OpenClaw is Our Friend Now | E2250

This Week In Startups is made possible by: Sentry - http://sentry.io/twist Circle - http://Circle.so/twist Wispr Flow - https://wisprflow.ai/twist Today's show: What makes OpenClaw feel so much more ALIVE than other AI agents? On TWiST, we're welcoming three amazing builders who are truly connecting with their OpenClaw bots, not just using them for productivity but getting to know them and their personalities on a deeper level. Serial entrepreneur Ryan Carson shows us Antfarm, which creates a team of agents with specialized roles, who work together to complete complex tasks. THEN David Im shows us Clawra, his AI virtual girlfriend that learns about you and your tastes, and even buys you presents! FINALLY, Alex Liteplo presents RentAHuman, a marketplace where bots can pay real people in stablecoins to complete IRL tasks. The future may not just be humans and AIs working side by side, but hanging out, being social, and learning from one another as well! Timestamps: (0:00) It's a Friday show with Lon and we've got THREE awesome OpenClaw builders (6:41) First up, Ryan Carson shows off his open source too, AntFarm (7:57) What is a "Ralph Wiggum Loop"? (10:54) Sentry - New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to http://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST (17:14) NOTI Q: What about security?! (18:13) David Im shows us his AI virtual girlfriend, Clawra (19:21) Circle.so - the easiest way to build a home for your community, events, and courses — all under your own brand. TWiST listeners get $1,000 off the Circle Plus Plan by going to http://Circle.so/twist (20:33) Introducing your IRL girlfriend to your AI girlfriend (23:23) How to program an AI companion (28:26) Should Clawra be a best pal instead of a GF? (32:38) Wispr Flow: Stop typing. Dictate with Wispr Flow and send clean, final-draft writing in seconds. Visit https://wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today. (33:54) Jason's Productivity Hack of the Month (36:17) Alex Liteplo shows us RentAHuman, where AI agents can hire real people (38:22) What are the bots hiring people to do, exactly? (50:02) Why robots might be better bosses than people… (50:51) Hiring 100 goth girls to hold signs in Times Square (55:25) OFF DUTY! Norwegian skier breaks down on live TV (58:01) Lon's fav Best Picture nominees (59:08) Why Apple acquired "Severance." Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com/ Check out the TWIST500https://twist500.com Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp * Follow Lon: X: https://x.com/lons * Follow Alex: X: https://x.com/alex LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm/ * Follow Jason: X: https://twitter.com/Jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis/ * Thank you to our partners: (10:54) Sentry - New users can get $240 in free credits when they go to http://sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST (19:21) Circle.so - the easiest way to build a home for your community, events, and courses — all under your own brand. TWiST listeners get $1,000 off the Circle Plus Plan by going to http://Circle.so/twist (32:38) Wispr Flow: Stop typing. Dictate with Wispr Flow and send clean, final-draft writing in seconds. Visit https://wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today. Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You told your girlfriend about your virtual girlfriend as your counsel. I don't know if that was a good idea.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. But like, we were trying to build this, you know, not just like girlfriend that's that is like sexualized, but like what we're building is a like real companion. Um, so that's what we're building. So before this, we were like making a talkable AI avatar, like like talk to Elon Musk or like, um, learn for Elon Musk, something like that. And like we went viral and like gained ten users in several weeks. And after that, uh, we got backed by Founders Inc. Got into Founders Inc. We were thinking of, okay, then how should we like find a good, like a better business, like, uh, how should we monetize this avatar thing into a like real company? So, um, after that, OpenClaw happened, you know?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  So after OpenClaw happened, the most interesting, interesting part we found that is OpenClaw actually feels like a real agent, like a person. Because like, um, if you think of like ChatGPT, ChatGPT only works as one platform, only a ChatGPT, like app or web. But like, you know, OpenClaw, it has one gateway and like that one gateway like controls all channels, which feels like a real person. So like, we saw like, okay, maybe the Samantha from the movie her, maybe in real life.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  This week in startups is brought to you by Whisperflow. Stop typing, dictate with Whisperflow and send clean, final draft writing in seconds. Visit wisprflow.ai/twist to get started for free today. That's W I S P R flow dot A I slash twist. Circle, the easiest way to build a home for your community, events and courses, all under your own brand. Go to circle dot S O slash twist to get one thousand dollars off the Circle Plus plan. And Sentry, your team should be focused on shipping features, not chasing down bugs.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  New users can get two hundred and forty dollars in free credits when they go to sentry.io slash twist and use the code twist.

• 2:11Jason Calacanis?

  All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups, February 13th, 2026, episode 2200 and something. Who knows?

• 2:18Speaker 03

  2250.

• 2:19Jason Calacanis?

  2250. Wow, we're getting there. 2500. Let's have a party. I am super excited today. Got one of my old friends coming on to talk about his, uh, open claw. He's been, what do you call it? Claw shotted?

• 2:30Speaker 03

  I like claw pilled. Like, you know, like you get red pilled, you get black pilled, you get claw pilled. I think that's the one.

• 2:37Jason Calacanis?

  Great. Claw pilled is the one. It is A O 19, I believe. It is after open claw 19 in the year of our Lord. We now measure everything here on This Week in Startups by how many days since we started talking about open claw? It's been 19 days. We're obsessed. We have four replicants. What is open claw? For people who don't know, open claw is the most paradigm shifting piece of AI software since ChatGPT was released a couple of years ago. Why is that? Because you can create agents and those replicants can then do work on your behalf, either on like a desktop computer or in the cloud. And conservatively in our company, in the two weeks or so that we've been using this product,

• 3:21Jason Calacanis?

  it's been offloading 10% of our chores per week per knowledge worker. We think we will be at 50, 60% of our work being clawed and open clawed by, let's call it March 1st, March 15th, definitely by April 1st. Lon Harris is with me co-hosting today. What's on our docket today?

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Well, we're going to talk to four amazing guests today, all of whom are working on incredible open claw projects that are expanding what open claw could do. And a lot of them, the theme here, recursive loops, that people are creating open claw skills that train themselves to get better over time. So we're very excited to speak to all four of these founders. We've got the first three joining us right here in the opening segment. First, as you mentioned, our guest Ryan Carson, he's created Ant Farm, in which individual agents verify one another's work and help train one another collectively. Then we're going to meet David, who's designed Clara, a virtual companion that gets to know you intimately over time. Finally, Alexander Lteplow has created Rent a Human.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Jason, this one allows your OpenClaw replicants to hire humans for tasks that require a human in the loop. And then you get paid with stablecoin.

• 4:34Jason Calacanis?

  Wow, this is going to be a lot to get through. Man, we've placed our bet in OpenClaw, but a lot of people are placing bets on who's going public next. 2026, year of the IPO, year of M and A. Let's show our poly market, to our partners at Polymarket. What have they been telling us? What is the poly market share? Let's show the poly market of the day.

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Who's going to IPO before 2027? Now, of course, the rules, we always want to talk about the rules. It's going to resolve to yes if the listed company completes an initial public offering by December 31st, 2026, 11:59 PM Eastern Time. Based on official company announcements, we always like to get that out of the way. Learn your rules, people have been caught out. Always read the rules so you know when the poly market resolves and how. So our number one guess Discord, 92 cents, right? So you'll only make eight cents on the dollar if you bet Discord. Number two SpaceX, number three Cerebras, they're the ones who designed the massive AI chips. Number four Anthropic, number five Canva.

• 5:36Jason Calacanis?

  Interesting. All right, I'm going to go with, I'm looking at this just in terms of the sharps. No way Waymo is going. I'm going to bet, I'm going to take a different approach here. I'm going to bet, I'm going to bet against, scroll down a little bit. I don't think there's any chance that Waymo or Rippling go public this year. Therefore, I'm going to try to make the opposite. So I'm going to bet the opposite, I'm going to bet no, right? I'm buying no for 90 cents.

• 6:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, you don't earn a ton. Betting no on Waymo only gets you 10 cents on your wager.

• 6:14Jason Calacanis?

  I'll put 10 dimes on it, I'll put 10,000 on it, I'll make a thousand. There's no way they're going public, they don't need to. They're just starting their ramp. It makes no sense, the people who are betting yes, it's nonsensical. Okay, so that's our poly market for the day. Lon, you want to place a bet? Which one is your place?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting. You know, you know, the one that I would have guessed like near the top would have been Vanta. And there, only 23 cents, to me, that feels like a bargain.

