3 AI Agents That Actually Replaced Human Jobs | E2272

7 Apr 2026 · 1 h 19 min · 36 chapters

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In short

The episode argues that “agentic” AI (OpenClaw and related tools) is starting to replace parts of human roles, but not via fully autonomous job takeovers. It also covers: (1) a China “anti-distillation” trend where workers try to get coworkers fired, (2) Anthropic ending bundled third-party tool access for Claude, (3) pricing/capacity pressure and likely higher tiers for model usage, and (4) a demo of Sidecast, a multi-persona AI producer for live podcasts.

Guests (backgrounds)

  • Ryan Carson: founder/developer; built open-source AntFarm; now demos “Claw Chief.”
  • Alex Finn: founder/CEO of CreatorBuddy; OpenClaw influencer/content creator.
  • Yazan Ali Rahim: founder/creator of Open Oats; previously built production-team AI ideas; now demos Sidecast.

Key claims

  • Checklists/SOPs make agent systems accountable and improve performance.
  • Companies will “optimize employees” (AI assistants) rather than eliminate coworkers immediately; humans remain “in the loop.”
  • Anthropic’s policy change forces pay-as-you-go for third-party tools, increasing costs and pushing users toward local/open models and hardware.

Notable examples

  • Claw Chief as a “chief of staff” agent; Sidecast personas (fact checker, archivist) using retrieval and optional live web search.
  • Analogies to Uber/Lyft and DoorDash subsidies; “caveman Claude” token-reduction example.
  • Sidecast’s archivist idea: searching the show’s past episodes (timestamps/analogies) like a “Grokipedia.”

Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.

Chapters

Tap a time to open that second in VO

Star Wars Comparisons

0:45 to 1:20

Discussion about the new Star Wars animated series and its comparisons to 'Andor'.

“Whoa, this is about to be controversial.”

Personal Reflections on Star Wars

1:20 to 2:29

Host shares personal feelings about Star Wars and its impact.

“This Week in Startups is brought to you by Shopify.”

The Importance of Checklists

3:50 to 5:35

Discussion on the value of being detail-oriented in startups and using checklists to minimize mistakes.

“And if you use the code twist, they're going to give you 10 % off your new note pin.”

Agentic Software and Checklists

5:35 to 6:31

Exploring how agentic software can enhance productivity through checklists.

“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.”

Introducing Guests for OpenClaw Discussion

6:31 to 7:18

The host introduces returning guests and their contributions to OpenClaw.

“That's where I keep running into trouble is Gaff is very forgetful.”

Family Updates and Personal Stories

7:18 to 8:30

Guests share family updates and personal stories, creating a more personal connection.

“Three of our top OpenClaw experts came back for a reunion special.”

Efficiency in Startups

8:30 to 10:40

A discussion on the necessity of efficiency and tools like Gusto for startups.

“Up next, we've got the founder and CEO of CreatorBuddy.”

The Future of Employment and Technology

10:40 to 14:00

Exploring the trends in employment dynamics and the role of AI in the workforce.

“Gusto is the essential payroll and benefits software built for your startup or small business.”

The Challenge of Hiring in the AI Era

14:00 to 15:11

Discusses the complexities and challenges of hiring humans versus AI.

“And then once you've got your Claw optimized, then you will hire a human to run that Claw.”

Optimism vs. Pessimism in AI Employment

15:11 to 17:05

Explores personal sentiments on AI's impact on the job market.

“What percentage are you, Alex, currently?”
Show all 36 chapters

Debating AI Job Loss Narratives

17:05 to 18:36

Evaluates contrasting viewpoints on AI job loss and its implications.

“But I don't see the actual business impact.”

Anthropic's New Subscription Model

18:36 to 19:18

Covers Anthropic's recent changes in subscription models for their tools.

“You know, I understand the concept here.”

The Economics of AI Tools

21:03 to 23:29

Analyzes the financial implications of using AI tools and their costs.

“don't like anything that costs me money.”

Future of AI Subscriptions and Models

23:29 to 28:00

Discusses the expected evolution of AI subscription pricing and models.

“of users a multiple times that, a multiple of that.”

Discussing Subscription Models for AI Tools

28:00 to 30:20

The conversation explores upcoming pricing for AI models and their implications for users.

“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 OpenModels.”

Insights from AI Agent Labs

31:38 to 34:15

The speaker shares experiences from working in an AI agent lab and discusses the future of AI models.

“So I spent, you know, six months inside of one of the, the premier agent labs, um, which was amp and you know, I know how this stuff works and this stuff, you know, you ship 30 times a day.”

The Shift to Hardware-Driven AI Solutions

34:15 to 36:54

Exploration of the trend towards using local hardware for AI processing instead of cloud solutions.

“Wait till it is built into your operating system.”

OpenAI's PR Strategy and Market Perception

36:54 to 42:00

Discussion on OpenAI's public relations strategy and the importance of positive market perception.

“Number one, in a peak bubble, acquisitions happen that do not make logical sense because people have valuations that don't make sense.”

The Importance of Product Quality in AI

42:00 to 43:32

Explore why the quality of AI models is critical for success in the tech industry.

“It just doesn't make sense to me because they even said it themselves.”

Concert Reflections: The Power of Great Products

43:32 to 44:40

Discuss a personal experience at a concert to illustrate the impact of an amazing product.

“I'll give you the ultimate example of this.”

Demo Time: Introducing Sidecast

44:40 to 45:24

Unveiling a new AI tool that enhances podcast production through multiple personas.

“They are the worst company I've ever seen do developer relations.”

Live Fact-Checking with AI

45:24 to 46:58

Understanding the challenges and solutions of live fact-checking in podcasts.

“Within days of his appearance, Yazan tweeted this multi-persona AI sidebar for podcasts and live streams.”

The Role of Archived Knowledge in AI

46:58 to 48:42

Discuss how AI can utilize archived content to enhance live discussions.

“This is something that highlights facts and missing nuance.”

Real-Time AI Coaching for Social Interactions

48:42 to 50:51

Exploring the concept of AI providing real-time assistance in social settings.

“You know how they say history doesn't repeat it rhymes?”

Integrating AI into Workflow Management

50:51 to 55:50

Examining how AI tools can be customized for personal and professional workflows.

“The maybe feed it notion, the dockets, other stuff.”

Turning Open Claw into an Assistant

56:00 to 56:50

Learn how to enhance AI capabilities to act as an effective assistant.

“The post was how to turn your open claw into the world's best assistant.”

Developing Claw Chief

56:50 to 58:00

Explore the design and execution of an open-source tool for AI assistants.

“Just point your open claw at it and say, use this.”

Skills and Functionality of Claw Chief

58:00 to 59:30

Understand the specific skills programmed into the AI to enhance its capabilities.

