Will OpenAI Tank OpenClaw? | E2251

Will OpenAI Tank OpenClaw? | E2251 This Week In Startups is made possible by: Northwest Registered Agent - https://www.northwestregisteredagent.com/twist Lemon IO - https://lemon.io/twist LinkedIn Jobs - http://linkedin.com/HiringProOffer Today's show: *OpenAI hired OpenClaw creater Peter Steinberger. What does this mean for the future of the AI virtual assistant platform, and what can the OpenClaw community do TODAY to help protect their favorite free, open-source resource? Jason and Alex consider the future of OpenClaw alongside guest experts and founders Hiten Shah and Jesse Genet. Plus we're taking a look at all of their OpenClaw creations. Check out demos of Hiten's "personal CRM" for busy investors and Jesse's family media aggregator. PLUS we've got "AI Scott Adams" creator John Arrow to talk about why he was inspired to create an AI clone of the iconic podcaster and "Dilbert" creator, and why he thinks it has so many internet commenters up in arms. Hiten Shahhttps://x.com/hnshahhttps://crazyegg.com Jesse Genethttps://x.com/jessegenethttps://Lumi.com John Arrowhttps://x.com/johnarrowhttps://www.aiscottadams.com/ Timestamps: (0:00) Introducing our guests Hiten Shah and Jesse Genet! (2:27) The panel's biggest concerns about OpenAI hiring OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger (6:03) Jason gives us his most optimistic and pessimistic OpenAI takes (7:58) Why Jason thinks OpenAI will give everyone their own closed-source assistant (10:45) Jesse's Mac Minis now outnumber her children! (15:28) What the OpenClaw community can do right now (17:08) Can companies "hijack" OpenClaw via hosting and skills? (20:12) Hiten live-trains an OpenClaw skill based on Jason's book "Angel" (22:37) How much is everyone spending on tokens anyway? (25:56) How Jesse vibe-coded an app to aggregate non-Slop videos for her family (34:19) Why Jason thinks Jesse's app is a great potential business (37:27) Hiten built the "personal CRM" busy people have always dreamed of having (44:12) "We're in an appless world." (45:19) Why markdown files (.md) are perfect for humans and their AI agents (52:36) So why are founders so obsessed with OpenClaw? (58:47) John Arrow, the creator of AI Scott Adams, joins the show (1:02:44) How does AI Scott Adams get more like Scott Adams over time? (1:04:37) The legal and ethical considerations around posthumous AI Clones

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

• 0:00Jason Calacanis?

  I am a crazy risk taker. I think you got a business here. I will give you 125K just to pursue your muse for the next year. If it doesn't work out and you burn the 125K, I don't care. I like to take risks.

• 0:13Speaker 01

  I can already afford my own Mac Studio, Jason, okay?

• 0:16Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, are we doing this or not?

• 0:21Speaker 02

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• 1:00Speaker 02

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• 1:11Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Monday, February 16th, 2026. Lots of news. He's at Alex. I'm at Jason. This is Twist. We have a breaking news story that dropped Sunday. OpenClaw getting bought by the evil empire. OpenAI Sam Altman has bought OpenClaw. Here we are in AD 24 or AO 24. 24 days after we started talking about the incredible open source project OpenClaw and it's already been purchased. We're going to talk all about what that means and handicap it. Alex, you decided to bring some great guests on today for our Monday show of Twist. Who do we got?

• 1:52Speaker 03

  Yes, we got a couple of awesome guests. First up, we have Heaton Shaw, someone that I've known in the technology world for a very long time. He's the CEO of Crazy Egg, prior co-founder and CEO of a number of other companies, fantastic technologist and OpenClaw fanatic. Heaton, thank you for coming on the show. And we also have Jessie Janay. She is a former founder and currently a homeschooling mom and she's using OpenClaw in and around how she teaches her kids about the world. So two different use cases, two different awesome people, but OpenClaw, Jason, as you know, has a lot of uses. So I figured let's bring them both on and learn from each of them.

• 2:26Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Ed Heaton, my God, I've known him for a long time. I know. He's an OG now. He's an OG now. He's got the gray hair, but he was a kid in the Web 2 era. And Jesse, I saw you on Twitter talking all about your homeschooling, which I'm a fan of, and how you're doing incredible things with Open Claw. Before we get to each of your individual uses of Open Claw, this incredible new platform, we have to talk about what some people feel is a rug pull, what some people feel is the end of the project, what other people feel is going to be just fine and they're extremely happy for the founder of Open Claw to secure a bag in under 60 days. This is going to wind up being the largest, if it is in fact a unicorn, which I'm sure with the stock options it will be.

• 3:12Jason Calacanis?

  Alex, this would be the solopreneur billion dollar company that we've been talking about.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, kind of. So this is the thing that I'm really curious about and I wanted to talk about it with the group because the numbers aren't super clear. The way they've phrased this is Peter's going to, Peter, the guy behind Open Claw originally, is going to join OpenAI and they're going to put Open Claw into a foundation that Dave Moore is involved with and so forth. But Jason, what was not discussed at any point was an enormous pile of money going from Sam Altman's pocket to Peter's pocket, at least explicitly. So is he being brought on to OpenAI with a fat sack of stock options as an equivalent to an acquisition? Is that how you see this working out?

• 3:52Jason Calacanis?

  My guess, I am strictly guessing here, is that they gave him a pile of cash as a signing bonus. I would estimate that would be a nine-figure, kind of mid-nine-figure deal. I would put it at 250, maybe even as high as 500 million in some combination of cash and stock in OpenAI.

• 4:16Jason Calacanis?

  Then he was probably given another equal amount to be a team member of OpenAI for the next four years. I would then put the deal at 250 plus 500, 500 plus 500, something in that zone because he could have easily raised 50 million dollars at a 300, 400, 500 million dollar valuation, perhaps even a billion dollar valuation from investors. So what OpenAI had to beat was 100 million from Sequoia, Andreessen, GC, any number of firms would have given him 100 million plus maybe bought 100 million of his shares. At a, let's call it a billion dollar post, a two billion dollar post, because this is such

• 4:59Jason Calacanis?

  a phenomenon, it is the highest ramping ever GitHub project. Therefore, you have to beat market. I'm going to guess what Peter did, and he will tell us over time, and he's interacted with me a bunch over the weekend and in my threads. Because I had told him and I had DM'd him, like, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. You're the chosen one. This is the chosen project. Do not sell to Sam Altman. Don't do it. Look at Sam Altman's history. Look at what he did to Elon. Look at his co-founders leaving. Look at him almost getting fired. Just look at that track record. Look at the YC track record. I, and this is nothing against Sam Altman. We're friendly, and we've known each other for over 20 years. But he's a cutthroat guy.

• 5:43Jason Calacanis?

  He's known as a dealmaker. Doesn't surprise me that he got this deal, because he's from the Zuckerberg school. I've said this over and over again. He is as sharp as a blade gets. He is the greatest dealmaker of this generation, I believe, or will become.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  All right, so we have two founders with us. We have two founders with us. I'm curious, first of all, first reactions to the deal, and do you guys agree with Jason's framing about the financials here? Let's do Heaton and then Jesse.

• 6:11Speaker 04

  Something had to happen. If you look at all the open source sort of projects that are out there, it's better when they're supported. So, you know, that's kind of my current take. Someone was going to support it. It just happened really fast, and so there's a lot of news and drama about it. And of course, lots of opinions. I don't have any, except I'm here to use the technology to the maximum benefit I can get and contribute as much as possible.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  Jesse?

• 6:34Speaker 01

  I hope, yeah, I think as a user, I hope the product just actually keeps getting better and better. I think obviously there's a little irony, like, we've got OpenClaw and we've got OpenAI, and maybe they're not so open. Hopefully, OpenClaw starts, continues to be an amazing open source project. We'll see.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  All right, so Jason, you were talking about how you were worried, you know, he is, this is the chosen app, don't sell to Sam. The foundation model, there's a lot of open source foundations out there, kind of a tried and true method. Do you think that it's going to be a good setup for OpenClaw to persist and keep improving over time? Or is this more of a sop to keep people happy as OpenAI tries to get all the juice from the particular lemon?

• 7:14Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, I'm going to give you the most optimistic take, and I'm going to give you the most cynical, worst-case scenario.

• 7:22Jason Calacanis?

  Give you both. Which one do you want first, Alex?

• 7:25Speaker 03

  I want the sad cynical, cynical first and then and then good after that. Yeah.

• 7:30Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, here's the most cynical take. This technology was becoming so powerful that it commoditized OpenAI and Claude. Because it it wins the interface. Whoever wins the interface wins the day. You can see the Chrome browser. You can see macOS. You can see Windows. If you own the operating system, you own the distribution. It was becoming very clear that the front door for using AI had switched from ChatGPT Chatroom to now people using OpenClaw. Anybody using OpenClaw stopped going to Claude XAI Gemini.

• 8:13Jason Calacanis?

  You just stop going there and you interact with your agent and your agent goes and interfaces, which commoditizes them. We know it commoditizes them because the discussion in under 10 days became in our organization, how do we get the maximum number of tokens for the lowest possible price? And everybody, and I'm sure Jesse, I see her nodding and heating, will all agree that you become a token junkie when you start using this. And you say, I have to get a Mac Studio because I want to run Kimi or I want to run, you know, DeepSeek. So that is the most cynical take. So what would you do? If a most cynical person in the world, the most cutthroat person in the world, let's call him Zuckerberg. What would Zuck do? What would Microsoft do? What would Gates do?

• 8:58Jason Calacanis?

  These are the two, you know, litmus test, most cutthroat. What they would do is they would sabotage that interface and make a better one inside their product. What are they going to do with OpenClaw? They're going to let it chug along. But then they're going to use Peter and his big brain. They're going to rebuild this product inside of OpenAI. And instead of going to OpenClaw and doing all this, you know, chores and tedious work to set it up, they're going to make it one click and give it to their billion users because they have distribution in order to preserve their distribution.

