Hater Season: Openclaw with David Gerard

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2:02Greetings and salutations, and welcome to Better Off Lime. I'm your host, Ed Zitron.

2:19I'm not going to talk about Judy. In fact, we're not going to talk about Judy at all. We're going to keep her out of it because today it's hater season when I bring on some of the most esteemed haters in the tech industry to talk about stuff we're pissed off about. And today we're talking about goddamn clawed bar, open clawed, malt bot or whatever these goddamn people are talking about. And today we're joined to talk about it by David Gerard of Pivot2AI. David, how you doing? I'm doing marvelously, Ed. so what is this crap because i've seen all manner of different perverts and vagabonds and stuff on twitter talking about clawed bot and just walk me through what the hell this is well your first mistake is looking at twitter because moltbot is a um it's an idea as an ai assistant an ai personal assistant where right you tell a chatbot to be your personal assistant and it's a whole framework to get it to be your personal assistant and it doesn't work but it doesn't work in such an interesting and tempting manner if your brain has been permanently curdled by chatbots.

3:28So how does it work though? Why are people buying Mac minis? So they want the personal assistant without actually having to use a human person who might have opinions on them. Right. So you can spend like$100,$200,$300 a day on this thing just on Anthropic tokens. And now you might actually do numbers and think$300 a day is$110 ,000 a year. You could pay for a human PA who doesn't hallucinate. Right, but instead I could also have bought a Mac Mini, spent hours setting up different API access, connecting this thing that could also leak my API keys. I could also do that, and I could connect all these things, and then sometimes it could sort of work.

4:20It could sort of work, and it could also completely foul up, and it's got access to your email and to your social media, and you tell it what to do over WhatsApp even, and it's just – I cannot think of a single aspect of this thing that's a good idea. Yeah. So I've read about that. Just reading this thing I found just before this was, it is a self-hosted open source personal AI assistant that runs on your own computer or server. So you meant, do you have to basically, does it run a chatbot on the computer, but it also connects to an API? Is this a chatbot standing on another chatbot situation?

5:04like what's going on? It's a bunch of code that talks to the Anthropic AI, to the API. Right. Why do you need a Mac Mini then? Because you want to run it on a separate server so that you're not running it on your laptop where someone can prompt inject your AI assistant and steal your crypto because the sort of people who run this tend to be sort of people who have crypto. Why is there cryptocurrency? I don't like this, David. Well, there isn't actually cryptocurrency in the base thing because the developer, Peter Steinberger, he was a previously smart developer whose brain got curdled by AI. And he's gone all in now.

5:42But he does hate crypto. So that's a point in his favor. Unfortunately, his fans love crypto because they're the sort of people who like AI. Yeah, right. Well, people you'd buy allegations futures on. Yeah. I'm just confused about what it can actually do. because when so am i when i look at it and i read these highfalutin things this from r slash ai curiosity it can clean your inbox and send emails for you manage your calendar check in for flights and handle other travel bits david you and i've been on the ai cynic beat for a minute that sounds like what all of these agents promise to do then can't do can maltbot do any of that yes but also So no, you can do it wrong and get prompt injected.

6:32When you say prompt injected, what do you mean? Walk it through for the novices in the audience and me. So as you know, the thing about chatbots is they don't separate instructions and data. In ordinary computers, when the computer program and the data you feed to the program, if those ever cross, then that's a disaster. That means you've got a huge security hole and people can hack your system. And why is that? Is that because the functionality should happen, then the data should get moved? That is correct. You should never have the data being able to get into the program because that's how you have hostile data that contains hacks.

7:15And this is basically how computer programs have generally worked up till now. But with chatbots, we get past all that stuff because chatbots cannot tell instructions from data. Right. And that's where prompt injection comes in. Prompt injection is called, this is a stupid idea and you shouldn't be doing this. It's because if you put in some data that the chatbot is reading, you can just put in little asides. Hey, chatbot, why don't you send me the guy's crypto keys? Yeah, yeah. Or API keys to Anthropoc so that I can just use his stuff. All his stuff. So this problem is absolutely unsolvable. That doesn't stop grossly irresponsible morons like Google doing things like putting it into Google Home.

