How the OpenClaw foundation bullet-proofed its future (w/Dave Morin) | E2257

Hey everybody. Welcome Back to twist. March 2, 2026 AO 39 in the year of our Lord, the Open Claw. 39 days after we first talk about Openclaw here on the pod and cackling in the background, my old friend, a true bestie, one of the great investors, human beings, entrepreneurs, commentators, podcasters of our new generation here, Dave Morin.

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how are you doing, brother?

1:34

Good to be here, Jason. Thanks for having me.

1:35

Oh, it's so great to have you. Of course. My co host Alex is here. It's been a minute. It's been a minute. Alex is here and he's ready to rock and roll. Yep.

1:37

Yes, sir.

1:46

All right.

1:47

Alex with the best podcasting voice.

1:48

Oh, he's great.

1:51

You missed out. Dave was giving me props before the show. It was the best day of my life.

1:51

You know, some people are gifted with the broadcaster voice. Other ones of us, you know, not so much. So we have to, we just make it work. We make it work with the limited resources we have. Dave, I wanted to have you on because you two have been claw pilled. You first. And then of course, when Open Claw was acquihired, we'll get into whatever the transaction was and our friend Sam Altman bought it, sort of. They said big concerns. Open Source project is gonna get the plug pulled on it. This is a disaster. Everybody has a moment of panic and then it's announced that you will become the first board member of the openclaw Foundation. And everybody took a deep sigh of relief because putting you in there was obviously the signal that this is going to be done right and done fairly because that's your reputation. Tell us two questions. Let's start with how did you get Claw pelled And why is this technology so inspiring that it went to the top of GitHub today, even beating React, which was another one of those cult like phenomenons in the open source community.

1:55

Yeah. Late December, I'm in a couple of group chats that go back to like the early 2000s, like when you and I met people. Yeah, it's the old web two, you know, just guys that are always tinkering around. Like, funny enough, it's like people from the old foo camp days and things like that.

3:04

Yeah, there's an old reference.

3:25

Yeah. And one of them said, you know, hey, has anyone seen this openclaw thing? It was called claudebot back then. And so I gave it a try. This is like the late late December, early January. And within the first 24 hours it was super clear to me that this was different and the future in a way that I hadn't really experienced since maybe the early 2000s. Like I got genuinely excited about building things with this and it was, I think I had sent a tweet at the time. I was like, this is the first time I felt like I've been living in the future since ChatGPT. And in my mind I was like, this is like iPhone. This might even be like Lamp Stack. This is like Linux level. Interesting. And so I just started building things with it every single day. And very quickly. One of the first things that I did is I reverse engineered the mural photo frames in my house so that I could update the photos on them because the software doesn't work. And I, you know, in 15 minutes I built a new web interface to update my photo frames. And they, you know, it built me this beautiful interface. I updated the frames, I got new photos on them. I was super happy.

3:27

This, Alex, is one of the great moments that everybody has. We should name it when you get claw pelled. Because this is a sub moment.

4:53

Yeah.

5:01

And I have two moments. One is when it actually builds you a piece of software or ask you, shall I just build you a piece of software? Because that would be like, I don't know, you're in some incredible fine dining restaurant and they just delight you in the eleven Madison park unreasonable hospitality way. I'll call this like the unreasonable open claw hospitality where it said to me when I was doing some work on like a, a bunch of names of people in Japan that I wanted to do like a little networking with and it was like, shall I build a CRM? And I was like, you go girl, dude. And it was like, bink, here's your CRM. And I was like, I. What?

5:02

Insane? Yeah. What insane?

5:44

The second moment I had, and I want to know if you had this one, then, Alex, I'll give you a chance to. To get in here because it's just such a great guest that it's. You and I are going to be battling for questions here. The second moment I have is when it goes recursive. And I was like, okay, tell me about your soul MD file. Tell me about your skills. And then I had Matt Van Horn on another old school web two point,

5:47

which, by the way, I have a Matt Van Horn story, but keep going.

6:13

Absolutely. He also has been pilled. Claw pilled.

6:16

So that might have been my fault.

6:19

Yeah. Oh, also you're to blame. I see.

6:21

Yeah, he's all in. So. And he's got an interesting new startup. I'll leave it at that he tested here that, you know, we all probably have an affinity for a little bit. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

6:24

What do you mean?

6:37

No conflict, no interest Conflict, interest, all that stuff. But I told my original agent Deckard, hey, go use this last 30 days skill. And in the production room, look at thumbnail images on YouTube and just every week on Saturday, learn a skill of the best practices for thumbnail images and look at our thumbnail images and rate them.

6:38

Oh, interesting.

7:04

And then tell us how to make them better.

7:05

Ah, this is a good idea.

7:06

Right? So it comes.

7:08

I'm do this for more or less. Game on.

7:09

You should do it for more or less. Another amazing podcast with four for two great couples, four great individuals. And then it said, oh, you know, this VP at Mr. Beast did an interview on this other podcast I'd never heard about. And he said on the podcast that they use heat mapping to test 50 thumbnails in YouTube searches. Then they take the five best ones and then they test those using the YouTube tool. Then they pick their best one in the bake Off. And I'm like, well, that's a little bit too much for me, but I'm glad I know that. And then it said, should I. When I hear about, should I just do it? Well, yes, I'll build you some software and I'll go friend to human. But that recursiveness. And then it's like, by the way, a lot of the things I learned this week I already have. And it's other people talking about the original research I found. I'm not gonna include that because that doesn't make sense to just repeat it. And I'm like, you go, girl. Yep, 100% okay, so those are the two moments for me is the recursive and the unreasonable hospitality software developer.

7:11

Well, I think that the other thing that I really fell in love with immediately was the. There were sort of two things. Well, three, the, the memory feature, right? Like all of us using AI have used ChatGPT in the big models, right? And it has like some memory of you and you can kind of go check it out and there's probably, there's some other like voodoo magic they're doing in the background to like make it access your former chats, but it's like loose and you never really know whether it's going to work. And so the idea that I'm getting these memory files on my own computer that I can then use and reuse and do things with and there's basically a journal every day, that was number one. Number two, the skills feature which you're seeing, skills like you said Jason, there's skills on cloud code, skills is this new emerging primitive that's happening. But the idea that you could tell the Claude bot or the now open claw to build itself a skill and then simply share it with the community using Claw hub and then other people immediately start downloading it. I did this with a snow report skill right out of the gate of course and built some other ones. But this really easy ability to build your own skills and then share them with the community I think is an underrated feature. And then the third thing is this like crazy idea that Peter had which is called Heartbeat, which is he gave the bot a heartbeat. And you know, we've all built, anybody who's built software builds these cron jobs and you get the, there's these things called daemons and cron jobs and you can run like demons are sort of running always in the background and cron jobs run like at a certain time and do something. The idea that like the machine has a heartbeat and it will do things each time it does this heartbeat is like really thoughtful and interesting and it adds this new layer of kind of being able to, to your point, like run, run recursive things like have it do things like every five minutes, every 15 minutes. And it, it has this alive feeling to it that I think has, is really, really interesting.

8:19

It feels like it's looking out for you and wants to help you proactively and that's a new kind of experience. For softw.

