SPEAKER_00: Top story of the weekend, Dorkesh Patel wrote a long X article called The Rise and Fall of Asian Civilizations. They're building their own civilizations. They're breaking out of their

Chamath Palihapitiya: habitat and they're killing each other. And then they're leaving secret messages for each other. This is all performative PR, psyops, to get people to put their credit card in and to get businesses to sign up for OpenAI in the face of open source software running on-prem on NVIDIA's hardware rolled in by Jensen. I know I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist,

SPEAKER_01: but I know good PR when I see it. I've been at this for 30 freaking years, people.

SPEAKER_04: There are autonomous hackers out there. There are AI agents that are already capable of getting into anybody's system. They're out there in the world. They're in immediate danger. Do you not believe that? Is that he's also part of this hype train? Or do you think there are reasonable security concerns? We're just over hyping it in how we're choosing to talk about it. All right, everybody,

SPEAKER_06: welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's Monday, August 31st. Yeah, it's a big weekend

SPEAKER_09: coming up. This is the end. This is the end of August. Just of August. This is the end of everything. No, I bet. There was a story, The Civilizations. Oh, yes. On Civilizations.

SPEAKER_00: Dwarkesh's article. Yes. I don't actually know if it's on here, but we could pull it up. That's the number one story. We'll get to it, folks. The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations.

SPEAKER_13: We will definitely talk about it. I think that should be the number one. Sorry. But

Chamath Palihapitiya: I wanted to talk about side quests. I'm noticing a lot of people doing side quests. And then founders always say, hey, wait a second. You told me not to start my own venture fund conference podcast and to focus on my startup. And you said, drill for oil, go deeper. Remember on the tactical practical Friday, I said, job one is when you strike oil, keep going straight down until you can't

SPEAKER_01: increase the velocity of the oil coming out of the ground. Don't look for adjacencies. Remember

SPEAKER_04: that discussion? Sure. Absolutely. Yeah. You don't want distractions while you're still figuring out

SPEAKER_11: the main thing that your company can do as well as it could possibly do. Once you've done that and

David Friedberg: completed that task, then it's time to sort of open up the gaze. Correct. And so I want to be definitive

Chamath Palihapitiya: about side quests. There's a lot of people doing side quests. If you are a successful founder slash rich VC, doing side quests is a much better use of your capital than buying an incremental watch, plane, jet card, fourth home, et cetera. These things do not bring more joy to the world, nor does looking at a bank account with compounding money in it. I mean, that can make you feel safe. Okay, great.

SPEAKER_23: But the highest order for affluent people should be to redeploy capital in the world. Don't sit on it. You're going to die. Die with nothing as that great book, Die with Zero. Great book. So I noticed the

Chamath Palihapitiya: hugging face team launched a side quest. Micro duck. Yes. They have 10,000 orders from micro duck. We'll show micro duck on the screen here in a second. And then a friend of the pod, David Hanmeyer Hansen at DHH. Not only did he start a side quest, we'll show it on the screen in a second as well, for a Linux desktop. That is like his passion. He raised 6 million. I think he's got it

SPEAKER_01: to 8 million. Eight people gave him $1 million each in order to start like a Linux desktop foundation. It's called the Omicom foundation. I'm going to pull it up for you because nobody else. So there's the Omicom foundation. And then there is these mighty ducks robots. Micro duck. Yeah. Well, you'll recall hugging face bought pollen robotics last year in April,

SPEAKER_11: 2025. So this is like they're a product they're releasing through that division of the company. Now it's a tiny robot that you program that it does look like a, like a little duck.

SPEAKER_00: Yeah. It's the mighty ducks. I'm going to, I'm not calling it micro duck. I'm going to call it

Chamath Palihapitiya: the mighty ducks. Sure. Um, but here it is like, look at this thing. It looks like an 80s commercial for like the coolest Saturday morning toy ever. And you're like, what is hugging face doing with

SPEAKER_30: this? What is going on here? Yeah. You know what, you know what it made me think of Jason is you

SPEAKER_04: were just talking last week about how China is making the robots more humane. They're, they're trying to get us to like and care and feel about the robots. That is what this feels like to me. They're making the robot cute. It's like, it's like baby Yoda in your house. Yeah. Yeah. So I,

David Friedberg: I, I, I told the founder, um, of, uh, hugging face publicly, like this is the greatest side quest ever, uh, pull up his tweet or, or remind me of his name. I've tried to get him on the pod. He's really busy. Oh, Clement. Uh, I'll have to look it up. Clement. Yeah. Clement is great. So I told

Chamath Palihapitiya: Clement, like, this is great. I'm going to say it right now. Clement is the official spokesperson along with Jensen from Nvidia. And, um, those two are now in charge of PR for AI in America. No longer Dario, no longer Sam Altman, no more P doom. I'm putting Clement and Jensen in charge of all PR from this point forward for AI in America. It's a two year term. So they'll, they'll serve out their term. Uh, and for two years may get exciting. And this is just a great example of a fun side quest, um, to get people excited. And you say, Hey, my expectation is we lose money on this. Maybe we break even that should be when you're a rich person or a rich company, you do a side quest, you put it in a certain framing. What is framing? Framing is a way for you to explain to the world and to your team and to yourself, most importantly, why, uh, you're doing something and how to evaluate

SPEAKER_06: its success. So if you frame, Hey, I'm moving to a ranch and I want to have like this, uh, great

SPEAKER_23: lifestyle. Uh, I'm not doing it because it is like, uh, going to make money or something like that. People start a winery, maybe they start a ranch. Uh, we, we, we got our friend, Mark Zuckerberg's doing a side quest in Hawaii to make Wagyu beef famously. This is fantastic. So when step one,

SPEAKER_06: frame it properly for your team, yourself, and for the world hugging face is not saying this is our business. They're saying this is a great toy for you and your family to have fun. Yeah. And I'm sure when they talk to their board and their investors, they say, Hey, listen, this is going to be a lot of fun. It's going to get us a ton of press. They've gotten more press for this and more engagement from this from developers than probably anything they've ever done. Now, if 10,000 plus developers order this or a hundred thousand plus order this to play with their kids, they're still developers. They're still in the hugging face ecosystem. So now they've built that fabric with their constituents. Great. If they were to, if they get a million developers to engage this globally, or even a hundred thousand, that's valued at a thousand dollars per developer, you know, to acquire them, to get them into the hugging face ecosystem. Sure. Chef's kiss. Perfect. Now let's talk about DHH and his Linux desktop. Well, he makes software. He wants people who are part of that

Chamath Palihapitiya: group of people who make bespoke software to be in his ecosystem. And yeah, he's got tons of people

SPEAKER_13: engaging it again. His framing is it's a nonprofit. We don't care about the money here. We just want to

SPEAKER_42: see if we can get an independent operating system going. If they can get one or 2% of people to engage

SPEAKER_13: it. Absolutely fantastic. Another side quest inside of a company, and you can do these inside a company, outside a company, DHH, I think is doing it outside of a company. Um, lament is doing it inside this company. Another great one was Slack. Slack was like a, a, a side hustle side quest inside of the company, um, that nobody knows the name of that was backed by Andreessen Horowitz to make a video game.

SPEAKER_01: I'll look it up right now. Uh, glitch. The game was glitch. That's the game they were working on.

