3 AI Agents That Actually Replaced Human Jobs | E2272

Anthropic just pulled the plug on Claude subscriptions for OpenClaw and every third party agentic tool. So Jason and Lon welcome back three of our top TWiST OpenClaw experts to break down what it means, how much it's going to cost now, and whether this is truly the end of the subsidized AI era. And they all brought demos! We're checking out ClawChief from Ryan Carson, Alex Finn's agent Henry, and Yazin Alirhayim's Sidecast protocol, inspired by a special request from JCal! Hosts Jason Calacanis: http://x.com/jason Lon Harris: https://x.com/lons Guests Ryan Carson: https://x.com/ryancarson Clawchief: https://github.com/snarktank/clawchief Alex Finn: https://x.com/AlexFinn Creator Buddy: https://www.creatorbuddy.io/ Yazin Alirhayim: https://x.com/yazins OpenOats / Sidecast: https://github.com/yazinsai/OpenOats Further Reading The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande: https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000 Marc Andreessen on AI job loss: https://x.com/pmarca/status/2040919227641856307 OpenAI acquires TBPN: https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-tbpn/ This Week In Startups is made possible by: Gusto - https://Gusto.com/twist Vanta - https://vanta.com/twist Shopify - https://shopify.com/twist Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist Today's show: Timestamps: 0:00 Welcome back to TWiST 0:32 Jason's thinks Andor is as good as Empire Strikes Back… 2:30 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off! 3:26 Check out the checklist manifesto! https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000 6:36 Our guests Ryan Carson, Alex Finn, and Yazin Alirhayim, and join the show 10:28 Gusto - Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small businesses and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months FREE at https://Gusto.com/twist. 10:46 People are automating their coworkers and getting them fired… 18:32 Anthropic Bans OpenClaw 20:06 Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist 24:06 How "caveman talk" makes AI works better 27:31 Alex thinks $2000/ month subscription plans are inevitable for AI. 29:31 Why is nobody using the leaked Anthropic Model? 30:30 Shopify: Turn those What If's into sales with the ecommerce platform powering millions of businesses. Sign up for your $1-per-month trial today at https://shopify.com/twist 32:37 Open models have been 6 months behind for the past few years 35:53 Why did OpenAI acquire TBPN? 42:01 Tactical/ Practical: The product itself is the most important thing 44:31 Demo or Die! Yazin is back to show off OpenOats 55:05 Ryan's "Claw Chief" https://github.com/snarktank/clawchief/blob/main/skills/executive-assistant/SKILL.md?plain=1 1:02:14 Alex's big announcement, "Henry intelligent machines" 1:12:33 Alex Finn DESTROYS Higgsfield's marketing strategy 1:15:35 Throwback to "Pay Per Post" Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/ Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland Check out Jason's suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis Follow TWiST: Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thisweekinstartups TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@thisweekinstartups Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to Twist. It is April 6th, 2025. How do I know it's April 6th? Maul is out today.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 0:07Jason Calacanis?

  The new Star Wars animated, and it's got great reviews. I love watching Clone Wars, Star Wars, Rebels.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  I'm excited to check it out.

• 0:15Jason Calacanis?

  All of it with my daughters.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  I'll tell you what I don't like, though. We're already in the point where any new Star Wars thing comes out, and immediately people start comparing it to Andor. That's what it's like. Oh, this is the Andor of cartoons. And it's like, I'm already tired of that. It doesn't have to be Andor to be good. Let's just enjoy it for what it is.

• 0:32Jason Calacanis?

  No, I'm gonna take the other side. I'll tell you why I'm gonna take the other side. Andor set the high watermark. So it used to be like, is this as good as Empire Strikes Back?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 0:41Jason Calacanis?

  And so, you know, now I consider Andor and Empire. This is gonna be big for people.

• 0:47Speaker 01

  Whoa, this is about to be controversial.

• 0:49Jason Calacanis?

  I consider them equal.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 0:51Jason Calacanis?

  I consider them equal. Now, that doesn't mean I don't have an affinity for Empire as a kid. It was like the most meaningful thing for me.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  For us old guys, yeah, it strikes a chord.

• 1:01Jason Calacanis?

  But, yeah. All right, listen, we have so much to get to.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  It's AO70, by the way. It's a, I've started keeping track again.

• 1:08Jason Calacanis?

  Good, AO70.

• 1:09Speaker 01

  Seventy, seventy days since our very first episode about open claw.

• 1:13Jason Calacanis?

  AO70, yeah. And I got a confession here.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  This Week in Startups is brought to you by Shopify. Turn those what-ifs into sales with the e-commerce platform powering millions of businesses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com/twist. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get SOC 2 reports fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at Vanta.com/twist. And Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small businesses and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months free at Gusto.com/twist.

• 2:01Jason Calacanis?

  I have been stunted, I'm stunted right now with my OpenClaw. Because of this Claw stuff, using the open source ones, it's not stable enough for me and I haven't taken the time to fix it. And then I find myself on perplexity computer and OpenClaw computer, which is what I think those platforms want is they want to shut down and get everybody to use their version of OpenClaw, which we will discuss today.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  We will.

• 2:29Jason Calacanis?

  But before I do any of that, I'm going to just take a minute to applaud Plaude. I'm going to turn on my Plaude pin. There it goes. Boom. I press the button. And now everything I say, I'm recording and it's on my lapel. This is the Plaude pin, but this is the other one. You can put this little device, seems like a little wallet. You snap it on the back of your iPhone. This is the iPhone. You can see how thin it is, iPhone. Yeah, boom. Boom, you put that right on the back. Then if you want, you just press this button. There's a little haptic, you're recording. Press it again. Haptic off. Why is that important? This thing's got like 1,700 microphones. Boom, I press this, I lay it on the table during our management meeting. I got everything set. I don't have to go futz with it or whatever.

• 3:10Jason Calacanis?

  And it's got a great little, this is the great thing about the Plaude. This is the base for the pin. You see that? This is my backup. Yeah. So I have two Plaude pins. Pop it in here. That's the USB C. Boom, it charges. But when it gets on my Wi-Fi, 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi, megahertz, it stinks.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:31Jason Calacanis?

  Then I send Lon the notes.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  It's like magic.

• 3:34Jason Calacanis?

  Then Lon has his whole weekend ready to go. He's had a whole bunch of plans and now he's got new plans. Give him the offer.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  If you and your work depend on having conversations, interviews, meetings, taking calls, you gotta get yourself a Plaude note pin. Check it out at P L A U D dot A I slash twist. That's Plaude dot A I slash twist. And if you use the code TWIST, they're going to give you 10% off your new note pin.

• 3:55Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, you know, we had a nice week last week. We did this $2 bill test.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Yes, the B of A $2 bill test.

• 4:02Jason Calacanis?

  And that went viral.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  I think it's close to a million views now on X, which for us is not bad.

• 4:09Jason Calacanis?

  I think it's important for people to be detail oriented. And you know, that's why I talk about the checklist manifesto all the time. And you wanted to see who's hungry to get things done and who's a detail person in startups. This is your tactical, practical tip. Everybody wants to be an idea person. Everybody wants to be a vibes person. But being a grinder and a detail person, a lot of people don't want to refine that skill. The founders, you get to be whatever you want. You're the founder. You created it. But for everybody else, you're obligated to be on point, tight is right, keep a checklist. Now, why is a checklist important? Well, I've talked about the checklist manifesto many times.

• 4:54Jason Calacanis?

  People are fallible. Is that the right word? Fallible. Fallible, thank you. As I just proved. We're fallible. Haven't used that word in like 30 years. Yeah, we make mistakes. People make mistakes. We make mistakes constantly. I make mistakes constantly. When you have a checklist, you'll make less mistakes. And one of the things we wanted to get right was just reviewing our social media. The fact that the $2 bill test went well was a function of, we found like an interesting moment in the show and we had a checklist, how we name the clips, how we do all this. So just do yourself a favor. Make checklists. Have your team do it. Force them to print them out and make sure you review the checklist. Whatever it is, you're onboarding a new customer. You're hiring somebody.

• 5:39Jason Calacanis?

  Make SOP, standard operating procedures. And everything will go better, especially in an agentic world. Yes. And that's what we're going to talk about today. If you're one of the people who's a detail person and you combine yourself with this agentic software, making the checklist was great for humans, but making the checklist is even better for OpenClaw. It's even better for Claude cowork. It's even better for perplexity computer. Yeah. That's what I want to get through here today. And I made that sort of jump like, hey, if you can make a checklist, then you can put your replicant on a checklist and You can hold your replicant accountable, and we're getting there. We're getting there.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  We've got a little closer. It's the memory, I think, is the key. Like, if you could get your open claw to start remembering everything, you're telling it and keep track of everything with their heartbeat and their soul MD and however you do it, that seems to be the key. That's where I keep running into trouble, is GAF is very forgetful.

• 6:34Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, your replicant is like...

• 6:36Speaker 01

  He lives in an EC2 instance, and so he's not, he's not on top of it.

• 6:39Jason Calacanis?

  Problematic.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:40Jason Calacanis?

  Hmm. I just bought the new, I just bought a new MacBook Pro, uh, because I have like a four-year-old air and it was, my air was great, but I was like, I'm in Brooklyn, you know, as I went to see my dad last week, uh, he's doing much better. Anyway, I get the MacBook Pro and my God, when you put 48 gigs of RAM on these things and this new M5 processor, it is like scary how much faster and better these, this hardware profile is, and it's only getting better, folks. This is the...