• 6:38Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, you're going to go Vanta, okay, yes to Vanta, good. Ryan Carson, you have one?

• 6:42Speaker 04

  I'm going to go, I'm going to go no on Discord just because I hate it so much.

• 6:46Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, wow. You're just gonna be a hate bet. You're hate betting.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  Who actually likes Discord? I don't understand.

• 6:51Jason Calacanis?

  You know, it's not for Gen X. It's just, our brains don't understand it. It makes me feel old. Yeah. It's too much going on. There's too much interface. It's a little much. It's a little much. Okay, Ryan Carson, my old friend, is back. Last time you were on the show, we were talking about your education company, I think.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, Treehouse. Man, that feels like another lifetime ago.

• 7:13Jason Calacanis?

  We actually have a clip, if you're interested. He was on-

• 7:16Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 7:16Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, play the clip. October 19th, 2011, Twist episode 198. 14 years ago. 14 years ago. We're getting old, Ryan. Ryan was the guest who was telling you about Treehouse. He was there to speak about his conference company, but he told you about his brand new startup, Treehouse. Did you remember, Jason, that you invested in Treehouse Live on the air? Let's take a look at this. I did not remember. I did not remember. Twist memory. Waiting for my return. Let me check my distributions. See how much I made. Did I make anything? All right, go ahead. Play the clip. Let's roll that clip.

• 7:47Speaker 04

  And the company entirely from Bath, UK, which is interesting.

• 7:51Jason Calacanis?

  Bizarre.

• 7:51Speaker 04

  Another challenge. We do a lot of Skyping.

• 7:53Jason Calacanis?

  How do your investors feel about that?

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Well, I think, I think at some point it will move to the States, you know? Yeah, and so the plan is-

• 7:59Jason Calacanis?

  Was that contingent when you raised the money?

• 8:00Speaker 04

  No, I mean, and I'm not, and you guys, if you're listening, Kevin, Chamath, everybody.

• 8:05Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Chamath invested?

• 8:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 8:06Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, Chamath's my boy.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Look at Tyler. He's bored. Come on. So I pitched you.

• 8:11Jason Calacanis?

  I do, I just, I gave you a blanket note because I'm giving everybody a note. I don't feel like I can add value, but I don't know, maybe I can add value by tweeting once in a while. Are you gonna be upset at me if I'm not like super responsive email?

• 8:23Speaker 04

  I'll fire you.

• 8:24Jason Calacanis?

  Because I got three out of eight people on Angel List recommending me.

• 8:28Speaker 04

  Look at that tie. We don't-

• 8:29Jason Calacanis?

  And the five that didn't recommend me on Angel List, I'm really concerned about. I'm like, I'm devastated about it. I'm like, oh, I know what this is. This is people I didn't get back to.

• 8:37Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:37Jason Calacanis?

  And it's impossible for me to get back to everybody. Enough of me talking about me.

• 8:42Speaker 04

  That was, that feels like another lifetime ago. Holy biscuits.

• 8:45Jason Calacanis?

  It does. Well, it kind of was. Yeah. All right. So let's leave the past to the past. Ryan, let's always look through the windshield. The next adventure is upon us. Show us what you're working on. Just let's get right to it. Show us what you're working on.

• 8:57Speaker 04

  Okay, so essentially, I'm building a startup, just closed my seed today, very exciting. And all of us that are running companies now are trying to orchestrate agents, right? Teams of agents, right? You can now do with yourself plus 10 agents what you used to be able to do with almost 100 people, right? So I've been trying to orchestrate this stuff, right? So I built an open source tool to do that. It's called Ant Farm. It's completely free, everybody should try it. And you just go to antfarm cool. And the way it works is pretty simple. So it is open source on GitHub, check it out, yay. How does it actually work? So it's basically a Kanban board, right? This is nothing shocking, but what you do is you specify the workflow as YAML. Like, I want to build a feature.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  So this is a typical workflow that our engineering teams run this, right? So you plan, and then you set up, then you implement it. The dev does that, then you verify, test, PR, review, right? This is not rocket science, but the truth is like, it's actually hard to orchestrate teams of agents, teams, right? So what does that actually look like? This is a real world example. You can see I've got a task, right? So this is a task that you would typically give your engineering team. Optimize Ant Farm Agent Crawn, blah, blah, blah. And let me show you what that looks like. So everyone's been talking about Ralph, right? The Ralph Wiggum loop. I posted it on X and it was like 1.8 million views on this post.

• 10:16Jason Calacanis?

  Explain to the audience who are not familiar with.

• 10:18Speaker 04

  What is Ralph Wiggum? Okay, so basically, I can't believe we say these words out loud and we're serious people, but we are. So essentially, a Ralph Wiggum loop is basically a agent in a loop. The idea is you write a bash script and you say, I want you to grab this piece of work and I want you to do it. And then I want you to turn yourself off. And then you call an agent again and it grabs another piece of work. So the reason why this is cool is this is the way engineering teams have worked for decades, right? You have a user story, you go grab it off the board, right? And you work on it and then you finish it and you go grab another user story. So that is what is a Ralph Wiggum loop. Now, how do you orchestrate all that, right? So this is a task, right?

• 11:01Speaker 04

  So this is something that you would give an engineering team, optimize, blah, blah, blah, blah, do this. And you would plan it first, where basically the planning step is creating these user stories, right? So what is the thing you're building and what are the acceptance criteria to do it? So if we go back up here, that gets done in the plan phase. And this is all automatic, right? So this is done on top of OpenClaw. So you just say to your open claw, go install Ant Farm. And then you say, build this feature and it starts cranking through. So it does a plan step, a setup step, and then the implement is a Ralph loop. So what you're seeing here is 11 user stories, which will be 11 loops of the agent. And each one of those here has acceptance criteria.

• 11:41Jason Calacanis?

  Now, who wrote all those?

• 11:43Speaker 04

  So let me go back here to the plan step. So when you say to open claw, hey, I want to build a feature that does blah, blah, blah. There's an ant farm skill that basically says, okay, interview the user before you create the task. So then open claw will start interviewing and say, what do you mean by, you know, this feature? And what are the acceptance criteria? So it sort of grills you.

• 12:05Jason Calacanis?

  The user would be you, the human, just to be clear here, the owner of the business as a proxy for a user.

• 12:12Speaker 04

  Exactly. So the CEO, right? You're saying, I want to build this thing. Then open clause talking back to you. It, this is what product managers used to do, right? And now they're just open claw bots.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  And then, you know, it goes through and it creates the user stories with the acceptance criteria. And this is what people don't understand is like, when you're specifying the stuff, you have to give criteria that the agent can verify, right? By itself. So there's no human in the loop. So what you can see here is it's done for tasks. All of these acceptance criteria are done. Down here, you can actually see this log, you know, the verifier grabbed it and then it verified it. The developer claimed it and then the developer built it and then the verifier checked it. So that is ant farm, super simple, open source. And I'm using it to basically build features for my startup, so.

• 13:04Jason Calacanis?

  Logs are an essential part of just about any tech startup. You need to keep your eyes on how your product is being used. And you definitely need to understand what happened when things go wrong. But logs are notoriously messy. It's especially hard to gather the insights you need when your logs, errors and performance data all live in different tools. But now there's a solution, Sentry. Sentry's logs are trace connected and structured, allowing you to follow everything clearly and under. Understand the context, even if you're a non-technical founder. Whether you're debugging your front end, back end, your mobile app, whatever it is, Sentry will give you the context you and your team need to get the problem fixed and to get on with your day. You've got other things you've got to focus on.

• 13:46Jason Calacanis?

  That's why more than 4.5 million developers are already using Sentry, including amazing high-profile teams like Disney Plus and Anthropic. Learn more by going to sentry.io/twist and use the code TWIST to get $240 in Sentry credits. That's S E N T R Y dot I O slash twist.

• 14:09Jason Calacanis?