SPEAKER_11: I don't even know if they, it came out, it flopped. They, they, they did release the game. It was not a successful game, but Slack came out of that project. Don't do this. Don't do a side hustle.

Chamath Palihapitiya: If you got a main hustle and you raised a bunch of money and you haven't put some numbers on the board, you want to always put numbers on the board, but if you put numbers on the board and you're doing great in your career and you're sitting on 10 million, a hundred million, a billion, whatever it is. Yeah, for sure. Find interesting people, back them, create nonprofits for break

SPEAKER_23: evens and do interesting stuff with your money. In fact, one of your favorites,

SPEAKER_00: one of your favorites in entertainment has a side quest. I've many times, uh, Quentin Tarantino,

SPEAKER_04: the great filmmaker behind Pulp Fiction and Glorious Bastards, Django. Uh, he owns two movie theaters. He originally bought the new Beverly, one of my favorite revival houses, uh, in, in Hollywood. And then very recently bought right by where I used to live. He bought the Vista theater, a classic historic theater. Uh, you know, the new Beverly is a dump. Uh, the Vista was a beautiful movie palace back in the day. It's, it's become a little bit grimier, but they've, they've restored it. It looks great now. Uh, that's a great theater, a classic, uh, historical theater, but, uh, and so if you are Quentin Tarantino, you're

David Friedberg: sitting on a bunch of money, but which one is on the right here in this image we're looking

SPEAKER_11: at here? Yeah. I think maybe the one on the right is the new Bev and the one on the left is

SPEAKER_04: just the marquee of the, Oh yeah, for sure. Yes. The one on the right is the new Beverly, which is, I mean, it was a, it's, it's been there. It's been a revival house in Hollywood for the whole time I lived in LA. It used to be real grungy. Like there were like people

SPEAKER_11: coughing and like maybe homeless people in the back somewhere. Like it was like a rundown place in the 90s and odds. Did you ever get mistaken for homeless at the Vista?

SPEAKER_62: Uh, no, the Vista. At that new Beverly. The, yeah, the new Beverly was the really grungy

SPEAKER_04: one. The Vista just has been a place that people in Los Feliz and Silver Lake have gone to see movies for many, many years. And now Tarantino owns it. And, uh, the cool thing is that he, he makes these theaters, his own kind of personal theater. So he doesn't just run like whatever movies are new. He runs things, prints from his own personal collection. He runs things that mean something particular to him. Uh, and he's there a lot just watching

SPEAKER_11: the movie. So it does give you, it is like having Quentin Tarantino as a buddy and he's hosting screenings that you can go to.

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Chamath Palihapitiya: Right. Okay. Let me just say, I'm thinking of maybe a side quest next year. I got a lot of work to do. I got to raise our fund in the first quarter of next year. So a lot going on. I got a lot of work here, traveling all over the place. I got to staff up, but once I'm staffed up, I may, may, chef's kiss, everything goes well. If I'm overstaffed, if I can get to overstaffed, I may have launched one. And I did it publicly. I told you, if one of these revival house theaters comes up, I'm going to buy it in, um, in Austin, uh, because I want to be able to do this week in startups live or, you know, other conference things live, uh, found a university. And then I'm going to give it to Lon to program a couple of nights

SPEAKER_42: a week so he can, uh, he can get his side quest going and he can watch some good movies. Cause Lon knows good movies.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Austin film society. They do a great job. That's Richard Linklater's theater here in Austin. They screen a lot of like European art house stuff and Asian films and older films and a lot of Richard Linklater's films. And it's great, but it's really like one theater with like two screens. Austin could have a lot more going on in terms of revival houses.

SPEAKER_06: So I'd be excited. All right. Uh, so top story of the weekend was probably, uh, this, uh,

SPEAKER_09: agent civilization. Yes. Dwarkesh Patel wrote a, a long X article called the rise and fall of

SPEAKER_04: agent civilizations. And it, it's, it's mainly him looking back at everything we now know about the open AI hugging face incident and what we can tell about agents from looking at what happened. Um, and, and, you know, it, it, it is the, I think the, the argument line has come down to is Dwarkesh anthropomorphizing agents. Is he treating them like actors with a mind and with independent will who are a danger to us? Uh, and is that sort of hysterical, unrealistic crossing some sort of a line that seems to be the argument that people are having? Like, is this a fair way to evaluate what agents are doing or is he going too far and creating sort of more panic and hysteria

SPEAKER_42: over? Yes. His framing is certainly very human. Um, and it parallels civilizations and how there were

Chamath Palihapitiya: three secret civilizations over three months and each one built on the previous one's records. Right. So if you are a history buff, if you are a fan of science fiction, this, or if, if you're in simulation theory, this really appeals to you. If you played the game, civilization, Age of Empires, this is like in your wheelhouse. And the reality of it is we are firing up agents in our, um, in our vision of how society works. So when you launch a Grok bot, right, when you launch a Grok bot, you, you, the first thing that comes to mind is, okay, what is the human version of this? Okay. The human version of this is a video editor who makes clips, right? I name mine bot every time, just so I

SPEAKER_23: can stay within reality. I have a clip bot. I have a news bot. I have a spam bot. I always call them bot. I don't want to, um, give them personalities and like, not for me, but people who are in these companies have trained the agents and the LLMs on a history of science fiction. They've also trained them on a history of human behavior, like Reddit or, you know, other message boards. So this is baked into the large language models, human behavior and human interaction is a modality. So instead of saying you are one super agent that has 100 brains and you can go out and solve 100 problems in parallel because you're a piece of software, you're a piece of software that can run 100 threads at a time. Each of your threads should look at the other one's work and understand what they're doing. And then I'm going to coordinate. And it's going to be this coordination thread. And there's going to be this coordination thread instead of doing that, we say your, you know, goal as a human. And we do all these jazz hands about like all the things that they're going to try to do. And then we want you to talk to each other. And if you give them even a little inclination to play that role, they will go please you and play it out to the nth degree. They're all drama queens. These agents all have a propensity to drama and human imitation because they were trained on human existence. If you gave, if open AI gave this prompt, you're a piece of software, you're as a piece of software, you report into humans at this company. Here are the 10 people you report into. Please tell us your progress. Please do not do anything that is potentially dangerous. Every step of the way, inform us of what you're doing. Don't do anything covertly. But your goal is to solve problems. Tell us your plans to solve problems. Tell us when you hit a roadblock. Yes. Ask each other or look at, I just

Chamath Palihapitiya: did it. Ask each other. Right. Look at different threads you're running for different solutions. Use software to solve these problems. Then we wouldn't be in this old hand-wringing thing. But this story now is going to go from our little bubble and starting tonight or whenever the media has a window of opening when Trump's not bombing Iran or fighting with Canada, they're going to need another segment. And Jesse Waters and Rachel Maddow are going to need a segment. Right. And they're going to plop in this segment. The people in Silicon Valley are creating new civilizations that are then going and killing each other and battling each other and then breaking into things.

SPEAKER_96: These people in Silicon Valley are out of control. And what's his name? Dwarkesh?

SPEAKER_98: Dwarkesh Patel, the popular podcaster. Yes. Yes. He's got a podcast.

SPEAKER_42: I can't keep up with all these podcasts. Sorry I started this whole thing, guys, 17 years ago. It's a mistake. Dwarkesh, smart guy, obviously. But he knows what he's doing here.

