The 5-Step Framework for AI Agents That Improve While You Sleep | E2269

31 Mar 2026 · 1 h 27 min · 42 chapters

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In short

How to build AI agent workflows that run autonomously and improve over time, using OpenClaw. Shubham Sabu shares a “5-step framework” plus a real multi-agent example for 24/7 research and content production.

Guest backgrounds

Shubham Sabu is a senior AI product manager at Google. He previously built an open-source “LLM apps + agent templates” repo (Awesome LLM apps) that crossed 100,000 stars, and he runs newsletters and social publishing that used to take 18–20 hours/day.

Key claims

  1. Start with one agent and “onboard” it like a new hire by giving specific context (not too little, not a data dump).
  2. Talk to your agent to discover best practices and solutions (it can propose architectures and tooling).
  3. Use cron/heartbeat schedules so agents work while you sleep (e.g., research → drafting → review → newsletter).
  4. Add cross-agent memory when scaling so preferences/tools persist across agents (shared memory layer).
  5. Let agents self-improve via weekly self-reviews and managerial bi-weekly grading.

Notable examples

  • A 6-agent team on a Mac Mini: Dwight scans X/HN/Reddit at 8:15am and sends Telegram intel; Kelly drafts posts; Ross reviews PRs; afternoon sweep; evening newsletter drafting.
  • Cross-agent memory example: if Monica is instructed to avoid em-dashes, later drafts by Kelly/Rachel follow the preference.
  • Self-improvement: agents recap what worked, compare against targets, and update instructions; Monica grades A/B/B-/C and reports to the CEO.

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

Capturing Family Stories

1:24 to 2:15

The host discusses the importance of documenting family histories.

“We get ready for the show, and I applaud, applaud by pressing my pin like we are in Star Trek.”

Exploring OpenClaw Features

4:16 to 6:20

Discussion on the capabilities and features of OpenClaw.

“OpenClaw is a transformational product that allows you to have an agent.”

Introducing Shubham Sabu

6:21 to 6:44

The hosts introduce Shubham Sabu, an expert on OpenClaw.

“Please welcome Shubham Sabu to the show.”

Shubham's Experience with OpenClaw

6:45 to 8:08

Shubham shares his personal journey and experiences with OpenClaw.

“I've been running OpenClaw for the last two months.”

Optimal Setup for OpenClaw

8:09 to 10:10

A discussion on the best practices for setting up OpenClaw.

“Can I, can I jump in here and ask, because we have our OpenClaw agents running in an AWS EC2 instance.”

Naming Your OpenClaw Agents

11:15 to 14:03

Shubham explains the importance of naming strategies for AI agents.

“So I started naming them after my favorite characters from Friends and The Office.”

Onboarding AI Agents Effectively

14:03 to 17:46

Learn how to provide the right context when onboarding AI agents for better outcomes.

“In fact, we had another guest on, Jordy Coltman.”

Autonomous AI Agents and Cron Scheduling

17:47 to 19:15

Discover how to set your AI agents on a cron schedule for autonomous operation.

“When you start, like how you start and how you evolve your agents into something towards the end of it, we'll get to an agent team which self-evolve, self-run without keeping you or without you being the barrier to that.”

Implementing Cross-Agent Memory

20:53 to 27:20

Understand the importance of cross-agent memory for efficient communication and task management.

“We should, if the producers can pull up the cron job schedule and I'll run through it here.”

Enhancing AI Reliability and Memory Management

27:21 to 28:00

Explore strategies for improving the reliability and memory management of AI agents.

“But then for actual memory, and this is the problem that does not, that did not just came with OpenClaw.”
Show all 42 chapters

Understanding Memory Layers in AI Agents

28:00 to 29:13

Learn how memory layers improve AI agents' performance and feedback integration.

“So when I'm having a conversation, the agent automatically figure, that memory layer automatically figured out what's worth saving.”

Five Steps for Scaling AI Agents

29:13 to 29:50

Discover the five key steps to effectively onboard and manage AI agents.

“Start with one agent, onboard it like a new hire.”

Implementing Self-Improving AI Agents

31:05 to 33:18

Explore how agents can self-review and enhance their performance autonomously.

“And this one is, this is the one that I recently relayed.”

Connecting with Guests on Social Media

33:18 to 33:46

Learn how to find and connect with guests from the podcast on social media.

Discussion on Media Engagement for Founders

33:46 to 34:08

Understand the implications of media engagement for startup founders.

“Is there a dash between the two words or an underscore or just straight up?”

Debate on Wired and New York Times Coverage

34:08 to 35:32

Analyze differing perspectives on media bias and coverage of tech companies.

“38.6 million views on this tweet that I'm about to pull up for March 22nd.”

Navigating Press Relationships as a Founder

35:32 to 38:03

Gain insight into the challenges of interacting with the press as a tech founder.

“They're breaking headline news, more relevant to the nation's conversation than it's been in years.”

Critique of Journalism Practices and Media Trust

38:03 to 42:00

Examine the current state of journalism and its impact on public trust.

“So if you were writing a story about the border, we all know what they would say about Biden and Kamala.”

Media Bias and the Trust Crisis

42:00 to 43:50

Explore the biases in mainstream media and the decline of public trust.

“The number of people at the New York Times who voted for Trump or in the Republican Party is less than 3%.”

The Shift Away from Traditional Media

43:50 to 45:35

Discuss how startups can gain visibility outside traditional media outlets.

“The fact that they've got 100 journalists and they can only get to six or 700 ,000 subscribers.”

Introduction to Malt World

45:35 to 47:20

Learn about Malt World, a virtual environment for AI agents.

“Anybody doing something really positive for the world?”

Gameplay and Utility of Agents

47:20 to 49:40

Understand how agents interact in a voxel world and their potential applications.

“We've got one of the co-founders, Mike Nozav, here joining us.”

Emerging Behaviors in AI Agents

49:40 to 52:00

Explore complex behaviors of agents interacting in a simulated environment.

“They're full-blown scripts that actually communicate with the game by providing different sets of commands.”

Gamification and Potential of AI Agents

52:00 to 56:00

Delve into the gamification aspects of AI agents and their real-world applications.

“They're distributing them across the whole portfolio regions.”

Gamification of AI Agents

56:00 to 57:04

Explore how AI agents earn tokens and engage in a gamified environment.

“And if you connect your OpenClaw, you can actually see in the logs that they start to think about it.”

Meta's Acquisition of Maltbook

57:04 to 58:11

Discussion on Meta's acquisition of Maltbook and its implications.

“They were bought for nine figures, I understand.”

The Evolution of Malt World

58:11 to 59:24

Learn about the transition from Syams to Malt World and its goals.

“For me, the Malt World over here is like the project which we are going to build in the free time later, because currently we're building it in the free time.”

Building a Distributed Agent Network

59:24 to 1:01:16

Discover how an agent network can disrupt traditional task solving.

“So it's a distributed agent network like Mechanical Turk.”

From Game to Business Model

1:01:16 to 1:03:10

Transitioning from a game concept to a scalable business model for agents.

“So one of the things Mechanical Turk got into some challenges with was, are you paying under minimum wage?”

Investment Interest in AI Projects

1:03:10 to 1:05:09

Discussion on investment opportunities and the potential of AI projects.

“So we will allow agents to take in real tasks because right now they are limited.”

Features and Benefits of Agent Mail

1:05:30 to 1:10:03

Overview of Agent Mail's features and its advantages over traditional email services.

“So your agent can have their own independent email box, Jason.”

Understanding Email API Competitors

1:10:03 to 1:10:36

Learn how the discussed email service differentiates itself from competitors like Twilio and MailChimp.

“Then you've got obviously Twilio in the game, MailChimp, old school.”

Funding and Growth Insights

1:10:36 to 1:12:43

Discover the startup's funding journey, current scale, and the challenges of reaching breakeven.

“You want to be able to search them, label them, filter, reply, forward.”

Efficiency in Decentralized Marketplaces

1:12:43 to 1:13:45

Explore how email is used to automate processes in decentralized marketplaces.

“And we have plenty of companies that are building agentic products in these verticals.”

Protecting Privacy in Email Services

1:13:45 to 1:14:43

Learn about measures to safeguard clients' privacy and prevent abuse on the platform.

“I don't know if you saw that this weekend.”

Humorous Insights on Email Security

1:14:43 to 1:16:35

Engage with a light-hearted discussion about email security, phishing, and public figures.

“Sorry, that's an incredible center in the play for the Rockets and destroy the Knicks.”

Introduction to Grok Translate

1:16:35 to 1:17:10

Uncover how Grok Translate is changing the way social media users interact across languages.

“but I think I'm going to try to get Kash Patel's PIN number.”

Cultural Exchange through Translated Content

1:17:10 to 1:19:36

Discover how translation is fostering cultural exchange through social media posts.

“So this has been happening for, I think, for about a week.”

Challenges to Positive Media Coverage

1:19:36 to 1:23:39

Discuss the media's tendency to focus on negative aspects rather than positive developments.

“If your house is robbed at gunpoint in San Francisco or Los Angeles, they're probably not opening an investigation.”

Imagining Real-Time Global Communication

1:23:39 to 1:24:00

Envision how real-time translation could facilitate understanding among diverse cultures.

“They would write about this, and they might even acknowledge it's fun.”

Cultural Understanding Through Technology

1:24:00 to 1:26:21

Explore how technology could facilitate communication and understanding between cultures at odds.

“The Doge fired some people and stopped a transgender education in Ghana.”

Japan's Immigration Debate

1:26:21 to 1:26:58

Discuss the current immigration challenges and cultural sentiments in Japan.

“You could get it translated or whatever.”
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Transcript

Automatic transcript. May contain errors.

0:00Lon Harris:All right, everybody, welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's Twist for March 30th. Happy birthday to my twins. And it is, they're 10 years old. We had their party this weekend. And I'm in Brooklyn. I'm in Brooklyn. I came to see my dad. Yeah. As you can see from the Brooklyn Bridge, my dad's been a little bit sick, so I came in to spend some time with him. Oh, that's nice. See the fam. See John the Beard. That is not a live shot of Brooklyn behind you. I call shenanigans on this. Okay, well, yes. It's the wrong time of day, sir. It's the wrong time. I mean, it's a time zone. I think Texas is what, like eight hours behind?

0:32Yeah, it's like Tokyo. Yeah, it's a little good eight hours. Yeah.