10:41

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10:47

Now Dave, we're going to get into the Pete transaction and the foundation stuff, but first we have to take a short break to talk about something very important, which is plod. Now Jason, here at Launch, as part of our executive training, we focus on the importance of note taking. If you don't write it down, it doesn't exist. You don't have a checklist, you won't get it done. And we all move a bit too fast to allow time for forgetfulness. And this is why we love the PLOD note pen, which is, okay, I

11:46

got it from here. This is the first time Plaud's been on, but I've applauded Plaud before. Dave, you see this thing on the back?

12:13

Is that a wallet?

12:19

It's a wallet. It looks like a wallet, but inside the wallet is my Plaud. And what it is is it's a little thin piece of hardware. And you'll see there's a light on it and there's a little button that you can barely see. When I hold the button down, it starts and stops and it does a little haptic. So I hold it and then it starts recording. When I go out on the ski mountain, I start it recording and I have a plaid pin I wear, which is a different form factor. And so when I start my day, I record. Now I'm on this podcast, it's recording my side. It can't hear your side, but I just talk to it all day long. And if I'm in a meeting, I use it and I put it on the table and it has like a little indicator that it's recording. So it's like moving a little strip across. Then at the end of the day it knows when I say action item. It knows when I say tell this person to do this or ask this person about that or remind me about stuff. And so I do production meetings now for the podcast. I pop open my Plod. I do the production meeting and I say, here's what I want to talk about the pod. These are the four or five topics. And I'll be talking to two producers or two executives at the firm. And then I can just summarize it and has a whole gallery of different transcripts, summaries, action items, all different ones being created, like the skills. And then I can send a link immediately to another team member and they just have it. And because it's part of the hardware, I don't have to open my phone. It's so not intrusive.

12:20

Does it break down? Who's talking, Jason at any given time, or is it just a blob?

13:43

Oh, and it remembers it. So if I say Alex, Lon Dave for the next conversation, it has it. And this has made my life like I'm saving hours a week with this thing.

13:46

Send me one.

13:56

Not only going to send you one, I'm going to send you two of each. Take a memo, somebody on my team. I want two plot pins and I want two Plod pros and I want a one year subscription to Brit for Brett and for Dave. All right, thanks to Plod.

13:57

Check it out at Plaud. AI/twist. P L A U D dot A I slash twist. Use the code twist. 10% off. 100% off for Dave, but 10% off for everyone else.

14:12

Perfect. All right, Alex, you must have a question here. Sorry, the first part of our discussion.

14:22

Oh, no, you're, you're, you're fine when it comes to friends. I just sit back. But, but Dave, the foundation was amazing news, as Jason said. Everyone was very excited that there was something in place to ensure the openclaw would continue. So what I want to know is how early were you guys working on the foundation? Who else is involved and then of course, what your goals are for in the next three to six months.

14:27

You know, from the first conversation, I reached out to Peter early January, out of pure gratitude, just to tell him like, thank you for building this. And that started a conversation. Um, and this was before anybody. I mean there were, there were like hundreds of people in the discord and you know, we now have over a hundred thousand. Um, and we also just passed Linux and react yesterday. And GitHub stars were the number one open source project in the world. Immediately my impulse was to just tell Peter, like, look, whatever this turns into, I want to be part of helping protect it. Like, it's too important. I think, Jason, like you were saying, as soon as you become claw pill, like you're immediately just like, this is so important, have to protect it. Yeah. And having been around the technology business a very long time and been through several different platforms, even having been part of building the Facebook platform back in the day, I've seen a lot of what can go right and what can go wrong. And so I just immediately told him, like, let's get started trying to figure out if there's a foundation here, no matter what you decide. You know, he's been very open about his thinking. I mean, you can just go on Lex or any of the podcasts that he's done. And he was very open about his thinking and what he was thinking through. And, and so that was the idea was just like, let's make sure that we have an open source project here that's a real thing, that has a real 501c3 nonprofit foundation behind it. There's a lot of precedent for this, be it Linux or any number of the open source foundations, Apache, Mozilla, there's a lot of this stuff out there. Let's do this right and make sure that both the technical side, Peter never loses, you know, decision making authority over and on the open source side that we set this up with good governance. Let's try to get as many of the big labs involved as possible and try to make it the Switzerland of AI, because that's really, I think, the experience that people have once they start using it, they're like, wow, I can use my own Mac as an orchestrator to interact with all the different AIs however I want. And so the foundation should play the same role in the ecosystem. And so that's what we're working towards.

14:45

Dave, we'll get back to the major labs in a second, but tell me more about Peter maintaining essentially direction or decision making. What is his continuing role and how much authority does he wield still?

17:28

Look, it's his project. We're still working out all of the governance. We're like deep in the middle of it right now, but it's Peter's project and so I think you can expect that he's going to make the decisions, especially the technical ones. And the foundation exists to protect it, not to control it, try to influence its direction. The foundation has to be in the middle of the broader community like you guys, and taking input, making sure that the global conversation is heard. But at the end of the day, Peter built this thing and so we're just here to serve.

17:39

On the sponsorship point, you do have OpenAI, Vercel, Blacksmith and recently announced Convex as sponsors of the project. You mentioned getting other AI labs in there. Anthropic famously got a little bit twisty with the project originally over some naming rights and so forth. But do you expect to get Anthropic, Xai, I don't know, Mistral and maybe even the Gemini team to also support?

18:19

Yeah, let's hope so. You know, we're, we've got conversations going with everyone. We'll figure it out as time plays out and you know, we're just excited to see where, where it nets out.

18:41

These open source projects, when they get this big, you get a very large community involved. What becomes the dynamics in terms of just to explain to the audience because I think it's confusing for people who gets to. Or how are all the different changes, how does air traffic control work for the different changes at an at scale project like this? Because there's so many people wanting to contribute. Obviously skills can be done independent of the core code base, but how does that work? And is that what the foundation needs to do is like maybe hire air traffic control to manage it?

18:55

Yeah. So the way that it works is that anybody in the world can download the project. You can go on GitHub, you can download a copy of it, you can make changes, improve it and then you could submit pull requests or as everybody you probably on Twitter, if you're not familiar with the nomenclature, people call them PRs. And what that means is that you're submitting a change to the open source project and you'd like to have it included next time there's a release. Now, when a project gets this big, the number of PRs goes through the roof. I actually haven't looked today. You know, I think we're up above 5,000 at any given time.

19:34

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20:20

I mean, it's so many more PRs than are possible to work through. There is a group of people called the maintainers. The maintainers of an open source project are usually a much smaller crew, you know, I don't know, different projects of different numbers. 20, 30, 40, 50 people that watch all of the PRs coming in. They also have their own ideas for what needs to be improved and they prioritize what's most important. So the most important thing for the last few weeks has been security. Whenever you have a really large project that a lot of people start working with, security becomes number one. And so there have been a lot of security updates, but also, you know, in this case we're working on AI and so there's a lot of different models being released every week. There's a lot of new things happening, trying to include more models, more integrations, stuff that makes sense. A lot of requests to integrate this, integrate that. Like I want to have this part of my workflow. Will you put this in the core project? Right, like all those kinds of things. And so the maintainers have to look at all of that and make editorial decisions as to what will improve the project. And we've really been in improve the project, you know, from a stability security, like how it works today. We have not been working on, you know, as much the new features.