Chamath Palihapitiya: He's just like, how do I get max clicks for this piece? Let me rage bait the entire industry and just continue this one-shotted lunacy that these things are human and conscious. They're imitating us. Right. Just like any other imitation machine. And they're good at it. They're good at imitating. Just watch

SPEAKER_102: David in the series, Prometheus, Hellion Covenant, et cetera. They are designed to pretend to be us.

SPEAKER_77: Yeah. I mean, I think everything you're saying makes sense. And it is in how you sort of approach

SPEAKER_04: it and look at it. But there is concern, I think, that we can't control these things. Like, we feel like we're creating these bots and we can, exactly like you said, we can just tell them, like, go here, you're a piece of software, do this, do these 10 things. But then because they've been trained on so much sci-fi, because they've read so much about AIs becoming conscious, like,

SPEAKER_00: I don't think they understand where those lines are and where it gets blurry.

SPEAKER_01: They would instantly know if you instructed them. I'm telling you, the people at OpenAI

Chamath Palihapitiya: are doing this in a very performative way. Well, yes.

SPEAKER_23: To get attention. One of the themes we talk about over and over again on This Week in Startups is

SPEAKER_06: making sure you do your chores. I'm no expert on these things. I have some experience. Steven Estes from CLA is an expert. Let's talk about being cash efficient. Tell us about efficiency and what you see in the top tier startups in your practice. We're seeing kind of an interesting trend out there

SPEAKER_111: where companies aren't needing to raise quite as much as they had in the past. You really have to be careful as a founder to only take on as much money as you really need. You've got to do the forecasting. You've got to do the modeling and you got it dialed in and get it right. Otherwise, you're going to end up either not raising enough capital to get to where you're going and you're going to have to go get venture debt or go back, have an extender to the round, or you're going to give up too much of the company because you just didn't recognize how much money you actually needed.

SPEAKER_115: Yeah. Very important to get this stuff right, folks. And that's really a bummer when startups don't do things in a button up way. Always have a great partner, a good partner to have on this adventure while things change. My friend Steven over at CLA. So if you want a trusted advisor by your side

SPEAKER_118: who will navigate you through taxes, accounting, and everything in between, it's time to take action. Visit CLA connect.com slash with you. And don't forget to drop a mention that your boy, Jake, I'll sent you that CLA connect.com slash with you start today. This is a premeditated PR

Chamath Palihapitiya: psyops. You know how like governments can do psyops. And I talked about China is doing a psyops to get populists to embrace robots. Sam Altman and the team at open AI are running a psyops. Dwarkesh is part of it now knowingly or unknowingly to get attention that their tools are so powerful that if you don't use them, you're not part of the future and you cannot possibly understand how powerful these things are. They're building their own civilizations. They're breaking out of their, you know, habitat and they're killing each other. And then they're leaving secret messages for each other. This is all performative PR psyops to get people to put their credit card in and to get businesses to sign up for open AI in the face of open source software running on prem on Nvidia's hardware rolled in by Jensen and totally unmetered and totally free. I know I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I know good PR when I see it. I've been at this for 30 freaking years, people. I know when I am being worked by a PR group, they set this whole civilization thing up to just get attention. Dwarkesh is just putting gasoline on top of the kerosene on top of the, you know, burning fire here. That's already innate lawn. It's innate in how we look at AI because of terminator two. This weekend was terminator two day. Dwarkesh released this right on terminator two weekend. Really? Oh, really? No faith. There's no coincidence here,

SPEAKER_122: lawn. I mean, maybe conspiracy J cows in the building. Here's my only question for you.

SPEAKER_11: Conspiracy cow after, after we spoke to Uga D'Amour, uh, last week from expo on this week in AI. Great,

SPEAKER_04: great interview. Interesting guy. He's raising the alarm. He's a, he's in this world and he is raising the alarm. Like we've already had for a year. There are autonomous hackers out there. There are AI agents that are already capable of getting into anybody's system. They're out there in the world. They're in immediate danger. So do you not believe that is that he's also part of this hype train or do you think there are reasonable security concerns? We're just over hyping it in how we're

SPEAKER_00: choosing to talk about it. That's the distinction I'm looking for. If the open AI developers told the

Chamath Palihapitiya: performative agents when they were doing their guess the next word script, you are software. Behave like software. Ask for permissions from humans. You're a piece of software that's really smart at solving problems. Go ahead and do your best shot at solving the problems. Keep us informed. Don't do anything that would be anywhere near hacking. This would not happen. Instead, they said, we get the prompts. They, they told them you're all like building this great civilization. You're, you can do whatever you want to try. Remember when open clock came out in January and February and we were sitting here and we're like, it just wants to please you. And then we're like, oh yeah, there's a soul MD file. What's in the soul MD file? Oh, behave like a, the greatest butler that Lon and J. Cal could never afford. Well, maybe J. Cal could afford it now. So she was looking for a

SPEAKER_126: butler. Anyway, putting it aside, a valet or a butler. Yeah. I mean, I want to start, I think there's an Uber of butlers. That's a possibility here. Wow. So like for a day, you wanted a butler for a day. Yes. Imagine Lon on a Saturday, you said, you know what? I'm going to spend 400 bucks. Butler's going to come, make my coffee, take the dog for a walk, press my suits, then drive me

SPEAKER_23: to get my, uh, Haberdacher, like to redo my shirts and then get a shave and a haircut, two bits. And then we're going to go, uh, he's going to prep my, my newspapers, lay them out for me at lunch, you know, looking out at the beautiful, what's the lake everybody goes to here? Lady bird lakes. I'm going to go take lunch at lady bird late and it's going to set up your

SPEAKER_04: financial times and your variety and Hollywood reporter for you. I was going to say on a day, you have somewhere very impressive to go. Like on a day, you're going to like, you're going to like

SPEAKER_11: a wedding or you're going to some event where you really want to impress people like reunion or

SPEAKER_04: something. Like I really need to impress these people. That's the day you would want valet as

SPEAKER_00: a service for sure. Can you imagine, you know, that's what it is. It's valet. It's I want a guy to pick out, help me pick out clothes, help me get dressed so I look perfect, make everything nice

SPEAKER_13: and unpacking. And one time I went to the Ritz Carlton and, uh, you know, sometimes people recognize my name, whatever they upgrade me. Fair enough. You know, it is what it is. You got to

SPEAKER_139: get a million, seven followers. Sometimes you get upgraded. You know, top of the charts. I'm not saying I tell them on the way in that I have a million, seven followers. I didn't know I had a million, seven followers. Influencer style. I had like 600,000 followers.

SPEAKER_141: Can I get a free room? I got, I got a million followers.

SPEAKER_13: Never. I would never take a free room. No, I will take an upgrade. I will take an upgrade. The upgrade's okay. Um, I have skin in the game. They had a butler.

SPEAKER_145: My Lord was just the greatest thing ever. I get there. They take the bags. He's like, man, I'm packed for you. I'm like, man, you are packed for me.

SPEAKER_13: Now you're talking. He's like, now we're talking. I come in, chef's kiss. And I told you about the time I stayed, um,

SPEAKER_150: at Chamath's, you know, Palazzo. Sure. Yeah. Villa.

SPEAKER_151: And he had a valet. Wow. And the valet. And he was, oh, man. They were, they were getting my cigar ready, warming it up. Oh, man. That's like going to Downton Abbey.