• 7:10Speaker 01

  I gotta get GAF his own system. This is ridiculous now.

• 7:13Jason Calacanis?

  I, I think when we get the Mac Studio out, I'll get you a Mac Studio.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  I got, I got it. I gotta get it.

• 7:17Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's introduce our guest. We've got a lot to get to today.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Yes, please. We got three returning favorites. Three of our top open claw experts came back for a reunion special. Uh, first up, uh, he is a founder, he is a developer. Last time he was on, he showed us Ant Farm, his open source tool. Uh, this time he's got a new demo to show us. It's called Claw Chief. Uh, give it up for Ryan Carson. Ryan Carson, back on the program.

• 7:39Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, yeah. Ryan Carson, my old friend. What continent are you on? Are you in the US now? I know you spent a lot of time in Europe. Where do you live now?

• 7:45Speaker 03

  So Jason, I guess you were seeing your dad. I'm visiting my dad this week, so he's not doing the best.

• 7:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm going though too, yeah. Yeah, my dad's here. How old is he?

• 7:55Speaker 03

  He's, you know, uh, late 70s.

• 7:58Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, that's when it gets real, you know.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and so I'm in beautiful Colorado Springs in their lovely home today, so hello.

• 8:04Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing, amazing. All right, well, uh, sending good vibes to your dad, and it's great that you're going to see him. I'm sure he is over the moon seeing his incredibly successful son.

• 8:15Jason Calacanis?

  My dad was super, super, super excited to see me, especially since I am his most successful son. Since you're his favorite child. Yeah, he did. He did mention that. Sorry to Jamie and Josh.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Jamie's doing great. Jamie's doing great.

• 8:28Jason Calacanis?

  He's doing great.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Proud member of the launch test. Up next, we've got the founder and CEO of Creator Buddy. He's a vibe coder. He's an open claw influencer. It's Alex Finn. Thanks for being here, Alex.

• 8:38Jason Calacanis?

  You just call Alex an influencer? I don't know if he likes it.

• 8:42Speaker 01

  Alex is an influencer. Alex is an influencer.

• 8:45Speaker 04

  I don't want to consider myself an influencer, but I do believe I'm the most influential person on earth.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  I'm personally very influenced by Alex.

• 8:53Jason Calacanis?

  Here's how you know he's an influencer. When he's on the pod here on Twist, he's normal. But when he does his YouTube videos, he's like, "I have to say, I am outraged."

• 9:06Speaker 01

  It works, Finn.

• 9:07Speaker 04

  It's called showmanship, Jason.

• 9:10Jason Calacanis?

  I love it. I love it. I haven't gotten there. I have to learn how to do the Mr. Beast.

• 9:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. We tried to put-

• 9:18Speaker 04

  I'll help you guys take it to the top. We'll talk again after this.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  We made those thumbnails that you do in the Mr. Beast face, Jason. You made us stop. You ordered us to stop.

• 9:27Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. I just feel it's, no offense, Alex, I just feel like when you're an old guy like me and Ryan- Hey. To do the-

• 9:37Speaker 04

  Listen, you have to be as cringe as humanly possible. It's the only way to win the internet game.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  Listen to Alex, Jason.

• 9:44Jason Calacanis?

  It's the only way? Okay, I'm gonna embrace my cringe and my off-

• 9:47Speaker 01

  Finally.

• 9:48Jason Calacanis?

  Just give in. I'm gonna give into the cringe. I'm gonna be cringe-maxing. Let's do it. Alex is cringe-maxing. I'm gonna cringe-max.

• 9:56Speaker 01

  It's time for cringe-maxing.

• 9:57Jason Calacanis?

  Who cares?

• 9:58Speaker 01

  All right. And finally, Jason, we've got one more member of our panel. He was on just about a week and a half ago. He's the founder, creator of Open Oats. He's, if you'll recall, we had Yazin on the show. We were like musing aloud, wouldn't it be great to have a virtual production team working with us? And AI is helping out with every aspect of the show. Within 24 hours of his appearance, he built it. So he's here to show off Sidecast, Yazin Ali Rahim.

• 10:25Jason Calacanis?

  Sidecast.

• 10:27Jason Calacanis?

  Yas and welcome back. You hear me say it all the time startups need to be lean. You gotta try to figure out how to get the most done while spending the least amount possible. It's called efficiency. You gotta have the smallest tightest team so that you can make your runway less. That's why you need Gusto. Gusto is a must though. Gusto is the essential payroll and benefits software built for your startup or small business. It's all in one, remote friendly and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire, onboard and support your team from anywhere. We use it, we love it. Take it from your boy J Cal. Gusto's built in tools are going to save you so much time. For example, Gusto automates every step of your payroll process, syncing your team's hours, PTO. That's paid time off and holidays seamlessly.

• 11:12Jason Calacanis?

  Plus, plus it's so fast and simple to transfer your existing data and switch over to Gusto at any time. So try Gusto today at gusto.com slash twist and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash twist. This is very important because there was also something that came out this week and I thought we should start with Lon, which is in China, there is a new trend, which is you get your teammates fired. Yes. Before you get fired. Right. So the concept here is we all know this is a sinking ship. When I say sinking ship, I mean employment.

• 11:55Jason Calacanis?

  The idea of working for a living, yes. The idea of having a job is over. Everybody understands that today, Sam Altman said to Axios, which I guess he's underwriting Axios. I didn't know that he was like paying for the newsroom over there. But he's got, there's some disclaimer at the end like, and just in full disclosure, OpenAI pays for a lot of our journalists, but. Tea this up, Lon. Tea up.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  All right.

• 12:24Jason Calacanis?

  This little cheese eater, the Chinese cheese eater movement.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  So a Bloomberg researcher named Steve Howe tweeted this the other day. Apparently, workers in China have been creating colleagues dot skill to distill their coworkers, hoping to make them redundant, hence saving themselves. In response, someone has recently invented an anti-distillation skill that has gone viral on GitHub. So yeah, I guess the idea being that your coworkers are now going to create a clawed skill that does your job, so that you get fired and they get to keep their job by the transitive property or something. I don't know.

• 13:03Jason Calacanis?

  This is the Chinese cheese eater movement. They ate cheese. This is it. You understand, Ryan. You eat cheese. That makes you a? Who eats cheese?

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Cheese eater? I don't know.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  A rat. I believe we're looking for a rat.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  A mouse.

• 13:18Jason Calacanis?

  A rat. And where I'm from in Brooklyn, if you eat cheese, that makes you a rat. And if you're a rat, watch your back, okay? Snitches get stitches. Ryan, you were in an education company. And now you see this. Are you in the? What percentage doomer are you? And by doomer, I mean?

• 13:40Speaker 03

  Well, I can tell you the facts, right?

• 13:42Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, please.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  So we just closed our seed round. Normally, you would hire up. And guess what? I'm not hiring anybody, right? So I just deployed Claw Chief as my assistant chief staff. Fine, that's pretty straightforward. I'm just about to deploy another open claw to be my marketing manager. Like, this is where it's gonna go. And then, once you've got your claw optimized, then you will hire a human to run that claw. But yeah, I mean, this is a real thing.

• 14:10Jason Calacanis?

  It's a real thing. And you have the money in the bank. And it used to burn a hole in people's pocket. Hey, who can we hire? Who can we hire? Now, it's like, ah, hiring people is a lot of work.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:22Jason Calacanis?

  And humans are fallible. We gotta work with them.

• 14:25Speaker 03

  And then, Jason, you lose them. You lose them. And then, you have to retrain and reskill. And I think this is, we'll talk about this on the show, but the big unlock is you are continually improving this employee.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  And the more you improve them, the better they get. And then, you can onboard even more. And I mean, unfortunately, all of us humans, hey, we have our own families to feed. We do our own things.

• 14:47Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, and free will. And free will, like, you can go. We have employment at will and we have free will. These two things, Alex, as human beings and in a society. Boy, if you invest in a employee, a team member, and they get really good, the reward for that is they leave and start their own company? Or they leave and go work for some big companies willing to overpay them? So where are you at? What percentage are you, Alex, currently? What percentage are you like doomer versus boomer?

• 15:23Speaker 04

  I'm 100% boomer, not from an age perspective, but from a optimist perspective.

• 15:28Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  I think where these guys got it wrong is I wouldn't be right. If I'm in the corporate world right now, I'm not writing skills to get rid of my coworkers. I'm writing skills to get rid of myself. I'm putting out skills so that I can automate myself. I'm going, I'm using OpenClaw to build a business on the side, so I don't care about the corporate world anymore. So I'm not like in jail from the corporate world. I think there's way bigger opportunity outside. So these people, I think they're doing it wrong. You got to automate yourself, not your coworkers.

• 15:56Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, as in AI boomer, AI doomer, just percentage wise, where are you at right now? Specifically, employment being the one that people seem to be scared of. We'll leave the Terminator, Skynet, you know, the thing gets out of control, off the table right now. Just, you know, this is the debate of our ages right now, and it's leaning towards doomer here in the US. Where are you, where are you leaning right now?

