Every AI Tool We’re Using & 4 Pillars to Guide You: Operators Build (E7)

Okay, we're here.

It is episode 7 of Operators Build. This is the all things AI episode. I want to start by saying, I think there's like 4 big things that we've created that I think are like pretty universal. Everybody should do. So the first is you have to think of company brain, right? This is like context, memory, all the stuff that like the models are just bad at.

Probably the most important part.

Number 2 would be like an operating system. So it's nice to use all these tools. It's great to build software, but you need some way for the humans in the company to interact and visualize things, right? So like we call that Winks OS. Agreed? Number 2.

All right.

Number 3, uh, all of the software and tools. So I don't know about you, man, but I'm just a believer. There's a lot of stuff that we shouldn't be building, that we should just buy and we should just use. So this is like the OmniSends, the rich panels, the Iris, Highbeam, like all of the, the tools that we've opted to buy for the company. Some of these are sponsors, some are not. And then number 4, uh, we'll call them agents. So for Winks, we have like a researcher, a brief writer, and we probably have other ones like competitor analyst. Yeah. Those are kind of the 4 big buckets. And I think what we do today, Cody, is like go very deep on each of them. Um, and we even show people like, let's share, share screen. We'll like get into like how we're actually constructing the company. All right, let's get into it. Explain brain to people.

The brain is your context layer. And so context engineering is one of the most important things is with these agents, with the Claude or Codex, they're the smartest, most capable things or people ever, but they're not trained on your specific business. They have a lot of general knowledge and what you need to do is equip them with specific knowledge. And I think about it the same way that you would want to educate somebody if they were coming into your business. What's all the context you would want them to know and have access to? What is your mission? What is your vision? What are your past tests? What are your products? What are your COGS? What are your SKUs? What are your reviews? What are your customer insights? You just want that dumped into one place. And then these agents and any tool, AI tools that you're using will then be able to access that and have knowledge of it. So you won't have to prompt it every time and say, hey, this is my company, this is what I want you to do. It'll just know what to do if you have the right setup.

And the thing with this is important is it's updating all the time.

Absolutely.

So you don't like set something like this up once. It's a living, breathing, like, that's why you call it like company brain. It's like you have to have it.

Always.

Yeah. Yeah. Let's go to number 2 then, like the operating system. So like one of the first things you did when we started on Winks was you set up Winks OS. What was the thinking? Like, why is that important?

I'd say this is one that's probably like not the most important. Things just live in so many different places, right? And like we would be getting ready for a launch and we would need, you know, cogs from this place and we would need shade descriptions from this place and copy here. And it just takes so long. I think the big theme is just everything in one place. that's for a human or for an agent, have everything in one place that it can access.

See, I disagree. I think that it is actually really important because if you've ever used one of these LLMs, like to people watching, listening, uh, they aren't very fast. So if I had to say like, can you show me the last 10 ads that we've made today? That's going to take a long time. Whereas if I go into WinxOS, I can just click and see them. They're there. So there are certain things that like, you should not be using all of this compute power from these models to do. So I still think it's like, more important. Okay, then let's move on to software. I think there's a lot of people out there that just think that it's stupid to pay for software in general now. Where do you stand on this subject? Because we're using a bunch of software.

Same thing. Just because you can doesn't mean you should. It's really easy to feel productive and it's really easy to waste time doing it. And then there's a lot of maintenance costs and stuff like that. So yeah, I think when it first came out, it was cool to try to build this stuff, but now it's like, no, spend your time on the most valuable parts of what's actually going to grow the business. And we're a 2 to 4 person team, we don't have time to waste.

No.

You know? Yeah. So I think for software, we're looking for a few things. We're looking for software that like has an MCP or an API. It's almost a non-negotiable where we can use it because there's a lot of value in taking the context and the brain and then giving it the tools to go and use a specific MCP to get access to something. And it can get more information about the specific tool, either that or a tool like a rich panel or an Iris where maybe it doesn't have the MCP, but it's purpose-built for that one specific thing. And like experts at technology and building softwares and finance or CX have actually built it to do that function. And they're gonna do a way better job than you and I are gonna be able to do.

Yeah, 100% agree. Okay, and then the agents. When do you decide that something should be an agent?

I truly think everybody listening that has an e-com brand should be using agents. I mean, if you're using Claude Code, that's a coding agent. Codex is a coding agent. It can go do stuff. You can watch it use a browser. So that's, very basic level, but something like a Runneth or a Hermes or something like that, or a GrokBot can be really, really powerful to just allow you to do a lot more with a leaner team.

Like scheduled tasks, workflows, like things that are just going to happen a lot. Agents are a good place to start looking.

Definitely.

Yeah. When we set out to build this company, one of the things we said from the beginning was AI first. Maybe Tell me, what does that mean to you when you hear like, oh, I'm gonna build this company AI first?

We're in a good time for us because we don't have people. And it's very hard to go AI first at an established company where you have like, instead of tech debt, you have like people debt and you have like workflow debt. And it's really hard to get things to change. And so the beginning, it's like, hey, we don't have people. Before we hire somebody, before we do emails or do ads, like let's see how far we can take it. And it doesn't have to be this binary, like people or not, but it's like, how do we give ourselves more leverage? 'Cause it's essentially you and I, day-to-day in marketing and we got ads to run, emails, landers, all that stuff. So it's like, how do we just give ourselves leverage to do as much as possible and do it to a high level? Yeah.

And what I'm noticing in other companies, like coming from Jones Road, coming from Pela, it's actually the workflows that are the hard part. It's like you have all these SOPs, so many systems, and they were all designed like human first. And the way that we're building things is whenever we have to do something, we're like, the We just start with, okay, well, can we get AI to do this? Can we start the workflow with AI so that we're only really reviewing things? So like, I would, I think this framework of like 10-80-10 with AI is great. It's like 10% of your effort goes into idea. So like right now we're talking offer yesterday. So it's like idea, okay, now we're gonna get AI to do 80% of it, all the grunt work.

Mm-hmm.

That's the workflow. And then the last 10 is let's make sure that it didn't hallucinate and do something really stupid.

Yeah, yeah.

And it always does. So like there's always like just dumb in the algorithm.

It's definitely not perfect.

Oh God, no. So why do you think this is important to build the company this way?

You know, just the way D2C's going, e-commerce is going, like more of your P&L's gonna go to CAC as possible. And so the best companies are just gonna be extremely high leveraged and they're gonna have, you know, OpEx 1%, 2%, 3%.

Yeah.

It's this like D2C 4.0 model and it's just probably not possible to do without a ton of automation and tech. But there are, there are $50 million, $100 million brands with like 2, 3, 4 full-time people.