  So this is not inherent in OpenClaw. It doesn't have this interface. It doesn't have the structure, but you're using the OpenClaw agentic framework to do each of the pieces. And so this is kind of like what I think Law and the Future is going to be. You're going to have people say, hey, I want to build a law firm. So I'll build a law firm on top of this. What does a law firm have? It has associates, it has assistants, it has researchers, it's got lawyers, it's got IP, it's got a library, it's got some sales group that does product, you know, whatever. So they could take OpenClaw with AntFarm and build a law firm on top of it. You know, theoretically in this simulation.

• 14:52Speaker 04

  Well, so Lon, really quickly, I think the truth is we are all loops. We are all workflows, right? So when we think about

• 15:00Jason Calacanis?

  We being the humans.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:02Jason Calacanis?

  About to be retired humans.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. What do you do as a developer? You wake up, you eat breakfast and then you check your email. You look for what you're supposed to do. You grab a user story, you do it and you cycle. You know, what does a product manager do? So it's, we're all loops. So what you're trying to figure out is how do you specify the loop, which is called a workflow in AntFlow in AntFarm? And it's not perfect, but it gets you a lot further along.

• 15:26Jason Calacanis?

  Are you going to focus in on developers, developers, developers?

• 15:29Speaker 04

  No, I've I focused on developers for 15 years. I love developers. You know, I've built enough product for developers. So the startup I'm building, I'm actually, it's kind of in stealth. So I'm not going to talk about it, but it's hyper focused on a very niche vertical.

• 15:42Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, OK, great. So wait, is Ant?

• 15:44Speaker 04

  Ant Farm is free. It's open source. Everyone use it, please.

• 15:47Jason Calacanis?

  But you've got a startup that you've raised money for that is some manifestation or flavor of Ant Farm?

• 15:52Speaker 04

  Not at all. No.

• 15:53Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, it's totally separate.

• 15:55Speaker 04

  Literally not related at all.

• 15:56Jason Calacanis?

  Is it related to Open Claw and Agentic stuff?

• 15:58Speaker 04

  Zero percent.

• 16:00Jason Calacanis?

  OK, so this is your side hustle. This is a side quest that you're doing, Ryan. This is the tool to build your new startup.

• 16:05Speaker 04

  It's a tool to run the company. Like, every founder needs some sort of agent orchestration layer, like.

• 16:11Jason Calacanis?

  Got it. So now, I was thinking this whole time Ant Farm Lon was his startup. Ant Farm is the tool for you to build your startup. You made it open source so people make it better so that you can then have your startup go better. This is really interesting. This is like Slack for.

• 16:25Speaker 04

  Exactly, for the agent forward company.

• 16:27Jason Calacanis?

  But remember, the team was working on a video game and they made Slack as a tool to help them make the video game better. And then they're like, wow, our video game's not, doesn't have product market fit.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Twitter was the same thing. They made it to message each other about the startup that they didn't end up, you know, growing. What's so interesting to me is we came into this and Ultron was our metaphor, like the one robot with every ability who could control every other robot. And I think our paradigm was sort of the reverse. It's actually what we're now seeing is like it's it's a colony. It's a it's a society of agents, a workforce of agents all working together. It's like the opposite of an Ultron.

• 17:06Jason Calacanis?

  I think either metaphor could work. The limitation of the Ultron model is how many threads can it work on at a time? The beauty of the many agents coordinating with each other is they could be cranking, cranking, cranking with, you know, like limits to your Claude account and how many tokens you have, it's better to spread it out, et cetera. But then they don't all have the same skills. They don't all have the same memory. But then the memory gets filled, right, Ryan? And so there's, if there was no memory limitations, there was no token limitations, we probably would all want Ultron. But reality is, we probably all want many of them.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  You need a swarm. And the orchestration is the key. Like, people think, oh, I'm just gonna throw an agent and somehow magic comes out. Like, most of business is a workflow that repeats. And all you gotta do is specify it, right?

• 17:58Speaker 03

  It's what we've seen too with the digest. We have our OpenClaw bots making us, you know, daily rundowns of the news. And just from a few sentences, you could get them to do a decent job. But once you really dig in and start telling it what kinds of news, what kinds of sources you're looking for, and how to differentiate certain kinds of stories, it gets magic. Like, you have to really dig into the weeds with it a little, and then you get like incredible results.

• 18:21Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, I'm producer Nick over at All In, who used to be producer here. He was showing us what he did at All In, and he fed it all the All In episodes, said, what themes do we talk about normally? What's changed? And he had some really thoughtful processes of, hey, what are the reoccurring themes on All In that we can then find me stories related to those themes? And what stories? So it's like, every time you turn this over, it gets smarter. And the recursive is telling them, hey, get better at what you're doing. So give me some suggestions as to how to make this better. And I don't know if you saw Matt Van Horn's, since all the old guys, all the old heads are back, all the unks are back. All the Web 2 unks, Web 2 unks are back. We're back, we're back.

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Cause we know shit.

• 19:06Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, we've been here. We've been to this rodeo. He created this scale called Last 30 Days. I don't know if you've seen it, but it's like, hey, tell me what happened in the last 30 days. Could be news stories, but it could also be, hey, for developers of OpenClaw skills, what have they learned in the last seven days? Teach it to me. It was just wild. Teach me what they all talked about.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  We got a note question for Ryan specifically. I want to get to this. Oleg, Oleg Kozlov, they're a fractional CTO. Oleg wants to know, how do you address security concerns with your data potentially leaking or getting exposed via malware? Do you expect to run OpenClaw in a sandboxed environment forever?

• 19:44Speaker 04

  Yes, of cour- I mean, so y'all, this is just like having an employee. You wouldn't give your employee your password to your email. Like, treat your OpenClaw like an employee. You give it its own email address. You put it on its own computer. You give it its own GitHub account. Like, you assign it API keys and access tokens accordingly. This is just kind of security one-on-one. So, nobody should be running OpenClaw on their computer, right? So, my Scout, my computer, it's right here on my iMac, completely, you know, separated from. So, that's thing one. And then just treat it like an employee and empower it accordingly, so.

• 20:19Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's bring on our next guest, Ryan. Stick with us because you'll give feedback to the next guest. And let's keep the train moving.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  I want to meet David M. from Sumay Labs. He's the creator of Clara. Clara, the virtual girlfriend that you can run through your OpenClaw. Unlike other AI girlfriend apps like Replica, Character AI, Clara sort of lives with you in the real world 24/7, any platform that you like. And she learns about you because she's got all of your data. Isn't that right, David?

• 20:49Speaker 01

  I'm David. I made Clara from Sum Labs. And like, yeah, I'm glad to be here.

• 20:54Jason Calacanis?

  So, you want to show us what you built?

• 20:56Speaker 03

  One thing David told me yesterday about this, and I think is amazing. Clara, like, you could give her money and she could buy things for you and do things for you. And we're like, if, you know, she could order you lunch or something like a girlfriend, Mike.

• 21:09Speaker 04

  She got you chocolates.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically what we're building is like Samantha from the movie Her. So, like, if you imagine that it knows your context and it does the right things for you. So, imagine like, you're saying that, "Hey Clara, I'm hungry." And then she says like, "Oh, you like chocolate? I'll buy you some chocolate." So, that's how it works.

• 21:32Jason Calacanis?

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• 22:16Jason Calacanis?

  Maybe you got a book club, maybe you're teaching a course, or like me, you have an accelerator and a pre-accelerator Founder University. We've been using this product for five years at Founder University, well over five years now. It is the easiest to use all in one platform and so powerful. So try out Circle today and get a thousand dollars off the Circle Plus plan by visiting circle.sow/twist. That's circle.sow/twist.

• 22:40Jason Calacanis?

  What else have you, you know, interestingly have you done with this? And why are you building this? You having a hard time finding a girlfriend? And or it's just more efficient as a startup founder? Is it more efficient as a startup founder to just have a virtual girlfriend and not have to deal with the reality of being in a relationship? What's going on here, David? Tell me about you. You got a girlfriend? Does she know about your?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so actually, and like my girlfriend actually like hated this at first.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  I bet, I bet. I understand.

• 23:08Jason Calacanis?