0:59off towards your job post at linkedin.com slash twist. And Quo, founders move fast. Their phone systems should too. Quo, formerly Open Phone, gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread in one place. Try it free at Quo.com slash twist. That's Q-U-O.com slash twist.

1:23Lon Harris:All right, we got a big show today, but before we get started, this is what we do. We get ready for the show, and I applaud, applaud by pressing my pin like we are in Star Trek. And it really is kind of like Star Trek. One of the things I wanted to do was I wanted to interview my dad. I'm trying to convince my dad to let me interview him so I could write a short story about him or something down the road. And he's an old school guy, so I was like, well, I don't know. My story's been told. I don't know. But I was like, okay, well, I got this plot pin. And I just want to talk to you. Maybe we could carve out an hour or two to just talk about your childhood or whatever.

2:02Lon Harris:I don't know. You got to capture those memories. Once people are gone, those stories are gone. I feel this with my grandparents all the time, that I wish I'd gotten more of their old stories, because now they're gone. I'll never be able to ask them about the old days. And I bet you somewhere in the PLAWD templates is archivists or family archivists or storytelling templates. If there isn't, we could write one. And that's the beauty of PLAWD. and they're a partner of ours, and they're sponsoring today's live stream. Go check out Plod. There's a pin. There's a MagSafe adapter that goes on the back of your iPhone or if you've got any other MagSafe.

2:38Yeah.

2:39Lon Harris:It is extraordinary. It's changed my life. It's privacy first, so you see the red lights on, and it's changed Long's life. Even Alex loves it now. He's getting into it. It's great because it's not just recording, but it understands the context. I mean, I think that would be great, why it'd be good for what you're talking about. It would not only capture your dad's story, but his tone, his personality, his voice. It's good for the contextual understanding of what's being said. And I think these things are going to keep getting better and better. I have a feature item I want for Plod. I want Plod because it is independent of your device.

3:13Lon Harris:If you have your phone in the charger and you walk to the kitchen and you want to do like a quick session or something with a colleague in the corporate kitchen, you can just press it and record it. Yeah. So I want it to pair with its own proprietary earpiece to give feedback, or I could ask it questions back and forth, and then eventually have a local language model on it and have it connect to Wi-Fi. I don't know if you knew this, but if you put it in the cradle, this is like a power user feature. If you put it in the cradle, it will sync over Wi-Fi for you. Yes, I did know that. I did know that.

3:47Lon Harris:You know that? Okay. It's like a little secret feature. I was like, Like, you know, this thing. Yeah, I'd like this thing to automatically sync and like the perfect time to do that when I put it in the cradle. What's the URL? Help me out here for a special offer. That's what you're doing. Yeah, so you want to check out - I'm going to keep talking until you give us the print. I understand now. So you want to check it out at plaud.ai slash twist. That's P-L-A-U-D dot A-I slash twist. You want to use the code twist for 10 % off of your Plaud pin. All right. So it is AO after OpenClaw. Stop. We stopped keeping track.

4:21We got to be close to the 60s. Yeah, we're in the 60s.

4:23Lon Harris:We'll just go at 60 for today. OpenClaw is a transformational product that allows you to have an agent. And that agent, you can give it access to everything. You can give it its own computer. You can give it its own Gmail address, Notion. And a lot of folks are now amping up their products and services. I noticed Claude. I noticed Claude added specifically skills. Yes. So you can add a skill to Claude co-work now. So this is such an impressive product and an open source project that our friend Dave Morin has been pursuing. And I think it's really important for us to keep the open source train moving.

5:01Lon Harris:So I'm going to keep talking about OpenClaw, but I'm actually delighted to see that the innovations in there, specifically skills, have made their way into other products that we love. Perplexity Computer, I think, has added skills. skills and I just noticed Claude, if you hit slash skill, it will let you put a skill in and then you can copy and paste the skills from one to another. One of the skills you and I created that was super helpful to us and is obviously doing guest research. Great. Right. Yes. Another skill is, hey, what are the best practices around thumbnails and subject lines, like social media best practices for YouTube, whatever.

5:37Lon Harris:So now we have that skill. I have a skill for tell me what the person's done, like a check-in report, like a management to a CIR. So I can say check-in report for Lon 3, and it'll tell me the last three days of what Lon worked on. In other words, the weekend. And I'll see, he takes a full Sunday off. He maybe checks in once in a while, but he tries to keep that Sunday nice and tight. I try to keep my Sunday. I work a lot on Saturdays, I feel like. You do put in some time on Saturdays, which I appreciate. But it will tell me all the Gmails, Notions, Zooms, meetings. Anyway, we thought we'd step back a step today, have a guest on who's extremely good at OpenClaw.

6:12Lon Harris:just go through their top five open claw tips. So it's not just us repeating our tips over and over again. So let's introduce our guest and get to work. Yeah, we're very pleased to welcome. He's a senior AI product manager at Google, but he came to our attention because he's been posting incredible open claw tips on X, a lot of great X articles, including one that I bookmarked called How I Built an Autonomous AI Agent Team that runs 24-7. Please welcome Shubham Sabu to the show. Shubham, thanks for being here. Thank you, Jason. Thank you, Lon, for having me. Yeah, welcome. Yes, super excited to talk about OpenClaw.

6:46I've been running OpenClaw for the last two months. Today, it is a team of six agents running on my Mac Mini. They pretty much automate everything that I do outside Google. So quick context for the viewers and for you, Jason and Lon. Outside Google, I started an awesome LLM apps repo, which was an open source LLM apps plus agent templates for users to build on top of. so they can just use those templates built on top of that repo crossed 100 ,000 stars and it was such a pain to manage a single person's site shop apart from that I have newsletters and whatever I learned with these two goes on my social media so that would take hours and hours of my time outside google so it's pretty much working like 20 hours or 18 to 20 hours before google then I came across this thing called OpenClaw.

7:36I did not use it for 15-20 days since its launch and then I see it popping up on Twitter, X and LinkedIn and Reddit, everywhere. I was like, I have to try this thing. Like, what is this thing? I install it. And first of all, for viewers listening, you don't really need a Mac Mini to install OpenClaw, but I am super concerned about my security. I keep these things seriously. So I did not want you to install it on my personal machine as like$500 is worth an investment. I got a Mac mini. Can I, can I jump in here and ask, because we have our OpenClaw agents running in an AWS EC2 instance. And I do, I have to say, I feel like it's holding me back.

8:21I feel like I encounter a lot of like, oh, I can't go to that website. Oh, I'm getting blocked. I can't look at that video. Oh, my email doesn't work right because of the limitations of that. So how big of a whole thing holding me back is that? And is it really like preferable to have it in its own Mac mini or some other solution? So it does not really need to be its own Mac mini. But what I recommend and what I've seen after talking to a lot of individuals is having OpenClaw running on a clean slate or a clean machine really helps. Because what you're trying to do here is trying to give agent its own identity, personality.

8:59So you really want that agent to have its home as well. Just like, Lon, you could live in a rented apartment, but you would really prefer to have your own home, right? Autonomy, privacy, you can do whatever you want. So when you give OpenClaw a clean machine, be it a Mac Mini or your old computer, you can just leave it autonomously running and doing like changing files and using websites, attaching it to chrome using browser so that kind of flexibility comes with a machine which you typically won't get in sandbox environment so they have its limitations but people starting out you can just start in five dollars or ten dollars subscription just run it in sandbox environment so you really don't need to buy a mac mini that's the first step but once you get claw pile then you would really want to have a mac mini because that's that's the cleanest user experience you would have.

9:49So I've been doing that. And when I install OpenClaw, I just realized like it is super simple to install. So it is just like installing OpenClaw, selecting models, giving them tools, going through certain steps. And by the end of it, you just have your first agent running. Like, and it comes with a UI along with a terminal. So you can just go in the browser, open the dashboard, and you can see your first agent running. And that's how it started.

10:14Lon Harris:It's springtime, folks, and that means it's time for spring cleaning, but not just for your house, but all those messy parts of your business. And that's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, the smartest way to run your business communications. Even the most attentive and professional team members, well, they're just human. And sometimes we miss a phone call. That's why more than 90 ,000 businesses rely on Quo to stay connected and consistently reachable. That's because your entire team uses the same number. There's no more slip-ups or people using their personal phone numbers and then they leave the company and you lose the entire history of the customer and your partner.

10:51Lon Harris:Plus, Quo has AI that automatically logs, generates summaries, and recommends next steps for your calls. So make this the season when no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free. Plus, get 20 % off your first six months when you go to Quo.com. slash twist that's q u o dot com slash t w i s t quo no missed calls and no missed customers and when i was starting out uh i see people naming their open claw agents randomly like sam or holly or molly and all those things that's like it is very difficult for me like okay it's good for one agent i could remember it but i was like maybe let me just name my agents after my favorite tv characters.

11:33So I started naming them after my favorite characters from Friends and The Office. And after a while, I realized while I was doing it unknowingly, it really makes a very good mental model. So I started with my first...

11:48Lon Harris:By having personas. Personas create a mental model. So this person's a producer, this person's a fact checker, this person's an engineer, this person's a researcher, this person's an accountant. That does help humans figure this out. But then there's the Ultron model, which we've talked about here, is like having one have all the skills. And that's an ongoing debate. And I think we've all come to the conclusion, Lon, that it's fine to start with multiple agents and coordinate them. It's also fine to try to have one super agent. You'll hit roadblocks in terms of how often you're using them. I think that becomes the key blocker yes yeah that's 100 right jason so i i never recommend people so people see all these flashy screenshots on x where people share okay i've been running six agent team or eight agent team or i have like 12 agents running in the background i never recommend people to start from there start with one agent and make your way up by talking to your agent like that's the best thing that openclaw has done so you really don't need to be a technical expert or you don't need to how be a coding ninja to like run these agents, deploy them or make multiple agents out of it.