“It's actually less behavioral and more execution, right?”

Innovative Monitoring with Crab Trap

59:30 to 1:00:00

Discover the unique approach to monitoring AI agents using another LLM.

“He describes he set up a thing called a claw trap for a crab trap for reining in unpredictable agent behavior.”

Executive Assistant Skills Breakdown

1:00:00 to 1:02:20

Dive into the essential skills that enhance AI performance as an assistant.

“is to actually have another LLM looking at it.”

Launch and Automate Businesses with Henry

1:02:20 to 1:05:10

Learn about building and managing businesses autonomously with AI agents.

“And this is coming from you or from your assistant when you do it?”

Comparing Open Claw and Hermes Agent

1:05:10 to 1:10:04

Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of two AI tools for productivity.

“So it is swarms of agents finding challenges and solving the challenges for you.”

Debating the Effectiveness of Open Claw vs. Hermes

1:10:04 to 1:11:13

The hosts discuss their differing opinions on the effectiveness of Open Claw and Hermes AI tools.

“not recommend people using them so i think just from a spiritual direction uh well i think there's probably many reasons.”

Social Media Psyops and AI Marketing Strategies

1:11:14 to 1:12:45

The conversation shifts to the influence of social media on perceptions of AI tools and marketing tactics used by companies.

“I have had trouble this morning with a couple technical issues in Slack.”

The Fine Line Between Influencer Marketing and Disclosure

1:12:46 to 1:15:53

Discussion on the ethical implications of influencer marketing and the importance of disclosing affiliations.

“I feel like when I go on social media, it's literally lobbyists, and it's just one lobby versus the other.”

A Controversial Marketing Moment in History

1:15:54 to 1:17:42

Jason recounts a past incident involving controversial marketing tactics that sparked a heated discussion.

“Like, oh, I don't know which one of my funds I'm in that I've gotten shares in.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Lon Harris:All right, everybody, welcome back to Twist. It is April 6th, 2025. How do I know it's April 6th? Maul is out today. Oh, right. The Dark Maul show. The new Star Wars animated and it's got great reviews. I love watching Clone Wars, Star Wars, Rebels. I'm excited to check it out. All of it with my daughters. 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. It's like, oh, this is the Andor of cartoons. And it's like, I'm already tired of that. It doesn't have to be Andor to be good. Let's just enjoy it for what it is.

0:32Lon Harris:No, I'm going to take the other side. I'll tell you why I'm going to take the other side. Andor set the high water mark. So it used to be like, is this as good as Empire Strikes Back? Yes. And so, you know, now I consider Andor and Empire. This is going to be big for people. Whoa, this is about to be controversial. I consider them equal. Wow. 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. For us old guys, yeah. It strikes a chord. But, yeah. All right. Listen, we have so much to get to. It's AO70, by the way.

1:06I started keeping track again. Good. AO70. 70. 70 days since our very first episode about Open Claw.

1:14Lon Harris:AO70, yeah. And I got a confession here.

1:20Alex Finn:This Week in Startups is brought to you by Shopify. Turn those what-ifs into sales with the e-commerce platform powering millions of businesses. Sign up for your$1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash twist. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get SOC2 reports fast. Get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. And Gusto. Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small businesses and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months free at gusto.com slash twist.

2:01Lon Harris:I have been stunted. I'm stunted right now with my open claw. Because of this claw stuff, using the open source ones, it's not stable enough for me. and I haven't taken the time to fix it. And then I find myself on a perplexity computer and OpenClaw computer, which is what I think those platforms want, is they want to shut down and get everybody to use their version of OpenClaw, which we will discuss today. We will. But before I do any of that, I'm going to just take a minute to applaud, applaud. 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.

2:38Lon Harris:And it's on my lapel. This is the Plod pin. But this is the other one. You can put this little device. It seems like a little wallet. You snap it on the back of your iPhone. This is the iPhone. You can see how thin it is. iPhone. There. Boom. Boom. We put that right on the back. Then if you want, you just press this button. There's a little haptic. Yeah. You're recording. Press it again. Haptic off. Why is that important? This thing's got like 1 ,700 microphones. Boom. I press this. I lay it on the table during our management meeting. I got everything set. I don't have to go futz with it or whatever.

3:10And it's got a great little, this is the great thing about the plod.

3:16Lon Harris:this is the base for the pin you see that this is my backup yeah so i have two plug pins pop it in here that's the usbc boom it charges but when it gets on my wi-fi 2.4 gigahertz wi-fi megahertz um it sinks yeah then i send lon the notes it's like then lon has his whole weekend ready to go he's had a whole bunch of plans and now he's got new plans give him the offer if you and your work depend on having conversations, interviews, meetings, taking calls. You got to get yourself a Plaud notes in. Check it out at plaud.ai slash twist. That's plaud.ai slash twist. And if you use the code twist, they're going to give you 10 % off your new note pin.

3:55Lon Harris:You know, we had a nice week last week. We did this$2 bill test. Yes, the B of A$2 bill test. And that went viral. I think it's close to a million views now on X, which for us is not bad. 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 detailed person, a lot of people don't want to refine that skill.

4:36Lon Harris: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 as 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? Fallible. Fallible. Thank you. As I just proved, we're fallible. I haven't used that word in like 30 years. We're fallible. People make mistakes. We make mistakes constantly. I make mistakes constantly. When you have a checklist, you'll make less mistakes. And one of the things we wanted to get right was just reviewing our social media.

5:18Lon Harris:The fact that the$2 bill test went well was a function of, we found like an interesting moment in the show and we had a checklist, how we name the clips, how we do all this. So just do yourself a favor, make checklists, have your team do it, force them to print them out, and make sure you review the checklist. Whatever it is, you're onboarding a new customer, you're hiring somebody, make SOP, standard operating procedures, and everything will go better, especially in an agentic world. And that's what we're going to talk about today. If you're one of the people who's a detail person and you combine yourself with this agentic software, making the checklist was great for humans, but making the checklist is even better for OpenClaw.

6:00It's even better for Claude Cowork.

6:03Lon Harris:It's even better for Perplexity Computer. 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. We've got a little closer. The memory, I think, is the key. Like, if you could get your open claw to start remembering everything you're telling it and keep track of everything with their heartbeat and their soul MD and however you do it, that seems to be the key. That's where I keep running into trouble is Gaff is very forgetful.

6:34Lon Harris:Yeah, you're a replicant. He lives in an E-Centu instance, and so he's not on top of it. Problematic. Yeah. I just bought a new MacBook Pro because I had like a four-year-old Air. And my Air was great, but I was like, I'm in Brooklyn. 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, folks. I got to get Gaff his own system. This is ridiculous now. I think when we get the Mac Studio out, I'll get you a Mac Studio.