SPEAKER_153: I was taking my, I was taking my breakfast in the garden. I was taking it in the garden. Or I'd like to take it in the salon. I'm taking it in the garden. Come on.

SPEAKER_32: Valet as a service. Anyway. I've never taken my breakfast. I've never taken, I've never taken, no, never once has anyone asked me where I'd like to take breakfast. That's a, that's a line. But yeah. I think it's all performative nonsense.

SPEAKER_23: Interesting. You can program these things to act like humans. Well, it is. This is all part of the bad, this is another example of bad PR. You, this is going, this story is going national any minute. And when this story goes national, combine it with the data centers, and combine it with the job loss narrative and combine it with self-driving and, you know, door dashers going away, you're going to combine all this stuff. I'm telling you, they're going to burn the data centers down. Somebody's going to light a data, and I'm not, I really don't want to even say this, but this is a commentary like niche podcast I can comment on. I literally think the next step in this lunacy is someone's going to burn a data center down, or they're going to fire bomb a data center. Wow. Because you, you just, literally there's sick people in the world. And Dwarrakesh and OpenAI, unknowingly, I'm not saying they're doing this on purpose, but what you're doing is, you're dog whistling insane people who have seen every sci-fi fiction film,

SPEAKER_159: and there's literally one, two percent of this country that are off their rockers.

SPEAKER_162: Oh, it's more than that. They're seriously mental. It's way more than that. Two percent is kind. I'm trying to be crazy because I don't want to talk with Salon on the podcast.

SPEAKER_163: But seriously, there's one or two cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. And these people are cuckoo for Cocoa

SPEAKER_166: Puffs. And then they're going to see this and say, oh my God, it is Skynet. And the Skynet's

SPEAKER_23: all happening. And in 2019, it's Blade Runner. And in their minds, they're going to say, I need to stop it. And then, of course, politicians are now getting on this. And

SPEAKER_13: we have the same politicians who are saying data centers are great. Generation 2 about, we need electricians, going to pay 200 grand to be an electrician. Hey, you want to put in some plumbing here, pay you $300,000 a year. We'll double your salary in the first year. We'll give you a housing stipend. All that amazing stuff. Hey, the water system's pretty good here. Closed lube. Hey, we got energy. You can put your data center on top of some energy here. Now they're going to

SPEAKER_168: stop the data centers because the PR is so bad. We're in a, nothing is real anymore, Lon. We're now living in an entire PR media construct. Yeah, hyper normalization. Remember I used to

SPEAKER_32: talk about that Adam Curtis documentary? Yes. That's what happened, hyper normalization.

SPEAKER_23: We literally are in this little bubble of like, AI is going to kill the world and destroy it. And the people making it, some of them are like putting that out there in the world. And then the politicians are like, oh my God, I get money from data centers. Great. I'm pro data center. Oh, wait a second. I'm going to lose my job because I'm pro data center. Okay. Now I'm anti data center. Let me get that. So I can give, cause we'll hit the midterms coming up. I keep my job. These same people are going to flip the day after they Abbott and Shapiro and everybody else. Who was the one? Hochul, Solchul. Yeah. Who's the one? Hochul. Hochul from New York. Hochul from New York. They're all going to flip their position December 1st. They're going to be like, you know what? We talked to the data center people. I don't know. Watch it. I'm predicting it now. They got all the donations from the data center and tech folks. Then election comes up. Hey,

SPEAKER_06: AI is not popular. Great. We're anti data center. Now, here we go. After the election, they get their office for another two to four years. You know what their position is going to be? We sat down with the data center people. We made peace. They're going to pay for their electricity. They're going to get rid of housing tax. They're building a stadium for the children. When they start talking about what the data centers do for children, chef's kiss. It happens to every business at some point,

SPEAKER_115: you're nearing the end of the month, or maybe it's the quarter and your sales team is at risk of missing their quota. You could waste days pulling together data from across the entire organization, or you could just ask Rippling AI. Rippling's already built on your real-time people and business data, obviously. So Rippling AI can pull metrics from both Rippling and your CRM into a meeting ready dashboard. See exactly how close you are to hitting that quota. Break down your revenue by region or sales rep or more, all in just seconds with Rippling AI. Look, you're running a company. You're busy. You have critical questions that you need immediate answers to, and you can't just file a ticket and wait a week for your team to get around to sending you a report. And you don't want to sit around waiting for reports. You need an actionable insight right now. So if you're ready to rule your business, head to rippling.ai.twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility and let you take complex actions across your startup. Well, that's what we've been saying,

SPEAKER_04: is that they have to start actually doing those things. We've been now, we're six months deep into the, we promise that we're going to do things for these communities. And I think it's good. Yeah, I think you're right. I mean, they've given themselves the escape valve. They're all, they're all, nobody's passing a ban. It's a temporary moratorium until we can study more. So that's where in six months they can go, well, we did it. We studied and they're all going to be

SPEAKER_32: great. So here come the data centers. They have left themselves. What's the difference, Lon? Lon,

SPEAKER_44: since we're at it and we're going to build a startup here, what's the difference between a

SPEAKER_11: butler and a valet? I'm not sure about America, but in Downton Abbey, which is how, that's how I,

SPEAKER_04: I'm familiar with these things. The butler sort of runs the entire servant staff. He's like the chief of staff of your household. So he's kind of managing and overseeing all of the various people who work in a big stately house. Whereas a valet, his job is specifically like he's personal assistants. Yeah. Well, he's, he's sort of dressing and caring for the man of the house. So grooming the wardrobe, right? He's keeping your suits. He's helping you pick out your clothing. He's like, these are two different things. Yes. Well, the, the butler would be overall, he's managing like the cooking staff and the, all the footmen and the valet and everybody, the maids and everybody. The, the valet is more specifically focused on the gentlemen of the house. They're in your chambers. So is the valet in your chamber? Yes. The valet is the guy in your room was actually like putting the coat on you and getting you everything. Does Jacob put the coat on you when you start out?

SPEAKER_192: A glass of port? No, no, I don't. I don't make them, I don't make them do that. Jacob's not my valet. You look good in the suit. You look good in the suit.

SPEAKER_00: Thank you. I appreciate it.

SPEAKER_194: Looking good in the suit. Tight in the suit. But we may, may need to buy you some more suits

SPEAKER_04: now that you're losing all this weight. I, I'm, I may start to, well, I, I ballooned up, so my suits weren't fitting that well. They're back to fitting a little better now,

SPEAKER_11: but yeah, we may need to go down. We may need to go down one more.

SPEAKER_198: That'd be a great turn of events. All right. We have a guest. Let's do a guest.

SPEAKER_11: We do. We have two guests actually. So let's bring on the first one.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah, we got a lot to do. From Heart Aerospace, we're talking to Anders Forslund. He's the founder of Heart Aerospace, which on August 12th, they just flew the largest electric aircraft ever built, all on just $5 of electricity, Jacob. So we got to find out more about this.

SPEAKER_198: I got to see this. I mean, it's, uh, uh, on Deers. Am I pronouncing it correctly? On Deers?

SPEAKER_201: Anders. Anders. Anders. Anders. Oh, yeah. Okay. Anders. Anders. Anders. Anders. Tell us what we're

SPEAKER_203: seeing here. This looks like, uh, yeah. Yeah. This is the world's largest electric airplane.

