where we get value from it but you know we've spent a lot of time talking to gpu providers and otherwise and the sort of thing we've found is that particularly if you can make an instance interruptible is what they call it so you know jason you've got 10 computers you sell them to mark most of the time for five bucks an hour but you know mark sort of on a thursday is like i don't need the compute last minute you know that he might sort of pick it up friday and you don't want to you don't want to go sell it to somebody else people in that instance are just looking to recover capital returns and operational costs so you can get compute at 10 cents on the dollar so we want to work with major providers to basically harness all that compute at 10 cents on the dollar because if we can get our training efficiency within you know a factor of 10 okay this is fascinating

SPEAKER_189: money so somebody who

SPEAKER_06: has extra compute like let's say it was even core weave i interviewed the founder of that

SPEAKER_07: company let's say they had old h100s and they hadn't sold them yet and they're five years old and they're still in racks and they could say you know what just we haven't sold them yet we don't have a new customer for them we might as well put them to use it would almost like being if you

SPEAKER_06: had a house and you hadn't sold it yet you put it into the airbnb inventory just to cover your cost basis or something at a discount

SPEAKER_27: just to make sure you pay your taxes your your real estate taxes and your you know operating costs for the home it's

SPEAKER_164: like that but it's this is sort of one of the foundations of deep in and decentralized ai is people are like oh you know i can use my compute for a day here what's unique about iota is it's like an airbnb but you can subnet for 20 minutes with no notice and get paid for it that's a better analogy there because

SPEAKER_196: it's you could use the home for one hour

SPEAKER_167: yeah an hour and that's where we think the real value is because if you're if you're renting out your house for a day or a week then you want you want a reasonable bit of money for it you want to account for all these wear and tear if you're trying to get 20 minutes or you're just trying to make a quick buck of something that's already in production the economics change really dramatically and we validated this with seven or eight different data center clients you all say basically the key thing is they want to be able to take the compute off you and there's no training method in the world that allows you to have the level of interruptibility we're designing for because typically training you know in a data center is something called synchronous training so all of the nodes move in lockstep and it's actually the slowest node that sort of drives the speed of the whole system we're trying to design for this world where we assume that mark will slam his laptop shut we assume that core we will take their rack back and sell it to a premium customer we actually assume that in sort of you know even the case of large labs you might just have an inference spike and you want to reallocate training computes to revenue workloads and then pull it back when you come down like you know my father was an energy engineer and you always design for the sort of peak load in the sinusoidal and we're trying to make training compute liquids so that we can sort of achieve ultimate economic value really

SPEAKER_27: any questions there mark and your thoughts on the project just generally speaking and how disruptive it is

SPEAKER_17: yeah i mean i think it could be one of the bigger projects in in bit tensor i think these guys are you know they've been around for a while and they they know the system better than than most of the other subnet owners uh and so i look i'm i'm i'm very bullish on

SPEAKER_13: them i i love both of what i love what both of them are doing

SPEAKER_11: and is this a corporation will and you have venture capital backing it or is it just uh a straight anachronistic uh uh crypto weirdo project how is this running

SPEAKER_205: we we are actually um we we are a company but we are fully bootstrapped

SPEAKER_164: we haven't raised venture capital today we've been uh we're fortunate to build actually stephan built the first subnet on bit tensor for his sin so we've been around for a while and um yeah we have no outside franchise except for our relationship with bit tensor so we're very fortunate to that very fortunate to the people who've sort of invested this over time but um creates a bit what do

SPEAKER_11: you think of the uh stephan what do you think of the kerfluffle with uh one of the subnets taking their

SPEAKER_27: tokens and marbles and leaving all of a sudden and the impact that it has on the ecosystem as uh one of the early um adopters of subnets

SPEAKER_211: i think it's very

SPEAKER_150: disappointing um i come from an ai background not a crypto background so being honorable and being trustworthy is a really important thing to me and something that i am extremely sensitive to when i operate in a crypto world uh it's disappointing uh it's disappointing that someone uh did that to a lot of people um i won't dive too deep into it but i think it's a shared emotion that we have right now i think the response of jake is is on point which is to say this is a great opportunity for us to reflect on a part of bit tensor that was too immature and needed to be uh iterated on and refined and i think that's the right pragmatic ones to see the experience um so yes uh this will be i'm sure just a bump in the road in the long

SPEAKER_116: term so you're frustrated disappointed and what do you think the solution is to avoiding it in the

