A (2:31)

When was that exactly?

B (2:32)

That would have been the end of November of 2022, just as soon as ChatGPT launched, you know, but the reality is I was part of a group of people called, which has evolved into what we call the Rise community with Mark Schaefer. And, you know, of course, you know Mark, and we were talking about all this stuff, and as soon as this thing launched, the texts are going buzzing like crazy and, oh, gosh, you got to see this thing by Shelly Palmer and you got to like. So we start looking at it and I felt like it was like putting on an old leather shoe. So comfortable for me. So from that moment on, I have been like. I don't know, I want to say. I want to say neck deep, but it's more like totally submerged in the world of generative AI. And, you know, I was a corporate guy at the time, so finding ways to use it and implement it was really challenging. And I had to, you know, make a lot of, I suppose, new excuses during my job and try to figure out ways to bring it into work. And it actually ended up working in my favor for the most part. And it allowed me to experiment even more under the auspices of my company. And then, you know, I went on my own eventually and here I am now. So it's been a. It's been a heck of a journey.

A (3:39)

Well, awesome. Super awesome to get you on the show. I mean, we've. We've connected at so many different conferences over the years, so it's really great to have you here. All right. When it comes to creating agents, which is effectively the bucket, the category under which we're going to be talking about today, what do you see as one of the biggest misconceptions that are out there? Because I know you're talking with a lot of people, they're talking to you, and there might just be some. Some things that we have to dispel before we get into this today. Let's talk about that a little bit, for sure.

B (4:07)

And I. I just want to put the caveat out there that I'm. I'm not an agentic AI guy, you know, I. I just experiment and do what I need to do. But that said, I think the first issue that we've seen and the first misconception is one just of what the heck is an agent, right? Nobody can agree on what an agent is. Or maybe we can. We're starting to agree now, but you know, you hear things like, oh, it's something that you just kind of let loose and runs around and does whatever the heck it does and ends up getting your credit card numbers and you're done. Right? That's one version. Another version is like for our copilot users out there, sorry, they see agent and they think basically custom GPT, you know, like, so there's that whole range in between. And you know, to me, basically an agent is any AI, like semi autonomous or autonomous AI, let's call it action or activity that you start and you let it go. And it has a degree of. It could do multiple things. It's not just working on one thing. It can actually, you know, when the AI actually accesses something else that's not in the immediate, like interface, for example, when it can access an app, when it can access your web, when it does one of those things, then it becomes agentic. There's an argument to be said that it's, that's like, oh, that's just a basic automation. But I think it goes, you know, far beyond from that moment where you're just, okay, I think I'm going to create an agent that's going to collect newsletters for me all the way up to. I'm going to just leave my computer open and let Cowork and Dispatch just run my day so that when I run my run overnight, so that when I wake up in the morning, I've got all kinds of things done that is extremely agentic. So, so there's, there's a range.

A (5:46)

Love it. Okay, so let's talk about Claude Cowork. We're going to get into the how side of it in detail. But what are the benefits? What are the, what's the upside when someone embraces Claude Cowork? And I'm going to confess, I have really not done very much with it at all. So I'm asking just as much for myself as I am for everyone who's listening. What, what does it open up? What are the advantages, the benefits?

B (6:15)

Well, first of all, I don't think. You're certainly not alone. I mean, it's still technically a research product from Anthropic.

A (6:23)

I believe it's six months old, right?

B (6:24)

I mean, it's less than a few months old and people look at it go, okay, what is this? Why did my desktop app for Claude all of a sudden change? And it's hard to kind of initially understand, well, why do I need it? But I think that the advantages and the kind of the, you know, the, the benefits, so to speak, of jumping in aren't apparent until you start to jump in. You know, it's one of those kinds of things. But what I learned real fast about that and when I started playing around with it, I thought, okay, this is, this is an interesting way to centralize some of the activities I have going on in claude. And then I realized, wait a second, this is an interesting way to centralize some of the things I have going on on my PC. And then it sort of started to dawn on me that it was a way to enhance and augment the building and the work that I've already done, whether it's in claude, on my PC, somewhere else, in my ecosystem, all from one convenient location. Because the agent that is Cowork is actually a system of many agents and it just does the job. I mean, that's, it's incredibly useful in that way. But I think you start to see the benefits immediately because, you know, becomes a one stop shop, like I said, for everything you've been doing in claude. And you know, especially if you're a CLAUDE user, the benefits are pretty clear immediately. But even if you're not, the fact that you start to work within files on your PC, the fact that you start to, you know, that you can see that it's connected to not only, you know, to your Google Drive and to things like that, which is nothing new in the world of AI really, but you start to be able to connect dots and understand the workflows that you have better than you did before because Cowork helps you understand them. And it goes all the way, I think, from there to, to this kind of ultimate benefit, which is, and I heard, I'm not going to take credit for this because it was a brilliant quote from, from Nate B. Jones. I don't know if you, if you ever see and if you. Nate B. Jones's videos. Guy's a genius, very technical fellow, but he said that it gets work off your desk. Like that's what it does. It gets work off your desk. And, you know, that's, I think, a