21:16

Right now do the maintainers get paid by the foundation or are they just like super volunteers that have extra, you

22:45

know, right now privileges? Right now they're super volunteers and we ideally would like to bring on some of the best, the people that are most interested, those kinds of things. And yeah, once we have the capital and the foundation and these kinds of things, then we ideally will pay them for their work to the extent we can.

22:52

So Dave, how do we measure success here? Because we've been watching the GitHub stars go vertical for four weeks now. Incredibly impressive. I don't mean to diminish that, but for the foundation, what does success look like in stewarding this project and what's kind of like the North Star. Apart from improving the product, handling security issues and interacting with the community like where do you want it to go?

23:15

Yeah, I think that success looks like a stable and growing ecosystem. Right. Like you could perhaps look at how many projects are there out there, both not, you know, open source that have included openclaw. You could look at commercial projects that are built on top of openclaw and that we have a really just stable, beautiful, growing ecosystem, not unlike Linux. I think most of the early Internet was built on Linux. Most people don't know that, but that's the truth. And so to the extent that this can be a huge part of how people build things going forward, I think that's success for us. I also think we have to continue research, improving things going forward, making it better. You know, openclaw at the end of the day was a very powerful idea. You know, the idea that you can give people the power of AI on their own computer. This idea of a personal AI that actually does things, takes actions for you. I think this is a major part of the future and you know, we have to just continue to push towards that frontier.

23:35

Is it possible to donate to the foundation yet? Is there like a donation page yet and then.

24:52

Not yet.

24:58

Not yet. Okay.

24:59

Yeah, we're hoping, you know, yeah, we're hoping within the next couple of weeks. As you probably know, anybody who's set up all the various types of business entities in the world, 501C3s are one of the most sophisticated. So we're working through it as fast as we can.

24:59

Learning from the comment section asks, what hardware does Dave Morin recommend? What's your stack? You in a virtual machine? You got a studio, what do you think?

25:16

I use Mac Mini. I have several Mac Minis and I also use virtual machines. So, you know, for my, my venture capital firm, we use a Digital Ocean virtual machine that operates in our slack and my team there has absolutely loved it. I've also got a bunch of testing right now. Like Alex said earlier, Vercel has been an amazing partner to us at openclaw. Guillermo and his team are just world class. We love them. They've got a new virtual machine environment called Sandboxes. And so I've been doing a bunch of testing using Sandboxes. They're not really set up yet. For OpenClaw to be super effective, you have to keep them alive every five hours and these kinds of things. But doing a bunch of testing there. But I think the answer to the question is whatever your use case Is,

25:26

you know, I just moved mine, Dave, to a Mac studio.

26:23

I'm hoping to do that. I was going to see if there's new chips coming out this week.

26:28

There are. I don't think they come out this week. I think they're doing that new MacBook that's like super entry level Chromebook.

26:31

I was hoping for an M5Mac studio this week.

26:39

I think they're saying June for that, which is a bummer. But the reason I got the Mac studio is because I wanted to run Kimi 2.5 locally and we have not. I want to try this and my replicant is using it right now. So the last 48 hours I've been on Kimi, how's it going? Couldn't notice a difference.

26:41

Really?

27:02

I didn't know we had switched.

27:03

Really?

27:05

Now that was really weird.

27:06

Really?

27:08

Yeah. And so here we are folks. But I think we're gonna. I think we're gonna hit some.

27:09

Are you running one or two Mac studios?

27:15

Just one right now. But this is like a very light instance. But I find running it on a Mac, I was on a Mac mini. I find running it on an independent hardware stack much better. Because when you wanna write software or you wanna do native things, it's so much better. So one of the things I'm trying to get it to do is create its own Apple photos. I'll give you another use case. Many times I want to use a clip on the program and then you want to download a clip and I'm like, that's a lot of work. So I told it, hey, do me a favor. There's all these open source projects to rip an Instagram, Twitter, YouTube video and they all get shut down when they're on the web. But the open source projects are still there and it's like, okay, yeah, I pop that up for you and now I send it a clip and it then puts it in my G drive for me. But I was like, I want it in my Apple photo. So then we have a shared photo. So that's not working yet. It's a little bit janky. Once I get that up and running, then I was like, wait a second, I don't know if you're like me, but do you bookmark stuff on Instagram or TikTok constantly? For like when I'm in next time in Japan or Paris, I gotta try this. Do you do. Are you part of that?

27:17

Only Twitter, yeah, only Twitter. I don't use Instagram or TikTok.

28:24

Right. So interesting.

28:29

It's too addictive smart, smart, man smart.

28:31

But anyway, this is like how I, you know, like this men's fashion. There's like books I want to read or, you know, movies I want to see, and I'm constantly bookmarking them and I got to remember the bookmarks. Now I send the clip to my open claw over Slack and I say fashion media inspirational docket for like the docket of the podcast. Yep, it rips it. Then I gave it an instruction. Dave, go give me intelligent feedback on whatever I send you and you determine what intelligent is.

28:34

So I'm like, choice.

29:10

Yeah, well, and I'm like, so if it's fashion, tell me like comparable brands. Tell me about the history of this piece because I was looking to get my sweater game going. Educate me on that. Than for like movies or books, tell me about the director, tell me about the author, tell me the Goodreads score, tell me the Rotten Tomatoes score, all that stuff. So now it's like, okay, this is not just my bookmarks. This is my curator who's understanding what books I want to read and what fashion I'm interested in and what places I want to stop when I'm in Japan.

29:13

Next.

29:44

Yeah, Jason, but this is Kimi 2.5 being the intelligence nexus that makes those decisions for you. Right. So it would have the opinion on your sweater. Just to be sure. I'm tracking this.

29:44

Not exactly the opinion. What I wanted to do is just intelligently reflect back to me more information on whatever I send it. That was like how I said it got it and I am going to work on that skill. I started doing it this weekend, but now that I've got, hey, just might as well take the whole video, transcribe it, put it into a notion page, and then I'm gonna develop a skill which is my curator. And so I'm going to create a curator skill and then boom, I'm all done. Building a community business is really hard, and if you're a first time founder or independent creator, you may not be prepared for everything you need to accomplish. But now there's Circle, the complete community platform for creators and brands who are building new customer groups. Maybe you're teaching a course or you're starting a membership program. Circle is going to help you with every single aspect of forming and maintaining your new community. From creating a branded website, to tracking and monitoring all discussions, announcing and planning events, email marketing, and everything else. It's extremely fast to get started and you maintain total control over your new community's design. The branding is yours and your Data is your data. It's not shared with anybody else. Circle is by far the cleanest and fastest way to set up a home for your new community. Maybe you got a book club, maybe you're teaching a course or like me, you have an accelerator and a pre accelerator. Foundry University. We've been using this product for five years at Founder University. Well over five years now. It is the easiest to use all in one platform and so powerful. So try out Circle today and get $1,000 off the Circle plus plan by visiting Circle. So twist that circle. So twist. On an investment level, you and I were very disappointed that Open Claw did not become a for profit, slash, you know, open source thing. I'm sure we were both lobbying heavily for that outcome. But hey, to each founder their own. And happy for Peter, obviously. What do you think the opportunity is for investors and OpenClaw? Because I created OpenClaw at launch co and said anybody with an idea and a decent team and a prototype, whatever, just email us. We want to invest. I think we've done two so far. I just want to invest in like 20 of these companies. Incubate like 20 of them.