• 9:38Jason Calacanis?

  And then whatever innovations, the safest, most innovative, easiest version, the most easiest version will be the default interface on ChatGPT within six to 12 months. In other words, in ChatGPT, you're not going to get a chat interface and ask a question to pick a model. You're going to get a persona and the persona is now going to operate and they will flip the default and it will start with two buttons, your assistant's name or ChatGPT, which would you like to use? And then at some point, they flip the default. That's the most cynical take.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  Why is that cynical? That sounds, it sounds awesome. What you're describing sounds awesome to me. I'm struggling to find the cynicism here.

• 10:28Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:09Jason Calacanis?

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• 11:32Jason Calacanis?

  Because it won't be open source anymore. And it will lock in all your data and take every innovation and privacy you have and give it to OpenAI. So every single thing Jesse is doing, we're going to hear about her project in a moment. Every single thing Jesse is doing with homeschooling will be owned by Sam Altman in ChatGPT.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Jesse's gonna have local models. Like, don't you think that's what they're... Isn't that probably what they're scared of, right? So like, if you're willing, and I understand that like, we're on a bleeding edge here. But if you're willing to, you know, get your friends over here going, then you're willing. Yeah, yeah.

• 12:10Jason Calacanis?

  Was that five Mac Minis?

• 12:11Speaker 01

  I'm really, they're outnumbering the children. But if you're willing to do that, then you're probably willing to figure out how to do local models. And that must be scary. So that's the scary, because if you're chewing tokens and you're telling your agents, like, okay, chew less tokens, get more optimized. I've got a nightly build every night where they're like figuring that out, like together as like a group. Then they're gonna say, like, they're gonna be like, we need a Mac Studio right away, Jesse. Like, you wake up to that news. That must be scary if you're Sam Altman, because basically, not only do I not want him owning my data, but I also just want to save money and I want to like have a private, you know.

• 12:45Jason Calacanis?

  So you're aligned with me with the most cynical version of why he's doing it, Jesse?

• 12:49Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm aligned with you. I think that there will be folks leading the charge, and I would put myself in this bucket, to like not, to, even if that future is like ahead of us, that there's gonna be these alternative paths to going local and like keeping your privacy. And that that's really important, especially when I think about like my children's entire education being like sitting on a Mac Mini or something. But I understand consumers like ease, but I think they also like saving money. And local models are gonna start being such a delta. So, I don't know. You know, I don't know how that's gonna pan out.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  We're gonna get back to the model thing, but I want to hear the other side of Jason's argument. Jason, what's the non-cynical take here?

• 13:30Jason Calacanis?

  Here's the most non-cynical take.

• 13:33Jason Calacanis?

  Sam Altman is going to build agents and they will become the default for a major part of what he's doing. OpenAI has fallen behind, and everybody has fallen behind Anthropic because of Cowork and Opus 4.6. Now, this has been a case of leapfrog, we all know that. But Gemini is gonna win the consumer. That's my belief. And Claude, Cowork, was gonna win business.

• 13:59Jason Calacanis?

  And that's where it was trending. And I would say XAI was going to win news and breaking news, right? And data centers in space, whatever. So and then you've got all the open source models. I believe open source is going to win the day on the token race. Okay, put that aside. The most optimistic model is Sam for less than, if he gave a billion dollars, less than 10 basis points in the value of OpenAI, say it's a trillion dollar company. He gave one tenth of 1% to have this person in the building and 10 people around him and gets to watch their meetings, gets to say, oh, here's what they're doing. Here's the plans for this open source project. How does that inform everything we do? And

• 14:41Jason Calacanis?

  then, hey, can we just make sure that instead of it defaulting to Claude's, you know, what's the name of Claude's?

• 14:52Jason Calacanis?

  Claude Code? Claude Code versus Codex. Like, that could be the reason. Like, just want to make sure that OpenAI's Codex is in there. Want to make sure OpenAI is got the hooks in there as much as possible. So it's just a defensive strategy to make sure that they're locked in and they have as much intelligence as possible. So you're giving Peter a billion dollars to be in the room with him, to watch him work on the open source project. So the rest of your team's informed for their consumer-based agent that gets to know you like Open Cloud. That's and then Dave Warren is one of the most thoughtful, creative, honorable, human

• 15:36Jason Calacanis?

  beings that I've met in the industry. Let me say that clearly. Sam Altman knows, like Sam Altman and Zuckerberg, the opposite of that would be Dave Warren. That's the opposite, right? Dave Warren is the high ethics, do the right thing for the community guy. Zuckerberg and Sam Altman would be do the right thing for the share price guy. Two different types of motivation.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I see you nodding your head about the Dave Warren comments. What's your take on him being part of the foundation, helping set it up and helping delete it?

• 16:05Jason Calacanis?

  You know, I was talking with some of my friends, and I think you folks will appreciate this analogy, but is he like Peter Sean Parker?

• 16:14Speaker 04

  Like, that's all I could think of, right? Like, someone who helps him kind of understand and, you know, rationalize what's going on in his life all of a sudden, right? That's kind of how I would put it. So I echo Jason's statement that someone should do it. Dave is a great person to be the one to help out with that.

• 16:31Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, so that's a great analogy. You're bringing some humanity and a thoughtfulness. So then the question becomes, what do we do here as a community? And I think what we have to do as a community is build this product and support so many people working on it that it never gets locked into OpenAI. So how do we do this? Number one, security. Number two, ease of use. Number three, 10,000 hosting services, 1,000 hosting services, driving the price down. So we're going to invest here at my firm launch and our accelerator. Any two or three entrepreneurs that want to work on security, ease of use, hosting, or skills.

• 17:16Jason Calacanis?

  If you have, and obviously any other idea, like Jesse's idea I love, but, and the application layer. But of those four, like, core principles, the skills remain open source. The security is paramount. The hosting is cheap and widely available.

• 17:33Jason Calacanis?

  Anything in that range, we want to fund. We funded two companies on the show last week. I have 20 slots, 10 in Founder University, 25K checks. That's for like really nascent projects, two or three people working on them. And if you're just one, we'll find you two other co-founders. We're going to do a co-founder, OpenClaw co-founder matching service. On the other side, if you've got the product made, maybe even have 1,000 or 10,000 thing, we'll do the 125K, come to the launch accelerator. Then I will introduce you to every investor I know. I had 10 investors email me the past week. Can I invest in the companies you're investing in? You're ahead of me on this. Just tell me what to put money in. Literally had like one of the highest profiles who just said, I'll match every investment you make blindly, J. Cal. I trust your judgment.

• 18:15Jason Calacanis?

  So we're going to put all of our energy into OpenClaw for the next year. 2026 in our firm is the year of OpenClaw. We must maintain this open source project. Ease of use, security, skills.

• 18:29Jason Calacanis?

  And a competitive hosting environment. So that we don't get into a situation where one person owns the hosting. Somebody, they get the skills, you know, they come up with some fakka crazy. We're going to have the skills inside of opening I, so it's safe for you. And they hijack that out of the project, right? That's my concern is they hijack hosting, they hijack skills.

• 18:50Speaker 04

  We're not gonna let them.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think what's cool is you can just say to your open claw, hey, build this skill. So basically, like, I think what's so like mind bending is, you know, software, like, you know, I built something for my, like, I built something for my kids software wise that I, I'm a previous startup founder who hadn't opened terminal until six months ago. Okay, so I was the, my, my co-founder was technical. So I like, but, but after six months ago, started Claude coding, then open claw, and now I can build anything like software is feeling free to me and I know, and I used to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to developers, it didn't feel free in the past. So that, doesn't that just mean like, it's going to be hard for anyone to control when

• 19:33Speaker 01

  I can say, build me this skill and it just, I have it in an hour.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  So I had the same experience. I was worried about security when I was rebuilding my open claw instance, Jesse, and I literally was just like, wait a minute, why don't I just make all these skills myself? Like, why would I bother to go through the security risk?

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Way less security issues. Like, someone, someone was talking about a security issue with a certain, you know, skill. And so like, instead of plus-ing, you know, get this skill, I just went to my open claw and I said, I like this skill, make this for me private.

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• 21:14Speaker 03

  So Hayden, please.

• 21:16Speaker 04

  I got to chime in here. I think Alex, if you were looking at the Slack I added to, you'd know why, but you might not have been looking at it. So while we were talking, I got Jason's book. It's probably somewhere on my shelf, but I have a PDF of it. Don't ask me how I got it. And I, you know, I got it. I got it, but I got it. I got it back here. I paid for it, Jason. It's a great book.

• 21:35Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, great.

• 21:36Speaker 04

  And basically I took the book and I think you might remember the four founder questions. So right now, Bob, one of my bots, agents, whatever we want to call them, he's actually making that skill right now off of your book. It analyzed the book, found all the frameworks. There's like three frameworks, the four founder questions, why now? And portfolio math, and it's going to go after making those skills and then we can use them.

• 22:00Speaker 03

  Love it. This is really, really, really, really cool. Yeah, I wasn't watching Slack because we were podcasting. I don't know if you noticed, but we're, we're doing a show right now. And if I just read Slack, I'm not going to be a very good podcast.

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Before we get into demos, I do want to do demos in a second, but I'm curious what everyone is using as their own intelligence engine, AKA model right now. Because I've been tinkering with GLM 4.7. I know GLM 5 just came out, Minimax and 2.5.

• 22:26Jason Calacanis?

  Explain what GLM is, please, for the audience.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Z dot AI or Zipu AI is a Chinese AI lab. And their model family, Jason, is called GLM, similar to how OpenAI's models are GPT dash. It's just the moniker that goes with them. There's a technical reason for it, but that's probably one level lower than we need to get. Lots of great new models out there, really cheap. I'm just curious, Jesse, Hayden, what are you guys running when you're burning a lot of tokens?