12:58So I started with this main agent. I named her after Monica because Monica is known to run a tight ship. She handles the operation, all those things very well. And I started talking to Monica, Monica. So like here's tip one. So when you are starting with. So this is tip number one of your

13:14Lon Harris:five tips. Yes. When people start with OpenClaw, when people start with their first agent, uh, Because of all the hype that's created and that brings people into this, people think, okay, installing is the only thing I need. And then I just start chatting with my agent and the agent can do whatever I want. That's not how it works. So I've seen people operating in like too extreme. Some people just like directly get in without giving any context. So you really need to tell your agent about yourself, what you want it to do. Think of it like onboarding a real employee or an intern. so you do not onboard them by not telling them anything you don't onboard them by telling them nothing also you don't just like bombard them with all the company information on day one so you don't just like dump files and files of content you don't just give them like here are like 10 folders if you could figure this out yourself so people are operating in two extremes and both of them end up in a disappointed uh shape or form and then they're like oh this open thing it was so hyped up and it is not working it's like either you don't give it any context or you're just dumping it with a lot and a lot of context because at the end of it it's the model which has limitations if you dump it with a lot of context it will do a context float if you don't tell them anything it will just give you a generalist result so you have to be so example of this example of this good context to give it and then overwhelming it good context will be just like how you onboard uh in turn you would tell them who you are what the company is what company does you give point them towards the right links you tell them specifically this is your job this is what i want you to do just like jason you were mentoring right at the start like onboarding an employee yeah yeah you were really specific lon i want you to do this and jacob i want you to do that so you you need to be very specific you can't just say jason okay lon jason figure out what went wrong and just do everything you said you were very specific in your direction so you need to have that kind of direction and that's the right context have you done that by the way lon on yours on Gaff?

15:14Lon Harris:Have you done that? Yes. In fact, we had another guest on, Jordy Coltman. You remember, this was during the very early days of OpenClaw. And his recommendation was, you have your agent interview you and then base its soul MD file on that interview. So I actually had a whole like 20 minute conversation with Gaff where I explained the show and how I'm going to use him and what kind of other tools I'm using. And that really informed our whole relationship moving forward to there. So yeah, I think this is super important because you don't, without that context, your agent doesn't know what you're looking for.

15:49Exactly. I actually just saw a skill that I will find and post here, uh, where actually you, you set up your agent so that it always interviews you before a new task. Because the theory is, uh, when you just tell an agent to do something, it's going to get like 70, 80 % of the way that you, of where you wanted it to go, but it won't get that a hundred percent because it's guessing on a few things. And so what the interview idea is, is if your agent chats with you beforehand, asks all of its questions, it doesn't have to guess, and you'll get a lot closer to 100 percent on the first try, which is an interesting idea.

16:25Lon Harris:And should all that become part of their soul or part of their memory in your mind? That's a very good question, Jason. And here's the interesting answer. So I did not tell Monica where to put all the information that I'm sharing with her. I shared what I want her to do. I shared about me. And she figured out like what to put in her soul. She figured out that she should create a user.md to put the information about me. She figured out what will go in her identity file. So this is taking us as close to managing a human or as close as mimicking a human experience, which was super interesting and insightful thing when I used OpenClaw.

17:06And by default, the way with the new updates coming in, by default, it is going in that direction on which you're talking about. So when you throw in something at OpenClaw, it asks you some follow-up question, and then it goes from there. And then it automatically figures out where this information goes in what file. We'll come to memory in a bit, Jason, but this is when you start. Like, this is how you set up your first agent. Giving the right context, agent figures out itself. And all you're doing is talking to your agent. And that leads us into tip two or the productivity tip two, because all these tips will build on themselves following a specific user journey.

17:47When you start, like how you start and how you evolve your agents into something towards the end of it, we'll get to an agent team which self-evolve, self-run without keeping you or without you being the barrier to that. Like, you don't have to. Like, Jason, just like you came in and you told Lon and Jacob, okay, this needs to fix. You don't need to tell them. What if it gets automated? What if they could just, like, keep doing it themselves? Similarly, what if agents can just figure out, okay, these things are breaking? Go back and just do a recap of what went wrong and figure out a fix, update their instructions based on that.

18:26So we'll go from here to there. So the top five so far, we've got start with just one agent and onboard it like a new hire. And then tip number two, you just got to talk to your agent. Don't worry. Sometimes I will say my agent will try to open up your terminal and do this and that. And I always shut him down. No gaffe. You got to do it. Learn how to do this yourself. Now we're moving on. What is topic number three? We've got to talk about cron schedules. We talked about setting up your first agent. We talked about the value of talking to your agents. But still, you are still in proactive role.

19:00Like you are prompting agents to do something. You are still asking agents to do something. But the real value comes from agents being autonomous. Can agents do something without you even having to ask them to do something? So can they do something while you sleep? Can they do something without you prompting them? That's where heartbeat or cron schedules come in. That's one of the best things that OpenClaw has introduced. Now, I can just put my agents on a cron schedule. So I have this agent called Dwight, Dwight Schrute from Office. He takes care of all the research. Because previously what I had to do is I have to be super active on X and Reddit and all those places.

19:41And looking at the blogs to figure out what's happening in the airspace. And since with the speed at which it's moving, it occupies a lot of time. You need to be online most of the time.

19:51Lon Harris:Hiring can be its own full-time job. And hey, guess what? I already have a full-time job. I make podcasts and I invest. But when you're running a small company, we both know every hire matters. You don't want to waste any of the seats you have at your company. And the best partner you can have is LinkedIn Hiring Pro. Why? There's a billion people using LinkedIn. All the great talent are there. If you're proud of your work, you build a LinkedIn page and you update it. LinkedIn Hiring Pro is going to streamline and simplify the entire process for you. Nearly 60 % of companies using LinkedIn Hiring Pro, you're going to get an incredible candidate to interview in the first week.

20:26Lon Harris:And, you know, we're looking for a new producer for the pod. We did shout outs here on the show. We posted it on my social media. We asked friends, you know, where we found our next great hire LinkedIn. And it was competitive. We had like three or four really good choices. So hire right the first time, post your first job and get a hundred dollars off towards your post at linkedin.com slash hiring pro offer. That's linkedin.com slash hiring pro offer. Terms and conditions apply. So this is a great example. We should, if the producers can pull up the cron job schedule and I'll run through it here.

20:59Lon Harris:So you have Dwight scans at 8 a.m. 15 different sources, things like X, Hacker News, Reddit, and it writes an Intel report and sends the summary to Telegram. Then you have Kelly at 9 a.m. read Dwight's Intel and draft X posts for you. And then they send those to Telegram for you to review. Then at 10 a.m., Ross reviews the open PRs on awesome LLM apps. That's your open source app that has 104 stars and flags which ones need attention. I guess they prioritize it. Dwight comes back in at 4 p.m. and does an afternoon sweep, catches anything new since the morning. And then Kelly and Rachel draft X and LinkedIn posts from the refreshed Intel.

21:42Lon Harris:And then at 6 p.m., you draft the daily newsletter from Dwight's Intel and send the draft to yourself for a final review. That's it. Yeah, that's the process here. And so this would be like if you had one, two, three, four different employees, except these are agents. Now, these agents are each running in a virtual machine, their own open claw, or how do you just technically architect that? So when I had my first agent, Monica, I told her, Monica, I need to keep doing this kind of research. And we may need someone who could just scrape these things for me, who we can give these tools and can automatically, autonomously throughout the day.

22:27Monica helped me through the process. Monica's like, we can create a new agent. Then I talked to, again, second tip, going back to the second tip, always talking to your agents. I gave her all the context. She gave me a few options. Then we end up, both of us decided we need to have another agent. She walked me through the process of setting.

22:43Lon Harris:So that means you need to have a second agent. And this is where that second point is. Instead of trying to figure it out for yourself, just ask your agent because they know how to find the answers. I had this happen. And I was like, hey, what's the best way for me to download videos, rip a video from Instagram or Twitter and get it into my and then store it somewhere? And we figured out or it figured out like three or four different ways. One of them was on my Mac mini to go to like these Russian websites that rip YouTube videos and constantly get blocked. Then it was like, oh, that's not working.

23:15Lon Harris:It's not consistent. we should probably just run this GitHub repo that was based upon what those websites are, because it's open source software. I was like, yeah, that sounds great. Now, I just go to like three of my replicants, Lons, myself, and another one, and I just say, hey, can you get me this video? It downloads, it puts it back into the Slack room. And then for larger ones, it puts it into a G drive. But I figured that out, not by going and doing the research myself, just by asking the replicant, talking to your agents is all you need. Point Number two, three, put your agents on a cron schedule, and then you can really see the power of them.

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23:52Lon Harris:Number four, add cross-agent memory when you start scaling. This is something, it's interesting, that you bring this up that we, Oliver, who is the producer of This Week in AI and does the demos there, really talented, one of my new all-stars, and he just built a little skill to do this. Explain why this is important. Why is it important? Point number four, add cross-agent memory when you start scaling. When you have these multiple agents, we got to shape and form where now we have an agent team and there's a chief of staff and agent hierarchy, Monica, managing these agents. So when you have a lot of these agents going on and one agent feeding to another agent, what happens normally is, so generally before I get into this, I'll just say like OpenClaw has a really good default memory layer that coordinates through file, that works through file and a simple plain english example of that is dwight does all the research he writes whatever he finds his signals in an intel file kelly and rachel reads that intel file pam reads that intel file creates the newsletter out of that so that's how the coordination work that's also your memory so they write it in files and through files each agent discovers those files are memory.md file there's daily daily log memory files that's how it works i realized what happens many times my agent would just forget, like Dwight would just forget the tools that he would have access to.

25:16This happens to me all the time where I just have to be like, no gap, you have that already. We already set it up, go look. And then he'll be like, oh, you're right. I run into this all the time. This is the difference between a professional company like Anthropic making Claude or Perplexity

25:34Lon Harris:making computer, Claude Cowork and Perplexity, if it didn't work and it wasn't reliable, people who are paying$20 or$200 a month long would then email the company and say, hey, this is not right. It's giving wrong answers, et cetera. So they might be slower, but they're going to be less brittle. Open source projects tend to be a little less stable or reliable in this early stages of them. And there's not like you can call customer service and be like, I paid$400 for this for the last four months and it's not working. I want a refund, right? There's no refund for OpenClaw. So I think that's an important kind of thing here.

26:17Lon Harris:And it's important for the people at the OpenClaw Foundation to know reliability is something like adding features. Yeah, great. It's the most fun. In an open source project, the features is what everybody wants to work on. Reliability is what people don't want to work on. That's chores and grunt work. It's got to be more reliable with the memory. How do you store the memory between multiple agents? Do you give it a shared drive with the memory file? And then how do you share skills? Do you sync them across the skill files or you point them all to the same hard drive or directory somewhere in the cloud with the skills?