SPEAKER_150: future i think what mark described earlier which is this idea of owner lockup so um you should have more of a fiduciary duty to the people that believe in you to put it simply and i think there's a way that you can translate that into things like smart contracts or similar which shows the commitment of founders and server operators to their community and that can actually be used to for price discovery for the project itself right it's it's a measure of intention it's a measure of conviction i think that's quite an elegant uh an elegant solution and i'm sure i'm sure we'll see a few different prototypes of that we might not get it

SPEAKER_216: right the first time but it feels like the roughly the right direction of travel to not have this experience

SPEAKER_49: again uh athena i'm the first investor um they are the greatest assistants in the world

SPEAKER_11: for a great price three thousand dollars a month you get a awesome full-time assistant to work with you on your scheduling on research projects and you say well oh we guys are talking about all this ai these assistants are ai powered and so they will um do all kinds of jobs for you uh and help you have a human in the loop as you're working uh i was the first investor in the company they're now a partner of all in they're a partner of ours here and it just makes me super super

SPEAKER_62: productive so uh you can basically turn your ea into your uh chief health officer that's this month's

SPEAKER_29: productivity hack thanks to athena for we got it we do a productivity hack once a month this month's productivity hack you should turn your ea into your chief health officer uh you know that for founders their health can often take a back seat jason so one of the ideas we came up with were all the different ways that you can sort of delegate some of these tests to your ea keeping up with your regular checkups dental cleanings handling your referrals and follow-ups taking care of your insurance paperwork and your reimbursements helping you plan healthy meals and what groceries to buy worrying about your nutrition all of these things can be things that you pass off to your ea to help save time if you want to learn more athena.com

SPEAKER_34: slash jcal j-c-a-l there you go that's where to go

SPEAKER_06: and uh as an example uh you know i lost weight shout out to my guys at roe.co um with glps but now i want to add more muscle and i've been adding some but i need to get a trainer so i said hey to my athena assistant within a 20 minute drive of my house uh of the ranch i want a trainer who has their own facility to do

SPEAKER_07: one-on-one training with me you know one to three times a week let them know i travel a ton my schedule is variable and here's how i'd like to pay because a lot of times they're like you have to pick the same slot every week or whatever doesn't work for me so i said hey i want to

SPEAKER_06: buy 20 sessions up front and then i want to be able to just drop in you know and it could change dynamically i might need to cancel within you know the same day right etc so they explain the rules of the road and some people are like yeah we don't work that way you have to do tuesday at 4 p.m every week for the year whatever and it's like that's not gonna work um so they pre-vetted and did all those discussions because i don't want to have that awkward

SPEAKER_11: discussion with the person and then i'm negotiating with a trainer then i said and then find me three people to come to the house and i would do the same thing i'll pay them for 20 sessions up front so they get the value of that

SPEAKER_06: money up front but they have to be willing to let me cancel same day you know within two or three hours if yeah like they have to get on a plane and it um it worked they went through 20 different people

SPEAKER_131: right and uh found me three of each and i just give them a go like that just keep calling people until you get to three

SPEAKER_224: yeah and they can they can take a day to do that you you can't do that you have too much

SPEAKER_131: other stuff i don't have

SPEAKER_225: the time for that the

David Friedberg: other thing that i had them do was i had them go on to different people's

SPEAKER_06: linkedin mark and i said i'm not happy with the flow of people coming in for these three positions so here's what i want you to do i want you to go on lon's linkedin my linkedin or heidi's linkedin and just send to anybody with this title in these three cities austin houston san antonio hey we're looking for this position in austin in an office if you know anybody let us know or if you were might be interested please let us know we get you know a two percent response rate

SPEAKER_07: to that but we filled two positions doing that yeah but that means that you have to get to 500 outbound so i just said well i can't do 500 outbound long can't do five it's a full-time job i said okay for four hours a day this is all i want you to do 10 people an hour four hours a day 40 people a day and for 10 days go it worked but i would never do that that's the job of a full-time recruiter so shout out to our friends athena.com slash shakeout you get a couple weeks off

SPEAKER_231: there you go check it out all right uh all right what do we got next here on the doc we have a little

SPEAKER_232: bit of ready to wrap we

SPEAKER_46: have a little bit of off-duty i have some viral stuff we could react to or we could just do some recommendations it's up to

SPEAKER_07: you okay i think i'd love to go off-duty yeah so let's go off-duty all right lon jake out and