A (8:45)

killer benefit for folks that are regular listeners to the podcast. The week before this week we did a podcast episode about Open Claw. And this week we are doing it specifically on Claude Cowork. Now, while Dan was talking, I looked. Claude Cowork came out in January of this year. So it's extremely new. Open Claw came out like literally, I think November or December of the prior year. So these are very, very, very new applications. And Claude coworkers by the company Anthropic. And Claude, as anybody who listens to the show knows, is one of my favorite apps that I, that I use all the time as far as AI stuff goes. So I just want to kind of set the groundwork that this is very, very new. And I work really hard to try to find people that understand this stuff that can speak to it with a. Of competency because they've done it. And when Dan and I connected and we decided to do this topic, I was very excited about this. So, Dan, what do we need to understand about Claude Cowork before we get into the actual house side of it? Because you've already made the case that this goes beyond your typical AI tool. It goes beyond ChatGPT, it goes beyond Google Gemini, it goes beyond Google Claude, because it has the ability to do things that frankly, those tools cannot do on their own. But just what, what exactly do we need to understand? Just help people kind of wrap their brains around kind of some basic stuff they need to understand.

B (10:11)

Yeah, I mean, wrapping your brain around is, is, is probably an apt way to, to, to start that, that discussion. Because I think initially you need to have the right mindset before you jump into something like this. And that is you're not going to go in there and chat with it like your buddy, or maybe you could eventually, but you're not going to treat it like a chatgpt or like a regular interface. You want to be a manager, you want to be a supervisor and a manager. The first thing is you're going in there imagining that now you have a team, and maybe I should have said that in the benefits section, but essentially cowork becomes. It's the fulfillment of that AI team that we have been talking about for ages. So when you have an AI team, the team needs a manager and a supervisor. So you gotta go in that with that managerial and supervisory intent. It also means you need vision. You have to be clear about your intention. The better you are in describing and understanding everything that you want to do in a given session, the better that cowork will work for you. It's the same with any AI, of course, the context is key, but with cowork in particular, it's going to go in a direction and it's going to keep going. You can stop it, but you want to make sure that you're not wasting your time and you're focused on your goals and on your tasks and on things you want to take care of. The other things that you, that you need to take care of. More kind of housekeeping, logistical type, type things like it works on your computer, like it, it works in your PC. You have to be comfortable with that. You have to have the security on your PC or the security settings in mind when you do that. And it's worth noting that when you are using Cowork, if you're using the, the Claude Pro or Max plan, you know, you need to be actively toggling off whether or not to make it available to training. So you have to actively opt out, let's say, of the training. And if you're on an enterprise version or a team version, it doesn't share the training, but it's not logged yet for compliance purposes. So anything you do on Cowork is pretty much, you know, on you. And you should check with your security levels at your company or wherever you are that see if it's allowed. The next thing that you have to understand, of course, you're allowing it to run free on your computer to a point, but it keeps asking you for permissions. So again, if you let it into someplace that it shouldn't be and it pulls out data that it shouldn't have, it's your fault. Just remember that. And then the fact that, you know, Mike alluded to it to it earlier, it can operate different apps within your PC or, you know, through the Web. And we're not talking about MCP connections, although those exist, we're talking about it. It can actually go and, you know, take your API and build something for you someplace. You know, like there's a lot that it can do. You have to be mindful of all of the security and all of the compliance risks that might come with that. So you are giving up a lot. But at the same time would say different from openclaw, which you. You've just spoken about, Mike. Anthropic provides and, you know, with claude, a much safer environment in which to do this. So your Claude desktop, and by the way, this only works through the desktop app, doesn't work through the Web. So you use your cloud. You have to download Claude desktop if you don't have it already for your PC or for your Mac. And that's where it works. It's kind of a sandbox. It's not going to go anywhere. It's not going to cause any problems unless you let it loose on the world and tell it to.

A (13:33)

Okay, I want to ask a couple of clarifying questions. If somebody already has a cloud account, they're paying their $20 a month or whatever it is, is that Good enough or do they need a higher level 2 here to use a tool like this? What's your reaction?

B (13:45)

Well, initially was only rolled out to what they call the, the Max plan people, but I think now it's available to anybody with Cloud Pro. Yeah, so you need to be paying. It's just you running, you run into uses, usage limits when, you know, you're at a, if you're not paying the most, etc. You know, the way you would expect.