There is, it is. I have a lot of questions on whether or not that company, those companies are sellable. Current market sellable, right? I think that there's like the, and this is a conversation that at some point we'll probably continue to have it as a bunch of shareholders, because I think there's an argument right now that the market doesn't know how to buy a business without employees. It's sort of, I don't know if you remember, maybe like 6, 7 years ago when the whole like VA thing or the, the whole like offshore thing started, same thing. There were buyers in the market saying, if there's 5 of you in America and 100 of you somewhere else in the world, how do we value that company?

Mm-hmm.

I think we're there right now. My bet is, uh, with what you're saying is that fast forward 5 years, we will absolutely have a framework as an industry for how to buy a company With 1 or 2%. It'll be the norm. 'Cause it'll just be normal. We'll know how to underwrite these deals. Like private equity will figure it out. So this is sort of like a, for me at least, it's a very forward-looking bet on like, this is just what the company in the future looks like.

Yeah. Right. I agree. Especially a consumer e-commerce brand.

Yeah.

And then the other thing is speed. Like when at Jones Road, when I was doing stuff and I did a lot of web and CRM stuff, you know, you can do a lot in these roles for conversion where design and development and strategy and copy, one person can do it all. And so yes, it's, you need less people. But also as soon as I finish strategy, I can go to design. As soon as I finish design, I can go to dev versus normally you have to do a handoff, right? It's just more people involved, slows things down. And I just think fundamentally speed is the biggest competitive advantage in a business like ours. Like we need to go from how do I have an idea? How do I have an insight? And like, how do I get that live today? And like, that's what the best brands are doing, whether it's AI or not, that's what the best brands are doing.

Yeah. And we've already seen it. Like you and I will chat on Slack and then we'll have something implemented It will be hours. Whereas if 5 years ago you could have a conversation and it might be a week, 2 weeks, like stand up a landing page, build up something new. Like we do this in minutes.

We launched with 7 landing pages. Maybe they weren't perfect and great, but I remember when Jones Road launched 5 years ago, like you wanted a landing page, it was like $20K for an agency.

Right.

Yeah.

It's a, it's a very different— I also, I think what you're talking about, so I didn't expect this with AI. My initial expectation with all tech is like, this is gonna flatten an org. So like companies themselves, like we'll just flatten them out. We'll have less hierarchy. What I didn't expect was that the roles would also start to merge.

Mm-hmm.

You know, like designers and developers, that's just like a person now. So I think that's also interesting is like neither one of us is like super technical by trade 2, 3 years ago. But if you look today, it's like we're doing a lot of code commits. We're doing a lot of everything. Like your GitHub usage is way up.

We're designing. I never designed before. I can't design to save my life.

I basically only wrote copy. That was it. Uh, now it's like you can take copy and turn it into any asset. And I think that's kind of what we're seeing. So what we're going to get into is like what functions and departments are like, what are we actually using AI for? But maybe let's start with what are we not using it for? Because that's going to be a small list, but it's probably an important list. So like, what are areas that you think We just don't use AI to do these things.

There's probably a few, there's probably a lot that are not black or white. We're using AI for a lot of copy, but in some ways AI sucks at copy, so it's not like we're just trying to one-shot it there.

No.

Design, we're using it a lot, but our first employee was a designer/editor that we brought on. There's a lot of limitations of that. We are using it for images, assets, but I think there are pros and cons of that. There are some people who are incredible at making AI really not look like AI images. And it actually, those are actually creative people. I actually don't have the skillset, not in the AI skillset, the moodboarding and the creative skillset, but I've seen some people do it. But I think we want real images. We want UGC, we want—

Real people. Yeah, real humans.

So I think people, and I don't know that we have a hard rule where it's like no people, but it's there. So I don't think we want that, but we want content. we'll do some AI ads, but I'm not bullish on like AI UGC. Like we want real content. So how do we, you know, for our creator programs, how do we do all of the, how do we automate all of the backend stuff, the uploading of the ads, sending briefs and stuff like that, the analysis, like let's automate that so we can actually get like real content.

Yeah, I think there's like a human taste element that AI is terrible at and that you still need people to start Every idea, right? And actually, I don't know, I use it to help me ideate. I definitely do. I'll start, if I have an idea on copy, I might go to Claude or ChatGPT or whatever and give it, get it to give me like 50 or 100 variations of the idea, but then I quickly narrow it down and I try to write most of the copy myself. Most AI tools right now are all promise and no delivery. You know exactly what I am talking about. Super fancy launch videos, This is why I'm loving what Rich Panel is doing. They have AI and support smashed together, made it practical, made it useful, made it valuable to brands today, not on some future promise. And instead of asking you to spend weeks writing prompts and uploading help docs and babysitting, they flipped the whole script. Their AI builds your support team for you and everything it needs. I've watched it. It works. It's freaking amazing. Rich Panel even guarantees 50% of your support volume will be automated by AI within 30 days or your money back. I call that a no-brainer offer. If you are interested, go to richpanel.com/demo, not for some generic demo, but to actually book a call and watch them build your actual support team. I don't know, like, how nerdy on copy you are, but we used to— copywriters used to do this thing where to get good at copywriting, you used to actually just handwrite.

Yeah, handwrite like sales letters and stuff.

You just like take it and like, I would just sit there and I would copy out. copy, copy. And that's how you learn to do copy. I think that all AI is gonna do is like make great creatives better creatives, make great copywriters better copywriters. It's gonna be like the great amplifier.

I completely agree with that. I had that thought when you were kind of describing it. Completely think about it the same way. And like what I've seen is that people that are very good at their subject matter expert, they are much better at it or like they can do more. Like a creative can actually design stuff in AI way better than I can.

Yeah, but I think here's the difference. Not every role in a company, so this applies to consumer, applies to everything, your business doesn't need superstars in every function. So I think in consumer, we need really great creative, that's like image, video, copy, and we need really good sort of judgment. Everything else is secondary. And this is what I mean, again, if you have employees, no employee likes to hear this. It's like, no, your job's just not as important. But it's true. Like some, some roles are just less valuable than others. So I think what AI is doing is you get people who are amazing copywriters. Well, now they can be a mediocre everything else. And that's fine because the company doesn't need them to be amazing at those things. You can just be a mediocre supply chain person because the, the super brain is going to be way better at it. Whereas copy, well, no, you still need to be a pretty freaking amazing copywriter. You need to be very good at making ads. That's kind of what consumer is.