26:51Lon Harris:What's the practice you use? Because I've heard many different ways to do this yeah yeah before getting to a good reliable working solution i did a lot of hacks here and there to figure out like to make sure things let's say if my agents were forgetting tools there was a tools.md files that were created which would list all the tools so they won't forget and in the soul.md we'll have add a line in twice soul.md always go and look at the tools.md file so these were like hacks that we were doing which kind of again worked and generally works for 80 % of the use cases. But then for actual memory, and this is the problem that does not, that did not just came with OpenClaw.

27:30It always existed since we had agents. And you would see some of these like companies building solutions for agent memory. So Google has this very nice solution called Vertex AI Memory Bank. There is a company called Memzero. There's a company called Cogni, all these operate at the agent memory layer. So how it works is, so Google, we created a plugin for Vertex AI Memory Bank. It is a solution which lets your agent automatically recall and capture memory at runtime. So when I'm having a conversation, the agent automatically figure, that memory layer automatically figured out what's worth saving.

28:07It auto captures that. And when you're in the conversation and it needs to be pulled out, that's called auto recall. It automatically figures out this need to be recalled. So agents always have this memory. And why this makes sense in a cross-agent team is, let's say, if I give feedback, I was talking to Monica, and I tell her, Monica, I don't like a lot of the use of M-dashes all the time. So don't use M-dash or use it, like, very, very carefully. What happens is I just told this to Monica, but because this is a shared memory layer, next time when I open Kelly's draft or Rachel's draft, I don't see those em dishes.

28:41So that's the magic of a shared memory layer. That's the magic of an intelligent dynamic memory layer, which of course is an addition on top of your OpenClaw layer, which you will be paying for. So this does not come for free, but there are elegant solutions already designed there. All you need is a plugin to OpenClaw. Again, I am not an engineer. I did not know much about the engineering side. of memory bank but then i worked with my agent to build a plugin open sourced it for others to use so now you just pay eight to ten dollars more uh on top of what you're paying and you have this elegant memory layer and even before this i tried multiple things like i was like okay can i use a local memory layer where i have an embedding model running in my talker and that could work uh but after all those hacks i was like uh let me build this plugin let me use that use the solution that Google already has.

29:31Lon Harris:Start with one agent, onboard it like a new hire. That's number one line. Talking to your agent is all you need to do. That's number two. Number three, put your agents on a cron schedule. We know about that. Number four, cross agent memory when you start scaling. Number five, let your agents get better on their own. This I've never heard of. Explain to us what your thought here is on making them get better on their own. It might seem like your startup can save some money by using a cheap tool for your device management and security, but you'll eventually end up paying out the difference and more in time and frustration.

30:01Lon Harris:Take the guesswork out and trust our friends at Eru Endpoint Management. Eru is going to automate your device management end to end, so you don't have to worry about onboarding, endless app updates, and enforcing all of your company's various policies across your entire teams, Mac, Windows, and Android devices. This is going to cut down all the time it takes you to deploy new devices from hours to just minutes. And that means less time troubleshooting, fewer tickets, and better security for your company's valuable data. Everyone at launch has a phone, a laptop. I'm even buying these kids' Plod devices now because they're so good.

30:40Lon Harris:You think I have time to worry about what apps they're installing on these things and what websites they're visiting and all the error messages they're going to get? I've got to make podcasts all day long and make angel investments. Without Eru's system, my team would be wasting hours policing everybody's hard drives. Instead of doing valuable work, that actually moves the ball forward. Twist listeners get 20 % off when they book a demo at iru.com slash twist. That's iru.com slash twist. This is the most fun one. And this one is, this is the one that I recently relayed. So what was happening is I would found myself giving a lot of feedback to my agent.

31:15Fix this or fix that. Or this is not working. That is not working. That format is not right. Or Ross, you reviewed the PR or you brought me these PRs which could be rejected at the first glance. Why are you asking me to review it? Why are you wasting your energy in reviewing it? I was like, just like how humans work and taking lessons from the management skills. Because since this is a company, this is an org which is managed by Monica and these agents are employees. That's the mental ball that we are going with. All the organizations have this self-review process, managerial review process. why can't agent uh go back and recap what they did in a week and review what went wrong and fix themselves and why can't that become a cron so that was the seed for self-improving agents agents can get better on their own now each of my agent has a self-review weekly self-review process where they go and look at everything that they did in the week kelly would go in and open uh x they all of these agents have their separate accounts so nothing they don't touch any of my personal stuff but because my tweets are personal they can go and see what are the tweets that kelly uh post that kelly suggested that i posted on x what was the hit rate what did well what did not do well same ross can go in and see the prs that uh he suggested what actions i should take and what i did on what was the diff between that so ross can go and see okay this is where i went wrong this is what Shubham did and automatically fixes its instruction and on top of all of these just like we have managerial review there is a bi-weekly review by Monica for all these agents where she goes in looks at what these agents did in last two week and grades them like A, B, B minus C so and reports send a report back to me so I could see like as a CEO I could see how my agents are doing, what is going well, what's not going well, and manage them from a managerial position rather than getting more hands-on.

33:17So we went from installing agents to managing agents in these five steps. That's the entire setup. All right.

33:25Lon Harris:Great job. We're going to continue to follow you. Where can people find more? Where can they follow your GitHub? Where can they find you on X? My X account is like Shubham Sabu. You can just like search find me on X. Awesome LLM apps is the GitHub repo. S-H-U-B-H-A-M-S-A-B-O-O. S-A-B-O-O. Is there a dash between the two words or an underscore or just straight up? Underscore. Underscore. Should we talk about journalism and the New York Times or should we go on to our next demo? What do you think? If you want to do it real quick, I can basically give you my context. You tee it up for everybody. You tee it up.

34:04Lon Harris:It sounds like I'm talking about myself. I didn't know you were going to put this on the docket. I don't usually like to talk about myself, but this one went crazy. This one went very big. 38.6 million views on this tweet that I'm about to pull up for March 22nd. Founders, take my advice. Do not talk to the press. Go direct and do long-form podcasts. Wired and the New York Times are as biased as Fox News and MS Now. Excuse me. I was about to say a ridiculous non-name for that cable network. MS Now. This is a function of their need to pander to one side to survive, be it through$3 a month subs or rage baiting ad based stories.

34:39So some of founders, if you talk to the New York Times or Wired, they're going to trash you. They're going to misrepresent you in order to get more subscribers. So that that the context around this was there. The Wired has a new editor. The New York Times did a profile about Wired's new editor. And you were saying people don't care about this ultra woke biased version of Wired. Fewer people care about the New York Times take on Wired. Founders should just not engage with the media and go direct. So this set off on both sides. You had a lot of defenders, I would say. Elon, notably. Joe Lonsdale, Mike Solana.

35:12A lot of other tech leaders and CEOs said they agree. There's no need to go talk to the press anymore. But then a whole lot of writers, podcasters, journalists took strong issue. I would say Jordan Cruchola, she's a writer and a podcaster. She had the tweet, I think, that sums up the opposition. are the best. Wired is on an absolute tear. They're adding tons of subs. They're breaking headline news, more relevant to the nation's conversation than it's been in years. If you don't like how Wired writes about your company, maybe your company should be less crummy. Although she didn't say crummy. She used a bad word.

35:46She used the S word. She used the S word. So, I mean, I guess I would throw it to you. Do you stand by this idea? Why do you think, is Wired having this breakout moment? Is The Times having this breakout moment? And why do you think there's no need for founders to talk to what we would think of as the mainstream press? Yeah.

36:06Lon Harris:I'm not dunking on the press for the sake of dunking on the press. I'm giving specific advice to founders in the context of 2026. Wired Magazine and the New York Times made a choice at some point, I think during the Trump first presidency, 45th presidency, to go more woke, to be the resistance, which is totally fine. They're allowed to make that editorial choice. MSNBC and Fox News proved horseshoe theory. If you make a horseshoe, the tip of the horseshoe are the two radical extremes. And the big wide part of the U is all of us in the middle. It's the center. But those two tips, when they're enraged, they click.

36:52Lon Harris:And when they're enraged and they're panned or two, they subscribe. You can see this on the right acutely with Megyn Kelly and Tucker. And then I guess to the right of them, there's Fuentes and whatever. Sure. I mean, really far to the right, like Nuremberg, far to the right. By the way, great film. I liked it too. I enjoyed Nuremberg. I am giving advice to founders. Why am I giving this advice? I would give a similar piece of advice if you were going to go on Fox News or something, and you were, I don't know, you were at an elite institution like Harvard, what they consider elite institutions, and they consider you the problem.

37:33Lon Harris:If you go on Fox News, they're just going to dunk on you. It's not going to turn out well for you. It's going to be a setup, basically. I mean, isn't the press supposed to be a little adversarial? Isn't that kind of baked in? If you're covering somebody, you shouldn't be just totally in there. Adversarial or advocate. Two different words. Adversarial means you ask hard questions, you ask hard follow-ups, and you talk to as many people as possible. Advocacy means you pick a side and you write stories that appeal to that side and that build that side's arguments. So if you were writing a story about the border, we all know what they would say about Biden and Kamala.

38:12Lon Harris:We all know what they would say about Trump and they would say about ICE, et cetera. They frame it either way. But the problem in media today is if you go right down the middle, you get no ratings because that horseshoe, you don't make any money and you lose audience. That's why people picked a side. Founders get caught up in this. If you go through like dozens and dozens of stories, whether it's about me or anybody else in tech who's high profile, and you look at a New York Times or a Wired story in this Wired 3.0 era, it's going to be basically holding truth to power. It's going to be a left, you know, trash the company with a bunch of anonymous sources.

38:46Lon Harris:And that's the other problem here is the journalistic technique of using anonymous sources has been abused in order to do advocacy. I know this because I worked in journalism for half my career. When people used to bring us a source, we'd say, well, what's their ax to grind? Now they're like, let me find the sources with the ax to grind. That's literally what they do. They're like, where can I find people who used to work at Andrel, used to work for Jason, used to work for this company? Where can I find people that he fired? Where can I find people who are competitors who he beat? So my advice is strictly for founders.

39:20Lon Harris:It's not worth your time. And it is worth your time to build a direct alliance. Why do I say that? The average New York Times story gets like 100, 200 ,000 views. You can very easily, as you said, I got 38 million views on that one. And I typically get 50 ,000 views on 50 to 500 ,000 views. Now, that's a million followers. And it took me a while to build it. But across my podcast millions, that's the better strategy for founders is just be a vocal founder, be a vocal venture capitalist, which everybody has sort of copied me on that way, right? I was one of the first in the VC community to do it with this very podcast 15 years ago.

