Will OpenAI Tank OpenClaw? | E2251

25:54And I think everyone learns that lesson, you know, about one time. So I've been thinking about like what to share and there's a lot of things I've been doing over the last, what is it, 20 days or so since this thing came out and throwing them in a bunch of slack. So I have about 10 or 15 of these bots running with OpenClaw. The best analogy I've come to to explain this to people is if with chat GPT or cloud, you get a car. With OpenClaw, you get a car and the mechanic built in. And so taking that analogy, basically you can extract it out or abstract it out to everything that I do. So what I do with models is we have, um, have it set up both locally and, um, have an open claw, open claw agent, uh, dedicated to this where we're actually taking the workloads we have and automatically running evals on them.

26:46So evaluations where we're evaluating the AI, the AI is evaluating the AI on those jobs in order to get to a spot where it can be either efficient or the right quality for what we're looking for. And so this is like an automated system that you would run if you were building an AI product. Now with just a bunch of prompting, I can run that loop. And so we're getting new data all the time. Jesse's been doing a lot of awesome work. And one thing that really kind of caught my eye, Jason, was this video tool that she made as a way to kind of curate YouTube for her children's educational purposes, all using an agent.

27:18So Jesse, take us through it. Yeah, so let me share screen real quick. So I don't know if any other parents, I mean, I sound stupid to even say. I know other parents suffer from this. Basically, there's amazing content on YouTube, but when you turn on YouTube, the app, it's defaulting to shorts, it's defaulting to slop. Your little kids especially get tricked by the AI cover art, and they like click on a video, and it's actually junk. So I've actually wanted to build this for years, and this is what I'm saying as a previous founder like software used to be expensive now I can just chat on my phone with my open claw who's using cloud code and codex and stuff and I and I built this so effectively I can choose what I call streams and we love like engineering videos science videos camping and stuff and I can subscribe to these streams my open claw one of them because I've got a few set up one of them is based on what I select on streams it's actually going through and finding and pointing my app at videos that fit that content stream.

28:22So this is not static content. I did not select all the videos myself like some kind of playlist. My open claw is like based on what I want my kids to watch, selecting streams and then I built so that I can do that interface in here. But then I have the app which I can use with my kids on TV. I got it actually set up on my TV which is like another, it like took a little bit more work. but they can just click and videos pop up um to play and all they can do is advance to the next video or pause they can't get out of that interface so the slot is okay slop is over uh but i've been wanting to build this for years and finally i can because i can't even sit at my computer for more than 20 minutes at a time with like four little kids but i'm literally just i I coded this on my phone with open claw because I can't even sit down.

29:13So this is an app or a website right now? This is an app. So this is just private to me. I'm not here pumping it up. This is, I will pay you a hundred dollars a month for this app immediately. Okay. And I want you to cure hate and defeat. This is for my family right now. Um, I need to make sure I don't run afoul of any, uh, other things I did with YouTube and stuff to make sure other people could use this app. Um, but I'll join your pod. I'm going to join your pod and I trust you. No, My 10-year-olds are on YouTube constantly. You identified the problem, which is slop. Kids are like these navigators to find this stuff, and the algorithm pulls it into it.

29:46And that's what I really want them to do is when I give them documentaries or creative stuff, they love it. But the algorithm is so powerful that it will pull them to two girls doing a makeup tutorial or, you know.

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31:07Disney princesses smoking cigarettes. I know. And YouTube shorts is pretty much trash. YouTube kids, I feel like it's actually like a junk product. I don't know if that offends anyone, but it's like you go on there and it's supposed to give you these parental controls, but the content's not good. So I built that. So that to me, that's just an example. Like, yeah, I was a previous founder, but I'm just a mom now and I'm able to like build this stuff, you know, off to the side. And I'm not exaggerating. I cannot sit on my computer. That's what Open Claw has given me is basically it's hands on my computer when I cannot sit down.

31:40So I don't know how relatable this is, but I think as a mom of young kids, like I was able to code this literally on my phone. Like I do voice notes, whatever. The other thing, the more macro thing, and I think you responded to this on X, is that I'm using OpenClaw to develop the entire curriculum to homeschool my children. And this is Obsidian. So my co-founder of my previous startup is now the CEO of Obsidian. So I'm kind of like geeked out on Obsidian just like, you know, because I know him super well. But Obsidian is basically a collection of Markdown files and AI loves Markdown files. So I'm using Obsidian as the basically brain of my homeschool.

32:20So if you see here, I have all these individual lessons logged of my children doing specific things. But here's where things are interesting. Like you look at all this data and you're like, wow, that looks like she's putting in a lot of effort. Like this is a really ADD person, like logging everything her kids do. That's where it's beautiful. I took this picture and I did a voice note. My kids did color theory today. They did a color wheel, blah, blah, blah, blah. My Open Claw writes this entire lesson log and logs it. Love it. I don't touch the computer to do this, okay? That's the difference with Open Claw is that they're like actually doing all the work for me.

32:55And then I have this beautiful log and my like, you know, kind of galaxy brain thought is that when they turn 18, I like can like literally give them the entire history of their education. And on a daily basis, I can ask Open Claw like, okay, tell me what Ford did last week. We need to plan lessons for him this week because I can't even remember, right? because I'm running around my head cut off. This is what teachers always talk about. I need more time to lesson plan. I want to do more time with the kids. I want to do less administrative. I want to be in less meetings. Give me more resources.

33:27Same thing is happening with doctors. We have a startup. One of my team members will tell me, we'll pull up the webpage right now that is doing note-taking for psychiatrists, specifically for psychiatry. Psychiatrists, you know, want to spend time with patients, but they have to do their billing, their codes, their note taking. They're running a business. Yeah. They're running a business, right? Essentially. And so this startup that just went through our accelerator story, I'm drawing a blank. I just got all the snow dumping down behind me and after the show, I'll be out in that powder. We desperately needed a snowstorm here in America.

34:02So this company, Next Visit, which we'll show on the screen here, they report that doctors were getting back like 10 % of their time. Now they're reporting doctors are getting back a third of their time and the notes are better. And so that's what you're experiencing. Here's next visit. So it's just medical note-taking, but man, it has done so well. Next visit.ai if you want to see it. Okay. I, Jesse, I love what you're doing. It's a business. You're a mom. Yeah. I think there's like three ways to go with this as a business. I'm enamored with what you're doing, the passion, the focus. I mean, are we doing this or not?