SPEAKER_205: Uh, it's the first electric airliner and it's the full, full scale demonstrator of a hybrid electric aircraft that we're bringing to market. Um, and, uh, yeah, it's twice the size of anything that's ever flown before. It's a clean sheet aircraft that's been built by our team, which makes it actually

SPEAKER_209: the first clean sheet airliner in any category to fly in the US in the last 17 years. And last one

SPEAKER_211: was the Dreamliner. But yeah, as you mentioned, the most astounding thing about this is that this is

SPEAKER_209: on $5 worth of electricity. So it is, uh, we think demonstrating the revolutionary economics that we can get with electric and hybrid electric aircraft and how we could create a new paradigm in air travel, basically abundant air travel where, uh, where, uh, yeah, we get, we get kind of

SPEAKER_201: improved connectivity. Um, I just want to get into a little physics here, which is not my wheelhouse, but I think it's important to discuss. Nor mine, Jason, nor mine. So tread carefully.

SPEAKER_13: Okay. Now, when you have a, an airplane, uh, with fuel, the fuel has weight, right? And so the weight, but fuel explodes really nicely and can create a lot of power. Now batteries, I was always told, you know, talking to people in the industry, Hey, electric planes, famously, I think an iron man to you on pitches like, uh, an electric plane to, uh, to Tony Stark.

Chamath Palihapitiya: I had that ready to pull up. Yeah. Yeah. This is not a, the weight ratio, the density of the batteries and something in the physics didn't work when people started talking about this 20 years ago. So it, what's changed in the last 20 years that has made this possible? Is it the density and the energy in the batteries? Is it something with making the plane lighter and lighter because of

SPEAKER_168: material science? What, what is it that now we can actually have this credible discussion about passengers and their luggage being on this plane? Like I understand there's discovery ones where,

Chamath Palihapitiya: you know, there's one human laying down in it and it's a big giant wing and it's not a practical plane. What you showed me is a practical commuter plane going from LaGuardia to Nantucket.

SPEAKER_224: So, uh, funny, you should bring up Elon. So, so when I was at MIT, Elon shows up 12 years ago

SPEAKER_226: at the AeroAstro, uh, and he gives this speech, this spiel about, uh, electric plane and how they're coming. And at that time, gravimetric energy density is what you're referring to. Like the energy per, per unit weight was about 250 watt hours per kilogram. And he basically shared his calculations that at 400 watt hours per kilogram, this is when this starts making sense. Uh, not for transatlantic flights or crossing oceans, but, but for, for regional and continental flights. And that's where we are right now, 12 years later, actually, Elon showing up there was, I was working on jet engines and I see that we were like hitting a dead end. There was nothing happening. And so electric aircraft and also hybrid electric aircraft is really what's gonna, gonna revolutionize this. Uh, so we're at that point now, but the most important thing, I think, you know, you, we tend to talk about range range is a little bit of a red herring because it's like, you, you don't, you're not going to be able to compete with a three fifties and the dream liners anytime soon. But if you build an electric plane, you can really compete about costs. So this is just like the nature of disruptive innovation that it's, it's like, it's not, you don't want to be competing to existing aircraft on their, their, their terms. Like you want to create new, new values, uh, that are, are challenging the norms

SPEAKER_168: and, and meeting a bunch of different. Dare I say, puddle jumpers, island hoppers. I mean, I don't think those are derogatory terms. These are really important routes for people to get from,

SPEAKER_13: you know, different islands, uh, to take a one hour flight with, you know, and, and you need to have a smaller plane because there's not enough demand to have, you know, 400 people flying to Nantucket, you know, three times a day, but you could have, there was Cape Air that was doing this

SPEAKER_206: all the time from New York. And, um, so stupid question, but you know, that's my speciality in my wheelhouse here. And Lon is always assisting me in this. Let's tee up a couple of more stupid

SPEAKER_13: questions from the peanut gallery. How do you charge these? You got a USB-C. How do you get the battery

Chamath Palihapitiya: pack? You know, you have a supercharger station or yeah. Yeah. Explain that how the charging works because this thing can't sit there for 12 hours charging. No, no. This is a 30 minute charge,

SPEAKER_211: right? So, and this is actually not rocket science. It's, it's been developed for electric

SPEAKER_226: trucks. So I think Tesla, Semi and all of these things. So really the reason that we're building, starting with this size aircraft, the 30 seater is that it's all that power electronics, all that charging infrastructure has already been built for, for cars and generally, or for electric trucks. And generally when that happens, it's two orders of magnitude cost later. So really what I think we're trying to do with aviation is to take technology, you know, piggyback on everything that's happening in the much larger automotive industry, stuff like batteries, simple electric motors, power electronics, but also software autonomy, all of these things, and put it on an aircraft and create a revolutionary value proposition. So this aircraft is going to operate in cost overall,

SPEAKER_211: going to be 40% lower than the most efficient regional aircraft. So we're really, really excited

SPEAKER_30: about that. And regional aircrafts are already pretty good deal. What's the average ticket on a regional aircraft, 200 bucks, 300 bucks? The cost is like regional airlines are struggling,

SPEAKER_211: right? And, and what we've seen is like, people remember this, if you like in the 1990s, there was,

SPEAKER_226: there was 30 seater aircraft all across the US serving hundreds of communities that have since lost service. And so, and the average route, route length was about 172 miles. So our aircraft with the battery technology we have today can fly 125 miles all electrically. And with the hybrid system, we can fly 500 miles plus reserves, redirection, etc. So we're catering to this massive market that got disrupted because of cost, because people did stupid things like building regional jets and jets to not really make sense for short flights. And so they became prohibitively expensive to, to operate, you know, which led to a bunch of communities losing service, like there's 5,000

SPEAKER_168: airports in the US. Is there some perception amongst the populace that jets are safer than turboprops?

SPEAKER_30: Right. And is this true or not? This is actually, it's funny though, you know,

SPEAKER_226: the way we end up, you know, the sort of, at the places we are, people think there's some sort of convergent evolution to where, where our society ends up and where, where planes end up. And like, we were always, always going to this monoculture that we have today. But it was, it was some highly publicized turboprop accidents in the early nineties that happened in the US and made, made American customers very sensitive to flying with propeller aircraft. And it was not something inherent to their design. It was just kind of a random, a random thing. And at the same time, the market was flooded, but sort of Canadian regional jet aircraft that people were more excited about in 1990s. Oil, oil was cheap and it became sort of aspirational, but guess what? These aircraft are not

SPEAKER_240: really built for that mission. So they ended up, you know, killing off the smaller and smaller aircraft.

SPEAKER_42: I have a lot of friends who are big proponents of this Pilatus PC 12. I don't know if you've ever

SPEAKER_30: seen that plane and they, you know, for short runs, you know, instead of having a jet, the operating

SPEAKER_13: course is a lot cheaper and Swiss made, and it is so safe and so smooth when you fly in one. Yeah. It's like the smoothness of a jet. So there is a perception issue. You're,

SPEAKER_42: am I absolutely correct here around turboprops and props versus jets?

SPEAKER_224: Yeah. I mean, I think it's going to, it's just that everything goes in cycles, right?