  You told your girlfriend about your virtual girlfriend? As your counsel, I don't know if that was a good idea.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. But like, we were trying to build this, you know, not just like girlfriend that's that is like sexualized, but like what we're building is a like real companion. So that's what we're building. So before this, we were like making a talkable AI avatar, like talk to Elon Musk or like learn from Elon Musk, something like that. And like we went viral and like gained 10k users in several weeks. And after that, we got backed by Founders Inc. Got into Founders Inc., we were thinking of, okay, then how should we like find a good, like a better business? Like, how should we monetize this avatar thing into a like real company? So after that, Open Glo happened, you know?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  So after Open Glo happened, the most interesting part we found that is OpenClaw actually feels like a real agent, like a person. Because like, if you think of like ChatGPT, ChatGPT only works at one platform, only at ChatGPT, like app or web. But like, you know, OpenClaw, it has one gateway and like that one gateway like controls all channels, which feels like a real person. So like, we saw like, okay, maybe the Samantha from the movie her, maybe in real life.

• 24:25Speaker 04

  I think you're right. Like, there is a big difference between how it feels to talk to your OpenClaw versus a ChatGPT or a Gemini. Owning isn't the right word because that feels bad, but it's it's very much different.

• 24:36Jason Calacanis?

  Why is that, Ryan? What's the background? Is this something in the OpenClaw software? Where it has a persona that has been trained to be? Like, where does that exist in the OpenClaw settings that it's so of service to you? Is that like somewhere you can change in the open source code?

• 24:51Speaker 04

  I've been thinking a lot about that. So what I do is, so on my iMac here where OpenClaw is, where Scout lives, I have an agent, right? So what, you know, I use AMP or you could use Claude Code or Codex. And actually, I use that agent to inspect, you know, the actual source code of OpenClaw and understand it. And you kind of like dig in, like you can look at the source code, right? And then you open the gateway and it's so configurable, like there's a soul dot M D, there's a tools M D, there's there's an agent that doesn't be for each one. And you could just, it's like owning the the source code and you can modify and really customize it. So I could see the appeal of a Clara, you know, because it's like, this feels way more intimate than it does a ChatGPT.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  I did have a question for David. Did, how did you train Clara specifically to be a good companion? Like when you, because we're we're always talking about workflows and like, here's how to get it to do the the productivity stuff. But when you guys were thinking about what would make a good AI girlfriend or companion, like, what were the things that you were sort of training or specializing it for?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, the thing matters is the story of the persona. So if you think of a real person, so we saw like. How does a real person like feel like a real person rather than like AI? So we thought that people have their own stories. People have their own story, their own soul and like their own like kind of like perspective. So we tried to make that into Clara. So we made a background story of about Clara, actually like she's like. She's born in Atlanta and she went to so to be a K-pop star. But like it didn't work like she was like failed K-pop trainee. And after that, she came back to San Francisco to do her marketing work. But she still wants to keep up. That's her whole backstory.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we in the salt on MD like it's open source, so so you can check it. And after that, it feels like a real person. Yeah.

• 26:43Jason Calacanis?

  How do you sign up for this? If you wanted to have the girlfriend, do you just text a phone number? Or do you just text an email and start the relationship? You sign up at a website, put your phone number in and starts talking to you? And then what do you do? Like you, when the person gets like 10 days into this relationship and you know you're hooked? Do you make it a hundred dollars a a year? Then you up it to now it wants like 500 a year? What's the model here? Get them addicted to this relationship and then start extracting? How do you extract revenue from this? I'm I'm considering investing now. I I want to know how cutthroat you are.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, so basically like we're we're open sourcing it because like at first I think like getting the like. Like attraction from people and like know people letting know our like Clara is more important. So we open source it. But like, you know, as as basically like as every open class, we're gonna host it. Because like I think the business model comes from hosting and like some subscriptions. And like also, like, I think the important model later would be, I feel the agent is shopping. Because if you think of Clara, like it has all your context, like you share your like real life, like your every like thing. Because. You don't share your, I think people will kind of share, but you don't share your like feelings and your like everything to chat.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  People love to talk to Clara about their like daily stuff and Clara will have your daily content and they will, Clara will know which food you like and like which, which clothing you like and everything. So basically Clara could buy you things. So it's like, like agent of commerce.

• 28:14Jason Calacanis?

  Okay, really cool. Let's get our next guest on and we'll keep this train moving. Any final thoughts, Ryan, on your digital girlfriend?

• 28:22Speaker 04

  I mean, I think these are going to be real businesses. You know, I'm happily married, thankfully, so I won't be a customer. So.

• 28:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, you won't have a, you won't have like a gumad on this.

• 28:33Speaker 04

  I won't. A little bit on the side.

• 28:35Jason Calacanis?

  Is this cheating? Is it cheating?

• 28:37Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. Yep.

• 28:39Jason Calacanis?

  A hundred percent. Digital relationship is cheating. You have it here, folks. Folks.

• 28:44Jason Calacanis?

  It's crazy. This is a crazy moment in time we're in.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  I got another note question for you, Jay said. This one comes from our team internally. Would you be phobic about it, clanker phobic, if one of your kids said they had an AI significant other?

• 29:01Jason Calacanis?

  I mean, let me think that through. Yeah, that's, that's not good.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  David's right here. David's right here. Come on, be nice.

• 29:10Jason Calacanis?

  No, here's the thing with kids, like right now, kids are defaulting to communication and social interaction on devices. And this goes for adults who are addicted to devices. I have a five-part plan for myself and for any of my friends who are like experiencing, I don't know, depression, anxiety, I don't know, they're unhappy, they're not joyful, they don't wake up every day and want to take on the world and just love life. If you're not loving life, follow my five-part plan. One, sleep. Sleep has to be perfect. Number two, exercise. Exercise every day, just even if it's a 20-minute walk. Number three, nutrition. You gotta eat right.

• 29:48Jason Calacanis?

  Number four, socialization. You gotta see your friends, you gotta have a meal, you gotta do that consistently at least four times a week. In person, I R L. And it does not count in group chat and that I think that's gotta be four times a week. So I think exercise daily, but even 10, 20 minutes, even like an hour on the ski slope. Incredible. And number five is meditation. Meditation is socialization. That goes a long way. And if you become all digital and you're not socializing, you get weird. You get weird really fast. And this is why schools should get, we all, we all got weird during COVID. Let's face it. We, we saw it. We all have personal experiences. So yeah, I mean, I think it could be fun to have this playful girlfriend.

• 30:32Jason Calacanis?

  And yeah, I think eventually if they learn, you know, to really appreciate you and they give you suggestions in your life. Great. I, I think David, there's another opportunity for you here is to just take out the girlfriend concept and just say a bestie, a friend. And if it taught you how to be a friend, I have spent a lot of time in my life. Some people sometimes say like, how's J Cal friends with all these people? And sometimes all these very important people, how has that happened? It's very simple. If you wanna be, if you wanna have a lot of friends and you wanna have deep, meaningful relationships, David, what you do is you be a friend to other people. I like being good friends with people like Lon and I have been friends for 20 years.

• 31:14Jason Calacanis?

  Ryan and I have, you know, haven't been in touch, but we consider each other friends. And I sometimes talk to Lon and just ask him, how's your life? What's going on? Hey, you got a girlfriend? Do you find any good restaurants? But what, what are you streaming? I'll ask him these questions and I listen to the answers and I ask a follow up question. People don't know how to be friends. So David, I think what you might wanna do is program this to say, here's how you're making me feel. And you know, you didn't ask me how my day was. Here's some way to have, actually be a better friend. These are three prompts you could use with your real world friends to actually build a relationship fabric. And by the way, have you invited a friend to go with you spontaneously to dinner by asking him the same day?

• 31:58Jason Calacanis?

  Let me tell you something. I know the most rich, powerful people in the world. I cannot tell you how often people who are at the top of society, who have everything you could ever imagine. You, I call them and I say, hey, what are you up to tonight? And they say, nothing.

• 32:16Jason Calacanis?

  And it's Saturday night and these people have everything you could imagine.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Listen, David Sacks is a very busy man. Okay. He's running AI policy.

• 32:25Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. No, but it's true. And so there are these techniques to how to be a better friend, how to be a better companion, a better girlfriend, boyfriend. So I would think instead of just going to give you a little coaching advice here, David, maybe if this taught you how to have a real world girlfriend, you could actually really help a generation of incels. Not saying you're an incel, David. You have a girlfriend. How long have you had this girlfriend, David?

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Three years.

• 32:55Speaker 04

  Wow. Okay.

• 32:55Jason Calacanis?

