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A
All right, everybody, welcome back to Twist. It is April 6, 2025. How do I know it's April 6? Mall is out today. Oh, right, the new Star wars animated and it's got great reviews. I love watching Clone Wars, Star Wars Rebels. I'm excited to see all of it with my daughters.
B
I'll tell you what I don't like, though. We're already in the point where any new Star wars thing comes out and immediately people start comparing it to andor. That's what it's like, oh, this is the andor of cartoons. And it's like, I'm already tired of that. It doesn't have to be andor to be good. Let's just enjoy it for what it is.
A
No, I'm going to take the other side. I'll tell you why I'm going to take the other side and. Or set the high water mark. So it used to be like, is this as good as Empire Strikes Back?
B
Yes.
A
And so, you know, now I consider andor an Empire. This is going to be big for people.
B
This is about to be controversial.
A
I consider them equal.
B
Wow.
A
I consider them equal now. That doesn't mean I don't have an affinity for Empire. As a kid, it was like the most meaningful thing for me.
B
Plus old guys. Yeah, it strikes a but.
A
Yeah. All right, listen, we have so much to get to.
B
It's AO70, by the way. It's. I've started keeping track again.
A
Good. AO70.
B
70. 70 days since our very first episode about OpenClaw.
A
AO70. Yeah. And I got a confession here.
C
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A
I have been stunted. I'm stunted right now with my openclaw because of this Claude stuff using the open source ones. It's not stable enough for me and I haven't taken the time to fix it. And then I find myself on Perplexity Computer and Open Claw Computer, which is what I think those Platforms want is they want to shut down and get everybody to use their version of openclaw, which we will discuss today. But before I do any of that, I'm going to just take a minute to applaud plod. I'm going to turn on my plod pin. There it goes. Boom. I press the button. And now everything I say, I'm recording and it's on my lapel. This is the plod pin, but this is the other one. You can put this little device sees like a little wallet. You snap it on the back of your iPhone. This is the iPhone. You can see how thin it is. IPhone there. Boom, boom. You put that right on the back. Then if you want, you just press this button, does a little haptic. You're recording, press it again. Haptic off. Why is that important? This thing's got like 1700 microphones. Boom. I press this, I lay it on the table. During our management meeting. I got everything set. I don't have to go futz with it or whatever. And it's got a great little. This is the great thing about the plodding. This is the base for the pin. You see that? This is my backup. So I have two plug pins. Pop it in here. That's the USB C. Boom. It charges. But when it gets on my Wi Fi 2.4 GHz, Wi Fi MHz, it syncs.
B
Yeah.
A
Then I send Lon the notes. Then Lon has his whole weekend ready to go. He's got a whole bunch of plans, and now he's got new plans. Give him the offer.
B
If you and your work depend on having conversations, interviews, meetings, taking calls, you gotta get yourself a Plaud note pin. Check it out at P L, A, U D AI Twist. That's Plaud AI Twist. And if you use the code twist, they're gonna give you 10% off your new note pin.
A
You know, we had a nice week last week. We did this $2 bill test.
B
Yes, the B of a $2 bill test.
A
And that went viral.
B
I think it's close to a million views now on X, which for us is not bad.
A
I think it's important for people to be detail oriented. And, you know, that's why I talk about the Checklist Manifesto all the time. And you wanted to see who's hungry to get things done and who's a detailed person in startups. This is your tactical, practical tip. Everybody wants to be an idea person. Everybody wants to be a vibes person. But being a grinder and a detail person, a lot of people don't want to refine that skill. The founders, you get to be whatever you want. You're the founder, you created it. But for everybody else, you're obligated to be on point. Tight is right. Keep a checklist. Now, why is a checklist important? Well, I've talked about the checklist manifesto many times. People are fallible. Is that the right word?
B
Fallible.
A
Fallible. Thank you. As I just proved, we're fallible. I haven't used that word in like 30 years. We're fallible.
B
People make mistakes.
A
We make mistakes constantly. I make mistakes constantly. When you have a checklist, you'll make less mistakes. And one of the things we wanted to get right was just reviewing our social media. The fact that the $2bill test went well was a function of. We found like an interesting moment in the show and we had a checklist. How we name the clips, how we do all this. So just do yourself a favor, make checklists. Have your team do it. Force them to print them out and make sure you review the checklist, whatever it is. You're onboarding a new customer, you're hiring somebody. Make sop standard Operating Procedures and everything will go better. Especially in an agentic world. Yes. And that's what we're going to talk about today. If you're one of the people who's a detailed person and you combine yourself with this agentic software. Making the checklist was great for humans. But making the checklist is even better for openclaw. It's even better for Claude Cowork, it's even better for Perplexity Computer. Yeah, that's what I want to get through here today. And I made that sort of jump like, hey, if you can make a checklist, then you can put your replicant on a checklist and you can hold your replicant accountable. And we're getting there. We're getting there.
B
We've got a little closer. It's the memory I think is the key. Like if you could get your open claw to start remembering everything you're telling it and keep track of everything, remember with their heartbeat and their soul md. And however you do it, that seems to be the key. That's where I keep running into trouble, is Gaff is very forgetful.
A
Yeah, you're a replicant.
B
He lives in an EC2 instance and so he's not, he's not on top of it.
A
Problematic. Yeah, I just bought the new, I just bought a new MacBook Pro. Cause I had like a four year old heir and it Was. My air was great, but I was like, I'm in Brooklyn, you know, as I went to see my dad last week, he's doing much better. Anyway, I get the MacBook Pro and my God, when you put 48 gigs of RAM on these things and this new M5 processor, it is like, scary how much faster and better this hardware profile is. And it's only getting better. This is the.
B
I gotta get Gaff's own system. This is ridiculous.
A
Now I think when we get the Mac studio out, I'll get you a Mac studio.
B
I got it, I got it. I gotta get it.
A
All right, let's introduce our guest. We got a lot to get to today.
B
Yes, please. We got three returning favorites. Three of our top open claw experts came back for a reunion special. First up, he is a founder. He is a developer. Last time he was on, he showed us Ant Farm, his open source tool. This time, he's got a new demo to show us. It's called Claw Chief. Give it up for Ryan Carson. Ryan Carson, back on the program.
A
Oh, yeah, Ryan Carson, my old friend. What continent are you on? Are you in the US Now? I know you spent a lot of
D
time in Europe, so, Jason, I guess you're a senior dad. I'm visiting my dad this week. So.
A
How's he doing?
D
Not great.
A
I'm going through two. Yeah. Yeah. My dad's in for. How old is he?
D
He's, you know, late 70s.
A
Yeah, that's when it gets real.
D
And so I'm in beautiful Colorado Springs in their lovely home today, so. Hello.
A
Amazing. Amazing. All right, well, sending good vibes to your dad and it's great that you're going to see him. I'm sure he is over the moon seeing his incredibly successful son. My dad was super, super, super excited to see me, especially since I am his most successful son.
D
Since you're his favorite child.
A
Yeah, he did. He didn't mention. Sorry. To Jamie and Josh.
B
Jamie's doing great. Jamie's doing great.
A
He's doing great. Proud member.
B
Up next, we've got the founder and CEO of Creator Buddy. He's a vibe coder. He's an open claw influencer. It's Alex. Finn. Thanks for being here, Alex.
A
You just call Alex an influencer. Alex.
B
Alex isn't.
D
Watch out.
C
I don't want to consider myself an influencer, but I do believe I'm the most influential person on Earth.
B
Yes, I'm personally very influenced by Alex.
A
Here's how you know he's an influencer when he's on the pod here on Twist. He's normal, but when he does his YouTube videos, he's like, I have to say, I am Alfred.
C
It's called showmanship, Jason. Showmanship.
A
I love it. I love it. I haven't gotten there. I have to figure out how to do the Mr. Beast.
B
Yeah, we tried to.
C
I'll help you guys take it to the top. We'll talk again after this.
B
We made those thumbnails that you do in the Mr. Beast face. Jason. You made us stop. You ordered us to stop.
A
I did this. I'm like, I don't know. I just feel. It's. No offense, Alex. I just feel like when you're an old guy like me and Ryan, hey, to do the listen, you have to
C
be as cringe as humanly possible. It's the only way to win the Internet game. It's the only way.
A
It's the only way. Okay, I'm going to embrace my cringe and my off.
B
Finally, I'll just give in.