7:15I got it. I got it.

7:17Lon Harris:All right, let's introduce our Gaff. We got a lot to get to today. Yes, please. We got three returning favorites. Three of our top OpenClaw 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 AntFarm, 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. Oh, yeah. Ryan Carson, my old friend. What continent are you on? Are you in the U.S. now? I know you spoke a lot of time.

7:44Ryan Carson:Where do you live? So, Jason, I guess you're a senior dad. I'm visiting my dad this week. How's he doing?

7:50Lon Harris:Not great. I'm going through it too, yeah. Yeah, my dad's in the group. How old is he?

7:55Ryan Carson:He's, you know, late 70s. Yeah, that's when it gets real. And so I'm in beautiful Colorado Springs in their lovely home today. So hello.

8:04Lon Harris: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. Oh, since you're his favorite child. Yeah, he did. He didn't mention that. Sorry to Jamie and Josh. Jamie's doing great. Jamie's doing great. He's doing great. Proud member of the Long Sacity. Up next, we've got the founder and CEO of CreatorBuddy. He's a vibe coder. He's an open-claw influencer. It's Alex Finn. Thanks for being here, Alex.

8:39You just call Alex an influencer? Alex is an influencer. Watch out. Alex is an influencer.

8:45Alex Finn:I don't want to consider myself an influencer, but I do believe I'm the most influential person on Earth. Yes, very good. I'm personally very influenced by Alex.

8:53Lon Harris: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 outranged. It works, man. It's called showmanship, Jason.

9:10Alex Finn:I love it.

9:11Lon Harris:I love it. I haven't gotten there. I have to learn how to do the Mr. Beast.

9:16Alex Finn:Yeah. We tried to help you guys take it to the top. We'll talk again after this. We made those thumbnails that you do in the Mr. Beast face, Jason. You made us stop. You ordered us to stop.

9:28Lon Harris:I don't know. I just feel it's no offense, Alex. I just feel like when you're an old guy like me and Ryan. Hey. to do the

9:38Alex Finn:listen you have to be as cringe as humanly possible it's the only way to win the internet game it's the only way it's the only way okay i'm gonna embrace my cringe and my off finally

9:48Lon Harris:i'll just give in we just i'm gonna give in to the cringe i'm gonna be cringe maxing let's do it alex is cringe maxing i'm gonna cringe time for cringe who cares 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 and creator of Open Oats. If you'll recall, we had Yazan on the show. We were like musing aloud. Wouldn't it be great to have a virtual production team working with us and 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. Yazan Ali Rahim.

10:26Sidecast.

10:27Lon Harris:Yazan, 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 must-o. Gusto is the essential payroll and benefits software built for your startup or small business. It's all in one, remote friendly, and incredibly easy to use. So you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. We use it. We love it. Take it from your boy, J.

10:59Lon Harris:Cal. Well, 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, it's so fast and simple to transfer your existing data and switch over to Gusto at any time. So try Gusto today at gusto.com slash twist and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash twist. This is very important because there was also something that came out this week, and I thought we should start with Lon, which is in China, there is a new trend, which is you get your teammates fired before you get fired.

11:47Lon Harris:So the concept here is we all know this is a sinking ship. When I say sinking ship, I mean employment. Employment. The idea of working for a living. Yes. The idea of having a job is over. Everybody understands that today, Sam Altman said to Axios, which I guess he's underwriting Axios. I didn't know that he was like paying for the newsroom over there. But he's got there's some disclaimer at the end. And just in full disclosure, OpenAI pays for a lot of our journalists. But tee this up, Lon. Tee up this little cheese eater, the Chinese cheese eater movement. So a Bloomberg researcher named Steve Howe tweeted this the other day.

12:32Apparently, 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 co-workers 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.

13:03Lon Harris:This is the Chinese cheese eater movement. They ate cheese. This is it. You understand, Ryan. You eat cheese. That makes you a who eats cheese.

13:12Ryan Carson:Cheese eater. I don't know. A cheese eater. We're looking for a rat, a mouse, a rat.

13:19Lon Harris:and where I'm from in Brooklyn, if you eat cheese, that makes you a rat. And if you're a rat, watch your back, okay? Snitches get stitches. Ryan, you were in an education company and now you see this. Are you in the, what percentage doomer are you? And by doomer, I mean -

13:40Ryan Carson:Well, I can tell you the facts, right? Yeah, please. We just closed our seed round. Normally you would hire up and guess what? I'm not hiring anybody, right? So I just deployed Claw Chief as my assistant chief staff. Fine, that's pretty straightforward. I'm just about to deploy another open Claw to be my marketing manager. Like this is where it's gonna go. And then once you've got your Claw optimized, then you will hire a human to run that Claw. But yeah, I mean, this is a real thing.

14:10Lon Harris: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, oh, hiring people is a lot of work. Yeah. Humans are fallible. We got to work with them. And then, Jason, you lose them.

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14:26Ryan Carson: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. And, I mean, unfortunately, all of us humans, hey, we have our own families to feed. We do our own things.

14:47Lon Harris:Yeah. And free will. and free will, like you can go, we have employment at will and we have free will. These two things, Alex, as human beings and in a society, boy, if you invest in a employee, a team member, and they get really good, the reward for that is they leave and start their own company or they leave and go work for some big companies willing to overpay them. So where are you at? What percentage are you, Alex, currently? What percentage are you like Doomer versus Boomer?

15:23Alex Finn:I'm 100 % Boomer, not from an age perspective, but from a optimist perspective. 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.

15:41Alex Finn:I'm putting an 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.

15:56Lon Harris:Yeah. As in AI boomer, AI doomer, just percentage wise, where are you at right now? Specifically employment being the one that people seem to be scared of. We'll leave the Terminator, Skynet, the thing gets out of control off the table right now. Just, yeah, this is the debate of our age is right now, and it's leaning towards Doomer here in the US. Where are you leaning right now? I'm probably like half-half. I don't think, and I've seen a lot of people just tweeting about OpenClaw and all the variants of OpenClaw, but there's probably a very small percentage of them that are actually making money off the thing.

16:34I mean, there's very few examples. I saw Nat nat elison i think uh who has his open claw and that's probably the best example uh where i think it's like it's making more than a million dollars ar i don't know if it got there but i mean it's selling like open claw skills so it's not exactly doing something sort of you know uh earth shattering or creating any sort of new business um so i don't know i'm probably like 50 50 i think i I definitely see some aspects of work 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.

17:20Or maybe not. I don't know. There is, Jason. There's this sort of counter narrative that I feel like we've heard from David Sachs 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 equals 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.