• 16:17Speaker 05

  I'm probably like half, half. You know, I don't think, and I've seen a lot of people like just tweeting about OpenClaw and, you know, all the variants of OpenClaw, but there's probably a very small percentage of them that are actually making money off the thing. I mean, there's very few examples. I saw Nat, Nat Elyson, I think, who has his OpenClaw. And that's probably the best example where I think it's like, it's making more than a million dollars a year. I don't know if it got there, but, I mean, it's selling like OpenClaw skills. So it's not exactly doing something sort of, you know, earth shattering or creating any sort of new business.

• 17:01Speaker 05

  So I don't know, I'm probably like 50/50. I think I definitely see like, you know, some aspects of, you know, work that can be, um, that can be improved, made more efficient. But, you know, I don't see like the actual business impact and maybe that's, you know, just a matter of time until you have like all the right integrations and stuff in place. Or maybe not. I don't know.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  There is, Jason, there's this sort of counter narrative that I feel like we've heard from David Sacks a lot on All In. Here's a Mark, here's a Mark Andreessen tweet from yesterday. "The AI job loss narratives are all fake. AI equals massive ramp in productivity, equals massive ramp in demand, equals massive jobs boom. Watch." And I have to say, I'm, I keep hearing this and I, there is something to it. What I would say is, to me, it doesn't feel like Gaff is anywhere near ready to work by himself. Like, even if he was in a Mac Studio, I feel like I would still need to be there giving him

• 18:01Speaker 01

  feedback, pointers, asking him to do things. I don't think he's ready to replace me. He's ready to do like 80% of what I do.

• 18:07Jason Calacanis?

  But now compare that to one year ago, your opinion, and two years ago, your opinion on ChatGPT 3.5.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  But I still feel like, to me, it feels too soon to be like there, we're not going to have any more need for people. All these companies are going to be entirely bot run. I feel like for the near future, at least, we do want humans in the loop. But it does feel like a lot fewer humans to me, like.

• 18:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, here's Mark Andreessen, you know, he says, "Employer recovery from post-COVID hiring correction. Employee recovery from post-COVID interest rate spike, elasticity, elasticity equals demand." You know, I understand the concept here. Hey, people become more ambitious, they start more companies, these tools enable more, sure. But, you know, there's a, there are entire careers that will be retired and I think it's deflationary, so compensation is also going to come down. They're even laying off people in India. I don't know if you saw this, but a lot of people in India are starting to get laid off and that's actually been concerning to people. But let's get into it. Let's talk a little bit more about the technology itself today and where we're at.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  Well, we got a top story we got to talk about. Everybody's been talking about it all weekend. On Friday evening, in a blog post, Anthropic announced that they were stopping the Claude subscriptions no longer cover third-party access for tools like OpenClaw. This took, make the YouTube face. This started on Saturday, April 4th. It was announced in an email sent out Friday evening. So instead, they're offering a pay-as-you-go option built separately from your main Claude subscription to cover it. Here's Anthropic exec Boris Chirney on X. "We've been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude and our subscriptions weren't built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools. Capacity is a resource

• 19:57Speaker 01

  we manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API." So that to me seems like the huge...

• 20:04Jason Calacanis?

  Alex Rugfo. Yeah. When you're a busy founder, you move fast. Sometimes you break things. That's the job. But when you want to land those big wells, those lighthouse customers, you know, the major enterprise clients, you can't move fast and break things. No. You need to make sure your security and compliance is locked down tight. Tight is right. That's why Founder University and I recommend startups work with Vanta. They're the leading security compliance solution that's being used by more than 15,000 customers. Vanta's not just going to help you with your SOC 2. Their AI-first system is going to continually monitor your filings and compliance, so big, important deals are never going to get hung up. That's why you need a trusted partner like Vanta. They understand changing regulations and buyer

• 20:48Jason Calacanis?

  expectations, so you don't have to sweat any of the details. Vanta's going to do that for you. Twist listeners get $1,000 off at vanta.com/twist.

• 20:57Jason Calacanis?

  That's V A N T A dot com slash twist for $1,000 off.

• 21:02Speaker 04

  Listen, I don't like it because it costs me money and I don't like anything that costs me money. But I will say I totally understand it, right? All the subscriptions are subsidies. That's it. That's all like you're you're just getting a lot of tokens for a small price. So what sense would it make for Anthropic to subsidize other companies' tools? That doesn't make sense. You know, they do the subsidies so that they can collect data on Claude code and data on other Claude tools so that they can improve those products. But if you use that subscription in Open Claw, which they don't control, that's just polluting the data. So I hate it because I now have to spend more money. But I get why they did it.

• 21:43Speaker 04

  And just as a side note, I think the people who's ripping out Claude out of their Open Claw now are making a tremendous mistake. Yes, it's going to be more because Opus 4.6 is clearly the best model for Open Claw. Like anyone who's used ChatGPT or Kim or anyone wants knows it is a downgrade and in some cases a significant downgrade. I personally believe Open Claw is the most powerful tool out there. So I think it would be silly to virtue signal and be like, oh, I'm ripping out Claude when all you're doing is just hurting your own productivity.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  So I've got a data, I've got a data point on this, right? So I've actually been using GPT 5.4 from the beginning on Open Claw. Disclosure, I have a bunch of credits on OpenAI API and I'm like, I'll burn them down. And it's interesting, and I actually messaged you Alex today about this. Because I started GPT 5.4, I've never used Opus in in Open Claw in anger. So it's hard for me to compare them, but for one day I decided to do it. I'm like, I want to feel the pain. I don't have any Anthropic credits. And for one full day of using Claw Chief, which is a high level Chief of Staff, that's an Open Claw. It was going to be $3,000 to $6,000 for per month, right?

• 22:54Speaker 03

  So you're talking $100 to $200 a day. So these labs are hemorrhaging cash. Like if there's no way you this stuff costs $200 a month, it just doesn't. So get used to it.

• 23:08Jason Calacanis?

  That's the key here is the entire industry and all the most powerful experiences in it are massive.

• 23:19Jason Calacanis?

  losses makes the losses of the Uber and Lyft competition when they were subsidizing rides or the food delivery, it makes it look silly. I you gotta think for every 20 or $200 subscription, they're losing on that top third of users a multiple times that a multiple of that. Every time they get one of these power users, they lose probably a couple of hundred dollars a year, maybe a couple of thousand dollars a year. So this is the next card to turn over in the AI race. When OpenAI goes public, when Anthropic goes public, even to a lesser extent, when SpaceX goes public, they probably won't have to disclose

• 24:02Jason Calacanis?

  all the way down to the XAI granular level, because it's part of like many different businesses and it might not be material. So they'll report on the Starlink business unit, but they may not have to report granularly. Anthropic is going to have to give these details in the rest one. And so is OpenAI. And there was a story this weekend that OpenAI had a little internal debate between Sam Altman and the CFO, Sarah Fryer, of like, maybe Sam's like racing towards the cliff. And this is all allegedly, the CFO is not happy about the spend. Yazzan, I want you to comment on this tweet. Not this one. We'll

• 24:43Jason Calacanis?

  get to that in a second. I put another tweet in of caveman. I don't know if you guys saw caveman. Did you see this, Yazzan?

• 24:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, my brother sent me this, this tweet, you know,

• 24:56Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what this is and if you buy it.

• 24:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that there's probably some truth to this. I didn't actually try it, but.

• 25:02Jason Calacanis?

  Well, explain what it is to the audience listening.

• 25:05Speaker 05

  So the idea is, you know, there is, I guess. The English language has a lot of fluff. You can probably get your message across using just like verbs and maybe, you know, a few adjectives. And that's essentially what this is, is like, you know, instead of blabbering on about how, oh, you know, I went ahead and did this thing. You could just say thing, did thing. And, you know, that's like 75% fewer tokens.

• 25:35Jason Calacanis?

  So this was basically, this guy, Om Patel, said, I talk Claude to talk like a caveman to use 75% less tokens. Normal Claude, 180 tokens for a web search task. Caveman Claude, 45 tokens. I would have gone with Hulk. I executed the web search tool, equals eight tokens. Caveman version, tool work, two tokens. I would have said Hulk.

• 25:53Speaker 05

  I wouldn't be surprised that it actually works. I think the problem is you might end up speaking like a caveman.

• 26:00Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 26:01Speaker 05

  If you do this, because, I mean, if that's all you're reading, it's going to affect your vocabulary at some point.

• 26:08Jason Calacanis?

  The good news here, Alon, is I think we're moving into the phase for the industry that there's tremendous value being created. People have become addicted to it. Just now insert ride sharing for the same thing. Now people have to pay the proper amount for it and the businesses have to move from being upside down and having a very deep J curve. The J curve, as I said on All In, and I think here, will be $500 billion for the LLM industry. Like, you know, 100, 200, 200 or 300 billion for OpenAI, 100 billion for Claude, 100 billion for XAI, whatever it is, winds up being. They're going to have to become profitable in three or four years and then pay back

• 26:53Jason Calacanis?

  $500 billion in paid in capital from their profits to make this industry absolutely work.

• 27:00Jason Calacanis?

  That should be a scary proposition to people.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Compute also has to come down in like wildly in cost, I feel like it's just not, nobody can afford to pay what we need to pay for everybody to run their open claw. Like we're talking about, you know, like we've been off, the users have been offsetting it to anthropic. Now they can't afford it. So they're throttling Claude. And it's like, at some point, we have to figure this out, or it's just imbalanced. It costs too much to run Opus 4.6 as much as people want to.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  So the show is this week in startups, right? We're all startup founders, right? And we are mercenaries for money, right?

