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Hello, my friend. Welcome back to another episode of Creator Science. I had a full episode outlined and planned to record and share this week for you, talking about what's on my mind as of January 2026. Some general updates about how I'm thinking about content. But over the last 48 to 72 hours I found myself spending a lot of time playing with a new tool called claudebot. And if you've been on X at all over the last few days, you might have seen some chatter about this. I've really fallen down the rabbit hole and spent a lot of time looking at this. And so I thought today what I would do is record an episode that talks about my first 48 hours with the tool, how I found it, what I thought about it, how I set it up, some ongoing thoughts and how I'm using it concerns how you should think about it if you're considering claudebot and just general takeaways for you in case you are looking at this saying, maybe this is something I should spend time setting up, maybe it'll save you some time, maybe it'll speed up your interest in setting it up. Totally up to you to decide, but that's what I want to talk about here today. I first came across this because I saw a video on X from a user named Alex Finn. I've started seeing a lot more of Alex's stuff on X over the last few months. He talks a lot about Claude code and vibe coding and AI in general. And he made a video showing how he bought a Mac Mini to run this claudebot and talked about some of his use cases for how he's using it. And something about that video just made it seem both futuristic and interesting, but achievable for me as someone who I would say it's very fair to call me non technical. I don't have an engineering background. I have a little bit of practice. I've used terminal before, but not to like build full applications or anything. So I'm mostly non technical. But this video made it seem like I think I can set this up. It seems like the creators of claudebot have been thoughtful about how to make it easy to set up. Whether or not that's the right thing to do. We'll talk about here in a second. But it felt like something I could probably dive into. So after watching Alex's video where he talked about having this assistant that he can just chat with in Telegram or WhatsApp and tell it to do things and set up these workflows so that every morning he Gets proactive messages from this assistant saying, here's what I did last night. I thought, okay, let's give this a shot. So what is claudebot? Claudebot is an open source AI agent gateway that connects large language models like Claude to messaging platforms and tools running on a server. So that sounds very technical because I actually asked claudebot to explain to me what it is and how to explain it. But think of it this way. If you've used an LLM like Claude or OpenAI, you see the power of what AI can do for you. Claudebot basically allows you to plug into those LLMs but let it run your machine. So some people are literally taking claudebot, giving it access to their laptop and therefore all of the apps and programs on their laptop and saying, do these things for me. Claudebot can do that. There are, of course, some concerns and considerations with that. If you think about an AI assistant as a human assistant, would you grant a new human assistant who you hired that you have no experience, experience or background with? Would you grant them access to your personal work computer and all of the documents, apps and things that are on it? Personally, for me, the answer was no. I wanted to, if I set this up, create it in an environment where I have very strong control over what it can actually access and who is able to access it, you know, so the reason a lot of people are buying these Mac Minis is because they set that up as its own dedicated environment and they say, I'm just gonna put on that machine the tools and apps and whatever that I am willing to let it control. But there's a step further than this. So once I started understanding what cloudbot can do, I started looking up other videos of people who have set this up, and I actually looked for more technical people who have set this up. And I came across two videos on YouTube. I one is by Neal Stephenson that was published a couple of weeks ago, setting up cloudbot. And the other was by a user named velvetshark and actually really liked the Velvet Shark approach because he was clearly a technical person and he took a security first approach. But both of these users, and I actually suspect that Neil might have watched that same Velvet Shark video. They both set it up on a vps, a virtual private server. And what that means is it's not running on your machine at all. It's actually running on a virtual machine in the cloud, on a server that you pay for. So this is what I did. I dug out an old MacBook Pro that I have since graduated from, and it's Just been sitting in my desk for years at this point. I formatted that disk and I started fresh with a brand new operating system. Then I set up Claude, claudebot, I should say, in a virtual private server on a website called hetzner.com and I could only access that virtual private server in the beginning from that cleaned old laptop. So claudebot only had access to whatever I put on that virtual server. And even if I screwed something up, it only had access to that laptop, not my personal machine. And so the key characteristics of this, by setting it up this way, this assistant is accessible and can run autonomously 24. 