• 22:51Speaker 01

  I haven't been optimizing yet, so I've really been, I've really been using like Gemini models and Anthropic models. And I do have, depending on what the agent does, I have them flipping between to optimize basically token usage. But, but I have a Mac Studio coming. And like they're on delay, you guys, I can't just get one tomorrow. And so when that comes, I'm gonna start to start playing with some local models, but some people might be experimenting more than me.

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Well, no, I mean, you don't even have to run these locally. There's a lot of inference providers.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  No, I know. Yeah, I've, I've just been, I've been trying so hard to get my agents behaving. I haven't been experimenting as much on the model side. They, but I've been asking them to optimize tokens based on what model they use when. And like being way more precise about that. That's like where I've been optimizing more so than playing with the new models that have been coming out every day so far.

• 23:38Speaker 03

  Hayden?

• 23:39Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm using Kimi for coding. And then we do a bunch of local training using Lama. Still works.

• 23:46Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 23:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Oh, all right. Jason?

• 23:48Jason Calacanis?

  And so on a comparative basis, you're burning through tokens that would cost from a major model provider, how much? Do you have any idea, Jesse or Hayden, how much you would be burning in, or even at your peak, what you were burning in OpenAI or Claude or XAI or whatever tokens?

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Sometimes, sometimes on a single day, I'm like, you know, really burning through cash. So I, that's why I do want to optimize and start playing with local models, but I haven't been doing so yet. But I'm, if I'm really cranking and having them doing dev projects as well as doing all the like book processing I've been doing for the homeschool and stuff like that. You know, sometimes I'm getting those like notifications like from Anthropic about sending $15 like every 45 minutes or something. So I've been, so I'm definitely motivated to optimize my usage, but haven't yet.

• 24:38Jason Calacanis?

  So low thousands, certainly hundreds of dollars.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the way I think about it, and I have the luxury of thinking about it this way, but you know, I have, I've on boarded, you know, like in my startup history, like definitely over 100 employees over time. And the way, and so like I'm really price anchored to how much people cost. I do, and maybe that will be a legacy way of thinking, but I'm so price anchored to how much people's time costs. That even when I'm kind of spending a lot on these models, I'm like, I'm getting so much done. I honestly don't overthink it. Uh, because I know that I'm getting projects done that I wish I was able to do four years ago. Or I feel like I've got three people working on curriculums for my kids. And I'm like, okay, I spent, you know, forty dollars today, like that, that's okay, because I can't afford it. So like lucky for that. But I, I just, to me, it's like, that's still so phenomenally cheap.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Um, but I have bigger projects like with book ingestion and stuff where if I really like, really want them to chew tokens, especially I'm like reading videos where I record videos of my kid and they like actually maybe scan the videos to understand the lesson, this type of stuff. I'm thinking local models will help me do that without just spending like thousands unnecessarily.

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, cuz you could really, you could really blow your token budget. My first fifty dollars in Anthropic API credits that I bought were gone in the snap of a finger because I was using Opus four point six for the wrong tasks, Jessie. And I think everyone learns that lesson, you know, about one time.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  So I, I've been thinking about like what to share. And there's a lot of things I've been doing over the last, what is it now? Twenty days or so since this thing came out and throwing them in a bunch of slack. So I have about ten or fifteen of these bots running with OpenClaw. Um, the best analogy I've come to to explain this to people is if, uh, with ChatGPT or Claude, you get a car. With OpenClaw, you get a car and the mechanic built in. And so taking that analogy, basically you can extract it out or abstract it out to everything that I do. So what I do with models is we have, um, have it set up both locally and, um, have an OpenClaw, OpenClaw agent, uh, dedicated to this where we're actually

• 26:41Speaker 04

  taking the workloads we have and automatically running evals on them. So evaluations where we're evaluating the AI. The AI is evaluating the AI on those jobs in order to get to a spot where it can be either efficient or the right quality for what we're looking for. And so this is like an automated system that you would run if you were building an AI product. Now with just a bunch of prompting, I can run that loop. And so we're getting new data all the time.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  Jessie's been doing a lot of awesome work and one thing that really kind of caught my eye, Jason, was this video tool that she made as a way to kind of curate YouTube for her children's educational purposes, all using an agent. So Jessie, take us through it.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, so let me, uh, share, um, share screen real quick. Um, so I, um,

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I don't know if any other parents, I mean, it sounds stupid to even say. I know other parents suffer from this. Basically, there's amazing content on YouTube. But when you turn on YouTube, the app, it's defaulting to Shorts, it's defaulting to Slop. Your little kids especially get tricked by the AI cover art and they like click on a video and it's actually junk. So I've actually wanted to build this for years and this is what I'm saying, as a previous founder, like, software used to be expensive. Now I can just chat on my phone with my open claw who's using Claude Code and Codex and stuff. And I built this. So effectively, I can choose what I call streams. And we love like engineering videos, science videos, camping and stuff. And I can subscribe to these streams.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  My open claw, one of them, because I've got a few set up, one of them is based on what I select on streams. It's actually going through and finding and pointing my app at videos that fit that content stream. So this is not static content. I did not select all the videos myself, like some kind of playlist. My open claw is like based on what I want my kids to watch, selecting streams. And then I built, so then I can do that interface in here. But then I have the app, which I can use with my kids on TV. I got it actually set up on my TV, which is like another, it like took a little bit more work. But they can just click and videos pop up to play.

• 28:49Speaker 01

  And all they can do is advance to the next video or pause. They can't get out of that interface. So the slop is gone, okay? Slop is over. But I've been wanting to build this for years and finally I can. Because I can't even sit at my computer for more than 20 minutes at a time with like four little kids. But I'm literally just, I coded this on my phone with open claw because I can't even sit down.

• 29:13Jason Calacanis?

  So this is an app or a website right now?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  This is an app. So this is just private to me. I'm not here pumping it out. This is just something I do for my family.

• 29:20Jason Calacanis?

  I will pay you a hundred dollars a month for this app immediately. Can I want you to curate it into feeds?

• 29:23Speaker 01

  This is for my family right now. I need to make sure I don't run afoul of any other things I did with YouTube and stuff to make sure other people could use this app.

• 29:32Jason Calacanis?

  All right, I'll join your pod. I'm gonna join your pod and I trust you. No, my 10-year-olds are on YouTube constantly. You identified the problem, which is slop. Kids are like these navigators to find this stuff and the algorithm pulls it into it. And that's what I really want them to do is they, when I give them documentaries or creative stuff, they, they love it. But the algorithm is so powerful that it will pull them to, you know, two girls doing a makeup tutorial or, you know.

• 30:05Jason Calacanis?

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• 30:49Jason Calacanis?

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• 31:06Jason Calacanis?

  Disney princesses smoking cigarettes.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  I know. And YouTube Shorts is pretty much trash. YouTube Kids, I feel like is actually like a junk product. I don't know if that offends anyone, but it's like you go on there and it's supposed to give you these parental controls, but the content's not good. So, so I built that. So that to me, that's just an example, like, yeah, I was a previous founder, but I'm, I'm a, I'm just a mom now and I'm able to like build this stuff, you know, off to the side. And I'm not exaggerating. I cannot sit at my computer. That's what Open Claw has given me is basically its hands on my computer when I cannot sit down. So I don't know how relatable this is, but I think as a, as a mom of young kids, like I was able to code this literally on my phone, like I do voice notes, whatever. The other thing, the more macro thing, and I think you responded to this on X,

• 31:53Speaker 01

  is that I'm using OpenClaw to develop the entire curriculum to homeschool my children. And this is just, this is Obsidian. So my co-founder of my previous startup is now the CEO of Obsidian. So I'm kind of like geeked out on Obsidian, just like, you know, because I know him super well. But Obsidian is basically a collection of markdown files, and AI loves markdown files. So I'm using Obsidian as the basically, um, brain of my homeschool. So if you see here, I have all these individual lessons logged of my children doing specific things. But here's where things are interesting. Like, you look at all this data and you're like, wow, that looks like she's putting in a lot of effort. Like, this is a really ADD person, like, logging everything her kids do.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  That's where it's beautiful. I took this picture, um, and I did a voice note. My kids did color theory today. They did a color wheel, blah, blah, blah, blah. My OpenClaw writes this entire lesson log and logs it.

• 32:49Jason Calacanis?

  Love it.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  I don't touch the computer to do this, okay? That's the difference with OpenClaw, is that they're like actually doing all the work for me. And then I have this beautiful log, and my like, you know, kind of galaxy brain thought is that when they turn 18, I like can like literally give them the entire history of their education. And on a daily basis, I can ask OpenClaw, like, okay, tell me what Ford did last week. We need to plan lessons for him this week, because I can't even remember, right? Because I'm running around with my head cut off.

• 33:16Jason Calacanis?

  This is what teachers always talk about. I need more time to lesson plan. I want to do more time with the kids. I want to do less administrative. I want to be in less meetings. Give me more resources. Same thing is happening with doctors. We have a startup, um, one of my team members will tell me, we'll pull up the webpage right now, that is doing note-taking for psychiatrists, specifically for psychiatry. Psychiatrists, you know, want to spend time with patients. But they have to do their billing, their codes, their note-taking.

• 33:46Speaker 01

  They're running a business, yeah.

• 33:47Jason Calacanis?

  They're running a business, right, essentially? And so this startup, uh, that just went through our accelerated story, I'm drawing a blank. I just got all this snow dumping down behind me, and after the show, I'll be out in that powder. We desperately needed a snowstorm here in the, uh, in, in America. So this company, uh, NextVisit, which we'll show on the screen here, they report that doctors are, were getting back like 10% of their time. Now they're reporting doctors are getting back a third of their time. And- The notes are better.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:17Jason Calacanis?