18:03I don't think he's ready to replace me. He's ready to do like 80%.

18:07Lon Harris: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, it feels too soon to be like, we're not going to have any more need for people. All these companies are going to be entirely bot run. I feel like for the near future, at least, we do want humans in the loop. But it does feel like a lot fewer humans to me. Yeah, here's Mark Andreessen. 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.

18:47Lon Harris: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. Well, we got a top story we got to talk about. Everybody's been talking about it all weekend.

19:19On Friday evening in a blog post, Anthropic announced that they were stopping. They clawed subscriptions no longer cover third party access for tools like OpenClaw. This took make the YouTube face. This started on Saturday, April 4th. It was announced in an email sent out Friday evening. So instead, they're offering a pay-as-you-go option built separately from your main Claude subscription to cover it. Here's Anthropic Exec Boris 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.

19:55Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully, and we are prioritizing our customers using our products and API. So that to me seems like to be huge. Yeah.

20:06Lon Harris:When you're a busy founder, you move fast. Sometimes you break things. That's the job. But when you want to land those big wells, those lighthouse customers, you know, the major enterprise clients, you can't move fast and break things. No, you need to make sure your security and compliance is locked down tight. Tight is right. That's why Founder University and I recommend startups work with Vanta. They're the leading security compliance solution that's being used by more than 15 ,000 customers. Vanta's not just going to help you with your SOC 2. Their AI first system is going to continually monitor your filings and compliance.

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21:02Alex Finn:Listen, I don't like it because it costs me money and I don't like anything that costs me money. But I will say I totally understand it. All the subscriptions are subsidies. That's it. That's all. 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. They do the subsidies so that they can collect data on Claude Code and data on other clawed tools so that they can improve those products but if you use that subscription open claw which they don't control that's just polluting the data so i hate it because i now have to spend more money uh but i get why they did it and just as a side note i think the people who's ripping out clawed out of their open claw now are making a tremendous mistake yes it's going to be more because opus 4-6 is clearly the best model for open claw like anyone who's used chat GPT or Kim or anyone knows it is a downgrade and in some cases a significant downgrade.

22:01Alex Finn:I personally believe OpenClaw is the most powerful tool out there. So I think it would be silly to virtue signal and be like, oh, I'm ripping out Claude when all you're doing is just hurting your own productivity.

22:10Ryan Carson:So I've got a data point on this, right? So I've actually been using GPT 5.4 from the beginning on OpenClaw. 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 uh in open claw in anger um 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 you this stuff costs you 200 a month it just doesn't so get used to it that's the key here is the entire

23:11Lon Harris: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 a multiple times that, a multiple of that. Every time they get one of these power users, they lose probably a couple of hundred dollars a year, maybe a couple of thousand dollars a year. So this is the next car to turn over in the AI race. When OpenAI goes public, when Anthropik goes public, even to a lesser extent, when SpaceX goes public, they probably wouldn'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.

24:09Lon Harris:So they'll report on the Starlink business unit, but they may not have to report granular levels. Anthropik 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 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 I saw Caveman. Did you see this, Yazan?

24:52Yeah, my brother sent me this tweet.

24:56Lon Harris:So explain what this is and if you buy it. Yeah, I think there's probably some truth to this. I didn't actually try it. Well, explain what it is to the audience listening. So the idea is, I guess the English language has a lot of fluff. You can probably get your message across using just verbs and maybe 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 percent fewer tokens. And this was basically this guy on Patel said, I taught Claude to talk like a caveman to use 75 percent less tokens.

25:41Lon Harris:Norma Claude, 180 tokens for a web search task. Caveman Claude, 45 tokens. I executed the web search tool equals eight tokens. Caveman version tool work, two tokens. I wouldn't be surprised that it actually works. I think the problem is you might end up speaking like a caveman if you do this, because if that's all you're reading, it's going to affect your vocabulary at some point. 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.

26:26Lon Harris: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$200 or$300 billion for open AI,$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. That should be a scary proposition to people. Compute also has to come down wildly in cost, I feel like. Nobody can afford to pay what we need to pay for everybody to run their open claw.

27:14We're talking about the users have been offsetting it to Anthropic. Now they can't afford it, so they're throttling claw. At some point, we have to figure this out or it's just imbalanced. It costs too much to run Opus 4.6 as much as people want to.

27:30Ryan Carson:So the show is This Week in Startups, right? We're all startup founders, right? And we are mercenaries for money, right? Yeah. And I think it's very simple, right? If your 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.

28:08Ryan Carson: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 OpenModels.

28:15Alex Finn: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. Who's doing each one, Spud and Mythos? Chad GBT, 5.5 is Spud. Mythos is Claude. And so they're both kind of leaking over the last couple of weeks. These are brand new models, nothing to do with their past models, much bigger, much more expensive.

28:48Alex Finn:So I think that's warming us up.

28:50Lon Harris:So you're saying the$2 ,000 a month subscription to Claude and OpenAI is coming for consumers, $24 ,000 a year, essentially a third of the salary of a two or three year out of school college graduate. That's going to be the next tier in order to use those models that scale.

29:12Alex Finn: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. Showmanship. Exactly.

29:21Lon Harris:No, you know what, Alex? 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 more. It's whatever it is,$2 ,000 a year. Hey, if we save 10 hours a month of lawns 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$16 one. You're like, well,$16 is a lot of money compared to taking the bus for$3.50 or the subway for$3.50.

30:04Lon Harris:But I'm kind of used to this and I love it. So I'm going to go door to door for$16. I'll figure out how to get the other, you know, I'll figure out where to get the incremental$9. One thing that was a big news story last week that seems to have really died out was this like Claude code leaked and now it's open. Everybody can find it. Is anybody considering using like an open Claude, like a variation on Claude code that got forked or is that not interesting? No. 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.

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31:37Ryan Carson:All right. So I spent, you know, six months inside of one of the, the premier agent labs, um, 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. Um, you know, there's some tricks with memory and some things in there, but honestly, none of it was surprising. Um, just, just use the stuff people like there's a whole companies that are doing this. Don't try to build a company to, for a tool that you can just buy?

32:06Lon Harris: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.

32:49Lon Harris:And then we'll fail over to the next one and then fail over to 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 Kimmy can do this oh no that's you got to use Gemma is that what they call the uh the Google one Gemma Gemma four people going crazy by Gemma four as well so I just think that's the the future of it getting that set up is a lot of work but if somebody abstracts it

33:19Alex Finn:it's super easy it's super easy it's actually I think very kind of overrated uh everyone's saying how difficult it is to do. I have three Mac Studios and a DGX Spark here. First of all, I agree. It's clearly the future, right? The more these companies squeeze, which they're doing the squeezing now, banning OpenClaw, you know, making the pricing more expensive. Everyone's saying the limits for Claw to 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, OpenModels have been about six months behind for the last few years.