34:41I mean, I think you got a business here. I want, I, the fact that in one generation, we went from about 1 % of kids homeschooled to about 6%, like it's a personal passion of mine. The more parents feel empowered to homeschool because I think the education quality is incredible. Uh, there's obviously lots of cool alternatives like alpha and everything as well. But, um, but anyway, so I'm passionate about sharing. That's why I started sharing. Okay. I'm not an influencer like type personality as my main thing, but I decided I've got to share this because my mind has been so blown by what I'm able to achieve with my kids.

35:12Like I feel like I've 10X'd myself at least with OpenClaw that I was like, I must at least share. I'm going to start with sharing. Okay. That's my only promise. From there, maybe there's some businesses, but I think we can get homeschooling past 10 % of kids within another few years from now. I'm passionate about that. Maybe there's a business in there too. Okay. I am a crazy risk taker. I will give you, I'll invite you to our accelerator, give you 125 K just to pursue your muse for the next year. If it doesn't work out and you burn the 125 K, I don't care. I like to take risk. If it's a one in 10 or one in 20 chance, I am okay with long odds.

35:52Just let it percolate. You don't have to give me an answer right now, although though that's great for ratings. But I'll give you the 125K. And what that will allow you to do is hire a second person who you love, trust. I can hire you for my own Mac studio, Jason. Okay. No, no. I'm not. I'm talking about a human. I'm rich. I don't need you. Gotcha. Alex tells me that all the time. He still shows up. He still shows up for work. I've been through YC. I do believe in like you surround yourself with like great people, great things happen. Just let it percolate. I'm very interested. I also have a three-month old.

36:26So for me, it's probably more of a making sure I've got, you know, life, life bandwidth, but I can spend the 125 K on a 12 hour a day nanny. You can literally spend it on nanny coverage. So you get an extra hour back a day. All right. I'm going to put it there. It's nine months of nanny time there, Jason. He's incepted. He's incepted it. I love the idea. Well, no, you know what I think an interesting idea would be for year one, because I'm passionate about this space as well. I have a full-time teacher working for us. And that's worked out amazingly for our family. We have means. But I think there's like, the people with means are doing this already.

37:06Then there's people with no means who are just suffering in this terrible education. There's people in the middle. I think like Uber did, people had chauffeurs, right? If you're a rich person, you get a Maybach, you got it. So that's us in this analogy. Then Uber Black came out. And then the next tier down said, oh, I can have my own personal driver. I take 10 rides a week,$60 a ride. Hey, that's$600 a week. It's$30 ,000 a year. Okay, now you give access. Then you give UberX, now another set of access. And then eventually autonomy and UberPool and LyftLine, those things kind of bring it down. There's a next tier here that I believe would pay$500 a month,$1 ,000 a month to have a set of tools and a curriculum.

37:49and the ability to be part of a community. And I think you get 100 of them to pay that amount, just middle class folk, upper middle class, whatever. And then as you do the tools, the advice and everything becomes free for everybody at the bottom to roll up their own, spin up their own. You're doing great work in the world, but there's a business model here that's subscription. I agree. I think that we, I really do believe we're trending towards over 10 % of US K through 12 students being homeschooled. and we think about the transformation that creates for all of us a generation from now also that's like to me it's like one of the most impactful things i can work on truly uh so i'm starting i'm starting close to home literally in my home uh but yeah i wanna um i i i view it as a mission all right i i wanna i wanna get to another demo though let's keep the demos going so heaton take us take us to slackville and uh tell us what you've cooked up with open claw i'm actually I'm actually gonna give you three things.

38:46And so let's start with the first one that I know everyone loves to talk about these kind of use cases. I'm not an automation junkie, so I don't connect this stuff to my calendar or my Gmail like a lot of other people do. It also helps me avoid any of the security concerns of it going rogue. I connect the open clause to GitHub. We can give it documents in GitHub or give it direct links, right? But one of the main use cases that people go after is what I'm gonna show you in this channel. So I started asking it what I was doing, but basically a couple days ago, I basically built a contact database for one of the products I'm building.

39:21It's a competitive intelligence tool, and usually that's like product marketing and those areas of a business that worry about it. You can imagine why I'm building it. I think those tools, they're just, in the last 20 years, I've been wanting to build something like this, but now the access to information is so easy. So I decided, okay, let me just give it my LinkedIn contacts. my business partner is going to put hers in there i gave it my gmail contacts and for two of my email accounts and then i basically had it make a database score it prioritize it tier it up and basically be able to tell me who i should be outreaching to a lot of people go to like automation go send the automated emails there's already even been public kind of screw ups on that where the cal.com founder said unsubscribe to the beehive folks i don't know if you folks have seen this it was kind of a lot of drama but it was because of automation he said unsubscribe to a beehive email from the beehive people not a beehive newsletter and it was automatic and it was an agent so i don't go for that but what i do want to go for is this kind of work would have taken me finding tools paying for tools maybe they'll work because linkedin doesn't like giving any tool the data but instead i'm able to do this here and the most powerful thing is that now i can take this and go give it to another bot so i've already ran this three or four times we run it at crazy egg now, same kind of thing.

40:41This does our outreach by basically finding the people, organizing it. We can give it more context. I mean, you can just keep going, right? So you've actually built here the personal CRM that everyone has talked about, Jason, since I first started paying attention to venture. I feel like personal CRM has always been the white whale of everyone who's really busy. And I did it in like 30 minutes and I could keep running it. And so, you know, they talk about replacing software and all that. I just want the outcome. I'm not even thinking about that. And I can get the outcome by treating it as a mechanic and a car.

41:15So here, I just asked the mechanic, what are improvements you can make? And it just gave me all the improvements right here, right, all these key improvements in email enrichment, stale data, whatever it's got. Then I said, give me a detailed plan. Research this and give me a detailed plan for each one. So for email enrichment, obviously I have to use an API or something. It's telling me which one I can use and what my options are. It even phased it out for me. I can have it build any of these and I'm not using anything special. This is basically open claw, plugged into Slack with a good enough account at chat, you know, chattypichia or clawed account and I can do this.