And there's some, again, areas where we're gonna, like you said, it's the 10-80-10. We're gonna, you know, we're never just kind of one-shot it. Like even like research and stuff like that, like you just have to be careful and have to know what you're looking for because it'll, you'll get slop and you can get like, I've heard people talk about this where AI can give you like the perception of competence, but it can just give these long reports and stuff like that. But like you have to know what you want it to do and know what to look for and kind of Curate it down.

I used Perplexity a lot to go do research for Wings, like persona research. And it would come back with these like crazy-ass briefs. And then I would ask it for sources and I would go to like Reddit or wherever and like read the sources. I'm like, that is not at all what I read. And I'm like, what you, your inference, you know, as an AI is completely off the mark of what like these ladies or this guy was saying.

Mm-hmm.

So I think That's a good call. Everybody should be very careful of just like blanket following this thing. It is really, really, really bad at constructing video scripts. I find, and maybe this is just how I use it, I find it terrible at like building a narrative. You know, it's sometimes it'll like, it'll get 1 or 2 lines right, but I find the actual structure just never looks quite good.

Mm-hmm.

And I got skills for this. I've built like, built so many versions. It still is just not there. Whereas like, if you meet somebody who can write a great piece of content, that per— it's like, it's so natural to that person. So I just find it's not great there. Okay, let's do this. Why don't we show people, uh, like our entire stack? Because I think that'll actually be helpful. How do we work? Like, let's start with HQ.

Mm-hmm.

Because I think that's like pretty foundational to how, that's also how we work together.

Yeah.

Is through HQ.

We'll finally get to explain to people what it is. The way I describe it, and I don't know if you have a different way, is like normally AI is like Microsoft Word or Excel.

Yeah.

It's like if I make a change to a financial model or Word document, I have it. And if I want you to have it, I have to send it to you.

Yep.

And then we can't really be working on the same thing at the same time. And that's like super outdated.

Yep.

Obviously everyone is using, either you can use a SharePoint or if you're using Excel or you can use Google Drive, but that's how most AI is. Most people are doing things locally, right? You have files on your computer and then you have to go and share it. And there are definitely ways without HQ to do it. We did it at Jones Grove before HQ, but you have to use GitHub and push and pull and teach everybody that. And so HQ just makes it really easy to be able to make AI stuff multiplayer. So it does a bunch of things, but essentially any file that I have, and a skill is just a file, right? It's all Markdown files and stuff. When I'm working in my HQ, which I only do my local HQ folder, I just have a folder, it kind of automatically gets pushed to the cloud, right?

Yeah.

And so it's just shared and then it automatically gets pulled down to yours, to anybody who's in our organization has it. And so we can be working on the same thing. So my analogy is it just takes it from Microsoft Word to Google Docs. And it's not quite real time where we can't do the exact same time, but it does help. So any skills that we have, we can just share them automatically. Um, you know, and then there's just a few small, really like quality of life things that are great. So like the skills, any like, uh, integration MCP, you know, cause I'll share credentials. Exactly. Cause I'll do, you and I both use Codex. We use Claude. Uh, we, I think both have a Mac mini. We have a Hermes, stuff like that. And so I used to have to put them in 3 different places and then like, and so there's just one One, it's very safe, secure. It just opens up a tab, you know, a window in your browser and you put it in there and it's very safe. Um, 'cause I've prior to that wasted a ton of time trying to, you know.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Like how you access Shopify is how I access Shopify.

Yeah. Yeah.

Omnisend, Omnisend, like we have shared credentials, Higgsfield, whatever we're using. HQ has like the secure vault of like all those credentials. Yeah. The way I explain it to people is Yes, it solves the multiplayer thing. So how do you get that? For me, I mean, the greatest thing with AI, the greatest downfall with AI is like we all have a memory problem, right? Like we have super geniuses with amnesia. So how do you solve the amnesia thing? There's lots of ways to do that locally. People use Obsidian, they create like, you know, whatever, your own GBrain, like all that stuff. But company memory, that's the issue. So I think HQ solves that. And then credentials. Like those are sort of the 3 big things. You can do other stuff in it, but like really for how we were working, it's mainly those 3.

Context.

Yeah, it's context. Yeah, it's company context.

Which is one of the most important things.

Dude, it's like all company value is inherent knowledge.

Well, and like, you know, 2 years ago, whatever it was like, people talked a lot about prompt engineering. Like that's pretty much dead. And we can share how we're actually using the models and stuff, but like all the models are so good. Like they don't really matter much. Prompting is dead. It's really context. And then like, understanding how to set loops and goals and stuff like that. But you have to have the company context, you know? And I think that's it where people will try to write copy or they'll try to do something and it's like, not good. Like you haven't built the skills, you haven't built the context and it takes a ton of time. I don't know how much time you put in, but like—

It's a lot of time.

[Sponsor Content] I wasted 2 hours over the weekend trying to upload ads. And I said, I'm never going to do that again. So I had Runneth do it. It looked at every ad, picked the right landing page. It named all the ads, wrote the headline and copy to match from options I gave it, set the naming conventions, set UTMs, all of it, and pushed it to Ads Manager for me. All I had to do was go into Ads Manager, QA it, hit live, and it was done. Runneth is an agent with its own virtual computer. So it never shuts off. It's always on. The whole team can talk to it the same, run it in Slack. It remembers everything. It has prebuilt skills based on some amazing stuff that the Motion team has built. Here's one example of how I'm using it. Last night I hooked up Tribe, our creator sourcing tool, and anytime a creator video comes in, it gets QA'd against my feedback that I've given it before. We get notified of any new video. I can have it add captions. It watches the video, figures out what it's about, adds naming conventions, edit hooks. I've been doing a lot, building a lot of static ads with Runneth as well. It's pretty awesome and it all comes out of the box. We've been using our Winks as our main creative strategist, using it to build tons of ads for us. Winks is using it. Ridge is using Runneth. HexClad is using it as well. Go to runneth.com. They're giving listeners 500 million free tokens for your first month.

So can you show people, uh, what it, when you say you have a local folder with HQ, you start working it, what does that look like?

So when I am, you know, using Codex, uh, which I use more often, but it's kind of just my default folder, right? And so normally It's just working on desktop or working on a folder and you just give it permissions. Um, but, but, you know, now default, I'm really only ever doing things in, in HQ. And so this will just have, um, you know, context of, of really all of the files that are in there. Okay.

So context, you have an HQ folder, you start all of your work, you start it in this one folder. So instead of having, let's say, 5 different GitHub projects, one for Shopify, one for Omnisend, one for— this is Just one.

Inside of there, there's different companies. So there's like, I have one for Winks. I have one for like my personal, I have one for like, you know, my, like for podcasts, stuff like that. Um, but yeah, you know, so for Winks, there's, there's one folder and one company. Um, and it, and so any work happens and goes in there.