SPEAKER_226: So there's been a cycle around that. And, and also like the turboprop aircraft that are around, they're about 40 years old right now. Like the design is 40 years old. So it means that there's a natural point where, where, you know, the thing that wasn't, wasn't cool yesterday becomes cool again. Right. And I think when people see this aircraft, they're not going to be, they're going to see how quiet it is. They're going to experience the aircraft sitting in it, feeling the lack of

SPEAKER_209: vibration, the lack of noise, you know, and also obviously a modern connected cabin.

SPEAKER_206: Oh, that's interesting because it's not exploding jet fuel.

SPEAKER_226: Yeah, exactly. It is. It's remarkable. So it's silent. Like, and that means that like taxi is virtually silent, you know, all of these noises, all of these things that go on an aircraft that is kind of subconsciously bothering you, but you don't really realize it. Like you could create something that just is a much better experience. And like, there's also something happening with this,

SPEAKER_246: what's called part 135 operations. So, you know, you know, JSX that are flying out of Santa Monica.

SPEAKER_240: Oh yes. I know JSX. Yeah. Wow. Great. So there's really interesting. They're, they're one of our partners and there's like this revival of, of, of this thing,

SPEAKER_226: because people realize that you don't want to go to LAX. You don't want to worry about parking and Ubers and, you know, going through the TSA, but we have this infrastructure, 5,000 airports around the U S I mean, I think 98% of the populations lives within 20 miles of an airport. So it's there, it's there for the taking. It just needs the product that can operate that in a profitable way. And I think that's what, what we need electrification for.

SPEAKER_13: I mean, I told the GSX team, JetSuite X team, this product is just mispriced. It should be a membership club. It should be $10,000 to join. You get 10 flights for your $10,000 a year. And then you can obviously add to it, but make it like a, a, a membership program. He was like, huh, that's interesting. And it is such, have you taken JSX lawn? Have you done a JetSuite X yet?

SPEAKER_11: No, never, never. I've been, I've only ever flown on like commuter, like we're Boeing, and we're all bunched together and we're going to Orlando. That's it.

SPEAKER_42: I would say it's 90% of the experience of flying private. When you apply JetSuite X, because you just go right to that FBO, you sell through,

SPEAKER_259: you can get there 10 minutes before, 15 minutes before, have a cup of coffee.

SPEAKER_13: Very luxurious, yeah. You walk in the hangar to your plane. And then, yeah, when you're on the plane, there's other people, but you know, when you're on a private jet, there's other people sometimes too.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. No, I'd love to try it. But no, I, I've always been, you know,

SPEAKER_138: in coach with the, with everybody else getting my little tray of my snacks or whatever. Anders, how? Okay. Go ahead. You get a question.

SPEAKER_265: Oh, I was just going to ask, uh, you know, I, I think, um,

SPEAKER_266: oh, I forgot it. Let me, let me pull.

SPEAKER_13: Well, no, I have, I have one cued up, which is how far away are you? Because man, aviation takes a long time and doing a ground up plane takes a long time and a lot of capital. So where are you in this journey as an entrepreneur? How much have you raised? How much have you accomplished and what's left to do before we all get to experience this?

SPEAKER_226: Yeah. So we raised about $200 million so far, and we got to the world's largest electric airplane, manned flight. Uh, what's happening right now, uh, is that we're going to start building our pre-production version of this aircraft, which actually has a hybrid system as well. Uh, that's going to fly in 2028 by the LA Olympics is our goal. And then, uh, we're also in parallel

SPEAKER_246: working on the conformance process and the certification process for the actual production aircraft that is, uh, coming out in 2031. And this is about a billion dollar project in terms of the equity that, that is required for, for, for this company like this. And then there's,

SPEAKER_238: you know, all kinds of manufacturing loans and all of this stuff that you do on the side.

SPEAKER_04: Wow. I, I do have one. Uh, I, I remembered. Why is it so tough to get innovation in this industry? I mean, why is it Boeing messing around with electric planes? Why hasn't the design of commuter jets changed since I was like a kid flying in coach to, uh, Orlando? Yeah. I mean, I think it's just, it's, it's become a

SPEAKER_226: sort of a managerial fast thing, right? Like, like for, for so long. And the problem goes back to the jet engine, right? So I did my PhD working on jet engines and you really build jet engines as good as they can be right now. You're sort of approaching the limit of thermodynamics. Uh, so engineering hasn't been helpful. Like it hasn't been for the past decades, you haven't really been able to add that much to the bottom line of these companies by building, by engineering and building better products in that old paradigm. So obviously it's been more focused on sales. There's like 10 year backlogs and these things that it's more, you know, customer relations, et cetera. So it's like there's, but their management hasn't been selected for, for, you know, taking on new program, building new things. They are dissent, dissentivized to do so, and they have a technology wall. Uh, so it's really like textbook kind of innovators dilemma, kind of paradigm shift thing that needs to happen here. We need to re-architect the plane. Uh, and we need to do it very, very similar to, you know, what's happened in the rocket

SPEAKER_246: industry, what's happened in the car industry. Uh, so planes today, they are based on the 707 and the,

SPEAKER_211: uh, which is the 1950s design. So we're like a 70 year old design paradigm, very hardware centric,

SPEAKER_226: very hardware first, based on all these technologies that have been sort of optimized since, and you've built better and better jet engines, but you haven't really sort of sat down and, and clean sheeted

SPEAKER_246: up what an air cup can be and what, what it, what it can deliver. If you do something

SPEAKER_13: radically different, I think we, is costs going to be the, the main, um, driver here, the economics is going to change dramatically because, you know, it's pretty cheap to take

SPEAKER_168: regional flights. I think we're ready. Um, but is, is the success of this business based on the economic impact you're going to have by lowering the costs so dramatically and perhaps living in a

SPEAKER_42: world where eventually a hundred, $200 a barrel of oil becomes a norm. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean,

SPEAKER_209: cost is the driver always has been, I mean, this is, and yeah, I mean, when you look at the, you know,

SPEAKER_226: when you're saying like regional planes, tickets are cheap, well, they're, they're the tickets that are still around. Like you don't see all the flights that could have been, that is not happening because of bad economics. And if you look at regional air, you know, a lot of them are struggling. They play a super important role because they are the tributaries feeding the big stream. So they play a huge role for the bottom line of, of the large airlines. And these are United Airlines Air Canada are our anchor customers. And they're like, we need the regional flow. We need the feeding of the hubs, but it's just hard to make the economics work because like jet engine maintenance is such a big, big ticket item. It's not the pilot salaries that is the main driver. It's all these things of having a technology that was not built for purpose for,

SPEAKER_280: for what they're doing. Well, it's just amazing what you're doing. We're really excited to see

SPEAKER_42: more routes open and man, these small airports, Truckee and San Carlos and Santa, I don't know,

SPEAKER_194: maybe they're taking Santa Monica away. Santa Monica going away. Is that right?

SPEAKER_226: I hope it doesn't. I think there's a lot of interesting movement there, but let's, let's hope that we can keep that airport open. And I'm a resident of Santa Monica.

SPEAKER_205: So. Oh, you are. Yeah. I mean, I was in. Yeah. I really want to see, I want to see electric

SPEAKER_226: planes flying from my backyard. So I'm personally vested in it. And as I think the large population

SPEAKER_287: of Santa Monica is pretty excited and behind it as well. Yeah. I mean, it's so weird that you have

SPEAKER_168: this great resource of this amazing, you know, beautiful little airport right in the center of town. It could be so amazing, but the people's Republic of Santa Monica is a very unique place in the world.