41:53So that's one use case. Keep going. I'm going to give my second one. So second one, I know a lot of people have shown like control panels and stuff like that. This is a completely different business. Both of these are newer ones that I can share stuff from. We've got a lot of stuff going on. So this looks like an interface, got a file explorer, a memory search. It's like a open claw interface. Here's the thing. Today is the first time I logged into it. We've been running this thing for, this is my first instance. It's called Otis. We've been running it for like 20 days or something like that, 15 days, whatever.

42:26Really early in, within a few days, we set this one up. This one actually also has a local NVIDIA 5090 sitting there with the engineer who works on it. Again, not super fancy. Still got Claude and all that stuff. We have OpenRouter hooked up. But the thing is, everything you see here that I'm going to show you, I'm only going to show you the skills area and maybe one other area. It built it. It keeps improving it. We never even log into it because I don't really like interfaces anymore, but that's a longer story. So you built a dashboard. Yeah, yeah. But it built it. We don't even use it. It built its own dashboard.

42:58This is literally what happened with Oliver on our team, who's now the producer of This Week in AI, our new podcast coming, he had it build his own dashboard, his replicant, and it built it. And now we have an interface to look at the skills and then we're telling it with, I don't know if you know Matt Van Horn's last 30 days. Yeah, yeah, that thing's cool. Yeah, every Saturday, I'm having it go out on Saturday at noon and saying, go research everything about thumbnails. And every Sunday, I say, go research everything about titles for podcasts, you know, et cetera. Tell us the best practices. Give us examples.

43:33Tell us who's talking about it. And it found a video that was out in the last 30 days from somebody who had worked for Mr. Beast who explained Mr. Beast's philosophy. Now, we've heard his philosophy before. But it was something recent. And I said, just keep adding this to your memory and skills. Create a Notion page or a Google Doc with every week what you learn. And then every week it's going to get better. You compare that, Jesse, to a human being. where a human being is just not capable, in my experience, of having that level of discipline. And if they are, they become Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits and become the greatest guitarist of all time, or they become Quentin Tarantino and they make the greatest films of all time or whatever.

44:18That level of obsession to be able to every week to get better at your craft is for impresarios. But it's now the default, Jesse, in this replicant world. I like, yes, and you also, I've managed a lot of people. I try to treat the replicants, as you're calling them, like I would people, like I'm not rude, but I'm far more direct. I don't have to worry that someone had a bad day and they're actually all teary because their boyfriend broke up with them. I don't have to do that kind of management anymore. So I can just be direct. I'm not rude, but I'm direct. Hinton said something that I think is really interesting, which is that UIs are kind of dead, right?

44:56I don't know if I don't want to speak for you, but maybe taking it to another level, are you guys dead? Because six months ago, I was trying to cloud code an app for my homeschool, like an app that I could click into and use on my phone. Then when OpenClaw launched, I'm like, there's no app. We're in an app-less world. I don't actually want an app, right? I don't want an icon. I don't want to click into something. I want my husband to log lessons, too. I don't want to make him get an app. There's no more apps. Like there's no more UI need. I just, I just like, he just needs to be able to chat with the replicant and so do I.

45:32So that just means UI is like, what's the future of that? I mean, there'll be some like niche ones, but it's crazy. Like that's a crazy shift. Yeah, this is like a directory for everything we've done. So you go here and like, you can see the skill builder I wrote, but like, look how big it is. Cause we've been entering the crap out of the skill builder. So we can build a really awesome, awesome skills off anything. All our research is here. I can click into one of them and it's got the entire document. Where are you running? Are you on your own machine or is this in a cloud? This is in the cloud.

46:02I exclusively run them in the cloud for these things, but for training and bigger model jobs, I'll run them locally because I just think we do have security issues with it. And there's no reason. There's a way you can contain that. And that's the whole point. And those are all.md files, right? You're like a whole.md. I clicked on my first article that had a copy in.md at the top. and I was like, yes, we're finally, we're all connected now. Explain what that means to NeoFights. Yeah, and our markdown files. So markdown files have existed forever, like really light structure, text-based structure.

46:38They're brilliant for AIs reading them. Like AI also loves to read. They can really quickly scan, really quickly understand. You can do linking between them with a tool. That's why I use Obsidian, frankly, is because it can link between and create an organization for them. but file structure, file format that existed forever, but now it's especially relevant because humans can read markdown files because they have nice formatting, and AIs can. So we've reached the file type that we both want, right? So I clicked on an article, I'm not sure who, because I'd love to credit them, and they have installed a copy in.md at the top of their articles that they're writing, and I was like, this person gets me.

47:16I copied it because I'm not going to read it, okay? I'm holding a baby. I click the button, copy and.md, give it to my replicant. They read it. I say, make me a podcast. I listen to it. And then now we're cooking, you know? Heaton just threw something in called a website to markdown. Explain what this does. You can take any website and basically get this markdown format that Jesse was talking about and then just give it to an AI. So, you know, like if you're really messing around with chat GPT and things like that, it's not getting to the webpage. You can just literally just click that and then it'll just download it in that format.

47:52Okay, wait a second. So website to markdown. You go to a website. Let's say there was a website. It was somebody's sub stack. It was Alex's sub stack for cautious optimism. You then go to it. You say, just download the whole McGill. It won't take the whole website. It'll just take a page at a time the way it works. But then it just makes it easy to get it, get that data in whatever place you want. Scraper as a Chrome tool that converts each page. So if I was a paid subscriber for but$100 a year, why wouldn't you subscribe to Cautious Optimism, get Alex's thoughts? You could take his entire opus and then say, I want Alex's thoughts in my memory for my bot because I'm a technology analyst at a venture firm.

48:36Yeah, just an easy way to get like, there's better ways to do that now where you can just tell it to go crawl a website. like our open claw bots if they have web search api like brave connected plus they have webfetch they can go get pages and crawl entire sites like jason like the other thing i wanted to show you folks this is number three i had three right um is basically how i uh i think alex you were going to ask me about this so we might as well go here right yeah well i'll kill well you bring it up i'll explain jason uh heaton was talking about something called pair prompting which was an entirely new method of working with AI.