A (14:02)

Yeah, I have like whatever 20amonth plan and it's available to me. I know that is available. Okay, so the next question has to do with a little bit of security stuff. The discussion that a lot of people are having specifically about utilizing tools like Open Claw and maybe even Claude Code is, hey, maybe find a separate computer because it's going to have access to a lot of things and it could do things to your computer that could be not good. Is that not the case with Claude Cowork? Is Claude Cowork a little more safe to use on your everyday work computer? Talk to me about that.

B (14:39)

Yeah, so, you know, I, I would defer to our friend Chris Penn for some of these discussions.

A (14:46)

What are you doing though? You know?

B (14:47)

Yeah, but I believe that you know and I know that Claude, if you run Claude code or, or Cowork, it is fundamentally safer than an Open Claw or one of these other open source products. Right. And in some cases you do get what you pay for. You're paying for security, you know, you're opting out where you need to opt out. You have the limits that you can place. And of course, if you're on a team or enterprise version, much, much more secure. So it's a matter of how far do you let it in to your computer. I wouldn't recommend like, I don't think you need a separate PC, a new PC to run something like, you know, Cowork. I would, if I was doing Openclaw, I would take out one of the PCs I haven't picked up in a while and dust it off and say, you know, maybe it'll run openclaw.

A (15:33)

Yeah.

B (15:34)

And, but yeah, I don't think the security concerns, while you should always be concerned about security and act as if you're going to be hacked any second. Right. You should be more at ease with Cowork than with the other ones.

A (15:48)

Here's what we heard so far. You got to have a paid account with Claude. Any one of them should do. You might hit limits, you might have to upgrade depending on what you want to do with it, you have to manage this thing kind of like you manage a person.

B (15:59)

Yeah.

A (16:00)

And it does work as a downloadable standalone app on your computer. And just make sure you have the settings in Claude turned off to train the model, because obviously it's going to get access to things, presumably that you don't want the Claude ecosystem to get trained on. So then as far as actually, what can it do?

B (16:18)

Yeah.

A (16:18)

And look, I'm assuming you've been a regular cloud user before you started Cloud Cowork.

B (16:22)

Yes.

A (16:22)

So there's a lot of people that already use Claude like me, and we already know that you can do a lot within Claude with projects. It's kind of a very powerful thing, and you can connect things to projects using connectors and all that kind of fun stuff. So what is like the extra push that comes from Cowork that is not available, you know? Yeah, exactly.

B (16:44)

Yeah. So the project Claude project, for those of you out there who may not be familiar with what a cloud project is, it's sort of Claude's answer initially to what a custom GPT is or something like this. But you create a fixed environment within Claude, like a little cloud within a cloud that has its own system prompt and its own resources, et cetera. Right. So. And you can work within that to achieve very specific and certain goals. And they're really robust and there's a lot you can do with them. And they kept adding more and more to them. Right. They kept adding connectors and different things, you know, Then where. Where Cowork comes in is it takes that project and then adds an entire layer of, okay, let's bring this project out into the world in a way and really enhance everything that you can do with it, with access to the web, access to apps, access to other things, and bringing CLAUDE code into the picture and bringing building and creating into the picture and finding new ways to maybe take your project in new directions. You know, I think so many people have built great, great cloud projects and, you know, through extreme effort and ingenuity, have Create. Have transformed those projects into apps, sometimes skills, which is something we'll talk about, which makes a lot of sense. But now you have a whole new frontier, or expansive, unknown frontier where you can take what you've built in the project and really kind of blast it out. So, like, let's say, for example, you have a cloud project that focuses on, we'll just say, content creation. Very simple. Right. You have a content creator for yourself. You might have built a skill on that before if you were really Advanced, or you might have, you know, kind of done a lot with it. With connectors with Claude Cowork, you can connect cowork or connect the project into cowork. So the project, the entirety of the project, becomes context for what you're going to do in Cowork. Oh, then you can use Cowork as if you're using the project. You know, you can tell it, I want you to follow the rules of the project. Or like, do, you know, look at, check out the instructions I have for the project. That's what I really want you to do. But, you know, what am I missing? What else can we do? How can I automate parts of this? And then because of the way that it uses resources in context, you can go a lot longer in a cowork conversation than you could in a project. And I am not super familiar with exactly how the technology behind that works, but when it approaches the context window, it automatically will compact the conversation and continue to keep going. And it will look for ways to. To use less context. So the conversations go a lot longer. You can get a lot more done.

A (19:27)

You know, as I'm thinking this through, I think I have an analogy. It's kind of like when you work with a project or any kind of AI bot, for lack of better words. You have to micromanage every single little task. It does what you ask it to do. It takes a few minutes, and then you have to look at it and you have to go back and forth and back and forth. It seems as if what Cowork does is it can tackle larger projects because it can actually go out and do all the pieces kind of on its own instead of doing them step by step. So it requires a little bit less active management, a little bit less micromanagement. It's the equivalent of hiring an employee who knows absolutely nothing and is constantly standing in front of your desk asking questions, versus one who's a little bit more experienced, is only going to come back when it to be needs. Is that kind of what I'm hearing you say?