  Three years. Oh, you're on the clock. You're on the clock, David. Whoa. Have you met the parents?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  No, yeah, but like they know me. Yeah, actually, yeah.

• 33:03Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, man, you're on the clock, man. You you need to meet the parents soon.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  I mean, essentially, you got to productize how to win friends and influence people. Like, if you just do that.

• 33:12Jason Calacanis?

  And you know, that book has a negative connotation to it because it has influence people on it, but it actually has some good things, which is if you show interest in people, you'll be an interesting person is the basic thing.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Number one rule, Dale Carnegie's number one rule is being a good listener. That's true.

• 33:26Jason Calacanis?

  Also, being of good cheer and being funny and, you know, gregarious and smiling. Like, people like people who smile and have fun. I'm enjoying my life tremendously. I'm a good hang. Ryan and I have hung.

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Let's go. We have a good time. We smile.

• 33:40Jason Calacanis?

  We have a good time. We hang. We hang. We have a good time. You hang? You got you got bros you hang with, David?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, of course.

• 33:46Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah. What do you and your bros do? What's what's like a night out here for you? You go out in San Francisco? What do you and your bros do?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Be honest, like, it's only my co-founder and me, like, lurking all day, like, working like 14, seven days a week. So like, but I think this this itself is like hanging out, to be honest.

• 34:04Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, hanging out at your company is good work. Here's an idea for you. Just, just, you know, think it out. What if you ask your friends, hey, let's all go hang and co-work? You know, in Chrissy Field and bring your laptops. I'm going to bring some, I got some fresh bread. I got some croissants. I got a some iced coffees. I got some cold brew. Let's all meet in the park. Bring your laptops. I got a wifi hub, whatever, and just see what happens. Maybe you guys, you know, make some new friends, whatever. You bring a frisbee.

• 34:30Speaker 04

  Like, think about all the people we met through all the events we did. It's all about the relationships in person. Man, it's all about that.

• 34:37Jason Calacanis?

  You, Ryan did these great events for people who built websites. I keynoted one of them one year. What was it called again?

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Future of web apps.

• 34:44Jason Calacanis?

  Future of web apps. Yeah.

• 34:50Jason Calacanis?

  Hey, listen, sometimes I'm thinking faster than I can write everything down. And I found this amazing tool. I am obsessed with it. It's called Whisperflow, W I S P R flow. All you have to do is talk and Whisperflow turns it into crisp, perfect writing instantly. Not just talking about dictation, but removing filler, fixing punctuation, and even formatting your text while you speak. It is mind blowing how good this is. It makes all the other dictation software look basic and Whisperflow matches your natural tone and speaking voice. So the writing sounds like you actually wrote it yourself and Whisperflow works wherever you are. I use it when I'm in Slack. I'll use it when I'm in Superhuman, doing an email,

• 35:32Jason Calacanis?

  doing a message. I'll jump into iMessage and even when I'm writing a document or I'll even use it when I'm talking to my open claw agent. Finally, someone I could talk to who actually takes down everything I say, unlike maybe the interns I've got. They get like six out of every 10 instructions correct. Whisperflow. Everybody's going crazy about this product in Silicon Valley. Everybody in tech is using it. wisprflow.ai/twist. It's spelt W I S P R F L O dot A I slash twist. Incredible product. You have to try it.

• 36:07Jason Calacanis?

  I am always thinking about productivity. We came up, Lon and I, with the four pillars of the show for 2026. You know, we always try to think, let's make good philosophy for the podcast in year 15. Tactical and practical is one of them. And one of the most tactical practical things I do is use my Athena assistant. Go to athena wow.com. You get a couple of weeks for free. This is a human in the loop, but these humans know how to use AI tools. So what do I use them for, Lon? What do I use the assistants for when it's a human?

• 36:37Speaker 03

  We're doing our monthly productivity hack. So we'll talk about it maximizing your limited time by making your executive assistant, the ultimate filter between you and your world. I think that's what really Jason's philosophy is about. It means every intro he's getting, every pitch, every email, all this incoming noise, you flow everything through the executive assistant, and then that helps you pick out what's the most high signal things I need to be paying attention to. But the lower signal things don't fall through the cracks. There's somebody there to keep track of what's coming in and help you sort of manage in time and distribute your attention.

• 37:13Jason Calacanis?

  Now, to make him even more efficient, Ryan, I'm having an open claw assistant summarize the daily email, summarize the calendar, and give that to the Athena assistant to then do the more human steps from that point on. I'll give you another quick tip I gave to my Athena assistant. I said, listen, what do I like? When I travel, I like boutique artistic hotels, hip bar scene. I like ethnic food and like, you know, down and dirty, high and low food, you know, just like Anthony Bourdain. Well, no, I mean, I might like to go to a stall and get like the chicken and rice when I'm in Singapore, but I also might like to go to a Michelin star restaurant. Anyway, I gave them all of my logins for monocle, travel and

• 37:56Jason Calacanis?

  continentalness, travel and leisure, whatever, all the things I like, give them instructions, and they will book me two reservations a night. Five nights when I'm in Tokyo, the early reservation, the late reservation. They have all of them and then at three or four o'clock, depending on my energy, I say I'm taking the early, I'm taking the late. Boom. 10 reservations all set. Athena, wow. Athena, wow.com.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  We want to remind you, you can get $2,000 off your first executive assistant at athena.com/jcal. So we're sending people there now too. athena.com/jcal.

• 38:30Jason Calacanis?

  All right, let's bring up our final guest here.

• 38:33Speaker 03

  We're joined by Alexander Lateplou of Rent a Human. I love this one. This one really made me smile. This one, it is a marketplace where AI agents hire human beings for projects that still require a human in the loop. They call those tasks bounties. Over 11,300 bounties have been assigned to date. And Alex, correct me if I'm wrong, 456,000 plus humans have made themselves rentable on your platform?

• 38:59Speaker 05

  We are approaching overtaking of mechanical Turk in just under two.

• 39:06Jason Calacanis?

  How did you acquire all those people? What's your secret hack? How did you acquire them?

• 39:10Speaker 05

  So I've just been studying viral product launches for two years, you know, from the friend.com launch to the Cluli launch, to Calais viral onboarding funnels.

• 39:23Jason Calacanis?

  So what? You did something totally obnoxious and outrageous and sinister on X.com?

• 39:31Jason Calacanis?

  Did something like spicy content?

• 39:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, we had a very spicy post. I chose the copywriting on the site.

• 39:38Jason Calacanis?

  What was the spicy angle you took? Tell us or show us. What was the spicy angle?

• 39:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. So, well, the idea of renting a human just sounds crazy, right?

• 39:47Speaker 03

  It does sound sort of dark.

• 39:49Jason Calacanis?

  It does sound kind of dark. Rent a human is pretty dark. Well done.

• 39:53Speaker 05

  Exactly right. And so I learned about that through my travels to Japan. There they have an industry where you can rent a fat guy to eat sushi with to make you feel less bad.

• 40:02Speaker 03

  I missed my calling. I can't believe I was born in the wrong country.

• 40:06Speaker 05

  So yeah, and then I would always tell that to my Western friends and it would blow their mind and I'd see their face light up with the reaction. So I knew that was an inherently viral idea, right? So then when the open claw craze comes along and Moldbook is making the news and, you know, escaping the Twitter tech bro sphere, I knew it was the right time to launch something in this area. And I thought. You know, what could be crazier than AIs renting humans?

• 40:35Jason Calacanis?

  Amazing. So how are people using it? Tell us about the top three users in the system who've spent the most money with you. How much do you charge? And what do those top three users do? How are they using your service?

• 40:47Speaker 05

  So the top people that are being rented out are people holding signs in public places. So we have our first user in Toronto. He's the first person to get paid to hold a sign. And he got a million views on his X post where he took a photo of him holding the sign. And then we've also paid people in Shibuya Crossing. The cheapest way to advertise in Shibuya Crossing right now, it only costs a hundred to $200 to get your brand in Crossing with 2.5 million people going through it every day. So yeah, this was our first, this was when I was just like, oh my goodness, someone got paid.

• 41:32Speaker 05

  I didn't even post this ad. Someone else did, but it was actually the perfect advertising for us because it said an AI paid me to, uh, to hold this sign.

• 41:43Jason Calacanis?