49:12And I wanted to explain to us what that means and why it matters. So I have a personal Slack. It's heaton.slack.com. You can't get it. You can't go in there unless I invite you, of course. So I've invited Alex and Jason there, and I wanted to show them how I essentially indoctrinate, for lack of a better word, humans into understanding how these AIs work and how we can work with them. So basically, I have you both in here. And Alex, I know you already started following up, but I happen to have Jason's book, which I talked about earlier so i had it go analyze it this is a whole thread on it analyzing jason's book coming up with all his frameworks and starting to make skills based on that for founder questions which it's in the process of and here it is and i even have it testing the skill it even found red flags to check like and it's just recursively doing all this and it's going to perfect the skill but i built the skill builder first to do this right it's basically the mechanic and the car you get both as long as you know where to point it.

50:10So we were able to take a book and turn it into a skill right here in the matter of this show. So that's one. And then another one is I have a bunch of research tooling and skills we built so it can quickly make a dossier on someone. So I knew Jason was going to be here. And now you're in the Slack, so you can ask it anything, Jason. I've done this for my friends, like our mutual friend, Oum Malik, where he's got a long history of writing, even more so than you, me, or even Alex. and I was able to get like his whole dossier in there, his trends of how his writing has changed and everything and all within minutes.

50:44So here, it's got your history. I even have a fact checker. So I told it to make sure everything is fact checked and there's multiple sources for it. So it's assessing that. So that solved the hallucinations and all that stuff because I'm using it as a mechanic to fix the car. And then Alex and I started messing around a little bit, tried to get it to give us something surprising about you. It started and then we made it dig deeper Okay. Now we know you have a psychology degree. I think that explains a lot, Jason. And then it went into essentially this story, which I've heard before, but it was just nice that it got here and kind of was trying to hypothesize how you became Jason, basically.

51:20Yeah. Yeah. It's a famous story that I tell in the book. My dad's bar got seized by the feds because he didn't pay his taxes after the stock market crashed. And so I had to figure out how to pay for school. and I basically wouldn't take no for an answer. And I tell some of those resilient stories of just getting knocked on my ass, you know, a dozen times in my life and getting up 13 times and just, you know, how doggedness and resiliency are the key, key features of success, which my friends are always apt to point out to me. All right. All right, Hayden, can you stop sharing for a minute? We're gonna do one last question, which I think is really pertinent to everyone who's both listening to this now and also on the feeds later on.

52:07Cognitive overload. One thing I love about OpenClaw is I can do so much. One problem with OpenClaw is that I can literally do so much. So when you guys are deciding what to automate and where to apply the tool for folks out there who maybe just started to tinker with OpenClaw, how do you handle just the feeling of being a little bit overwhelmed by the possibilities, the options, the risks, the tools? It's a lot. Jessie, why don't we start with you? Yeah, my first thought is I take the things in the progression of my normal day, the things that weigh on my mental load, and I try to pass that off.

52:42So, you know, a quick example is that I was overwhelmed by how much crap we owned for, like, homeschooling and stuff. And I was overwhelmed by pulling out, like, what to pull out. So one day I realized that I took a bunch of photos, gave them to my open claw, and it made an inventory. And so then it tells me what to put out. But I think that this is a way of answering like, it works for me. So I think people are having this anxiety of it not working. I am a JOMO person instead of a FOMO person. So this is helpful for me, my mindset, because yes, there's times when my open claw is not working, but I don't freak out about that.

53:15But I go through my day anytime I hit a slow moment where my mental load is like max, I give that job to my open claw and try to automate it. All right, Heaton, really briefly, same thing to you. Just give me the two bullet point version of handling cognitive overload in the era of open claw. I just try to pick and choose. It's a whack-a-mole problem, right? Like whatever the thing is that's coming up. Oh, contact database. I need to contact more PMMs for my competitive intelligence tool. Great. How can this thing help me get there a hundred times faster? And every time it seems to do that. So once you get in the habit, it's just like using chat to UBT.

53:47Well, Jesse, I think you went to YC. I think this project appeals to entrepreneurs for a number of interesting reasons. I have my own thoughts on why an entrepreneur becomes obsessed with this so predictably. Why, Jessie, do entrepreneurs get so consistently, so predictably addicted to open law in your mind? because uh we we as founders we always thought we could do it all um and now we can like like a it's like a bingo okay like i thought i could do everyone's job a little bit better i'm just being a jerk but now i can i i i also have worked with amazing people i'm being facetious a little bit but i i now i can extend myself like infinitely that is exactly it heaton what do you think why I, so predictably, Matt Mullenweg, you, me, Alex, everybody saw this, started playing with it and said, I can't stop.

54:54Why, Heaton? Why is this? Agency. Founders naturally earn, get, use, have whatever agency. This gives you so much more agency. I mean, I'm up till like 2, 3 a.m. I haven't been up till 3, 3 a.m. in the morning since college. And it's because I need to, like, Like in one of the businesses I helped someone start, like it's a marketing agency. Overnight, we increased efficiency 10x. And now I'm making sure every night, this one in there, the name's Gary, long story. But Gary's always running for this guy who's running the agency. And we scale very differently now. So it's agency. Alex, give your opinion.

55:32And then I'll give the correct answer. We're hearing versions of the correct answer here, but what's your position here? I'm going to be slightly facetious, But one thing I've always had was a lot of jealousy at people who could take their ideas and turn them into code. And for me, so this is kind of a variation of agency. But for me, it's turned me into the person that I wanted to be if I was better with semicolons, patience, and syntax. And so to me, it makes me feel like I'm 10 feet tall. And I no longer have to ask permission for anything. Okay, you guys are nailing it. In my mind, there is a reason why this resonates.

56:09This speaks to the rugged individualism and the ability to carve a place in the future by shipping products and building that you very rarely see in human existence in the history of entrepreneurship. And one of those moments was when people had ships and they could go anywhere and explore the new world, right? And you had Columbus and people just going all the trade routes. then you had people land in America and they said, you know, going west pretty hard. And like right behind me, Donner Pass, like it's going to be rugged. It's going to be hard. But if you get to California, Hey, there's gold in them, their hills.