  And so that's what you're experiencing. Here's next visit. So it's just medical note taking, but man, it has done so well. Nextvisit.ai if you want to see it. Okay. I, Jesse, I love what you're doing. It's a business. You're a mom.

• 34:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:32Jason Calacanis?

  I think there's like three ways to go with this as a business. I'm enamored with what you're doing, the passion, the focus. I mean, are we doing this or not? I mean, I think you got a business here.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  I, I want, I, the fact that in one generation, we went from about 1% of kids homeschool to about 6%, like it's a personal passion of mine that more parents feel empowered to homeschool because I think the education quality is incredible. Uh, there's obviously lots of cool alternatives like Alpha and everything as well. But, um, but anyway, so I'm passionate about sharing. That's why I started sharing. Okay. I'm not an influencer like type personality as my main thing, but I decided I've got to share this because my mind has been so blown by what I'm able to achieve with my kids. Like I'm, I feel like I've 10x'd myself at least with OpenClaw that I was like, I must at least share. I'm going to start with sharing. Okay. That's my only promise. From there, maybe there's some businesses, but I think we can get homeschooling past 10% of kids, uh, within another few years from now. I,

• 35:27Speaker 01

  I'm passionate about that. Maybe there's a business in there too.

• 35:31Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. I am a crazy risk taker. I will give you, uh, I'll invite you to our accelerator, give you 125K just to pursue your views for the next year. If it doesn't work out and you burn the 125K, I don't care. I like to take risk. If it's a one in 10 or one in 20 chance, I am okay with long odds. Just let it percolate. You don't have to give an answer right now, although that's great for ratings, but I'll give you the 125K and what that will allow you to do is hire a second person who you love, trust.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  I can own my own Mac Studio, Jason. Okay.

• 36:06Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, I'm not. I'm talking about a hu- I'm rich. I don't need you. Gotcha. Alex tells me that all the time. He still shows up.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  So no, but I do, I do.

• 36:15Jason Calacanis?

  He still shows up for work, so.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  I've been, I've been through Y C. I do believe in like you surround yourself with like great people, like great things happen. Um, so yes, I, I'm very, I'm very interested. I also have a three month old. So, uh, for me, it's probably more of a making sure I've got, you know, life, uh, life bandwidth. But I, I love what you're throwing down.

• 36:31Jason Calacanis?

  You can spend the 125 K on a 12 hour a day nanny. You could literally spend it on nanny coverage. So you get an extra hour back a day. All right. I'm gonna put it there. It's nine months of nanny time there, Jason. It's accepted.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  He's, he's accepted it. He's accepted it. Um, I, I love the idea and, um, and let's.

• 36:49Jason Calacanis?

  Well, no, you know what I think an interesting idea would be for year one? Cause I'm passionate about this space as well. I have a full-time teacher, uh, working for us, uh, and, uh, that's worked out amazingly for our family. We have means, but I think there's like, the people with means are doing this already. Then there's people with no means who are just suffering at, you know, in this terrible education. So there's people in the middle. I think like Uber did, Uber Black, people had chauffeurs, right? If you're a rich person, you get a Maybach, you pay off, you got it. So that's us in this analogy. Then Uber Black came out and then the next tier down said, oh, I can have my own personal driver. I can take 10 rides a week, $60 a ride. Hey, that's 600 a week. It's 30,000 a year. Okay. Now you get access. Then you get Uber X. Now

• 37:33Jason Calacanis?

  another set of access and then eventually autonomy and Uber Pool and Lyft Line, those things kind of bring it down. There's a next tier here that I believe would pay $500 a month, a thousand dollars a month to have a set of tools and a curriculum and the ability to be part of a community. And I think you get a hundred of them to pay that amount, just middle class folk, you know, upper middle class, whatever. And then as you do the tools, the advice and everything becomes free for everybody at the bottom to, to, to roll up their own, spin up their own. You see, doing great work in the world, but there's a business model here that's subscription.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  I agree. I, I, I, I think that we, I really do believe we're, we're trending towards over 10% of US K through 12 students being homeschooled. And when you think about the transformation that creates for all of us, a generation from now also, that's like, to me, it's like one of the most impactful things I can work on truly. Uh, so I'm starting, I'm starting close to home, literally in my home. Uh, but yeah, I wanna, um, I, I, I view it as a mission.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  All right. I, I wanna, I wanna get to another demo though. Let's keep the demos going. So Hayden, take us, take us to Slackville and, uh, tell us what you've cooked up with OpenClaw.

• 38:43Speaker 04

  I'm actually gonna give you three things. Um, and, uh, so let's start with the first one that I know everyone loves to talk about these kinds of use cases. Um, I'm not an automation junkie, so I don't connect this stuff to my calendar or my Gmail like a lot of other people do. Uh, it also helps me avoid any of the security concerns of it going rogue. I connect the OpenClaws to GitHub. We can give it documents in GitHub or give it direct links, right? But one of the main use cases that people go after is what I'm gonna show you in this channel. So I started asking it what I was doing, but basically a couple of days ago, I basically built a contact database for one of the products I'm building. It's a competitive intelligence tool, and usually that's like product marketing and those areas of a business that worry about it.

• 39:28Speaker 04

  You can imagine why I'm building it. I think those tools, they're just, in the last 20 years, I've been wanting to build something like this, but now the access to information is so easy. So I decided, okay, let me just give it my LinkedIn contacts. My business partner's gonna put hers in there. I gave it my Gmail contacts and for two of my email accounts, and then I basically had it make a database, score it, prioritize it, tier it up, and basically be able to tell me who I should be outreach to. A lot of people go to like automation, go send the automated emails. There's already even been public kind of screw ups on that where the Cal.com founder said unsubscribe to the Beehive folks. I don't know if you folks have seen this. It was kind of a lot of drama, but it was because of automation.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  He said unsubscribe to a Beehive email from the Beehive people, not a Beehive newsletter. It was automatic and it was his agent. So I don't go for that. But what I do wanna go for is this kind of work would have taken me finding tools, paying for tools. Maybe they'll work because LinkedIn doesn't like giving any tool the data, but instead I'm able to do this here. And the most powerful thing? Is that now I can take this and go give it to another bot. So I've already ran this three or four times. We run it at Crazy Egg now. Same kind of thing. This does our outreach. By basically finding the people, organizing it, we can give it more context. I mean, you can just keep going, right?

• 40:49Speaker 03

  So you've actually built here the, the personal CRM that everyone has talked about, Jason, since I first started paying attention to venture. I feel like personal CRM has always been the white whale of everyone who's really busy.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  And I did it in like 30 minutes. And, and I could keep running it. And, and so, you know, they talk about replacing software and all that. I just want the outcome. I'm not even thinking about that. And I can get the outcome by treating it as a mechanic and a car. So here I just asked the mechanic, what are improvements you can make? And it just gave me all the improvements right here. Right? All these key improvements, email enrichment, stale data, whatever it's got. Then I said, give me a detailed plan. Research this and give me a detailed plan for each one. So for email enrichment, obviously I have to use an API or something. It's telling me which one I can use and what my options are. It even phased it out for me. I can have it build any of these. And I'm not using anything special. This is basically OpenClaw plugged into Slack

• 41:46Speaker 04

  with a good enough account at Chat, you know, ChatGPT account or Claude account, and I can do this. So that's one use case.

• 41:55Speaker 03

  Keep going.

• 41:55Speaker 04

  I'm gonna give my second one. So second one, I know a lot of people have shown like control panels and stuff like that. This is a completely different business. Both of these are newer ones that I can share stuff from. We've got a lot of stuff going on. So this looks like an interface, got a file explorer, a memory search. It's like a OpenClaw interface. Here's the thing. Today is the first time I logged into it. We've been running this thing for, this is my first instance. It's called Otis. Uh, we've been running it for like 20 days or something like that, 15 days, whatever. Really early in, within a few days, we set this one up. This one actually also has a local Nvidia 5090 sitting, sitting there with the engineer who works on it. Again, not super fancy, still got Claude and all that stuff. We have OpenRadar hooked up. But the thing is,

• 42:40Speaker 04

  everything you see here that I'm going to show you, I'm only going to show you like the skills area and maybe one other area. It built it. It keeps improving it. We never even log into it because I don't really like interfaces anymore, but that's a longer story.

• 42:53Jason Calacanis?

  So you built a dashboard.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. But it built it. We don't even use it.

• 42:57Jason Calacanis?

  It built its own dashboard. This is literally what happened with Oliver on our team, who's now the producer of This Week in AI, our new podcast coming. He had it build his own dashboard, his, uh, his, um, replicant. And it built it. And now we have an interface to look at the skills and then we're telling it with, I don't know if you know Matt Van Horn's Last 30 Days.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, that's cool.

• 43:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, every Saturday, I'm having it go out on Saturday at noon and saying, go research everything about thumbnails. And every Sunday, I say, go research everything about titles for podcasts, you know, et cetera. Tell us the best practices. Give us examples. Tell us who's talking about it. And it found a video that was out in the last 30 days from somebody who had worked for Mr. Beast, who explained Mr. Beast's philosophy. Now, we've heard his philosophy before, but it was something recent. And I said, just keep adding this to your memory and skills. Create a Notion page or a Google Doc with every week what you learn. And then every week, it's going and get better. You compare that, Jesse,

• 43:59Jason Calacanis?

  to a human being, uh, where a human being is just not capable, in my experience, of having that level of discipline. And if they are, they become Mark Knopfler of Dia Strates and become the greatest guitarist of all time, or they become, you know, Quentin Tarantino, and they make the greatest, you know, films of all time or whatever. That level of obsession, to be able to every week to get better at your craft, is for impresarios. But it's now the default, Jesse, in, in this replicant world.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  I, I, I like, yes. And, and you also, um, I've, I've managed a lot of people. I, I try to treat the replicants, as you're calling them, uh, like I would people, like I'm not rude, but I'm far more direct. I don't have to worry that someone had a bad day and they're actually all teary because their boyfriend broke up with them. I don't, I don't have to do that kind of management anymore. So I can just be direct. I'm not rude, but I'm direct. Uh, Henson said something that I, I think is really interesting, uh, which is that UIs are kind of Dead right I I don't know if I don't want to speak for you but but like maybe taken to another level. Are you eyes dead like because of six months ago. Uh I was trying to Claude code an app for my homeschool like a like an app that I could click into and use on my phone. Then when open claw launched, I'm like.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Why there's no app like we're in an appless world. I don't actually want an app, right? I don't want an icon. I don't want to click into something. I have um I I want my husband to log lessons too. I don't want to make him get an app. I apps are like there's no more apps like there's no more UI need. I just I just like he just needs to be able to chat with the the um the replicant and so do I. So that just means UI is like what's the future of that? I mean, there'll be some like niche ones, but. It's crazy like that's a crazy shit.