B (20:16)

Yeah, I think so. And I think, you know, a good way to think about it is you. So you. Let's go back to our content creation project. Okay, You've got. You've got the Mike Stelzner bot, or whatever you want to call it. Whenever you want to write something in that, you upload some document or you kind of think about, okay, here's what I want to write about. And you bring in some resources, et cetera, right? And you go through it Miraculously, you get some great content out of it, I hope, Right? Well, with Cowork, let's say you connect Cowork to the project. You don't have to go searching for documents anymore. You just start to say, look, here's what I want to do, Claude, cowork for my content engine. I want something every day. I want a new article on this topic. I want you to go out and search for it. Then I want you to bring it here. And using the guidelines I have in my project, I want you to create three summaries and two LinkedIn posts and so on. So you can do this, have it all done for you by the time you wake up in the morning or while you're getting a cup of coffee or whatever it is, and you've just sort of radically expanded your capability and maintained the quality gates that you've probably put into your product or to your project.

A (21:17)

I love it. Let me ask you this. Is it taking over my browser so I cannot work at the same time, or is it all done behind the scenes?

B (21:24)

Well, it's interesting. If you want it to take over your browser, you have to allow it to, of course. But when it does, you can see it. You can. It opens up a tab group. If you're in Chrome, it opens up a tab group and it's working over there. And you may get, you know, you may get these kind of cloud is now debugging your browser type thing, and initially that freaked me out. But you can continue doing whatever you're doing while it does its thing in its browser windows and you can go look at what it's doing. Like you can open up, you can go click over into its tab group and you can see it moving the mouse. It's slow, but it does the job. Yeah. So you can continue working on everything else while it's going in the background.

A (21:57)

I talked to a lot of people on the ground at AI Business World last month, and what I heard over and over again is people are having a hard time keeping up with the change and figuring out exactly where they should focus. And it's true that that is hard to keep up with. But my keynote, I think could help. It was called the Future of Marketing how to Thrive When AI Changes Everything. And in it, I share research, real AI applications, and a clear framework for yielding AI as your most powerful ally, making you irreplaceable. And here's the thing, you can still watch it. And not just that keynote, but every keynote and session and workshop from both AI Business World and social media marketing world is available to you right now with your virtual ticket. We're talking dozens of quality sessions focusing on AI workflows, content, Instagram, Facebook ads, and a whole lot more. And you have 18 months to consume it. All right, now, tickets are on sale for $200 off, but only until May 15th. Head over to AIbusinessWorld Live, that's AIbusinessWorld Live, to get your tickets today. All right, you have a couple of examples that you and I agreed on. One is about WordPress, and the other one's about SEO. Let's give those examples and then we'll dig into some of the granular details.

B (23:12)

Yeah, and I will say that this is kind of. You asked earlier about how you wrap your head around it, and you wrap your head around it by experimenting. And my first kind of run with it to kind of really see how it could go, especially with browser takeover, I was, okay. All right, cloud cowork, let's see what you can do. I have a WordPress website, and I'm not a WordPress guy. I, you know, I've learned a lot. I can do a lot with WordPress, but I was having some particular issues with plugging in snippets of code, which incidentally, six months ago, snippets of code would never have been in my vocabulary. Right. So the fact that I'm saying that is a miracle.

A (23:49)

Code snippets, I think is what they call them.

B (23:51)

But yeah, what code snippets, you know, and thank you. So, yes, it's still not properly in my vocab, but it's all good, you know, code snippets, anything. And I didn't. I didn't even know how to do it. And I said, okay, let's do it. We can do. So I opened up cowork and I said, all right, here's my problem, and I want you to go to my WordPress website and et cetera says, and then it goes to website. Can you log in for me? Sure, I'll logged in. And then it proceeded to go through the dashboards in the back end of my WordPress to locate where I needed to make the changes. And it said to me, oh, what you need is a plugin that allows you to insert and inject snippets into the page code. Would you like me to install that for you? Here are your choices. And it gave me three choices and said, this is. And it told me this choice is probably the recommended one because it has five bajillion daily users These are a little less. So I say, fine, do what you want. Right? Make it happen. And it wasn't like, instantaneous. It walked me through the process. But by the end of the session, I had. The snippets were where they needed to be. It didn't break my website. And in this case it was snippets for some advertising code, you know, for some code, for some tracking for code. So, like, it put it in there perfectly well. Now success. I thought this was tremendous. If it could do this, what else could it do? And then my brain started going, you know, so I said, okay. Still in the same session, you must have noticed, Claude, that I have Yoast SEO on there, but I also have Google Tag Manager and these other things. I have all these things, help me set up all the things. And, you know, to my great pleasure, it helped me come up with all of the ways to. You know, when you build websites, sometimes you don't fill all the stuff in. You're just like, okay, I'm just going to do this and let's. Nope. It gave me everything for everything and gave me, at least at that level, what I needed to have an SEO optimized website. Now, of course, then you need to have the human who's really an expert to come in and say, well, you know, you should do it differently. And that's. I would totally recommend that. But if you're just getting off the ground, oh, my gosh.