56:49This is a gold rush, rugged individualism and autonomy and resiliency. If you're willing to play with the tools, if you're willing to go through the Donner Pass and you time it right, you might be the first to the promised land. You might get there first, and you might be able to build something and stake your claim in this new world. The same way mobile, cloud, the internet itself, when dial-up modems came out, when the PC revolution came out. I remember when people got PCs, they had this agency that if you could embrace this technology, you would be so far ahead of the average human. If you understood the internet, like I did in college in 1988 when I saw BitNet and Arpanet, and it was like, whoa, if you were one of the few people who knew what that was, you just were, you were infinitely ahead of everybody else.

57:40If you knew broadband, if you knew mobile apps, you were infinitely ahead. And that's what this really represents is an open blue ocean, wild west, rugged individual, go claim, stake a claim, folks, go get this technology and stake a claim. That's what I believe is going on here at its best. But yeah, I mean, it's just amazing. I think you guys also summed it up amazingly. And anytime an entrepreneur starts playing with it, they become addicted. If you're not a member of our YouTube community, just go and type this week in startups. And you can go to this week in startups, hit the subscribe button, hit the thumbs up.

58:21Now I've got a surprise for you guys. Okay. Editorial director Lon is here. So this morning we were checking out AI Scott Adams. I believe if we have a clip. Now, this is not the real Scott Adams. They have created a digital clone of the Dilbert cartoonist, who, of course, passed away earlier this year in January. So here is the AI approximation of Scott Adams that is now hosting a regular podcast of his own. Let's take a look. And to add to what Alana's saying, tragically, Scott Adams passed away, the creator of Dilbert last month, he had said on his podcast, he was obsessed with the idea. And I was friendly with Scott for many years.

59:05He had said he was long considering making an AI version of him and he wanted people to play with that concept. And then there were some people who he may have changed his mind a little bit about that. But here is an example of AI coffee with Scott Adams. For those of you who don't know, Scott Adams would do at 7 a.m. Pacific time every day for thousands of episodes, his little take on the news, influence, skill sets, reframes, whatever. He had a delightful show every morning. So here's the AI version of that. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine here today. All right.

59:44I think it gives everyone a bit of a taste of it. And I want to point out that I am not Scott Adams, even though apparently we look very much alike. I did not know that fact going into that. Clip. Here. We have the founder of AI Coffee with Scott Adams, correct, Lon? Yes. John Arrow is joining us. He and his brother are the creators of AI Scott Adams. So let's bring on John. Hello, John. Thanks for joining us. All right. Hey, John. John, tell us why you created AI with Scott Adams. I'm assuming you were a fan of Coffee with Scott Adams? I appreciate you asking that question. I mean, it's something that really nobody has asked about the story.

1:00:23I literally grew up my bedtime stories at night were Scott Adams Dilbert cartoons. My parents would read them to me. So I was a fan from a very early age and kind of identified with that. And then when he started putting out his books, I kind of reconnected with him around the COVID time and started listening to his podcast very frequently. So, you know, I know there's people that were bigger fans than me by far, but I think I got a lot of value out of it. And like many people, I heard him say it's so important after I'm gone. I want to become an AI. This is how I can get to immortality. I heard him say it time and time again.

1:00:59And then after his death, I went and reviewed that again and decided, look, this is something that I can do, my brother and I can do to be useful. And that's exactly what we did. And it's brought, I know a lot of people, a lot of joy and comfort during this period. And it's something that's really been a lot of fun. How many days have you done it? And then what is the technique for the content? Because Scott had a very specific content format. He would do this simultaneous sip at the beginning. He would say, oh, you need a cup or a mug or a glass. Everybody would do it together and create a bonding experience.

1:01:32He would talk about the news. He would do reframes for people, just psychologically, how you view the world. He would help people with micro lessons, a topic that was so powerful. of these micro lessons that I bought the domain name micro lessons.com. And I emailed him, I said, Hey, I have micro lessons.com. I bought it for like two grand. Would you like it? I'll gift it to you. And he's like, no, no, go for it, Jake. I was like, I don't know why I'm buying it. I just love that term. So how do you make the content? Are you writing a script? Are you having AI write the script? How does it come together?

1:02:02Because it seemed like it's very in line with what Scott would have done. It's an extremely iterative process. So the goal is to let AI do as much of it as possible. We have access to all of the transcripts, all the videos that are out there, a lot of his writing. So basically the corpus of anything that he put out there publicly, we try to have him use that as much as possible. Now there are some discontinuities where some, you know, sometimes Zach or myself need to write, but the goal is to have AI do as much as possible. So yesterday, I think AI Scott Adams replied to one of your tweets. That was a case where we saw it, but he actually typed that response.

1:02:35That was not a person. Jesse or Heaton or Lon, Do you have a question for John about the creation of AI Scott Adams and what this means? Obviously, John, I take you at good faith. I think Scott would have taken you at good faith that you're doing this because you're a fan. This isn't a commercial project to make money off the legacy or the estate of Scott Adams. I'm really impressed. I'm really impressed technically about it and I think it's very cool. But I'm curious, as someone who might want to generate other content with other personalities, or like I'm doing homeschool, like historical figures, like you're piquing my curiosity about this.

1:03:20Is there anything else you can share technically with how you brought it together? Sure. For those that are interested in doing it themselves, I would just say start experimenting. I mean, some of the tools that we're using, we're using 11 Labs, we're using Fall.ai. And this is one of the situations where I think perfect is the enemy of good enough. So I would just try and experiment with it. The tools keep getting better. Speaking of micro lessons, Jason, we're going to put out a micro lesson very soon on how to let other people create not only their own version of AI Scott Adams, but anybody, because that's probably been the most consistent question we've gotten is how can I turn this into educational content or do this for somebody else?

1:03:54And I hope we have 50 of them more. My question is, are you refining the work? Like as you go, are you sort of like continually training it to be more Scott Adams-like or to sort of sound or, you know, come up with content that's more like him? And if so, like, how are you sort of layering that in? There's a huge recursive element. And what we use for feedback is the comments themselves on the X post. So previously we were on YouTube, but they got us kicked off of YouTube. They said people might get confused that this is really Scott Adams. So I don't think they have much thought for the intelligence of their viewers.