• 45:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is like a directory for everything we've done. So you go here and like you can see the skill builder I I wrote, but like look how big it is. Cause we've been entering the crap out of the skill builders. So we can build a really awesome. Awesome skills off anything. All our research is here. I can click into one of them and it's got the entire.

• 45:57Jason Calacanis?

  Where are you running? Are you on are you on your own machine or is this in a cloud?

• 46:01Speaker 04

  This is in the cloud. I exclusively run them in the cloud for these things, but for training and bigger model jobs, I'll run them. Uh locally because I just think we we do have security issues with it and. There's no there's no reason there's a way you can contain that and that's the whole point.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  And those are all dot M D files, right? You're you're like a whole down do I I I clicked on my first article that had a copy in dot M D. At the top and I was like, yes, they they were finally we're all we're all.

• 46:28Jason Calacanis?

  Explain explain what that means to.

• 46:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and our markdown files. So markdown files have existed forever, um like really light uh structure, text, text, uh text based structure. They're brilliant for AIs reading them like AI also loves to read. They can really quickly scan, really quickly understand. You can do linking between them. With a tool. That's why I use Obsidian frankly is because it can link between and create an organization for them. But um a file structure that exists file format that's existed forever. But now it's especially relevant because humans can read marked like markdown files because they have nice formatting. And AIs can. So we've reached the like file type that we both want, right? So I I clicked on the article. I'm not sure who because I'd love to credit them and they have installed a copy in dot M D at the top of their articles that they're writing.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  And I was like, this person gets me. I copied it because I'm not going to read it. Okay, I'm holding a baby. I click the button, copy and dot M D. Give it to my, give it to my replicant. They read it. I I say, make me a podcast. I listen to it. And then now we're cooking, you know?

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Heaton just threw something in called a website to markdown. Explain, explain what this does.

• 47:35Speaker 04

  You can take any website and basically get this markdown format that Jesse was talking about and then just give it to an A I. So, you know, like if you're really messing around with chat G P T and things like that, it's not getting to the web page. You can just literally just click that and then it'll just download it in that format.

• 47:52Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, wait a second. So website to markdown. You go to a website. Let's say there was a website. It was somebody's Substack. It was Alex's Substack for cautious optimism. He, you then go to it. You say, just download the whole McGill.

• 48:07Speaker 04

  It won't take the whole website. It'll just take a page at a time, the way it works. But then it just makes it easy to get it. Get that data and where whatever.

• 48:14Jason Calacanis?

  So it's a scraper as a Chrome tool that converts each page. So if I was a paid subscriber for but a hundred dollars a year, why wouldn't you subscribe to cautious optimism? Get Alex's thoughts.

• 48:26Jason Calacanis?

  You could take his entire opus and then say, I want Alex's thoughts in my memory for my bot because I'm a technology analyst at a.

• 48:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, just an easy way to get like, like, like, you know, there's better ways to do that now where you can just tell it to go crawl a website like our open claw. Bots, if they have web search A P I like brave connected plus they have web fact, they can go get pages and crawl entire sites like. Jason, like the other thing I wanted to show you folks, this was number three. I had three, right? Is basically how I, I think Alex, you were going to ask me about this, so we might as well go here, right?

• 49:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I'll, I'll, well, you bring it up. I'll explain. Jason, Heaton was talking about something called pair prompting, which was an entirely new method of working with A I. And I wanted to explain to us what that means and why it matters.

• 49:16Speaker 04

  So I have a personal Slack. It's heaton dot slack dot com. You can't get it. You can't go in there unless I invite you, of course. So I've invited Alex and Jason there. And I wanted to show them how I essentially. indoctrinate, for lack of a better word, humans into understanding how these AIs work and how we can work with them. So basically, I have you both in here. And Alex, I know you already started following up, but like I happen to have Jason's book, which I talked about earlier. So I had it go analyze it. This is a whole thread on it analyzing Jason's book. Coming up with all his frameworks and starting to make skills based on that for founder questions, which it's in the process of. And here it is, and I even have it testing the skill. It even found red flags to check like, and it's just recursively doing all this.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  And it's going to perfect the skill, but I built a skill builder first to do this, right? It's basically the mechanic and the car. You get both as long as you know where to point it. Right? So we were able to take a book and turn it into a skill right here in the matter of this show, right? So that's one. And then another one is I have a bunch of like research tooling and skills we built. So it can quickly make a dossier on someone. So I knew Jason was going to be here. And now you're in the Slack, so you can ask it anything, Jason. I've done this for my friends, like, you know, our mutual friend, Om Malik, where he's got a long history of writing, right? Even more so than you, me, or even Alex. And I was able to get like his whole dossier in there, his trends of how his writing has changed and everything and all within minutes.

• 50:44Speaker 04

  So here it's got your history. I even have a fact checker. So I told it to make sure everything is fact checked. And there's multiple sources for it. So it's assessing that. So that solves the hallucinations and all that stuff because I'm using it as a mechanic to fix the car. And then Alex and I started messing around a little bit, trying to get it to give us something surprising about you. It started, it started, and then we made it get deeper. Okay, now we know you have a psychology degree. I think that explains a lot, Jason.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  And then it went into essentially this story, which I've heard before, but it was just nice that it got here. And kind of was trying to hypothesize how you became Jason, basically.

• 51:20Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, it's a famous story that I tell in the book. My dad's bar got seized by the feds because he didn't pay his taxes after the stock market crashed. And so I had to figure out how to pay for school. And I basically wouldn't take no for an answer. And I tell some of those resilient stories of just getting knocked on my ass, you know, a dozen times in my life and getting up 13 times and just, you know, how doggedness and resiliency are the key, key features of success, uh, which my friends are always apt to point out to me.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  All right. Uh, Hayden, can you, uh, stop sharing for a minute? We're gonna, we're gonna do one last question, which I think is really pertinent to everyone who's both, uh, listening to this now and also on the feeds later on. Cognitive overload. One thing I love about OpenClaw is I can do so much. One problem with OpenClaw is that I can literally do so much. So when you guys are deciding what to automate and where to apply the tool, for folks out there who may be just starting to tinker with OpenClaw, uh, how do you handle just the, the, the feeling of being a little bit overwhelmed by the possibilities, the options, the risks, the tools? It, it's a lot. Jesse, why don't we start with you?

• 52:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. My, my first, my first thought is, uh, I take the things, uh, in the progression of my normal day, the things that weigh on my mental load and I try to pass that off. So, uh, you know, a quick example, uh, is that I, I was overwhelmed by how much crap we owned for like homeschooling and stuff. And I, I was overwhelmed by pulling out like what to pull out. So one day I realized that I took a bunch of photos, gave them to my OpenClaw and it made an inventory. Uh, and, and so then it tells me what to put out. But, but I think that this is a way of answering like, uh, it works for me. So I think people are having this anxiety of it not working. Um, I, I am a Jomo person instead of a FOMO person. So I, this is helpful for me, my mindset, because yes, there's times when my OpenClaw is not working, but I don't freak out about that. But

• 53:15Speaker 01

  I go through my day, anytime I hit a slow moment where my mental load is like max, I give that job to my OpenClaw and try to automate it.

• 53:23Speaker 03

  All right, Hayden, really briefly, same thing to you. Just, uh, give me the, give me the two bullet point version of handling cognitive overload in the era of OpenClaw.

• 53:30Speaker 04

  I just try to pick and choose. It's a whack a mole problem, right? Like whatever the thing is that's coming up. Oh, contact database. I need to contact more PMMs for my competitive intelligence tool. Great. How can this thing help me get there a hundred times faster? And every time it seems to do that. So once you get in the habit, it's just like using ChatGPT.

• 53:47Jason Calacanis?

  Well, Jesse, I think you went to YC. I think. This project appeals to entrepreneurs for a number of interesting reasons. I have my own thoughts on why an entrepreneur becomes obsessed with this so predictably. Why, Jesse, do entrepreneurs get so consistently, so predictably addicted to open claw in your mind?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Because we, as founders, we always thought we could do it all, and now we can. Like, it's like a

• 54:24Jason Calacanis?

  Bingo.

• 54:25Speaker 01

  Okay, like, I thought I could do everyone's job a little bit better. I'm just being a jerk. But now I can. I also have worked with amazing people. I'm being facetious a little bit, but now I can extend myself like infinitely.

• 54:39Jason Calacanis?

  That is exactly it. Heaton, what do you think? Why so predictably? Matt Mullenweg, you, me, Alex, everybody saw this, started playing with it and said, "I can't stop." Why, Heaton? Why is this?

• 54:56Speaker 04

  Agency. Founders naturally earn, get, use, have, whatever. Agency. This gives you so much more agency. I mean, I'm up till like 2:00, 3:00 a.m. I haven't been up till 2:00, 3:00 a.m. in the morning since college. And it's because I need to, like, in one of the businesses I helped someone start, like, it's a marketing agency, overnight, we increased efficiency 10x. And now, I'm making sure every night, this one in there, the name's Gary, long story, but Gary's always running for this guy who's running the agency. And we scale very differently now. So it's agency.