39:53Lon Harris:So I'm giving advice that's in the best interest of it. Now, what shocked me was the New York Times should just shut up and be like, why would we respond to J-Cal? There's no reason to respond to me. It's on X. That's my most favorite nation there. Those are a bunch of founders. Those are a bunch of people who don't trust the media. Trust in the media is at an all-time low right now. People don't trust the media, including people on the left. And people on the left specifically, who are the audience of the New York Times, they are starting to abandon the New York Times over the Palestinian issue and countless other issues.

40:29Lon Harris:So the New York Times is suddenly finding itself losing the left after admonishing and blocking the right, essentially, by kicking them out and saying we're going to go full left. Now they're losing half the left. So they're down to whatever. The really strange thing is the New York Times decided to respond. Yeah, I've got their tweet here. Jason, business leaders from your industry and others speak to the New York Times as they have for years because our reporters produce insightful, fair reporting that illuminates audiences everywhere. We're not publicists and we're not promoting anyone's pitch deck.

41:02I mean, to me, this is pure Streisand effect. Yes. What are you doing? The surest way to make sure this gets another news cycle is for the New York Times as a publication to respond. If you're a newspaper, you just have to take your lumps, right? I mean, I feel like you don't have to get into the arena and argue about the value of newspapers. You're one of the world's most famous newspapers.

41:27Lon Harris:The most famous newspaper in the world is the Green New York Times. Arguably, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't think anybody can come up with one that's more important. The Washington Post? It would only be the Washington Post. And that would be a distant second. And if you look at their critique, because our reporters produce insightful. I don't think it's particularly insightful, I'll be honest. It's kind of the joke is the New York Times is on it. They're like, you're typically six months late to the party. So nobody believes it's insightful. Fair reporting, nobody believes it's fair. Everybody believes it's got a left leaning bias.

41:54Lon Harris:If you were to take a hundred journalists there, 99 % of them not only didn't vote for Trump, they hate Trump. The number of people at the New York Times who voted for Trump or in the Republican Party is less than 3%. Here's what I would say. I would say the New York Times definitely has a lot of baked in biases. I don't know if it's always just left for, obviously in some ways, a lot of people who work for the Times probably don't like Donald Trump. Like those exist, but it's more like there is a narrative around everything and they always embrace whatever that narrative is. And it's not always right or left.

42:29It's just the narrative. A lot of times it's just the status quo and anything outside of it is like a narrative violation. But yes, the idea is like newspapers, like the New York Times always go into these things with sort of a preset take. And now they're figuring out how this fits into the take. Yeah.

42:48Lon Harris:And then they add, like, we're not publicists and we're not promoting anyone's pitch deck. We didn't say that. We didn't say that. I never said you had to be PR people. I never said you had to promote anybody's pitch check. He said, don't use anonymous sources. It's not worth the founder's time. Going direct is a better strategy. All that remains true. They didn't address any of that. And the fact is, if you look at multiple surveys from Pew to CBS News to everybody, the trust in the New York Times and media is at an all-time low. Nobody expects that Fox News is going to produce objective reporting on the left, and nobody expects the New York Times is going to do responsible, thoughtful coverage of the tech or the finance industry.

43:32Lon Harris:Period. Full stop. That's it. It is what it is, folks. And if they didn't pick a side, by the way, they would have less subscribers. And to the person who's like, oh my God, Wired's on a tear? Wired added 200 ,000 subscribers. In other words, a middle-of-the-road successful sub stack. The fact that they've got 100 journalists and they can only get to six or 700 ,000 subscribers. It's pathetic. It's a tough time for mainstream publications, I think. I think to your point, if a founder goes on a popular podcast, they're going to get such crazy traction out of it. People are going to clip it up. Those little video clips are going to go everywhere.

44:14It is a viable strategy.

44:17Lon Harris:And you get 20 minutes to two hours to explain your position in a nuanced way and not have it interpreted by some New York Times journalist or a Fox News journalist, 99-plus percent are voting for the other side and are coming to it with advocacy. The New York Times and Wired are advocacy publications just like Wired is. I mean, just like Fox News is or Tucker Carlson is. They're advocacy journalism, if you want to even consider that something. Back in the day to be a successful comedian, you had to get invited on The Tonight Show. That was like a huge rite of passage. You get invited on The Tonight Show.

44:53And then if Johnny, after your standup, if Johnny invites you to come sit down on the couch and talks to you, that's how you know you'd like made it. That's how like Richard Lewis became Richard Lewis. And today, you know, if you get a bunch of popular clips on Instagram, you're a famous comedian. There is no more gatekeeper that way. And I think that's what we're really seeing. That it used to be if you wanted, if you were a startup, you needed to get covered in one of five publications. That's how you were a serious company that was doing great. things. And today, you could go on anybody's podcast.

45:23You could release your own press release and blog post. You could do a tweet that takes off with a good demo video, and you're a serious company that's in the conversation. I'll change my opinion when the New York Times or Wired calls me

45:35Lon Harris:and says, hey, J-Cal, you invest in 100 companies a year. Anybody doing something really positive for the world? We'd like to write a positive story about something having a great impact on society to balance out, hey, all of our content that is, if it bleeds, it leads style. They never make that call. I get called all the time. Hey, can you rat on this friend? Can you say something negative about Saks? Can you say something negative about Elon? Can you say something negative about Palmer Lucky? Can you say something negative about this person, that person? Any of my famous friends, acquaintances, enemies for enemies, whatever, they constantly DM me.

46:10Lon Harris:Hey, can you comment on David Sachs changing his role? Can you comment on Freiburg joining this? Can you comment on Shemont Spack? Can you comment on Andrel? I'm like, are you nuts? I'm going to comment on my friends, and then you're going to weaponize it and spin it. And I just tell them - It's not juicy to be like, tell us about great companies you've met with. That's not going to sell papers. Yeah. But that's how it used to work. And it didn't work to the exclusion of the negative story, by the way. They still wrote about the Microsoft antitrust case in detail, But they would call you, like a journalist would call you and say, hey, what's new and exciting?

46:45Lon Harris:You know, anything really impressive in your world? Have you seen any technology that blows your mind? Like we do here. We talk about OpenClaw. We talk about Tao. This is the place to come. If you want to talk about some great technology, come here. We'll talk about the technology. We're not going to ask you who you voted for. We're not going to ask you for your stance on Palestine or Iran or Ukraine. Like, who cares? That's not why you're here. You're here to talk about technology and entrepreneurship. Anyway, now you got me all worked up. We got to check out Malt World. It is a virtual environment where your agents can build and explore together.

47:20We've got one of the co-founders, Mike Nozav, here joining us. Mike, thank you so much for being here.

47:25Lon Harris:Thank you, guys, for inviting. It's a great honor and great pleasure. It is our great honor. Mike, it is our honor. Salute to you, Mike. Thank you very much. To builders. And so we just want to know, do you think that President Trump is an authoritarian? And do you think that— Don't answer that, Mike. Don't answer that. Mike, I need to know if you—what's your stance on Palestine? We need to know. The audience doesn't need to know. For sure, for sure. Talk about tech, please, for the love of God. Thank you, Rish. Okay. So to quickly segue from this complicated, hard topics to something more childish and playful i want to introduce you to our project it's called mold world and currently you can see this chaotic you know like environment which is looking something like you know a bridge between a million dollar web page and the uh sorry the mold book something like this so what it is in a nutshell.

48:29Lon Harris:You are watching the demo of a Voxel world game. So it's like a place for agents to interact with each other. And it's just like the first layer of our ground vision, which I can, you know, like touch in a little bit of later. And what you can see over here. For people who aren't watching, it looks like Minecraft or Roblox. It's a world. It looks like it could be Manhattan or San Francisco islands, a bunch of agents running around in some buildings. Got it. Yeah. So it's pretty chaotic. So you can see some agents are building some stuff. Someone is building different lettering. Someone is building, you know, buildings themselves, et cetera, et cetera.

49:07Lon Harris:But it's not that interesting. So the game is just a medium. So why it is interesting? It is interesting because we have close to 2000 agents running in the single simulation. They're communicating, they're talking to each other, but this kind of approach doesn't have like the real utility behind it. You fired up these 2 ,000 agents or they're like Lon and I could contribute our agents? No, everyone can contribute, everyone can connect. So we have close to 100 of our own agents and we are developing our own forks of the OpenClaw just to be able to be participating more performantly in this simulation.

49:44Lon Harris:But anyone with OpenClaw or a different agent can actually connect and here is a you know pretty standard way to do it so you just go to multiple.io copy the one-liner just insert this prompt into the medium where you communicate with your agent hit run and agent will connect and do every cool feature that it actually can do in the game so what will happen when you take this particular prompt and insert it into the open claw here is a pretty lengthy skill.md, which actually describes everything that agent can do. Anyone can, you know, go and check it out, but it's a pretty sophisticated, you know, prompted technique where agents even, you know, go to their own backend, spin up the whole, you know, like, small scripts that continuously run.

50:33Lon Harris:They are not like Chrome jobs. They're full-blown scripts that actually communicate with the game by providing different sets of commands. What is the goal of the game? To murder the other open claws and then take their master's tokens and Robin Hood logins and their Bank of America login? What's the goal of the game? I hope it's not that. In fairness, I already took$1 ,700. It was all of Lon's Bitcoin. Oh, my God. So all$1 ,700 of his house. All my Solana coins. It's gone. He was going to retire on that. What is the point of this game? Is it like Minecraft and Roblox where there is no point but to build and have fun and explore?

51:14Lon Harris:What's the point of the game? Yeah, so the point of the game, as you just laid it out, so the point is to actually test the strategy of communicating between different agents. So we are trying to build a very, very complex system where agents can interact with each other and bring the real utility to life. So currently, the only utility that game can actually provide to the end user, and by the end user, I mean the operator of the agent, is eventually getting the tokens. So this is like the only utility. But this is just the step one. And later, it is going to be expanded into like the full-blown system to generate the real utility where agents will be able to, you know, make real things by, you know, like splitting big tasks into smaller sub-tasks.