SPEAKER_233: mark mark mark mark's gonna join us you gotta give us

SPEAKER_07: an idea i don't know if they told you what off-duty is but it's basically we're not doing crypto yeah we

SPEAKER_234: can talk about whatever we want whatever we want product about whatever you

SPEAKER_235: bought a gadget you bought a tv show you're watching music an album i want to get

SPEAKER_29: your your thoughts on one viral story before we get into recommendations so coachella the coachella valley music and art festival for weekend one was this past weekend there's been there were two headliners very different performances people are really debating uh you know and i think it speaks a

SPEAKER_236: lot to beaver was one beaver was one

SPEAKER_29: sabrina carpenter was the other and i think it really speaks to what what are we looking for in a performance what is the value of authenticity versus showmanship i think it gets to some really interesting questions so first up sabrina carpenter she headlined it was massive cars on stage huge sets dancers we can take a look at a at a quick clip here that i pulled up yeah so let's do

SPEAKER_239: that extremely yeah sabrina carpenter extremely entertaining i saw her at um austin city

SPEAKER_126: limits acl so here's

SPEAKER_29: sabrina's performance you could see they built this massive set she's got tons of dancers it's a huge thing

SPEAKER_126: that's going on this was it's a production we're not playing the song this is espresso her huge hit there uh of course and thinking about me yeah thinking big about that that's that me espresso exactly oh how do i do this okay there we go uh and then i want to show

SPEAKER_29: this this one other part too she actually drove a car off the set like she drove through the crowd in coachella through the crowd you know like this was how she closed it out if you can see wow this

SPEAKER_235: bigger literally driving a car that car's not her driving it must be on the

SPEAKER_29: track no it is it's she's just drive they cleared out this aisle here and you can see she's just driving out of coachella in this car so that's cool it's very big it's spectacle a lot of showmanship it was like a party was like showmanship and then there was justin bieber he was the headliner on sunday night and he went on stage alone just him and a laptop and a screen behind him that was screen sharing and he played youtube clips a lot of them of himself and then he sang over his old music videos sort of treating them like a backup singer i'll show you a little clip so he you can see yeah this was weird here he is he's on stage he's pulling up youtube you can see his screen he's typing in baby which of course that was his old school song with him as a kid and then he stands up and he's watching the video he's not even facing the audience he's watching the video and he's like singing along with himself from when he was a kid and then here's he wasn't even just singing the whole time he also uh just watches youtube for some of it and he's here he is watching the godim meme and then you'll see he flips over to double rainbow and he's just he's he's hanging out playing on youtube so a lot of people were praising this it's so authentic it's so real and he started his career as a youtuber justin bieber he was arguably the

SPEAKER_251: first youtuber to get super super famous uh yeah here he's all right watching i'll get

SPEAKER_252: my job i can give my judgment so i'm there's a

SPEAKER_29: lot of back and forth of course between the sabrina and the bieber stance but i think everybody i think it's an interesting debate which performance would you be more interested in seeing and if you pay all this money to go to coachella it's like a thousand dollars plus to

SPEAKER_34: get to coachella do the do the artists owe you a sabrina carpenter level spectacle okay

SPEAKER_189: so it really is in the execution of these things it on its face

SPEAKER_06: when you describe what justin bieber did you would say that was phoning it in a little

SPEAKER_11: just played his video and he talked over or whatever okay sure enough it's that would be a surface level interpretation of it

SPEAKER_06: however he kind of did some storytelling in there yeah it was interactive with the audience and at the end of the day was the audience engaged in this they were and i would say they were equally engaged in bieber's surfing youtube as a performance art so right it's very meta commentary yeah and it was done so well that i think he hit the the right note which is this is a meta commentary on my career and i'm going to relive how you experienced me exactly and there was some brilliance to that now if you were you know uh any other artist who was not a native youtube artist they might not have pulled off that

SPEAKER_62: meta commentary on

SPEAKER_07: right there is another analogy to this i i had uh dinner uh the other night and i i sat next to jimmy ivan

SPEAKER_260: wow you had a big weekend

SPEAKER_07: so anyway and i start talking to jimmy he's also a kid from brooklyn he's from

SPEAKER_06: red hook i'm from bay ridge you know just right on the guanus canal there we had a talk and i told him hey you know i'm a big dire straits fan i know you did uh the album making movies and we talked for an hour about that oh okay and uh he also had bruce springsteen uh was you know the big