A (25:57)

Well, I mean, you could technically tell it to learn how to do that and be the expert and have another Cowork session come in and actually review it. Could you not?

B (26:06)

You absolutely could. And maybe that's a good segue into our discussion about skills and about. About plugins and so on with, with. With Cowork.

A (26:15)

Yeah. Before we go there, before we go there, first of all, we've talked about projects and one of the questions I've got is, has to do with, like, costs. Right. Because if anybody uses Claude, they know that at least as of this recording, Opus is the greatest model, but it also kind of burns through your credits pretty quickly. And then Sonnet is the next most powerful one. With Cowork, do you kind of get to choose or how does that work? Like, let's talk about that a little bit.

B (26:47)

Sure. Just like anything else, any other Claude interface, you'll be familiar with the interface. If you're familiar with Claude, you have the box and you can choose your model and make connections and all this kind of stuff. Just some of the options are different. But yeah, you can choose your model and decide where you're going to burn your tokens. If you're concerned about that, and if you're not on a max plan, you should be concerned about that. Probably, especially. Especially now at the time of this recording, you know, there's been an influx of users. So, yeah, Anthropic is tamping it down a little. So, yeah, you can be careful. And there's certain things you definitely don't need Opus 4.6 for. And, you know, it's on.

A (27:21)

So you were telling me in preparation that you had some projects that you had created that were not optimized for opus. Talk a little bit about how you used Cowork to help you with that.

B (27:32)

Yeah, well, once I discovered that, that you could connect projects into Cowork, and you could do that in one of two ways. You can go from the project. There's a. If you're in cloud project, you could say opening Cowork, but now Cowork has a little add button at the bottom. You can. You can add a project in, and I believe you can add multiple projects into one session. But don't quote me on that yet. I've been using cloud projects since there's been cloud projects, whatever that is.

A (27:57)

Yeah.

B (27:57)

612 months, 18 months. I don't know what the numbers. You do, right?

A (28:00)

I feel like it's been forever. Yeah, yeah.

B (28:02)

So you go back and you say, okay, well, I designed this project when I. When we were still on, you know, Sonnet 4.1, and. Or I knew, whatever. And now we're on Opus, and the prompts or the system prompts that you have, that you've built under Sonnet don't work the same way in opus, or it's not necessary to work the same way in opus and vice versa. So I had a few projects that I was working on a lot, and I said, oh, well, maybe coworker. You know, normally I would. I would take the project instructions copied into an MD file and say, okay, hey, you know, let's go through this. Let's. Let's tidy this up. But open the project and Cowork. I said, cowork, this project was designed for Sonnet 4.5. It will do better with Opus 4.6. I want you to optimize it for me. Great. Will do. And then it just went. And it gave me a complete new set of instructions. It revised the system instructions or the system prompt, which was able to cut it down by almost half.

A (28:56)

Wow.

B (28:56)

It told me to get rid of a bunch of the Resources that were like now considered to be redundant because Opus 4.6 has a lot of inferential capabilities that you don't need to spoon feed it everything. And yeah, it ended up like I went, I had one project, I never used the max amount of space allowed, but I had one project that was up to like 30 or 40, 40% of usage of like allotted space after optimizing went down to 15%. The thing works a lot faster and it works better. I mean like I didn't necessarily trust him. Like why don't you need that. That guideline that I spent so long creating, you know, not what, we don't need it.

A (29:33)

I love it.

B (29:33)

Claude is principle based.

A (29:35)

So did it make a new project for you or did it actually just give you the system instructions and you had to do it yourself? I'm just curious.

B (29:43)

Well, it, it, at that time when I did it, it didn't create a new project for me. I don't know if I could do that today. Maybe it could. Okay, but, but no, I didn't. It just told me, here, just cut and paste these over what you got and make it happen.

A (29:54)

Love it.

B (29:55)

And I did. It was easy.

A (29:56)

Okay, so talk to me about connectors. Because we dropped the word connectors earlier. We mentioned that connectors are something you can use inside of almost anything in Claude.

B (30:08)

Yeah.

A (30:08)

What do connectors do and how do they differ specifically when it comes to cowork, if at all?

B (30:14)

I wouldn't say they differ that much when it comes to cowork, except coworker uses them a lot more efficiently.