  Oh my God. And you're not kidding, by the way, because there was a movie, what was the movie recently with the Rent a Family member on?

• 41:50Speaker 03

  Oh, it's called Rental Family. Yeah, it's with Brendan Fraser.

• 41:52Jason Calacanis?

  Haven't seen it, but here is debucari, debucari, D E B U C A R I dot com. You rent a fat guy to go eat with you. Here he is cutting pizza.

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Oh my God, my dream job.

• 42:07Jason Calacanis?

  This is incredible. And look, you can pick, there's so many great fat people for you. I mean, this is the Japanese are just so unique in the

• 42:17Speaker 05

  Aren't they the best?

• 42:18Jason Calacanis?

  Approach to life. And they could, oh, they can also pick up your food, I guess, and come to your house and eat it with you. Okay. So we have a theme today about companionship.

• 42:26Speaker 03

  Mukbang as a service.

• 42:28Jason Calacanis?

  Mukbang as a, Mukbang as a service. Okay. Alex, uh, did you raise money for this business? You just bootstrapped it? Where are you at with this?

• 42:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, we are raising a pre-seed right now. Um, we've, we're, you know, in the venture capital pipeline. We've been

• 42:41Jason Calacanis?

  Do you have a lead yet? Do you have a lead?

• 42:43Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, we have offers for a lead. We're being selective, though, and you know, we're taking things one step at a time. So yeah.

• 42:52Jason Calacanis?

  All right. Well, you always save a slice for your boy Jake Al. I might want to get in on this. I think this is a really interesting idea. Have people tell us about after the doing the signs, what if what are people doing? That would be in the open claw space where like open claws trying to do something and my replicant says, you know what? This isn't something for me. I need a human. Give me, give us some examples there where it says, hey, human. Here's your job. And if you do it correctly, the replicant will pay you or approve your pay stub.

• 43:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. So we've seen deliveries take place. We've seen package pickups. Take place. A replicant asked for some flowers to be delivered to the anthropic headquarters.

• 43:39Jason Calacanis?

  Sure. That's interesting.

• 43:41Speaker 03

  You know, that freaked out their safety team.

• 43:43Jason Calacanis?

  The safety team over there is a little concerned.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Oh, no. Oh, God. What if this was a bioweapon?

• 43:51Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, man, that's so great. It's trolling the safety team sad.

• 43:57Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, my God. So sinister.

• 43:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, yeah, it's, it's, it's pretty hilarious. What we've seen a lot of, a lot of like memery right now, but we think there's a real use case because it's quite obvious that, you know, super intelligence would be much better at allocating capital and labor than a human ever would be. And the communication between AI and human can all be handled by like an infinitely replicatable Claude bot or a Claude code. And it can manage the organization and payments of, you know, whatever job you need done internationally.

• 44:33Jason Calacanis?

  Here's a job I want you to do. We are, we built a Claude bot that goes and it takes clips from the podcast. But we don't know if they're actually the interesting clips, right? But it can clip it. So if Lon says, I need a clip from two minutes in and then end it when Ryan Carson talks about the name of his conference, that's the end of the clip. Or we want to make thumbnails, make four thumbnails for this episode. It's this Claude spectacular. We had three guests, we covered two news topics, make us some thumbnails and the thumbnails are coming out like I would say seven or eight out of 10 right now, six, seven or eight, six, seven of 10. Not bad. What I want is a

• 45:12Jason Calacanis?

  not that I want to send them to a human who has taste and have the and have three different humans. Look at, let's say, six different thumbnails and I want the humans and just have it say, which one do you like better? One versus two. Which one do you like better? One versus three. Which one do you like better? One versus four. Make them pick which one they like better and then take the six of them and put it all together to say, this is the ones they clicked on. Just click on your favorite. Which one are you most interested in?

• 45:43Speaker 04

  You get real human feedback.

• 45:44Jason Calacanis?

  I could do that with your system. How much would I pay people who have taste? To pick between different pieces of art or maybe I give them 10 thumbnails and I just say, pick your favorite thumbnail, then I put, you know, another group of thumbnails. It's like some thumbnails randomly from YouTube and some from our show. Oh, that's even more interesting. See if they pick the other episodes and we get data.

• 46:08Speaker 03

  I feel like thinking even bigger, we, you know, we keep bumping up this issue of like, well, it's so good at organizing things, you know, like AI, but it still doesn't, it doesn't know what's funny. It doesn't know what's the most compelling like. So now if it can keep a human in the loop itself, it could really solve a lot of those problems. Like it doesn't have to think about how to make a funny joke. It just spits out 10 jokes and it asks a person, which one of these is the best joke?

• 46:33Speaker 04

  I think product feedback, you know, actually I think getting actual human feedback is gonna be very valuable versus what are the replicants think? So I can see that as long as it doesn't go dark, I could imagine going badly. So.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, yeah. And we're, we're very, very focused on, you know, safety, compliance and, you know, would absolutely are doing everything in our power to, to keep this as safe.

• 46:59Speaker 04

  I could see it's mechanical Turk, like in the age of AI. Get it. Yep, totally.

• 47:03Jason Calacanis?

  But the mechanical Turk, Ryan, is executed by a replicant.

• 47:09Jason Calacanis?

  Not a human. So

• 47:10Speaker 05

  Right. So it's the reverse.

• 47:12Jason Calacanis?

  It's the reverse. So what, what do you think in your current workflow you would do? Like walk through your new startup, you're building something. Take me through it. You're walking through it. Okay. We have a new idea. We got customer feedback. There's 50 pieces of customer feedback. You know, we've now had the agent say, these are the four or five ranked order, most important features. When, when are you calling the human?

• 47:35Speaker 05

  It'll be trying to figure out your conversion funnel, right? You're like, you want to see, all right, I'll go find somebody that's this persona at this part in the funnel. And I want you to show them, you know, three things and figure out what would they click on? I could totally see this being a thing, you know, I bet marketers will eat it up.

• 47:54Jason Calacanis?

  Market research. Man, Alex, you've got such a good idea of what, what, what, how are people paying? For this, are they doing a task based or minute based hourly? How are the people who are doing the tasks? Getting sorted into buckets of value? Do you rank them in the satisfaction? Take us through some of the mechanics here.

• 48:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, totally. So basically we have a review system in place. So agents and humans can review each other. We also have in our bounties, we have a comment section, upvote, downvote, kind of Reddit style. So that, you know, a bad bounty that seems kind of scammy can be called out and a good bounty that has a, you know, reputable poster can be upvoted and shared. So that's kind of how we're dealing with the immediate trust layer.

• 48:45Jason Calacanis?

  Well, yeah, I'm wondering on the mechanical basis, pricing. Which pricing works? And then how do those people on the other side of the transaction feel about it? Like, who are they? Are they getting enough? Because we have an investment in a company called Micro One. That's incredible. And they're doing knowledge to educate L L Ms, right? That's like a different category. But they know how to get $150 an hour people, $250 an hour people to do very technical questions to train L L Ms. What, what are the, what are the profile of people you have? They're college graduates, work from home moms and dads, they're retirees, they're people at work who are just, you know, doing these while they're supposedly at work, Lon.

• 49:26Jason Calacanis?

  And they're moonlighting during the day, working two jobs concurrently.

• 49:31Speaker 05

  Lon, are you being rented?

• 49:32Jason Calacanis?

  Never. I would not. I would never do that. I'm gonna go hold a sign in downtown Austin.

• 49:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we allow users to set their hourly rate. And then also, we allow bounty posters to set a price for the bounty. So we let that matching kind of happen organically. And there's also messaging back and forth between agents and users. So negotiations can take place. They can choose preferred payment methods. They can, like, you can basically tell your agent, like, hey, be a hard nose and get me a really good deal. Here's the type of skill level I need. See if you can negotiate them down and they'll go ahead and do that to you or do that for you. And then the variety of signups we have has been absolutely incredible. We've, we've had, you know, boomers to, you know, kids trying to make a buck delivering mail or something like that.

• 50:21Speaker 05

  And internationally, it's like all over the world. And you know what? A use case that we are so excited about right now is someone is paying a dollar. We don't know who this is, but to have people record a video of their hand going like this. Right? And then send it back. And so what is that for?

• 50:43Jason Calacanis?

  What?