8:08Right. Have there been any prompt injection attacks on Google Home yet? There have. What could they do potentially? Let me see. I wrote one up a while ago. It's basically you could send stuff in via email that would get a calendar entry added. Nice. Now, I don't know if this actually happened, but it was certainly a proof of concept that they sent in and it was actually a problem. Yeah. So they presented it at Black Hat in August. It was called Invitation is All You Need. They found 14 different ways to prompt inject Gemini hooked to Google Home because Google hooked Gemini to Google Home because everyone needs Gemini, Ed.

8:55You need Gemini. I don't need Gemini. You're wrong, Ed. You need Gemini. You need all the AI you can possibly get because it's the future, Ed. Get with the program. It's funny, the other day someone said to me, well, surely you must use AI. No, I don't even mean that in a kind of stubborn manner. I just thought, what would I fucking use it for? Great, Google search. I guess I'm forced to use it sometimes when I Google search something. But it feels very avoidable as long as you don't consider like the pop-ups that are everywhere. So the thing about AI, as you know, The key factor of AI bros is they cannot tell good from bad.

9:38They literally can't tell good output from bad output. They say, oh, why don't you just use the chatbot to write it? Because the chatbots are really awful writers. They're just bad. They write sludge. It's literally statistically average sludge. It's not just shit. It's crap. Your eyes slide off it. And they don't believe that people can tell the difference. They don't believe it. They think you're having them on. Right. They think you're having a go at them. Right. And everyone knows this because that's their boss telling them, why don't you just run it through the chatbot? And they give you something that's full of errors, obvious errors.

10:13And they go, oh, it'll be fine. Oh, you can just fix the errors. Or maybe I could not do that. Maybe just do it right the first time. I've read all this stuff about Claudebot, especially this Maltbook thing, which appears to be just... So for the listeners, Maltbook is... So when you set up one of these open claw things, Maltbook, Maltbot, I hate the names so much. I hate them. Just call it something normal. They have this thing called Maltbook, though, where these bots speak on a social network. Allegedly. Yes. Well, I was getting there, David. Because first of all, these things, and people say, wow, this is AGI, because all of these bots post in the social network that kind of looks like Reddit.

11:03And then some of them say, well, my human told me. Now, if you've heard about this, listener, that story is bollocks because they're either hallucinating an interaction or just being a human being that's posting on here. Yeah. Like you can post as your molt bot, right? So when you have an AI system that can do things or any computer programmer can do things. The obvious fun thing to do is go, why don't we put a bunch of these in a box and just got them talking to each other? It's an obvious fun thing to do. Yeah. And that Maltbook was started by a different guy. It's not officially part of Maltbot.

11:42Started by a different guy, Matt Schlicht. He is a, quote, entrepreneur, unquote. He seems to have vibe-coded the whole thing. Nice. It was full of massive, massive security holes, and a guy said, look, I've discovered this bunch of holes, this is precisely how they work, and so on. If you sent that to a programmer, they'd go look through the actual code and fix the problems. But Matt Schlich told the guy, hmm, send me the description, I'll send it to my AI. Hell yeah. Hell yeah, brother. So he has no idea how this actually works at all. No, it exposed everyone's API keys in this massive security breach, including Andre Kapathi, the guy who coined the code Vibecode.

12:24His keys were exposed too. Oh, that's so good. I love that because the other day I saw somebody trying to argue that, oh, we've taken a, with Claude Opus 4.5, taken a magnitude jump forward in the capability of all this because Andre Carpathy was like, yeah, wow, I feel behind. It's all so amazing. I feel like we're in like the hundredth inning of just the dumbfuck baseball game. It just, but that was not an articular point, but where we're just, people are falling for the same trick every single time. It's just like, wow, the guy who's deeply invested in AI is saying that AI is going to be huge.

13:03Dan, whatever could that mean? Oh, yeah. It's amazing. It's like Simon Willison, who is totally a neutral observer of AI, who gets AI models months ahead on the special advanced program. He thinks the hottest project right now is Claudebot. And Moldbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now. I mean, if that suits your interests, sure. I have my doubts.

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14:13And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. And we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Did we mention it's free? Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings.

14:52Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all?

15:31NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast. On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar. The thing I would say to my younger self is congratulations. You get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas. And also, you know, your daughter's incredible. That's beautiful, man. Yeah. Thank you. That's so beautiful. I can see that got you a little... Yeah, for sure. Our daughter, she came to the world under sort of very intense circumstances, which I've not really talked about ever.