7 on the server. Not just when a laptop is open, not just when I open the app and it connects to for me, Telegram, you can connect it to other messaging apps to communicate with it, but Telegram seems to be the easiest and most reliable. So I have it saved as a Telegram chat and I actually use a tool called beeper, beeper.com that aggregates my different chat tools. So inside of Beeper I get direct messages from Instagram, from LinkedIn, from X, and it also pulls in my WhatsApp threads and Telegram threads. So I use Beeper, I have a pinned chat for my Telegram chat with my claudebot and I can communicate with it. It's powered by Anthropics language model. I can communicate with it all the time. So what's cool about this is I can just give it selective access to things that I want and ask it to do stuff. And what's really cool about it is it's an open source project that has built in skills that as people develop, they add them to the project. And you can just ask claudebot to install this skill, whatever that skill is. And anytime I want cloudbot to do something, I say I want you to do this, can you do it? And it will tell me if it can and if it needs things from me. So right now I have it integrated with a few tools. Those tools are Notion, my Oura Ring, my Fathom, Notetaker X, Dropbox, where I keep a lot of my work files kit, my email sending system and my Google accounts like Google Sheets, Google Docs, my Google Calendar. All of those things are accessed via API, not my personal login credentials. So the great thing about this is instead of just using Claude Desktop, which you have to set up like projects, if you want to give it some instructions or memory, it remembers context across all of our conversations and inside of the files inside claudebot. So it's as if it has near limitless memory and a persistent knowledge base to tell you whatever is within it if you need it to reference things like the reason that I connected it to Dropbox is I wanted it to be able to access all of my podcast transcripts, 300 transcripts. I also uploaded a JSON of all the blog posts that I have written historically that I exported from Ghost. So now claudebot can reference any of my past writing any of my past episodes and it runs a weekly process to check and see are there new transcripts, are there new essays, are there new broadcasts in kit? And what it will do is something like okay, new podcast transcript. I'm going to dig through and pull out some insights in short form, draft them inside of notion and score them based on how good or how interesting I think this topic is. And so proactively, anytime I create a piece of long form content, I now have several drafts of ideas around short form that I can look at, take as inspiration, edit them and say okay, this is pretty interesting and publish that. And it's based on my long form content. So this is a taste of what is possible here with this claudebot because what the unlock has been for me, as someone who has not tried to automate a ton with Claude in the past, this feels so much more user friendly to ask Claude to do things on my behalf. I can just text it. I just text it in telegram and say hey, I want you to send me a report every morning going through my X timeline and I want you to tell me what is trending. I want you to do a vibe check of what's like the current conversation on my for you page of things that I pay attention to. I want you to pull interesting threads from people in the creator economy. I want you to pull interesting threads from people in AI and tell me the engagement metrics on those threads. So I just get a curated list in the morning of these different tweets and I can go in and reply to them. I can educate myself. It also gives me a readout of my Oura Ring scores that morning. Which, you know, historically I've opened the Aura app and looked at my scores, but now it just gets served to me in the morning through cloud with my morning report as well as going in and I can reply to these different threads on X. So that's really exciting because essentially what I want to do as a creator is spend more and more time building relationships, reading and creating long form content predominantly through writing. But as a creator, especially a creator who educates creators, I feel so much pressure to exist on social media and short form. And this helps me stay on top of kind of the vibe of what's going on proactively and lets me react and edit, revise short form ideas derived from things that I've already written in long form. So that just feels very interesting to me. So the setup was not the easiest thing in the world that I've done, especially going the route of the Virtual Private Server on Hetzner. The hardest thing actually was connecting it to my existing anthropic account, not via the API. It really wanted to connect to the API inside of my anthropic Claude account, which I think can get very expensive. But I already have a Claude Max account which is $200 per month, and I found how to set up Claudebot to connect to that subscription rather than the API. So my subscription cost stays the same. I was already paying for it and the Hetzner Virtual Private server is about $6 per month. So for an additional $6 per month I have this set up is the takeaway and it's so proactive and user friendly. The learning curve is real, I would say. I came across that initial video about Cloudbot at 8pm on Saturday night. It was 1:30 until I actually had it working on this laptop that I also had to format and start over from scratch. And I slept until about 7:30 when the baby woke me up. Once we had kind of our morning routine down, I spent all day Sunday playing with this, setting things up, giving it access to different APIs that I wanted to be able to access and do things with. And it's been very, very fun. The ironic downside is like I've spent a lot of time talking to it now and because it is so accessible I can just pull out my phone. I've actually created a shortcut in Apple to push the Action button and it opens my thread with my cloudbot so I can just talk to it just by long pressing that button. So I spent a lot of time talking to it. Has that made me more productive or has it made me actually less present? We'll see. I'm going to give another week and I'll update you on that thought because right now I've probably spent more time working over the last 48 hours working quote unquote, because I've been excited about this, I've been in flow and I've been setting it up. But here are some tasks that I have asked Tubi I named my cloudbot Tubi because Tubi is a little creator science mascot. Here's what I've asked Tubi to do so far. So because I gave it access to Notion, I created a connection, an app in Notion, and so I can connect Tubi to specific pages in Notion to give it access. It doesn't just have access to everything I have in Notion unless or until I want to give it that. But right now I have a page called Tubi Dashboard. And within Tubi Dashboard I have a kanban board called Tubi Tasks. I have a content ideas database called Tubi Content Ideas. And Tubi can also add pages to the Tubi Dashboard so it can't touch or read all of my stuff yet. Because again, I'm taking this slow and I care a lot about security, privacy, access, but I can ask