• 27:36Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  And, and I think it's very simple, right? If your open clause actually doing valuable work for you, for instance, chief of staff, marketing manager, et cetera. So you have to pay three grand a month. It's nothing, right? The value you're getting out of that compared to a human that you would have paid to do that job is astronomical, right? And it's retainable, it's improvable, it's scalable, right? So I think you have to separate out these folks that are toying with open claw and they're mad that they, it doesn't cost them $200 a month to real operators who are building businesses with this stuff. And I'll give Alex a layup here and basically say, well, the mercenaries for money are going to then do what he's doing with, with open models.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, there's, there's two things that are going to happen here. Uh, the first thing is it's obvious that in the next month or so, we're going to start getting $2,000 a month subscription plans. Like that's just painfully obvious. The next round of models, which they're already kind of hinting at Spud and Mythos saying much bigger, much more expensive models.

• 28:33Jason Calacanis?

  Who's, who's doing each one? Spud and Mythos?

• 28:35Speaker 04

  ChatGPT 5.5 is Spud, Mythos is Claude. And so they're both kind of leaking over the last couple of weeks. These are brand new models, you know, nothing to do with their past models, much bigger, much more expensive. I think that's

• 28:49Jason Calacanis?

  So you're saying the $2,000 a month?

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 28:53Jason Calacanis?

  Subscription to Claude and OpenAI is coming for consumers. $24,000 a year, essentially a third of the salary of a, you know, two or three year out of school, uh, college graduate. That's going to be? The next tier in order to use those models that scale.

• 29:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I said, if it doesn't happen this year, I'll delete all my social media accounts. I am not confident it's gonna happen. It only makes total sense.

• 29:20Speaker 01

  Showmanship, showmanship.

• 29:21Jason Calacanis?

  No, I, you know what, Alex, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say, I think you're 100% correct here. What's happening now is they got us on the hook. They showed us how productive this stuff can be. They got us to go from a $20 subscription to a 200 because it was like, well, it's 180 bucks more. It's whatever it is, 2,000 a year. Hey, if we save 10 hours, a month of lawn's time, that's worth thousands of dollars. Okay, great, we're gonna save money with this. Now they're gonna appropriately price it. This is like going from a $5 Uber or Lyft, remember the $5 Uber and Lyft rides? To the, you know, $16 one, you're like, well, $16 is a lot of money compared to taking the bus for 350 or the subway for 350, but I'm kind of used to this and I love it.

• 30:07Jason Calacanis?

  So I'm gonna go door to door for 16. I'll figure out how to get the other, you know, I'll figure out where to get the incremental $9.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  One thing that was a big news story last week that seems to have really died out was this like Claude code leaked and now it's open, everybody can find it. Is anybody considering using like an open Claude, like a variation on Claude code that got forked? Or is that not interesting? No.

• 30:30Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:11Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:38Speaker 03

  So I spent, you know, six months inside of one of the premier agent labs, which was AMP. And, you know, I know how the stuff works. And this stuff, you know, you ship 30 times a day. So whatever we saw is outdated. You know, there's some tricks with memory and some things in there, but honestly, none of it was surprising. Just use the stuff, people. Like, there's whole companies that are doing this. Don't try to build a company for a tool that you can just buy.

• 32:07Jason Calacanis?

  I love having the open source models just to, and having powerful local computers. I like this because it feels like they're going to flip in the next year. And when it does, I want to be ready to go. Doesn't mean I won't pay the 2000, but we fired up three more on my Mac Studio, three more open source models. They're running concurrently, and we're testing, putting jobs against all of them. There's a startup that's doing, I got pitched on, that's doing intelligent routing of queries. So you do your query, and then it instantly is like, I think it's best for this one. Or let's try it at this one, and then see if we get a result that we think is good enough, and then we'll fail over to the next one, and then fail over to this one.

• 32:51Jason Calacanis?

  So that's going to be an extraordinary dynamic process. Like, can you imagine you send a query, and it's like, you know what? Kimi, Kimi can do this. Oh, no, that's, you gotta use Gamma. Is that what they call the Google one?

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Gemma 4.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Gemma 4.

• 33:08Jason Calacanis?

  People are going crazy by Gemma 4 as well. So I just think that's the future of it. Getting that setup is a lot of work. But if somebody abstracts it...

• 33:19Speaker 04

  It's super easy. It's actually, I think, very kind of overrated. Everyone's saying how difficult it is to do. I have three Mac Studios and a DGX Spark here. First of all, I agree. It's clearly the future, right? The more these companies squeeze, which they're doing the squeezing now, banning OpenClaw, you know, making the pricing more expensive. Everyone's saying the limits for Cloudera have come down. Everyone's saying Opus is getting stupider. The more they squeeze, the more people are going to go to the DGX Sparks, the Mac Studios. And as you said, open models have been about six months behind for the last few years. So, right now, they're at about Sonet 4.5, which was six months ago. All I do to load these new models, Gemma 4 came out. I go to OpenClaw, I say, "Hey, I think Gemma 4 just came out. Figure it out."

• 34:04Speaker 04

  It goes, it installs it for you. So, the complexity is pretty much gone. And I think as people feel more and more of the squeeze, they'll be running out and buying this hardware and loading these up.

• 34:15Jason Calacanis?

  Wait till it is built into your operating system. And this was, Ryan's old enough to remember this. Remember like having to install TCP IP and put an Ethernet card into a computer to get people on the internet and like, "It doesn't work." And like, "Oh, what's their port?"

• 34:32Speaker 04

  When I first went to UCLA, you had to go wait outside the library with your hard drive so that they could install their Ethernet card into your computer and you could go use the internet in your room.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  That's so funny.

• 34:45Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so, you know, once it's abstracted away and like, there's a system tray and the system tray is just automatically updating these models. And I can see it so clearly. I just spent $3,400 on my Mac M2, M5. My Mac M5, 48 gigs of RAM. I could have gone even higher and I was like, "Ah, it doesn't seem necessary." But I bought this thing and I was like, "I don't have a..." There's no cost difference for a business between a $1,500 laptop and a $5,000 laptop. There's no difference. Any business that's a viable business with 10 employees, it's a $35,000 difference over five years, which is a $6,000 difference, which is a $500 a month difference. It doesn't make a difference.

• 35:30Jason Calacanis?

  We've just gotten used to computers being $1,500. They used to be, when I was growing up, the first PC was $4,000. That was in $1,984, $1,983. That's three times that. So, they were originally $12,000. It was like buying a used car or even like a new cheap car. We're going to get back to that. People are going to start looking at, "Hey, when you hire somebody, yeah, you gotta put into account a 10K, 15K worth of hardware." That's where I think it's all going. But I want to see Yazin's incredible demo. He came on last time and he showed me, hey, what if you had, you know, this assistant that could be in your Zoom and could be chatting with you. I said, you know what I want? I want like four or five people

• 36:14Jason Calacanis?

  on the podcast, one of them a fact checker, one of them writing jokes, basically the entire Stern crew from Jackie Martling to Gary Delabate, to whoever like the smartest person is in the back.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Fred, Fred Norris.

• 36:27Jason Calacanis?

  John Heine, Fred Norris, just all contributing pieces quietly to the host in their earpiece or on like a little monitor, you know, a tech-based monitor. So we're going to see that in a minute. He built it. I'd also like to thank Sam Altman for buying the Podcast Bros Network because they got rid of all of the advertising. So, welcome to all the Podcast Bro advertisers who are now here. Why do they do that? I still scratch my head. Okay, I can explain it in like three acts. Number one, in a peak bubble, acquisitions happen that do not make logical sense because people have valuations that don't make sense.

• 37:07Jason Calacanis?

  And then people want the stock of these magical companies. So if you're sitting there and you have a way to get 100 million or 200 million in pre-IPO OpenAI shares, you're going to consider that, right? Even if your company's making 20 or 30 million like theirs was, and it's on a tear. Not in viewership, but in the revenue and the vibes. Number two, these, one of the guys worked with Sam Altman before. We've been an investor in his company. Sam Altman's looking at a communication deficit at OpenAI that people are saying like, is there Achilles heel? So if somebody says, your Achilles heel is that every time somebody at OpenAI talks, the value of the company goes down, trust in the company goes down, the public perception of the company goes down.

• 37:52Jason Calacanis?

  It's like, well, who's got good vibes? Hey, these tech bros just keeping it all light and positive, never saying anything negative, just keeping it upbeat, banging a gong, doing a soundboard, you know, hey, everybody. Hi, welcome to the morning show. You know, hey, and they're doing kazoo's and it's fine. Like, that keeps it world positive. And I'm not goofing on them. I'm just saying like, it's great, like, awesome. Like, keep it positive. That's what Sam needs. So bringing them in to take the vibes playbook, Ryan, and apply it to OpenAI's just horrific

• 38:25Jason Calacanis?

  The public, political, investor community's view of that company? What if it works? What if they can turn the vibes around? Turning the vibes around on a trillion dollar company? How much is that worth? Is it worth 1%? Yes. Is it worth 5%? Yes. If you could take a company with really bad vibes, which I think we'd all agree, opening have some bad vibes around it.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Aren't they a little insider for that? I feel like these guys are wildly popular among people who already love.

• 38:54Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, it doesn't need to make perfect sense. It doesn't need to make perfect sense. I'm giving you the contours of a weird thing that occurred. And how a weird thing occurred.

• 39:03Speaker 01

  It is weird.

• 39:03Jason Calacanis?

