Will OpenAI Tank OpenClaw? | E2251

Summary

This transcript from a February 2026 episode of This Week in Startups centers on the breaking news of OpenAI’s acquisition of the open-source sensation OpenClaw. Hosts Jason Calacanis and Alex Wilhelm discuss the strategic implications of the deal, which is estimated to be worth mid-to-high nine figures. While some view the acquisition as a “rug pull” of a promising open-source project, the discussion weighs two perspectives: a cynical view that Sam Altman is neutralizing an interface that threatened to commoditize OpenAI, and an optimistic view that the project’s move to a foundation led by Dave Morin will provide it with necessary resources. Calacanis emphasizes the need for a “counter-strategy,” pledging to fund startups that focus on keeping OpenClaw’s security, hosting, and skills open and decentralized.

The conversation shifts to the practical revolution triggered by OpenClaw, featuring guests Hiten Shah and Jesse Genet, who demonstrate how AI agents—or “replicants”—are replacing traditional software and user interfaces. Jesse Genet showcases how she used OpenClaw to build a custom, “slop-free” YouTube app for her children and an automated homeschooling curriculum, leading Calacanis to offer her an immediate $125,000 investment. Hiten Shah demonstrates how he built a personal CRM in minutes and maintains autonomous dashboards. A major theme of this segment is the “death of the UI,” as founders move toward direct, text- or voice-based interactions with agents that possess the “agency” to perform complex professional tasks.

The final segment explores the ethical and legal frontier of “digital immortality” through a project created by John Arrow: an AI clone of the late cartoonist Scott Adams. The project sparked significant controversy after being banned by YouTube for potential viewer confusion. The discussion explores the “Right to Publicity” and the moral tension between a creator’s public wish to be memorialized via AI and their estate’s desire for privacy. The hosts and guests debate the need for “Do Not Replicate” (DNR) legal filings and how the falling cost of AI will lead to more frequent, unauthorized recreations of public figures, ultimately concluding that “break bread” negotiations with families are essential for such high-fidelity digital replicas.

Highlights

”Panel’s concerns about OpenAI hiring”

“My guess, I am strictly guessing here, is that they gave him a pile of cash as a signing bonus. I would estimate that would be a nine-figure, kind of mid-nine-figure deal. I would put it at 250, maybe even as high as 500 million in…” — Jason Calacanis, 2:43

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”Jason’s optimistic and pessimistic takes”

“Okay, I’m going to give you the most optimistic take and I’m going to give you the most cynical, worst case scenario. Give you both. Which one do you want first, Alex?” — John Arrow, 6:03

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”Jesse’s Mac Minis outnumber her children”

“Go ahead, Jesse.” — Jason Calacanis, 10:44

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”Hiten live-trains a skill on Jason’s book”

“I’m the guy on the dark web.” — Jason Calacanis, 20:18

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”We’re in an appless world”

“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.” — John Arrow, 44:28

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Key Points

• OpenAI hires Peter Steinberger (2:43) - Panel discusses biggest concerns about OpenAI hiring the OpenClaw creator
• Optimistic and pessimistic scenarios (6:03) - Jason gives his most optimistic and most pessimistic takes on OpenAI’s motives
• OpenAI’s closed-source assistant (7:27) - Jason predicts OpenAI will give everyone their own closed-source assistant
• Mac Minis vs children (10:44) - Jesse Genet reveals her Mac Minis now outnumber her children at home
• What the community can do (15:21) - Discussion of what the OpenClaw community can do right now to protect the project
• Can companies hijack OpenClaw? (17:08) - Debate on whether companies can take over OpenClaw via hosting and skills
• Live training an Angel skill (20:18) - Hiten Shah live-trains an OpenClaw skill based on Jason’s book ‘Angel’
• Token spending discussion (22:37) - How much everyone is actually spending on AI tokens
• Jesse’s family video app (25:57) - Jesse demos her vibe-coded app to aggregate non-slop videos for her family
• Jesse’s app as a business (34:21) - Jason thinks Jesse’s family app has real business potential
• Personal CRM for investors (37:26) - Hiten built the personal CRM busy people have always dreamed of having
• Appless world (44:28) - Discussion of how we’re moving into an appless world powered by agents
• Markdown files are perfect (45:19) - Why .md files are the ideal format for humans and their AI agents
• Why founders are obsessed (52:36) - Discussion of why founders are so obsessed with OpenClaw
• AI Scott Adams creator (58:47) - John Arrow joins to discuss creating an AI clone of Scott Adams
• AI Scott Adams gets better (62:44) - How AI Scott Adams improves its likeness over time
• Posthumous AI clones ethics (64:36) - Legal and ethical considerations around AI clones of real people

Mentions

Companies

• OpenAI (2:27) - Hired OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger, raising concerns
• Crazy Egg (20:12) - Hiten Shah’s analytics company
• Lumi (25:56) - Jesse Genet’s packaging company
• Northwest Registered Agent (0:00) - Sponsor - business formation
• Lemon.io (0:00) - Sponsor - developer hiring
• LinkedIn (0:00) - Sponsor - job posting

Products & Technologies

• OpenClaw (2:27) - Future at risk after creator’s departure to OpenAI
• AI Scott Adams (58:47) - John Arrow’s AI clone of Scott Adams/Dilbert creator
• Personal CRM (37:27) - Hiten Shah’s OpenClaw-powered personal CRM for investors

People

• Peter Steinberger (2:27) - OpenClaw creator hired by OpenAI
• Hiten Shah (20:12) - Serial entrepreneur, demos personal CRM and live skill training
• Jesse Genet (10:45) - Lumi founder, her Mac Minis outnumber her children
• John Arrow (58:47) - Creator of AI Scott Adams
• Scott Adams (58:47) - Dilbert creator whose AI clone was created

Surprising Quotes

“Then he was probably given another equal amount to be a team member of OpenAI for the next four years. I would then put the deal at 250 plus 500, 500 plus 500, something in that zone.” — Jason Calacanis, 3:04

“So you’re aligned with me with the most cynical version of why he’s doing it, Jesse?” — Jason Calacanis, 11:35

“So we’re going to put all of our energy into OpenCloth for the next year. 2024, 2025 in our firm is the year of OpenCloth. We must maintain this open source project. Ease of use, security, skills, and a competitive hosting environment.” — Jason Calacanis, 17:08

“I agree. I really do believe we’re trending towards over ten percent of US K-through-twelve students being homeschooled.” — Jesse Genet, 36:58

Transcript

Jason Calacanis: 0:00 All right everybody, Monday February 16th, 2026. Lots of news. He’s at Alex, I’m at Jason. This is Twist. We have a breaking news story that dropped Sunday. OpenClaw getting bought by the evil empire OpenAI. Sam Altman has bought OpenClaw. Here we are in AD 24 or AO 24, 24 days after we started talking about the incredible open source project OpenClaw and it’s already been purchased. We’re gonna talk all about what that means and handicap it. Alex, you decided to bring some great guests on today for our Monday show of Twist. Who do we got?