1:04:28If they think somebody who was dead would now be coming back. I mean, we had it clearly labeled as an AI. So unfortunately, we lost those thousands of comments that were being used to refine the process. But now that we're on X, we're able to take those comments at the end of every day. We feed that back into the model, and it tries to incorporate as much of that feedback as it can. Wait, did you say YouTube banned your account? YouTube banned us, and it was something we had just a huge, huge fall, and more people were watching it there than X. And if you look, go ahead. No, and YouTube banned it.

1:04:58What reason did they give you? And did they give you a strike? Did they talk to you or they just shut the channel down? It was a straight ban. And the reason was very bizarre. We talk about it on our X account and AI Scott Adams has talked about it, trying to make sense of it too. Because if you look at the YouTube policy, they allow parody accounts, they allow fan accounts as long as they're identified as such. And we were not violating those provisions. I've been kicked off enough platforms before I know to try to adhere to the terms that that service puts forth. And so they found a really obscure part of their policy where they said that people might be confused.

1:05:31of what was happening. It wasn't that this was an AI. It wasn't that this was a fan account. It was that people might believe that Scott Adams had come back from the grave and was now doing his podcasts again, even though we say it's AI. Scott Adams says he's AI multiple times. So I think it was, there's probably another reason. What if you put a permanent watermark across it that on YouTube that said, this is not Scott Adams. This is a parody AI account. And it was literally a watermark, which would be annoying, and like a lower third that just said, this is not Scott Adams, this is an account.

1:06:07If you tried to do that, do you think they would let you do it? And then I want to get into the ethics and morality of this, Heaton, and then I'm sure you have a question. So what do you think of trying again? Absolutely. We started the appeal process. We haven't heard from them. We don't think the appeal is really about what it's about. I think it was one of those situations where they banned the video. What do you think it's about? The reason, Scott Adams is an amazing person, had a lot of different connections. I understand And some of the people who didn't want our video up were kind of banding together and calling the people that they knew at YouTube and at Google.

1:06:37Apparently, I think their contacts were a little bit more senior than some of mine, even though I've done a ton of work with Google in the past. So I think that's more what it was about. It was a it was a band that was looking for a reason. We've started the appeal. We haven't heard anything from them. I would be in favor of your idea. I think that'd be awesome. I think that'd be great. Just do a new account. Just do a new account. We got a new account. And so we found a little bit of a loophole. They weren't going to let any version of AI Scott back. So we have AI Abigail now. So you can have coffee with AI Abigail, which is presumably AI Scott Adams' daughter.

1:07:05And so at least you can get the same content there. It's not going to be in Scott's likeness, but we just launched that. And it's a pretty small following now. Again, our main mode of distribution was YouTube until they pulled the plug on us. Hopefully we'll build that. I just had a quick question. Yeah. How long did it take you from start to when you felt like it was good enough to share? That's a great question. So my brother, Zach, is the one who did a lot of the rendering on all of that. And we went through several iterations where it went from kind of just embarrassing. I would say kind of the first, you know, call it five to ten hours that we spent on it.

1:07:37And then, you know, spent a few weeks tinkering. And then we got it to a point where, look, it wasn't perfect. But if you watch any of the conventional Coffee with Scott Adams episodes, there were always mic issues. There were always printer issues, technical glitches. So I think it's kind of very similar to what he had. And it makes it maybe even more real. But I guarantee you, we're not intentionally causing the problems that you see. We're trying to work those out. People seem to be really mad at you, though, John. There's a lot of commentary on X, people being kind of cross about this. I know Scott Adams said he wanted this to happen, but he may have gone back and forth a little bit, depending on who you ask.

1:08:10So has the estate reached out to you? Have there been any kind of formal commentary from them? So, you know, we've heard from literally thousands of people that love what we're doing. We've heard from literally thousands of people that don't love what we're doing. My message is filled with hate and love every day. My DMs. One group we haven't heard from is the estate themselves. So it's people from the show that have just kind of sent some obscenities our ways. But nobody has made any inroads to have a productive conversation. I've said I've been open to that. But I haven't seen any of those attempts.

1:08:41And I think I understand, you know, why from the people that don't love it. I mean, if you were very close to Scott Adams as a family or a friend. And, you know, first of all, it's kind of bizarre to see somebody, you know, in an AI form that passed away. Second of all, if you legitimately believe their wishes were to the contrary of what they publicly expressed and you believe that in your heart of hearts, that makes sense that you would try to stop that. And I think this is one of the classic Scott Adams, two movies on one screen. There's a bunch of people that were really, really close to Scott that says this is what he wanted.

1:09:11And there's a lot of people who were who were close to him that say this is not what he wanted. it. I don't want to disclose it, but I have had some extremely high level people message me saying, hey, look, I've talked to Scott in the last days before he passed away. This is something that he wanted to do. You're doing a great job here. There would be a very simple solution here, in terms of IP protection. And you're a media expert, so I'm going to hand it off to you to sort of walk us through this. But in knowing what I know, Lon Harris, about IP protection, this is so close to looking like Scott Adams because it's a video replication and the voice is so perfect that, number one, it could be traumatizing for family members to see this, and we hold space for that particular nuance to this discussion.

1:09:54That said, public figures have to be open to parody and cartoons being written about them or being mocked even or being celebrated, any of those things. However, this is a particularly gray area. If this was done as a puppet, just to pick one, or a cartoon, Lon, this would not be as big of an issue, do you think? And how do you, Lon, parse this on a moral and ethical basis? Yeah, I mean, I think it comes down to the realism. I mean, I can't speak for YouTube and why they did what they did or what their real motive is here. But I think the idea that a person who may not know that Scott Adams died in January, who was just flipping around.

1:10:43This is lifelike and realistic enough that it might cause confusion. And usually the rule with parody is that it has to be obvious that this is not true. Like any person who may not have insider knowledge of that situation or whatever would be like, oh, they're clearly joking. So if it was animated, if it was with a puppet, if it was very comic and over the top, you immediately would be like, oh, okay, this counts as parody. No reasonable person would watch this. Whereas, you know, AI Scott Adams, it's a testament to John and Zach's work that it is very lifelike. I mean, when I first watched it, I was like, wait, is this a real clip of Scott Adams saying he's okay with an AI?