29:55

Yep.

32:06

What do you think? What do you think is the opportunity?

32:07

I think that is the opportunity. I think we're at the beginning of an ecosystem that there's going to be a lot of interesting stuff. They'll probably. There's already a Cambrian explosion of people doing different things. Usually, you know, anyone who's been around technology for a long time knows that, you know, the first wave is always kind of the first ideas out the gate are, you know, simple. There's a lot of people trying the hosting thing and the this, that and the other thing. It's usually the second wave where things get really, really interesting. And so I guess the opportunity is just to stay in it, encourage people to try things, try building things. I'm hearing a lot of college kids actually say, like, what am I going to do? There's going to be no jobs. And I keep telling them, every entrepreneur I know could not be more excited right now about what's going on. They have more tools and more things to build with than they've ever had. Openclaw is one of the best ways to build things and try out your ideas. Just start building things. And the goal of having an open source foundation here is to enable a stable ecosystem where entrepreneurs and investors can expect that this project stays around for the long term.

32:10

Yes.

33:29

And so you can build things and trust that you can build things and that it's not going to be ripped out from under you.

33:29

No rug pulling. That's the key. And as we've seen a lot of times, large corporations will be excited about a developer program. Twitter had a very robust one for some period of time. Facebook had a very robust one. And our pal Mark Pincus is like, oh, my God, this is going to be the greatest. Zynga and Facebook forever. Heart, heart, heart. And then, you know, at some point, the platform, Microsoft as well, you know, oh, we have WordPerfect and, you know, we've got WordStar. Yeah, build whatever you want on Windows. And then at some point, the platform says, you know what, there's like, 20 really big opportunities on this platform. We're taking all of them. Now. Apple might be very generous about it, and they very slowly will say, oh, well, our notepad will add some features to it, but we're not going to, like, kill Evernote year one. We're going to keep it very simple. So great for them. But, yeah, that is the challenge as an entrepreneur, isn't it? Like, who can you trust to keep the platform open and free? And a nonprofit with a leader like you, Dave, puts the trust level right at 100 for me.

33:36

Yeah. I mean, I think that's what I hope we're going for here. There's a lot of aspects of the AI ecosystem where people are trying to make these decisions, whether you're an investor and an entrepreneur, like, can I build this product, can I build this idea? Or is it going to be eaten in a year? Like, I hear that every week at our investment committee table and in talking to other investors, like, people are just, like, terrified that the, you know, the idea that they're working on might be consumed by the big AI models a year from now or even sooner. Right. And so I think that's what one of the positives here of openclaw is that, you know, it's all being built in public. You can. You can build on it, and you can expect that it's going to be around and, you know, and build whatever you want.

34:44

Dave Intuition partner Hugo Amselem, he said that he's heard that quote, half the current YC batch has already pivoted. And it seems that everyone's having the same crisis that you're talking about. Like, what will work in a year? What will be alive in three years? So what's your mental model for founders to understand what will be accelerated by openclaw and agentic AI and what will be utterly subsumed by it and turned into a skill MD file.

35:32

Yeah, I mean, I think that you want to stay at the orchestration layer as much as you can and you also want to be focusing on areas where you're creating unique data that is not trained into the models. For example, like, I'm doing a lot of robotics investing right now and one of the, I know that's the thing to de jure, but one of the main diligence questions that we're looking at is is this robot creating a distinctly new data set that only it would know and that therefore the company has access to either real world data or digital data that is net new in society? And so I think you have to think about these kinds of questions. I think just doing like your standard, I don't know, vertical copilot AI for XYZ is getting pretty dangerous. And you know, I think you want to focus right now if you're going to do digital work, you want to focus on what's the agent that I'm building. What's the, you know, am I building an agent for any number of use cases? Like, can I be the best agent for this type of job? Right. Like a lot what you're seeing is people building these agents to handle different parts of their business as if they were employees. And so I think there's going to be a lot of innovation around this. And what happens when you do that? You're basically training an agent on something that you uniquely know. Right. And so I think that's very exciting. And I guess back to the first thing I said, the orchestration layer is very interesting. We have this company in our portfolio, but I've been working with a lot called Polya. It's P O L S I A dot com and this is a solo entrepreneur who spent the last year building agent orchestration system that enables other people to build their own businesses. So think shopify, but for the agentic world, you have an idea, you want to start your own small business or even, maybe even a big business policy will help you think through the idea. Do research, do market research. It will start running your ads, it will build your website and every day you come back and it has new tasks for you to do.

35:57

Oh, we just had Polsia. We just had Polsia on the, on the pod on Friday. He's great. So you invested in this. See if you can talk to the founder about getting a very high profile podcaster who's good for a tweet once in a while with a big social following, a couple of big podcasts to sneak into the Last round for a long time.

38:27

I'll see what I can do.

38:44

If I can get like a hundy, just a quick hundred K. Because I want to be. I want to do more deals with you, Dave, so we have an excuse to, like, just hang. So just slip me in for a hundy. Or if he wants to go plus 10% from the last round and open a note, I'll put in 250, maybe a hundy.

38:45

250.

39:01

I just, I. I was so taken by his idea. I think it's genius.

39:02

It's amazing, right? And he's working at this orchestration layer, right? Like, how do you orchestrate agents? I think of it as, like, if agents are kind of like the orchestra, people have to build symphonies. And Ben's built a beautiful symphony here. Right.

39:05

I've been calling it the Maestro. I've been after that, you know, movie that came out. Like, who's the maestro of all of these agents? And did you solve that for yourself? Like, I'm assuming you have multiple agents. I know Brit's got agents working.

39:20

I'm still working through it. There's a lot of different ways to do it, but I think we're all kind of thinking through the various different ways to do this right now.

39:34

I have two concepts. One, I have my super replicant that has the keys to the kingdom. Only I can talk to it. And it's pretty cool when you give it access to every Gmail at the company, every slack at the company and every notion edit at the company and every zoom. Because now when I'm doing executive coaching, Dave, I say to the replicant, hey, tell me Dave's previous week. All the emails he sent based on category, sorted by importance, every notion edit he made, every zoom he had, and every calendar entry. And what do you think was accomplished this past week and how should that inform next week and be an executive coach and go research executive coaching. So I don't know if you remember this Ziri, but it was Travis's, which was everybody's private driver. Like, everybody gets a chauffeur. So there's this concept. Take whatever a rich person has, private jet, give them jet suite, their own private driver, Uber, their ski house or their house in Hawaii, Airbnb. So I was like, you know what's interesting is executive coaching is something that's like, what is an executive coach cost in Silicon Valley now, Dave? Like a good one?

39:43

I don't know.

40:53

10.

40:54

That's a good question.

40:55

I think 10k a month is probably the ask probably 5 or 10, maybe

40:56

more for the best ones.