Alex Wilhelm: 0:41 Yes, we’ve got a couple of awesome guests. First up we have Hiten Shah, someone that I’ve known in the technology world for a very long time. He’s the CEO of Crazy Egg, prior co-founder and CEO of a number of other companies. Fantastic technologist and OpenClaw fanatic. Hiten, thanks for coming on the show. And we also have Jesse Genet. She is a former founder and currently a homeschooling mom and she’s using OpenClaw in and around how she teaches her kids about the world. Uh, so two different use cases, two different awesome people, but OpenClaw, Jason, as you know, has a lot of uses. So I figured let’s bring them both on and learn from each of them.

Jason Calacanis: 1:17 Alright, and Hiten, oh my God, I’ve known him for a long time. He’s an OG now, he’s an OG now, he’s got the grey hair, but he was a kid in the Web 2 era. And Jesse, I saw you on Twitter talking all about your homeschooling which I’m a fan of and how you’re doing incredible things with OpenClaw. Before we get to each of your individual uses of OpenClaw, this incredible new platform, we have to talk about what some people feel is a rug pull, what some people feel is the end of the project, what other people feel is going to be just fine and they’re extremely happy for the founder of OpenClaw to secure a bag in under 60 days. This is going to wind up being the largest, if it is in fact a unicorn, which I’m sure with the stock options it will be. Alex, this would be the solopreneur billion-dollar company that we’ve been talking about.

Alex Wilhelm: 2:07 Yeah, kind of. So this is the thing that I’m really curious about and I wanted to talk about it with the group because the numbers aren’t super clear. The way they’ve phrased this is, Peter’s going to, Peter, the guy behind OpenClaw originally, is going to join OpenAI and they’re going to put OpenClaw into a foundation that Dave Morin is involved with and so forth. But Jason, what was not discussed at any point was an enormous pile of money going from Sam Altman’s pocket to Peter’s pocket at least explicitly. So is he being brought onto OpenAI with a fat sack of stock options as an equivalent to an acquisition? Is that how you see this working out?

Jason Calacanis: 2:43 My guess, I am strictly guessing here, is that they gave him a pile of cash as a signing bonus. I would estimate that would be a nine-figure, kind of mid-nine-figure deal. I would put it at 250, maybe even as high as 500 million in… some combination of cash and stock in OpenAI. Then he was probably given another equal amount to be a team member of OpenAI for the next four years. I would then put the deal at 250 plus 500, 500 plus 500, something in that zone. Because he could have easily raised $50 million at a 300, 400, 500 million dollar valuation, perhaps even a billion dollar valuation from investors. So what OpenAI had to beat was 100 million from Sequoia, Andreessen, GC, any number of firms would have given him 100 million plus maybe bought 100 million of his shares at a let’s call it a billion dollar post, a 2 billion dollar post because this is such a phenomenon, it is the highest ramping ever GitHub project. Therefore, you have to beat market. I’m going to guess what Peter did, and he will tell us over time, and he’s interacted with me a bunch over the weekend and in my threads, because I had told him and I had DM’d him like don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. You’re the chosen one, this is the chosen project. Do not sell to Sam Altman. Don’t do it. Look at Sam Altman’s history. Look at what he did to Elon. Look at his co-founders leaving. Look at him almost getting fired. Just look at that track record. Look at the YC track record. I—and this is nothing against Sam Altman, we’re friendly and we’ve known each other for over 20 years. But he’s a cutthroat guy. He’s known as a dealmaker. Doesn’t surprise me that he got this deal because he’s from the Zuckerberg school, I’ve said this over and over again. He is as sharp as a blade gets. He is the greatest dealmaker of this generation, I believe, or will become.

Alex Wilhelm: 4:49 All right, so we have two founders with us. I’m curious. First of all, first reactions to the deal and do you guys agree with Jason’s framing about the financials here? Uh, let’s do Hiten and then Jesse.

Hiten Shah: 4:59 Something had to happen. If you look at all the open source sort of projects that are out there, it’s better when they’re supported. So, you know, that’s kind of my current take. Someone’s gonna support it, it just happened really fast and so there’s a lot of news and drama about it and of course lots of opinions. I don’t have any except I’m here to use the technology to the maximum benefit I can get and contribute as much as possible.

Jesse Genet: 5:12 I hope I—yeah, I think as a user, I hope the product just actually keeps getting better and better. Um, I think obviously there’s a little irony, like we’ve got OpenDevin and we’ve got OpenAI, um, and maybe they’re not so open. Uh, hopefully OpenDevin starts to—like continues to be an amazing open source project. Uh, we’ll see.

Alex Wilhelm: 5:23 All right, so Jason, you were talking about how you were worried, you know, he’s the—this is the chosen app, don’t sell to Sam. The foundation model, there’s a lot of open source foundations out there, kind of a tried and true method. Do you think that uh it’s going to be a good setup for OpenDevin to persist and keep improving over time or is this more of a sop to keep people happy as OpenAI…

Jason Calacanis: 6:00 the AI tries to get all the juice from the particular lemon.

John Arrow: 6:03 Okay, I’m going to give you the most optimistic take and I’m going to give you the most cynical, worst case scenario. Give you both. Which one do you want first, Alex?

Alex Wilhelm: 6:13 I want the sad cynical, cynical first and then good after that, yeah.

John Arrow: 6:19 Okay, here’s the most cynical take. This technology was becoming so powerful that it commoditized OpenAI and Claude. Because it wins the interface. Whoever wins the interface wins the day. You can see the Chrome browser, you can see Mac OS, you can see Windows. If you own the operating system, you own the distribution. It was becoming very clear that the front door for using AI had switched from ChatGPT chat room to now people using OpenClaude. Anybody using OpenClaude stopped going to Claude, XAI, Gemini. You just stop going there and you interact with your agent and your agent goes into interface, which commoditizes them. We know it commoditizes them because the discussion in under 10 days became in our organization, how do we get the maximum number of tokens for the lowest possible price? And everybody, and I’m sure Jesse, I see her nodding, and Hiten will all agree that you become a token junkie when you start using this.

Jason Calacanis: 7:25 Ha ha ha!

Alex Wilhelm: 7:26 Yeah, yeah.

John Arrow: 7:27 And you say I have to get a Mac Studio because I want to run Qwen or I want to run, you know, DeepSeek. So that is the most cynical take. So what would you do if a most cynical person in the world, the most cutthroat person in the world, let’s call him Zuckerberg? What would Zuck do? What would Microsoft do? What would Gates do? These are the two, you know, litmus tests. Most cutthroat. What they would do is they would sabotage that interface and make a better one inside their product. What are they going to do with OpenClaude? They’re going to let it chug along. But then they’re going to use Peter and his big brain. They’re going to rebuild this product inside of OpenAI. And instead of going to OpenClaude and doing all this, you know, chores and and tedious work to set it up, they’re going to make it one click and give it to their billion users because they have distribution in order to preserve their distribution. And then whatever innovations, the safest, most innovative, easiest version, the most easiest version will be the default interface on ChatGPT within six to 12 months. In other words, in ChatGPT, you’re not going to get a chat interface and ask a question to pick a model. You’ll get a persona and the persona is now going to operate and they will flip the default and it will start with two buttons: your assistant’s name or ChatGPT. Which would you like to use?