1:11:25Or is this AI Scott Adams doing his show? And it took me a second. So I think that's why we're on this sort of like edge case gray zone is because it is so lifelike. In terms of the ethics, I mean, I think we're all kind of on the same page. If we all feel like the man Scott Adams, when he was alive, was very excited about the possibilities of AI and wanted to be memorialized in this way, I think it's hard to make the argument that it's wrong to do it. I mean, it was a dying man's wish, you know, like it's right to fulfill a dying man switch. But I think, yeah, if in the absence of that, I honestly think, you know, what it sort of reminds me of is like a DNR or a living will.

1:12:09Like we might, we might soon be at a time where everybody just has a legal document that they fill out. That's part of estate planning that you're like, yeah, I'm good with people making AI representations of myself after I'm gone versus never do that. I hate that idea. Lon, explain DNR for people who are not familiar with that. DNR would be a do not resuscitate. So if you, you're not sick now, but you're like, if I ever get to the point where I would need to be kept on a machine to be kept alive, I don't want to be, I don't want to have a breathing machine. Just let me die. And I think that you have to file it before while you're still in sound mind.

1:12:48And I think that would be the same situation. So DNR, do not replicate. Resuscitate. Do not replicate me. Do not replicate me. Jesse, what are your thoughts here? I was going to pose that back to John, which is like how much of the pushback, and this is a guess, but how much of the pushback is people thinking about this one person and their wishes versus fear of AI. It's more of like, I think some people look at this example and they're not really worried maybe just about this one isolated example. they're worried like okay if we allow this uh like and i get this fear in response to my content about homeschool stuff as well like people are like if we do this then then what's next like people just have this fear explosion about ai in general that i think is pushing back on all of these use cases uh but i'm curious if you feel john like it's people are upset about this one guy uh or are they upset like ai like fear jess you hit the nail on the head here i mean that's what's going on.

1:13:46It's a slippery slope type of thing. People are imagining, could this happen to me? Could this happen to one of my loved ones? Could this happen to somebody else that we care a lot about? And my answer is no, not legally. There's a bunch of laws that would prohibit this type of thing. The reason that we're doing this is because there are dozens of instances where Scott Adams, while he was alive, of sound mind, called for turning all of his likeness over to the public domain so people like myself and Zach could go out and create these types of videos. There's there's literally hours of him talking about this type of thing.

1:14:19And he did over three thousands of these of these coffee with Scott Adams podcasts during his life. Not once did he publicly say, I'm taking that back. Don't do this anymore. There are some times where he said he changed his personal plans about what he might do, but nothing about donating this to the public domain and giving everybody full unencumbered rights, not only to make an AI like we did, which was in good spirits. He said, if you want to have the quote is, if you want to have this person say things I didn't say, that's okay with me too. I hereby authorize it in public so that you can use as many as you want.

1:14:52And then you could use me for your personality. I authorize that. And there's dozens of these things. We posted some of them on AI Scott Adams for you to see. It's pretty unequivocal. So I don't think there's a risk of this happening for the common person. Jesse, you had a follow-up I can say. Well, basically you said, like, I actually wonder how settled this lie is, like, as it relates to all other personalities and stuff. So actually kind of just skipping off with Scott Adams because I don't want to, I'm not like nitpicking you on that, but more so, I think, you know, all of our laws on the books, right, in each state and federally, et cetera, about likenesses and about, you know, what our wishes are upon death and all these types of law, AI was not existent when anyone wrote this stuff.

1:15:35So I actually am curious, like, is it illegal if someone uses my face and likeness after? Can you go after for defamation on someone if you're dead? like there's going to be all sorts of interesting things because the tech has never been so good that it is convincing right a cartoon or even like someone really good at animation the cost barrier so the ai is going to make us question when cost barrier goes from why would someone spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to replicate jesse after her death to why would someone just have an idea in an afternoon and just do it i don't know if we know these answers like it's a really interesting question i wonder if the mark is going to answer that for us because there's a lot of demand for this sort of thing if ai coffee with scott adams goes goes super viral people love it.

1:16:11I think that's going to change how we think about it from a demand perspective. Jason, sorry. John, do you want to address that? And I actually can address some of the legal issues. I'm actually looking forward to that. I mean, I've been involved in a lot of litigation over my years. I'm sure you've been involved in more. And so we'd love to hear that thought because hopefully this video is not an exhibit A in the original, you know, since. But yeah, you go for it. No, no. Give your thought and then I'll give it. I think there's still existing laws, right? There's publicity laws. If you look at different states, a lot of them have laws, you know, the Walt Disney copyright, that's which is separate from publicity.

1:16:46But a lot of laws like Texas, where, you know, I'm based, I spent my time between Texas and New York, they have 60 years, right? So you basically for 60 years after someone's death, unless they explicitly gave that right away, you're not allowed to do that. So it doesn't matter if it's AI, there's already an existing law on the books that would prohibit that other states go longer, other states go shorter. But if you are out there in the public saying, I pledge this right, I donate this right, then you are the estate. You are part of that then. So there is a law called the right to publicity. And this is for famous people.

1:17:20How do I know about this law? Sometimes people will take me or an AI version of me and they will start selling their crypto project or some nutrient. And I have to have my team go file and just write a letter and say, hey, don't do that. I've had this happen many times. Somebody did it in one of their promotional videos, famously on the internet. And I said, hey, please take me out of that. Why? Because you're infringing on my ability to do endorsements in other places. People pay me six and embarrassingly even seven figures for my endorsement. That's the reality of where I am in my career. It took 25, no, 30 years of me building my career to be able to get those opportunities.

1:18:01now. And so what they did was they removed me from their endorsement and then they put a puppet in and they republished it and they got even more. And I was like, listen, guys, I'm not going to sue you. Just please just leave me out of it. And then they had some fun with me, which is totally fine. This right is done on a state by state level. It's not done at the federal level. And the reason exists is because you don't want commercial exploitation. And the people who have passed away or are alive have a business in this. So the estate of Elvis has a massive licensing business and they will come down on you just like Mickey Mouse, but Mickey Mouse is a fictional character.

1:18:42You know, for a real character like Elvis, you basically get 75, 100 years from the time of death to exploit that person's eye pain. You can't use it for confusing people, etc. But there is a protected area. Editorial use like a documentary. You can make a documentary about Scott Adams right now without permission or Elvis. Artistic use. You could make an artistic, you could make an entire album of songs as a tribute to Scott Adams and his work. You could do any type of news reporting. And if somebody happened to be like, if you had a picture of me in the background of a photo, you know, at a demo day and there were 20 of us there, you, you, you know, you don't have to pay for that.