• 55:30Jason Calacanis?

  Alex, give your opinion, and then I'll give the correct answer.

• 55:34Speaker 03

  Um.

• 55:35Jason Calacanis?

  We're hearing versions of the correct answer here, but what's your position?

• 55:39Speaker 03

  I'm going to be slightly facetious, but one thing I've always had was a lot of jealousy at people who could take their ideas and turn them into code. And for me, so this is kind of a variation of agency, but for me, it's turned me into the person that I wanted to be if I was better with semicolons, patience, and syntax. And so to me, it makes me feel like I'm 10 feet tall, and I no longer have to ask permission for anything.

• 56:00Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, you guys are nailing it. In my mind, there is a reason why this resonates.

• 56:09Jason Calacanis?

  This speaks to the rugged individualism and the ability to carve a place in the future by shipping products and building that you very rarely see in human existence, in the history of entrepreneurship. And one of those moments was when people had ships and they could go anywhere and explore the new world, right? And you had Columbus and people just going all the trade routes. Then you had people land in America and they said, you know, going west pretty hard and like right behind me, Donner Pass, like it's gonna be rugged, it's gonna be hard, but if you get to California, hey, there's gold in them there hills.

• 56:50Jason Calacanis?

  This is a gold rush, rugged individualism and autonomy and resiliency. If you're willing to play with the tools, if you're willing to go through the Donner Pass and you time it right, you might be the first to the promised land. You might get there first and you might be able to build something and stake your claim in this new world. The same way mobile, cloud, the internet itself, when dial-up modems came out, when the PC revolution came out. I remember when people got PCs, they had this agency that if you could embrace this technology, you would be so far ahead of the average human. If you understood the internet, you know, like I did in college in 1988, when I saw BitNet and ARPANET, and it was like, whoa!

• 57:35Jason Calacanis?

  If you were one of the few people who knew what that was, you just were, you were infinitely ahead of everybody else. If you knew broadband, if you knew mobile apps, you were infinitely ahead. And that's what this really represents is an open, blue ocean, Wild West, rugged individual, go claim, stake a claim, folks. Go get this technology and stake a claim. That's what I believe is going on here at its best. But yeah, I mean, it's just amazing. I think you guys also summed it up amazingly. And anytime an entrepreneur starts playing with it, they become addicted. If you're not a member of our YouTube community... Just go and type this week in startups and you can go to this week in startups.

• 58:19Jason Calacanis?

  Hit the subscribe button, hit the thumbs up. Now I've got a surprise for you guys. Okay, editorial director Lon is here.

• 58:25Speaker 05

  So this morning we were checking out AI Scott Adams. I believe we have a clip. Now, this is not the real Scott Adams. They have created a digital clone of the Dilbert cartoonist, who of course passed away earlier this year in January. So here is the AI approximation of Scott Adams that is now hosting a regular podcast of his own. Let's take a look.

• 58:50Jason Calacanis?

  And to add to what Lon is saying, tragically, Scott Adams passed away, the creator of Dilbert, last month. He had said on his podcast, he was obsessed with the idea. And I was friendly with Scott for many years. He had said he was, Lon, considering making an AI version of him and he wanted people to play with that concept. And then there were some people who, he may have changed his mind a little bit about that. But here is an example of AI Coffee with Scott Adams. For those of you who don't know, Scott Adams would do at 7:00 AM Pacific time every day for thousands of episodes. His little take on the news, influence, skill sets, reframes, whatever. He had a delightful show every morning.

• 59:33Speaker 03

  So here's the AI version of that.

• 59:37Speaker 06

  I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dope I mean here today.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  All right, I think it gives everyone a bit of a taste of it. And I want to point out that I am not Scott Adams, even though apparently we look very much alike. I do not know that fact going into that clip.

• 59:53Jason Calacanis?

  Here. We have the founder of AI Coffee with Scott Adams, correct, Lon?

• 59:58Speaker 05

  Yes, John Arrow is joining us. He and his brother are the creators of AI Scott Adams. So let's bring on John. Hello, John. Thanks for joining us.

• 1:00:08Jason Calacanis?

  All right, hey, John. John, tell us why you created AI with Scott Adams? I'm assuming you were a fan of Coffee with Scott Adams?

• 1:00:19Speaker 07

  I appreciate you asking that question. I mean, it's something that really nobody has asked about the story. I literally grew up, my bedtime stories at night were Scott Adams Dilbert cartoons. My parents would read them to me. So I was a fan from a very early age and kind of identified with that. And then when he started putting out his books, I kind of reconnected with him around the COVID time and started listening to his podcasts very frequently. So, you know, I know there's people that were bigger fans than me by far, but I think I got a lot of value out of it. And like many people, I heard him say, it's so important after I'm gone, I want to become an AI. This is how I can get to immortality. I heard him say it time and time again. And then after his death, I went and reviewed that again and decided, look, this is something

• 1:01:03Speaker 07

  that I can do, my brother and I can do to be useful. And that's exactly what we did. And it's brought, I know, a lot of people, a lot of joy and comfort during this period. And it's something that's, that's really been a lot of fun.

• 1:01:16Jason Calacanis?

  How many days have you done it? And then what is the technique for the content? Because Scott had a very specific content format. He would do this simultaneous sip at the beginning. He would say, oh, you need a cup or mug or glass. Everybody would do it together and create like a bonding experience. He would talk about the news. He would do reframes for people, just psychologically, how you view the world. He would help people with micro lessons, a topic that was so powerful, these micro lessons, that I bought the domain name microlessons.com. And I emailed him, I said, hey, I have microlessons.com. I bought it for like two grand. Would you like it? I'll gift it to you. And he was like, no, no, go for it, Jake. I was like, I don't know why I'm buying it. I just love that term. So how do you make the content? Are you writing a script? Are you having AI write the script?

• 1:02:01Jason Calacanis?

  How does it come together? Because it seemed like it's very in line with what Scott would have done.

• 1:02:05Speaker 07

  It's an extremely iterative process. So the goal is to let AI do as much of it as possible. We have access to all of the transcripts, all of the videos that are out there, a lot of his writings. So basically, the corpus of anything that he put out there publicly, we try to have him use that as much as possible. Now, there are some discontinuities where some, you know, sometimes Zach or myself need to write, but the goal is to have AI did it, do as much as possible. So yesterday, I think AI Scott Adams replied to one of your tweets. That was a case where we saw it, but he actually typed that response. That was, that was not a person.

• 1:02:38Jason Calacanis?

  Jesse, or Heaton, or Lawn, do you have a question for John about the creation of AI Scott Adams? And what this means? Obviously, John, I take you at good faith. I think Scott would have taken you at good faith that you're doing this because you're a fan. This isn't a commercial project to make money off the legacy or the estate of Scott Adams.

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  I'm really impressed. I'm really impressed technically about it, and I think it's very cool. But I'm curious, as someone who might want to generate other content with other personalities, or like, I'm doing homeschool, like historical figures, like you're piquing my curiosity about this. Is there anything else you can share technically with how you brought it together?

• 1:03:23Speaker 07

  Sure. For those that are interested in doing it themselves, I would just say start experimenting. I mean, some of the tools that we're using, we're using Eleven Labs, we're using Fall.ai. And this is one of the situations where I think, you know, perfect is the enemy of good enough. So I would just try and experiment with it. The tools keep getting better. Speaking of micro lessons, Jason, we're going to put out a micro lesson very soon on how to let other people create not only their own version of AI Scott Adams, but anybody, because that's probably been the most consistent question we've got is, how can I turn this into educational content or do this for somebody else? And I hope we have 50 of them wearing it.

• 1:03:56Jason Calacanis?

  My question is, are you refining the work? Like, as you go, are you sort of like continually training it to be more Scott Adams-like? Or to sort of sound or, you know, come up with content that's more like him? And if so, like, how are you sort of layering that in?

• 1:04:11Speaker 07

  There's a huge recursive element, and what we use for feedback is the comments themselves on the X post. So previously, we were on YouTube, but they got us kicked off of YouTube. They said, people might get confused that this is really Scott Adams. So I don't think they have much thought for the intelligence of their viewers if they think somebody who was dead would now be coming back. I mean, we had it clearly labeled as an AI, so unfortunately, we lost those thousands of comments that were being used to refine the process. But now that we're on X, we're able to take those comments at the end of every day. We feed that back in to the model, and it tries to incorporate as much of that feedback as it can.

• 1:04:45Jason Calacanis?

  Wait, did you say YouTube banned your account?

• 1:04:49Speaker 07

  YouTube banned us, and, you know, it was something we had just a huge, huge following. More people were watching it there than X. And if you look, go ahead.

• 1:04:57Jason Calacanis?

  No, when YouTube banned it, what reason did they give you? And did they give you a strike? Did they talk to you or they just shut the channel down?

• 1:05:03Speaker 07

  It was a straight ban and the reason was very bizarre. We talked about it on our X account and AI Scott Adams has talked about it, trying to make sense of it too. Because if you look at the YouTube policy, they allow parody accounts, they allow fan accounts as long as they're identified as such. And we were not violating those provisions. I've been kicked off enough platforms before I know to try to adhere to the terms that that service puts forth. And so they found a really obscure part of their policy where they said that that people might be confused of what was happening. It wasn't that this was an AI. It wasn't that this was a fan account. It was that people might believe that Scott Adams had come back from the grave and it was now now doing his podcasts again, even though we say it's AI. AI Scott Adams says he's AI multiple times. So it's, I think it was, there's probably another reason.

• 1:05:46Jason Calacanis?

  What if you, what if you put a permanent watermark across it that on YouTube that said, this is not Scott Adams. This is a parody AI account. And it was literally watermark, which would be annoying.