Jason Calacanis: 9:00 And then, at some point, they flip the default. That’s the most cynical take.

Alex Wilhelm: 9:05 Why is that cynical? That sounds awesome. What you’re describing sounds awesome to me. I’m struggling to find the cynicism here.

Jason Calacanis: 10:26 Because it won’t be open source anymore. And it will lock in all your data and take every innovation and privacy you have and give it to OpenAI. So every single thing Jesse is doing, we’re going to hear about her project in a moment, every single thing Jesse is doing with homeschooling will be owned by Sam Altman in ChatGPT.

Jesse Genet: 10:42 Well, Jesse’s going to have local models.

Jason Calacanis: 10:44 Go ahead, Jesse.

Jesse Genet: 10:46 Isn’t that probably what they’re scared of? Right? So if you’re willing, and I understand that like we’re on a bleeding edge here, but if you’re willing to, you know, go get your five Mac Minis over here going, then you’re willing-

Jason Calacanis: 10:58 I think I saw five.

Jesse Genet: 10:59 Yeah!

Jason Calacanis: 11:00 Was that five Mac Minis?

Jesse Genet: 11:01 Yeah, yeah, I’m really- they’re outnumbering the children. Um, but if you’re willing to do that, then you’re probably willing to figure out how to do local models and that must be scary. So that- that’s the scary. Because if you’re chewing tokens and you’re telling your agent like, ‘Okay, chew less tokens, get more optimized.’ I’ve got a nightly build every night where they’re like figuring that out like together as like a group, then they’re going to say, like, they’re going to be like, ‘We need a Mac Studio right away, Jesse.’ Like, that’s- you wake up to that news, that is- must be scary if you’re Sam Altman because basically not only do I not want him owning my data, but I also just want to save money and I want to like have a private, you know, Mac-

Jason Calacanis: 11:35 So you’re aligned with me with the most cynical version of why he’s doing it, Jesse?

Jesse Genet: 11:38 Yes, I’m aligned with you. I think that there will be folks leading the charge, and I would put myself in this bucket, to like not- to- to even if that future is like ahead of us, that there’s going to be these alternative paths, um, to going local and and like keeping your privacy, and that that’s really important, um, especially when I think about like my children’s entire education being like sitting on a Mac. or something? But, uh, but, I understand consumers like ease, but I think they also like saving money and local models are going to start being such a delta, so I don’t know, you know, I don’t know how that’s going to pan out.

Alex Wilhelm: 12:13 We’re going to get back to the model thing, but I want to hear the other side of Jason’s argument. Jason, what’s the non-cynical take here?

Jason Calacanis: 12:19 Okay, here’s the most non-cynical take. Sam Altman is going to build agents and they will become the default or a major part of what he’s doing. OpenAI has fallen behind, and everybody has fallen behind Anthropic because of Claude 3 and Opus 3.5. Now, this has been a case of leapfrog, we all know that. But Gemini is going to win the consumer, that’s my belief. And Claude 3 was going to win business, and that’s where it was trending. And I would say xAI was going to win news and breaking news, right? And data centers and space, whatever. So you, and then you’ve got all the open source models. I believe open source is going to win the day on the token race. Okay, put that aside. The most optimistic model is, Sam for less than, if he gave a billion dollars, less than 10 basis points in the value of OpenAI, say it’s a trillion-dollar company. He gave one-tenth of one percent to have this person in the building and ten people around him and gets to watch their meetings, gets to say, ‘Oh, here’s what they’re doing, here’s the plans for this open-source project. How does that inform everything we do?’ And then, ‘Hey, can we just make sure that instead of it defaulting to Claude’s, you know, uh what’s the name of Claude’s… Claude Code? Claude Code versus Codex, like that could be the reason, like just want to make sure that OpenAI’s Codex is in there. Want to make sure OpenAI’s got the hooks in there as much as possible.’ So it’s just a defensive strategy to make sure that they’re locked in and they have as much intelligence as possible. So you’re giving Peter a billion dollars to be in the room with him, to watch him work on the open-source project so the rest of your team’s informed for their consumer-based agent that gets to know you like Claude. That’s… and then Dave Morin is one of the most thoughtful, creative, honorable human beings that I’ve met in the industry. Let me say that clearly. Sam Altman knows, like Sam Altman and Zuckerberg, the opposite of that would be Dave Morin. That’s the opposite, right? Dave Morin is the high-ethics, do-the-right-thing-for-the-community guy. Zuckerberg and Sam Altman would be do-the-right-thing-for-the-share-price guy. Two different types of motivation.

Alex Wilhelm: 14:47 Hiten, I see you nodding your head about the Dave Morin comments. What’s your take on him being part of the foundation, helping set it up and helping to lead it?

Hiten Shah: 14:54 You know, I was talking with some of my friends and I think you folks will appreciate this analogy, but is he like…

John Arrow: 15:00 Peter Sean Parker?

Hiten Shah: 15:03 Like that’s all I could think of, right? Like someone who helps him kind of understand and, you know, rationalize what’s going on in his life all of a sudden, right? That’s kind of how I would put it.

John Arrow: 15:14 So I echo Jason’s statement that someone should do it. Dave is a great person to be the one to help out with that.

Jason Calacanis: 15:21 Yeah. So that’s a great analogy, you’re bringing some humanity and a thoughtfulness. So then the question becomes what do we do here as a community? And I think what we have to do as a community is build this product and support so many people working on it that it never gets locked into OpenAI. So how do we do this? Number one, security. Number two, ease of use. Number three, 10,000 hosting services, a thousand hosting services driving the price down. So we’re going to invest here at my firm Launch and our accelerator, any two or three entrepreneurs that want to work on security, ease of use, hosting, or skills. If you have and obviously any other idea like Jesse’s idea I love, but at the application layer. But of those four like core principles, the skills remain open source. The security is paramount. The hosting is cheap and widely available. Anything in that range we want to fund. We funded two companies on the show last week, I have 20 slots, 10 in Founder University, 25k checks. That’s for like really nascent projects, two or three people working on them. And if you’re just one, we’ll find you two other co-founders. We’re going to do a co-founder OpenCloth co-founder matching service. On the other side, if you’ve got the product made and maybe you even have a thousand or 10,000 users, we’ll do the 125k come to the Launch accelerator. Then I will introduce you to every investor I know. I had 10 investors email me the past week, “Can I invest in the companies you’re investing in? You’re ahead of me on this, just tell me what to put money in.” Literally had like one of the highest profiles who just said “I’ll match every investment you make blindly J-Cal. I trust your judgment.” So we’re going to put all of our energy into OpenCloth for the next year. 2024, 2025 in our firm is the year of OpenCloth. We must maintain this open source project. Ease of use, security, skills, and a competitive hosting environment. So that we don’t get into a situation where one person owns the hosting, somebody they get the skills, you know, they come up with some fakakta crazy, “we’re going to have the skills inside of OpenAI so it’s safe for you,” and they and they hijack that out of the project, right? That’s my concern, is they hijack hosting, they hijack skills.