  That's the thinking.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  It's just the numbers are weird. Like, it's so much for a.

• 39:07Jason Calacanis?

  Don't worry about the numbers. Don't just take the numbers out of your head.

• 39:10Speaker 01

  All right, all right.

• 39:11Jason Calacanis?

  And say, I gave you a trillion dollars in monopoly money. The company is worth, you know, 250 billion.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:22Jason Calacanis?

  Based on its burn and reality, right? But it's in funny money territory. It's magically worth a trillion. So each dollar is worth four times.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  They could fund like an Avengers franchise.

• 39:32Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, but.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  But is the implication there that they are going to like, kind of change their editorial style to like glaze OpenAI more? Like, wouldn't that fundamentally?

• 39:42Jason Calacanis?

  I don't think it's.

• 39:43Speaker 04

  Erode trust in them and like their own company?

• 39:45Jason Calacanis?

  I don't, I don't think anybody looked at them as a place to get, you know, objective, hard hitting, ask the hard question journalism. They got the vibes like, hey, hey, everybody come on the show. We're bang the gong. Congratulations, you know, tell me about your business. We're done. There was nobody like, you didn't have a Jessica Lesin there or a Kara Swisher or, you know, into a lesser extent, someone like me being like, hey, here's a hard question. They're not asking hard questions there to try to, and they're certainly not doing gotcha journalism like some of those folks might. And they're not certainly doing agenda based, anti tech socialist journalism like at the New York Times or Wired magazine, you know? So I don't think anybody like is looking to.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  I think it's a little more.

• 40:28Jason Calacanis?

  Tech bros for objectivity.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  I think it's a little more in the middle. I think if they're, if they're constantly having OpenAI people on and just swooning over them, I do think people would get fired on it.

• 40:36Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, sure, but they won't do that.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they've got to keep a better balance.

• 40:39Jason Calacanis?

  I'll tell you the big, you want to know what the big risk factor is? You're working with a, the other group of companies will not participate.

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 40:49Jason Calacanis?

  So like, it's very hard for me to get Democrats to participate in all in, since three of the four guys are like.

• 40:54Speaker 04

  I, I get that. I understand that.

• 40:56Jason Calacanis?

  Two of them are in the administration, one of them's a super donor, or whatever they call a super bundler. So you have three people who are all in on the Trump, you know, you ask, you know, Josh Shapiro to come on the program, or Pete Buttigieg. I got Pete Buttigieg to come, I got Josh Shapiro coming on. It's just hard. You know, they're just like, that's not my home court advantage. So that's what's gonna happen. Anybody who's outside or competing with OpenAI, they may be like, I'll take a pass on being on this podcast. But anyway, it's not important anyway. They're getting 50,000 views an issue. This is Aqua Hiring, a very talented group of marketers and storytellers. If anybody were to say like, what's the skillset of those guys? It's like building vibes,

• 41:39Jason Calacanis?

  you know, taking like that sports show, morning show, and then just adapting it and making all the vibes immaculate. That's like, they make the vibes immaculate. Sam Waltman's like, these vibes are not immaculate. Everybody who speaks for our company, steps in it. Let's let these guys speak for our company and keep the vibes positive. Go ahead, Alex. You're shaking your head and you're, you're perplexed.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  Cause I think it goes again, I, I, it just doesn't make sense to me because they even said it themselves, they've done too many side quests lately. The only thing anyone cares about, anyone in this industry cares about is what is the quality of your model? Right? They could do whatever they want. People get pissed off at 90% of the things Anthropic says and does, but they don't care. They keep using Claude for everything because it is the best model. Opus 4.6 is the best model, right? I just don't understand from OpenAI's perspective, why they keep getting distracted by the video, Sora and this. Just make ChatGPT as good as humanly possible and every other problem goes away. The moment Codex is better than Claude code, no one cares about what you say, what you do.

• 42:43Jason Calacanis?

  Hundred percent correct.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  They just want a good model. That's it.

• 42:45Jason Calacanis?

  This is an important tactical, practical thing for founders. At the end of the day, the product is the most important thing. Everything else around the product. is very important, but the product is most important. That's why when people say like, you can't put lipstick on a pig, like trying to really work hard on your sales team and your marketing team to get better leads, to get people to try a product and do a demo, to put them on a trial, all that's fine. I've seen it countless times in a company where the product didn't have product market fit. We called it a leaky bucket. There was a hole in the bucket. So you're pouring money into the top of the bucket to get leads, to buy better salespeople,

• 43:26Jason Calacanis?

  whatever, and it just flows right out because the product's not as good as another product in the market.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Jason, I'll give you the ultimate example of this. I'll give you the ultimate example of this.

• 43:35Jason Calacanis?

  Go ahead.

• 43:35Speaker 04

  Over the weekend, I saw the best concert of my entire life. I went to see Kanye West in LA.

• 43:39Jason Calacanis?

  Forty-five songs.

• 43:41Speaker 04

  I knew it was gonna be. This guy is the most insane human being that's ever walked this planet, has said the most hateful things any public figure has ever said in history.

• 43:50Jason Calacanis?

  On his, is his.

• 43:52Speaker 04

  He released a song called Hail Hitler. The most hateful words ever. And you know what happened? I went to SoFi Stadium, 80,000 people singing along to his music because the product is amazing. If your product is amazing, you can do quite literally anything you want. People will still come to you. Well, I'll back that.

• 44:10Jason Calacanis?

  You could be Hitler. You could, you could write a Hitler themed song and sell out a stadium for two minutes in a row.

• 44:17Speaker 04

  We're on a Signal chat together, Jez. Wasn't that the very first thing I said? I'm like, if he said, if he apologized, if he's gonna play Runaway, I'm gonna go see it. Like, I don't, I don't care.

• 44:26Jason Calacanis?

  He sold swastika shirts during the Super Bowl. He sold swastika shirts.

• 44:29Speaker 04

  He said he's sorry, I'm ready to hear, can't tell you.

• 44:32Jason Calacanis?

  And you're Jewish, Lahan, you're Jewish. You're ready to move on.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  So take this back to reality and AI and technology, everybody.

• 44:38Jason Calacanis?

  Please, help me out here.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  A very real example, a very real example is this, right? Anthropic is terrible at DevRel. They are the worst company I've ever seen do developer relations. They're just are the worst, right? And then you, you, you look at Codex. So the Codex team in OpenAI, they are one of the best. Their DevRel team is killer, right? But the truth is, people, as Alex said, what are we still using to do our work? And it's Opus 46. So it's the model, it's the model, it's the model, it's the model.

• 45:09Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, make the model better at all costs.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Speaking of great products, Jason, we've got two demos. Should we jump in?

• 45:15Jason Calacanis?

  Let's go. Demo or die time.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:17Jason Calacanis?

  Demo or die.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  Yasmin was on the show back in March. He was gonna show us, he showed us Open Oats. And while we were discussing it, Jason mentioned his idea for a cluster of agents that function as live podcast producers, doing the job of, say, Howard Stern's show, or say, yours truly, me, Lon Harris does during live shows. Within days of his appearance, Yasmin tweeted, "This multi-persona AI sidebar for podcasts and live streams, he's calling it Sidecast." Yasmin, show us around.

• 45:47Speaker 05

  All right, so this is Open Oats. Jason and Law, you guys had this idea of having like a Sidecast. You already have the stuff sort of calculated beforehand, so it's really just doing like search and retrieval. You're not doing live search. And I was a bit concerned about, like, okay, is it gonna be too slow? If you're having a live call, for the thing to go out there, find information, pick it up, and show it to you the way like a fact checker or researcher might need to do.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  And that is, I will say, as a person who does live fact checking and research, that's a human concern. Like, I'm often not able to get the right piece of information before Jason has moved on to the next point on the show. So that's not even just an agent worry, that's a real worry for a human producer as well.

• 46:32Speaker 05

  Exactly. And so I thought, like, the latency is probably gonna be like a bit too difficult to, you know, have in like a live setting. And I was shocked. So I'll show you guys what I got. So here, the core idea is you need an LLM provider. This could be like a local Ollama. I'm using Open Router here, because I'm running this on my Mac Mini. You configure your personas, and these'll look pretty familiar. So you got like the fact checker. This is something that highlights facts and missing nuance.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 47:10Speaker 05

  And for each of these, you can provide your own prompt. And there's also a toggle for whether it supports a live web search or not. So for the fact checker, you obviously need a live web search. And then you can configure other things like how, how long the responses are and you know, how often it would step in. The next is also the archivist. This will pick up like, like previous, I don't know. How similar is this, you know, this thing that people are currently discussing in the context of the video to, you know, past events.

• 47:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, like going back into the archive, taking all 2,000 plus episodes, having it have that in, you know, some amount of the topics, maybe like the, you couldn't put all the transcripts into memory, but you could probably have most of the timestamps in there. So 2,000 timestamps times 20 lines each, 40,000 lines, maybe that would work.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  Even just the last, you know, six months would be super helpful. It doesn't have to have the full, you know, 20 year archive of the show, but even just the last six months would be like, hey, you previously mentioned this in February, you mentioned this in January, like, I can't keep up with that at the pace of the show. So this is something that you'd need an agent to producer to do.

• 48:25Speaker 03

  Yazmin, where's the context coming from on this for the archives?

• 48:28Speaker 05

  So the knowledge base feature that I shared earlier allows you to search through the knowledge base and this will surface stuff from the web. So you can, you can combine both of those things.