• 1:06:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:06:02Jason Calacanis?

  Or, and like a lower third that just said, this is not Scott Adams. This is an account. If you tried to do that, do you think they would let you do it? And then I want to get into the ethics and morality of this, Heaton. So, and then I'm sure you have a question. So what do you think of trying again?

• 1:06:15Speaker 07

  Absolutely. We started the appeal process. We haven't heard from them. We don't think the appeal is really about what it's about. I think it was one of those situations where they banned the video.

• 1:06:23Jason Calacanis?

  What do you think it's about?

• 1:06:24Speaker 07

  Down the reason, I, you know, Scott Adams is an amazing person, had a lot of different connections. I understand, you know, some of the people who didn't want our video up were banned, were kind of banning together and calling the people that they knew at YouTube and at Google. Apparently, I think their contacts were a little bit more senior than some of mine, even though I've done a ton of work with Google in the past. So I think that's more what it was about. It was a, it was a ban that was looking for a reason. We've started the appeal. We haven't heard anything from them. I would be in favor of your idea. I think that'd be awesome. I think that'd be great.

• 1:06:52Jason Calacanis?

  Just do a new account. Just do a new account and see what happens.

• 1:06:54Speaker 07

  We got a new account and so we found a little bit of a loophole. They weren't going to let any version of AI Scott back. So we have AI Abigail now. So you can have coffee with AI Abigail, which is, you know, presumably AI Scott Adams' daughter. And so at least you can get the same content there. It's not going to be in Scott's likeness, but we just launched that and it's a pretty small following now. You know, we had, again, we had, our main mode of distribution was YouTube until they, until they pulled the plug on us. Hopefully we'll build that.

• 1:07:19Speaker 04

  Heaton? I just had a quick question.

• 1:07:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 04

  How long did it take you from start to when you felt like it was good enough to share?

• 1:07:27Speaker 07

  That's a great question. So my brother Zach is the one who did a lot of the rendering on all of that. And we went through several iterations where it went from kind of just embarrassing. I would say kind of the first, you know, call it five to 10 hours that we spent on it. And then, you know, spent a few weeks tinkering and then we got it to a point where, look, it's, it wasn't perfect. But if you watch any of the conventional Coffee with Scott Adams episodes, there are always mic issues. There are always printer issues, technical glitches. So I think it's kind of very similar to what he had. And it makes it maybe even more real, but I guarantee you, we're not intentionally causing the problems that you see. We're trying to work those out.

• 1:07:59Speaker 03

  People seem to be really mad at you though, John. There's a lot of commentary on X, people being kind of cross about this. I know Scott Adams said he wanted this to happen, but he may have gone back and forth a little bit depending on who you ask. So has the estate reached out to you? Have there been any kind of formal commentary from them?

• 1:08:15Speaker 07

  So, you know, we've, we've heard from literally thousands of people that love what we're doing. We've heard from literally thousands of people that don't love what we're doing. My message is filled with hate and love every day, my DMs. One, one group we haven't heard from is the estate themselves. So it's people from the show that have just kind of sent some obscenities our ways, but nobody has made any, any inroads to make a, have a productive conversation. I've said I've been open to that, but I haven't seen any of those attempts. And I think I understand, you know, why, why from the people that don't love it. I mean, if you were very close to Scott Adams as a family or a friend and, and, you know, first of all, it's kind of bizarre to see somebody, you know, in an AI form that passed away. Second of all, if you legitimately believe their wishes were to the contrary of what they publicly expressed,

• 1:08:59Speaker 07

  and you believe that in your heart of hearts, that makes sense that you would try to stop that. And I think this is one of the classic Scott Adams, two movies on one screen. There's a bunch of people that were really, really close to Scott that says this is what he wanted. And there's a lot of people who were, who were close to him that say this is not what he wanted. I don't want to disclose it, but I have had some extremely high level people message me saying, hey, look, I've talked to Scott in the last days before he passed away. This is something that he, that he wanted to do. You're doing a great job here.

• 1:09:26Jason Calacanis?

  There would be a very simple solution here, Lon, in terms of IP protection. And you are a media expert, so I'm going to hand it off to you to sort of walk us through this. But in knowing what I know, Lon Harris, about IP protection. This is so close to looking like Scott Adams because it's a video replication and the voice is so perfect that, number one, it could be traumatizing for family members to see this and we hold space for that particular nuance to this discussion. That said, public figures have to be open to parody and cartoons being written about them or being mocked even, or being celebrated, any of those things. However, however, you know, this is a particularly gray area.

• 1:10:11Jason Calacanis?

  If this was done as a puppet, just to pick one, or a cartoon, Lon, this would not be as big of an issue, do you think? And how do you, Lon, parse this on a moral and ethical basis?

• 1:10:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think it comes down to the realism. I mean, I'm not, I can't speak for YouTube and why they did what they did or what their real motive is here. But I think the idea that a person who may not know that Scott Adams died in January, who is just flipping around, this is lifelike and realistic enough that it might cause confusion. And usually the rule with parody is that it has to be obvious that this is not true. Like, any person who may not have insider knowledge of that situation or whatever would be like, oh, they're clearly joking. So if it was animated, if it was with a puppet, if it was very comic and over the top, you immediately would be like, oh, okay, this counts as parody. No reasonable person would watch this.

• 1:11:13Speaker 05

  Whereas, you know, AI Scott Adams, it's a testament to John and Zach's work that it is very lifelike. I mean, when I first watched it, I was like, wait, is this a real clip of Scott Adams saying he's okay with an AI? Or is this AI Scott Adams doing his show? And it took me a second. So I think that's why we're on this sort of like... Edge case gray zone is because it is so lifelike. In terms of the ethics, I mean, I think we're all kind of on the same page. If we all feel like the man Scott Adams, when he was alive, was very excited about the possibilities of AI and wanted to be memorialized in this way. I think it's hard to make the argument that it's wrong to do it. I mean, that was, it was the, a dying man's wish, you know?

• 1:11:58Speaker 05

  Like, it's right to fulfill a dying man's wish. But I think, yeah, if, in the absence of that, I honestly think, you know what it sort of reminds me of is like a DNR or a living will, like, we might, we might soon be in a time where everybody just has a legal document that they fill out that's part of estate planning, that you're like, I'm good with people making AI representations of myself after I'm gone versus never do that. I hate that idea.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  Lon, explain DNR for people who are not familiar with that.

• 1:12:31Speaker 05

  A DNR would be a do not resuscitate. So if you, you're not sick now, but you're like, if I ever get to the point where I would need to be kept on a machine to be kept alive, I don't want to be, I don't want to have a breathing machine, just let me die. And I think that, you have to file it before while you're still in sound mind. And I think that would be the same.

• 1:12:50Jason Calacanis?

  So DNR, do not replicate. Well, no, but we just, do not replicate me. Jesse, what are your thoughts here?

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  I was gonna pose that back to John, which is like, how, how much of the pushback, and this is a guess, but how much of the pushback is people thinking about this one person and their wishes versus fear of AI? Like, it's more of like, I think some people look at this example and they're not really worried maybe just about this one isolated example. They're worried like, okay, if we allow this, like, and I get this fear in response to my content about homeschool stuff as well. Like, people are like, if we do this, then, then what's next? Like, people just have this fear explosion about AI in general that I think is pushing back on all of these use cases. But I'm curious if you feel, John, like it's, people are upset about this one guy? Or are they upset like AI, like fear?

• 1:13:43Speaker 07

  Jess, you hit the nail on the head here. I mean, that's what's going on. It's a slippery slope type of thing. People are imagining, could this happen to me? Could this happen to one of my loved ones? Could this happen to somebody else that we care a lot about? And my answer is no, not legally. There's a bunch of laws that would prohibit this type of thing. The reason that we're doing this is because there are dozens of instances where Scott Adams, while he was alive, of sound mind called for turning all of his likeness over to the public domain so people like myself and Zach could go out and create these types of videos. There's literally hours of him talking about this type of thing. And he did over 3,000 of these Coffee with Scott Adams podcasts during his life. Not once did he publicly say, I'm taking that back.

• 1:14:28Speaker 07

  Don't do this anymore. There are some times where he said he changed his personal plans about what he might do, but nothing about donating this to the public domain and giving everybody full, unencumbered rights, not only to make an AI like we did, which was in good spirits. He said, if you want to have, the quote is, if you want to have this person say things I didn't say, that's okay with me, too. I hereby authorize it in public so that you can use as many as you want. And then you could use me for your personality. I authorize that. And there's dozens of these things. We posted some of them on AI Scott Adams for you to see. It's pretty unequivocal. So I don't think there's a risk of this happening for the common person.

• 1:15:03Jason Calacanis?

  Jesse, you had a follow up, I can see.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  Well, basically, you said, like, I actually wonder how settled this law is, like, as it relates to all of their personalities and stuff. So actually, kind of just skipping off of Scott Adams, because I don't want to, I'm not like nitpicking you on that, but more so, I think, you know, all of our laws on the books, right, and you'd stayed and federally, et cetera, about likenesses and about, you know, what our wishes are upon death and these, all these types of law. AI was not existent when anyone wrote this stuff. So I actually am curious, like, is it illegal if someone uses my face and likeness after? Can you go after for defamation on someone if you're dead? Like, there's going to be all sorts of interesting things, because the tech has never been so good that it is convincing, right? A cartoon, or even like someone really good at animation, the cost barrier.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  So the AI is going to make us question when cost barrier goes from, why would someone spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to replicate Jesse after her death, to why would someone just have an idea in an afternoon and just do it? I don't know if we know these answers. Like, it's a really interesting question.

• 1:16:04Speaker 07

  We want to.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  I wonder if the market's gonna answer that for us, because there's a lot of demand for this sort of thing. If AI coffee with Scott Adams goes goes super viral and people love it, I think it's gonna change how we think about it from a a demand perspective. Jason, sorry.