John Arrow: 17:41 We’re not going to let them.

Jesse Genet: 17:42 Yeah, but I think what’s cool is you can just say to your OpenCloth, “hey, build this skill.” So basically like I think what’s so like mind-bending is software like, you know, I built something for my kids software-wise that I’m a previous startup co-founder who I hadn’t opened terminal until six months ago. Okay, so I was the- my co-founder was technical. Um, so I- like but after six months ago started Claude coding, then open Claude, and now I can build anything. Like software’s feeling free to me. And I know and I used to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to developers. It didn’t feel free in the past. So that, doesn’t that just mean like it’s gonna be hard for anyone to control? When I can say build me this skill, and it just I have it in an hour.

John Arrow: 18:27 I had the same experience. I was worried about security when I was rebuilding my open Claude instance, Jesse. And I literally was just like, wait a minute, why don’t I just make all these skills myself? Like why would I bother to go through the security risk?

Jesse Genet: 18:36 Way less security issues. Because someone was talking about security issue with a certain, you know, skill. And so like instead of plusing, you know, get this skill, I just went to my open Claude and I said, ‘I like this skill, make this for me, private.’

Hiten Shah: 19:59 I got to chime in here. I think Alex, if you were looking at the Slack I added you to, you’d know why, but you might not have been looking at it. So while we were talking, I got Jason’s book. It’s probably somewhere on my shelf, but I have a PDF of it. Don’t ask me how I got it.

Jason Calacanis: 20:18 I’m the guy on the dark web.

Hiten Shah: 20:20 I, you know, I got it. I got it. But I got it back here. I paid for it Jason. It’s a great book.

Jason Calacanis: 20:26 Okay great.

Hiten Shah: 20:28 And basically I took the book and I think you might remember the four founder questions. So right now, Bob, one of my bots agents, whatever we want to call them, he’s actually making that skill right now off of your book. It analyzed the book, found all the frameworks, there’s like three frameworks: the four founder questions, why now, and portfolio math, and it’s going to go after making those skills and then we can use them.

Alex Wilhelm: 20:49 Love it. This is really, really, really cool. Yeah, I wasn’t watching Slack because we were podcasting. I don’t know if you noticed, but we’re doing a show right now. And if I just read Slack, it’s not going to be a very good podcast. Uh, before we get into demos, I do want to do demos in a second, but I’m curious what everyone is using as their own intelligence engine aka model right now because I’ve been tinkering with GLM 4.7, I know GLM 5 just came out, Mini-Max engine 2.5.

Jason Calacanis: 21:15 Explain what GLM is, please, for the audience.

Alex Wilhelm: 21:17 Yeah, so z.ai or Zhipu AI is a Chinese AI lab, and their model family, Jason, is called GLM, similar to how OpenAI’s models are GPT-dash. It’s just the moniker that goes with them. There’s a technical reason for it, but that’s probably one level lower than we need to get. Lots of great new models out there, really cheap. I’m just curious, Jesse, Hiten, what are you guys running when you’re burning a lot of tokens?

Jesse Genet: 21:41 I haven’t been optimizing yet, so I’ve really been using like Gemini models and Anthropic models, and I do have, depending on what the agent does, I have them flipping between to optimize basically token usage. But I have a Mac Studio coming, and they’re on delay, you guys. I can’t just get one tomorrow. And so when that comes, I’m going to start doing start playing with some local models, but some people might be experimenting more than me.

Alex Wilhelm: 22:05 Well, no, I mean you don’t even have to run these locally. There’s a lot of inference providers.

Jesse Genet: 22:08 No, I know. Yeah, I’ve just been trying so hard to get my agents behaving. I haven’t been experimenting as much on the model side. They but I’ve been asking them to optimize tokens based on what model they use when and like being way more precise about that. That’s like where I’ve been optimizing more so than playing with the new models that have been coming out every day so far.

Jason Calacanis: 22:27 Hiten?

Hiten Shah: 22:29 Oh, I’m using Kimi for coding, and then we do a bunch of local training using Llama. Still.

Jason Calacanis: 22:36 Oh really?

Hiten Shah: 22:37 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 22:38 Oh, all right. And so on a comparative basis, you’re burning through tokens that would cost from a major model provider, how much? Do you have any idea Jesse or Hiten how much you would be burning in or even at your peak what you were burning in OpenAI or Claude or XAI or whatever tokens?

Jesse Genet: 22:58 Sometimes, sometimes on a single day I’m like, you know, really burning through cash. Um, so I, that’s why I do want to optimize to start playing with the local models, but I haven’t been doing so yet. Um, but I’m, if I’m really cranking and having them do dev projects as well as doing all of the like book processing that I’ve been doing for the home school and stuff like that, you know sometimes I’m getting those like notifications from Anthropic about sending 15 dollars like every 45 minutes or something. So I, I’ve been, so I’m definitely motivated to optimize my usage, but haven’t yet.

Jason Calacanis: 23:29 So low thousands, certainly hundreds of dollars.

Jesse Genet: 23:32 Yeah, yeah. The way I think about it and I, I have the luxury of thinking about it this way, but you know, I have, I’ve onboarded, you know, like in my startup history like definitely over a hundred employees over time. And the way and so like I’m really price anchored to how much people cost. I do maybe that will be a legacy way of thinking, but I’m so price anchored to how much people’s time costs that even when I’m kind of spending a lot on these models, I’m like, I’m getting so much done, I honestly don’t overthink it, because I know that I’m getting projects done that I wish I was able to do four years ago. years ago or I feel like I’ve got three people working on curriculum for my kids and I’m like, okay, I spent, you know, $40 today. Like, that’s okay, because I can afford it. So, like, lucky for that. But I just—to me, it’s like, that’s still so phenomenally cheap. Um, but I have bigger projects, like with book ingestion and stuff, where if I really, like, really want them to chew tokens, especially on, like, reading videos where I record videos of my kid and they, like, actually maybe scan the videos to understand the lesson—this type of stuff—and I’m thinking local models will help me do that without just spending, like, thousands unnecessarily.

Alex Wilhelm: 24:31 Yeah, because you can really, you can really blow your token budget. My first $50 in Anthropic API credits that I bought were gone in the snap of a finger because I was using Opus 4.6 for the wrong tasks, Jesse.

Jesse Genet: 24:41 You learn it.

Alex Wilhelm: 24:42 And I think everyone learns that lesson, you know, about one time.

Jesse Genet: 24:45 One time.

Hiten Shah: 24:46 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 now, 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 ChatGPT or Claude 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—I have it set up both locally and have an OpenClaw agent dedicated to this where we’re actually taking the workloads we have and automatically running evals on them, so 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.

