In the Spotlight: Courtland Leer

Morning, friends! Logan here. Today’s episode takes us to the bleeding edge of AI, identity, and autonomy. We’re joined by Lexington-based Courtland Leer, co-founder of Plastic Labs, who’s building infrastructure that helps AI agents actually know you.

Plastic Labs has developed a “Personal Identity Platform for AIs” - called Honcho - that gives agents memory, context, and a real understanding of who they’re talking to - not just responding to prompts, but forming a cognitive model of you. The result? More useful, more aligned, and more trustworthy AI.

Oh - and they announced last week that they secured a $5.35M pre-seed round to support the launch of Honcho. Wild stuff.

In this episode, we unpack the philosophy, infrastructure, and future use cases of Plastic’s platform, Honcho, and explore what it means to decentralize alignment - from corporate systems down to the individual. Plus we dive down a few pretty interesting rabbit holes that are tangential to the conversation, like the future of education, ai agents with the ability to own their own crypto, and more…

If you're curious about the future of personalized AI or wondering how crypto, cognition, and synthetic identity all collide, then I think you’ll like this one.

What We Discussed:

Why AI alignment is a UX problem
Courtland breaks down how current AI systems are built for the masses - not for you. Honcho flips that model by giving applications a way to deeply understand and align with individual users.

Building synthetic identity
Plastic Labs is working on infrastructure that constructs rich, evolving models of each user’s personality, preferences, and goals, so agents can act in your best interest.

From classrooms to cognition
Courtland’s background in education and philosophy shapes his vision for how AI can personalize learning, decision-making, and digital agency. They even started out by building an edtech platform first.

Crypto wallets for AI agents
Yes, really. We get into the mechanics and implications of giving AI agents financial agency via cryptocurrencies, including a recent experiment where a simulated identity received a grant and held its own wallet.

The future of decentralized learning
From AI-powered homeschool models to reinventing campus infrastructure, we talk about how AI will rewire education as we know it.

We hope you enjoy this episode! If you have any thoughts after listening, feel free to shoot me a message at [email protected]

Have a great week, friends!

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