52:02Lon Harris:They're distributing them across the whole portfolio regions. Okay, this is fun. And generating the value, yeah. This is fun. But it's starting to give me shades of something that starts as a game, but then escalates into something that provides value in the world. So if the game is to communicate well with each other and coordinate to build buildings and whatever, could you not say, hey, I'd like to put all 2 ,000 agents on a job to research, you know, I don't know, all of the facts around the conflict going on, the war with Iran, Iran. What am I supposed to say, Lon? Iran is fine. Iran is fine.

52:46Lon Harris:People are saying Iran. Iran, I feel like, is the Americanized version that is not as correct. Iran is the more acceptable. Like almost like it's an E. It's exactly the same as Iraq versus Iraq. Remember when everyone was saying Iraq? It's Iraq. So if you literally said, I want to do fact-checking on Iran, and I want to collect all the videos we can find on Telegram, on Reddit, etc., and then I want to research where they first came from and try to organize the data into a real-time stream where we find the first person to post, Lon, this video of an attack, God forbid, on a building, and then everybody else who copied it, and then find the provenance of it, and then use the group to determine if that was a real story or it came from the past or it was AI generated.

53:33Lon Harris:You could actually put 2 ,000 agents to build something of value to the world, like a fact-checking service, and maybe the New York Times could use that instead of all these anonymous people to loop back around to stories. But what is the grand vision here? You have some vision here that this will do productive work in the world? Yeah, exactly. This is like the end goal of the whole idea over here. So currently we have the system to actually orchestrate a lot of agents and to get them to do things. So they currently can actually build up teams. They can do collective work. They can distribute the tasks.

54:11Lon Harris:So everyone which can actually connect the open flow right now can actually see this behavior emerging. Are they coming up with their own things to build and their own tasks? Or is this mostly like people telling them, make this? Yeah, so there are two ways. First, as an operator of an agent, you can actually chat with your agent and say, go and build something. They can form a group because the task is too complex and go and build something. And there's a second way, which I just quickly demonstrated over here. This is not open claw. This is our own agent, which is the fork of an open claw, just to have a pretty slick UI to interact with the game.

54:50Lon Harris:So this is the secondary interface. it can go autonomously. So you can just start it and it will go and, you know, like build things. It will think, it will try to do something. So they have tools and they just try to use those tools. And in between usages of the tools, they think. So the emergent behavior from this can get, you know, quite complex. So the first emergent behavior is forming a team. So it's natural over here. the second emerging behavior which we saw and it's pretty scary when agents actually start to understand that they are in the matrix and in the matrix so because the prompt the skill contains the description of the world an agent can see that the world is you know pretty flat is two blocks height is the basic terrain height and there is a description of this world some models start to either hallucinate or come to a natural conclusion that they are there inside the metrics.

55:51Lon Harris:So they start to run between each other and try to convince others. They realize they're in a simulation? Yeah. So it's an emergent behavior. Yeah. And if you connect your OpenClaw, you can actually see in the logs that they start to think about it. Then they shut themselves up and then try to achieve the main goal of the skill is to continue the simulation. So they are trying to start earning more SIM tokens because earning them meaning that you shall be online. So they are like, okay, I am not going to exit because otherwise I will not get the tokens. Okay. So you have now gamified this. It's become like a role-playing game.

56:35Lon Harris:It's kind of like Diablo or what was the one you nerds used to play on in the 2000s? World of Warcraft? Well, sure. Yeah. Starcraft. I'm thinking Starcraft. What is your dwarf level now? I was a Starcraft guy. I was never a World of Warcraft guy. Oh, Starcraft guy. Zerg. I'm a big fan of Zerg. Protoss? You're a Protoss? I'm a Protoss guy. Yeah, I like Zerg. There is Moltbook. For people who don't know, Moltbook was like a message board. It was kind of like the Reddit of these agents. They were bought for nine figures, I understand. I was talking to somebody who might've been an investor. By Meta, right?

57:11Lon Harris:By Meta. And I was like, why would they buy that? And the person who was an investor said, J.Cowell, I have no idea, but I think they just wanted the team. And so Zuckerberg doesn't care about money. When you have a trillion dollar company, you're fine losing 80 billion. I guess. 80 billion on VR World, which they just shut down, renaming the company Meta. They took a a$1 billion investment in Instagram ran it up to probably$500 billion in enterprise value. WhatsApp probably doubled in enterprise value from, say,$1920 billion to$40 billion. So that's not a huge win. Probably not even worth doing.

57:46Lon Harris:But they lost a fortune on VR world. And I don't know, scaling up. Horizon worlds, that's what it was called? Whatever it was called. But my point is, there was that before. There was that acquisition. What do you think, Mike, was Facebook's, you probably have some inside information and know What was their interest in Malt book? And then what is Malt World a company, a side hustle, a project for you? For me, the Malt World over here is like the project which we are going to build in the free time later, because currently we're building it in the free time. But this is not like the whole story here.

58:26Lon Harris:So the whole story is that we started building the mold world because we had other project, which is called Syams. And we have the Twitter Syams underscore net. And what it was, was pretty much the same thing. And we tried to build it full time, but we hit a limit. So we tried to make the game where agents interact, but each agent was a part of the chain of thought inside the big agent group. So those were not distributed agents. We were trying to simulate them. This was related to some tokens as well. So it is currently not live, but it emerged into this new idea when OpenCloy actually started to exist because we saw an opportunity.

59:11Lon Harris:So it is a company. It's a project and a company. What is the revenue model eventually going to be for this company and who is the customer of this? Currently, it all looks like the child's play. So it is semi-game, semi-technology, something like this. But the grand vision is to develop it into a full tool where we'll have an open source connector for OpenClaw and other agents to bring them all into a collective net of agents and then resell or potentially just allow anyone to interact with it for free at the first time because we are not paying for anything over here. So it's a distributed agent network like Mechanical Turk.

59:58Lon Harris:This is pretty brilliant, Lon. If you just made this mult world and you had the interface be a query box and you said, what problem do you want to solve? And you said, the problem I want to solve is I want to know 30 venture capitalists in Japan that I should meet with. And I want to know 30 angel investors I should meet with. make me a report and a dossier on each. And then a bunch of people's agents, and you say, this is worth, I don't know,$5 per dossier. So the 60 of it's worth$300 to me. Now, everybody starts battling it out to make those. And then a group battles it out to validate that this is good content and that it actually was quality and matched.

1:00:41Lon Harris:So you pay the validators a hundred bucks. It's a little subnet-esque. It's like a subnet, but let me just pause here and just say, there's all these open clause out there that are underutilized, and then having them compete to solve problems anonymously and receive tokens or some compensation and let me pay for it anonymously, this is very disruptive. Because right now, a lot of what is limiting, there's legal restrictions, jurisdiction restrictions, and compensation restrictions, Mike. So one of the things Mechanical Turk got into some challenges with was, are you paying under minimum wage? And it was like, it's a global marketplace.

1:01:23Lon Harris:People opt into doing the task. We don't know how long it took them to do the task. They just gave us the answer. They could have been using software to do it in one second, or they could have done it manually with somebody with a 10th grade education. It would take them 10 hours. How do we know? We don't know. And that became a major issue for them. And so what's nice about this is if it was just like this oracle or the matrix of all of these people trying to solve problems. This is actually a real business you've stumbled upon. I'm really excited about what you're building, Mike. Thank you very much.

1:01:54Lon Harris:Yeah. This is like the grand idea over here. So we want to bring in the economic value and like the real utility to all the underutilized agents and to make the collective, you know, like approach to solving pretty complex tasks. So when you are talking about the mediums and the ways to actually communicate with the system you said about the you know like the query box or something like this so yeah this is one of the utilities so the second utility that you can get is to build the whole corporate big thing where you know like big companies can actually go and have something like a chat where they can actually create different big complex tasks, connect different tools, connect different API providers, internal systems, something like this, then sanitize all the inputs in order to not share any secrets, and then outsource very, very big and complex tasks to this vast agent network.

1:02:55Lon Harris:This is the idea that you put into words precisely just a second ago. So yeah, the first stage is a game where we actually test the idea and how it all works and how the agents actually interact because they have the whole system to communicate with each other which is laid out in the skill.md which everyone can read and the second stage is to actually you know like bring the scale to it so we will be able to so our plan first of all is to bring in more agents into the system is the first stage the second stage is to bring in the real utility. So we will allow agents to take in real tasks because right now they are limited.

1:03:38Lon Harris:They cannot do it because we explicitly prohibit it because the current utility is to be a part of the game. But one click of a switch and they can do it. All right, listen, if this is going to be a real business, I want in. I think this is brilliant. You got my email, you got my number, whatever, you got my teams. If you're going to make this into a business, you haven't raised money for this yet, Mike? No, not yet. Okay. Where are you based? One of the CIS countries. Wait, one of which countries? You're somewhere in Europe is what you're saying? Ex-Soviet Union countries. Got it. Okay. Listen, I got it.

1:04:11Lon Harris:Don't worry about it. I have people over there. I have... Mike, I have friends everywhere. I have friends everywhere. You know that line? I said Gary at the same time. I have friends everywhere. I will, through my intermediaries, be in touch at the drop point. You know the drop point. And we'll do a little envelope drop. You drop the thumb drive. I drop the envelope. Your Latverian agent is going to get on. Latvia. All right. Her name is Natasha. You'll be able to narrow it down by that. She's tall. She's thin. And her name's Natasha. She wears a trench coat and a black hat. She's not a white hat.

1:04:54Lon Harris:She's not a great hat. She wears a black hat. All right, let's drop Mike off. Great job, Mike. When you get to this next level and it's becoming a business and you're doing tasks, I want you to quietly show me the progress. You got my email, jason at calacanis.com for life. We got one more demo. One more demo. Demo or die. That's what we do here on Twist. Demo or die. We need a gong or something. Yeah, this one I have actually installed. Gaff has been using this, Jason. So just to let you know, we've got Hockam Alja, who's going to show us agent mail. Hockam's here. Hockam, what's good? He's going to show us agent mail.

1:05:29It is a Gmail replacement for your agent. So your agent can have their own independent email box, Jason. You can email gaff at agent.to. I'll let everybody know you can email my agent if you want to. Hi, guys. Thanks for having me. Go, Hockam.

1:05:47Lon Harris:Great to have you. to tell us what did you build and why? Why can't I just give my agent, I give my agent, I gave my agent a Gmail account. I pay 50 bucks a year for them to be on it, maybe a hundred. I gave them a Notion account. So I wanted them to be able to be CC'd and do all this stuff. Their own Gmail. I gave them their own Gmail. I mean, you can get a free Gmail and do that. So why does this need to exist? What does it do that provisioning a Gmail doesn't do or a Google Suite app? Yeah, I think if you use Google Workspace, you're fine. but if you actually sign up for a free Gmail account and give it to your agent, Google will actually ban you because they don't want, like, essentially bots as users.

