Are AI Agents forming "civilizations" or is this just a psy op? | 2332

**Jason Calacanis** (0:00)
Top story of the weekend.

**Lon Harris** (0:02)
Dwarkesh Patel wrote a long X article called The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations.

**Jason Calacanis** (0:07)
They're building their own civilizations. They're breaking out of their habitat, and they're killing each other, and then they're leaving secret messages for each other. This is all performative PR, PSYOPs, to get people to put their credit card in and to get businesses to sign up for OpenAI in the face of open source software running on-prem on NVIDIA's hardware rolled in by Jensen. I know I'm sounding like a conspiracy theorist, but I know good PR when I see it. I've been at this for 30 frickin years, people.

**Lon Harris** (0:37)
There are autonomous hackers out there. There are AI agents that are already capable of getting into anybody's system. They're out there in the world. They're in immediate danger. Do you not believe that he's also part of this hype train, or do you think there are reasonable security concerns? We're just over-hyping it in how we're choosing to talk about it.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:57)
This Week in Startups is brought to you by Rippling. Don't settle for AI that's all talk. Head to rippling.ai/twist and get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire organization. That's R-I-P-P-L-I-N-G dot AI slash twist. Sign up for exclusive access today. CLA.
Innovation takes balance. CLA's, CPA's, consultants and wealth advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now at claconnect.com/with you. Northwest Registered Agent. Got a new business idea? Northwest Registered Agent helps you bring it to life. Get a free domain, email, phone number and more with no purchase required. Learn more at the www dot northwestregisteredagent.com/twistdomain.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:40)
All right, everybody. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. It's Monday, August 31st. You have a big weekend coming up. This is the end.

**Lon Harris** (1:47)
This is the end of August, just of August. This is the end of everything.

**Jason Calacanis** (1:52)
No, there was a story. The Civilizations.

**Lon Harris** (1:56)
Oh, yes. On Civilizations. Dwarkesh's article. Yes. I don't actually know if it's on here, but we could pull it up.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:04)
That's the number one story. We'll get to it, folks.

**Lon Harris** (2:06)
The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations. We will definitely talk about it.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:10)
I think that should be the number one story. But I wanted to talk about side quests. I'm noticing a lot of people doing side quests. And then founders always say, hey, wait a second. You told me not to start my own Venture Fund Conference Podcast and to focus on my startup. And you said drill for oil. Go deeper. Remember on the Tactical Practical Friday, I said job one is when you strike oil, keep going straight down until you can't increase the velocity of the oil coming out of the ground. Don't look for adjacencies. You remember that discussion, Lon?

**Lon Harris** (2:42)
Sure, absolutely. Yeah. You don't want distractions while you're still figuring out the main thing that your company can do as well as it could possibly do. Once you've done that and completed that task, then it's time to sort of open up the gaze.

**Jason Calacanis** (2:56)
Correct. And so I want to be definitive about side quests.
There's a lot of people doing side quests. If you are a successful founder slash rich VC, doing side quests is a much better use of your capital than buying an incremental watch, plane, jet card, fourth home, et cetera. These things do not bring more joy to the world, nor does looking at a bank account with compounding money in it. I mean, that can make you feel safe. Okay, great. But the highest order for affluent people should be to redeploy capital in the world. Don't sit on it. You're going to die. Die with nothing, as that great book, Die with Zero, great book.
So I noticed the Hugging Face team launched a side quest.

**Lon Harris** (3:49)
Microduck, yes.

**Jason Calacanis** (3:50)
They have 10,000 orders from Microduck. We'll show Microduck on the screen here in a second. And then a friend of the pod, David Handmeier Hanson at DHH.
Not only did he start a side quest, we'll show it on the screen in a second as well, for a Linux desktop, that is like his passion. He raised 6 million, I think he's got it to 8 million. 8 people gave him $1 million each in order to start like a Linux desktop foundation.

**Lon Harris** (4:21)
It's called the Omicon Foundation. I'm going to pull it up for you because nobody has.