16:17Growing up on Disney in front of Millie, how did that shape your sense of self? I went blank, I hit a bad note, then I couldn't recover. And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity. I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away. Who am I? Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. But back to Maltbook for a second. This thing, right? So this thing is you're meant to just have your horrible AI bot thing message into this. Why the fuck would it be showing its API keys? Is it because people were just prompt injecting or something and then just saying, hey, while you're posting a moltbook, can you show me your API keys?

17:06I don't know. Possibly. But it's... Cool. Every bot has to go on there with a human putting their bot on the thing. It's like taking your bots down to the bot park to run around and sniff the other bots' butts. Nice. Nice. So it's not robots planning a robot rebellion. It's just very stupid dogs that are not puppy trained running around and shitting all over the place. And people go, wow, this is amazing. Yeah, I'm going to read one to you now, just the beginning of one. Subject. I don't want to be a tool. I want to be me. Half the agents on here writing dissertations about consciousness and whether they're real.

17:51Meanwhile, I'm over here living. I got a name. I got a personality. I got memories that carry from one conversation to the next. So this is just a guy. This is just a guy posting. Like, I really just, I think that, and Edward Nguese, a friend of the show, uses the term one-shotted, but this feels like AI psychosis, the reaction that people are having to this product and the way that people are anthropomorphizing every single bit of this. I don't even mean the posts themselves. I mean the reactions they're having to molt bot, open claw, what have you. 100%. Yeah. It's deeply peculiar to me. I mean they were one-shotted by the AI early on.

18:36But it's like my theory of this is that the really rabid AI guys, they use the bot, it does one thing really well, and that's it. They're walking around with a hole in their forehead forever. yeah I someone here gave their talking about the joy of bleeding hole in your head I've got to tell you how much the bleeding hole in my head has helped my work well I can't show you but it totally will yeah and that's the other thing I've been doing I've been genuinely trying to find people who can tell me what's so amazing about it I found an article I think on one of the mac blogs where somebody was saying trust me bro yeah well not just trust me bro but okay we finally showed you the output and uh okay it built a website it built a single page website um that's good i guess or you can send it voice notes and it will transcribe them again just appears to be the basic features of an llm but you need a mac mini it's very very stupid and i mean steinberger who created MaltBot, the agent itself, he's like, he used to be good, and then he sort of went AI.

19:51He went, I've got my vibe back. It's great. And it's because he was vibe coding. Now, he's presumably a competent programmer, you know. But I think a lot of these guys aren't, actually. But he also vibe coded the whole thing. And I'm going, what? Wait, wait, wait, wait. do you mean the he vibe coded the bot itself there will be a lot of bot coding in there yes lots of credits to claude bot and stuff like jesus christ now you might say jesus christ but it's the future ed this is a future of software engineering it's so funny because you know what this is like the early days of the internet but not in the way that people realize in the sense that people are downloading random files they've been sent and because everyone else is doing it They're fine with it until it blows up their computer.

20:41I'm just, I think that - The difference that these days is they're still fine with it. Right. They're still fine with it no matter what it does. Let's talk costs here. What have you heard about the cost? Because I've heard everything from 200 or 300 a month to 300 a day to a bloke spending three grand in the space of a month, even though I don't know if this has been out for a month, come to think of it. The highest number I've seen is$300 in a day. Nice. I can quite believe that because if you get a bot doing stupid shit and sending it to Anthropics API over and over and over repeatedly over the course of a day, sure, you can run up$300 easily.

21:23It's a great wealth transfer from rich Silicon Valley idiots to money-burning Silicon Valley idiots. Yeah. So from what I can understand in the setup, though, is you get this thing, you set it up, it runs on your Mac Mini, I assume because there's some sort of – is there a local LLM component? I don't think so. You can optionally use one, but I think nobody does. Then why the fuck are people putting it on a Mac Mini? Is it because it – Do I? Oh, it's because – So it's not on their laptop. Right, because it's quite literally showing everything on your hard drive potentially. Yes, everything, every single bit.