A
We've just. I'm going to give in to the cringe. I'm going to be cringe maxing. Let's do it. Alex is cringe maxing. I'm going to cringe.
B
It's time for cringe. All right. And finally, Jason, we've got one more member of our panel. He was on just about a week and a half ago. He's the founder creator of Open Oats. He's. If you'll recall, we had Yazen on the show. We were like musing aloud. Wouldn't it be great to have a virtual production team or working with US and a AIs helping out with every aspect of the show within 24 hours of his appearance. He built it, so he's here to show off. Sidecast Yazen Al Ibrahim.
A
Sidecast Yazen. Welcome back. You hear me say it all the time. Startups need to be lean. You got to try to figure out how to get the most done while spending the least amount possible. It's called efficiency. You got to have the smallest, tightest team so that you can make your Runway less. That's why you need Gusto. Gusto is a musto. Gusto is the essential payroll and benef software built for your startup or small business. It's all in one remote, friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere.
C
We use it.
A
We love it. Take it from your boy, jcal. Gusto's built in tools are going to save you so much time. For example, Gusto automates Every step of your payroll process, syncing your team's hours, PTO that's paid time off and holidays seamlessly. Plus plus it's so fast and simple to transfer your existing data and switch over to Gusto at any time. So try gusto today@gusto.com twist and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll@gusto.com twist this is very important because there was also something that came out this week and I thought we should start with Lon, which is in China there is a new trend which is you get your teammates fired before you get fired.
B
Wow.
A
So the concept here is we all know this is a sinking ship. When I say sinking ship, I mean employment.
B
Employment. The idea of working for a living. Yes.
A
The idea of having a job is over. Everybody understands it. Today Sam Altman said to Axios, which I guess he's underwriting Axios. I didn't know that he was. Is like paying for the newsroom over there. But he's got. There's some disclaimer at the end like. And just in full disclosure, OpenAI pays for a lot of our journalists, but tee this up, lan. Tee up this little cheese eater. The Chinese Cheese eater movement.
B
So a Bloomberg researcher named Steve Howe tweeted this the other day. Apparently workers in China have been creating colleagues skill to distill their coworkers, hoping to make them redundant, hence saving themselves. In response, someone has recently invented an anti distillation skill that has gone viral on GitHub. So yeah, I guess the idea being that your. Your coworkers are now going to create a Claude skill that does your job so that you get fired and they get to keep their job by the transitive property or something. I don't know.
A
This is the Chinese Cheese eater movement. They ate cheese. This is it. You understand, Ryan, you eat cheese, that makes you a. Who eats cheese?
D
Cheese eater. I don't know.
A
Who's a cheese eater? I believe we're looking for a rat.
D
A mouse.
A
A rat. And where I'm from in Brooklyn, if you eat cheese, that makes you a rat. And if you're a rat, watch your back. Okay? Snitches get stitches. Ryan, did you. You were in an education company and now you see this. Are you in the. What percentage doomer are you? And by doomer I mean.
D
Well, I can tell you the facts, right?
A
Yeah, please.
D
We just closed our seed round. Normally you would hire up and guess what? I'm not hiring anybody. Right. So I just deployed claw Chief. As my assistant chief staff. Fine. That's pretty straightforward. I'm just about to deploy another open claw to be my marketing manager. Like, this is where it's going to go. And then once you've got your claw. Claw optimized, then. Then you will hire human to run that claw. But yeah, I mean, this is a. This is a real thing.
A
It's a real thing. And you have the money in the bank. And it used to burn a hole in people's pocket. Hey, who can we hire? Who can we hire now? It's like, ah, hiring people is a lot of work. Yeah, humans are fallible. We gotta work with them.
D
And then, Jason, you lose them. You lose them. And then you have to retrain and reskill. And I think this is. We'll talk about this on the show. But the big unlock is you are continually improving this employee. And the more you improve them, the better they get. And then you can onboard even more. I mean, unfortunately, all of us humans, hey, we have our own families to feed. We do our own things. Yeah.
A
And free will. And free will. Like, we can go. We have employment at will and we have free will. These two things, Alex, as human beings and in a society, we boy, if you invest in a employee, a team member, and they get really good, the reward for that is they leave and start their own company. Or they leave and go work for some big companies willing to overpay them. So where are you at? What percentage are you, Alex, currently? What percentage are you like doomer versus boomer?
C
I'm 100% boomer. Not from an age perspective, but from a optimist perspective.
A
Yes.
C
I think where these guys got it wrong is I wouldn't be right if I'm in the corporate world right now. I'm not writing skills to get rid of my coworkers. I'm writing skills to get rid of myself. I'm putting out skills so that I can automate myself. I'm going, I'm using open claw to build a business on the side. So I don't care about the corporate world anymore. So I'm not like in jail from the corporate world. I think there's way bigger opportunity outside. So these people, I think they're doing it wrong. You got to automate yourself, not your coworkers.
A
Yeah, as in AI Boomer. AI Boomer. Just percentage wise, where are you at right now? Specifically employment being the one that people seem to be scared of. We'll leave the Terminator, Skynet. The thing gets out of control, off the table Right now, just, this is the debate of our ages right now and it's leaning towards doomer here in the us where are you leaning right now?
E
I'm probably like half, half, you know, I, I don't think. And I've seen a lot of people like just tweeting about openclaw and you know, all the variants of openclaw, but there's probably a very small percentage of them that are actually making money off the thing. I mean there, there's very few examples. I saw Nat, Nat Lyson, I think, who has his open claw and that's probably the best example where I think it's like it's making more than a million dollars. ARR. I don't know if it got there, but I mean it's selling like open cloth skills so it's not exactly doing something sort of, you know, earth shattering or creating any sort of new business. So I don't know, I'm probably like 50, 50. I think I definitely see like, you know, some aspects of, you know, work that can be, that can be improved, made more efficient, but I don't see the actual business impact. And maybe that's just a matter of time until you have all the right integrations and stuff in place. Or maybe not. I don't know.
B
There is Jason, there's this sort of counter narrative that I feel like we've heard from David Sacks a lot on All In. Here's a Marc Andreessen tweet from yesterday. The AI job loss narratives are all fake. AI equals massive ramp in productivity, equals massive ramp in demand. Equal equals massive jobs. Boom. Watch. And I have to say I'm, I keep hearing this and there is something to it. What I would say is to me, it doesn't feel like Gaff is anywhere near ready to work by himself. Like even if he was in a Mac studio, I feel like I would still need to be there giving him feedback pointers, asking him to do things. I don't think he's ready to replace me. He's ready to do like eight.
A
But now compare that to one year ago, your opinion, right? Two years ago, your opinion on ChatGPT. But I still feel like to me
B
it feels too soon to be like there. We're not going to have any more need for people. All these companies are going to be entirely bot run. I feel like for the, the near future at least, we do want humans in the loop. But it does feel like a lot fewer humans to me.
A
Like, yeah, here's Mark Andreessen. Yeah, he says Employer recovery from post Covid Hiring correction. Employee recovery from post Covid Interest rate spike. Elasticity. Elasticity equals demand. You know, I understand the concept here. Hey, people become more ambitious, they start more companies. These tools enable more. Sure. But you know, there's a, there are entire careers that will be retired and I think it's deflationary. So compensation is also going to come down. They're even laying off people in India. I don't know if you saw this, but a lot of people in India are starting to get laid off and that's actually been concerning to people. But let's get into it. Let's talk a little bit more about the technology itself today and where we're at.
B
Well, we got a top story we gotta talk about. Everybody's been talking about it all weekend. On Friday evening in a blog post, Anthropic announced that they were stopping they Claude subscriptions no longer cover third party access for tools like OpenClaw. This took. There you go, make the YouTube face. This started on Saturday, April 4th. It was announced in an email sent out Friday evening. So instead they're offering a pay as you go option build separately from your main Claude subscription to cover it. Here's Anthropic exec Boris Tierney on X. We've been working hard to meet the increase in demand for Claude and our subscriptions weren't built for the usage patterns of these third party tools. Capacity is a resource. We manage thoughtfully and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API. So that that to me.