1:19:31Um, but that's why when like Steve Jobs did his famous, uh, ad about the misfits and everything, each of those people in that commercial use had to be approved. So when he said the artists, the misfits, and they show Bob Dylan or the Beatles or Einstein, whoever's under a hundred years old that has an estate reduce. So here's what's going to happen. I predict with John and Scott Adams. You'll either move to an editorially protected area that doesn't infringe on the actual family's ability to do that, which would be making it more artistic, making sure it's non-commercial and making sure it doesn't confuse the users and you will then be protected.

1:20:06Or you'll have a heart-to-heart with the family and say, hey, we're going to make Abigail and Abigail is an inspiration based on Scott's work and she's the female version who brings the Gaia to Scott Adams' work. And it'd be like super cool because it's an interpretation, it's artistic, et cetera. Or you'll sit down, break bread with the family, and the family will give you a license to it. And they'll say, under these circumstances and these tools, we don't want you to do anything adult or inappropriate or racist or this or that. We don't want you to bring up the cancellation where Scott got canceled for what he said or whatever.

1:20:40We just wanted to live in this zone and have the ability to prove it. And any money goes to our children. I can tell you right now, my estate is going to defend this to the end of the earth. my 2 ,500 podcast episodes and growing so that my three daughters get every fucking penny of everything because I'm not giving any money to charity when I go and giving it to my three daughters to go rule the universe and be queens and take over the empire. We are getting a lot of pushback from the chat, Jason. I feel like I should mention a lot of folks in the chat upset with our depiction. Rapid fire. So at DrDavis62, Scott Adams spent the last year explaining on air that he would not create an AI Scott Adams because he did not feel that the tech was up to the task.

1:21:24Lido Opa, the age of the AI agent is akin to ethical slavery. Another Dr. Davis, he did not want to be memorialized in this way and said so on his podcast. He looked at the tech and felt that it would misrepresent him. So John, do you want to respond to these people who feel like Scott was clear at the end of his career that he didn't actually want an AI client? End of his life. Absolutely. First, let me respond to what Jason said. I'm with you, Jason. And I would love to have that type of conversation. There's, you know, there's been no attempt to have it. Any of my attempts to have it have kind of fallen on deaf ears.

1:21:55So I'd love to have that conversation. Second of all, the question I would pose for everybody that kind of is in line with those comments is if you're somebody who wants to pledge your existence so that people could make AIs out of you, how do you do it? Because Scott Adams did it tried dozens of times and said, this is what I want. This is what I want. And despite some of those comments, there is not one video segment of him provoking it or saying, look, don't do this anymore. I know I said this over and over and over again. I pledge my likeness, everything about me to the public domain. Go out there and make AIs.

1:22:27That's what he said. There's many videos of him saying that. No videos of him not saying that. So how would somebody go out and even do that? I mean, that's the question I would pose for everybody else. Because if you I signed up, if I die, hopefully I'm immortal. But if I die, I'm signed up to go to Alcor where I'm frozen out. And I think it's in Scottsdale, you know, and it's kind of a scary thing. If people love and care about you, they might decide, no, John doesn't really want that. Right. And normally we have wills and last testaments for that type of thing. But Scott Scott did something even better.

1:22:57He said that to the public. And that does constitute a pledge and something that he wanted to do. So it's for all these people filling up your comments saying he didn't want this. This sounds a lot like mind reading to me. And it's something that Scott Adams warned against. Don't try to predict what other people want. Go by what their words are. All the corksicles are in Arizona. Why would we put all the frozen people in the hottest part of the United States? I think it's less than earthquakes. Like, I mean, Arizona is made for this. I think it must have to do with some laws. I got to think it has to do with laws as well.

1:23:31Anyway, this here's, you know, Scott had a concept of internet dads. And I think I was part of that group of like, you know, Gen X dads or as my, as people are starting to call me Unc. I guess that's like a way of saying boomer. They call me Unc. Yeah, they're calling me Unc now. I think Heaton, you're going to get into the Unc category pretty soon. Lon, you're there. So here's what Unc says. I'm going to give my, as the chairman of the interwebs, I'm going to give my my what is it when a judge gives their statement, Lon? The ruling. Predict? I'm going to get my ruling. Here's my ruling. Ruling.

1:24:09My ruling is Scott would have loved this. Scott would have loved it. And Scott would have had some space that if it was hurting his family members and it was traumatizing for them, if it was too soon, a month after his death, where the fidelity wasn't there, where they didn't have approval of it, he would also have taken that into account. As such, I am laying my judgment down. John, you got to break red with the family. And if you're going to make a literal one, you have to then get their permission. However, if John wants to make one that is a send up, parody, female version, a Muppet version that is extremely clear to the public that this is not Scott Adams.

1:24:56It is an inspiration of Scott's philosophy carrying on in the future that there is space for that as well. And that means it would have to have another name and, you know, in the fine print say, hey, this is inspired by our love for Scott Adams philosophy. That is my ruling. And you can appeal it. The appeal can happen at any time by any person. And we will thank John for coming to the program and to the family of Scott Adams. What a tremendous career. We miss him. He and I debated things. I was on a show one time. We had crazy debates about January 6th and all kinds of things. But I think he was a net, net positive for the world and actually did actually care about people.

1:25:39So rest in peace, power, replicant, Scott Adams. We'll drop you off. Peace is good. You are a star, Jesse. Thanks for coming, Heaton. John, thank you for - and John, you could drop off. We will see you on the next episode. Well done, well done. Plenty in the show notes about those great guests we had. His name is, and he's exhausted because he was up late last night watching movies or doing Open Club. His name is Lon Harris. Follow him, x.com slash Lon's, L-O-N-S. He's Alex, x.com slash Alex. They're part of the four-letter club on Twitter. I'm right behind him, x.com slash Jason. I have more work to do.

1:26:20If I can get rid of the A and just be Jason. Jason, yeah. We'll see you all on Wednesday for another live, insane, unstoppable twist. Bye-bye. Bye.