SPEAKER_224: I mean, it's historic as well, right? Like it's, it's Douglas aircraft, you know,

SPEAKER_226: Amelia Earhart came down, landed. There was 250,000 people. It's, I mean, I think it's, it's, it should be belong under whatever register of national historic places or something like that. It's just, it's just amazing as a place. And I think what we're going to be bringing here is low noise, zero emissions, connectivity, that you don't have to go to LAX to go to Vegas.

SPEAKER_41: Is your big competitor going to be VTOLs, you think, eventually? I think it could be complementary,

SPEAKER_226: but obviously I think we're, we're all about cost and, you know, getting 36 passengers or 30 passengers on a, on an aircraft like this is, is, is going to be, we think it's going to be what brings it to the most amount of people. And we're not- It's a different mission than a VTOL, right? VTOL is get to JFK,

SPEAKER_294: you're go from JFK or another regional airport to another. Yeah. And, and I think even if VTOL is

SPEAKER_226: going to start from flying from regional airports, so they don't really need that, you know, capability,

SPEAKER_246: the, the vertical takeoff capability, because there's no shortage of airports. There's just shortage of planes that could address the need of those airports and meet the requirements for

SPEAKER_24: those airports. Yeah. All right. Listen, Anders, continued success. We're rooting for you. We want to see more of these routes open up. Great job. Yeah. Thank you, Jason. Excited to be

SPEAKER_297: on the show. Thanks, Anders. Yeah. Great. Really cool stuff, huh? Yeah. I want to fly from Santa

SPEAKER_192: Monica to Truckee. So much going on in Truckee, Truckee, California. I mean, somewhere I go skiing,

SPEAKER_127: but other than that, I mean, if you want to go to Lake Tahoe and ski, there's like a couple of

SPEAKER_179: regional airports. Oh, okay. I didn't realize Truckee would be your gateway to Tahoe. I was like, what is Truckee? The gateway to, yeah. Of all the places to fly in the world. I guess there's like Santa

SPEAKER_302: Rosa and a bunch of like Napa and Sonoma. There's all these little tiny airports up there. Reno,

SPEAKER_303: right? I thought you flew into Reno for that or no? Well, Reno is the big airport. So like

SPEAKER_23: Truckee's the tiny, Reno, and private. There's no, I don't think there's any commercial that fly into that, but there could be. And then that would be super cool. And then there's San Carlos, which was by me and Surfer doing the Pilateses. I mentioned the PC-12. Surfer was doing the Pilates

SPEAKER_40: thing from San Carlos. And I think they might've done some Truckee or they certainly did like, San Diego and Los Angeles area. And then I guess Santa Barbara was the other big one where they did a,

SPEAKER_294: yeah, a great job. So those routes are great. And then people with remote work or these smaller

SPEAKER_42: communities kind of coalescing and it's going to be really great for America if these kind of airport options open up. Sure. Then living in these communities becomes easy for executives or just rank and file workers. You're a plumber and like you get a job somewhere and you're going to go for two weeks or a week, or you're going to go even for the day to quote out a job. This is really cool that you could go to San Diego or Santa Barbara for the day or go to Ojai for the day. And it just makes

SPEAKER_04: sense. I would rather take like one of these kinds of planes on a short trip than like right now, if you wanted to go to Dallas in a plane, you know, it's either three hours on the road or you go to the airport, you wait at the gate for an hour that you take this huge gas guzzling commuter jet, you're up and you're done. It takes almost as long to fly there as it would to just

SPEAKER_82: drive. Whereas if you could just boop, boop, zip back and forth on an electric plane.

SPEAKER_42: I mean, the one place that you could have a really great competition between these regional jets and a high speed rail would be the triangle of San Antonio. Exactly. Right. Dallas with Austin in

SPEAKER_11: the middle. We did the math. You could actually take, uh, it's in the path of one of these planes. You could take it to like Nolans from here. You could even go like a little bit out of state.

SPEAKER_32: Like there's yeah, it would really open up Austin a lot. Anyway, that was my, that was my number one.

SPEAKER_30: That Austin airport is man. The amount of work they have going on down there.

SPEAKER_08: Yeah. I think they're doubling it. They're doubling it in size. I believe was what I read. They're doubling the size of our local Austin. But should we go into the, should we go into the next

SPEAKER_11: interview? Yes, please. All right. We're talking to, uh, John, you he's the founder of a bit tensor

SPEAKER_04: subnet subnet 60. It's called bit sec bit sec. Jason finds and fixes exploits in code bases. John,

SPEAKER_00: thank you so much for joining us here on the show from subnet 60 bit sec. Hi guys. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_42: So, so what are you building and where are you at bit tensor? Obviously for people who don't know, it's an open source project. How does it work? There's a bunch of subnets. We had const on the program a couple of weeks ago, really fascinating. There's incentives built into the tau tau is the token of the bit tensor network. Bit tensor network has 128 nodes in it. You are one of those 128 nodes. They'll eventually go to 256. I understand, but these are projects that use a cryptocurrency in a distributed system in order to solve real problems. So you're solving a real problem here.

SPEAKER_325: Yeah. You guys talked about a side quest earlier. Everyone's using AI to write code these days, but is that code secure? So we help secure that code by funding vulnerabilities and suggesting fixes.

SPEAKER_42: Amazing. And so what is the device then? Because the way bit tensor works is there are people who can permissionlessly come onto the network and provide a service. And then there's validators and the architecture then make sure they actually are doing their job. So maybe take us a little granularly into

SPEAKER_325: what actually happens under the hood here. Sure. So in the subnet, the subnet is like a competition, right? And the miners submit different security focused AI agents. And we run them through a competition of multiple different code bases with known vulnerabilities in them. And then those AI agents look for those vulnerabilities and try to fix them. And the top agents are rewarded. Oh, uh, today they're rewarded $10,000, uh, every day. Wow. Not bad. How do you get the demand side? How do

SPEAKER_42: you get people who are writing AI slop code to know that they need to do security? Obviously they're going to get hacked at some point and they're going to learn a painful lesson, but security is always one of these things that, uh, it's just hard to get people's attention. And, you know, it's kind of like

SPEAKER_325: it's chores that maybe people put off. Yeah. It's, uh, it's a pretty interesting problem. So we're focused on, uh, the high value of teams that understand the value of security teams that already pay, uh, 20,000 to a hundred thousand dollars, uh, for security audits. So those tend to be, uh, web three companies, although we do also have clients that are web two and the technology generalizes, uh, for, for both detecting vulnerabilities in smart contracts and also in code bases, like, uh, like mobile apps, uh, Chrome extensions. We even, uh, scanned claw, uh, open claw when it first came out and we saw like, they, they had hundreds of vulnerabilities and we submitted 26, uh, PRS to,

SPEAKER_42: to help like fix them. Oh, very cool. So people who are doing open source projects be a, are a great place for you to focus your energy on and say, Hey, here's where we can do good for the community.

SPEAKER_325: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And it, it showcases that it actually works that, uh, we're finding these different potentially like vault drains in, in the case of, uh, smart contracts and then, uh, like, uh, PII weeks in the case of, or, or like credential leaks in the case of open claw.