And then in that one company, Winks, we might have like, we have a GitHub repo for Shopify. We have a GitHub repo for something else. So then it's all inside of that one company.

I would say like GitHub is like slightly different where like, This is like the context and stuff. It's not, doesn't house the actual codebase. So the actual codebase is in there, but it kind of has knowledge of everything.

Yeah. It can see it all.

Right.

So if you're going to go work on, like right now you're probably doing work on our Shopify site. You'll still start that in HQ, even though there is still a separate GitHub repo for Shopify.

All of our skills live in HQ. And so even prior to HQ, if I was working on our website, Um, I don't wanna do it directly on our live site, right? Normally you have a dev theme, but I actually would be working on that locally.

Right.

On my computer, no one would be able to see it. And then I would push that using the Shopify CLI, the command line interface, to Shopify to be able to preview it there. And then once I wanted to actually, um, we'll call it submit that or commit it, I would open a PR, a pull request.

Yeah.

And have that go to Shopify. But so it's just, I'm doing it locally, which is HQ, but then it just syncs it with like the HQ cloud.

Yeah.

And so the benefit of that is A, it gets saved, B, it's, again, it has all of that context in one place. So as I'm working, I'm working on an ingredient section right now and I'm like, hey, pull from this claim, pull from this study. Because what I did is, you know, I just think the context in engineering is really helpful. You know, we have Dr. Todd Born who formulated a bunch of stuff. He tossed in a Google Drive folder of all studies. So as soon as I see something like that come in, just give it to an agent and say, hey, toss this in HQ. This is what it is. So it just has the memory of that. It has the context of it. And so it's just really powerful. I learned this the first time when I was building maybe a CRO system for Jones Road. I built a copy skill and copy context for a different project. And this was when I was earlier on and the CRO skill was just calling upon it and writing copy as I was building landing pages, even without me trying to. So sometimes even when you don't know the intended goal, just getting all of this context in one place can just be extremely helpful and valuable.

Yeah. I think this is the thing too, Um, so obviously like for this show, we have different sponsors for different things, but we also have a lot of other tools that we're using. So like Codex isn't sponsoring the show. Claude's not sponsoring. Like, this is just our chosen stack right now. Like we use Higgsfield for things. We use—

Amelia's.

Amelia's for things. Like we're trying out to, like, I think my approach at least has been like, let's just try out everything. This is a fun time. It's nice when you're starting something scratch.

You're like, screw it, man.

Let's just try it all. Like we don't need to be married to anything. Um, in this case, like HQ. I'm actually super impressed. Like I was a bit hesitant when we started using it. I'm like, I don't know, this seems like onerous and more, I had something else I had to learn. I didn't want to do it.

Yeah.

I'm kind of happy now. Um, it was like a pleasant surprise.

That's with all these things. It just takes time to learn and not all of them are worth it, but yeah. But I definitely think, you know, it, it allows us to, to share stuff and not have to do this like—

I think the start work, what is it? The handoff thing. So like if I'm working on something and I want you to have it, I can just hand off and then send you a link.

Yeah.

Just tell me what the file is.

Yeah.

And then And it just keeps working. I think for the people who are listening or watching, and if you're going to be doing work together as a team, this is whether you use HQ or not, like just figure this part out. As productive as you think you're going to get single player, the multiplayer thing is where like the company part gets built.

Definitely. And the brain and like the company brain.

Oh yeah. The company brain thing is like, is huge.

Let me, let me show it if that is helpful. Let's do it. Yeah. All right, cool. So I'll share my screen here.

Like this is what it would actually look like.

So I'm inside HQ here. Again, I, I, I never have to go in here, but just to see what the, you know, organization, you know, system is. So this is cool. Like people have probably seen this with Obsidian.

Yep.

But it's a very similar thing where it just shows you all of your, your different things you have. And here are all the skills that, you know, we have and kind of the, the connection they have with each other. These are a lot of the different files that, you know, we've built and kind of projects that, that we've done. Knowledge. These are just various, this is just our brain, but these are just different files, competitors, different things that we've done over time, best practices. I think about training agents and building context the same way you would think about training employees and onboarding employees. Just here's everything I know, here's how I want this to be done.

Yeah.

And so that has all that, but yeah, you can see if we hover over it, That's actually a good frame.

'Cause like, every employee you hire needs context. Like you have to get them, you onboard them.

Yeah. You onboard them. Yeah.

Teach you about company culture, like all that stuff. So like, this is sort of where we do that. And then people can see like there's a folder structure that is in place, right? There's projects, there's skills, there's just like lots of stuff and everything goes in here. I want people to get like, we don't work outside of HQ. So even when we use like we're going to do work with Omnisend, right? We're going to work with the Omnisend MCP to build emails or something. We do it through HQ.

Yeah. The emails live in HQ and then we use the Omnisend MCP to push it to our Omnisend account.

Right.

So here's knowledge and this is the company brain, but just the file structure of it. And you can kind of see what are new things. And so one of the things, one of our sponsors is Motion and Runneth, and we're using that for agents. And the first thing we wanted was how do we get Runneth to have access to this? But also we need, we need, we need Runneth to know what HQ is. So if we tell Runneth, hey, go find this, but vice versa, we need, we need our agents to know, like our Claude and Codex to also know who Runneth is as well. So this is just context. Just, you know, you just go in and say, hey, this is, this is what this is. This is what Runneth is. I'll even go to Runneth and say, hey. This is what I want to do. Please write up a document that I can copy over to explain what you are and who you are.

Yeah.

Um, and it'll just save it. And so you don't have to tell it again, you know, of that, that amnesia thing.

You have been listening to us talk for years about building 9-figure durable goods brands, HexClad, Ridge, Simple Modern, Pela. When we sat down to build Winks, there was never a question. It had to be a subscription brand. And being the veterans we are, we could work with anyone, but we decided to work with Skio to build Winks. Working with the team over at Skio has been awesome. We get to see all of the stuff that the fastest growing CPG brands are actually doing to acquire more subscribers and keep them longer. My favorite example of this has been incentivizing new customers to go from a monthly subscription to a quarterly subscription right after their first purchase, but before they get their first order. The team at Skio has been sharing insights on how much in-portal flexibility to give subscribers, when to change frequency, when to offer product swaps. When to do gifting, what rewards should look like, what is cancel flow optimization? The list is freaking endless and they have shared it all. They have been incredible to work with. They are bringing so much value to this partnership. It almost feels a little unfair. If you run a subscription brand, you should be talking with the team over at Skio. They know their stuff.