John Arrow: 25:57 Jesse’s been doing a lot of awesome work and one of the things 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. So Jesse, take us through it.

Jesse Genet: 26:08 Yeah, so let me share screen real quick. Um, so I—I don’t know if any other parents—oh, I mean, I sound stupid to even say, I know other parents suffer from this. Basically, there’s amazing content on YouTube, but—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. Uh, so I’ve actually wanted to build this for years, and this is where I’m saying as a previous founder, like, software used to be expensive, now I can just chat on my phone with my OpenClaw who’s using Claude Code and Cursor and stuff, and I—and I built this. Uh, 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 OpenClaw, one of them, because…

Alex Wilhelm: 27:00 So I got this set up that 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. So 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 then 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 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 slop is gone, okay? Slop is over. And but I’ve been wanting to build this for years and finally I can because I… 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 like… I coded this on my phone with LLMs with Open Claw, because I can’t even sit down.

Jason Calacanis: 28:03 So this is an app or a website right now?

Alex Wilhelm: 28:05 This is an app. So this is just private to me. I’m not here pumping it out. This is just something I built for my life.

Jason Calacanis: 28:09 I will pay you a hundred dollars a month for this app immediately. And I want you to curate it into feeds.

Alex Wilhelm: 28:13 Okay, well this is just for my life right now. I need to make sure I don’t run afoul of any other things I did with YouTube and stuff to make sure other people could use this app. But…

Jason Calacanis: 28:21 Or I’ll join your pod. I’m going to join your pod and I trust you. No, my ten-year-olds are on YouTube constantly. You identified the problem which is slop. Kids are like these navigators to find the stuff and the algorithm pulls it into it. And that’s what I really want them to do is they love… when I give them documentaries or creative stuff, they they love it. But the algorithm is so powerful that it will pull them to, you know, two girls doing a makeup tutorial or…

Alex Wilhelm: 29:56 Disney princesses smoking cigarettes.

Jason Calacanis: 29:58 I know. And YouTube shorts is pretty much…

Jesse Genet: 30:00 YouTube Kids, I feel like is 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 build this stuff, you know, off to the side. And I’m not exaggerating, I cannot sit at my computer. That’s what Open Claw has given me is basically, it’s hands on my computer when I cannot sit down. So 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 Open Claw to develop the entire curriculum to homeschool my children. And this is just an example, 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. So if you see here, I have all these individual lessons logged of my children doing specific things. But here’s where things get 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. My Open Claw writes this entire lesson log and logs it.

Jason Calacanis: 31:29 Love it.

Jesse Genet: 31:29 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. And 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 with my head cut off.

John Arrow: 32:05 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. Same 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.

Jesse Genet: 32:39 They’re running a business. Yeah.

John Arrow: 32:40 They’re running a business, right? Essentially. And so this startup that just went through our accelerator, sorry, I’m drawing a blank, I just got all this snow dumping down behind me and after the show I’ll be out in that powder. We desperately needed a snowstorm here in the, in America. So this company, Next Visit, which will show on the screen here, they report that doctors are getting back like 10% of their time.

Jason Calacanis: 33:00 The 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 is done so well. Nextvisit.ai if you want to see it. Okay. I, Jesse, I love what you’re doing. It’s a business. You’re a mom.

Jesse Genet: 33:20 Yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 33:21 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? I mean, I think you got a business here.

Jesse Genet: 33:32 I, I want I the fact that in one generation we went from about one percent of kids homeschooled to about six percent 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-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. Like I feel like I’ve 10x-ed myself at least with Open Cloth that I was like, I must at least share. I’m gonna 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 uh within another few years from now. I’m passionate about that. Maybe there’s a business in there too.

Jason Calacanis: 34:21 Okay. I am a crazy risk taker. I will give you, uh, I’ll invite you to our accelerator, give you 125k just to pursue your muse for the next year. If it doesn’t work out and you burn the 125k, I don’t care. I like to take risk. If it’s a one in ten, a one in 20 chance, I am okay with long odds. Just let it percolate. You don’t have to give me an answer right now, although 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.

Jesse Genet: 34:52 I can hire four of my own Mac Studios, Jason, okay?

Jason Calacanis: 34:56 No, no. I’m talking about a human.

Jesse Genet: 34:58 I’m rich. I don’t need you.

Jason Calacanis: 34:59 Got you. Jesse Alex tells me that all the time. He still shows up.

Jesse Genet: 35:04 He still shows up for work. I know, but I do, I’ve been through YC. I do believe in like you surround yourself with like great people, like great things happen. Um, so yes, I’m very very interested. I also have a three month old, so for me it’s probably more of a making sure I’ve got, you know, life life bandwidth. But I I love the momentum.

Jason Calacanis: 35:22 You can spend the 125k on a 12 hour a day nanny. You could literally spend it on nanny coverage so you get an extra hour back a day. All right. I’m gonna put it.

Alex Wilhelm: 35:30 There’s nine months of nanny time there, Jason. He’s incepted it. He’s incepted it. Um, I love the idea and um and look.

Jason Calacanis: 35:39 Well no, you know what I think an interesting idea would be for year one because I am passionate about this space as well. I have a full-time teacher uh working for us uh and that’s worked out amazingly for our family. We had means. But I think there’s like the people with means are doing this already. Then there’s people with no means who are just suffering at you know in this terrible education system. There’s people in the middle.

Jesse Genet: 36:01 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 36:02 I think like Uber did, Uber Black… people had chauffeurs, right? If you’re a rich person, you get a Maybach, you pay- 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 to take ten rides a week, sixty dollars a ride. Hey, that’s six hundred a week, it’s thirty thousand a year.’ Okay, now you’ve got access. Then you get Uber X, now another set of access. And then eventually, autonomy and Uber Pool and Lyft Line, those things kind of bring it down.

Jesse Genet: 36:29 Yes.

Jason Calacanis: 36:30 There’s a next tier here that I believe would pay five hundred dollars a month, a thousand dollars a month to have a set of tools and a curriculum and the ability to be part of a community. And I think you get a hundred of them to pay that amount. Just middle-class folk, you know, 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. So you’re doing great work in the world, but there’s a business model here that’s subscription.

Jesse Genet: 36:58 I agree. I really do believe we’re trending towards over ten percent of US K-through-twelve students being homeschooled. And when you 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. So I’m starting close to home, literally in my home. But yeah, I view it as a mission.

Jason Calacanis: 37:26 All right. I want to- I want to get to another demo though. Let’s keep the demos going. So Hiten, take us- take us to Slackville and tell us what you’ve cooked up with OpenClaw.

Hiten Shah: 37:31 I’m actually going to give you three things. And 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 OpenClaw 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 going to 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. It’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- there’s just in the last twenty 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’s going to put hers in there, I gave it my Gmail contacts 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 reaching out to. A lot of people go to like automation, go send the automated emails, there’s already even been public screw-ups on that where the Cal.com founder said ‘Unsubscribe’ to the Beehiiv 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 beehiiv email from the beehiiv people, not a beehiiv newsletter and it was automatic and it was his 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 as this 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 that’s the point.