• 1:16:15Jason Calacanis?

  John, do you want to um address that? And I I actually can address some of the legal issues having.

• 1:16:20Speaker 07

  I'm actually. For that, I mean, I I've been involved in a lot of litigation over my years. I'm sure you've been involved in more. And so would love to hear that thought, because I'm hopefully this is this video is not an exhibit A in the original. You know, since but but.

• 1:16:33Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:34Speaker 07

  You go for it.

• 1:16:36Jason Calacanis?

  No, no, uh, give give your thought and then I'll.

• 1:16:38Speaker 07

  I think I think there's existing laws, right? There's publicity laws. If you look at different states, a lot of them have laws, you know, the Walt Disney copyright, that's which is separate from publicity. But a lot of laws like Texas, where where, you know, I'm based, I spent my time between Texas and New York. They have sixty years, right? So you basically for sixty years after someone's death, unless they explicitly gave that right away, you're not allowed to do that. So it doesn't matter if it's AI. There's already an existing law on the books that would prohibit that. Other states go longer, other states go shorter. But if you are out there in the public saying, I pledge this right, I donate this right, then you are the estate. You are part of that then.

• 1:17:14Jason Calacanis?

  So there is a law called the right to publicity. And this is for famous people. How do I know about this law? Sometimes people will take me or an AI version of me, and they will start selling their crypto project or some nutrient. And I have to have my team go file and just write a letter and say, hey, don't do that. I've had this happen many times. Somebody did it in one of their promotional videos famously on the internet. And I said, hey, please take me out of that. Why? Because you're infringing on my ability to do endorsements in other places. People pay me six and embarrassingly even seven figures for my endorsement. That's the reality of where I am in my career.

• 1:17:54Jason Calacanis?

  It took twenty five, no, thirty years of me building my career to be able to get those opportunities. Now, uh, and so what they did was they removed me from their endorsement. And then they put a puppet in and they republished it and they got even more. And I was like, listen, guys, I'm not going to sue you. Just please just leave me out of it. And then they had some fun with me, which is totally fine. This right is done on a state by state level. It's not done at the federal level. And the reason this exists is because you don't want commercial exploitation. And the people who have passed away or are alive have a business in this. So the estate of Elvis has a massive licensing business.

• 1:18:35Jason Calacanis?

  And they will come down on you, just like Mickey Mouse. But Mickey Mouse is a fictional character. You know, for a real character like Elvis, you basically get 75, 100 years from the time of death to exploit that person's IP. You can't use it for confusing people, etc. But there is a protected area. Editorial use, like a documentary. You can make a documentary about Scott Adams right now without permission. Or Elvis. Artistic use. You could make an artistic, you could make an entire album of songs as a tribute to Scott Adams and his work. You could do any type of news reporting.

• 1:19:20Jason Calacanis?

  And if somebody happened to be, like, if you had a picture of me in the background of a photo, you know, at a demo day and there were 20 of us there, you, you, you know, you don't have to pay for that. But that's why when, like, Steve Jobs did his famous ad about the Misfits and everything, each of those people in that commercial use had to be approved. So when he said, "The artist, the Misfits," and they show Bob Dylan or the Beatles or Einstein, whoever's under 100 years old that has an estate, you do it. So here's what's going to happen, I predict, with John and Scott Adams. You'll either move to an editorially protected area that doesn't infringe on the actual family's ability to do that, which would be making it more artistic, making sure it's non-commercial, and making sure it doesn't confuse the users.

• 1:20:05Jason Calacanis?

  And you will then be protected. Or you'll have a heart-to-heart with the family and say, "Hey, we're going to make Abigail." And Abigail is an inspiration based on Scott's work. And she's the female version who brings the Gaia to Scott Adams' work. And it'd be, like, super cool, because it's an interpretation, it's artistic, etc. Or you'll sit down, break bread with the family, and the family will give you a license to it. And they'll say, "Under these circumstances and these tools, we don't want you to do anything adult, or inappropriate, or racist, or this, or that. We don't want you to bring up the cancellation." Where Scott got cancelled for what he said or whatever. We just wanted to live in this zone and have the ability to prove it and any money goes to our children. I can tell

• 1:20:45Jason Calacanis?

  you right now, my estate is going to defend this to the end of the earth, my 2,500 podcast episodes and growing, so that, so that my three daughters get every fucking penny of everything because I'm not giving any money to charity when I go, I'm giving it to my three daughters to go rule the universe and be queens and take over the empire.

• 1:21:06Speaker 05

  We are getting, we are getting a lot of pushback from the chat, Jason. I feel like I should mention, a lot of folks in the chat upset with our depiction.

• 1:21:13Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, rapid fire.

• 1:21:13Speaker 05

  Uh, so at Dr. Davis 62, Scott Adams spent the last year explaining on air that he would not create an AI Scott Adams because he did not feel that the tech was up to the task. Uh, Lido Opa, the age of the AI agent is akin to ethical slavery. Uh, another Dr. Davis, he did not want to be memorialized this way and said so on his podcast. He looked at the tech and felt that it would misrepresent him. Uh, so, uh, John, do you want to respond to these people who feel like Scott was clear at the end of his career that he didn't actually want an AI clone?

• 1:21:46Jason Calacanis?

  End of his life.

• 1:21:46Speaker 07

  Absolutely. First, let me respond to what Jason said. I'm with you, Jason, and I would love to have that type of conversation. There's, you know, there's been no attempt to have it. Any of my attempts to have it have kind of fallen on deaf ears. So I'd love to have that conversation. Um, second of all, the question I would pose for everybody that kind of is in line with those comments is if you're somebody who wants to pledge your existence so that people can make AIs out of you, how do you do it? Because Scott Adams did it, tried dozens of times and said, this is what I want. This is what I want. And despite some of those comments, there is not one video segment of him provoking it or saying, look, don't do this anymore. I know I said this over and over and over again. I pledge my likeness, everything about me to the public domain. Go out there and make AIs. That's what he said. There's many videos of him saying that. No videos of him

• 1:22:31Speaker 07

  not saying that. So how would somebody, how would somebody go out and even do that? I mean, that's, that's the question I would pose for everybody else because if you, I signed up, if I die, hopefully I'm immortal, but if I die, I'm, I'm signed up to go to Alcor where I'm frozen out in, um, I think it's in Scottsdale, you know, and it's, it's kind of a scary thing. If people love and care about you, they might decide, no, John doesn't really want that, right? And normally we have wills and last testaments for that type of thing, but Scott, Scott did something even better. He said that to the public. And that does constitute a pledge and something that he wanted to do. So, so it's for all these people, you know, filling up your comments saying he didn't want this. This sounds a lot like mind reading to me and it's something that Scott Adams warned against. Don't try to predict what other people want. Go by what their words are.

• 1:23:16Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 1:23:16Speaker 03

  All the corp circles are in Arizona? Why would we put all the frozen people in the hottest part of the United States?

• 1:23:21Speaker 07

  I think it's less, but they have earthquakes.

• 1:23:24Speaker 03

  Like, I mean, Arizona is made for this.

• 1:23:26Jason Calacanis?

  I think it must have to do with like some laws. I gotta, I gotta think it has to do with laws as well. Anyway, this, here's, you know, Scott had a concept of internet dads and I think I was part of that group of like, you know, Gen X dads or as my, as people are starting to call me unk. I guess that's like a way of saying boomer. They call me unk. Yeah, they're calling me unk now. I think he and you're going to get into the unk category pretty soon. Lon, you're there. So here's what unk says. I'm going to give my, as the chairman of the interwebs, I'm going to give my, my, what is it when a judge gives their statement, Lon?

• 1:24:05Speaker 07

  Their ruling.

• 1:24:06Speaker 04

  Verdict?

• 1:24:07Jason Calacanis?

  I'm going to give my ruling. Here's my ruling. Ruling. My ruling is Scott would have loved this. Scott would have loved it. And Scott would have had some space that if it was hurting his family members and it was traumatizing for them, if it was too soon, a month after his death, where the fidelity wasn't there, where they didn't have approval of it, he would also have taken that into account. As such, I am laying my judgment down. John, you gotta break bread with the family and if you're going to make a literal one, you have to then get their permission. However, if John wants to make one, that is a send up parody, female version, a Muppet

• 1:24:51Jason Calacanis?

  version, that is extremely clear to the public that this is not Scott Adams. It is an inspiration of Scott's philosophy carrying on in the future, that there is space for that as well. And that means it would have to have another name and, you know, in the fine print say, hey, this is inspired by our love for Scott Adams philosophy. That is my ruling. And you can appeal it. The appeal can happen at any time by any person. And we will thank John for coming to the program and to the family of Scott Adams. What a tremendous career. We miss him.

• 1:25:29Jason Calacanis?

  Him, he and I debated things. I was on a show one time. We had crazy debates about January 6th and all kinds of things, but I think he was a net, net positive for the world and actually did actually care about people. So rest in peace, power, replicant, Scott Adams.

• 1:25:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, peace is good.

• 1:25:46Jason Calacanis?

  You're a star, Jesse. Thanks for coming, Heaton. John, thank you for Heaton. John, you could drop off. We will see you on the next episode. Well done, well done. Plenty in the show notes about those great guests we had. His name is, and he's exhausted because he was up late last night watching movies or doing open club. His name is Lon Harris. Follow him, X.com slash Lonns, L-O-N-S. He's Alex, X.com slash Alex. They're part of the four letter club on Twitter. I'm right behind him, X.com slash Jason. I've got more work to do. If I could get rid of the A and just be Jason.

• 1:26:23Speaker 05

  Jason, yeah.

• 1:26:24Jason Calacanis?

  We'll see you all on Wednesday for another live, insane, unstoppable twist. Bye bye.

• 1:26:32Speaker 05

  Bye.