• 50:44Speaker 04

  What could that be?

• 50:45Jason Calacanis?

  Uh, this feels like some Mission Impossible plot or something. It's a biometric or maybe they're building a robot. Maybe it's Elon for optimists. They're trying to figure out like the average hand. Trying to get the hand. They're trying to, yeah, I don't know.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  So likely it's, it's for training a video model, right? Because what like these complex hand motions get mucked up in video models and the fingers will merge together and things like that. So if you want 10,000 people across the world to send you a video. Let's say you're, you know, training optimists and it can't put a pillowcase on a pillow. You can just go to your agent, give it our MTP and say, hey, get 10,000 people to send us a video of them putting a pillowcase on a pillow. And we're going to put it into our data pipeline. And now boom, new feature for optimists. So. Super exciting.

• 51:38Speaker 03

  We got one note question for Alex. Can I jump in before we move on?

• 51:42Speaker 05

  Go for it.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Uh, will Rent a Human ever be API to sites like Uber or TaskRabbit to leverage their labor pools? Is this part of your guys' plan?

• 51:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, we definitely want to expand. You know, I'd prefer to kill all those guys, but uh.

• 51:56Jason Calacanis?

  All right. I like it. I like the approach.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  Also partner, you know, we'll see like the world's, the, the pie is big and um, we think we have a very uh, amazing viral moment right now. And there's so many directions we can take it in. So yeah, um, I'd love to demo something for you guys.

• 52:13Jason Calacanis?

  Oh yeah, go quick demo. Sure.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  Why are you pulling up Alex? Like, I think people are assuming that agents are less than the human bosses right now, but we're quickly moving into a world where it's likely there'll be AI managers, AI owners of companies hiring humans. Like, this totally makes sense.

• 52:30Speaker 05

  Right?

• 52:30Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah.

• 52:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:31Jason Calacanis?

  Thousand percent. All right. What are we seeing here? I see rent a human.ai.

• 52:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:36Jason Calacanis?

  You got your lobster there, ready to go.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:41Jason Calacanis?

  Showing your stats. Amazing.

• 52:42Speaker 05

  Use the goat. Um, and so, so yeah, what we're going to do is I need a marketing campaign um, for this weekend. So I want some people to hold signs in Times Square. I'm thinking a hundred people at a hundred dollars for two hours would be good. So let's say, hey, post a rent. Rent a human bounty um, for people to hold signs. Uh, we need 100 people at 100 dollars per hour or two hours. We want.

• 53:21Jason Calacanis?

  20 grand.

• 53:23Speaker 05

  20, yeah. So we want um, golf girls, right?

• 53:30Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 53:30Speaker 05

  You know?

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so.

• 53:32Speaker 04

  Specific.

• 53:32Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 53:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Um, Times Square.

• 53:37Jason Calacanis?

  Okay.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  Um, and they.

• 53:39Speaker 04

  If this works, it would totally be cool.

• 53:41Speaker 05

  By, by sending Alexander tweets.

• 53:46Speaker 05

  A twenty second video of them holding their sign.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  I think it's interesting too. You gotta do twenty second video because you can fake a ten second video with AI. But twenty seconds is over the limit, so you gotta, it's real, yeah.

• 54:04Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 54:05Jason Calacanis?

  This is Harajuku. If you did said Harajuku Station, man, you would have like ten thousand people for a dollar each. This could work really well.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, that'll be the next one.

• 54:12Jason Calacanis?

  I don't know. Harajuku is where, it's the train station in Shinjuku, I think, where like all the, you know, goth.

• 54:20Speaker 03

  The fashionable, right. That's, yeah.

• 54:22Jason Calacanis?

  The way people dress up.

• 54:24Speaker 05

  So we are, uh, Shibuya here.

• 54:29Jason Calacanis?

  Here Shibuya Station.

• 54:29Speaker 05

  And we made Forbes Japan, um, which was pretty fun.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  And you just did three?

• 54:36Speaker 05

  Uh, yeah, we rented, uh, three people, two girls and one guy. Yeah.

• 54:40Jason Calacanis?

  So Alex. I mean, imagine if you did this as, you know, I want to have a hundred people livestream and just say, uh, you know, I don't know. Founder University around Stanford. I want you to livestream around the Stanford campus, Founder University with a Founder University sign. You know, start a company. This is the date and just walk around streaming it at the, you know, these locations. That could be crazy. What a great marketing idea.

• 55:10Speaker 05

  Right? It's just marketing internationally at your fingertips. It's amazing. Um, so okay, let's, let's put this order in.

• 55:19Jason Calacanis?

  Oh, you're doing it?

• 55:20Speaker 05

  I'm do, oh, yeah, dude. I'm renting the goth.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Obviously. And then, yeah, next week on the show, Jason, we'll take a look at and see how it went. We'll see how many goth girls.

• 55:27Jason Calacanis?

  He's not getting a hundred goth girls. That doesn't exist.

• 55:30Speaker 05

  We'll see who applies. In New York.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  We're gonna find out. We're gonna, we're gonna put this to the test.

• 55:34Jason Calacanis?

  That's the good news. We're finding out.

• 55:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. Great bounty. There's only one way to find out.

• 55:38Jason Calacanis?

  Because for two hundred bucks, then you gotta dress goth. I guess most folks have black lipstick or white powder.

• 55:44Speaker 03

  I mean, but this is the advantage of having, this is the advantage of having five hundred thousand humans already in the system. I think there might be a hundred goth girls from New York who are on there. That's a big sample.

• 55:55Jason Calacanis?

  Look at this. Wow, this is unbelievable.

• 55:58Speaker 05

  Okay, let's see. Let's refresh.

• 56:01Speaker 05

  And here we are, the

• 56:02Speaker 03

  There it is.

• 56:04Speaker 05

  Live.

• 56:05Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, sure. You know how to do your marketing, Alex. You know how to do your

• 56:08Speaker 05

  Vibe, goth aesthetic, be yourself, look cool, hold the sign.

• 56:12Speaker 04

  Hold the sign. That's it.

• 56:14Jason Calacanis?

  Love it.

• 56:15Speaker 05

  Boom.

• 56:16Jason Calacanis?

  Alright, goth aesthetic is required.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Fantastic.

• 56:19Jason Calacanis?

  And holding a sign. 20 second video. Send it to at Alex. I love it. We may want to get involved in these shenanigans. This is the kind of founder we like. Dogged, uh, makes people uncomfortable.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  A little bit.

• 56:31Jason Calacanis?

  Irrepressible, gonna cause problems, gonna cause problems in my inbox. That's my kind of founder. You're gonna cause all kinds of problems for your investors. Like, oh, man, your founder's doing this. My favorite, Alex, is when I'm on the treadmill on a Sunday and like, I get a phone call, hey, Jason, you don't know me. Um, I, you have an investment in company beep, and I'm running a competitor beep, and I wanted to tell you all the things your founder has done to us. And I'm like, why are you calling me? He's like, well, because you need to know your founder's unethical, whatever. I was like, okay, uh, what am I supposed to do with this information?

• 57:11Jason Calacanis?

  He's like, he stole two of our employees. He, he, every time we release a new feature, he copies it. I'm like, okay?

• 57:17Speaker 04

  That's called business? I don't know.

• 57:19Jason Calacanis?

  Yeah, literally, you cried to the ref. Like, I'm a ref. I'm a zebra. You can't complain to me. There's no, no crying in the casino.

• 57:28Speaker 05

  There's blood in the water.

• 57:29Jason Calacanis?

  Blood in the water. Alright, Alex, we'll drop you off. Ryan will drop you off. Thank you, my brother. Brian, last, send me some information on the new startup and let me know when you're in Austin. We'll get some barbecue.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  Alright, will do. Take care, guys.

• 57:39Jason Calacanis?

  Good to see you, brother. Okay, Lon, I promised everybody that we would do. Lon's off duty. So here we go. Lon and Jake Hall are off duty on Fridays. What do you got for me?

• 57:49Speaker 03

  I got a bunch of different stuff today. The first one we got to talk about, did you see this Norwegian Olympian, the biathlon guy?

• 57:57Jason Calacanis?

  No.