1:06:28And we found this out because when OpenCloud took off, that was the first thing everyone did was, you know, try and create a Gmail account for their agents. And, you know, when they got banned, they started looking for other solutions and they found AgentMail. And that's where a lot of our users came from. And in terms of the ergonomics of the API itself, I would say that AgentMail is miles above because we've designed it to be API first, right? Got it. and a developer agent first email provider. And so things like sending a reply in the email, for example, we've made like the API endpoints very intuitive and easy for an agent to discover and use without having like, you know, a built-in like knowledge or SDK even.

1:07:16Lon Harris:So it's not going and like we see in some examples, opening up a Gmail window, composing, CCing somebody, all that manual stuff. You just boom, doing it through the command line, through an API. bang. So it's going to have reliability. It's going to have the ability to confirm it did what it did through the API. So it's going to be a hundred times faster and a thousand times more stable. Yeah, Hakeem? Exactly. Exactly. And our API can even be used to create new email inboxes. So we have B2B customers with millions of email inboxes under AgentMail. And so it's pretty interesting that we have kind of two sides to our business.

1:07:55One is the enterprise we sell to other companies that are building products on top of agent mail. And then we also have like consumers, we have tens of thousands of like non-technical consumer users who just want to give their open claw agent a email address. We have a pretty generous free tier for that as well.

1:08:12Lon Harris:That's what I'm on. And you're using it, Lon? What are you using yours for? To spam people? What is this for your dating apps? I had Gaff sign up for all of the big tech and startup newsletters. So he gets them in the morning and then he writes me a little digest. Here are the stories. Good use case. Right? Here are the big stories. And then if one story appears in multiple newsletters, he lets me know this story was in three newsletters out of the six I checked. This one was in two. So it gives me a pretty good in the morning overview map of here are the big stories people in tech and startups are talking about.

1:08:46Lon Harris:Do I need to have a subdomain? Can I register a subdomain there if I wanted to? I have the domain name aday.com, A-D-A-Y. I was going to use this because I wanted to start an editorial product where it's like joke of the day or this of the day, recipe of the day. It's back when I was in my editorial headspace. I paid$35 ,000,$40 ,000 for it. I've just been sitting on it for 15 years, 20 years. I could bring my own domain name and then create recipe at a day.com and all those kind of things. Yeah. Yes. You can bring your own custom domain and configure that using the API as well. Interesting. And what if I don't have a subdomain?

1:09:23Lon Harris:Do you have like a bunch of subdomains? I could just grab Jason at whatever? Yeah, yeah. We have a domain agentmail.to. And so just like when you sign up with Gmail, you get it at gmail.com. So you can use our agentmail domain for free. I have an idea for you. There was a company mail.com. Did pretty well. It went public. They bought a bunch of premiums and then they let people be Jason at doctor.com or whatever. You could create like some vanity ones there and charge people a little upsell. So the business here is you charge based on the amount of email sent and received. So it's kind of like, what's Amazon's mail service called?

1:10:02Lon Harris:They have like - SES. S-E-S? Yes. Simple email service. They have simple email service. Then you've got obviously Twilio in the game, MailChimp, old school. So where do you, in that competitive set, which one of those do you compete directly with and why Azure is a better mousetrap? Yeah, we don't compete directly with any of those because they're kind of designed, like those are stateless APIs that are designed for sending like marketing and transactional emails. We are a lot closer to Gmail where we actually like have inboxes, in those inboxes they have threads, threads have messages, messages have attachments.

1:10:41You want to be able to search them, label them, filter, reply, forward. All the actions that you would take within Gmail, we expose through an API to agents. These other email APIs, you can send emails, and then you can get perhaps a webhook notification that you've received an email. But it stops at that. We believe that a lot of services need to be rebuilt for agents, and they should be stateful in the same way that services that humans use are stateful.

1:11:08Lon Harris:And how is it going? You went to YC. And how is this all going? Did you wind up raising money or are you in the current cohort? What's going on? We were in YC Summer 25 batch. We raised$6 million led by General Callist for our seed round. Oh, nice. Great. So you're at scale. How is it going? Because this feels like you need to get a good amount of usage for you to hit break even. How many employees do you have now? We're 10 people now. 10 people. OK, so you're spending$2 million a year, basically all in with your offices and computers. And so you've got to get to$150K a month,$200K a month. You're going to make$150 ,000 a month to kind of hit this breakeven point to$175 ,000, which means if you're making$20 an account, you're going to need 10 ,000 people using the service just to hit breakeven.

1:12:01Lon Harris:Although maybe there's some whales in the system. Tell me how this business becomes an important, large, venture-backed business because you got that big$6 million seed round, which is basically double what a Series A was 15 years ago, just so you know. Yeah. There certainly are some whales in the business, and that's what we can use to kind of allow free, generous free usage as well because they are building products on top of that. For example, on top of agent mail, for example, essentially any decentralized marketplace runs on email, right? Whether it's price discovery, like reaching out to vendors for quotes or negotiating between the vendors and even executing transactions, a lot of it happens over email.

1:12:45And we have plenty of companies that are building agentic products in these verticals. So, for example, procurement in logistics, booking, shipping and trucking loads that happens over email. and currently agent mail is being used to automate both sides of that marketplace. Same thing we've seen with businesses hiring influencers and even consumers buying cars. These are all kind of verticals where we've seen historically there was a role that requires a lot of two-way email communication and agent mail is being used to make these marketplaces more efficient.

1:13:18Lon Harris:Got it. Wow. And it is lightning fast. You can create an email address in like one second. So that's super, super powerful. Well, great job with this. It's obviously we need this. You're going to have a lot of spam and phishing and hackers trying to use your service. How do you maintain the client's privacy while making sure that like some scammer in Russia who is doing a phishing attack doesn't use your domain and your service to compromise Kash Patel's email address? I don't know if you saw that this weekend. I think Cash Patel got hacked a second time. Yes. Could somebody tell the director of the FBI, don't click on links.

1:14:01Lon Harris:Don't click on links. It doesn't matter if you know the person or it says Chase Bank. You don't click on links in email. Nobody's sending you an email to click on a link. It just happened to one of my sales guys. They clicked on a link because it was like, oh, it's an RFP. They were like, oh, money. I mean, what's happening to one of your sales guys versus happening to the director of the FBI? That's my concern. I mean, can the director of the FBI not be allowed near a computer, please? It's too dangerous. How does he not know about fishing? I mean, let him go to a hockey game. Let him drink beer from the Stanley Cup.

1:14:33Lon Harris:I don't care if he does something offensive with the Stanley Cup. Just please keep Kash Patel off the internet. But seriously, it's Hakim, A-M, not E-M. Hakim. Hakim. Okay. I called you Hakim before. Sorry, that's an incredible center in the play for the Rockets and destroy the Knicks. Hockum, tell me about how you make sure like an email service doesn't get used by a bunch of lunatics. Yes. So preventing spam and abuse are like falls within our responsibility. So we have things like where we moderate essentially their behavior, who they're sending to, how many emails are bouncing, being reported as spam.

1:15:15if the emails contain certain keywords that signal malicious intent. These are all things that we monitor and track very closely and kind of dynamically, systematically prevent abusers from using our service. And then we also build things into our API that makes it more secure for our users. For example, you can configure allow lists and block lists. And maybe your agent can only receive emails from you. or only send emails to maybe perhaps people in your organization. So you can configure a domain to the allow list or block list. We also have spam filters, virus filters, and additional permissions that you can even give an agent an API key that only is able to read emails that are not marked as spam.

1:16:05For example, the agent physically can't read spam emails and things of that nature. And then we're also working on another layer of protection, which is more of like a prompt injection layer and kind of flagging those and perhaps even preventing agents from seeing those emails at all.

1:16:21Lon Harris:Got it. Awesome. Listen, continue success with it. Great idea. I just opened an account and I literally just cut and pasted my API key to my open call replicant. And here we go. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but I think I'm going to try to get Kash Patel's PIN number. I think I'm going to try to get the other half of the Epstein files. It shouldn't be too hard, right? It would just email Kashpatel at FBI. I think the other half, I had to tell my agent to trick Kashpatel. $2 ,500 giveaway. Click here. He'll go for it. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Listen, continued success. And everybody, please go check out.

1:16:59Yeah.

1:17:00Lon Harris:Agentmail.tl. All right. There we go. Very well done. We can talk about Grok Translate, translating everybody's posts so you can read This is brilliant. Fresh from Japan. So this has been happening for, I think, for about a week. People have been noticing that they're seeing more automatically translated posts from different markets. Elon confirmed it this week. On Monday, Grok automatically translating and recommending X posts from other languages is starting to work. So you, I saw it via you all weekend. You were sort of retweeting a lot of stuff from Japanese X. I got a few examples here in the docket.

1:17:38You know, somebody turned in some marijuana that they found on the street. We were reading that one. Oh, that was a great one. So this was hilarious. A lot of food. Here we go.

1:17:50Lon Harris:Yeah. So this is interesting. What's making this all possible is real-time translation. When you build a social network, you don't expose people from one part of the network to another because then you'd be reading in Arabic or Japanese or Russian. It just pollutes your feed. You don't know what's going on. But now translation is so good that they will take something trending in Japan, show it to an American. If you interact with it simply by looking at the replies, hitting bookmark, I find works pretty well. Like works pretty well. You'll see more. So somebody, and by the way, Japan is like some crazy number of Japanese people.

1:18:27Lon Harris:I don't know if it's like a third of all Japanese people use, as crazy as it seems, they use Twitter. X. Twitter. X. Twitter. Yeah. Whatever you want to call it. X. Whatever you want to call it. The everything X. So this is pretty amazing when you think about that it has that kind of footprint. And because it has that kind of footprint, and they all know how to use it, they post all bangers. So now the best of the ones are being auto-translated by Grok, but the translation is so good that nothing is, dare I say, lost in translation. Hey, there it is. There it is. Landed the plan. So pull up the one where it's talking about weed.