A
Alex Rugpole. Yeah, when you're a busy founder, you move fast. Sometimes you break things. That's the job. But when you want to land those big wells, those lighthouse customers, you know, the major enterprise clients, you can't move fast and break things. No, you need to make sure your security and compliance is locked down tight. Tight is right. That's why Foundry University and I recommend startups work with Vanta. They're the leading security compliance solution that's being used by more than 15,000 customers. Vanta's not just going to help you with your SoC2. Their AI first system is going to continually monitor your filings and compliance. So big important deals are never going to get hung up. That's why you need a trusted partner like Vanta. They understand changing regulations and buyer expectations so you don't have to sweat any of the details. Vanta is going to do that for you. Twist listeners get $1,000 off at vanta.com twist that's V A N T A.com/twist for $1,000 off.
C
Listen, I don't like it because it costs me money and I don't like anything that cost me money. But I will say I totally understand it, right? All the subscriptions are subsidies.
A
That's it.
C
That's all. Like you're, you're just getting a lot of tokens for a small price. So what sense would it make for Anthropic to subsidize other companies tools? That doesn't make sense. You know, they do the subsidy so that they can collect data on CLAUDE code and data on other CLAUDE tools so that they can improve those products. But if you use that subscription OpenClaw, which they don't control, that's just polluting the data. So I hate it because I now have to spend more money. But I get why they did it. And just as a side note, I think the people who's ripping out Claude out of their Open Claw now are making a tremendous mistake. And yes, it's going to be more because Opus 4. 6 is clearly the best model for open cloth. Like anyone who's used Chad, GPT or Kim or anyone knows it is a downgrade and in some cases a significant downgrade. I personally believe Open Claw is the most powerful tool out there. So I think it would be silly to virtue signal and be like, oh, I'm ripping out Claude when all you're doing just hurting your own productivity.
D
So I've got data, I've got a data point on this, right? So I've actually been using GPT5.4 from the beginning on Open Claws disclosure. I have a bunch of credits on OpenAI API and I'm like, I'll burn them down. And it's interesting. And I actually messaged you Alex today about this because I started GPT 5.4. I've never used Opus in Open Claw in anger, so it's hard for me to compare them. But for one day I decided to do it. I'm like, I want to feel the pain. I don't have any anthropic credits. And for one full day of using Claw chief, which is a high level chief of staff, that's an Open Claw. It was going to be three to six thousand dollars for per month, right? So you're talking 100 to $200 a day. So these labs are hemorrhaging cash. Like if there's no way this stuff costs $200 a month, it just doesn't. So get used to it.
A
That's the key here is the entire industry and all the most powerful experiences in it are massive losses. Makes the losses of the Uber and Lyft competition when they were subsidizing rides or the food delivery. It makes it look silly. You got to think for every 20 or $200 subscription, they're losing on that top third of users multiple times that a multiple of that. Every time they get one of these power users, they lose probably a couple of hundred dollars a year, maybe a couple of thousand dollars a year. So this is the next car to turn over in the AI race. When OpenAI goes public, when Anthropic goes public, even to a lesser extent, when SpaceX goes public, they probably won't have to disclose all the way down to the XAI granular level because it's part of like many different businesses and it might not be material. So they'll report on the Starlink business unit, but they may not have to report granular levels. Anthropic is going to have to give these details in their S1. And so is OpenAI. And there was a story this weekend that OpenAI had a little internal debate between Sam Altman and the cfo Sarah Fryer of like, maybe Sam's like racing towards the cliff. And this, this is all allegedly the CFO is not happy about the spend. Yazan, I want you to comment on this tweet, not this one. We'll get to that in a second. I put another tweet in of Caveman. I don't know if you guys saw Caveman. Did you see this, Yassin?
E
Yeah, my brother sent me this, this tweet.
A
You know, explain what this is and if you buy it.
E
Yeah, I think that there's probably some truth to this. I didn't actually try it, but explain
A
what it is to the audience listening.
E
So the idea is, you know, there's, I guess the English language has a lot of fluff. You can probably get your message across using just like verbs and maybe, you know, a few adjectives. And that's essentially what this is, is like, you know, instead of blabbering on about how, oh, you know, I went ahead and did this thing, you could just say thing, did thing, and, you know, that's like 75% fewer tokens.
A
This was basically this guy owned. Patel said, I taught Claude to talk like a Caveman, to use 75% less tokens. Normalclaw 180 tokens for a web search task. Caveman Claude, 45 tokens. I would have gone, I executed the web search tool equals eight tokens. Caveman Version tool work, two tokens.
B
I would have said hopefully I wouldn't
E
be surprised that it actually works. I think the problem is you might end up speaking like a caveman.
C
Yes.
E
If you do this because I mean, if that's all you're reading, it's going to affect your vocabulary at some point.
A
The good news here alon is I think we're moving into the phase for the industry that there's tremendous value being created. People have become addicted to it. Just now insert ride sharing for the same thing. Now people have to pay the proper amount for it and the businesses have to move from being upside down and having a very deep J curve. The J curve as I said on all in and I think here will be $500 billion for the LLM industry, like 2 or 300 billion for OpenAI, 100 billion for Claude, 100 billion for XAI, whatever it is winds up being they're going to have to become profitable in three or four years and then pay back $500 billion in paid in capital from their profits to make this industry absolutely work. Compute, that should be a scary proposition to people.
B
Compute also has to come down in like wildly in cost. I feel like it's just not. Nobody can afford to pay what we need to pay for everybody to run their open claw. Like we're talking about, you know, like we've been off the users have been offsetting it to anthropic. Now they can't afford it, so they're throttling Claude and it's like at some point we have to figure this out or it's just imbalance. It costs too much to run Opus 4.6 as much as people want to.
D
So the show is this week in startups, Right. We're all startup founders. Right. And we are mercenaries for money, right?
A
Yeah.
D
And I think it's very simple. Right. If you're open claw is actually doing valuable work for you, for instance, chief of staff, marketing manager, et cetera, say you have to pay three grand a month. It's nothing. Right. The value you're getting out of that compared to a human that you would have paid to do that job is astronomical. Right. And it's retainable, it's improvable, it's scalable. Right. So I think you have to separate out these folks that are toying with OpenClaw and they're mad that it doesn't cost them $200 a month to real operators who are building businesses with this stuff. And I'll give Alex a layup here and Basically say, well, the mercenaries, for money are going to then do what he's doing with. With open models.
C
Yeah. Well, there's. There's two things that are going to happen here. The first thing is it's obvious that in the next month or so, we're going to start getting $2,000 a month subscription plan. It's like, that's just painfully obvious. The next round of models, which they're already kind of hinting at Spud and Mythos, saying much bigger, much more expensive models.
A
Who's doing each one? Spud and mythos, Chad.
C
GPT5.5 is spud. Mythos is Claude. And so they're both kind of leaking over the last couple of weeks. These are brand new models, you know, nothing to do with their past models. Much bigger, much more expensive.
A
I think that you're saying the $2,000 a month. Yes. Subscription to Claude and OpenAI is coming for consumers $24,000 a year, essentially a third of the salary of a, you know, two or three year out of school college graduate. That's going to be the next tier in order to use those models at scale.
B
Yeah.
C
I said, if it doesn't happen this year, I'll delete all my social media accounts. I am not confident it's going to happen. It only makes total sense.
B
Showmanship. Exactly.
A
No, I. You know what, Alex? I'm going to. I'm going to say, I think you're 100% correct here. What's happening now is they got us on the hook. They showed us how productive this stuff can be. They got us to go from a $20 subscription to a 200 because it was like, well, it's 180 bucks more. It's. Whatever it is, 2,000 a year. Hey, if we save 10 hours a month of launch time, that's worth thousands of dollars. Okay, great. We're going to save money with this now. They're going to appropriately price it. This is like going from a $5 Uber or Lyft, remember the $5 Uber and Lyft rides to the, you know, $16 one. You're like, well, $16 is a lot of money compared to taking the bus for 350 or the subway for 350. But I'm kind of used to this, and I love it.
B
Yeah.
A
So I'm gonna go door to door for 16. I'll figure out how to get the other. You know, I'll figure out where to get the, you know, incremental $9.
B
One. One thing. That was a big news story last Week that seems to have really died out. Was this like Claude code leaked and now it's open, everybody could find it. Is anybody considering using like an open Claude, like a on Claude code that got forked or is that not interesting?
D
No.
