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

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Today's show:

Hugging Face's $399 Microduck and the art of companies taking on side quests. Then, we get into Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," which blew up online this weekend. Jason calls the "secret AI civilization" framing deliberate PR, and thinks it's inflammatory enough that someone might attack a data center over it.

Then, Anders Forslund of Heart Aerospace shows off the X1, a battery-powered electric airliner designed for regional flights that can fly for 30 minutes on just $5 of juice. PLUS, we've got John Yu of Bitsec explaining how his subnet project outperformed Fable 5 in website vulnerability checks.

Guests:

Anders Forslund on X: x.com/AndersForslund1?s=2

Heart Aerospace: heartaerospace.com

John Yu on X: x.com/yubrew

Bitsec: sentios.io & sentios.io

Relevant Links:

MicroDuck: pollen-robotics.com/microduck

Dwarkesh Patel, "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggingface

Dwarkesh's launch thread on X: x.com/dwarkesh_sp/status/2093833419377815719

METR's independent investigation of the OpenAI/Hugging Face incident: metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-i…

X1 first flight announcement — heartaerospace.com/newsroom/heart-aerospace-co…

JSX (JetSuiteX) — jsx.com

Pilatus PC-12 —pilatus-aircraft.com/en/fly/pc-12

Surf Air — surfair.com

Zcash → z.cash

Timestamps:

Is Hugging Face's Microduck the greatest side quest ever?

Jason puts Clem Delangue and Jensen Huang in charge of AI PR

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Top story: Dwarkesh Patel's "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations"

Why agents act like people: they were trained on us

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"I know good PR when I see it"

The prompt Jason says OpenAI should have written instead

The data center backlash and the politicians who will flip

Rippling - Don't settle for AI that's all talk. Head to Rippling.ai/twist to get the only AI built to give you full visibility across your startup and take complex actions across your entire business.

Guest: Anders Forslund, Heart Aerospace, and the X1's first flight

Turboprops vs. jets and the regional routes America lost

JSX, Santa Monica Airport, and 5,000 underused airports

Why Boeing won't build this: the innovator's dilemma

Guest: John Yu, Bitsec — Bittensor Subnet 60

How the subnet works: miners, validators, $10K a day

Bitsec vs. a frontier model: 160+ vulnerabilities to 60

Was the agent civilization story a pre-IPO PR play?

Sentios.io and continuous coverage

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