Alex Wilhelm: 39:30 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.

Hiten Shah: 39:51 And I did it in like 30 minutes. And I can 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. So 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. 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 Claude, plug into Slack with a good enough account at chat, you know, ChatGPT or Claude account and I can do this. So that’s one use case.

Jason Calacanis: 40:45 Keep going.

Hiten Shah: 40:47 I’m gonna 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, memory search, it’s like a open Claude 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. Um, we’ve been running it for like 20 days or something like that, 15 days, whatever, really early in, within a few days, we set this one up. This one actually also has a local Nvidia 5090 sitting, 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 that you see here that I’m going to show you, I’m only going to show you like 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, and we’ve all done it through Slack.

Alex Wilhelm: 41:42 So you built a dashboard. Yeah, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 41:44 But it built its own dashboard. This 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 Logikcull’s representation…

John Arrow: 42:00 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…

Jesse Genet: 42:07 Yeah, yeah, that thing’s cool.

John Arrow: 42:08 Yeah, every Saturday I’m having it go out on Saturday at noon and saying, ‘Go research everything about thumbnails,’ and every Sunday say, ‘Go research everything about titles for podcasts, etc.’ Tell us the best practices, give us examples, tell 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 MrBeast who explained MrBeast’s philosophy. Now, we’ve heard 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 and getting 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 one of the greatest guitarists of all time, or they become, you know, Quentin Tarantino and they make the greatest, you know, films of all time or whatever. That 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.

Jesse Genet: 43:21 I like, yes. And 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. Hiten said something that I think is really interesting, which is that UIs are kind of dead, right? I don’t know if I don’t want to speak for you, but but maybe taking it to another level, are UIs dead? Because six months ago, I was trying to Claude-code an app for my homeschool, like an app that I could click into and use on my phone. Then when OpenClaude launched, I’m like, why? There’s no app. Like, we are in an appless world. I don’t actually want an app, right? I don’t want an icon. I don’t want to click into something. I have… I want my husband to log lessons too. I don’t want to make him get an app. Apps are… like, there’s no more apps. Like, there’s no more UI need. I just… he just needs to be able to chat with the replicant, and so do I. So that just means UIs… like, what’s the future of that? I mean, there’ll be some, like, niche ones, but that’s crazy. Like, that’s a crazy shift.

John Arrow: 44:28 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 because we’ve been iterating 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 research into…

Alex Wilhelm: 44:46 Where are you running? Are you on… are you on your own machine or is this in a cloud?

John Arrow: 44:51 This is in the cloud. I 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…

Hiten Shah: 45:00 And there’s no reason… there’s a way you can contain that and that’s the whole point.

Jesse Genet: 45:05 And those are all .md files, right? You’re doing like 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 all connected now.’

Jason Calacanis: 45:16 Explain what that means to a neophyte.

Jesse Genet: 45:19 Yeah, an .md, markdown file. So markdown files have existed forever, like really light structure text-text-text-based structure. They’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 a organization for them. But a file structure that’s existed—file format that’s 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 like 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.’ I copied it because I’m not gonna read it, okay? I’m holding a baby. I click the button ‘Copy in .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?

Jason Calacanis: 46:20 Hiten just threw something in called ‘Website to Markdown’. Explain what this does.

Hiten Shah: 46:26 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 ChatGPT and things like that and it’s not getting to the webpage, you can just literally just click that and then it’ll just download it in that format.

Jason Calacanis: 46:44 Okay, wait a second. So Website to Markdown. You go to a website, let’s say there was a website… it was somebody’s Substack. It was Alex’s Substack for Cautious Optimism. He… you then go to it, you say ‘Just download the whole magilla.’

Hiten Shah: 46:57 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 bot you want.

Jason Calacanis: 47:04 So it’s a 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.’

Hiten Shah: 47:24 Yeah, just an easy way to get… like you know 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 web fetch they can go get pages and crawl entire sites like Jason. Like the other thing I wanted to show you folks, this was number three, I had three right? Is basically how I… I think Alex you were going to ask me about this so we might as well go here right?

Alex Wilhelm: 47:51 Yeah, well I’ll check while you bring it up, I’ll explain. Jason, Hiten was talking about something called ‘pair prompting’ which was an entirely new method of working. …with AI and I wanted him to explain to us what that means and why it matters.

Hiten Shah: 48:04 So, I have a personal Slack. It’s hiten.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 like, I happen to have Jason’s book, which I talked about earlier. So I had it go analyze it. So 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 four 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…

Alex Wilhelm: 48:48 Yeah.

Hiten Shah: 48:49 …and it’s going to perfect the skill. But I built a 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, right? So we were able to take a book and turn it into a skill right here in the matter of this show, right? Um, so that’s one. And then another one is I have a bunch of like 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, you know, our mutual friend Om Malik…

Jason Calacanis: 49:21 Yeah.

Hiten Shah: 49:22 …where he’s got a long history of writing, right? 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. So 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 solves 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, 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.

Jason Calacanis: 49:58 Sure.

Hiten Shah: 49:59 And then, 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.

Jason Calacanis: 50:11 Yeah. 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 crash. 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 resilience 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, uh, which my friends are always apt to point out to me.

Alex Wilhelm: 50:46 Alright Hiten, can you stop sharing for a minute? We’re going to, we’re going to 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. Cognitive overload. One thing I love about Claude is I can do so much.

Jason Calacanis: 51:00 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 may be just starting 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. Jesse, why don’t we start with you?

Jesse Genet: 51:20 Yeah, my first — 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. So, 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 what to pull out. So one day I realized that, I took a bunch of photos, gave them to my OpenClaw 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’m a JOMO person instead of a FOMO person, so this is helpful for me, my mindset, because yes, there’s times when my OpenClaw is not working, but I don’t freak out about that. But I go through my day, anytime I hit a slow moment where my mental load is like maxed, I give that job to my OpenClaw and try to automate it.

Jason Calacanis: 52:12 Got it. All right, Hiten, really briefly, same thing to you. Just give me the two-bullet point version of handling cognitive overload in the era of OpenClaw.

Hiten Shah: 52:23 I just try to pick and choose. It’s a Whac-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 a habit, it’s just like using ChatGPT.

Jason Calacanis: 52:36 Well 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, Jesse, do entrepreneurs get so consistently, so predictably addicted to OpenClaw in your mind?

Jesse Genet: 52:58 Bingo! Because we as founders always thought we could do it all, and now we can. Like it’s like a megalomania, 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 also have worked with some amazing people. I’m being facetious a little bit, but I now I can extend myself like infinitely.

Jason Calacanis: 53:31 That is exactly it. Hiten, what do you think? Why so predictably? Matt Mullenweg, you, me, Alex, everybody saw this, started playing with it and said ‘I can’t stop.’ Why, Hiten? Why is this?