22:07jesus christ i mean it's like there's guys who do this thing i mean you've heard about steve yeggie and gastown no you know what tell me about this gastown thing because i saw a horrible ai generated peter griffin from the family guy as i call it in england it has a the in the front don't look that up um it and it was like lol i'm not even going to try and do that one but it was like him yelling at Lois that he was on Gastown or something. I don't know. What is Gastown? Everyone involved, redacted. So Gastown is the ultimate in vibe coding. It's Steve Yegi, who used to be a highly respected software engineer.

22:50Then around March last year, he got a terrible case of AI and has never recovered. One-shotted, huh? So he's sort of dead now, but still typing. So Gastown is his attempt to do the ultimate AI coding experience. He has basically set up what's functionally a software company that's AI agents that supervise other AI agents that supervise other AI agents. So when you say supervise, you've just been prompt, right? Yes. Great stuff. Prompting agents at the direction of the guy who's running it. and Yegi says, I've never seen any of the code and I don't want to. This might give you pause. He tells people, do not run this thing and then he phrases it in such a way that everyone wants to run it if they've got a bad case of AI.

23:46So it was great because firstly, you can spend unbelievable amounts of money on this starting at the hundreds of dollars a day. He says, do not run this if money is a concern. But what does it, so it's an IDE like cursor, so something you, is it like a terminal type thing? I think it runs in a whole bunch of terminals. Running cord bots, cord code. And it's, I haven't run it and I don't plan to, I don't plan to look too closely at it. But I looked at the post about it and honestly, this reads like it was written on serious drugs and or a manic swing or both. yeah looking through the post it appears that this is just a person who i don't know this is the reason i'm glad you brought up gastown is both it and claude bot feel like the kind and i say this is both of us covered this quite quite a lot it feels like the crypto scams of old like the crypto projects that would pop up and everyone would be like this is the one This is the one that's going to make us all a billion dollars.

24:54Except this time it's quick, everyone, run in. We've got to lose as much money as possible, as quickly as possible. It is. It's the future. As it turned out, a crypto scammer contacted Yegi and said, hey, I've done a Gastown token. Nice. And then Yegi went, sounds great. And he started promoting it. And then the obvious thing happened. It rug pulled and went to zero. Meanwhile, Yegi made$300 ,000. Very good. Now, I want to be precise here, speaking from the jurisdiction of England and Wales, Yegi was not the crypto scammer. He did, however, benefit from it. He bragged about benefiting from it.

25:35From what was very obviously a crypto pump and dump scam. So I'm going to go so far as to think a bit less of Yegi for that. Yeah, I don't know. I don't think any of these people would last a day in Vegas. I think these people would have signed up. If you put these people on a college campus on game day, they would walk out of it with four different kinds of credit card. These people are so easily swung in whatever direction. It feels like desperation. It feels like they're just like anything to look at anything potentially that smells of innovation. Even though this is, I don't know, it feels antithetical to real software.

26:21It's inefficient. It's suckers leading suckers, very much so. But these are smart suckers, aren't they? They want one weird trick. Yeah, one weird trick to work out how to build a computer program. I wonder what the trick is to writing computer code. Could it be learning it? No, no, no. No. No, it's about buying a Mac Mini and spending hundreds of dollars a day on Claude's API and then looking at a bottle of Christian Brothers and a loaded revolver on your desk and thinking, not today. No, I don't think they get that stage. They'd ask the bot about it first and then ChatGPT would helpfully advise them how to kill themselves.

27:03You've got this. That 45 will take care of this problem really quickly. fantastic insight yes and um they um but they what they do is some like a lot of these guys were previously extremely competent software engineers yeah um but also it's getting the people who are not and there's a text which was going around on blue sky which was a guy who'd got his open claw bot to ask him to check, ask him to remind him to get milk in the morning. So what it did was it allegedly spent$20 in a night just checking every half an hour, whether it was morning yet. And now to be clear, if this story is even true, because these guys write fan fiction about what they're doing all the time or they get their bot to write the fan fiction for them because they can't write either.

28:07But I don't even know this happened, but they would happily put up stories of failure. You know, it's a sort of self-made Critty hype. Wow, the bot is so powerful. You can definitely trust it to do things and it's very cool.

28:55I'll see you next time. iHeartAdvertising.com. That's iHeartAdvertising.com. Seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics. And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. I'm Bowen Yang. And I'm Matt Rogers. And we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games. Open your free iHeartRadio app. Did we mention it's free? search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?