Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes film resists a verdict

Sports (2)

• Carb and Keon describe Austin’s Formula One week as a luxury networking scene, where wealthy attendees use races and private suites to entertain clients; Carb also says a company invited Carb to a private Dave Chappelle show box.
• Baker argues that soccer’s financial fair play rules protect established clubs by limiting spending to club revenue, making it harder for new investors to build competing teams. The post compares the system with Germany’s 50% plus one rule and criticizes rules presented as fairness measures.

Mining (2)

• Jason B.’s Hashrate Hearth estimates how many home miners would be needed to counter Foundry and Antpool, which Jason says produce 58% of block templates. The calculator estimates 133 million Bitaxe Gamma miners or 337,000 S21 XP Hydro miners.
• HeatBit’s BitWater converts an electric water heater’s heating element into a Bitcoin-mining device. Keon likes the retrofit design and replaceable mining rod; Carb sees a possible apartment-installation business, while noting that gas water heaters are common in Texas.

Payments (2)

• OpenReceive offers merchants a self-hosted way to accept Lightning payments through an NWC connection that cannot send funds. Keon says the receive-only default limits what an attacker could steal if the payment server were compromised.
• Siggy reports that PubKey’s Washington, DC location spans about 12,000 square feet, has two bars, and gives customers 21% off when they pay with Bitcoin through Square. Keon says New York’s PubKey used Zeus when Keon visited; the hosts discuss the DC venue’s potential political influence.

Labor (1)

• Simple Snacker explains the secretary problem as rejecting the first 37 of 100 candidates, then hiring the next candidate better than everyone seen so far. The strategy assumes immediate hiring, no revisiting rejected candidates, and success means choosing the single best candidate.

Custody (2)

• Scoresby’s Off Wallet turns a Game Boy Color into a Bitcoin wallet, using button presses as coin flips because the console has no hardware random-number generator or clock. Keon treats it as a hobby project, not a wallet for meaningful funds; the hosts also mention a separate floppy-disk seed-generation experiment.
• Den upgraded from Block’s original BitKey to its newer screen-equipped version and tested the recovery process. Den uses BitKey for warm storage; the screen allows transaction review and fee selection, though Den found the new device larger, less sturdy, and more interactive.

Adoption (1)

• Laura created a Geyser fundraiser to cover PubLab workshops and local Bitcoin outreach that organizers have been paying for themselves. Carb says the workshops have helped orange-pill nearby businesses and urges listeners to support local hubs.

Models (2)

• The US government has barred DeepSeek from government IT systems, and China publicly criticized the move. Keon views the dispute as part of rising US-China distrust but says individuals running open-source DeepSeek are unlikely to face restrictions soon; Womble also cites a possible wider restriction involving Chinese device-testing labs.
• Alby’s integration lets users sell inference through Mesh LLM and receive payment directly to an Alby Hub. Carb would isolate the service on a separate VPS; Mort raises privacy and bandwidth concerns while noting that public-data tasks may allow open reasoning.

Society (1)

• Blockchain Boo’s TabConf food recap features Atlanta meals including fried catfish, grits, collard greens, calamari, lobster bisque, and a salmon Philly. Keon and Carb praise Steamhouse Lounge’s cheese-jalapeño grits, while Carb complains that Atlanta offered few taco options.

Social Media (1)

• The Stacker News Top Cowboys segment tracks consecutive daily activity: Blockchain Boog had 1,102 days, Grey Ruby 1,066, and Undisciplined 1,023. The hosts say an Alby update can interrupt a streak if a user forgets to unlock the hub afterward.

VC (8)

• Jason Calacanis says This Week in VC will publish one focused product: a weekly deep dive into a deal’s participants, mechanics, and due diligence, rather than breaking news. The team is hiring two full-time writers.
• Sam Lesson says betting adds little to his life because venture investing already means taking financial risks, and small wagers do not move him emotionally. The panel also discussed Oscar-market odds, including a documentary at 73% to win its category and 19% for best picture.
• Paige Doherty says investors should ask apparently basic questions repeatedly and watch how founders respond. Jason Calacanis describes requesting tax returns and bank statements to teach early founders diligence before later rounds.
• Sam Lesson says he knows of one fraudulent investment among 350 companies and admits he skipped extra reference checks because he believed in the founder; Jason Calacanis estimates a 2.5% fraud rate, compared with Sam’s roughly 1%. Jason names a background-check startup and the JP Morgan fake-customer case as examples.
• Jason Calacanis used Harmonic to compare funding histories for Theranos and FTX, arguing that later investors often relied on earlier investors’ diligence. Harmonic tracked $786 million for Theranos and $1.7 billion for FTX, whose rounds included Sequoia, SoftBank, and other major firms.
• The investors disagreed about Elizabeth Holmes’s prospects after prison: Sam Lesson doubts she could rebuild trust, while Jason Calacanis predicts she may pursue another biotech venture and Paige Doherty would take a meeting but questions her record. Paige also asks how Holmes could repay the $452 million owed to investors.
• Valor Atomic’s CEO Isaiah Taylor said the company sued early investor Day One Ventures over pro rata rights after an amendment removed springback rights before a new financing. Day One’s Masha Butcher said Valor had agreed the rights could not be removed without its consent.
• Sam Lesson says seed funds need enforceable pro rata rights because their returns depend on maintaining ownership in winners; Jason Calacanis says his firm treats those rights as non-negotiable. Both argue founders should understand the terms before signing and resist pressure from later investors to waive them.

Markets (1)

• Sam Lesson argues prediction markets can aggregate information because markets let people express what they believe will happen. Jason Calacanis sees a use for ski-trip insurance, while Sam imagines flights that take skiers to wherever conditions are best.