Hiten Shah: 53:47 Agency. Founders naturally earn, get, use, have agency. This gives you so much more agency. I mean, I’m up to like 2:00, 3:00 AM. I haven’t been up till 3:00 AM in the morning since college, and it’s because…

John Arrow: 54:00 I need to like in one of the businesses I helped someone start, like it’s a marketing agency. Overnight, we 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 we scale very differently now. So it’s agency.

Jason Calacanis: 54:20 Alex, give your opinion and then I’ll give the correct answer.

Hiten Shah: 54:24 Uh, we’re hearing versus the correct answer here, but what’s your position for this?

Alex Wilhelm: 54:27 Well, 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 on agency, but for me, it’s it’s turned me into the person that I wanted to be if I was better with semicolons, patience, and 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.

Jason Calacanis: 54:52 Okay, you guys are nailing it. In my mind, there is a reason why this resonates. This 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 is 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 there hills. This 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, you know, 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. If 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… 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. Now I’ve got a surprise for you guys. Okay, editorial director Lon is here.

Alex Wilhelm: 57:13 Uh, so this morning we were checking out uh, AI Scott Adams, I believe we have a clip. Now this is uh, not the real Scott Adams. They have created a digital clone of the Dilbert cartoonist who of course passed away uh, in uh, earlier this year in January. Uh, so here is the AI approximation of Scott Adams that is now hosting a regular podcast uh, of his own. Let’s take a look.

Jason Calacanis: 57:38 And to add to what Lon is saying, tragically, uh, Scott Adams passed away, the creator of Dilbert last month. He had said on his podcast, he was obsessed with the idea, uh, and I was friendly with Scott for many years. He had said he was, Lon, 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 7:00 a.m. Pacific time every day for thousands of episodes, his little take on the news, influence, skillsets, reframes, whatever. He- he had a delightful show every morning. So here’s the AI version of that.

Alex Wilhelm: 58:26 Good. I like coffee. Join me now for the unparalleled pleasure of the dopamine hit of the day. The thing- All right, I think that 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.

Jason Calacanis: 58:42 A young Scott Adams is here. We have the founder of AI Coffee with Scott Adams, correct Lon?

Alex Wilhelm: 58:47 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.

Jason Calacanis: 58:55 John, uh, tell us uh, why you created AI with Scott Adams. I’m assuming you were a fan of Coffee with Scott Adams?

John Arrow: 59:04 I- I appreciate you asking that question. I mean it’s something that really nobody has asked about the story. I literally grew up, my bedtime stories at night were Scott Adams’ Dilbert cartoons, my parents would read them to me. So, um, I was a fan from a very early age and kind of identified with that and then when he started putting out his books, um, I kind of reconnected with him around the COVID time and started listening to his podcast very frequently. So, uh, you know, I know there’s people that were bigger fans than me by far, but, um, I think I got a lot of value out of it. And, uh, 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. And 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 uh, it’s- it’s brought, I know a lot of people a lot of joy and- during this period and it’s something that’s- that’s really been a lot of fun.

Jason Calacanis: 60:04 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. You would say, oh, you need a cup or mug or glass. Everybody would do it together. It created like a bonding experience. He 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, these micro lessons, that I bought the domain name microlessons.com and I emailed him and I said, hey, I have microlessons.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, J-Cal. 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? Because it seemed like it’s very in line with what Scott would have done.

John Arrow: 60:54 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, to all of 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. That was- that was not- not a person.

Jason Calacanis: 61:28 Jesse or Hiten or Alex, 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.

Jesse Genet: 61:51 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 that- with other personalities or like I’m doing home school like historical figures, like you’re- you’re peaking my curiosity about this. Is there anything else you can share technically with how you brought it together?

John Arrow: 62:12 Sure, happy- 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 Eleven Labs, we’re using Fall.ai, and this is one of the situations where I think, you know, 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- but anybody because that’s probably been the most consistent question we’ve got is how can I turn this into educational content or do this for somebody else? And I hope we have 50 of them or more.

Alex Wilhelm: 62:44 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?

John Arrow: 63:00 There’s a huge recursive element in what we use for feedback is the comments themselves on the X posts. So previously we were on YouTube, but they got us kicked off of YouTube. They said, uh, 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 if 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 for refining 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.

Jason Calacanis: 63:36 Wait, uh, did you say YouTube banned your account?

John Arrow: 63:40 YouTube banned us. And, um, you know, it was something we had just a huge, huge following. More people were watching it there than X and, um, if you look, go ahead.

Jason Calacanis: 63:45 Well, no, and when YouTube banned it, what reason did they give you? And did they give you a strike? Did they talk to you, or they just shut the channel down?

John Arrow: 63:52 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. Um, 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 of about 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 AI Scott Adams says he’s AI multiple times. So I think it was, there was probably another reason.

Hiten Shah: 64:36 What if you… what if you put a permanent watermark across it that on YouTube that says ‘this is not Scott Adams, this is a parody AI account’ and it was literally watermarked, which would be annoying…

Jason Calacanis: 64:54 …or and like a lower third that just said ‘this is not Scott Adams, this is an account’. If 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, Hiten, so and then I’m sure you have a question. So what do you think of trying again?

John Arrow: 65:07 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. Um, I think it was one of those situations where they banned the video and took down the reason.

Jason Calacanis: 65:13 What do you think it’s about?

John Arrow: 65:15 I, you know, Scott Adams is an amazing person, had a lot of different connections. I understand, um, some of the people who didn’t want our video up were kind of banding together and, and calling the people that they knew at YouTube and at Google. And apparently, 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. Uh, so I think that’s more what it was about. It was a, it was a ban 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.

Hiten Shah: 65:41 Just do a new account. Just do a new account and see what happens.

John Arrow: 65:42 Yeah, 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, you know, presumably AI Scott Adams’ AI daughter. And 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. You know, we had, again, our main mode of distribution was YouTube until they, until they pulled the plug on us. Hopefully we’ll build that back.

Jesse Genet: 66:08 Hiten.

Hiten Shah: 66:10 Yeah?

Jesse Genet: 66:11 I just had a quick question.

John Arrow: 66:13 Yeah.

Jesse Genet: 66:14 How long did it take you from start to when you felt like it was good enough to share?

John Arrow: 66:16 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 5 to 10 hours that we spent on it. And then, you know, spent- been a few weeks tinkering and then we got it to a point where, look, it’s- it wasn’t perfect, but if you watch any of the conventional Coffee with Scott Adams episodes, there are always mic issues, there are 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- the problems that you see, we’re trying to work those out.

Alex Wilhelm: 66:48 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. Um, 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. So has the estate reached out to you? Have there been any kind of formal commentary from them?

John Arrow: 67:06 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 messages- my message is filled with hate and- and love every day, my DMs. One group we haven’t heard from is the estate themselves. So, we’ve seen some people from the show that have just kind of sent some obscenity our ways, but nobody has made any- any inroads to make- have a productive conversation. I’ve said I’ve been open to that, um, but I haven’t seen any of those attempts. And 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 friend and- and 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, and there’s a lot of people who- who were close to him that say this is not what he wanted. I don’t want to disclose it, but I have had some extremely high-level people message me saying, ‘Hey, look, I talked to Scott in the last days before he passed away. This is something that- that he wanted to do. You’re doing a great job here.’