A (30:20)

What are they exactly? Describe.

B (30:22)

So okay, connectors are generally, you know, usually MCP based for the non technical audience.

A (30:26)

What does that mean?

B (30:27)

It's a. I knew you were going to ask me that. It's.

A (30:30)

You don't have to say something.

B (30:32)

Context protocol.

A (30:33)

Yeah, but like describe it in non technical terms. What is mc?

B (30:36)

So it, you know, there's, there's different ways to connect from app to app.

A (30:40)

Model context protocol. By the way, I just looked.

B (30:43)

Model context protocol. Thank you very much. There's different ways to connect from apps. App. Right. You can use an API which is like was never for the faint of heart before. Now it's, now it's not that hard. But you can do it that way. But an MCP connection is like a USB that goes between one app and another. Like it's just a universal connector.

A (31:00)

Okay. It's just, it's like a connector. Okay. Yeah. And what. Why would you want to use them at all?

B (31:05)

Because when you have different apps connected in by MCP or, you know, or by API. But here we're talking about the connectors. The MCPs, generally speaking, it gives Claude seamless integration and use of these different tools. And then it can make decisions on the fly about whether or not which connector is going to be necessary or, hey, I'm going to try, you know what? Oh, I see you have Airtable. Let's. Let's see if we can build this out in airtable. Right? Let's build this out in Google Sheets. Where do you want the output? So it gives it a lot more. Many more options from which to build whatever you're going to build or solve what you're going to solve and enables you to really just expand your tool ecosystem in ways that you may not have thought of before.

A (31:46)

Well, and for folks that are curious where you find these, if you go into Claude and you go into your settings, there's a thing called connectors and it looks like there's like a thousand of them. I mean loads of them. I don't even know what half these things are, but what are some of the ones that. I'm seeing some stuff in here like ah, RAF and Active Campaign and Airtable on Asana, by the way, that's one of the ones I've used because we use Asana, but like GitHub, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Calendar. What are some of the ones that you recommend and how are you using them? Just so people can understand that the

B (32:20)

beauty of MCPS is that. And the reason there's so many of them is that it's situational. So you, as a marketer and a communicator, what are the things that you're doing all the time? You know, like I don't need an Asana connector, so I don't have one. You know, it's available to me, but why would I do it? But I use Airtable a lot and I use Google Drive all the time and I use my Gmail and all these, you know, these things. So I chose the connectors that are connected to the things that I use all the time for work. So by connecting to Google Drive now, I give Claude access easy access to the folders and to the, to the files I have, I've saved there. But I also give the capability to write to it, so it can do outputs that way. By connecting to airtable, there's a lot you can do with an Airtable or with an Asana or some of those things. So it be. Could, you know, Claude now Helps me to build out bases in airtable and reporting and all that good stuff.

A (33:09)

You used to have to use third party tools like Zapier and Make and all that stuff. Right. This kind of bypasses that to a point.

B (33:16)

Right. So there's some native integration through MCP that you can do, there's some that you can't, and it varies app to app. What I've found is that I try whatever I can do to avoid automation, like, to avoid dealing with and make and like, what a pain in the neck. And that, by the way, is maybe my favorite thing about Claude Cowork is it just allowed me to skip right over all that stuff, you know. But yes, sometimes you do need an additional, an additional connector and when you're working with Claude, it will tell you, you know, you really should connect this with make or with Zapier. Right. Which by the way, also have MCPs within, within Claude.

A (33:53)

I want to talk about Control Chrome, because this is a critical one we've kind of alluded to a little bit earlier. Explain why that's so valuable.

B (34:01)

How much of your work are you doing in Chrome? Right. How much of your work are you doing in your browser?

A (34:05)

Like almost 100% of it for me.

B (34:07)

Right.

A (34:07)

You know what I mean?

B (34:08)

Exactly. And you know, sure, you can be doing work through apps. And where, where do those apps open? They generally open in your browser. You know, when you want to do any kind of coding or design. If you're not using the terminal, if you're not a little adventurous, you're using your browser. Therefore, when you, when you let Claude control your, you give it control of Chrome, you're basically saying you can write this stuff for me, you can fill in this form for me, you can click these buttons for me. This tool that I never heard of before. If you're saying that it's going to really be the thing that solves my deepest and greatest desire, then by all means open up Chrome and give it a go. You just generally need to sign in and give it authorization to do it. And you need to be careful. But it is, it's been revolutionary in some ways for me. And, and as you said before, like it can do it while you're doing other things, you know, and it opens up its own tab group and it goes, you know, hey, I'm checking this out now, and I'm checking that out now. It gives you, it gives you the play by play if you want to check it out. But it's not only a productivity booster, which sort of goes without saying, it's actually a. I'd say horizon expander. You know, like, it just. It will keep going in directions and take screenshots and it finds things that you didn't find before and everything from proofing your own website, which is probably the most basic thing to let's inject some code or let's open up this app and go ahead and build something for me. If it can be done through Chrome, then Cloud can do it through Chrome. If you give it control.