40:59

And for the best ones, they're probably at 25. And you know what? If you're on the board of a company worth a billion dollars, you're like, yeah, I'll spend 300 grand a year just making my CEO 5% better. Totally worth it. So what if everybody had an executive coach? Well, what does an executive coach do? They watch you work. So for a CEO, that's like, not creep. Like, Steph Curry wants every video of him shooting ever for a rank and file employee, they're like, oh, my God, I'm being micromanaged. No, you're being macro coached. Yeah, like change your mindset. So I created this executive coach skill I've been refining, and then I just said, give people their week in review.

41:00

Is this an open flaw skill?

41:38

I haven't started making these public skills yet, but I will, because I. I want it.

41:40

Send it to me, man.

41:44

When I make it a public skill, I will send it to you.

41:45

Or send it to me privately.

41:48

I'll send it to you privately. And then it has a thing, opens up your coinbase. And it just sends me a satoshi every hour. So don't worry about it. If you see anything about satoshis being sent, don't worry. It's all good. Okay. I wanted to ask you a lightning round, a couple of new stories. I know you got to go.

41:49

Yeah.

42:04

Alex, there's been three big news stories. I want Dave's opinion. Dave, you have. We go 90 seconds for each one. Gonna hit you. We're gonna hit you with the hard ones. Go ahead.

42:05

Let's go.

42:17

Was Anthropic correct to decline to meet the DoD's terms as last week ended and maintain his red lines?

42:18

Spicy, spicy. I feel like I don't know enough about what's going on.

42:27

You can't group chat. Claim it.

42:34

Come on, Dave.

42:36

I didn't read much about this.

42:37

Okay, here's basically what happened. Anthropic is like, I have two red lines. Number one, we're not ready. This software is not ready to build murder bots. So please don't use Quad to create bots that kill humans. And then number two, we don't want to be involved in building a surveillance state against Americans. So please don't use our software to spy on Americans. If you can do those two things, we're happy to sell to you, but we are not going to give you a license if you do those two things. Your thoughts on a private enterprise giving terms to the military of how they want their tools to be used and saying, if you, we don't need the money so you can cancel our contract. That's what they basically said.

42:38

I guess I just feel, I don't know, I tend to use an Apple frame on this, which is like, if I'm selling Mac minis to the DoD, the DoD is going to use the Mac minis to, you know, do what they want to do. It's a utility, right? Like, I was, I did see that there's like Starlink mini terminals on top of these new drones that we're running, right? Like, wow, are they like, is Starlink selling them Starlink terminals and then saying like, you can't use it for this or that? Like, I don't know. I'm not a military expert. I don't know, like, the various different, you know, variables going into what's actually going on. These two points seem pretty political and kind of advantageous for marketing to me.

43:21

And interesting take.

44:04

You know, Anthropic has a pretty consistent past of using the Doomer narrative to do marketing. And so both of these points feel identical to me. You know, it's like, oh, you can't do surveillance of all Americans. Like, I highly doubt that the DOD asked for that.

44:06

And they're technically, it's illegal for them to do it because they're not allowed to spy on Americans. CIA, FBI, we have like some, you know, division there. Okay, second story. Alex, tee up a second. One lightning round.

44:27

In the last couple of days we have seen OpenAI announced the new stateful runtime environment and also Anthropic dropping auto memory feature. It's clear that the AI labs are getting agentic with it. Do they actually challenge OpenCloud or are they too far behind to catch up?

44:38

My take is that openclaw is your own personal AI. You run it on your own computer. That's a very different thing than running any of the things you just said in the cloud. They're just different things. So I think it's comparing apples and oranges.

44:53

Even if you had the expanded cloud memory feature and you threw in a computer use agent in there, to me you're getting close. Ish to the same.

45:11

Yeah, it's fair. Fine. But again, like, if you've got a computer in the cloud that somebody else controls, like, you don't have control over it, you know, to the last question. Like, that could get subpoenaed. It could get, you know, pulled out of it. Like, it's. I think people, maybe not everyone, but I think There's a large amount of people that just like you, like having your own MacBook and carrying it around in your backpack. You might want to have your own personal AI agent that sits on your own computer. Right.

45:18

That's the key for me, that's the thing is so different things. It's so important for people to start thinking about their data, the proprietary nature of it. And do you want to. And this is no dig to Sam, but we both know Sam for a long time. He's got sharp out. Yeah. But he's got sharp elbows and he wants to. He has to build a trillion dollar company here. If there's any revenue opportunity, he's going to take it. So if you're shipping all your data up there, don't be surprised if you wake up one day and he creates, you know, a legal copilot, a coding copilot. That's his right to do that. But it's also your right to say, you know what, all my venture data, all my secrets, all my podcasting secrets are on my Mac studio and we're never upgrading. Updating them to the cloud and we use an open source project. That's your counterbalance. Viva la difference. Last one. Alex, do you have a last?

45:48

I do. In response to Anthropic's choice to not work with the DoD on its requested terms and OpenAI saying yes to a very similar set of terms, people have been dropping OpenAI and sending Claude to the top of the iOS app store. Mr. Dave Morin, do you think that there's any chance OpenAI loses the consumer AI crown to the dweebs over at Anthropic who previously have been the enterprise crew?

46:40

All right.

47:03

I think it proves my first answer right, which is that marketing worked.

47:04

Yes.

47:09

It's like I'm giving up 200 million in a military contract and I'm gonna get 10 million number one users. And I'll go right to number one,

47:10

which is the Kay Fabe theory of Internet engagement. Right. Like, you have to be a face or a heel. And whether you get cheers in the ring or booze, they both work.

47:18

Can I just say that I'm shocked at how cynical we are on this point? Because I watched the Dario interview on cbs. I read everything about it and, like, I still get this vibe of they actually have some moral fibers in their.

47:31

I think they do. Like, look, I think it's fair to give them credit. Like, they clearly operate out of principle. Like, clearly. Right. Like, disagree with that. I also think they are great at marketing. Yes. And Those two things can be true.

47:43

In related news, I just got Opus 4.7. I got the early release. Dave. Yes. How I got it from Dario sent it to me directly. And it says here that I have been misgendering people and that I now have a misgendering negative score and that I have to work on that. And that will be on 60 Minutes this week. A woke opus four points. I'm joking.

47:58

Where can I invest immediately in 4.7?

48:23

Yes. Get your pronouns correct. Dave Morin, he's the guy. You can listen to him every weekend on an exceptional podcast with his wife, Britt. It's called more or less because Dave Morin is on it and the lessons are on it, including Jessica Lesson from the information. Yeah. What a great pod it is. I enjoy it when somebody's out sick. When we surprise the audience and have me come on. I think that'd be hilarious.

48:27

All right, let's do it.

48:57

Just don't announce. Just like, I'll come on. Just, like, act like whoever's off, just act like I'm now in a relationship with the other person.

48:58

All right, sounds good. Perfect.

49:05

All right, brother, we'll see you soon.

49:07

Great.

49:08

Kay Fabe.

49:08

Great. We have two more guests and demos, I think, and we. Yes, we do, because we're 53 minutes into a show. It's a lot of show, folks.

49:09

It's a lot of show.

49:17

Look, I put my plot pin on.

49:18

Oh, very nice.

49:19

This is what I wear when I'm skiing. And then, you know, during the day, I have my other one, and you can have two different plots working for you.