33:53Alex Finn:So right now they're at about Sonnet 4.5. which was six months ago. All I do to load these new models, Gemma 4 came out. I go to open cloud. 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.

34:15Lon Harris:Wait till it is built into your operating system. And this was, Ryan's old enough to remember this. Remember like having to install TCP IP and put an Ethernet card into a computer to get people on the internet. And like, it doesn't work. And like, oh, what's their port? Well, you know. 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. That's so funny. So, you know, once it's abstracted away and like there's a system tray and the system tray is just automatically updating these models.

34:53Lon Harris:And I can see it so clearly. I just spent$3 ,400 on my Mac M2, M5, my Mac M5, 48 gigs of RAM. I could have gone even higher. And I was like, it doesn't seem necessary. But I bought this thing. And I was like, I don't have a, there's no cost difference for a business between a$1 ,500 laptop and a$5 ,000 laptop. There's no difference. Any business that's a viable business with 10 employees, it's a$35 ,000 difference over five years, which is a$6 ,000 difference, which is a$500 a month difference. It doesn't make a difference. 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.

35:36Lon Harris: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 got to put into account a 10K, 15K worth of hardware. That's where I think it's all going. But I want to see Yazan'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 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.

36:18Lon Harris: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 and their earpiece are on like a little monitor, you know, a 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. Why do they do that? I'm still scratching my head. Okay. I can explain it in like three acts.

36:57Lon Harris: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 is 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 Walton before. We've been an investor in his company. Sam Altman's looking at a communication deficit at OpenAI that people are saying, like, is there Achilles heel?

37:40Lon Harris:So if somebody says, you're 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, you know, hey, everybody. Hey, 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.

38:13Lon Harris: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 opening house some bad vibes around it. Aren't they a little insider for that? I feel like these guys are wildly popular among people who already love opening house.

38:54Lon Harris:It doesn't need to make perfect sense. It doesn't need to make perfect sense. I'm giving you the contours of a weird thing that occurred and how a weird thing occurred. It is weird. That's the thing. It's just the numbers are weird. Like it's so much for a pocket. Don't worry about the numbers. Just take the numbers out of your head. All right, all right. 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.

39:28Lon Harris:So then instead of making a 50... Well, no, but...

39:32Alex Finn:But 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?

39:45Lon Harris: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 buying the gong. Congratulations. You know, tell me about your business. We're done. 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. 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.

40:24Lon Harris:So I don't think anybody is looking to tech bros for objectivity. I think it's a little more in the middle. I think if they're constantly having open AI people on and just swooning over them, I do think people would get tired. Oh, sure. But they won't do that. Yeah. I think they've got to keep a better balance. 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 are like, I get that. I understand. Two of them are in the administration.

40:58Lon Harris:One of them's a super donor or whatever they call a super bundler. So you have three people who are all in on the Trump. You know, you ask, you know, Josh Shapiro to come on the program or Pete Buttigieg. I got Pete Buttigieg to come. I got Josh Shapiro coming on. It's just hard. You know, they're just like, that's not my home court advantage. So that's what's 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.

41:34Lon Harris:If anybody were to say like, what's the skill set of those guys? It's like building vibes, you know, taking like that sports show morning show and then just adapting it and making all the vibes immaculate. That's like they make the vibes immaculate. Sam Waltman's like, these vibes are not immaculate. Everybody who speaks for our company steps in it. Let's let these guys speak for our company and keep the vibes positive. Go ahead, Alex. You're shaking your head and you're you're perplexed.

42:00Alex Finn: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 the things Anthropic says and does, but they don't care. They keep using Claude for everything because it is the best model. Opus 4.6 is the best model, right? I just don't understand from OpenAI's perspective why they keep getting distracted by the video, Sora, and this.

42:32Alex Finn:Just make ChadGBT 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. 100 % correct. They just want a good model. That's it.

42:45Lon Harris: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.

43:20Lon Harris:So you're pouring money into the top of the bucket to get leads, to buy better sales people, whatever, and it just flows right out because the product's not as good as another product in the market.

43:31Alex Finn: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 of my entire life. I went to see Kanye West in LA. I knew that was going to be good. 45 songs. I knew it was going to be good. This guy is the most insane human being that's ever walked this planet, has said the most hateful things any public figure has ever said in history. He released a song called Hail Hitler. the most hateful words ever and you know what happened i went to sofi stadium 80 000 people singing along to his music because the product is amazing if your product is amazing you can do quite literally anything you want people will still come to you well and i'll back it up you could you could write a hitler theme song and sell out a stadium for two minutes in a row we're on a signal chat together just 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.

44:25Like, I don't care.

44:26Alex Finn:He sold swastika shirts during the Super Bowl. He sold swastika shirts. He said he's sorry. I'm ready to hear. Can't tell you about it. And you're Jewish, Lon.

44:33Ryan Carson:You're Jewish. You're ready to move on. So take this back to reality and AI and technology, everybody. Please.

44:39Lon Harris:Tell me out here.

44:40Ryan Carson:A very real example is this, right? Anthropic is terrible at DevRel. They are the worst company I've ever seen do developer relations. that just are the worst, right? And then 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 in its Opus 4.6? So it's the model. It's the model. It's the model. It's the model.

45:09Lon Harris:Yeah, make the model better at all costs. Speaking of great products, Jason, we've got two demos. Should we jump in? Let's go. Demo or die time. Yes. Demo or die. Yazan 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, me, Lon 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.

45:45Yazan, show us. Show us around. All right. So this is OpenNotes. Jason and Law, you guys had this idea of having like a sidecast. You already have the stuff sort of calculated beforehand. So it's really just doing like search and retrieval. You're not doing live search. And I was a bit concerned about like, okay, is it 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? And that is, I will say, as a person who does live fact checking and research, that's a human concern.

46:21Like I'm often not able to get the right piece of information before Jason has moved on to the next point on the show. So that's not even just an agent worry. That's a real worry for a human producer as well. Exactly. And so I thought like the latency is probably going to be like a bit too difficult to 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 Mac Mini. You configure your personas, and these will look pretty familiar.

47:02So you got like the fact checker. This is something that highlights facts and missing nuance. Sure. 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 like previous, how similar is this thing that people are currently discussing in the context of the video to past events?

47:46Lon Harris:Yeah, like going back into the archive, taking all 2 ,000 plus episodes, having it have that in some amount of the topics. Maybe like the, 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. Even just the last six months would be super helpful. It doesn't have to have the full 20-year archive of the show, but even just the last six months would be like, hey, you previously mentioned this in February. You mentioned this in January. I can't keep up with that at the pace of the show.