A (35:43)

Love it. Okay, you mentioned skills, and I think you might have mentioned the word plugins. So I don't know what the difference is. Are they one in the same? Let's talk about that a little bit.

B (35:53)

Luckily, we can. We. I think we can talk about them together. Okay, so. Okay, so a skill is. Let's just think of skill as a task that you do a lot that you can. Now you can create a little mini package program. It's almost like a little custom GPT that you insert into Claude. So, for example, I have a skill that I built called the ideal customer profile skill. So I knew what my ideal customer profiles were, so I created the Personas and I just said, claude, build a skill from this. So Claude built a skill so that now if I create something or if I have an idea, I say, can you run this by my ICPs? And it invokes the ICP skill and then it does what the ICP skill tells it to do. Right? And you know, a skill is, Is. Is a little package of several assets. That's all it is. Now, you can have a bunch of different skills, and Claude comes native with a lot of them. Like when it writes a Word document, it's using a Word, a Docx skill when it's, you know, when it goes to PowerPoints using a PowerPoint skill. Plugins are collections of skills.

A (36:48)

Okay?

B (36:49)

I think that's the best way to think about, like, a bucket of skills. So plugins are a new thing for cowork, but essentially you install a. Let's say you install the legal plugin, which is, I think what I talked to you about earlier, Mike, is the legal plugin is a collection of. I don't know off the top of my head, but let's say six or seven legal skills. So one of those skills is like contract a review, and one of those skills is. Is risk assessment. So when you have a legal issue, you know, you can invoke the legal plugin and it will find what it needs to do, but in fact, you generally don't even need to do that because if you have the plugin installed, Cowork knows, hey, I'm going to use my legal stuff and I'm going to do this. I should say, by the way, that between the last time we talked and now there's been a court case that was. That got a lot of air about. And I can't recall the exact. It's US versus Hadrick or something, but anything you do in Claude is not considered attorney client privilege. So be careful with using legal plugins and then, you know, acting on them before you consult your attorney. Okay. So it's important, but there's different kinds of plugins and.

A (38:02)

Yeah, I want to talk about this a little bit. So when you're inside of Claude or you're inside of the app, it's called Customize. It looks like a little toolbox, right?

B (38:10)

Yeah, they changed it. It was connector now like it was connection to go to. You go to customize and you can

A (38:14)

add these things and underneath there you have connectors and you have skills. So first of all, how in the world do we make a skill and then how do we find these other skills as well? Because it's not super intuitive to me. You're like right out of the gate, how in the world to do this?

B (38:31)

Well, there's a skills marketplace just like there is for anything else. And you can, you can, when you go and you add a skill, you go to like manage skills and.

A (38:38)

Oh, here we go. Yeah, I'm in it right now and I actually see like when you click

B (38:42)

on skills, there's a plus at the top.

A (38:44)

There's something that says browse plugins and I see productivity, design, marketing, data engineering, finance. There's like just a limited amount. These are presumably things that, these plugins are presumably made by Anthropic and partners.

B (38:57)

It says so it tells you, right? It tells you whether it's anthropic created or not. You know, so those, those are the plugins.

A (39:03)

Okay.

B (39:04)

You know, and, and skills are just like, you know, one off little packages that you can, there's a marketplace for them. You can, you can find a lot of them, you can create them yourself. It's easy to build a skill. Like when I had the ICP situation, I just knew that was something I kept asking Claude to do. Can you check this again? Here's my three customer profiles. I'm going to load them into this chat. Can you check this against these three customer profiles? Perfect use case for a skill. If you keep doing that, just package it as A skill and just. It's in there and you just say, hey, now check these against my, my ICPS brand guidelines are a great example for that. You know, you have brand guidelines for Social Media Media examiner. You can package that in a skill and you can anytime it creates a doc or something. You say, now run this against my brand guidelines. So.

A (39:48)

Well, and my understanding is that, I mean, I know I, I've used Claude to create a skill from a project. I said make it as a skill.

B (39:55)

That's right. You can do that.

A (39:56)

And it used to be that I had to download a file and re. Upload it, but I think that's not the case anymore. Is that correct? You can.

B (40:00)

That's right, yeah. I mean it's, they make it easy. It used to save it as a, like as a zip file and then you had to drag it over or it saves it as a skill MD and you drag it over. Now it's easy, it's much easier. You can just kind of drag the skill into the conversation and it will, it will, you know, install it for you. Yeah.

A (40:18)

Have you used any of the off the shelf skills or do you prefer to make your own skills because you have a little bit more, you know, customization options? What's your thoughts on that?