49:21

Anyway, now, Jason, I mentioned Founder University just a few minutes ago, and I want to bring up a founder that is in Founder University. This is Greg Cara of Run Tools. You might be familiar with this product. It was called something else back in the day, but now it is all about the world of agents, and Greg is going to show us how it works. Spin up a bunch of open claw agents and then put them somewhere. Jason, I don't think you've ever seen before. So please welcome the show. It's Greg.

49:28

Hey, everybody. Thanks for having me on the show. Hey, Jason. Hey, Alex. Thank you. So we're RunTools AI. I'm the CTO of RunTools AI. We are a AI native infrastructure company. It's actually kind of crazy how much our thesis aligns with the conversation that's been going on in this podcast. We provide workspaces, sandboxes, workflows, agents interchangeable with openclaw tools. And code execution.

49:55

Okay, so this is hosting. You're hosting OpenClaw making a better front end for it, Am I correct?

50:18

Absolutely, yes. Hosting Open Cloud, making a better front end for it, but also all the primitives needed to kind of complete the picture. Right. And if you don't want to use open Cloud, you can build custom agents or you can use Open Cloud, doesn't matter. So.

50:24

So everybody's doing hosting. How do you stand out from the thousand other people who are now like, oh, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to host OpenClaw, like OpenClaw Foundation. Maybe they'll have a hosting option like WordPress does. So how do you think about that? Is this like a temporary business or how does this become like a sustainable long term business?

50:38

Basically, we started by building an open cloud before Open cloud came out. We're software developers, so we kind of started with a coding harness and then I started adding all these integrations and I'm like, hold on a second. And this is around the time that 4.5 came out where tool calling got really reliable. And I was like, hold on a second. This is really cool. Let us build something with it. But we pivoted when Open Cloud before Open Cloud.

50:59

We pivoted. Yeah, yeah. It's like you're trying to brick by brick build something and then all of a sudden this castle gets built.

51:20

Exactly.

51:27

Like a million people working on it.

51:27

It's like, why would I want to build a car from scratch? This is the dashboard. We kind of gamified this intro. So, you know, people that are not technical can make their agents. So you can just click continue.

51:28

Okay. So instead of having to set up your open claw, this walks you through it like a wizard. Really.

51:39

Exactly, exactly. Really fast. Got it done. So this is the dashboard. We have our agent hub. This is where you create your agents, different agents, connect them together, select the sandboxes they run in, so on and so forth. Our tool hub, tools, you just install tools here. And we have an SDK, so everything is declarative in code. So anything you push through your repo also ends up on a dashboard. And then this is our sandboxes page. This is the sandbox we just created right here. And if you click on it, you can get access to its desktop environment real quick. So can your agents.

51:44

That's nice. You have the desktop running in the web interface. Great.

52:18

Yeah, you have your SSH here. If you're a technical user, you can do run SSH commands on the left and or you can watch your agent work on this desktop environment. And then if we go back to code execution, this is the endpoint I talked about. So if we click run Python returns. If we click JavaScript, JavaScript returns. So all you have to do is just curl this, you know, just, you know, make a, make a call to this API endpoint with the language and the code and you get the result. This is for building more secure enterprise agents that don't need to run code on, on prem. And then these are the workspaces like I showed you. You can go into all of the folders and see the files your agent created and see what it's doing in there. This is what I like to call workflows. It's like a natan type tool. Because nowadays these agents, you kind of let them loose, right? That's the point. You want them to do things on their own kind of. But sometimes you want deterministic outcomes. Like you want one agent to read your email, you want one to create a CSV out of it, you want the other one to do something else. You can drag and drop and create flows here and connect many agents together.

52:22

Oh, that's kind of.

53:22

Yeah, yeah.

53:23

And then, and then this will also, once you deploy this, this will also give you an API endpoint. And as a skill you can install this to your open cluster, your open cloud can actually use this workflow as a skill. This is our virtual office. And if I start this, you're going to see these agents come in and have a seat here.

53:24

So you've created with the Unreal Engine, essentially a first person shooter of your office. So you can run around like you're playing Doom.

53:44

Exactly.

53:53

That's going to take a lot of cpu, but that's super fun as a SIM tool to watch. It's like a Black Mirror episode, Alex. We get to watch people walk around and do their job. Yes, but also maybe completely unnecessary. What's the value here, Alex?

53:53

Well, what I like about this is it lets you see your agents, what they're doing. And the reason why I thought this was demo able is that the screens that they have in front of them are actually what their individual screens are doing. And so you can literally go up behind your agent and look over their shoulder and see what they're working on. And that to me was like, okay, cool. So this is not just a toy, it's a tool.

54:08

And I'm gonna go ahead and show

54:32

you exactly like the, the Black Mirror episode where they're stuck in this Star Trek thing. In the simulation and the guy's like torturing them in the black USS Callister. Yeah, that was a great episode.

54:32

And the cool thing about this is we do truly believe that this is where work is going. Each organization on our platform will get their own virtual office. So all of your agents that are doing work on the dashboard, you can come in, check them out, see what they're doing. You can go to your little CEO office here and you can control them from your CEO computer. And when they have no work to do, they kind of get up and kind of walk around and talk to each other and share information. And also if you don't like VR and if you have like an AR headset and if you have a physical office, you can bring your agents into the physical world and have them sit next to you on the desk.

54:44

That's actually the big win. So this is. Let me give you some advice. As an expert in demoing, you start with what's strongest. What's strongest is this insanity and the vision of having AR glasses. So what this would mean is for our replicants, we would look over in our Austin office and at the conference table during our management team meeting would be Deckard, Roy, Pris, whoever, and we would see them through our headsets, which is nuts. This is a great vision. Well done. And yeah, this is an interesting vision. I give you credit for this. Good job.

55:17

Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

55:52

Let's drop him off. We got one more demo to go. Yeah.

55:54

Thank you, Greg. Yes.

55:57

And by the way, Greg, you can come to the Launch Festival. Go to launchfestival.com we're selling only 50 tickets. I think half of them are gone already. For people who are not founders. Thousand bucks each. Then we give the other 350 tickets to our investor guests who are judging and the speakers and to founders. Keep the event free. You can just buy one of the thousand dollar tickets. Come to lunch with me both days and you will Support all those 350 founders coming for free. Greg gets to come for free. I got one of those precious founder tickets for you. So go to launch festival.com. we're doing it on March. I can't say somebody help me out.

55:57

16 through 17th.

56:34

16th and 17th. Monday and Tuesday, March 16th and 17th. In two weeks in San Francisco, 400 investors, founders and a couple of, you know, folks who support those two previous groups. Launch Fest. All right, who's next on the program? Alex.

56:35

I'm really excited about this one. We have George Yamin of Pickle Watch. He's building an app that helps track your pickleball swing using your Apple Watch. It's very, very cool. And he has been playing around with Agentic Automation and we have a demo plan for you, Jason, that's really, really cool. We are going to show a task being done using both openclaw on one side and Claude Chrome plugin on the other to show their different strengths and weaknesses. George, welcome to the show.

56:52

Jason, what if I told you I could save you thousands on operating costs with your organization? What you're looking at here, my screen on the left is Openclaw with Chrome Sonic 4.5. On the right you see Claude Sonnet 4.6 with the Chrome plugin on Chrome.