48:21So this is something that you'd need an agent to producer to do.

48:25Ryan Carson:Yazan, where's the context coming from on this for the archive? So the knowledge-based feature that I shared earlier, allows you to search through the knowledge base, and this will surface stuff from the web. So you can combine both of those things.

48:39Lon Harris: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. We're like, oh yeah, that's exactly what Uber and Lyft did and DoorDash. Oh no, that's even more similar to this that occurred in the 90s with the websites.

49:16Lon Harris:They were acquiring customers for$500 each and they hoped to have a lifetime value and they were putting a value on page views, right? Page views as the perfect example of a bogus metric. 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 know everything you've talked about. They remember all these shows. They have this head full of knowledge and then they leave and a new producer comes in. No matter how good they are, they don't have that familiarity. But now we can sort of have a bot that has that familiarity.

49:50Lon Harris:yeah i think we got to do this with time stamps 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 a wikipedia of each episode gaff has his own mac studio what he'll maintain well yeah and then have it make like um its own wikipedia like a grokipedia 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, I 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.

50:28Lon Harris: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, you know, deep research three minutes ago. Now I want deep research in real time. And that is, you know, that's got to be a couple of years away, I think. Yeah. The maybe feed it notion, the dockets, other stuff. You know, I think this would be this would be crazy, like just feed all 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.

51:07I'll go through the rest of these. So there's the sniper for just punchy one liners. And then, you know, short quips. And then the menace, this is kind of like, you know, 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

51:25Lon Harris:you that you provided, Jason, you imagine you have a chat room on YouTube or LinkedIn or whatever, and it's not, you know, it's not super vibrant, people are 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.

52:09Lon Harris:I'll double down on your idea.

52:10Ryan Carson: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 has even more credibility where you're like, oh, that's actually an interesting point. And I like this bots take a point of view.

52:37Lon Harris:Alex, people must be doing this for their Reddit. Have you figured out how to get your open claw to like operate in Reddit well?

52:44Alex Finn:So I have a 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 that doesn't he try to block you if you do too many

53:12Lon Harris:searches too much stuff it's always like no bueno yeah but there's ways around it they're very perspicuous on reddit but if you're very active they'll overlook some stuff it's just you can't you can't just drop in and 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.

53:51Yeah. And as the conversation flows, you're going to see more input from the checker, the sniper, the menace.

53:59Lon Harris:This is from the checker. The pre-seed bar is up because product velocity is up. AI allows teams to reach scale exponentially faster. That's true. I don't know how it came to that conclusion, but that is a correct assumption. 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. 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.

54:51Lon Harris: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. Yeah. Real-time coaching. It's another one of those things that makes you sort of think of her where he's got Samantha in his ear and she's just talking to him and prompting him all day. Like, we're getting to that world where it's real-time. In the actual app, you can just hide it off the screen so it's not visible when you're doing screen sharing. Sure. And now you've got facts at your fingertips.

55:22You've got, you know, perfect memory so you can pull stuff out of the archive. You know, punch you one-liners. You got, you know, this is what clearly was.

55:32Ryan Carson:This is what clearly was supposed to be. Right. And sometimes it's actually useful. They sort of backed off now and they're just doing a note taking again. But this was the original pitch, especially the it disappears on other people's screen. So they can't see that you're cheating. That was the whole clearly thing. All right. Well done. We want to check out Claw Chief. That's Ryan's founder, chief of staff, Open Claw Protocol that he released the other day from Ryan. He says it is opinionated about the architecture of the workflow, but meant to be customized for your own people, programs, calendars, inboxes, trackers and recurring routines.

56:08The post was how to turn your open claw into the world's best assistant.

56:13Ryan Carson: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. um and actually jason i was just thinking about um you know what you all were saying on all in recently about assistance and how this kind of works um so so that's the first thing i did i wanted to turn r2 my claw into the world's best chief 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 and you know i've seen what they can do and and how good they are and how you know much they fall short so um i started designing my open claw around that um and it was getting so good um i was like maybe it's funny i was like maybe i should build a little side business off this uh and and charge for it um and i quickly realized i have no time for that i don't care about that uh i'm just gonna open source it um and so i released claw chief uh version one and everybody loves it and uh then very quickly I saw the interview with Brex and the 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.

57:48Ryan Carson:It's open source. Just point your open claw at it and say, use this. And I think you'll see a big, big jump in ability.

57:59Lon Harris:And you gave it its own behavioral traits based on an executive assistant.

58:06Ryan Carson:It's actually less behavioral and more execution, right? So there's a list of crons, right, that run. So for instance, the executive assistant cron runs every 15 minutes and all the cron says is use your executive assistant skill. So you have a cron that fires on a regular basis and that cron...

58:28Lon Harris:What's in the skill then?

58:30Ryan Carson:So this is the magic. I mean, this is what I worked on for weeks, right? And it's how a good executive assistant should work, right so um if you look at it you'll see it's in depth right um it's how to respond to emails like do you respond the same thread you know how quickly do you follow up uh how do you check the calendars and and how to use gog which is the primary cli interface so it's all the tactics it's the real stuff um 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.

59:10Ryan Carson: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 that I've never talked to. So here we go. 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. He describes he set up a thing called a claw trap for a crab trap for reining in unpredictable agent behavior. This is pretty amazing. Let's check out. Let's check out that clip.

59:44Lon Harris:We're actually going to open source this, but we actually build this entire technology layer. We actually call it crab trap, funnily enough, where the idea is when you have something like open claw running, the best way to monitor what an agent is doing isn't to have a human looking at it. is to actually have another LLM looking at it. So we build this thing that effectively intercepts all the traffic coming out of like an open call 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?

1:00:21Lon Harris:So for example, should a recruiting agent send like a harmful message to a candidate? No. And it can go in and block that request at the network layer while the agent itself is 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. Amazing. And then here is on GitHub, the skill for executive assistant.

1:00:57Lon Harris:I thought this was really well done. did you, I guess you asked it to make this and then you edited it a bit. You had that.

1:01:05Ryan Carson:Yeah. And I was actually going to say everyone, we don't read coding more, 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 until it was great. So if you go to GitHub, obviously you have claw

1:01:21Lon Harris:chief skills, the executive assistant skill, and then you have skill.md. That's the structure of OpenClaw, and it has its name, it 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 auto-resolver to decide whether to act, draft, escalate, or ignore.

1:02:00Lon Harris:If the signal is primarily a lead status, outreach track, or prospect, pipeline item, route it through business development workflow instead of treating it as a generic EA task. Like, this is fantastic.

1:02:11Ryan Carson:I've worked a lot on it, and it works.