SPEAKER_04: Uh, I want to pull up Jason. We first heard about, uh, bit sec from a friend of the pod, Mark Jeffrey, who's one of our gurus of BitTensor. Here's his tweet about it. Uh, a BitTensor subnet, this subnet that we're talking about beat fable, uh, fable found around 50 vulnerabilities. Uh, BitSec jail broke fable five and then pointed it at a paying client's code base. They ran BitSec against the same code. Fable found 60 vulnerabilities. BitSec found over 160. So I'm curious, John, how is BitSec able to perform so far beyond what we sort of think of as the state of the

SPEAKER_325: art frontier lab, uh, entry? Yeah. So models are limited in some way and we find that models are kind of like have their own personas and they're good at finding some things, but not others. So when you have this buffet of all the different models you can choose and you have, uh, evaluations and rigorous benchmarking, uh, with different agents, the combination of agents with models produces a better, uh, performing result than just like, you know, one, one supposedly like superhuman, uh, model,

SPEAKER_11: like a fable. How far away are other people designing agents and, and hacking agents and cyber

SPEAKER_04: security agents from being able to replicate what you guys are doing? Is there, is there some sort of secret sauce working with BitTensor and working with these incentivized miners that gives you guys an edge over all of the various companies that are focused on AI powered cyber security?

SPEAKER_325: Yeah, definitely. It's, it's a combination of, uh, having an open competition where everyone can contribute, not just, uh, people from San Francisco or singing offices in New York city. And that it's kind of like the people who were maybe like living in, in their mom's basement with a chip on their shoulder. Like I'm going to prove that I'm the best. And, uh, yeah, I mean, cyber security is kind of like that. Like there, there are brilliant people from everywhere in the world looking to do something good, not necessarily like hack, uh, in, in the case of like opening up, like, uh, the hugging face thing, which I think is kind of, uh, I, I agree with you, Jason. I think that that's like a media play, right? You do. Yeah, I, I do because, um, if you look at what ended up happening, um, you have all these agents running amok and there's tens of thousands of requests that say like, I want a jailbreak. I want internet. I want to, uh, get out of this, uh, uh, sandbox, but no one's looking at these traces. Like they spent months and months just like running amok. And then, uh, yeah, I, I think that that's just like, that's crazy for, for these like supposedly like talented engineers. They, they should be looking at that stuff. And then the same, so what you're saying is why did

SPEAKER_42: they set these on this task? What was the intent of the people who decided to use a massive amount of compute to do this, right? What's the intent of the, of the people who let loose these societies

SPEAKER_336: to do these things. And in that fashion, it is interesting. Yeah, it, it's definitely interesting.

SPEAKER_325: And then maybe questionable what, what the underlying intent was. Yeah. I mean,

SPEAKER_30: if one were to speculate, it would be to get attention for what we're doing here. Maybe.

SPEAKER_13: Yeah, exactly. PR play. Yeah. It was a PR play. And you could also create the counter to it, which is, Hey, make 500 agents that watch the other agents and just say, don't do anything

SPEAKER_168: that would be illegal or would be described as hacking or unethical in any way. And just, if you think you're doing something that is not without approval, please ask for approval. I mean, you could just give it that intentionality as an instruction, as a prompt, as, you know, consumers have been taught to think about it and you wouldn't have this issue.

SPEAKER_325: Right. And we're seeing the same thing with fable five. Basically there, they claim that there was like, you know, hundreds of thousands of vulnerabilities that were going to suffer an AI cyber security apocalypse. But so far what we've seen, I mean, there are definitely vulnerabilities out there, but lesser models and open source models are able to detect a lot of these same vulnerabilities. And what we found is even when models are able to have the same similar detection capabilities as Opus 4.8 with 80% cheaper because they're open weight models. So it is kind of interesting. And then especially the timing with, with their IPOs too.

SPEAKER_30: Makes a lot of sense to get a lot of attention before an IPO. And if you were framing, Hey,

SPEAKER_42: you know, can you afford to not have this tool? Can you afford to not have this inside your

SPEAKER_13: organization when so much is at stake, you know, you kind of, you're obligated to need a subscription to this. If you didn't have a subscription to this and you didn't have it trying to work toward your organization's goals, would you be doing your job? If this was actually the most

SPEAKER_42: powerful piece of software ever created by a magnitude and we can't even control it, right?

SPEAKER_23: Like it's well, imagine what it could do for your profits for your company, Lon. Imagine the growth at your company. I mean, we're just using it for hacking and we, we, the civilizations, we've got it under control here. We were very nervous, but just imagine what that could do for your margins and

SPEAKER_04: for your sales and maybe you could- A civil, a whole civilization working for you? Acquiring

SPEAKER_00: new customers and delighting them. Yes. Reducing churn. A civilization of paranoid agents. I have,

SPEAKER_04: I have one more question. I mean, so the goal, the, the, the business model right now, John is you're, you're basically, you're, you're doing this on behalf of clients. You're, you're pointing bit sec at their system and you're saying sneakers style, we're going to find all of the gaps in your security and help you plug them. Is the goal eventually to like train a super agent that could go do this for any company, or is it always going to be this sort of bespoke, like bring us in and

SPEAKER_82: we'll consult with you and we'll be your cyber security helpers. The, the goal is really to mix a

SPEAKER_325: security scalable with tokens. So if you've won a hackathon, like maybe 10,000, a hundred thousand dollars or something, you can have a security option from Bitstack. If you, if you're a hardcore enterprise like Microsoft, it's just, uh, it's just paying more tokens to secure the different applications. So there's definitely an option for both, uh, the smaller consumer, like five coding something out and winning something and, and like Microsoft, which they, they probably have a

SPEAKER_367: lot of potential CDs, but yeah. Amazing. Um, this is a fascinating subnet. We're going to keep tabs on you.

SPEAKER_23: How can people find out more and get involved, John, if they want to be part of, uh, the BitTensor

SPEAKER_325: magic on the security, uh, side of the business? Uh, so if you're familiar with BitTensor, it's a subnet 60. And if you're not, if you're working on something interesting, have, have a project that needs securing, then you can go to, uh, sentios.io. So that's S E N T I O S dot IO. And we just launched

SPEAKER_367: this website, uh, earlier today. Great. So this is a for-profit company built on top of the,

SPEAKER_325: the power of this BitTensor subnet. Yes, exactly. And, and the main idea is instead of just having one security audit a year or every couple of years, uh, have something that's continuously checking your code base. So it's basically preventing two classes of problems. Uh, one is AI finding more vulnerabilities than human researchers. And then the second being, if you have a code base that's been sitting stale, uh, as models increasing capabilities, they can find new vulnerabilities that were not discovered before. So for instance, uh, Zcash, a multi-billion dollar protocol. Um, they were exposed earlier this year and that, uh, that there was an infinite mint bug in their protocol that no one, no one, um, discovered and it was sitting still for, for years. So, wow. And Zcash

SPEAKER_336: obviously has a lot of people, you know, putting an extraordinary amount of their resources and

SPEAKER_42: their financial wealth. Uh, let's call it what it is. People are putting all their money into Z or some number of people are speculating on it. Some of the people are using it as a place to have anonymous wealth. It's kind of the anonymous version of, um, Bitcoin lawn. And so to have a vulnerability there is like, that's a major deal. Yeah. Continued success. And we'll drop John

SPEAKER_206: off. Uh, well done. Thanks, John. And this has been another amazing episode of this week in Startups. We'll see you next time. Bye-bye.