There's just, you know, there's knowledge and, um, the folder structure, which I don't, you know, necessarily look and care about, but just of having the different kind of folder structure the same way you would do like a Google Drive kind of where you have, you have a department and then you have subfolders within it.

And what's interesting, you're right here. Like I actually don't look at what's in here. I use Codex or Claude to look at what's in here. Um, I also have, I don't know if you've done this, but like I have, uh, I will take like my Hermes agent, which is my personal like CEO brain thing. And I will then have it commit things and It can work with HQ. So it's just like anything that's like multiplayer, it's like, okay, just put it in here. 'Cause like we need every, every person that we add to the team needs to have access to this.

Yep. Yeah. Just dump everything in. That's my philosophy.

Yeah. Okay. So then from HQ, let's talk about like, what have we plugged into this thing? So like, what are, what's the rest of our tech stack? Let's just go through that for people.

So we've got, um, Omnisend for email and SMS. And so what's really cool is we're doing that from Codex, Claude, Terminal, something like that. Yeah.

Like we don't log, like I don't, I log into Omnisend simply. It was so easy to just like MCP and build the emails and then use it. Uh, that I actually, the only reason I logged into Omnisend, 'cause I didn't believe that it just—

Oh, just to approve. Yeah.

I just like, I need to see that this is true. Then I would go in there when we were building the initial flows, you're like, can you just go in and check everything? And I'm like, I would go to HQ and use Claude. I'm like working. I'm like, no, I need to go double-check that this is all actually accurate. Oh no, there it was.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah.

That's pretty cool.

Yeah. Yeah. I, that was my, my other big surprise was like how easy and how good the Omnisend MCP was. Like, well done to that team. Um, okay. So there's Omnisend, uh, Rich Panel, right? So like Rich Panel for customer service AI, like they've been a longtime sponsor. Yeah.

Rich Panel's a little different because we're not doing that from like a Clouder Codex.

Nope. Um, yeah, they just, that's our, just part of our AI stack.

Exactly.

We just need best-in-class like customer service.

Yeah. But it's like, Solved, handled. Like very rarely do we have to go in and think about it.

Yeah. You just gotta go check. Okay. So then all website work, right?

Yeah. We don't have a developer. We are the design and dev team currently.

All that is just done through HQ. Um, are you using Codex or Claude more for that now?

Primarily Codex.

Um, is that an Astra thing or is that—

Primarily Codex. Um, is that an Astra thing or is that— Even before that, um, Codex was terrible at design prior to GPT-5.6. Um, so it was definitely more Claude before that. Fable is really good at design, but on 5.0, it's just 8 tokens. It's way better now on 5.1. So I do use it more, but Astra is pretty good at design. So that's my preference.

Do we have like a set of design skills for the brand? And is that in HQ?

Yes, they all live in HQ. So we have design system. That's like one of the really important ones. And actually I can share like Winks OS as well.

Oh yeah, we should show people.

But we have design system, we have skills for development. Like we have very specific rules for like never pushed to production. Here's the audit, you know, here's different things like that. So we have, there's like a whole workflow that again has been refined that allows non-technical people like you and I to, to, you know, do our website with no developers.

Without also breaking it every time we touch it. Okay. So websites done through there. Uh, what about asset generation? So images, videos.

Yeah. So you like Higgsfield. So you use that a bunch.

Well, I like Higgsfield because that's just the one I know. Old dog. And, um, but I think we've got Melius.

Melius. And then we use just like OpenAI APIs.

Yeah.

I, I built a skill. I think you had some of your own as well of, of, you know, doing that. So we kind of built some, some skills for like static ad design and things like that. Playing around obviously with like the videos, the animated videos, we built some skills.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. We had, yeah, Sean showed us how to make animations. Then we went to town. Okay. And then Runneth, let's, let's talk Runneth a little bit because I've actually had a few people message me. How are you guys using Runneth? Where does it live? What is it good at? Maybe, uh, you've been, I watch you in Slack and you just boss it around.

I think I'm nice to it.

Yeah, you're very polite. Uh, but, um, what are, what are you mainly using Runeth for?

It took me a while with like Runneth and even like other harnesses to understand all of it. So I'll try to like explain a little bit. Again, you have, you have really, I guess, 2 different components of like an agent or anything, and you have the harness and the model.

Yep.

Right. And so the model is, you know, you have from Anthropic, you have Claude, you have Fable, you have Opus, there's the different ones. That's the model and there's different sizes and token costs of them. And then you have the harness and the harness is essentially the UX that you're using it with, with any prebuilt skills or things like that. Oh, and then you also have the machine, right? So we're doing stuff locally on our computers primarily, but if your laptop is closed, it's not running.

Yeah.

So a lot of people, what they did with other harnesses, which is a harness that can then run on a model. And yeah, I think we have our Hermes, Hermes as well, which runs on, you run yours on your Codex plan, right? But Hermes and other options are 2 other ones that require a little bit more setup. They're very early and they kind of, you have to be a little bit more technical. And most people run them on a Mac Mini because it just can always run. It never closes. And so that's what we do, but it does require more setup and There are definitely like prebuilt skills that come with those, but they're very general, right? Like there's a skill with Hermes where it auto learns and creates stuff, but like there's no marketing knowledge that it has. There's no, you know, company knowledge. What Runneth is, is again, it can run on multiple models. So it can run on, you know, all of them. We have access to them because they have different skills. Um, it has a lot of prebuilt things. For example, you and I spent a lot of time building static ad skills. With Runneth, it was just done. You know what I mean? Yeah, it's good. It's really good. Yeah. And because they've trained it, you know, it also runs on a virtual computer. So instead of a Mac mini, um, and now, you know, I think they were pretty early to that. Rezo was early to it. Now GrokBot is, you know, they're on a virtual one. Muse is on a virtual one.

Instinct is doing the same thing. Like they're all giving you like sort of dedicated hardware because they also realize like you got to solve the memory problem.

Exactly. So that's essentially it. And then again, you can use it where you want. You can use it in, um, you know, the Motion app and run it or in Slack. And so I also think it's really cool just to have it in Slack and collaborate with people on it. Yeah.

Workflow is like, we live in Slack.

Yeah.

Like most work in companies is like in a Slack.

Yeah.

Yeah.