A
Every founder at some point confronts self doubt. It's just part of the job. Starting any kind of new project from a startup to a podcast, it's a leap of faith, right? You gotta have confidence, you gotta get in there. But there's one thing that can really boost your confidence and help you persevere through this journey and that's having an amazing partner you can trust. Like the launch accelerator and our friends at Shopify. Shopify is the e commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. In fact, they're powering 10% of all E commerce in the United States. From household names like Heinz and Mattel to companies that are just getting started. And if that's you, they're going to help you launch your new site with your own design studio. That's right. With hundreds of ready to use templates, Shopify is going to set you up with an elite online story that fits perfectly with your brand style. And if you ever get stuck, Shopify always has someone around to help out 24, 7, 365 days a year. So it's time to turn those what ifs into sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com twist that's shopify.com twist
D
so I, I spent you know, six months inside of one of the, the premier agent labs which was amp and you know, I know how this stuff works and this stuff, you know, you ship 30 times a day. So whatever we saw is outdated. You know, there's some tricks with memory and some things in there, but honestly none of it was surprising. Just use the stuff people like. There's whole companies that are doing this. Don't try to build a company for a tool that you can just buy.
A
I love having the open source models just to and having powerful local computers. I like this because it feels like they're going to flip in the next year and when it does, I want to be ready to go. Doesn't mean I won't pay the 2000, but we fired up three more on my Mac Studio, three more open source models, they're running concurrently and we're testing, putting jobs against all of them. There's a startup that's doing, I got pitched on that's doing intelligent routing of queries. So you do your query and then it instantly Is like, I think it's best for this one, or let's try it at this one and then see if we get a result that we think is good enough. And then we'll fail over to the next one and then fail over this one. So that's going to be an extraordinary dynamic process. Like, can you imagine? You send a query and it's like, you know what? Kimmy can do this. Oh, no, that's. You got to use Gamma. Is that what they call the Google one that you're. People going crazy about? Gemma 4 as well. So I just think that's the, the, the future of it. Getting that set up is a lot of work, but if somebody abstracts, it's super easy.
C
It's super easy. It's actually, I think, very kind of overrated. Everyone's saying how difficult it is to do. I have three Max Studios and a DGX Spark here. First of all, I agree it's clearly the future. Right. The more these companies squeeze, which they're doing the squeezing now, banning Open Claw, you know, making the pricing more expensive, everyone's saying the limits for Clawd have come down. Everyone's saying Opus is getting stupider. The more they squeeze, the more people are going to go to the DGX Sparks, the Mac Studios. And as you said, Open models have been about six months behind for the last few years. So right now they're at about Sonnet 4 or 5, which was six months ago. All I do to load These new models, Gemma 4 came out, I go to Open Claw, I say, hey, I think Gemma 4 just came out. Figure it out it goes, it installs it for you. So the complexity is pretty much gone. And I think as people feel more and more of the squeeze, they'll be running out and buying this hardware and loading these up.
A
Wait till it is built into your operating system. And this was Ryan's, old enough to remember this. Remember, like having to install TCPIP and put an ethernet card into a computer to get people on the Internet and like it doesn't work. And like, oh, what's the. Their port?
B
When I first went to ucla, you had to go wait outside the library with your hard drive so that they could install their ethernet card into your computer and you could go use the Internet in your room.
D
It's so fun.
A
Yeah. Once it's abstracted away and there's a system tray and the system tray is just automatically updating these models. And I can see it so clearly. I just spent 30 $400 on my Mac M2 M5, my Mac, M5, 48 gigs of RAM. I could have gone even higher. And I was like, doesn't seem necessary. But I bought this thing. And I was like, I don't have a. There's no cost difference for a business between a $1,500 laptop and a $5,000 laptop. There's no difference. Any business that's a viable business with 10 employees, it's a $35,000 difference over five years, which is a $6,000 difference, which is a $500 a month difference. It doesn't make a difference. We've just gotten used to computers being $1,500. They used to be. When I was growing up, the first PC was $4,000. That was in $1984. $1983, that's three times that. So they were originally $12,000. It was like buying a used car or even like a new cheap car. We're going to get back to that. People are going to start looking at, hey, when you hire somebody, yeah, you gotta put into account a 10k, 15k worth of hardware. That's where I think it's all going. But I want to see Yazen's incredible demo. He came on last time and he showed me, hey, what if you had this assistant that could be in your zoom and could be chat with you? I said, you know what I want? I want like four or five people on the podcast. One of them a fact checker, one of them writing jokes. Basically the entire Stern crew, from Jackie Martling to Gary Delabate to whoever. Like the smartest person is in the back. Fred, Fred Norris, John Hine, Fred Norris. Just all contributing pieces quietly to the host in their earpiece or on like a little monitor, text based monitor. So we're going to see that in a minute. He built it. I'd also like to thank Sam Altman for buying the Podcast Bros. Network because they got rid of all of the advertising. So welcome to all the podcast bro Advertisers who are now here.
D
Why do they do that? I'm still answering my head.
A
Okay, I could explain it in like three acts. Number one in a peak bubble, acquisitions happen that do not make logical sense because people have valuations that don't make sense. And then people want the stock of these magical companies. So if you're sitting there and you have a way to get 100 million or 200 million in pre IPO OpenAI shares, you're going to consider that, right? Even if your company's making 20 or 30 million, like theirs was. And it's on a tear, not in viewership, but in the revenue and the vibes. Number two, one of the guys worked with Sam Altman before we'd been an investor in his company. Sam Altman's looking at a communication deficit at OpenAI that people are saying, like, is there Achilles heel? So if somebody says your Achilles heel is that every time somebody at OpenAI talks, the value of the company goes down. Trust in the company goes down, the public perception of the company goes down. It's like, well, who's got good vibes? Hey, these tech bros, just keeping it all light and positive. Never saying anything negative, just keeping it upbeat, banging a gong, doing a soundboard. Hey, everybody.
E
Hey.
A
Welcome to the morning show. You know, hey. And they're doing kazoos. And it's fine. Like that keeps it world positive. And I'm not goofing on them. I'm just saying, like, it's great, like awesome. Like, keep it positive. That's what Sam needs. So bringing them in to take the vibes playbook, Ryan, and apply it to OpenAI's just horrific. The public, political investor community's view of that company. What if it works? What if they can turn the vibes around? Turning the vibes around on a trillion dollar company, how much is that worth? Is it worth 1%? Yes. Is it worth 5%? Yes. If you could take a company with really bad vibes, which I think we'd all agree OpenAI has some bad vibes
B
around it, I'm a little insider for that. I feel like these guys are wildly popular among people who already love.
A
It doesn't need to make perfect sense. It doesn't need to make perfect sense. I'm giving you the contours of a weird thing that occurred is how a weird thing occurred.
B
It is weird.
A
That's the thing.
B
It's just the numbers are weird. Like, it's so much for a.
A
Don't worry about the numbers. Don't just take the numbers out of your head.
B
All right, all right.
A
And say I gave you a trillion dollars in monopoly money. The company is worth, you know, 250 billion based on its burn and reality. Right. But it's in funny money territory. It's magically worth a trillion. So each dollar is worth four times. So then instead of making a fifty. Well, no, but. But is.
C
Is the implication there that they are going to, like, kind of change their editorial style to like glaze open AI more like. Wouldn't that fundamentally. I don't think it's erode Trust in them and their own company.
A
I don't, I, I don't think anybody looked at them as a place to get, you know, objective, hard hitting, ask the hard question journalism. They got the vibes like, hey, hey, everybody, come on the show. We're bang the gong. Congratulations, you know, tell me about your business.
F
We're done.
A
There was nobody like you didn't have a Jessica Lesson there or a Kara Swisher or, you know, into a lesser extent, someone like me being like, hey, here's a hard question. They're not asking hard questions there to try to. And they're certainly not doing gotcha journalism like some of those folks might. And they're not certainly doing agenda based, anti tech socialist journalism like at the New York Times or Wired magazine, you know, so I don't think anybody like is looking to. I think it's pros for objectivity.
B
I think somewhere in the middle. I think if they're, if they're constantly having OpenAI people on and just swooning over them, I do think people would get tired.
A
Oh, sure. But they won't do that.
B
Yeah, I think they've got to keep a better bag.
A
I'll tell you the big. You want to know what the big risk factor is? You're working with the other group of companies will not participate. Right. So, like, it's very hard for me to get Democrats to participate in all in since three of the four guys
B
are like, I get that.