• 48:39Jason Calacanis?

  I think a really interesting thing for the archivist to do would be to look for things that rhyme. You know how they say history doesn't repeat, it rhymes? If you taught it a skill, Brian, that was like, take the trends that we're talking about and look for analogies, describe the trend in plain English and then look for analogies from other time periods. So it's like, oh yeah, we're in the J curve. People are investing a lot of money. They're losing money on each customer. Like, oh yeah, that's exactly what Uber and Lyft did and DoorDash. Oh no, that's even more similar to this that occurred in the nineties with the websites. They were acquiring customers for $500 each and they hoped to have a lifetime value and they were putting a value on page views, right?

• 49:24Jason Calacanis?

  Page views as the perfect example of, you know, a bogus metric.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  We've struggled with so much because a podcast has so much inherited knowledge. Like if a person produces your podcast for three years. They're so, they know everything you've talked about. They remember all these shows. They have this head full of knowledge and then they leave and a new producer comes in. No matter how good they are, they don't have that familiarity. But now we can sort of have a bot that has that familiarity.

• 49:50Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think we gotta do this with timestamps. We have to have the entire archive. What we need to do is have a canonical perfect archive somewhere on a Mac Studio, you know, on the web. Have it build the Wikipedia of each episode.

• 50:03Speaker 01

  When Gaff has his own Mac Studio, is what he'll maintain.

• 50:07Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, and then have it make like its own Wikipedia, like a Grocapiedia on the local of every episode of everybody who's been on as a guest. You know, have a Ryan Carson page where it's like, when was on these four times? Here's his appearances. Here's his, you know, what he's done in his career. Here's his LinkedIn. So that just all that knowledge is right there really fast at its fingertips. So you could do real time stuff. Because that's actually the mind blowing thing about this, Alex, is we're starting to move from being able to do a query and hey, go get a cup of coffee, turn on your notifications for your browser and it's gonna give you an alert. Hey, remember you did that, you know, deep research three minutes ago? Now I want deep research in real time. And that is, you know, that's gotta be a couple of years away, I think.

• 50:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, the, maybe feed it Notion, the Dockets, other stuff. You know, I think this would be, this would be crazy, like just feed all of the context. And like I said, I'm actually surprised at how well this worked, even with web, which I thought would just be insanely slow. I'll go through the rest of these. So there's Sniper for just punchy one liners. And then, you know, short quips. And then The Menace. This is kinda like, you know, a bit of a, yeah. You kinda set these up and you can also create your own. So these are just the suggestions that you, that you provided, Jason.

• 51:27Jason Calacanis?

  You imagine you have a chat room on YouTube or LinkedIn or whatever and it's not, you know, it's not super vibrant. People are kinda chilling. Now you send in five personas and say, hey, mix it up in there.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 51:41Jason Calacanis?

  Read what they're saying and what they're saying on the show.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  That would be cool.

• 51:47Jason Calacanis?

  So you have two inputs, the comments and the show transcript, and it learns over time, Ryan,

• 51:53Jason Calacanis?

  how to get more engagement, how to rage bait, and you just teach it like, you know, you do a kind of reinforcement learning. If you get more people to view the live stream, if you get more people to reply to you, if you get people to block you, you're doing your job.

• 52:08Speaker 03

  I'll double down on your idea. Like, I think if these personas become actual personas, say, on X, right, the interestingness of what they say goes up, right? So, so say that you basically, you build these pundits and on X they have interesting things to say. When you see them live and commenting on the show, it adds even more credibility where you're like, oh, that's actually an interesting point. And I like this, this bot's take of you, you know, point of view.

• 52:37Jason Calacanis?

  Alex, people must be doing this for their Reddit. Have you figured out how to get your open claw to like operate in Reddit well?

• 52:44Speaker 04

  So I have it doing a lot of consuming of Reddit. So I'm actually announcing a product in about an hour from now in which I have basically swarms of agents at the moment, looking at Reddit, all these other sites, looking for challenges to solve. And so I have it doing more of a consuming side rather than talking side.

• 53:07Jason Calacanis?

  Perfect.

• 53:08Speaker 04

  But the flip side of this will be actually they're going to solve the challenges.

• 53:11Jason Calacanis?

  Doesn't it try to block you if you do too many searches, too much stuff? It's always like, no bueno?

• 53:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, but there's ways around it.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  They're very persnickety on Reddit, but if you're very active, they'll overlook some stuff. It's just, you can't, you can't just drop in and.

• 53:25Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, so here it is. You got a previous show, you went to the 43 minute mark, you hit play, and now we're seeing the transcript underneath it and in the side. We're starting to see the four personas give feedback. And the archivist says, don't confuse prosumer stickiness with mass adoption. Microsoft co-pilot had 15 million enterprise seeds, but stagnant consumer growth proving that cool tech doesn't always translate to paying customer scale.

• 53:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, and as the conversation flows, you're going to see more input from the checker, the sniper, the menace.

• 53:59Jason Calacanis?

  This is from the checker. The pre-seed bar is up because product velocity is up.

• 54:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, allows teams to reach scale exponentially faster.

• 54:07Jason Calacanis?

  That's true. I don't know how it came to that conclusion, but that is a correct assumption.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  You can see the sources under each one of these. So web citations, you can see all of the sources that it used at the time of the generation.

• 54:20Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is really powerful, I think. If you think about Lon, the real world and Meta glasses. Now you're operating in the real world. You're at a comedy show or a bar in Austin. And you're thinking of clever things to say. You know, you're talking to a couple of interesting people at the bar. And it's like, hey, maybe you could bring up something about this song on the radio. And it's giving you prompts like, hey, here's your romance coach. Here's your fascinating coach. Here's your, you know, non creepy coach. And it's coaching you on how to talk to people for people who maybe are a little shy or don't know how to break the ice. This is really fascinating, real time coaching.

• 55:03Speaker 01

  It's another one of those things that makes you sort of think of her, where he's got Samantha in his ear and she's just talking to him and prompting him all day. Like, we're getting to that world where it's real time.

• 55:14Speaker 05

  And the actual app, you can just hide it off the screen. So it's not visible when you're doing screen sharing. And now you've got facts at your fingertips. You've got, you know, perfect memories. So you can pull stuff out of the archive, punch you one liners. You got, you know.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  This is what clearly was, this is what clearly was supposed to be, right?

• 55:35Jason Calacanis?

  Something like this.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  But actually useful. I love it.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  They sort of backed off now and they're just doing AI note taking again. But this was the original pitch for Cluley, especially the, it disappears on other people's screens. So they can't see that you're cheating. That was the whole Cluley thing. All right, well done. We want to check out Claw Chief. That's Ryan's founder, chief of staff, open claw protocol that he released the other day. From Ryan, he says, "It is opinionated about the architecture of the workflow, but meant to be customized for your own people, programs, calendars, inboxes, trackers, and recurring routines." The post was how to turn your open claw into the world's best assistant.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Like everybody probably watching the show, like everybody here on stage, we are starting to use open claws to do real work in our companies, right? And the obvious first choice for a claw is your assistant and chief of staff. And actually, Jason, I was just thinking about, you know, what you all were saying on All In recently about assistants and how this kind of works. So that's the first thing I did. I wanted to turn R2, my claw, into the world's best chief of staff. So, you know, I've been fortunate to work with real human EAs over the years. I've hired probably two or three of them and, you know, I've seen what they can do and how good they are and how, you know, much they fall short. So I started designing my open claw around that.

• 56:57Speaker 03

  And it was getting so good, I was like, maybe, it's funny, I was like, maybe I should build a little side business off this and charge for it. And then I quickly realized, I have no time for that. I don't care about that. I'm just going to open source it. And so I released Claw Chief version one, and everybody loves it. And then very quickly, I saw the interview with Brex. And the founder of Brex went on to a show and explained specifically tactically how he's augmented his claw. And it's awesome. So you have basically a priority plane document. There's all this machinery. And so I just released V2 of Claw Chief.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  It's on GitHub, right? So I don't know if we can throw up the GitHub if people want to go see it, but it's free, it's open source. Just point your open claw at it and say, "Use this." And I think you'll see a big, big jump in ability.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  And you gave it its own behavioral traits based on an executive assistant and

• 58:06Speaker 03

  It's actually less behavioral and more execution, right? So there's a list of Crons that run. So for instance, the executive assistant cron runs every 15 minutes and all the cron says is use your executive assistant's skill. So you have a cron that fires on a regular basis and that cron

• 58:28Speaker 01

  What's in this skill then?

• 58:30Speaker 03

  So this is the magic. I mean, this is what I worked on for weeks, right? And it's how a good executive assistant should work, right? So if you look at it, you'll see it's in depth, right? It's how to respond to emails, like, do you respond the same thread? You know, how quickly do you follow up? How do you check the calendars? And how do you use GOG, which is the primary CLI interface? So it's all the tactics. It's the real stuff. And then there's a biz dev skill, which there's a cron that runs business development and it calls the skill. And in biz dev skill, it just does all the stuff that you also want a really good chief of staff to do. You know, today, R2, my claw, has already booked three meetings for me.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  Like, and these are not just me passing on, hey, R2 booked this meeting. These are real people that I'm doing business development with that I've never talked to. So here we go.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  We do. All right. Jason, we do have a clip from that Core Memory podcast with Pedro Franceschi, the CEO and co-founder of Brex. Here's, he describes, he set up a thing called a claw trap for, a crab trap for reining in unpredictable agent behavior. This is pretty amazing. Let's check out, let's check out that clip.