SPEAKER_11: artist that he had produced yeah sure in the day he did born in the usa one of the great seminal works born to run times of all time

SPEAKER_265: darkness on the edge of town he did yeah

SPEAKER_11: yeah so this is like a you know a legend i got it was real privileged to talk

SPEAKER_06: to him uh for all this time and uh bruce springsteen did springsteen on broadway and when he did springsteen on broadway he did a meta commentary of him he did sing some of his songs right like bieber did but he also told the story behind the songs it was so engaging it was so rich that as a fan you can get away with that now i've also seen bruce springsteen no less than 20 times probably over 30 years in concert you know like i've seen him two or three nights in a row my mom's a big bruce fan and actually took my mom to bruce on broadway you have to execute at a very high level you have to be a true star there has to be a lot behind it in order to pull that off so i give justin bieber credit for actually pulling it off which is not easy sabrina carpenter couldn't pull that off right now sabrina carpenter if she has 10 more espressos if she lasts right i don't know how long bieber's been in pop culture now i

SPEAKER_141: think it's 15 years yeah 20 years or so close 20

SPEAKER_06: years yeah when sabrina carpenter 20 years into her career she is she will be able to pull it off but not in year three of her career right so i think both of these were fantastic sabrina carpenter has to build the foundation brick by brick in order to do the meta commentary which only comes after you have 50 hits 25 hits you know in a certain size audience so i give them both credit mark

SPEAKER_11: any any thoughts here i know you're a big rock and roll

SPEAKER_157: fan yeah you guys should know better than ask me about anything other than classic

SPEAKER_17: rock but okay i'll i'll dive in a little bit here so i mean i'm sort of split because i feel like i do feel like bieber i've seen like little clips of it it looked fun right like it didn't look it didn't look bad right it didn't look like it was crashing out on stage it looked fun right so i you know i i think probably the audience enjoyed it um that said i love a spectacle i love a big rock show you know jkl and i uh went to go see the wall when uh roger waters was touring that around yeah

SPEAKER_275: that's so good it's life

SPEAKER_17: changing yeah i totally agree and it was that was like a very big production of tunes that you've listened to your entire life and just love right so that that's what i want when i go to a show that's probably the the apotheosis of that so you know i guess i'm sort of

SPEAKER_29: split i think i probably would have preferred the b i'm not a huge fan of i you know i'm not like a die-hard sabrina or bieber fan but i think just i would have preferred the bieber set it's something real you're seeing him really think about and process this whole career this trip down memory lane this sort of nostalgic look back with him i think that would be a lot more engaging as a viewer than you know big dance routines and the big pop i kind of feel in general and this is old man of me but i'm going to say it anyway when i used to go to coachella like the early and mid aughts it was just bands playing there wasn't

SPEAKER_51: this like it wasn't this like you're going to see a pop star like fly out of something and parachute into the arena and it was just like bands playing songs you liked or rappers performing songs you liked or whatever djs uh and i i i feel like i like that more authentic sort of feel yeah i mean

SPEAKER_10: listen the kids love the vibes there's a meta commentary going on yeah and it's vibe culture and that

SPEAKER_11: you know if the vibes are either immaculate or the vibes are inauthentic and you know you're taking a little bit of risk or i have i have been one time to coachella and um it was quite enjoyable to go from set to set to set i think i saw lord oh nice um and mgmt and

SPEAKER_231: like some other incredible artists like back to back to back to back and it was like wow this is pretty impressive

SPEAKER_126: i went in 04 it's like a classic one radiohead pixies flaming lips mf doom wow air really good year that beck was

SPEAKER_290: there that anyway thanks thanks

SPEAKER_289: unk yeah like a three unk

SPEAKER_126: special oh man yeah we're old to be talking about this stuff but i did i thought it was it's an interesting conversation that's going on between this sort of i'll tell you there's an analogy

SPEAKER_06: here yeah i i went one night to see chappelle he happened to be in town a friend of mine's friends with him i

SPEAKER_11: texted my friend and i was like hey your friend chappelle is playing he's like oh let me text him and maybe we'll

SPEAKER_06: go see the show last minute we go see the show after the show uh chappelle says hey you guys want to roll with me we're gonna go do this after show and he goes to this you know small comedy

SPEAKER_11: place that in san francisco that hosts maybe a hundred people 150 people we go there and we got a table set up for us and then he does just him interacting with the audience sure he's had a