A
I understand that two of them are in the administration. One of them's a super donor or whatever they call a super bundler. So you have three people who are all into the Trump. You know, you ask, you know, Josh Shapiro to come on the program or Pete Buttigieg. I got Pete Buttigieg to come. I got Josh Shapiro coming on. It's just hard, you know, they're just like, that's not my home court advantage. So that's what's going to happen. Anybody who's outside or competing with OpenAI, they may be like, I'll take a pass on being on this podcast. But anyway, it's not important Anyway, they're getting 50,000 views an issue. This is Aqua hiring a very talented group of marketers and storytellers. If anybody were to say, like, what's the skill set of those guys? It's like building vibes. Taking that sports show, morning show and then just adapting it and making all the vibes immaculate. That's like, they make the vibes immaculate. Sam Altman's like, these vibes are not Immaculate. Everybody who speaks for our company steps in it. Let's let these guys speak for our company and keep the vibes positive. Go ahead. Alex. You're shaking your head and you're.
C
You're perplexed because I think it goes again, it just doesn't make sense to me because they even said it themselves. They've done too many side quests lately. The only thing anyone cares about, anyone in this industry cares about is what is the quality of your model, right? They could do whatever they want. People get pissed off at 90% of things anthropic says and does, but they don't care. They keep using Claude for everything because it is the best model. Opus 4:6 is the best model. Right? I just don't understand from OpenAI's perspective why they keep getting distracted by the video. Sora and this just make Chad GBT as good as humanly possible. And every other problem goes away the moment Codex is better than Claude code. No one cares about what you say, what you do.
A
100 correct.
C
You just want a good model. That's it.
A
This is an important tactical, practical thing for founders. At the end of the day, the product is the most important thing. Everything else around the product is very important, but the product is most important. That's why when people say, like, you can't put lipstick on a pig, like trying to really work hard on your sales team and your marketing team to get better leads, to get people to try a product and do a demo, to put them on a trial, all that's fine. I've seen it countless times in a company where the product didn't have product market fit. We called it a leaky bucket. There was a hole in the bucket. So you're pouring money into the top of the bucket to get leads to buy better salespeople, whatever, and it just flows right out because the product's not as good as another product in the market.
C
Well, Jason, I'll give you the ultimate example of this. I'll give you the ultimate example of this. Over the weekend, I saw the best concert in my entire life. I went to see Kanye west in LA.
B
I knew that 45 songs.
C
This guy is the most insane human being that's ever walked this planet. Has said the most hateful things any public figure has ever said on his
B
is he released a song called Hail Hitler.
C
Most literally words ever. And you know what happened? I went to Sofi Stadium. 80,000 people singing along to his music. Because the product is amazing. If your product is amazing, you can do quite literally Anything you want, people will still come to you.
A
You could, you could write a Hitler theme song and sell out a stadium for two nights.
B
We're on a signal, chat together. James, wasn't that the very first thing I said? I'm like, if he said, if he apologized, if he's going to play Runaway, I'm going to go see it. Like, I don't, I don't care.
C
He sold swastika shirts during the Super Bowl. He sold swastika shirts.
B
He said he's sorry. I'm ready to hear can't tell.
A
And you're Jewish. And I'm. You're Jewish. You're ready to move on, to take
D
this back to reality and AI and technology.
A
Everybody, please help me out here.
D
Example, a very real example is this, right? Anthropic is terrible at Devrel. They are the worst company I've ever seen do developer relations. They just are the worst, right? And then you, you, you look at Codex. So the codex team in OpenAI, they are one of the best. Their Devrel team is killer, right? But the truth is, people, as Alex said, what are we still using to do our work? And it's Opus 4.6. So it's the model. It's the model. It's the model, it's the model.
B
I think that makes a lot of sense.
A
Make the model better at all costs.
B
Speaking of great products, Jason, we've got two demos. Should we jump in?
A
Let's go. Demo or die time.
B
Yes.
A
Demo or die.
B
Yasin was on the show back in March. He was going to show us. He showed us open oats. And while we were discussing it, Jason mentioned his idea for a cluster of agents that function as live podcast producers doing the job of, say, Howard Stern show, or say yours truly, Milan Harris does during live shows. Within days of his appearance, Yazan tweeted this multi Persona AI sidebar for podcasts and live streams. He's calling it Sidecast Yazen. Show us, show us around.
E
All right, so this is OpenNotes. Jason and LA, you guys had this idea of having like a, like a sidecast. You already have the stuff sort of calculated beforehand. So it's really just doing like search and retrieval. You're not doing live search. And I was a bit concerned about, like, okay, is it going to be too slow if you're having a live call for the thing to go out there, find information, pick it up and show it to you the way like a fact checker or researcher might need to do.
B
And that is, I will say, as a person who does live fact checking and research, that's a human concern. Like I'm often not able to get the right piece of information until before Jason has moved on to the next point on the show. So that's not even just an agent worry, that's a real worry for a human producer as well.
E
Exactly. And so I thought like, the latency is probably going to be like a bit too difficult to, you know, have in like a live setting. And I was shocked. So I'll show you guys what I got. So here the core idea is you need an LLM provider. This could be like a local olama. I'm using open router here because I'm running this on my, on my, on my Mac mini. You configure your Personas and these will look pretty familiar. So you got like the fact checker. This is something that highlights facts and missing nuance. And for each of these you can provide your own prompt. And there's also a toggle for whether it supports live web search or not. So for the fact checker, you obviously need live web search. And then you can configure other things like how long the responses are and how often it would step in. The next is also the archivist. This will pick up previous. How similar is this thing that people are currently discussing in the context of the video to past events?
A
Yeah, going back into the archive, taking all 2000 plus episodes, having it have that in some amount of the topics. Maybe the. You couldn't put all the transcripts into memory, but you could probably have most of the timestamps in there. So 2,000 timestamps times 20 lines each, 40,000 lines. Maybe that would work.
B
Even just the last six months would be super helpful. It doesn't have to have the full 20 year archive of this show, but even just the last six months would be like, hey, you previously mentioned this in February, you mentioned this in January. I can't keep up with that at the pace of the show. So this is something that you'd need an agent to producer to do.
D
Jasmin, where's the context coming from on this for the archive?
E
So the knowledge base feature that I shared earlier allows you to search through the knowledge base and this will surface stuff from the web so you can, you can combine both of those things.
A
I think a really interesting thing for the archivist to do would be to look for things that rhyme. You know how they say history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. If you taught it a skill, Ryan, that was like, take the trends that we're talking about and look for analogies. Describe the trend in plain English and then look for analogies from other time periods. So it's like, oh yeah, we're in the J curve. People are investing a lot of money. They're losing money on each customer. Like, oh yeah, that's exactly what Uber and Lyft did in Doordash. Oh no, that's even more similar to this that occurred in the 90s with the websites. They were acquiring customers for $500 each and they hope to have a lifetime value. And they were putting a value on page views. Right. Page views as the perfect example of.
B
And this is something.
A
A bogus metric.
B
We've struggled with so much because a podcast has so much inherited knowledge. Like if a person produces your podcast for three years, they're so they know everything you've talked about. They remember all these shows, they have this head full of knowledge and then they leave and a new producer comes in. No matter how good they are, they don't have that familiarity. But now we could sort of have a bot that has that familiarity.
A
Yeah, I think we got to do this with timestamps. We have to have the entire archive. What we need to do is have a canonical perfect archive somewhere on a Mac studio, you know, on the web. Have it build the Wikipedia of each episode.
B
Gaff has his own Mac studio. What he'll maintain.
A
Well, yeah, and then have it make like its own Wikipedia, like a grokopedia on the local of every episode of everybody who's been on as a guest. You know, have a Ryan Carson page where it's like Ryan was on these four times. Here's his appearances, here's his, you know, what he's done in his career. Here's his LinkedIn. So that just all that knowledge is right there really fast at its fingertips. So you could do real time stuff. Because that's actually the mind blowing thing about this, Alex, is we're starting to move from being able to do a query and hey, go get a cup of coffee, turn on your notifications for your browser and it's going to give you an alert. Hey, remember you did that deep research three minutes ago. Now I want deep research in real time. And that's got to be a couple years away, I think.
E
Yeah. Maybe feed it notion, the dockets, other stuff. I think this would be crazy. Just feed all the context. And like I said, I'm actually surprised at how well this worked even with web, which I thought would just be insanely slow. I'll go through the rest of these. So there's the sniper for just punchy one liners and then short quips and then the menace. This is kind of like a bit of a. Yeah, you kind of set these up and you can also create your own. So these are just the suggestions that you provided, Jason.