• 59:44Speaker 06

  We, we're actually going to open source this, but we actually build this entire like technology layer. We actually call it Crab Trap, funnily enough, where the idea is when you have something like Open Claw running, we, the best way to monitor what an agent is doing isn't to have a human looking at it. It's actually have another LLM looking at it. So we build this thing that effectively intercepts all the traffic coming out of like an open client instance and routes it through another LLM that's through an HTTP proxy that screens all the traffic and says, is this something that a recruiter agent should be doing? So for example, should a recruiting agent Send like a harmful message to a candidate? No.

• 1:00:27Speaker 06

  And it can go in and block that request at the network layer. While the agent itself is even not even aware that that's happening. And the really cool thing of that is you can actually run this at scale. And the only technology that we think will be able to monitor agents is actually agents themselves. But you build this almost adversarial effect. Where you have one agent monitoring another agent. And we've seen surprisingly good outcomes of this thing so far.

• 1:00:53Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. And then here is on GitHub, the scale for executive assistant. I thought this was really well done. Did you, I guess you asked it to make this and then you edited it a bit? You had that?

• 1:01:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. And I was actually gonna say, everyone, we don't read code anymore, but we should read Markdown. So there's a lot of Markdown here and pay attention to this. But yeah, I just worked with R2 on this over and over again till it was great.

• 1:01:18Jason Calacanis?

  So if you go to GitHub, obviously you have Claw Chief, Scales, the executive assistant scale, and then you have skill.md. That's the structure of Open Claw. And it has its name and has its description. Perform owner names, executive assistant workflow using Google Workspace, Viagog, and your chat messaging layer for updates. Usement handling, general inbox triage, sending short operational email replies, scheduling, yada, yada. Operating standard, be decisive, brief, and useful. Clear, low-risk operational work instead of escalating everything. Use priority map to decide what matters and what can be batched. Use the auto resolver to decide whether to act, draft, escalate, or ignore.

• 1:02:00Jason Calacanis?

  If the signal is primarily a lead status outreach tracker prospect, pipeline item routed through business development workflow instead of treating it as a generic EA task. Like, this is fantastic.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  I've worked a lot on that and it works.

• 1:02:12Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, meeting note ingestion. Read it, extract principal tasks, assistant tasks, decisions and follow-ups. Classify them through the priority map, run auto resolver. Policy, update Claw Chief slash task MD and any other live source of truth in the same turn. Record notes in, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Inbox handling rules. Handle without asking first when authority is clear. Meeting scheduling, short acknowledgement replies, confirming receipt.

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  Boom, and this is coming from you or from your assistant when you do it?

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  These are mostly messages to your assistant, right? So it's everything you want a good EA to do. Like, this is from 25 years of experience of working with EAs and people, right?

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  All right, well done. Anything else on the docket for us, Lon? Do you want a quick, we're in demo mode, I could do a quick two-second demo of what I've been working on? Yes, please. Okay, this is an official announcement. I was going to reveal this on my live stream after this, but I'm just so inspired by Ryan and Yazin. I kind of want to demo it now. It's a Twist exclusive, folks. This is a Twist exclusive, let's do it. This is Henry Intelligent Machines. This is something I've been working on for a while. This is autonomous swarms of agents finding challenges and solving them for you. And basically, the way this works is I have many, many agents right now running locally on my multiple computers, going out and finding challenges online, going on Reddit, X, YouTube, Product Hunt, message boards,

• 1:03:38Speaker 04

  literally thousands of different sites, finding challenges people are having and then autonomously solving them and earning revenue. And so, here's what you see. Here's your dashboard. You see how much revenue you made that month. You can go in here and it finds custom opportunities and challenges based on your interests. So it did deep research on me, found things I'm interested in, found opportunities based on those interests on many, many different websites. And now I can go in, see the opportunities, see what the thesis is around this challenge. This is an AI workflow automation playbook for creators. And so, it wants to start a business around AI workflow automation. It has a proposed plan of how it's going to start this business,

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  a breakdown of the market size, competitive advantage, feasibility, timing, all of that. And then I can just say, "Launch this venture." Give it a budget, so I'm depositing money in. It has money to work with. It can, you know, launch Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Instagram, whatever. Give it a timeline of how long it has to make money or make revenue. I launch it and now if I go into this active run, Henry is now going and building this business autonomously. It is now building out the products. It's going to post it to Gumroad. It's going to prepare an email campaign and it is going to autonomously start this business itself. And now you scale this up. You can start multiple ventures at once, multiple businesses. It eventually gets to the point where it sees, okay, this can be solved with a 3D printed item.

• 1:05:05Speaker 04

  Let me go find a 3D printing warehouse, print out all these products and ship them autonomously for you. So it is swarms of agents finding challenges and solving the challenges for you.

• 1:05:17Jason Calacanis?

  Love it. You know, we've had two of these type of genres on the program in the last month or so, which is, I'll call Ryan Startup in a Box. Identify, you know, an interesting business. One we had on Friday, basically took the entire list and description and URLs of every YC company, ripped through them and said, how defensible are they? And just make a fake version website.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  Felt sense.

• 1:05:44Jason Calacanis?

  Felt sense. Felt sense. That was Friday. The guy did it kind of to be provocative. And then there was another one that was all from one interface. I saw Kevin Rose interviewed the founder.

• 1:05:55Speaker 04

  Pulsia.

• 1:05:56Jason Calacanis?

  Pulsia. And we had Pulsia on before that.

• 1:05:58Speaker 04

  We did. We had Pulsia on like before he'd launched it formally, I think.

• 1:06:01Jason Calacanis?

  And Pulsia is like, I don't know, more Ryan, like a platform like eBay or something where, or Airbnb where you can come in, put in your business idea or your business, and then kind of be in competition with other people to see who can grow it faster and like a little leaderboard, almost like a Sims. It was kind of like, reminded me of The Sims. What do you think this says about startup culture? When Alex can bring in, you know, the tried and true, look for business ideas on Reddit. Like it's always been like an underground thing. Like if you see people frustrated in a subreddit and then you solve their problem, they might become your customers. Awesome, like great technique.

• 1:06:44Jason Calacanis?

  But here we are, like one click make it, one click do a A B test, like Eric Ries and the startup and Steve Blankfeld, the startup.

• 1:06:53Speaker 04

  Startup engine, whatever they called it.

• 1:06:55Speaker 03

  I think this is cool. This gets you past the zero to one, right?

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  So your agent, this is cool, Alex. So Henry's out there like, hey, there's some business opportunities. And you're like, this is worth 200 bucks to see. Like, is there anything here?

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  Right?

• 1:07:07Speaker 03

  And I'm sure, you know, he'll get you somewhere. And then as the model's getting better and better, you know, give us a year, you'll probably see tools like Henry actually building the business for real, like where it's truly handoff. You know, I presume we're in a spot now where it gets you started, does a pretty good job, but then you have to come in and be pretty hand holdy. But we all know where this is going. The models are going to be, are basically already AGI, so.

• 1:07:34Speaker 01

  I'm interested in how proactive Henry is. I'm sharing a tweet now in the room where you said, "I woke up this morning and my AA employee, Henry, texted me that he did all these tasks overnight without asking. He fixed bugs, he read through your emails, built a CRM, gave you ideas for new videos, and even sent you a nano banana image of itself where he sees himself as an owl." How are you reining in how free Henry feels like he should be? Or are you reining in? Is Henry basically could do whatever he wants overnight? And if he spends tokens or whatever, you're not worried about it? What's the protocol?

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  I'm basically giving him complete freedom to consume as much as he wants and prepare the drafts of what he wants to do. But anything that is public facing, it just goes through an approval gate, right? So it can't go crazy and do things that will damage you. But I'm giving him pretty complete freedom to, one, go online, go anywhere he wants. Two, build his own skills and toolset so he can accomplish anything he wants. And then right before that final gate, that's where you have to approve, or you can send a note back, or you can edit. So I'm trying to give it as much freedom as he possibly can have.

• 1:08:45Jason Calacanis?

  Super powerful. Okay, Lon, what else was in the document?

• 1:08:48Speaker 01

  All right, well, we could talk about Hermes Agent, which is an open source agent from France's New Research that was released in February. Get the chart showing token use growth by Hermes Agent on one particular API router on OpenRouter, if we want to show that chart up. Lives on your server, it remembers everything it learns, and it gets more capable over time. They call it the agent that grows with you. And I know Alex has been using it some, so if we want to chat with him about it.

• 1:09:16Jason Calacanis?

  So what do you think of this? Is it in any way going to challenge? OpenClaw and are you still dedicated to OpenClaw when you see all these other tools coming out?

• 1:09:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I've been using Hermes Agent pretty significantly over the last few weeks. I do think it is a very strong tool. I'm going to be honest, I do not think it's as strong as OpenClaw at the moment. I'm having a ton of challenges when it comes to memory, but I will say this, I do think it's worth using. It's very easy to put side by side with OpenClaw. They can communicate with each other. There's ACP so that they can talk to each other and have each other do different tasks. I also, I just like the, the brand and the vision for the product. They are on record of supporting local open source models. They're building this for local open source models. Peter Steinberger is on record as saying he does not support them. He does not think they're good for OpenClaw. He does not recommend people using them.