[Sponsor Content] Yeah. I believe, I don't know exactly everything it's trained on, but obviously Motion has just so much data and context, you know, like Alicia, who's great, who's working with us. Um, you know, she's got a lot of different, just like creative strategy. Yep. Stuff. Um, and so we have it in HQ, but it can do a lot like off the shelf. I'm getting back into the weeds. One of the things I'm probably the rustiest on is email. I'm super excited to be using Omnisend. They're using them on Winks. We're AI-pilled. We are using it to do everything. I'm running most of our email program from Claude and Codex using the MCP, and it's awesome. We also have email, SMS, and popups all in one place. We have all of our flows. Welcome series, it's all talking to each other. I love the platform. The analytics are really good. Highly recommend it, especially if you're in the position that Wings is in, new brand starting out. But if you're on a different platform and you're paying too much and you want to switch, they will do the migration completely for you. No lost data, no lost list. It takes only 5 days start to finish. And they are giving our listeners 30% off the first 3 months. Go to omnisend.com/9operators to try it out for yourself. I have been very impressed with what it can do. I spent 2 hours last week uploading ads and I'm like, I'm never doing this again. And so Runneth is uploading our ads now. So any ad, it'll watch the ad. We created, again, you just have to build this stuff from the beginning. We created a—

You can see like it's connected to Tribe. So like our Tribe creators submit videos, right? And then you can have Runneth upload the videos into It does that.

I had to add captions.

Yeah.

Next step is working on video editing skills. It'll watch the videos, for example, for a static ad or for not, it'll figure out what they're about. I, we built a database, uh, in HQ of our landing pages, right? And if it's a more general sleep one, it'll pull, it'll name the naming conventions and it'll pull copy for the headline and text based on, you know, what we've given it and it'll run it to a general landing page. Versus if it's a melatonin one and it figures melatonin, it's gonna go to our melatonin page we told it to go to with a melatonin headline. That's another example of like the workflow debt that like at Jones Road we had a spreadsheet and there's somebody there who's sitting there matching these things up and going like, and it just takes a ton of time. And so now it's automatic. I was at the US Open the other day. We got some Tribe videos in, they got sent in Slack. I approved them, Runith built them, you know, all you have to do and go into Meta and just, I asked Runith to pause them, keep upload and pause, and then I go in and upload them. But so that's the 10/80/10 thing, right?

It's like, look, you know, we go in, we recruit the creators, we do all that stuff. Then there's this workflow that happens, right? Creators submit videos, Runneth goes in, gets them, sends them to us. We approve uploads. We approve. That's what I mean by like, that's a very AI-first workflow that would have, and my last company, same thing. It's like there would have been a creative key sheet where like all of this stuff is in there. It's all tracked. We try to naming convention, match it to Meta. Like we don't do any of that.

None.

None.

And it's, I was thinking about this before. It's all about how ambitious you want to go. Like we're pretty advanced and like, I was surprised that Runneth could do all of this. And so now even like the motion team is pushing us to be like, let's integrate more. What feedback does Cody normally give on Tribe videos? Like let's have Runneth learn from that. Can Runneth start giving feedback on the videos as it comes in?

Like, so what, what are some examples? Like you're, you've got Slack open. What are some of the things that you've done with?

So there's one of our Tribe videos. So like we just set this up where just any new Tribe video comes in. Again, this is like a pretty basic one, but any new Tribe video comes in and just, you know, to be able to watch.

Yep.

I'll show you. I wanna create, you know, some ads. I mean, this is one I do all the time where like, I don't think that this is the most sophisticated way to come up with ads, but I do it for fun 'cause I'll just be scrolling on X or on social at night and I'm just like, hey, make this for us. And again, yeah, play with this idea.

I like this idea. Can you make me a version?

And that's all. And because this shows, right? If we didn't have the context with HQ and all this stuff, it's like, hey, I want you to make this ad. My brand is Winx. We target moms. It's like, no, here's our ingredients. You do it once, you put it in HQ, you have context, and then you say, make it for us. And it's not always going to do it perfect, but it knows because I've asked it to do it before, always make me a 4 by 5 first. Once I prove that, it'll do that. It'll analyze this one, right? It'll analyze this ad. It'll pull that. It's trained on a decent amount. And it made me an ad. I mean, is it perfect? No, I don't think so. But I'll show you. I mean, it did pull, again, without asking it, images of the ingredients. It had context of the ingredients. But there's some small design things. There should be more spacing there. There should be more padding. Yeah, sure.

We can improve the copy. I think it's just like you go from an idea to a prototype, very quickly, which a lot of people are using AI to do that with software. I mean, one of my goals is like, I want to build less software. Like I don't actually want to use AI to build a lot of custom software. Custom software needs to be taken care of.

Yeah.

But it's like saying I want 45 kids. Like I don't want 45 kids. That sounds like a lot of work. I would like to just continue to use the models, right? And use something like Runa. So I'll have it get better. So now that we've got this, to me, it's like, great. You can take a designer and just like, this is actually really good. Like clean it up and make a better version now.

That is the one part where the handoffs are not good. So on that 10/80/10, like I can one-shot, maybe I'll do this, like I can one-shot a landing page and get it, we'll call it this, like 80% of the way there really easily. That extra 10%, what I wish I could do is hand it to a designer and have them actually do stuff by hand. But there's not a great workflow for going, 'cause this is all—

You literally need to take it by hand now.

This is what I mean. code. And so it doesn't transfer super well to Figma. It, you know, Claude Design is decent and stuff, but like, that's the one challenge. But yeah, I, I completely agree. But if they could fix that, like, that would be epic. 'Cause then you could just ship so much faster. But now going back and forth and being like, hey, I want you to change this headline. I want you to change that. Like, that does take multiple rounds of revisions normally, you know?

If you had a designer, if you had like an amazing one, they would get closer on the first shot. But if you had a junior designer, there's a lot of rounds of feedback. It's like you're going back and forth anyway.

And a lot of this, so like, for example, this headline was, I'll call it benefit-driven. It pulled in one that was more feature right here. And so you just say, hey, you just give it feedback. Hey, Runneth, I want it to be a benefit headline. You pulled in a feature and there's not enough spacing. Please make those changes. Please save this so you don't make this mistake again. And so each time you do it, it's just learning your preferences more and more. So you posted this video and so it uploaded that ad.

Oh, you even tried to get it to whitelist me.

Yeah, yeah. And then it told us, hey, you don't have permissions. Here's what to do. But so it launched that creative analysis. So this is Alicia from Motion. And so analyzing the ad can do a really great job of that. Oh, this was a pretty cool one, captions. So we launched this ad from Tribe, was doing pretty well. It was B-roll, not a talking head. So I thought it needed captions. So Run of added the captions.

captions to the video.

So it downloaded the original video from Tribe using the API.

This is awesome.

Told it who it was, created the naming conventions for it, what campaign it lives in, added the captions, picked what landing page to go to, showed them here.

Jeez.

I didn't love, there was something I didn't love. I forget what it was, but it was like the format or the style of So I asked it to change that.

Sure.

Oh, I wanted to add then like a hook up top.