A
You know, imagine you have a chat room on YouTube or LinkedIn or whatever. And it's not, you know, it's not super vibrant. People are kind of chilling. Now you send in five Personas and say, hey, mix it up in there. Read what they're saying and what they're saying on the show. So you have two inputs, the comments and the show transcript. And it learns over time, Ryan, how to get more engagement, how to rage bait. And you just teach it like, you know, you do a kind of reinforcement learning. If you get more people to view the live stream, if you get more people to reply to you, if you get people to block you, you're doing your job.
D
I'll double down on your idea. Like, I think if these Personas become actual Personas, say on X, right. The interestingness of what they say goes up, right? So say that you basically build these pundits and on X they have interesting things to say. When you see them live and commenting on the show, it adds even more credibility where you're like, oh, that's actually an interesting point. And I like this. Bots take a point of view, Alex.
A
People must be doing this for their Reddit. Have you figured out how to get your OpenClaw to operate in Reddit?
C
Well, so I have been doing a lot of consuming of Reddit, so I'm actually announcing a product in about an hour from now in which I have basically swarms of agents at the moment looking at Reddit, all these other sites looking for challenges to solve. And so I have it doing more of a consuming side rather than talking side. But the flip side of this will be, actually, doesn't it try to block you?
A
If you do too many searches, too much stuff, it's always like, no bueno.
C
Yeah, but there's ways around it.
B
They're very persistent on Reddit, but if you're very active, they'll overlook some stuff. It's just, you can't, you can't just drop in.
A
Okay, so here it is. You got a previous show, you went to the 43 minute mark, you hit play, and now we're seeing the transcript underneath it. And in the side we're starting to see the four Personas give feedback. And the archivist says, don't confuse prosumer stickiness with mass adoption. Microsoft Copilot had 15 million enterprise seeds but stagnant consumer growth. Proving that cool tech doesn't always translate to paying customer scale.
E
Yeah. And as as the conversation flows, you're going to see more inputs from the the checker, the sniper, the menace.
A
This is from the checker. The precede bar is up because product velocity is up.
E
AI allows teams to reach scale exponentially faster.
A
That's true. Don't know how it came to that conclusion, but that is a correct.
E
You can see the sources under each one of these so web citations. You can see all of the sources that it used at the time of the generation.
A
I mean this is really powerful. I think if you think about lon the real world and metaglasses. Now you're operating in the real world. You're at a comedy show or a bar in Austin and you're thinking of clever things to say. You're talking to a couple of interesting people at the bar and it's like, hey, maybe you could bring up something about this song on the radio. And it's giving you prompts like, hey, here's your romance coach. Here's your fascinating coach. Here's your non creepy coach. And it's coaching you on how to talk to people for people who maybe are a little shy or don't know how to break the ice. It's really fascinating real time coaching.
B
It's another one of those things that makes you sort of think of her where he's got Samantha in his ear and she's just talking to him and prompting him all day. We're getting to that world where it's real time.
E
And the actual app, you can just hide it off the screen so it's not visible when you're doing screen sharing. And now you've got facts at your fingertips. You've got perfect memory so you can pull stuff out of the archive. Punchy one liners you got.
D
This is what Cluli was supposed to be. Right. But actually useful.
B
They sort of backed off now and they're just doing AI note taking again. But this was the original pitch for flu especially the it disappears on other people's screens so they can't see that you're cheating. That was the whole Cluley thing.
A
All right, well done.
B
We want to check out Claw Chief. That's Ryan's founder chief of staff, Open Claw protocol that he released the other day from Ryan. He says it is opinionated about the architecture of the workflow but meant to be Customized for your own people, programs, calendars, inboxes, trackers, and recurring routines. The post was how to turn your open claw into the world's best assistant.
D
Like everybody probably watching the show, like everybody here on stage, we are starting to use open claws to do real work in our companies, right? And the obvious first choice for a claw is your assistant and chief of staff. And actually, Jason, I was just thinking about, you know, what you all were saying on all in recently about assistance and how this kind of works. So that's the first thing I did. I wanted to turn R2, my claw, into the world's best chief of staff. So, you know, I've been fortunate to work with real human EAs over the years. I've hired probably two or three of them. And, you know, I've seen what they can do and how good they are and how much they fall short. So I started designing my openclaw around that, and it was getting so good, I was like, maybe it's funny. I was like, maybe I should build a little side business off this and charge for it. And I quickly realized I have no time for that. I don't care about that. I'm just going to open source it. And so I released claw Chief Version 1, and everybody loves it. And then very quickly, I saw the interview with Brex, and the founder of Brex went on to a show and explained specifically tactically how he's augmented his claw. And it's awesome. So you have basically a priority plane document. There's all this machinery. And so I just released v2 of Claw Chief. It's on GitHub, right? So I don't know if we can throw up the GitHub if people want to go see it. But it's free, it's open source. Just point your open claw at it and say, use this. And I think you'll see a big, big jump and ability.
A
And you gave it its own behavioral traits based on an executive assistant.
D
And it's actually less behavioral and more execution, right? So there's a list of crons that run. So for instance, the executive assistant cron runs every 15 minutes. And all the cron says is use your executive assistant executive assistant skill. So you have a cron that fires on a regular basis and that cron,
A
what's in the skill then?
D
So this is the magic. I mean, this is what I worked on for weeks, right? And it's it. It's how a good executive assistant should work, right? So if you look at it, you'll see it's it's in depth, right? It's how to respond to emails. Like, do you respond the same thread? You know, how quickly do you follow up? How do you check the calendars? And how to use gog, which is the primary CLI interface. So it's all the tactics, it's the real stuff. And then there's a biz dev skill, which there's a cron that runs business development and it calls the skill. And in biz dev skill, it just does all the stuff that you also want a really good chief of staff to do, you know, today, R2, my claw has already booked three meetings for me. Like, and these are not just me passing on, hey, R2, book this meeting. These are real people that I'm doing business development with, I've never talked to. So here we go.
B
We do. All right, Jason, we do have a clip from that Core Memory podcast with Pedro Franceschi, the CEO and co founder of Brex. Here's he describes, he set up a thing called a claw trap for a crab trap for reining in unpredictable agent behavior. This is pretty amazing. Let's check out that clip.
F
We're actually going to open source this, but we actually built this entire technology layer, we actually call it crabtrap, funnily enough, where the idea is when you have something like open cloud running, the best way to monitor what an agent is doing isn't to have a human looking at it, it's actually have another LLM looking at it. So we build this thing that effectively intercepts all the traffic coming out of like an open cloud instance and routes it through another LLM that's through an HTTP proxy that screens all the traffic and says, is this something that a recruiter agent should be doing? So, for example, should a recruiting agent send like a harmful message to a candidate?
A
No.
F
And it can go in and block that request at the network layer while the agent itself is even not even aware that that's happening. And the really cool thing of that is you can actually run this at scale. And the only technology that we think will be able to monitor agents is actually agents themselves. But you build this almost adversarial effect where you have one agent monitoring another agent. And we've seen surprisingly good outcomes of this thing so far.
A
Amazing. And then here is on GitHub, the skill for executive assistant. I thought this was really well done. I guess you asked it to make this and then you edited it a bit. You had.
D
Yeah, and I was actually going to say, everyone, we don't read code anymore. But we should read Markdown. So there's a lot of markdown here and pay attention to this. But yeah, I just worked with R2 on this over and over again until it was great.
A
So if you go to GitHub, obviously you have claw chief skills, the executive assistant skill, and then you have skill md. That's the structure of openclaw and it has its name and has its description. Perform owner names. Executive assistant workflow using Google Workspace, viagog and your chat messaging layer for updates. Use when handling general inbox triage, sending short operational email replies, scheduling, yada yada, operating standard. Be decisive, brief and useful. Clear, low risk operational work. Instead of escalating everything, use priority map to decide what matters and what can be batched. Use the autoresolver to decide whether to act, draft, escalate or ignore. If the signal is primarily a lead, status outreach, tracker, prospect, pipeline, item routed through business development workflow instead of treating it as a generic EA task like this is fantastic.
D
I've worked a lot on it and it works.