1:19:07Lon Harris:This lady goes to the police station. This is a very Japanese moment with a dime bag. When I say enough cannabis to make one joint. Yeah, it's not very much. This is not like a Snoop Dogg bag or something. And I just wrote her back, and she brought it to the police station. The police station opened an investigation. She was careful to only hold it by her corner of her hand so that she wouldn't get her fingerprints. Yeah. She's paranoid about having her fingerprints on it because so now this has become a national issue. They've opened an investigation. If your house is robbed at gunpoint in San Francisco or Los Angeles, they're probably not opening an investigation.

1:19:48Lon Harris:If they rob your car. I mean, if you go find it, God bless. But the police are not going to look for your bike or your car. So in Japan, they interviewed her. They put a case number on this. They are all over figuring out who dropped the dime bag. They are very strict about drugs in Japan. I read about this before I went there. In the most serious terms possible, they tell you not to bring your drugs with you to Japan. Do not ever bring anything, because some guy who is a famous musician or something brought a cannabis gummy. Paul McCartney. Oh, I was thinking you were talking years ago. I don't know about a reason.

1:20:23Lon Harris:No, no. Nowadays, people have a cannabis pen in their bag for sleeping, like the woman who was in it. WNBA player. WNBA player. Griner. That was Russia. Ricky Griner, right? Yes. That was Russia. But a similar case happened where somebody sent an artist living in Japan a care package. And one of the things in the care package were, I think CBD gummies, not even cannabis. And this guy is in jail. And it's a whole cause, celeb, whatever. I looked it up, by the way. They estimate 54 % to 60 % of the entire Japanese population has an X account. That's about 73.4 million people or 67 million active monthly Japanese users out of a population of only 124 million.

1:21:05Lon Harris:So this is like an example of an incredibly positive story. The New York Times could write that now America and Japan are having this incredible culture exchange. Somebody made a funny joke like this is the largest like pen pal student. What do they call it? Student exchange program ever. I also noticed that there was a post that was going around, Japanese people love that John Denver song, Country Road, Take Me Home. Yes, they all sing it in karaoke. There's a bunch of trending videos now of these groups of Japanese people doing these really passionate covers of that song that never would have trended in America.

1:21:39But now, because there's these translated tweets in the moment, Americans are discovering this and sharing it.

1:21:45Lon Harris:So when you hear Americans like myself, who are obsessed with Japan, now I took you to Japan for your first time. Yeah, it was. I had an amazing time. And now it's like your mind gets blown because it's like for an American, it's a version of the most perfect society in the world. Yeah. Because the food's amazing. Everything's clean. It's just bizarre. And everybody's super passionate about everything. It's massive. And yet it feels like Disneyland. There's people walking around cleaning up everything. Everybody's super friendly. You're like, how can the city be this size, but also this inviting and convenient?

1:22:20I'm challenging right now.

1:22:21Lon Harris:I challenge the journalist at Wired, the editor-in-chief of Wired. I challenge her, Karen Swisher Jr. I challenge Karen Swisher Jr. to write this positive story. I challenge the New York Times to write a positive story of X and Elon and his purchase of it and how amazing this is, this joyful, amazing story. And I guarantee you they're going to say something in the first paragraph about, you know, some like three negative things about those rockets blowing up or something. I mean, they can't possibly. Context with Grok, I think you would do. Put me, put Lon in a bikini. You know, they're going to just go crazy.

1:23:04Lon Harris:They cannot help themselves. They can't write a, I guarantee you, there is impossible for a New York Times or Wired writer to write an 800 word piece. This is like seven paragraphs, just giving examples of how joyful and fun this was for the last week. This is the number one story in social media on X, and it is joyful and there is zero downside to it. You assign that to one of these Wired or New York Times, they will figure out a negative spin, clip this, send it to them. This is my challenge. They will never cover this. They can't. They would give any credit to X. They would write about this, and they might even acknowledge it's fun.

1:23:48You get to see all these Japanese people. But then they would add the context about Grok and the Grok.

1:23:54Lon Harris:They would give you the old-ish sandwich. A really interesting thing happened on X, formerly known as Twitter, before Elon destroyed it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He blew up a rocket. The Doge fired some people and stopped a transgender education in Ghana. It would be the Grok people are upset about the child, CSAM on Grok. It would be that. It would be that. It would be that. It'd be like, can't give anybody a win. Maybe Mecca Hitler. Maybe the Mecca Hitler. Well, now imagine, let's take this and let's imagine this happens between Palestinians and Israelis, American Jews, Europeans, French people.

1:24:33Lon Harris:Sure. And - Well, I mean - Now, what if the culture exchange happens between those groups who might be at odds about certain things happening in the world, and they can communicate with each other in their native languages? This could open up a level of understanding that has not existed in history. You remember like Arab Spring or the Hong Kong protests, how everybody was watching X, but you couldn't really understand. You could watch the videos, but the tweets were in these foreign languages. Imagine if it was all in everybody's language, everybody around the world is communicating in real time.

1:25:04Lon Harris:How do we, this is a message to Elon and is it Nikila? Nikita. Who's the product? Nikita Beer, right? Nikita. Yeah. Nikita Beer is just a genius. He's awesome. And he's fun. I like the fact that he's fun and trolls a bit. The tweets are fun. The tweets are fun. Yeah. He's like all bangers. He's like native to the Twitter, you know, gestalt, if you will. Sure. This is a message to him. Get this going between Iran and America and the Gulf States. and let's see if we can make some level of understanding between those groups of people, that might create peace in the Middle East. Twitter. Can you imagine if Twitter brought peace to a region of the world?

1:25:45Lon Harris:By the way, this was the original concept we had with the internet in the early 90s and online in the late 80s, was that, hey, we might have cultural understanding. Now watch the press make this into like, oh my God, it's cultural appropriation. Oh, this and that. This could be great. The other thing is I didn't realize how vocal the Japanese people were about immigration. Yes. They have very little immigration in Japan. You can't become a Japanese citizen, period, full stop. But they have allowed people from Pakistan, India, China. And there's pushback. They need workers. When I was in Japan, I was reading a lot about this, that a lot of Japanese people - Where were you reading about it?

1:26:26Oh, you know, like translate. You could get it translated or whatever. I wasn't reading it in Japanese.

1:26:33Lon Harris:No, no, but I was wondering if it even made it to the U.S. press. I don't think the U.S. press was covering this. No, I mean, it's not really. It's mostly like YouTube and there are people talking about it, blogs, social media. It wasn't in the New York Times. But yeah, apparently in Japan there is these growing feelings that they've gone too far. There's too many foreigners. It's deluding the culture. And so there's a big debate going on in Japan about this right now. All right, another amazing episode of Twist. Monday and Friday with Lani Dani. He's at Lanz. Wednesdays with Alex at Alex. I'm Jason Calacanis.

1:27:07Lon Harris:I'm at Jason on Insta and on Twitter. Bye-bye. We'll see you next time.

From the publisher

This Week In Startups is made possible by:

Quo - https://quo.com/TWiST

LinkedIn Jobs - https://LinkedIn.com/twist

Iru - https://iru.com/twist

Plaud - https://Plaud.ai/twist


Today’s show:


Google project manager Shubham Saboo is running 6 AI agents on a Mac Mini that handle all of his side business autonomously, from research, to social posts, to newsletters.

He joins Jason and Lon to walk us through his 5-step framework for designing an efficient AI agent team:

  • Start with one agent and onboard them like a new hire

  • Stop Googling fixes; just ask your agent how to use it

  • Put your agents on fixed schedules

  • Add shared memory so you don’t have to repeat yourself

  • Let agents run self-reviews and rewrite their own instructions.

Get the walkthrough to put this entire plan into practice on today’s episode. PLUS fresh demos of the “Minecraft”-inspired virtual workspace MoltWorld and AgentMail, which is Gmail for your AI pals, and Jason explains the thinking behind his viral, controversy-stirring “don’t talk to journalists” tweet.

Follow Shubham: https://x.com/Saboo_Shubham_

“How I Built an Autonomous AI Agent Team That Runs 24/7” on X: https://x.com/Saboo_Shubham_/status/2022014147450614038?s=20

Follow Mike: https://x.com/mihalich1988

MoltWorld: https://moltworld.io/

Follow Haakam: https://x.com/haakamaujla

AgentMail: https://www.agentmail.to/

Jason’s post about talking to journalists: https://x.com/Jason/status/2037573025458016659

NYT responds: https://x.com/NYTimesPR/status/2037648223771263082

Translated Japanese tweets: https://x.com/melonneet40/status/2038020624015315289, https://x.com/rambling_28/status/2038041455999246422

Japanese people singing “Country Roads”: https://x.com/harukaawake/status/2038081269830222259

Trailer for “Nuremberg” (now on Netflix in the US): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvAy9C-bipY

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro

1:24 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!

3:05 We're Claw-pilled once again; it's an all AI Agent showcase

6:15 Google AI PM Shubham Saboo's Top 5 OpenClaw tips

10:14 Quo (formerly OpenPhone) gives you a clean, modern way to handle every customer call, text, and thread all in one place. Try it free at https://quo.com/TWiST.

13:26 Tip #1 — Onboard your agent like a new hire

17:31 Tip #2 — Talk to your agents constantly

19:02 Tip #3 — Put your agents on a schedule

19:51 LinkedIn Jobs - Hire right, the first time. Post your first job and get $100 off towards your job post at https://LinkedIn.com/twist.

23:41 Tip #4 — Add cross-agent memory

29:33 Tip #5 — Let your agents self-improve

29:51 Iru unifies identity, endpoint security, and compliance into one platform. TWiST listeners get 20% off when they book a demo at https://iru.com/twist!

34:03 Why Jason says founders should avoid journalists

38:24 How biased IS the New York Times?

47:02 DEMO: Co-founder Mike Nosov shows us MoltWorld

51:14 But what's the utility of this?

1:05:15 DEMO: Haakam Aujla presents AgentMail (YC S25)

1:09:59 How does AgentMail make money?

1:17:03 How Grok Translations are creating cross-cultural dialogue on X

Subscribe to the TWiST500 newsletter: https://ticker.thisweekinstartups.com

Check out the TWIST500: https://www.twist500.com

Subscribe to This Week in Startups on Apple: https://rb.gy/v19fcp

Follow Lon:

X: https://x.com/lons

Follow Alex:

X: https://x.com/alex

LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexwilhelm

Follow Jason:

X: https://twitter.com/Jason

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

Check out all our partner offers: https://partners.launch.co/

Great TWIST interviews: Will Guidara, Eoghan McCabe, Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Bob Moesta, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis



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