Yep.

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So it's edit. This is like for people listening Literally editing video in Slack.

Right now it's adding captions to it.

Yeah, but still, that has to edit video. Yeah. And the next step is like to cut it up.

Yeah.

Combine this. See, I use Claude Code for that.

Oh, really?

Like I open up a Claude Code session, uh, and I edit the videos right in there.

Okay, cool.

And we have, um, skills, especially on the animation inside of, uh, YouTube Studio for that. And it's like, it's pretty good. I took what Sean built and I'm just like, okay, that's good. like, how do we make it as repeatable as possible? So you can now go in there and say like, we have consistent characters, you can animate anything for the brand.

So yeah, video editing, it's like very close. So like, but I mean, again, think about, you know, Jones Road, we had 4 or 5 editors and, um, I wasn't doing any design myself, any editing. Like 5 years ago, I tried to teach myself editing, you know, but now like, are we going to be the, you and I going to be the best editor in the world? No, but like a basic UGC thing, we can do things like that. And so I think that's what's so cool is like, Like, if you have a marketing team and you have a growth marketer, they can have this idea and then be empowered to go and do it and not need to put it in Asana and do a brief and get 3 different people reviewing it and then go and do it.

What's your take on this whole ad volume versus quality of ads? And I get that to make great ads, you gotta make a lot of ads, but it seems like everything we're talking about, it would be easy for somebody to look at this and just be like, great. You guys are promoting making like 5,000 sloppy ads every day. Where is this going? Like, I actually wonder, is this going to force us all to make better ads because everybody can make these now?

I think quality first and then volume. And I feel like everyone you ask has a different opinion of this. I mean, if you're doing the same ad and the same messaging, you're not going to get a better hit rate or a better win rate. So I think get the performance, get quality, learn what works, and then you can just ship slop and it can work. Like, I was talking to some e-com dropshipping guy in DMs the other day.

Dude, it's crazy.

And he was asking me some questions and I was asking him and he's like, yeah, it's just AI slop, bro. But like, I think he's getting some winners first though. But no, when we reached out to Sean the other day to like get some ideas on offers and stuff, the first thing he said was, let's just launch 1,000 ads.

Yeah, I know. It's like, Sean, we want to iterate an offer. He's like, launch 1,000 ads. Like, that's not what we asked for.

But like, IMA, stuff like that, like you can see they're, they're all launching a ton of ads, you know, but I think they're getting winners and it's just like, how do you compete with that? Like if you're, if you're not and you're doing things the old way, like I don't know how you—

Yeah, there are ad accounts. I've, there's one, I don't want to name names, uh, in one of my chat groups, there's 14,000 active ads in that ad account. And I'm like, I get it, they're big, but like, that's a lot of ads. Now I think 90% of it is AI slop. But I don't think they would have them in there if they weren't working.

Yeah.

Like at that scale. So there's also part of me thinking like the old school guy in me is like, just make great pieces of content. And then the other part of me is like, well, it's working. You know, people seem to be reacting to this crap. So.

Yeah. I think there's some bar level of quality. And I know that there are people that say that the way you get quality is actually volume.

Yeah.

And I kind of—

I tend to be in that camp, you know, just make a lot and you'll get better at it.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

As long as you're actually getting better at it, I think like if you're working with creators and we're on Tribe, like it is a volume thing, but you do have to then learn from it and get better at it. You can't just make the same ad.

And you have to coach them and you have to like do all that stuff. Yeah. Okay. So, uh, HQ, Omnisend, Rich Panel, uh, all of our site work. There's Higgsfield, Melius, Runneth, because all software now has an element of AI built into it. Um, so like Mike is doing a ton of modeling. Right. So like he took a lot of what he built at Simple Modern around like taking in real-time sales data and can we build a financial model for the business that is updating like in the minute as orders come in, it's then building like individual customer and individual SKU forecasting, which I think is a very interesting use case for AI. All of our asset management, do you want to show people Winks OS and how we're doing this?

Yeah, definitely. So we did this at Jones Road, um, and I just wanted to set it up. So like I set this up before launching, just like kind of very similar HQ. Like anything that is in WinksOS also lives in HQ.

Yep.

But it's just like, how do we get everything in one place?

And how do you get a view, a human viewable version of what's in HQ? Fair. That's how, that's how I like, I use WinksOS. It's like, I still need to be able to look at this stuff sometimes.

I mean, here's a good example, like, uh, design system.

Right.

Like what lives in GitHub is just markdown files and CSS. Yeah.

And it turns out we suck at reading those.

Yeah. And so this is just, you know, a way to visualize it. And then we have a shareable asset, you know, a way to share this, but it's just, here are our rules for typography and font and when we do and use certain things. Um, just so that they stay consistent. So things like that are in here. Also, like, again, like anytime we save an ad, right? Like I have them in here, like, and I just have like different, you know, landers. Let me see if I could find, um, you know, some of them, but like just different ads that we've saved and things like that. Because, you know, if you're using all of these different tools, then your agents don't, might not have access to all of them. And so, you know, that's, that's another example of it.

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And then asset library, same thing. It was like, okay, how do we get it? So I never have, I never want to go to an agent and be like, hey, let me go and I'm going to upload this image and use this image. It just should know. And so in Creative, we built an asset library.

One of the things you can do for people, again, listening, watching, is you can set up a process. So if you're a doom scroller, like I'm a doom scroller and I like to just find stuff, all I do is bookmark or save it. And then my agent picks that up and will then—

You have your Hermes do that?

Yeah.

Okay, cool.

Yeah.

I actually just had Muse do it, because Muse, you know, is the Instagram one.

Yeah, it's built in.

Yeah. But yeah, so I—

Oh wait, so does Muse have access to your Instagram?

Yeah.

Holy cow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like I showed my wife, 'cause we're building a house right now and my wife is doing a lot of it. And so I set her up on her Muse the other day and I was like, hey, go, go ask it to find these fixtures and you're, and you're saved. Yeah. So that's like a really cool—

Oh yeah. I, I, 'cause I think that's like one of the downsides to a lot of this stuff is, um, Instagram's a closed playground, right?

Yeah.

Like you gotta use different tools to scrape and all that. And it's really inefficient, like inefficient in that it uses a lot of tokens, it costs money.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if—

It might be good for creator stuff actually.

Yeah, that's kind of what I'm thinking. Yeah.

So yeah, so here's all our assets again. It's not perfect. I think I have to just do a little bit like architecture on it, but it has all of our assets. You can download 'em, they're all saved here. And actually built an MCP for this asset library. So now it can pull from them and not have to use you know, the browser, but just wanted to get everything in one place, um, versus having all of these different, you know, places and directions and things like that.