A
Yeah. Meeting node, ingestion, read it. Extract principal tasks, assistant tasks, decisions and follow ups. Classify them through the priority map. Run autoresolver policy update, claw chief task MD and any other live source of truth in the same turn. Record notes in blah blah blah blah blah, inbox handling rules. Handle without asking first, when authority is clear. Meeting scheduling, short acknowledgement, replies, confirming receipt. Boom. And this is coming from you or from your assistant when you do it?
D
These are mostly messages to your assistant. Right? So it's everything you want a good EA to do. Like this is. This is from 25 years of experience of working with EAs and people.
E
Right.
A
All right, well done. Anything else on the docket for us?
C
Lon, do you want a quick priest? We're in demo mode. I could do a quick 2 second demo. What I've been working on, please. Okay, this is an official announcement. I was going to reveal this on my live stream after this, but I'm just so inspired by Ryan and Yazin, I kind of want to demo it now.
B
Twist exclusive. Folks.
C
This is a Twist exclusive. Let's do it. This is Henry Intelligent Machines. This is something I've been working on for a while. This is autonomous swarms of agents finding challenges and solving them for you. And basically the way this works is I have many, many agents right now running locally on my multiple computers, going out and finding challenges online, going on Reddit x YouTube, product hunt message boards, thousand, literally thousands of different sites finding challenges people are having and Then autonomously solving them and earning revenue. And so here's what you see. Here's your dashboard. You see how much revenue you made that month. You can go in here and it finds custom opportunities and challenges based on your interests. So did deep research on me, found things I'm interested in, found opportunities based on those interests on many, many different websites. And now I can go in, see the opportunity, see what the thesis is around this challenge. This is an AI workflow automation playbook for creators. And so it wants to start a business around AI workflow automation. It has a proposed plan how it's going to start this business, a breakdown of the market size, competitive advantage, feasibility, timing, all that. And then I can just say, launch this venture, give it a budget. So I'm depositing money in. It has money to work with. It can, you know, launch Facebook ads, Twitter ads, Instagram, whatever. Give it a timeline of how long it has to make money or make revenue. I launch it and now if I go into this active run, Henry is now going and building this business autonomously. It is now building out the products. It's going to post it to Gumroad, it's going to prepare an email campaign, and it is going to autonomously start this business itself. And now you scale this up, you can start multiple ventures at once, multiple businesses. It eventually gets to the point where it sees, okay, this can be solved with a 3D printed item. Let me go find a 3D printing warehouse, print out all these products and ship them autonomously for you. So it is swarms of agents finding challenges and solving the challenges for you.
A
Love it. You know, we've had two of these type of genres on the program in the last month or so, which is, I'll call Ryan Startup in a box, identify, you know, an interesting business. One we had on Friday, basically took the entire list and description and URLs of every YC company, ripped through them and said, how defensible are they? And just make a fake version. Website felt sense, I think.
B
Felt sense.
A
Felt sense. That was Friday. The guy did it kind of to be provocative. And then there was another one that was all from one interface I saw. Kevin Rose interviewed the founder, Pulsia, and we had Pulse on before that.
B
We had Pulse on before he launched it formally, I think.
A
And Pulse is like, I don't know, more Ryan, like a platform like ebay or something where. Or Airbnb where you can come in, put in your business idea or your business and then kind of be in competition with other people to See who can grow it faster in like a little leaderboard, almost like a Sims. It was kind of like reminding me of the Sims. What do you think this says about startup culture when Alex can bring in the tried and true. Look for business ideas on Reddit. Like it's always been like an underground thing. If you see people frustrated in a subreddit and then you solve their problem, they might become your customers. Awesome. Great technique. But here we are. One click. Make it one click. Do a AB test like Eric Reiss and the startup and Steve Blankfeld, the startup engine, whatever they called it.
D
I think this is cool. This gets you past the zero to one, right?
A
Yeah.
D
So your agent. This is cool, Alex. So Henry's out there like, hey, there's some business opportunities. And you're like, this is worth 200 bucks to see. Like, is there anything here? Right. And I'm sure you know, he'll get you somewhere. And then as the model's getting better and better, you know, give us a year, you'll probably see tools like Henry actually building the business for real, like where it's truly handoff, you know, I presume we're in a spot now where it gets you started, does pretty good job. But then you have to come in and be pretty handholdy. But we all know where this is going. The models are going to be are basically already AGI.
B
So I'm interested in how proactive Henry is. I'm sharing a tweet now in the room where you said I woke up this morning and my A employee Henry texted me that he did all these tasks overnight without asking. He fixed bugs, he read through your emails, built a CRM, gave you ideas for new videos, and even sent you a nano banana image of itself where he sees himself as an owl. How are you reining in how free Henry feels like he should be? Or are you reigning in is Henry basically could do whatever he wants overnight and if he spends tokens or whatever, you're not worried about it. What's the protocol?
C
I'm basically giving him complete freedom to consume as much as he wants and prepare the drafts of what he wants to do. But anything that is public facing it just goes through an approval gate. Right. So it can't go crazy and do things that will damage you. But I'm giving him pretty complete freedom to one, go online, go anywhere he wants to build his own skills and tool set so he can accomplish anything he wants. And then right before that final gate, that's where you have to approve or you can Send a note back or you can edit. So I'm trying to give it as much freedom as he possibly can have.
A
Super powerful. Okay, Lon, what else is in the docket?
B
All right, well, we could talk about Hermes Agent, which is an open source agent from France's new research that was released in February. The chart showing token use growth by Hermes Agent on one particular API router on OpenRouter. If we want to show that chart up, lives on your server. It remembers everything, it learns and it gets more capable over time. They call it the agent that grows with you. And I know Alex has been using it some. So if we want to chat with him.
A
So what do you think of this? Is it in any way going to challenge openclaw? And are you still dedicated to openclaw when you see all these other tools coming out?
C
Yeah. So I've been using Hermes Agent pretty significantly over the last few weeks. I do think it is a very strong tool. I'm going to be honest, I do not think it's as strong as openclaw at the moment. I'm having a ton of challenges when it comes to memory. But I will say this. I do think it's worth using. It's very easy to put side by side with openclaw. They can communicate with each other. There's ACP so that they can talk to each other and have each other do different tasks. I also, I just like the, the brand and the vision for the product. They are on record of supporting local open source models. They're building this for local open source models. Peter Steinberger's on record is saying he does not support them. He does not think they're good for Open Claw. He does not recommend people using them. So I think just from a spiritual direction. Well, I think there's probably many reasons. He's scared that from a security perspective, local models are more dangerous. So he kind of goes for a I don't trust the consumer as much. Like, by default, I don't trust the consumer to use it correctly perspective, which I don't agree with. On the other hand, you know, Hermes, the team is like, I trust the consumer. I want them to use open agents and experiment and do random crazy things. So I just like that direction more. But I'm going to be honest, like, I think Open Claw at the moment's better. I'm getting way better results. But I'm using them side by side and I think they're worth using side by side.
D
The switching costs are too high now. Forget it. Like, I bet Hermes is great. I'm just all in an open claw and it will take me two weeks to really see if Hermes is good and I'm not interested in that. I'm glad the team is building it and obviously they're going to be supportive of local models and I love that. But you have to bet on Peter. I mean, and with the backing of OpenAI now, it's going to be the best I saw.
A
Dave Morin said the new version of OpenAI is going to not. OpenAI of OpenClaw is going to drop this week. Is that correct?
D
I'm using it, yeah.
A
You're using it?
D
Yep.
A
Oh, it came out today?
D
Yeah, it shipped last night.
C
And so they drop every day. They have updates every single day.
D
R2 is using it. It's got this really cool feature called dreaming, which is what humans do. So when you sleep, you obviously consolidate your memories, you process the information. That's why we need sleep. And now openclaw does that overnight. I'll let you know tomorrow how it went. I have had trouble this morning with a couple technical issues in Slack, so there's some bugs. So it's not perfect. And supposedly he's juiced GPT 5.4 to be really good in it. We'll see.
A
Interesting. Any thoughts yourself, Alex, on it?
C
On the actual functionality around Hermes? I think it's good. I am excited for the updates like OpenClaw. They just have more people working on it as well from a actual migration perspective. Ryan, they actually do have built in migration in Hermes where you can just do Hermes migrate and it'll take all your memories, all your instructions, everything in like a second and Hermes. So I think it's worth testing out. There's. I mean I also think there's like PsyOps on social media where people are saying Hermes is better and they don't actually believe it, but they haven't used it right.