• 1:10:09Speaker 04

  So I think just from a spiritual direction.

• 1:10:13Speaker 04

  Well, I think there's probably many reasons. He, he's scared that from a security perspective, local models are more dangerous. So he kind of goes for a, I don't trust the consumer as much. Like by default, I don't trust the consumer to use it correctly perspective, which I don't agree with. On the other hand, you know, Hermes, the team is like, I trust the consumer. I want them to use open agents and experiment and do random crazy things. So I just like that direction more, but I'm going to be honest, like I think OpenClaw at the moment is better. I'm getting way better results, but I'm using them side by side and I think they're worth using side by side.

• 1:10:50Speaker 03

  The, the switching costs are too high now. Forget it. Like I bet Hermes is great. I'm just all in an OpenClaw and it will take me two weeks to, to really see if Hermes is good. And I'm not interested in that. I'm glad the team is building it and obviously they're gonna be supportive of local models and I love that. But you have to bet on, on Peter. I mean, and with the backing of OpenAI now it's gonna be the best.

• 1:11:14Jason Calacanis?

  I saw Dave Morin said the new version of OpenAI is gonna, no, OpenAI, of OpenClaw is gonna drop this week. Is that correct?

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  I'm using it. Yeah.

• 1:11:22Jason Calacanis?

  You're using it?

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:11:24Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it came out today.

• 1:11:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it shipped last night and

• 1:11:27Speaker 04

  They drop every day. They have updates every single day.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  R2 is using it. It's got this really cool feature called dreaming, which is what humans do. So when you sleep, you're you're obviously consolidate your memories. You you process the information. That's why we need sleep. And now Open Claw does that overnight. I'll let you know tomorrow, like how it went. I I have had trouble this morning with a couple of technical issues in Slack. So there's some bugs, so it's not perfect. And supposedly, he's juiced GPT 5.4 to be really good in it. We'll see.

• 1:12:03Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting. Any thoughts yourself, Alex, on it?

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  On the actual functionality around Hermes? I think it's good. I I am excited for the updates. Like Open Claw, they just have more people working on it as well. From a actual migration perspective, Ryan, they actually do have built in migration in Hermes, where you can just like do Hermes migrate, and it'll take all your memories, all your instructions, everything in like a second, and Hermes. So I I think it's worth testing out. There's, I mean, I also think there's like psyops on social media where people are saying Hermes is better, and they don't actually believe it, but

• 1:12:35Speaker 03

  They probably haven't used it.

• 1:12:37Jason Calacanis?

  Right. This is becoming a big thing on social media, obviously, is just people having opinions based on where they've placed their bets.

• 1:12:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hot take, a hot take has its own value.

• 1:12:48Jason Calacanis?

  No, it's it's becoming acute, I would say. Like, I feel like when I go on social media, it's literally lobbyists. And it's just one lobby versus the other. We're back to like the Mac. It's all ops, all lobbying, nonstop. And I'm just tired of it. Tau versus Solana, Mac versus PC, Android versus

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  It's something they've done to the algorithm.

• 1:13:13Jason Calacanis?

  Local models versus

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  The algorithm downstairs.

• 1:13:15Speaker 04

  It's literally, it's a marketing strategy now from a lot of companies, like the infamous one is Higgs Field. Literally, their entire marketing strategy is illegal undisclosed advertising. They pay influencers to go say Higgs Field's incredible. It's clearly an ad. And like, that's just like the entire marketing strategy for a lot of these companies.

• 1:13:35Speaker 01

  Did you see, Jason, over the weekend, our friend of the pod, Nick O'Neill, was tweeting nonstop about Higgs Field? I was a little, I got a little suspicious, I have to say.

• 1:13:43Jason Calacanis?

  Really?

• 1:13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think he's one of the, I think he's one of the guys that Higgs Field is contracting to do this, because he doesn't strike

• 1:13:50Jason Calacanis?

  Don't they have to disclose that now?

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  They're they're supposed to.

• 1:13:55Jason Calacanis?

  I know that this is happening because the guy who's running product at X, Nikita, he was like, he DM'd me and he's like, hey, can you put a label on your Polymarket tweet that it's an ad? And I was like, it's not an ad. I don't sell my tweets. And he's like, okay, fair enough. And I'm like, that was a weird interaction. Like, oh, I get it. People are ratting people out. Like, I might be a shareholder in a company, but that doesn't mean I'm getting paid to tweet about the company. So if I tweet, I love Uber, that's not a paid ad, but I am a shareholder.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  This gets murky because I get a lot of credits. So like, and I disclosed it to be in a show. And I have a lot of OpenAI API credits. Fine. I have a lot of Devon credits now. Fine. Like, I actually think you probably do need to disclose at a deeper level now, you know, because I'm not being paid by anybody, but I do get credits now. So.

• 1:14:52Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I think it's like, there's like multiple layers. There's, I'm explicitly being paid to do this. Clearly, the FTC requires you to disclose that. Then there's, I have an affiliation, or I'm a shareholder in, or I benefit some way if this company wins. And that is like, an optional thing, I think, where you could put it on your landing play page of disclosures, like, I'm an investor in 600 companies. If you look through this list, you're going to find a gazillion cross-referenced conflicts, right? I'm an LP in 21 venture firms. Like, okay, like, I don't know what they've invested in. So you start getting to conflicts for somebody

• 1:15:33Jason Calacanis?

  like me in the most conflicted area in the world, startup investing, like, I couldn't even tell you what I'm an investor in. I probably have shares in Lyft from being in some venture firms, and I don't even know it. At some point, somebody might give me shares in Androl because I'm an LP in their company. And people are like, oh, my God, I thought you were banned from getting Androl, Androl shares. Like, oh, I don't know which one of my funds I'm in that I've gotten shares in. So definitely more disclosure is, but I thought that was like an interesting one.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. PTG Kyle in the YouTube chat asks, is this just the modern word of mouth people sort of shilling on, on social media? I don't know. I think it's a little, I, there's a little bit more to it than just word of mouth.

• 1:16:16Jason Calacanis?

  You remember Pay Per Post, Lon?

• 1:16:17Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:16:18Jason Calacanis?

  In the early days?

• 1:16:18Speaker 03

  I remember Pay Per Post. Man, the founder of that, that guy was brutal.

• 1:16:22Speaker 01

  Oh, I don't remember.

• 1:16:23Jason Calacanis?

  That guy was. So bad.

• 1:16:25Speaker 01

  This has always been with us. Anywhere where there's, if a conversation takes off here, there's monetary value associated with it, there's always going to be gamesmanship from the earliest days, as I recall.

• 1:16:36Jason Calacanis?

  Do you remember Paper Post founder coming on this week in startup and getting into it with Milan?

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  I think I do. Wow, that was a long time.

• 1:16:44Jason Calacanis?

  He's so combative. Ted Murphy.

• 1:16:45Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, I do remember this.

• 1:16:48Jason Calacanis?

  And do you remember what I did to him? Oh my God, it was so dark.

• 1:16:52Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:16:53Jason Calacanis?

  He had done this whole Paper Post thing with a poor woman.

• 1:16:59Jason Calacanis?

  What was his name? So his name was Ted.

• 1:17:02Jason Calacanis?

  So the guy Ted was getting a woman, it became Isaiah. Oh my God, I'm like having flashbacks. He became Isaiah and he was doing all this covert marketing stuff, Paper Post. I was doing Weblogs Inc. at the time, blogging. And I was like, you gotta disclose this stuff. Like, it's just, it's, you know, whatever. And the guy had written on this poor woman's forehead with a Sharpie, like this degrading thing to do for like a hundred dollars. And he was seeing what she would do for money as part of like this promotion thing. Well, that's gross. And he made a video of it. It was like totally gross. Everybody was like, oh my God. So I said to him, I said, yeah, but if I told you, like, I'll pay you to write

• 1:17:46Jason Calacanis?

  Paper Post on your forehead with a Sharpie for a hundred dollars. He's like, yeah, I'd totally do it. And I was like, okay, Tyler, go get me a Sharpie and get me a L D from my wallet. I didn't know what to do on air. So I was like, okay, fine. Write Paper Post, Tyler, on his forehead. And the kid did it. And I was like, this thing is off the rails. I gotta end the show here. It was like so bizarre.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  It was, I think this was 2008, Jason. I can't find the original post, but I think that's what this was, this happened. I think it was that long ago.

• 1:18:17Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  Anyway.

• 1:18:18Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, this is where like the forever, yeah.

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Eighteen years ago, geez.

• 1:18:23Jason Calacanis?

  It was like 18 years ago. It was.

• 1:18:25Speaker 03

  This is where we need Yazin's tool to be telling us all this stuff.

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  That's exactly right.

• 1:18:29Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God.

• 1:18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:31Jason Calacanis?

  We look at the archives. It was, oh my God, sorry, I'm just looking for.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this one got memory-holed into history. I can't find it.

• 1:18:41Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, it was like, there were a million blog posts about this moment.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I remember it now that you're talking about it, but I can't find the actual.

• 1:18:48Jason Calacanis?

  And he like literally wrote on his forehead. It was insane. I don't even want to get into it. All right, listen, this has been another episode.

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  Crazy episode.

• 1:18:57Jason Calacanis?

  Blah, blah, blah, Twist. Thank you, Yazin, Alex, and Ryan, and Lan, and we will see you all on Wednesday on Twist. Bye-bye.