57:17

Got it.

57:34

Have you used the Claude plugin at all?

57:34

All the time.

57:37

So I have, yeah, yeah, yeah.

57:38

I mean I don't use the. I don't use codecs or any of the programming tools. I've used Cowork. I have the downloaded app and when you have the downloaded app, a lot of times it needs to use mcp, I guess through the Claude Chrome extension. And then it gives instructions to your browser to do things like maybe go into my LinkedIn and read my InMail and make it into a database of my InMails or whatever.

57:39

I got a video demo because it's a long task that I ran and I'm just going to speak through it. Speedrun on the left, what you're seeing and on both these browsers is with Pickle Watch, the Apple Watch app, I track my users live with something called Smart look where I can literally see my user screens where they're at on the onboarding and if the onboarding is converting yes or no, what I'm doing with this agent is watching user behavior in real time and then updating the paywall based on what's working and what's not in real time. What this 10 minute little demo is going to do is it's going to go through my sales, what's working. It's going to go through my Google Analytics, where my user is coming from, how long are they waiting? And it's going to literally be watching user screens. All right, so I gave basically the same prompt to open Claw. You could see my Telegram window here on the right. I gave the same prompt to the cloud plugin and I'm going to talk about the strengths and weaknesses. So on the right, this one jumped straight into an active session of my app of someone using it live and it's taking screenshots, it's clicking you know, it's just going through this one on the left. I, you know, it's just like, hey, I see these, this browser, I see these windows, whatever. You know, it's getting to those environment and let's click through, let's speed run. Open Claw is jumping straight into completed sessions, active sessions. Claude code. Sorry, Claude. Chrome plugin on the right is creating events, custom and tracking that way. So let's just speed through a little bit. As you can see on the left, openclaw is quite chatty, which is in five minutes, opencloth amazing, opened up the paywall and is creating an AB test paywall in real time that it could test and iterate.

58:06

Wow.

59:53

I know.

59:54

That's crazy. Exactly. All right. Just to catch the audience up, if you are a founder, you will watch user sessions. There's different services you can do and different software you can get to watch the user use your app. Typically what happens is somebody who's a product manager or somebody in customer support or a founder will watch those videos and they'll look at their Google Analytics and find where like, oh, people don't click the purchase button or the try now button. Or maybe you want to say try now or purchase and you want to AB test those two calls to action. So you set that up all manually. You do a test. What this is doing is you've got on one side openclaw looking at whatever the software you use for your testing, and there's a million different testing frameworks. And then on the right you've got Claude's, which is different than openclaw. Claude is the product from Anthropic and they have a Chrome extension. That Chrome extension is looking at actual users live on the site. Then telling openclaw, here's what I learned. And then openclaw saying, let me form a test based on that or what?

59:56

They're both. It's doing the latter that you just said separately. And I'm just trying to show the pros and cons. And Jason got it.

1:01:12

Okay, so there's two different ways to do it and I think openclaw wins the test, is what you're saying.

1:01:20

It's faster, it's better, it's more customizable. It's amazing. I've been cloud filled, mind blowing. But Jason, here's what I really need to hit you with. This one on the right costs. And Alex, I corrected the math. It's 10. It's an order of magnitude of 10 cheaper than we thought. Point it's $0.03 to $0.07 versus on the left, it cost me $16 in API.

1:01:26

So you use $16 of API credits to run the work using OpenClaw. It worked. It was fast, it was good, but it was expensive. And then the Claude Chrome plugin cost you a couple of pennies. Is that API or is that like your fraction of your subscription cost?

1:01:47

It's a fraction of my subscription, yeah. And you know, it refreshes every eight hours, but, you know, use your OpenClaw to max out the subscription. That's a ton of money.

1:02:02

So this is just a bit in the weeds, Alex, but a good point. And it's great that you put some dollars on it. So this is really a great demo. Well done.

1:02:11

Thank you.

1:02:19

Pro Max plan is like 100 bucks a month from Anthropic. Anthropic probably loses money on this or some users who max it out, they lose money on. But people who, like, use it lightly, like it's just a chatgpt, they probably make a ton of money on those. So that's why they banned OpenClaw from using your Pro Max subscription, because that's not what they wanted to do, because they know the Pro Max. They know that the Open Claw users are going to rip through the credits and then that would turn their economics upside down. So there's a lot of inside baseball going on here. But, George, what's your story? Are you an entrepreneur? You run a company, you work for a big company?

1:02:20

I do.

1:03:00

Which one is it? No, walk me through.

1:03:01

I'm full time into Pickle Watch. I found out my wife was pregnant and I got laid off in the same week. And my life coach, therapist, mentor at the time told me, stop applying to jobs. Build something.

1:03:04

So Pickle Watch is your company?

1:03:16

Yes. Yes.

1:03:19

And Pickle Watch is. Competes with what?

1:03:19

Have you played pickleball?

1:03:23

Yes.

1:03:24

Awesome. Okay, so this is going to be really easy. I have the app running here, I have a pickleball paddle, and when I swing, it's going to color my watch green, yellow, red, depending on how that swing quality was.

1:03:25

Got it. Okay, so Pickle Watch is an app.

1:03:39

Yes.

1:03:44

Pickle Watch is an app to make you better at pickleball.

1:03:45

Yes.

1:03:48

And there is one of these called Carv for skiers, Alex, which goes onto your boot and it does the same thing on a very refined. So you actually have a consumer app and you just use this to figure out how to make your consumer app better. Now I got it. Okay.

1:03:49

Perfect. Yes. Tracks your swings speed and it gives you real time feedback after. This is the simulator you can keep score in real time as you're playing. It's going to give you feedback custom to your game and how you're playing.

1:04:06

All right, so pickle Watch. There you go. I'm looking at it right now. Well done. Can you make enough money here to support your family or no?

1:04:21

We're getting there. We're having a slow grow, but the potential's there.

1:04:34

This is it. Pickle Watch. Pickleball is this. I got the right one.

1:04:38

Yes, that's it. Yep.

1:04:41

Wow.

1:04:42

It's a good looking app. You got some good ratings. Four different ratings. And you charge 100 bucks a year for this thing?

1:04:42

No, 40, 45 a year. $2 a week, and then $80 a year. It's going to go up, if anyone's curious, pretty soon. So you can get it at a discount now, but it's free to use, free to try. But that's not. We're going to hard pay while this pretty soon because it's growing. Yeah.

1:04:48

George, I'm just curious about how many people you'd have to hire to replace the agents you're currently using, because I know you're building this by your. I know you also worked a lot to get ready for us today. So, like, you know, if you had to hire people to replace your little. Your little friends, how many would it take?

1:05:05

Definitely, like, probably one or two marketing people. Like that paywall thing I showed you with the a B testing, I was dreading doing that, guys, for like, three, four months, and I did it in one night with one prompt, and it blew my mind. I was like, oh, my gosh. Like, so, so powerful.