Models (2)

• The panel debated whether ElevenLabs’s Archer voice was copied from Chris Williamson or recorded from a different actor, and noted that the actor said the clone used about an hour of his audio. Jason Calacanis argues creators should be paid for commercial voice use; Jenny Fielding says courts have not settled how publicity rights apply to AI, while Paige Doherty points to changing name, image, and likeness rules in college sports.
• Jason Calacanis says Obliteration provides hosted, unconstrained AI models for cybersecurity teams that need to build their own rules and safeguards. He congratulated the company on joining Andreessen Horowitz’s Speedrun program.

AI Infrastructure (1)

• Sponsor pitches covered DigitalOcean’s AI inference platform, which claims workload costs can fall by up to 50%; Odoo Discuss for messages and meeting transcripts; Rippling AI for sales and business metrics; and Plod, which offered a 10% discount with the code TWIST.

Startups (2)

• Paige Doherty says Knox Metals, a pre-seed and seed investment, reached $25 million in annualized revenue by making metal servicing easier for manufacturers that cannot order directly from mills. An investor ordered metal during a Detroit factory tour and received it about two hours later.
• Jenny Fielding says Electric Plants translates plants’ electrical signals into data that could support uses such as indoor landscaping and carbon accounting. She backed the founder’s earlier company and described the new venture as a high-conviction bet on the founder’s plant expertise.

Agents (1)

• Jason and Lon Harris said Plaud records meetings on a phone or pin and turns audio into formats such as meeting notes, lesson plans, and interview Q&A. Jason said the show now uses Plaud to produce more comprehensive show notes than its former three-hour manual process.

Startups (4)

• Anthropic proposed putting 5% of its stock into a fund for public-benefit projects, subject to shareholder approval; its board could add 2% for each 50% increase in company value above an undisclosed baseline. Jason argued direct share distributions would give ordinary Americans a stake in AI’s gains, while Lon Harris questioned letting Anthropic leaders decide how the fund is spent.
• Jason said founders seeking a premium domain should use a broker to conceal their identity and avoid bidding against their own public valuation. He cited GoDaddy’s $99.99 broker service and estimated clone.com could cost hundreds of thousands to millions; the hosts also joked that domain ownership disputes after an owner’s death could inspire a romantic comedy.
• The hosts promoted startup services including Northwest Registered Agent’s free identity tools, Vanta’s compliance software, Rippling AI’s cross-system business dashboards, and GoDaddy’s domain and security services. Vanta said it serves more than 16,000 companies; the sponsors offered a 10% Plaud discount and $1,000 off Vanta.
• Jason and Lon Harris said their Substack publishes tactical startup advice and uses Claude to develop infographic concepts, which Jason argued would be too slow and costly to produce with a human illustrator for every post. The team is hiring business writers across experience levels and plans to compare advice from people with opposing views.

Society (2)

• Jason argued that giving children company shares could build financial literacy and make people more supportive of AI by sharing its upside. He cited Michael and Susan Dell’s contribution to the Invest America effort, praised the Trump administration’s role, and urged the Trump family to donate half its net-worth increase during the term.
• In a brief Texas firearms discussion, Lon Harris cited bus ads warning people not to leave loaded guns in cars because thieves can steal them. Jason supported carrying a gun, saying the world was chaotic, while Lon said he was not armed.

Robotics (4)

• Clone Robotics CEO Rad Krishnan said the company uses hydraulic artificial muscles instead of the electric motors and tendon-pulley systems common in humanoid robots. Pressurized fluid contracts a rubber tube inside a braided sleeve, producing linear motion; Krishnan said this approach could cost a fraction of motor-actuated designs while preserving human-sized strength and movement.
• Krishnan said he began pursuing androids as a lifelong goal, built a one-megawatt plasma thruster at 13, and met his Polish co-founder on Facebook in 2020. He moved to Poland in 2021 to start Clone Robotics, after deciding that hydraulic muscle technology and newer deep-learning methods made the project viable.
• Krishnan said Clone plans to deploy human-level torsos in enterprise settings before complete androids, with assembly-line and manufacturing work as early uses. He expects complete home robots in two to three years, described 2027 as a possible first deployment year, and cited $25,000 as a potential affordable price while also envisioning luxury models.
• Krishnan said Clone is betting that open models and human-generated data will supply much of the robot’s intelligence, while the company focuses first on proprietary hardware. He expects models to turn over quickly and plans to adapt open-weight checkpoints with robot data, simulation, motion capture, and reinforcement learning.

Models (2)

• Odyssey showed a simulated fruit-fly brain flying through worlds generated by its Odyssey 3 model, prompting discussion of whether a sufficiently realistic simulation could be indistinguishable from reality to its inhabitants. The hosts connected the demo to simulation theory and games such as Grand Theft Auto and Free Guy.
• Jason said ElevenLabs’ Archer voice was based on podcaster Chris Williamson’s distinctive accent, despite ElevenLabs saying a different voice actor supplied it. The company removed Archer without admitting wrongdoing; Jason argued the resemblance could confuse listeners and urged ElevenLabs to compensate Williamson or license his voice.

Safety (1)

• Jason called the chance of losing control of AI minuscule, estimating it at one in a billion, and argued that software would remain controllable. Lon Harris said the show should hear multiple sides, while Jason replied that AI-safety advocates already receive extensive media coverage; the hosts also debated religion and the ethics of creating simulated minds.

Comedy (1)

• Nathan Fielder developed his distinct editing style and interest in reality television while producing segments for Canadian Idol and writing for comedy shows. He later translated those reality television mechanics into his 2013 series Nathan For You.