Very cool. Before we finish, can you just show people?

I'm gonna show something. It'll take a little bit of time. I'm also gonna show, um, a more complicated version. This is kind of like, not to like toot my own horn, but like something that is not like a, a 101.

Okay.

Just to show like what it can be potentially capable of because These things can be really, really powerful if you allow it to do that.

Sweet.

So it's kind of pull a few of these principles together that we talked about. So number one, I'm gonna use a skill. So I have this Winks page builder skill and I've trained the skill. It's one I built for Jones Road and ported over to Winks, but it is going to build us a new landing page. And it's kind of trained on analyzing an existing landing page, figuring out what are the principles that makes that page successful, And how do we build that page for Wix using our design system?

Okay.

So Javi has great pages. I don't think they'll mind that we're using ours.

They're like one of the best landing pages.

They have, they're amazing pages. I love their UX. So we're going to pick theirs. Um, and I'm a big WhisperFlow guy, so I'll kind of, you know, yap a lot and do things like that. But it, this is going to use the skill. It's going to use context that we have about our business and our brand. And I'm going to set up what's called a loop or goal. I'm actually going to spin out some sub-agents. This is where it's getting a little bit more complicated. Within here, I do have Runneth with the CLI. I have access to it. This is Codex. I do have Claude and then Grok models as well. One thing agents are bad at is grading their own homework.

Yeah.

Right? And so sometimes it helps to bring them out. And I'm going to do a goal, which is essentially saying, don't stop until you do this.

Yep.

That being said, This is, we're doing design thing, which is subjective and it is harder to do. It's called non-verifiable. And so I'm going to try to make it more objective and verifiable, but it's not always perfect. Okay.

How are you going to make it more objective?

I will, I'll show you. I would like you to make a new landing page for Winks using the page builder skill and this Javi page. I want you to use all of the context that you have in HQ about our business, use our current or recent ad performance. To take any learnings that you have from this. I want you to set up a goal. I want you to propose an overly ambitious goal. I want you to spin up adversarial subagents using Runneth, using Claude code on Fable 5.1, Grok as well. I want you to create objective criteria where you're going to spin up creative director subagents. You're going to do at least 3 rounds of revisions. And you are going to get it into a 9.5 out of 10 until you think I would be happy shipping this page live. Ask me any questions you have, set an ambitious goal, and then start.

Boom. And now it'll work. And we don't want to sit here and like—

We'll see. We'll see.

Well, it's going to go do work and it'll probably come back and ask you questions because that's what it does. But then once it's going, it's going to It's just gonna work for a while. Yeah. Right. So we're not gonna make people sit here and watch. No, I get you. 'Cause like that's sort of the thing. And, and do you always do this on like Astra? This is a nerdy question. Astra medium, like why, why medium?

Astra's a new model.

Yeah.

And so it's just very powerful. Uh, very intelligent. You know, it's their most powerful model, so it will use more tokens.

Yeah.

And so I think medium is just, it's, it's a good mix where it can do most things.

Don't put it on extra high.

Yeah. I, or, or else it would burn your weekly, you know, credit.

Yeah. If you say hello to Astra on extra high, it's like there goes half your week. Okay. So while it's working, I think let's, let's wrap. And I want to say this, everything AI is changing all the damn time. Like every week is a massive, like massive whiplash sort of experience.

New models.

New models. Then like this one-upmanship. And it's like, I mean, these labs just continually punch each other in the face and it's fun to watch as a spectator. But I think if you try to keep up with it on a daily, weekly basis, it's, it's a lot. So if I could leave people with sort of, I think I think there's 3 things that I think you absolutely need to like get in place right now. Um, so the first is, and we started off the episode with like company context. So this is like shared memory, inherent knowledge. As you build a business, you're collecting this stuff. You gotta put it all in one place. It needs to be agent-friendly and it needs to be human-friendly, right? Would you agree? That's number one.

Yeah, definitely. Okay.

Number 2, and this is, I have a very strong bias here because I've seen the value of it at this point, is you should build your own, this is not company, your own CEO founder brain and agent to take care of your brain. Everything that you read, write, watch, anything you create, every email you get, everything that is literally entering just your brain, not your teammates, just yours, That should all be stored and duplicated somewhere that is like AI-friendly so that as you go through life, you're keeping a perfect copy of everything that you do with work and personal. So that like when I start my next day, I have like a perfect, like, here's what you're doing today. Here's context from the last week. I can see that you're meeting with Cody. This is the last thing that you talked to Cody about. Like all of it's in my brain. And I say this because as a founder or a builder or creator, whatever you want to call yourself, There is no fucking way that you remember all this. Like, there's just not. I don't remember what I did last year on this day. I don't. My brain does though. Like, it has a perfect recounting of that. So I think that's number 2. Would you agree?

I think so. Yeah. I mean, I have it. I use it as my note-taker. I don't use it. I'll just use my Hermes and be like, hey, I parked here. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. To keep everything there. Okay. Number 3 is what you just showed us, which is learn to work in goals and loops. So a lot of people use these tools and it's a very linear and transactional, hey ChatGPT, hey Claude, I would like you to go do this for me, and then they wait for it. And if they're crazy, then maybe they have 4 or 5 or 10 of them going all at once. But what you just showed us is like, I'm gonna give it a job.

Mm-hmm.

I have a goal in mind and I'm gonna give it specific set of instructions and you're just human language this thing, and then you're going to let it go off and work, and it's going to figure out how to get, reach the objective, and it's going to loop around and do whatever. It's absolutely token heavy. Like it can be very token heavy. Would you agree with that? That, that is like a skill that people working with AI, they should have that right now?

Yeah. I would say first start using agents. And so I think only 2% of the population are using agents and most people are using chat. There are a lot of people who don't know what it can do. And there's people that are using it like a chatbot, and then there's people who are running entire businesses and their whole lives with it. And I think agents are becoming more popular as Muse or GrokBot or Instinct are making it easier to set up.

Yeah.

But I would say just start experimenting. If you're using it like that, start somewhere and start having it do things for you and taking things that you used to do manually. And it could be as easy as organizing your inbox. It's a great place to start.

Yep.

Or organizing your files on your desktop. But as far as go and do this action for me, buy this thing for me, do this flight, upload these ads, like take some manual things. And then once you're done with manual things, then take things that are actually hopefully income producing, revenue producing, and create these ads, build these things. So just test that. And then once you get that, then putting it all together where you have your context, your skills, your MCPs, your software, your brain, agents, set up loops for that, and that can— you get the full power of these systems.

Yeah, I like that. That's great framing. Awesome, dude. I think that's the pod.