1:02:13Lon Harris:Yeah, meeting note ingestion. Read it. Extract principal tasks, assistant tasks, decisions, and follow-ups. Classify them through the priority map. Run auto-resolver policy. Update claw chief slash task MD and any other live source of truth in the same turn, record notes in, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, inbox handling rules, handle without asking first when authority is clear, meeting scheduling, short acknowledgement replies, confirming receipt, boom. And this is coming from you or from your assistant when you do it?

1:02:41Ryan Carson:These are mostly messages to your assistant, right? So it's everything you want a good EA to do. Like this is from 25 years of experience of working with DAs and people, right?

1:02:52Lon Harris:All right.

1:02:52Alex Finn:Well done. Anything else on the docket for us, Lon? Do you want a quick, since we're in demo mode, I could do a quick two-second demo what I've been working on? Yes. Please. Okay. This is an official announcement. I was going to reveal this on my live stream after this, but I'm just so inspired by Ryan and Yazine. I kind of want to demo it now. It's a twist exclusive, folks. This is a twist exclusive. Let's do it. This is Henry Intelligent machines. This is something I've been working on for a while. This is autonomous swarms of agents finding challenges and solving them for you. And basically the way this works is I have many, many agents right now running locally on my multiple computers, going out and finding challenges online, going on Reddit, X, YouTube, product hunt, message boards, literally thousands of different sites, finding challenges people are having, and then autonomously solving them and earning revenue.

1:03:46Alex Finn: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 of 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.

1:04:45Alex Finn: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.

1:05:17Lon Harris: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. Felt sense. Felt sense. That was Friday. The guy did it kind of to be provocative. And then there was another one that was all from one interface. I saw Kevin Rose interviewed the founder. Pulsia. And we had Pulsia on before that.

1:05:58Lon Harris:We did. We had Pulsia on before he launched it formally, I think. And Pulsia is like, I don't know, more, Ryan, like a platform like eBay or something where, or Airbnb, where you can come in, put in your business idea or your business, and then kind of be in competition with other people to see who can grow it faster. And like a little leaderboard, almost like a Sims. It was kind of like reminding me of the Sims. What do you think this says about startup culture when Alex can bring in, you know, the tried and true look for business ideas on Reddit? Like it's always been like an underground thing.

1:06:36Lon Harris:Like if you see people frustrated in a subreddit and then you solve their problem, they might become your customers. Awesome. Like great technique. But here we are like one click, make it one click, do a AB test like Eric Reese and the startup and Steve Blankfeld, the startup, startup engine, whatever they called it.

1:06:55Ryan Carson:I think this is cool. This gets you past the zero to one, right? Yeah. So your agent, this is cool. So your 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 um 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 hand off 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.

1:07:30Ryan Carson:The models are going to be basically already AGI. I'm interested in how proactive Henry is. I'm sharing a tweet now in the room where you said, I woke up this morning and my AA employee Henry texted me that he did all these tasks overnight without asking. He fixed bugs. He read through your emails, built a CRM, gave you ideas for new videos. And even to set you a nano banana image of itself where he sees himself as an owl. How are you reigning 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?

1:08:09What's the protocol?

1:08:10Alex Finn:I'm basically giving him complete freedom to consume as much as he wants and prepare the drafts of what he wants to do. But anything that is public facing, it just goes through an approval gate, right? So it can't go crazy and do things that will damage you. But I'm giving him pretty complete freedom to, one, go online, go anywhere he wants, two, build his own skills and tool sets so he can accomplish anything he wants. And then right before that final gate, that's where you have to approve, or you can send a note back, or you can edit. So I'm trying to give it as much freedom as he possibly can have.

1:08:45Lon Harris:Super powerful. Okay, Lon, what else was in the docket? Well, we could talk about Hermes Agent, which is an open source agent from France's new research. that was released in February. Get the chart showing token use growth by Hermes agent on one particular API router on OpenRouter, if we want to show that chart up. Lives on your server. It remembers everything it learns, and it gets more capable over time. They call it the agent that grows with you. And I know Alex has been using it some, so we want to chat with him about it. So what do you think of this? Is it in any way going to challenge OpenClaw?

1:09:21Lon Harris:And are you still dedicated to OpenClaw when you see all these other tools coming out?

1:09:25Alex Finn: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. uh 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 as 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 uh well i think there's probably many reasons.

1:10:15Alex Finn: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 is better. I'm getting way better results, but I'm using them side by side. And I think they're worth using side by side.

1:10:50Alex Finn:The switching costs are too high now.

1:10:52Ryan Carson:Forget it. Like I bet Hermes is great. I'm just all in an open claw and it will take me two weeks to, to really see if Hermes is good. And I'm not interested in that. I'm glad the team is building it. And obviously they're going to be supportive of local models. And I love that. But you have to bet on, on Peter. i mean and with the backing of open ai now it's gonna be the best i saw dave morin said the new

1:11:16Lon Harris:version of open ai is gonna not open ai of open claw is gonna drop this week is that correct i'm

1:11:21Ryan Carson:using it yeah you're using it morning yep oh it came out today yeah it shipped last night and they drop every day they have updates every single day r2 is using it it's got this really cool feature called dreaming um which is what humans do so when you sleep you're you're 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.

1:12:02We'll see.

1:12:03Lon Harris:Interesting.

1:12:04Alex Finn:Any thoughts yourself, Alex, on it? 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 an actual migration perspective, Ryan, they actually do have built-in migration in Hermes where you can just like do Hermes migrate and it'll take all your memories, all your instructions, everything in like a second. And Hermes, so I think it's worth testing out. 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.

1:12:37Lon Harris:This is becoming a big thing on social media, obviously, is just people having opinions based on where they place their bets. Yeah, a hot take has its own value. No, it's becoming acute, I would say. 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 the Mac. It's all ops, all lobbying, nonstop. And I'm just tired of it. Tau versus Solana. Mac versus PC. Android versus Android. It's something they've done to the algorithm. Local models versus hosted models.

1:13:16Alex Finn:It's literally, it's a marketing strategy now from a lot of companies. Like the infamous one is Higgsfield. Literally their entire marketing strategy is illegal, undisclosed advertising. They pay influencers to go say Higgsfield's incredible. It's clearly an ad. And that's just the entire marketing strategy for a lot of these companies. Did you see, Jason, over the weekend, our friend of the pod, Nick O 'Neill, was tweeting nonstop about Higgs field. I got a little suspicious, I have to say. Really? Yeah. I think he's one of the guys that Higgs field is contracting to do this because he doesn't strike.