David Friedberg: couple of drinks or whatever crowd work i call it crowd work what are they he's

SPEAKER_296: doing crowd work crowd work

SPEAKER_295: is what they call you

SPEAKER_06: telling stories and it's not a set it's not a funny set like he had just done yeah at the chase center it is just him bantering and you know some jokes in it and he was not working on new material exactly but it was just a different type of performance so to see both back to back and then compare them again back to this meta commentary there was him talking about the show he just did them him talking about his life and it was really like to see those two bookends together was actually really nice just like going and seeing a bruce springsteen show and then

SPEAKER_62: seeing springsteen on broadway talk about bruce springsteen and his life right also super it's nice what a great

SPEAKER_297: intimate intimate evenings

SPEAKER_185: yeah you got anything else

SPEAKER_29: here on um i did there was one thing i want to recommend there's a movie i saw it at the austin uh film society here in austin one of my favorite local theaters shout out to them uh but it is now on hulu it's a spanish film called surat it's about a father and a son the father's uh older daughter has gone missing she was a big raver who attended a lot of these raves in the desert in north africa so the father and son are following these moving raves around the desert looking for this missing uh young woman and then it leads into this whole separate adventure story i don't want to give anything else away about this movie because it takes some real turns but wow it is don't give it up it is incredible it is a real experience you don't want to learn too much about it you just want to watch it and take the ride with it uh yeah i i loved it real intense all right

SPEAKER_238: i'll give one recommendation here uh people have heard me reference my favorite pen yes

SPEAKER_11: uh i'm not like a pen snob i don't like the idea of buying a hundred or five hundred dollar pen i don't collect pens but i like to write and i like a great pen but i know i'm going to lose a pen so somewhere between you know a commodity pen for you know a dollar or two dollars and these hundred dollars or pens that cost hundreds of dollars i found one of the nicest writing pens ever the g750 retractable pen uh and i think it goes for 10 15 bucks

SPEAKER_224: yeah there's like 1394 here yeah

SPEAKER_11: yes and you can get it on amazon uh and it's just an incredible pen when you write with this pen uh you

SPEAKER_06: will learn why this is uh such an amazing pen now the reason i know about this pen is because uh unk is uh basically unk that's me yeah uh was

SPEAKER_11: on tiktok and i and i stumbled upon the staples baddie uh caden roland works at

SPEAKER_06: staples sure and if you type in her name

SPEAKER_62: and you type in zebra uh is 750 she's 750 she's the one who recommended it to

SPEAKER_11: me and she is uh this incredible um young person who works at staples

David Friedberg: and she might be trans or you know i'm not sure exactly are you sure but she has an incredible performance where she goes and um talks with extreme passion about

SPEAKER_11: staples and photocopies and pens and journals and she literally clank clanks her nails and snaps up her favorite office

SPEAKER_62: products and uh she's probably done more for the brand of staples with young people uh and all the way up to gen x myself than staples could ever do with a hundred million dollar ad campaign i don't know what they're paying her are they paying her

SPEAKER_311: i don't are she's a she's embracing her

SPEAKER_102: she's an a store employee lon oh but

SPEAKER_46: yeah but they're not paying her to make these videos she they're just paying her

SPEAKER_231: to work the register i think now they are

SPEAKER_07: paying her i i they must be paying her now if not there's a hundred people who would

SPEAKER_06: hire her to be the walmart baddie or the target baddie i mean she should be getting paid a million dollars a year minimum minimum of

SPEAKER_07: a million dollars a year any if one of my startups came to me and said we want to hire this person to run our social media for a million for you know a hundred thousand dollars a year plus nine hundred thousand dollars a year in stock options i would say do it do it immediately because the ability to

SPEAKER_62: authentically engage and then get me to buy the pen and know who the staples baddie is is just infinitely uh valuable yeah i think i

SPEAKER_46: found her tiktok she has uh 582.3

SPEAKER_29: thousand followers on tiktok that's crazy i mean

SPEAKER_314: somebody's got to poach her just for talking

SPEAKER_29: about staples there's a there's a papa john's guy too right i've seen him a bunch on tiktok

SPEAKER_08: where he's just a guy i mean i think now this is going to become a thing he's just a guy who works

SPEAKER_108: at papa john's but he talks about how they make great pizza which i don't another amazing

SPEAKER_27: episode of twist is in the can for monday april 13th thanks mark jeffrey