B (40:29)

I've used both. You know, I, I haven't made that many myself because in, you know, in the realm of sometimes when I'm creating content especially or when I'm writing or when I'm kind of evaluating an executive profile or whatever it is I'm doing, a lot of that is eyeballing and my own knowledge that isn't really necessarily packaged into a skill. But when it comes to things like editing or like creating or just like if I putting things in brand guidelines, yeah, I have skills for those and checking against my ICPs or Personas, you know, I start the new company that I started called Lillipath is, is all about LinkedIn optimization. At this point. There's, it's going to be more than that. But at this point, right. If you want to. We have a very unique way of, of, of evaluating and optimizing profiles that started months and months ago as a skill in my Claude, you know, a project that became a skill. So like there's this kind of pathway that you can go if you start to play with this. The other thing about skills is that they're portable so you can send them to other people and they can then install it on their cloud. And by the way, be careful about that. But you can do that?

A (41:34)

Yeah, I wanted to ask about that because it is true. Like, I've got multiple staff members. We don't have a team account, but they've got individual accounts. And I've sent them a skill for my conference that was really well trained up with a big document of testimonials that it can pull from. You mentioned there's marketplaces for skills. Like, do you know where to find those marketplaces?

B (41:52)

And, oh, it, it's just through Claude. Through the.

A (41:54)

Oh, okay.

B (41:55)

Because when you add skills, you can just kind of scroll through and you'll. Got it, you know, you'll see.

A (41:58)

I would imagine there are third party marketplaces for skills, but like, I would, I would be really reluctant to using them, wouldn't you? Because who knows what their instruction sets are, right.

B (42:08)

Whenever it says something like, hey, check out the skills marketplace on GitHub. I just generally don't do it, you know, like, you know, not that there's anything wrong with GitHub, I just, I'm like, okay, but I would imagine you

A (42:18)

could upload the thing into Claude and say, please study this and look for any nefarious stuff that's inside of it. And Claude's pretty good at that, I would imagine.

B (42:25)

You could certainly do that. You can use. In fact, there's a skill called code review. I think in the engineering plugin there are such things where you can check on whether or not something is safe or not. You know, whether you trust it is another issue. But you can.

A (42:39)

How often are you using Cowork versus Claude itself now that you have access to Cowork?

B (42:46)

Yeah, it's completely flipped. It used to be when Cowork first started, it was probably 90 10. I was using my projects to cowork. Now it is the opposite. I mean, I barely use the regular, the regular run of the milk cloud anymore. And I feel bad maybe.

A (43:01)

Did you have to upgrade?

B (43:01)

Yeah.

A (43:02)

Because you were using so much tokens or whatever.

B (43:04)

No, I mean, since, since Claude has been the backbone of my business and my consulting and my training services for a while. I, I went full in right from the get go. So I've been.

A (43:16)

You had like a teams account or whatever or the max. What is the cost?

B (43:19)

I, it's that I went to 200amonth plan because it was absolutely worth it for me. I wouldn't recommend that everybody do that.

A (43:26)

Right.

B (43:26)

But especially if you're, if you're going to start coding and building, it starts to make more sense to go to the higher plans. And now with, with lilypath, we're on a team plan, so we have. We have a little bit more leeway in what we do with token usage and so on. But, yeah, it's. It, it took a little bit of an investment, I'm not going to lie, you know, to. To do that.

A (43:44)

But I would imagine it was a very wise investment because the alternative investment would have been an enormous amount of your time or an enormous amount of someone else's time. And both those things are very valuable. Dan Nestle, we have just scratched the surface of the amazing things that you're doing. If people would love to connect with you online, what platform is your platform of choice? And if they're interested in checking out your business, where do you want to send them?

B (44:07)

Thanks, Mike. Of course, LinkedIn. You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty much an open book. And, you know, just search for Dan Nestle or Daniel Nestle. Either one. You'll see me, you can Google me. My business is Lilypath. That's L I L Y P A T h dot com. And I urge you to check it out. And then, of course, you can find me on the trending Communicator podcast every two weeks.

A (44:30)

Awesome.

B (44:31)

With an episode coming to you.

A (44:32)

Awesome. Dan, thank you so much again for sharing your insights with us. It was amazing.

B (44:36)

Mike, it was a pleasure and an honor and a privilege to be on the show. I appreciate it.

A (44:40)

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over@socialmediaexaminer.com A103. Be sure to follow this show on whatever app you're listening to us on. And if you've been a listener for a while, we would love a review and we'd also love you to share with your friends. Do check out my other show, the Social Media Marketing Podcast. This brings us to the end of the AI Explored Podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day, and may AI help you become more successful.

B (45:11)

The AI Explored Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

A (45:18)

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