Jason Calacanis: 68:18 There would be a very simple solution here Lon 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 I- we hold space for that particular nuance to this discussion. That said, public figures, um, have to be open to parody and cartoons being written about them or being mocked even or being celebrated, any of those things. However, however, um, you know, this is a particularly great… Yeah, 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?

John Arrow: 69:16 Yeah, I mean, I think it comes down to the realism and I mean, I’m not— 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 is just flipping around, this 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, or 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 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, that was a dying man’s wish, you know, it’s right to fulfill a dying man’s wish. 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, like we might soon be in a time where everybody just has a legal document that they fill out that’s part of estate planning that you’re like, I’m good with people making AI representations of myself after I’m gone versus never do that, I hate that idea.

Jason Calacanis: 71:18 Lon, explain DNR for people who are not familiar with that.

John Arrow: 71:22 Oh, a 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 and I think that would be the same situation.

Jason Calacanis: 71:39 So DNR: Do Not Replicate. Do Not Replicate me.

Alex Wilhelm: 71:43 Right, you know, it would just be ‘Do Not Replicate me’.

Jason Calacanis: 71:45 Jesse, what are your thoughts here?

Hiten Shah: 71:47 You’re exactly right.

Jesse Genet: 71:48 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? Like, 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, like, and I get this fear in response to my content about home school 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, or are they upset, like, AI, like fear.

John Arrow: 72:31 Jess, you hit the nail on the head here. I mean, that’s what’s going on. It’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, 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, 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. And he did over 3,000s 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, and then you could use me for your personality, I authorize that.’ And there’s, there’s dozens of these things. We posted some of them on AI Scott Adams for you to see. It’s, it’s pretty unequivocal. So I don’t think there’s a risk of this happening for the common person.

Jason Calacanis: 73:53 Jesse, you had a follow up, I could see.

Jesse Genet: 73:55 Well, I basically… you, you said, like, I actually wonder how settled this law is, like, relative to all other personalities and stuff. So, so actually, kind of just skipping off of 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, etc., about likenesses and about, you know, what our wishes are upon death and these, all, all these types of law, uh, AI has, was not existent when anyone wrote this stuff. So 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 gonna 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 gonna 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.

Alex Wilhelm: 74:52 We want to, I wonder if the market is going to answer that for us. Because if there’s a lot of demand for this sort of thing, if AI Coffee with Scott Adams goes super viral and people love it—

John Arrow: 75:00 I think it’s going to change how we think about it from a- a demand perspective. Jason, sorry.

Jason Calacanis: 75:03 John, do you want to- address that? And I- I actually can address some of the legal issues having been in some…

John Arrow: 75:09 I’m actually looking forward to that. I mean, I’ve been involved in a lot of litigation over the years. I’m sure you’ve been involved in more. And so would love to hear that thought because I’m- hopefully this- this video is not an exhibit A in the original fifth thing that- that, you know, this is. But- but yeah, so you go for it.

Jason Calacanis: 75:24 No, no. Give your- give your thought and then I’ll- I’ll give…

John Arrow: 75:26 I think there’s existing laws, right? There’s publicity laws. If you look at different states, a lot of them have laws, you know, Walt Disney copyright, that’s which is separate from publicity. But a lot of laws, like Texas, where- where, you know, I’m based. I spend my time between Texas and New York. They have 60 years, right? So 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 were 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.

Jason Calacanis: 75:59 So, there is a law called the right to publicity. And this is for famous people. How 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. Now, uh, 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 this- uh, 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. You know, for a real character like Elvis, you basically get 75-100 years from the time of death to- uh, exploit that person’s IP. 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 don’t have to pay for that. But that’s why when like Steve Jobs did his famous 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 100 years old that has an estate, you do. 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. Or you’ll have a heart-to-heart with the family and say, hey, we’re going to make Abigail, and Abigail’s 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, etc. 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. We just want it to live in this zone and have the ability to approve 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. I’m giving it to my three daughters to go rule the universe and be queens and take over the empire. Full stop.

Alex Wilhelm: 79:57 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. Okay, rapid fire. Uh, 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. Uh, LidoOpa, the age of the AI agent is akin to ethical slavery. Uh, another DrDavis, 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. Uh, 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 clone?

Jason Calacanis: 80:40 End of his life.

John Arrow: 80:41 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. So 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 can make AIs out of you, how do you do it? Because Scott Adams did it, tried dozens of times, and said, this is—

Alex Wilhelm: 81:00 This is what I want. This is what I want. And despite some of those comments, there is not one video segment of him revoking 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. That’s what he said, there’s many videos of him saying that, no videos of him not saying that. So how would somebody, 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 in, 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 did something even better. He said that to the public. And that does constitute a pledge and something that he wanted to do. So for all these people, you know, 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.

John Arrow: 82:01 Okay. All the corpsicles are in Arizona? Why would we put all the frozen people in the hottest part of the United States?

Alex Wilhelm: 82:11 I think it’s less… less of earthquakes.

John Arrow: 82:13 Like, I mean, Arizona’s made for this.

Alex Wilhelm: 82:15 Or Alaska? I think it must have to do with laws. I gotta think it has to do with laws as well.

Jason Calacanis: 82:21 Anyway, 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 people are starting to call me Unk. I guess that’s like a way of saying boomer, they call me Unk. Yeah, they call me Unk now. I think Hiten, you’re going to get into the Unk category pretty soon. Lon, you’re there. So here’s what Unk says. I’m going to give my… as the chairman of the interwebs, I’m going to give my… what is it when a judge gives their statement, Lon?

Alex Wilhelm: 82:53 Their ruling.

John Arrow: 82:54 Verdict?

Jason Calacanis: 82:55 Ruling. Verdict? Ruling. I’m going to give my ruling. Here’s my ruling. Ruling. My 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, or the fidelity wasn’t there, or they didn’t have approval of it, he would have also taken that into account. As such, I am laying my judgment down. John, you got to break bread 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, it 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. That is my ruling, and uh 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. Um, him- he and I debated things, I was on his show once, 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. So rest in peace, power, replicant Scott Adams. We’ll drop you off John.

Jesse Genet: 84:33 Yeah, peace- peace is good.

Jason Calacanis: 84:34 You are a star Jesse, thanks for coming. Hiten, John-

Jesse Genet: 84:37 I had so much fun!

Jason Calacanis: 84:38 Hiten, John, thank you for coming. Hiten, 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-clo-, his name is Lon Harris, follow him x.com/lons, lons. He’s Alex, x.com/alex. They’re part of the four-letter club on Twitter. I’m right behind him, x.com/jason. I’ve got more work to do, if I could get rid of the ‘a’ and just be JSON.

Alex Wilhelm: 85:14 JSON, yeah.

Jason Calacanis: 85:15 We’ll see you all on Wednesday for another live insane unstoppable twist. Bye-bye.

Alex Wilhelm: 85:21 Bye.