A
This is becoming a big thing on social media, obviously is just people having opinions based on where they place their fans as a. Yeah, I mean a
B
hot take has its own.
A
It's because. No, it's. It's becoming acute, I would say. Like I feel like when I go on social media it's literally lobbyists and it's just one lobby versus the other. We're back to like the Mac. It's all ops lobbying non stop and I'm just tired of it. Tao versus Solana, Mac versus PC, Android
B
versus local models versus the algorithm.
C
It's literally.
B
Go ahead.
C
It's a marketing strategy now from A lot of companies, like the infamous one is Higs Field, literally their entire marketing strategy is illegal undisclosed advertising. They pay influencers to go say, higgs Field's incredible. It's clearly an ad. And like, that's just like the entire marketing strategy for a lot of these companies.
B
Did you see Jason, over the weekend, our friend of the pod, Nick o', Neill, was tweeting non stop about here, Higsfield. I was a little, I got a little suspicious, I have to say.
A
Really?
B
Yeah, I think he's one of the, I think he's one of the guys that Higsfield is contracting to do this because he doesn't strike.
A
Don't they have to disclose that now?
B
They're, they're supposed to.
A
I know that this is happening because the guy who's running product at X Nikita, he was like, he DMed me and he's like, hey, can you put a label on your polymarket, tweet that it's an ad? And I was like, it's not an ad. I don't sell my tweets. And he's like, okay, fair enough. And I'm like, that was a weird interaction. Like, oh, I get it. People are ratting people out. Like, I might be a shareholder in a company, but that doesn't mean I'm getting paid to tweet about the company. So if I tweet, I love Uber, that's not a paid ad, but I am a shareholder.
D
This gets murky because I get a lot of credits and I disclosed it at the beginning of the show. Didn't I have a lot of OpenAI API credits? Fine. I have a lot of Devin credits now. Fine. I actually think you probably do need to disclose at a deeper level now because I'm not being paid by anybody, but I do get credits.
A
Yeah, I think it's like there's multiple layers. I'm explicitly being paid to do this. Clearly the FTC requires you to disclose that. Then there's I have an affiliation or I'm a shareholder in. Or I benefit some way if this company wins. And that is like an optional thing, I think. Or you could put it on your landing page of disclosures, like, I'm an investor in 600 companies. If you look through this list, you're going to find a gazillion cross referenced conflicts. Right. I'm an LP in 21 venture firms. Like, okay, I don't know what they've invested in. So you start getting to conflicts for somebody like me in the most conflicted area in the World startup investing. I couldn't even tell you what I'm an investor in. I probably have shares and Lyft from being in some venture firms and I don't even know it. At some point somebody might give me shares in Andrew because I'm an LP in their company and people are like, oh my God, I thought you were banned from getting Andril shares. Like, oh, I don't know which one of my funds I'm in that I've gotten shares in. So definitely more disclosure is. But I thought that was like an interesting one.
B
Yeah. P PTG Kyle in the YouTube chat asks, is this just the modern word of mouth people sort of shilling on. On social media? I don't know. I think it's a little.
A
I.
B
There's a. There's a little bit more to it
A
than just word of mouth. You remember Paper Post? Lon sure. Early days.
D
I remember Paper Post. Like, man, the founder of that. That guy was brutal.
B
Oh, I don't.
A
That guy was so bad.
B
Remember, always been with us as anywhere where there's. If a conversation takes off here, there's monetary value associated with it. There's always going to be gamesmanship from the. From the earliest days, as I recall.
A
Do you remember Paper Post founder coming on this week and startup and getting into it with me live?
B
I think I do. Wow, that was a long.
A
So Murphy.
B
Yeah, he's. So do remember this.
A
And do you remember what I did to him? Oh my God, it was so dark.
B
No, this is.
A
He had done this whole Paper Post thing with a poor woman. What was his. So his name was Ted. So the guy Ted was getting a woman. It became Isaiah. Oh my God, I'm like having flashbacks became Isaiah. And he was doing all this covert marketing stuff. Paper Posts. I was doing weblogs Inc. At the time, blogging. And I was like, you gotta disclose this stuff. Like it's just. It's, you know, whatever. And the guy had written on this poor woman's forehead with the Sharpie, like this degrading thing to do for like a hundred dollars. And he was seeing what she would do for money as part of like this promotion thing. And he made a video of it. It was like totally gross. Everybody was like, oh my God. So I said to him, I was like, yeah, but if I told you, like, I'll pay you to write Paper Post on your forehead with a Sharpie for. For $100. Like, yeah, totally do it. And I was like, okay, Tyler, go get me a Sharpie. Get me a Lindy. From my wallet. I didn't know what to do on air, so I was like, okay, fine, write paper. Post Tyler on his forehead. And the kid did it. And I was like, this thing is off the rails. I gotta end the show here. It was like, so.
B
It was.
A
I think this was bizarre.
B
2008, Jason. I can't find the original post, but I think that's when this happened. I think it was that long.
A
Oh, my God. Anyway, I mean, this is where, like the. Forever.
B
Yeah, 18 years ago. Geez.
A
It was like 18 years ago.
D
We need Yasin's tool to be telling us.
B
That's exactly.
A
Oh, my God.
B
Yeah.
A
Where do you load up the observation? It was. Oh, my God. Sorry, I'm just looking for.
B
Yeah, I think this one got memory holed into history. I can't find it.
A
I mean, it was like there were a million blog posts about this moment.
B
Yeah, no, I. I remember it now that you're talking about it, but I can't find the act.
A
And he like, literally wrote on his forehead. It was insane. I. I don't even want to get into it. All right, listen, this has been another episode. Blah, blah, blah, Twist. Thank you, Yazen, Alex and Ryan and Lon. And we will see you all on Wednesday on Twist. Bye.
B
Bye.
Date: April 7, 2026
Host: Jason Calacanis
Panelists:
This episode explores the practical realities of AI agents replacing human jobs, particularly with the rise of agentic software like OpenClaw and similar autonomous tools. Jason and his panel of founders and developers dig into real-world examples, debate employment trends and the economic impact of AI agents, and showcase demos of next-gen agent platforms already performing high-level, previously human-only work.
Topics include:
Trend in China: Workers building AI agents (Claw Skills) not just to automate their own jobs but to out-compete and displace coworkers—hoping to avoid being on the chopping block themselves.
Founder Perspective:
Debate: Automate Yourself or Your Coworkers?
Split Sentiment:
Counter-Narrative:
Anthropic’s Change to Claude Access:
Massive Losses:
Workarounds & Local Models:
Debate: OpenClaw vs. Hermes Agent
[45:47-55:03]
[56:13-62:52]
[63:12-68:46]
"We make mistakes constantly. I make mistakes constantly. When you have a checklist, you'll make less mistakes...in an agentic world...making the checklist is even better for openclaw...you can put your replicant on a checklist and you can hold your replicant accountable." — Jason (05:07)
"The more they squeeze, the more people are going to go to the DGX Sparks, the Mac Studios...and as you said, Open models have been about six months behind for the last few years." — Alex (33:21)
"If your product is amazing, you can do quite literally anything you want, people will still come to you." — Alex (43:54) — on the power of product overruling all PR & marketing woes (in a controversial example).
"The product is the most important thing. Everything else around the product is very important, but the product is most important...I've seen it countless times in a company where the product didn't have product market fit. We called it a leaky bucket." — Jason (45:09)
"Agents monitoring other agents — the only technology that we think will be able to monitor agents is actually agents themselves." — Pedro Franceschi (Brex) (59:44)
"Anything that is public facing just goes through an approval gate. So it can't go crazy and do things that will damage you. But I'm giving him pretty complete freedom to one, go online, go anywhere he wants to build his own skills..." — Alex (68:46) — on setting guardrails for autonomous agents
"This is becoming a big thing on social media, obviously, is just people having opinions based on where they place their fans...It's just one lobby versus the other. We're back to like the Mac/PC wars. It's all ops, lobbying non stop and I'm just tired of it. Solana vs. the algorithm..." — Jason (73:11)
For Founders & Operators:
It’s time to move beyond AI-powered note-taking and assistant bots. Employ agents for high-leverage, revenue-critical work—while investing in hardware, open models, and your own process IP. Track the economics carefully as ‘cheap tokens for all’ are a relic.
End of Summary.