1:13:50Lon Harris:Don't they have to disclose that now? They're supposed to. I know that this is happening because the guy who's running product at X, Nikita, he was like, he DM'd me. And he's like, hey, can you put a label on your Polymarket tweet that it's an ad? And I was like, it's not an ad. I don't sell my tweets. And he's like, OK, fair enough. And I'm like, that was a weird interaction. Like, oh, I get it. People are ratting people out. Like I might be a shareholder in a company, but that doesn't mean I'm getting paid to tweet about the company. So if I tweet, I love Uber, that's not a paid ad, but I am a shareholder.

1:14:33Ryan Carson:This gets murky because I get a lot of credits. So like, and I disclosed it at the beginning of the show, didn't I? I have a lot of OpenAI, API credits, fine. I have a lot of Devon credits now, fine. Like I actually think you probably do need to disclose at a deeper level now, you know, because I'm not being paid by anybody, but I do get credits now. I mean, if so.

1:14:52Lon Harris:Yeah, I think it's like there's like multiple layers. There's I'm explicitly being paid to do this. Clearly, the FTC requires you to disclose that. Then there's I have an affiliation or I'm a shareholder in or I benefit some way if this company wins. And that is like an optional thing, I think, 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, like, 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.

1:15:38Lon Harris:Like, I couldn't even tell you what I'm an investor in. I probably have shares in Lyft from being in some venture firms, and I don't even know it. At some point, somebody might give me shares in Andrel because I'm an LP in their company. And people are like, oh, my God, I thought you were banned from getting Andrel 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. But I thought that was like an interesting one. Yeah. PTG Kyle in the YouTube chat asks, is this just the modern word of mouth people sort of shilling on social media?

1:16:11I don't know. I think it's a little, there's a little bit more to it than just word of mouth.

1:16:16Lon Harris:You remember paper posts, Lon? Sure. In the early days, of course. I remember paper posts.

1:16:20Ryan Carson:Man, the founder of that, that guy was brutal. Oh, I don't remember. That guy was so bad. This has always been with us. Anywhere where there's, if a conversation takes off here, there's monetary value associated with it. There's always going to be gamesmanship from the earliest days, as I recall.

1:16:36Lon Harris:Do you remember paper posts found or coming on this week in startup and getting into it with me, Lon? I think I do. Wow, that was a long time. He's so combative. Ted Murphy. Yes. He is so combative. I do remember this. And do you remember what I did to him? Oh, my God. It was so dark. No. He had done this whole paper post thing. You have a poor woman. What was his name? His name was Ted. So the guy, Ted, was getting a woman. It became Isaiah. Oh, my God. I'm having flashbacks. Oh, that's right. He might see it. And he was doing all this covert marketing stuff, paper posts. I was doing weblogs at the time, blogging.

1:17:17Lon Harris:And I was like, you got to disclose this stuff. Like, it's just, it's, you know, whatever. And the guy had written on this poor woman's forehead with a Sharpie, like this degrading thing to do for like$100. And he was seeing what she would do for money as part of like this promotion thing. Well, that's gross. And he made a video of it. And 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$100. He's like, yeah, totally do it. And I was like, okay, Tyler, go get me a Sharpie and get me a link from my wallet.

1:17:57Lon Harris:I didn't know what to do on there. 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 got to end the show here. It was like so, it was, I think this was bizarre. 2008 Jason I can't find the original post but I think that's what this was this happened I think it was that oh my god anyway I mean this is where like the forever yeah 18 years ago geez it was like 18 years ago

1:18:25Ryan Carson:it was we need Yazen's tool to be telling us that's exactly

1:18:28Lon Harris:oh my god yeah where do you look at the archive? um it was oh my god sorry I'm just looking for yeah I think this one got memory hold into history I can't find I mean, it was like there were a million blog posts about this moment. Yeah, no, I remember it now that you're talking about it, but I can't find the action. And he like literally wrote on his forehead. It was insane. I don't even want to get into it. All right, listen, this has been another episode. Amazing episode. Twist. Thank you, Yazan, Alex, and Ryan, and Lon. And we will see you all on Wednesday on Twist. Bye-bye.

From the publisher

Anthropic just pulled the plug on Claude subscriptions for OpenClaw and every third party agentic tool. So Jason and Lon welcome back three of our top TWiST OpenClaw experts to break down what it means, how much it’s going to cost now, and whether this is truly the end of the subsidized AI era.

And they all brought demos! We’re checking out ClawChief from Ryan Carson, Alex Finn’s agent Henry, and Yazin Alirhayim’s Sidecast protocol, inspired by a special request from JCal!

Hosts

Jason Calacanis: http://x.com/jason

Lon Harris: https://x.com/lons

Guests

Ryan Carson: https://x.com/ryancarson

Clawchief: https://github.com/snarktank/clawchief

Alex Finn: https://x.com/AlexFinn

Creator Buddy: https://www.creatorbuddy.io/

Yazin Alirhayim: https://x.com/yazins

OpenOats / Sidecast: https://github.com/yazinsai/OpenOats

Further Reading

The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande: https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000

Marc Andreessen on AI job loss: https://x.com/pmarca/status/2040919227641856307

OpenAI acquires TBPN: https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-tbpn/

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

Gusto - https://Gusto.com/twist

Vanta - https://vanta.com/twist

Shopify - https://shopify.com/twist

Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist

Today’s show:

Timestamps:

0:00 Welcome back to TWiST

0:32 Jason's thinks Andor is as good as Empire Strikes Back…

2:30 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!

3:26 Check out the checklist manifesto! https://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0312430000

6:36 Our guests Ryan Carson, Alex Finn, and Yazin Alirhayim, and join the show

10:28 Gusto - Check out the online payroll and benefits experts with software built specifically for small businesses and startups. Try Gusto today and get three months FREE at https://Gusto.com/twist.

10:46 People are automating their coworkers and getting them fired…

18:32 Anthropic Bans OpenClaw

20:06 Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://www.vanta.com/twist

24:06 How "caveman talk" makes AI works better

27:31 Alex thinks $2000/ month subscription plans are inevitable for AI.

29:31 Why is nobody using the leaked Anthropic Model?

30:30 Shopify: Turn those What If's into sales with the ecommerce platform powering millions of businesses. Sign up for your $1-per-month trial today at https://shopify.com/twist

32:37 Open models have been 6 months behind for the past few years

35:53 Why did OpenAI acquire TBPN?

42:01 Tactical/ Practical: The product itself is the most important thing

44:31 Demo or Die! Yazin is back to show off OpenOats

55:05 Ryan's "Claw Chief" https://github.com/snarktank/clawchief/blob/main/skills/executive-assistant/SKILL.md?plain=1

1:02:14 Alex's big announcement, "Henry intelligent machines"

1:12:33 Alex Finn DESTROYS Higgsfield's marketing strategy

1:15:35 Throwback to "Pay Per Post"

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