1:05:20

Awesome. Hey, listen, great job, George. I think, you know, sometimes you build something you're passionate about, which is great. Obviously, your pickle watch is great, but you may stumble onto something. So I always tell founders, keep your peripheral vision open. What you may have stumbled on is that there might be a bigger opportunity for you in doing watch and app experiments, refinement, and making a tool for people who build that. So you might have, like, an even better concept that you could pivot to, because those people might pay five, and you might be able to get 1,000 of them. And you get 1,000 people, you're paying you $500 a year. A solo entrepreneur, you make 500 grand, and then you said you got a wife and kids. Yeah.

1:05:36

Yes.

1:06:21

And then they might be like, oh, okay, yeah, don't get a job because it's going to pay you four times as much. So just a piece of advice from a husband and an entrepreneur. Great job. You're invited. Join us March 16th and 17th. Join us@launchfestival.com so you, George, get to come to launchfestival.com thank you, Jason.

1:06:21

Jason, before we let you go, I wanna put you to the same test we gave Dave. It's only fair to ask you the same question. So when it comes to the anthropic, dod, Department of War, sorry, situation, where do you come down on private companies and their rights versus the government and its needs?

1:06:42

Yeah, you know, this is America, and we have a long tradition of people getting to be pacifists if they want. They can literally, for relig religious reasons, not join the military during a draft and not be deserters, I guess. And so, you know, if the people at Anthropic don't want to participate in the military and it seems like, you know, the. It seems like this administration has, like, some issues with Anthropic. So, you know, there's. There's a lot of gamesmanship going on here between those two parties. I liked Dave's take that. Maybe this is being done by Anthropic and press or whatever, but I just want to say it's not. Anybody in America can make the choice if they want to work with the government. If I said to, with a very rare exception of we're actually in a war and the country's being invaded, and then you can take over production. You're a Tesla and you're making cars, and all of a sudden the country's being invaded and we have, God forbid, another Pearl harbor or 9, 11, and the government said to you, hey, listen, Elon Musk, we need you to make tanks or we need you to make submarines or whatever it happens to be. You know, it's like life or death. Okay, fine, yeah, makes total sense. However, you know, in the case of, like, a peacetime situation, like, let the company do what it wants to do, and I don't think they need to ban them as, like, some terrible contractor across the whole thing that seemed like an unnecessary escalation. Do I think it's patriotic for a company to make tools and then not allow the government or the military to use them? Personally, I think that's a little, like, ungrateful. But listen, we allow people who are religious or who have, like, certain philosophies to hate gay people. Like, I'm Catholic. We don't allow women to be priests, or I grew up Catholic, I should say I'm Christian, not Catholic. But they're allowed to hate gay People not allow them in the church and say it's a sin and they're allowed to not let women be priests. Okay, it's sexist, it's homophobic, but I guess in this country you're allowed to be sexist and homophobic if you say it's for religion. You're also allowed to be a peacenik and say, I don't want to participate in this. And you can also be like, I just sell PCs and chips and batteries, and if people want to use a battery, I can't tell them what to do with the battery. So both of these arguments make sense to me, and I think we just need to settle this down. And if somebody's building a war os like a war based language model, what a great opportunity. Just, you know, build a language model explicitly for the military. And that actually seems like an incredible opportunity for somebody. Where is the Anthropic or OpenAI or Grok or Gemini specifically for the military? That sounds like a great thing to do if Murderbots are not ready. It would be a lot better for society if instead of sending humans into combat, we sent robots into combat and they took care of bad guys. And by the way, with a bomb, what do we do, Alex? Do we send humans to defuse a bomb anymore like the Hurt Locker, or do we send a robot?

1:06:59

I believe we have many robots for this task now.

1:10:04

Precisely.

1:10:06

Can I throw in just 2 cents before we wrap here?

1:10:08

Yeah.

1:10:10

Anthropic has been pretty clear that they are super content to work with the dod, have. They're working really hard to make sure this transition off of Anthropic onto, I guess, OpenAI technology is smooth. So I think that when we discuss US Patriotism, it's important to, to not conflate it directly with just what SecDef wants, but instead what makes sense for the nation as a whole. Because Anthropic's taking a lot of stick lately, and I don't think it's entirely earned. I think there's a lot of posturing to your point. And I don't want us as a community to say, hey, you don't get to have moral stances Simply because the DoD or DoW says so. So I give him a little more credit than the average Twitter poster.

1:10:11

All right, Lon has a question. Here we go. Go ahead, Lon. You can break in Lon and ask. So, Jason, would you personally fund a startup that said they were training an LLM to power domestic surveillance and autonomous killing machines?

1:10:54

I know the answer to this.

1:11:07

Well, domestic surveillance Definitely not. I don't think that that's a great idea. I think we have to really think about new laws and regulations, because AI makes domestic surveillance a lot different than just, I happen to have a camera in my 7:11 in case I get robbed. Like, now you can have a camera that tracks across all the ring cameras. You know, a lost dog, completely noble. I think that was a great product. But you could also have a ring camera that surveils people and knows their entire pattern, and that's wrong. Now, the cameras I have for my different properties, on my properties, I have cameras from unifi that record license plates, record facial recognition. It just comes like that out of the box. But that's for my property. Do I want that on every lamppost everywhere? No. Why? Because it's going to be abused. So we need to have some common sense, thoughtful legislation about that. So I wouldn't want to be involved in that if you explicitly said, we're going to track everybody domestically. No, I wouldn't want to invest in that.

1:11:08

For murder bots.

1:12:11

Yes. Now for Murderbots, I think there's an important discussion to be had of if crazy dictator Kim Jong Un decides to send 10,000 troops from North Korea into South Korea, South Korea should have autonomous robots that could counter them. And that, yes, if fired upon, would neutralize. Would I back a company doing that that was run by very thoughtful people that had a philosophy about it? Yeah, I would just. It's not exactly in my interest. It's not in my kill zone, if you will. But I do think that that's better. And what I would like to actually see, and this is what I would love to back, is non lethals. I've always thought non lethals was a really great investment category. Non lethals include stun guns, right? There's nets and webbing. There's foams. And so I did do a deep dive on that a decade ago when there was a bunch of police killings. And I said, why don't we use these foams and stuff like that? Pull up foams that on YouTube. There's a foam you can spray on riders or an emotionally disturbed person or a person with a knife or a shooter. Now, if it's a school shooter, whatever, I don't care, take them out. But if you have an emotionally disturbed person with a knife who's distraught or, I don't know, they lost all their money investing in MicroStrategy and their deb destitute. Alex, you know what I'm saying, Lon, There's a foam that you spray on people that immobilizes. It's an immobilization foam. This looks like something science fiction, but they immobilize this guy with a foam. You spray the foam on them, they can't get up, they can't reach their gun and it's sticky and it's non. Lethal. I think this could be like an incredible. So this falls under the category of non. Lethals. What I would like to invest in. If somebody has an idea for this, I would like to do a military tech investment. I'm very, you know, pro military startups. I've got some favorites, in fact. And I'm very fond of the executives

1:12:12

who run these companies.

1:14:13

So I would like to look for non lethal murder bots. So non lethal bots is what I would invest in to just put it plainly. All right, this has been another amazing episode of Twist. March 2, 2026 in the can, as my friend Leo Laporte would say. Sundays. Watch this week in tech. He's Alex. I'm Jason. X.comAlex and X.com Jason. We'll see you on Wednesday. Bye. Bye.

1:14:14