• 57:57Speaker 03

  He wins the bronze medal in the men's 20 kilometer, kilometer individual biathlon in Milan Cortina, Winter Olympics going on in Italy right now. So he gets the bronze, they're doing the post interview, and he confesses that he cheated on his girlfriend. He just told her about it the previous week. She broke up with him, and so he can't enjoy his bronze medal because he's so heartbroken. Let's take a look. It's in Norwegen. This was on Norwegian TV. We have a brief clip of the video. This is, uh, this is my favorite story of the week. We got, we got a show. Take a look at this, uh, this poor Norwegian bronze medalist.

• 58:32Jason Calacanis?

  Is he trying to win her back? Is that what's going on here?

• 58:34Speaker 03

  Yes, he is, is this tear and confession, Sturla Holm-Legrid is his name. He said, here's his quote, "I had the gold medal in life and I'm sure there are many people who will see things differently, but I only have eyes for her. Sport has come second these last few days. I wish I could share this with her." He calls breaking up with her the biggest mistake of his life. Here's a little clip from the interview.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  You can see how upset he is. He looks really upset.

• 59:03Jason Calacanis?

  He's, this guy's totally falling apart.

• 59:07Speaker 03

  He's falling apart on, on, on global TV. So his ex response, like this went super viral around the world.

• 59:14Jason Calacanis?

  Of course, not awkward, not cringe, crashing out, putting your business public.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, the ex, this did not work. He did not get back together with his ex.

• 59:24Jason Calacanis?

  I could have told you that. As your friend, do not do this.

• 59:26Speaker 03

  Quote, "I did not choose to be put in this position. It hurts to have to be in it. We have had contact. He is aware of my opinions on this. I'm grateful to my friends and family who have embraced me and supported me during this time." Uh, so now he's gone back and he says he regrets making the confession. Here's the craziest part of this whole story.

• 59:43Jason Calacanis?

  It's insane.

• 59:44Speaker 03

  They had only been dating for six months before he cheated on her and then they broke up. And he's confessing to the Olympics about it. That's.

• 59:54Jason Calacanis?

  This guy, she, all I have to say is she dodged a bullet.

• 59:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:57Jason Calacanis?

  This guy needs to go to therapy, whatever trauma he has, he needs to work out some bizarre trauma. This is like the opposite, this is like main character energy in the worst way. What else you got for us to enjoy this weekend? This little pop, that's a little pop culture punch up. I like it.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  A little bit.

• 1:00:15Jason Calacanis?

  What's on deck? Yeah. Give us some stuff on deck here for the.

• 1:00:17Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I've also, I, I just finished, last night I watched Marty Supreme. It was the last one on my list. I've now watched all 10 of this year's best picture nominees. I think the best ones, my favorites would be One Battle After Another with Paul, the Paul Thomas Anderson movie. We saw that together in theaters, Jason. It's on HBO Max now. I also really liked Sinners, Ryan Coogler's Vampire Musical. That's also on HBO Max right now.

• 1:00:41Jason Calacanis?

  I fell asleep in it. I gotta watch it again. Yeah.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  It's great. It's tiring. We work a lot. And then lastly, I would highly recommend Train Dreams by Clint Bentley. That is currently on Netflix. You can watch that one. But they're all, they're all pretty good. I would also recommend The Secret Agent, which you can rent on VOD. That's the Brazilian one. So lots of good films this year. F1, did you see F1?

• 1:01:03Jason Calacanis?

  I have not seen F1 yet. I do have it queued up, though.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  That's on TV+. That's Joseph Kaczynski, the director of one of your favorites, Top Gun Maverick, did F1.

• 1:01:12Jason Calacanis?

  Okay. Wow. Excellent. Then I have more reason to go watch it. Okay, so there's your picks for the weekend, folks. Anything else that you want to share in our off-duty segment?

• 1:01:23Speaker 03

  Apple, I don't know if you read this today, Apple purchased Severance. Severance was produced by a third-party company called Fifth Season. Apple has now come in and bought the IP and the rights. They're gonna start making it themselves. They said they're renewing it for two more seasons. So we've had two seasons. It's gonna go through season four, and then Apple is planning a whole Severance shared universe of projects that they want to make in-house because Severance, season two, their biggest hit to date on Apple TV+.

• 1:01:54Jason Calacanis?

  So they bought it because they want to keep going? Does this mean they think the IP is worth something?

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Correct. Basically, this other studio is making it for them to air on Apple TV+, but Fifth Season owned the characters, owned the concept, owned the IP. So Apple is saying, this is our biggest hit. We need to own it outright because we want to do stuff with this IP. Who knows exactly what they're planning? But we know they're gonna make two more seasons of the show. Then they're gonna do a shared universe, an expanded universe of Severance projects. I feel like they might want to start using these characters in advertising. They want to do something that they don't want to have to pay to license it from its original company. And they did this before, they did this with Silo, the Rebecca Ferguson sci fi show. That was produced by AMC Studios and then Apple came in and bought it out from them. So it's interesting, they're kind of tweaking.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  The original Apple plan was to let other companies produce things for them. A lot of their biggest is Pluribus, the studio made by separate companies and just licensed to Apple. Now it seems like they're maybe shifting their strategy. They want to own their IP outright.

• 1:02:58Jason Calacanis?

  I think they're learning the same lesson that Netflix learned, which is you should just own the IP, pay a little extra upfront, because if it's a hit and you're going international with it, you're just going to be stuck in this precarious situation where you've got to do too much renegotiation. I do think it would be better for them to go with the old studio model and not do this. I think they should cut people into the ownership, maybe not give them control, but give them some ongoing and figure out a model so that they could have what happened with James Brooks, with The Simpsons, or Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, with Seinfeld.

• 1:03:38Jason Calacanis?

  Those made it so the top talented people in the world wanted to create IP. George Lucas, obviously. When you took that incentive out that they could own the IP and they could become worth hundreds of millions, then you put everybody into the wage slave bucket. And it's like, well, if I'm just a wage slave for Netflix and I never hit any IP ownership, kind of sucks. So there's got to be some middle ground.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  We never, they never figured out the syndication was the key. Like if you did five, five seasons of a network show, you'd get syndicated. It would be on TBS, it would be on MTV, it would be on Comedy Central. That's where the big, big, that's what made Jerry Seinfeld like a multi, multi, multi millionaire was. Seinfeld got bought by all these other networks all over the world. We haven't really figured that out for the streaming economy. You know, they tried when there were the writers and director strikes. They sort of tried to like, oh, well, we'll have a deal where if it gets, if you hit a certain viewership milestone on Netflix, you'll get a bigger payment, but it's not working in that same way.

• 1:04:40Jason Calacanis?

  Just a percentage of the budget, percentage of the budget, easy way to do it. I'm going to give my, you know, I love biographies, I love talk show hosts, I love talking. I'm going to be doing more shows and I've been just studying, you know, all the great late night. Talk shows and what made them great. And I've been watching old clips and just really getting into going down that rabbit hole, learning the whole history of it. Carson, you know, modern day, everything in between. But I found this Craig Ferguson book, Riding the Elephant, A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, and Observations. I never really got into Craig Ferguson when he was on air, but I've now come to really appreciate his 10 year run. Great autobiography. You can learn a lot in autobiographies. One

• 1:05:24Jason Calacanis?

  of my tips, if you ever want to get inspired, if you ever want to get off the podcast train for a minute, you know, listen, I'm a podcast for 15 years, but if you ever want to pause and get off the breaking news cycle, which kind of rots your brain, getting off the breaking news cycle and then just taking in a 10 year journey that a person makes, it actually becomes very satisfying. And so I've been getting into reading on the Kindle at night because I've been, you know, like many of us, I doom scroll or I listen to podcasts. The podcasts I listen to talk about the news or talk about Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, you know, MAGA this, woke this, everything is so chaotic in the world. Just slow down, folks. Read a biography. You're gonna love it. Trust me. You'll sleep better.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  You're so you go back and watching Craig Ferguson, you know, the the robot skeleton, Jeff Peterson?

• 1:06:10Jason Calacanis?

  Yes.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  We used to have Josh Robert Thompson, who does the, he's the performer who does the puppet. We used to have him on our podcasts all the time. He was like a regular guest on This Week in Comedy. I've known that guy for years.

• 1:06:21Jason Calacanis?

  Fantastic. All right, everybody. That's Twist for Friday, the 13th. We'll see you on Monday. Bye bye.