Tubi to do things on my behalf in Notion and it will create a page in the Tubi Dashboard. So some things it's done so far it's done guest research for my upcoming three podcast interviews, I asked it to create this structured prep document and we've iterated on the format of this, where it goes through their career timelines, it finds the links to their different social profiles, it looks at other interviews it can access for some ideas. I give it the direction of what I want the conversation to cover. So it will do research in that lens. And this won't necessarily replace all the research I do for this interview. Like typically for an interview, I'll go listen to other interviews with that guest and I'm still gonna do that. But this does serve us a lot of factual information that otherwise I'm spending time on doing. And within that document, I ask it to source with links where it found the information that it's presenting to me. So the next several interviews, the initial research done, incredible. It now has stored all my podcast transcripts, I told you that. Where it can pull quotable lines, ideas for short form, put that into the Tubi shortform database for me to react to. I had it pull all my previous essays like I said, so it can create short form content ideas from that. I connected it to a Google Sheet. So previously when I was just using Claude, I created a fitness project and that desktop version of Claude was creating spreadsheets for me every week for my fitness, where I have a cell that I fill in. Here's the weight for this exercise, here's the number of reps I did. Now that I'm several weeks in, it recommends my weight progression based on my goals. But when I was going out to my gym, I was still pulling up the Google Sheets app. And then Entering in that information in the cell, which is okay, but it's a couple of steps. So I gave claudebot access to that spreadsheet and now I can long press my action button, click the voice transcription and just tell claudebot what I've done for my exercise and it will fill in the sheet for me and then it will generate on a weekly basis a new sheet based on those goals in the same Google Doc. And I don't have to do this prompting anymore because we've created what's called a cron job to do that automatically. So that's been really fun. It just feels so much more natural. There's less friction. And now I can ask claudebot anytime anything related to my fitness because it's offed into that sheet and the progress that I've made. Some other one off stuff that I've done that I think is interesting. As I think more about long form writing, I had a sense for a few writers that I really admire and respect their style and I kind of feel like I'm a combination of those styles. So I gave it the name of these four writers and I said, analyze these writers styles and tell me what it is that makes their style them. And then how can I try to write more like them, but also a little bit more like this? It was a very cool exercise to read through the analysis of these four writers and then workshop with Claude Bott. Okay. How can my writing take more of the form of elements from these different writers? And it literally gave me exercises to write. Okay, so a couple of examples from this pile. I really like how dense and practical James Clear's writing is. I think a lot of people would say he's an incredible writer. It's very practical in that way. But I also like how warm and encouraging Amy McNee's writing is. Her Instagram account is called Inspired to Write. So I had IT do a little bit of analysis of these two writers to see what is it that makes me feel like Amy's writing is very encouraging. What is it about James's writing that feels very practical? And so it gave me some writing exercises to practice to try and embody what it would be like to combine these strengths inside of my voice. A long time ago I had a voice guide created from ChatGPT where I said, here are a bunch of my essays. What makes a Creator Science essay a Creator Science essay. And it gave me kind of a guide. So now that lives inside my cloudbot assistant. And so with that voice guide and with this analysis of these different writers. I said, okay, here are some of the essays that I've written on Substack. Tell me how well I'm doing in embodying some of the different style elements of these four writers. And it did that. And it said, you're actually like 80% of the way there. Here are the ways that you've done this. Here are areas you could push further and gives me very tactical direction on how to do this further. Again, this is all powered by Claude from Anthropic. So you can do this in Claude Desktop. You can ask it to do the same thing. So you can set it up a project file. You can give it instructions to say, you are a writing coach. Here's my voice guide. I'm gonna upload that. And here's some writers. You can do a lot of this without claudebot. My point is the friction now for me to communicate with the same technology that's underneath Claude is just so low. Cause I'm just texting in Telegram. The other great thing though, is that all of this lives within my own system. It's very private. You know, it's just in this virtual server that only I have access to, that I'm only allowing myself to really access from this machine that I don't use otherwise. So it's very private in that way. Another thing I had it connect to was my Fathom notetaker. I said, every day, pull down transcripts from my latest Fathom calls so we can reference that in the future. And in particular, what I did. We had our town hall in the community last week. And in the town hall we talk about ideas and initiatives that we want to do in the future. We had an open discussion. So I said, go to Fathom. Pull the transcript from that call. Then I uploaded the Zoom Chat file that I had saved to my computer. I said, look at the transcript, look at the Zoom Chat file. Create a document in notion with the action items for what I proposed and what the community agreed with on that call. It did that in moments. And it also pulled testimonials from the chat call of people saying, I love the lab. The lab is the best investment that I made in myself. It was because of the lab that I made this decision at the offline event last year. I did this, and it's made a huge difference in my year. It just pulled these testimonials that because I was leading the call, I didn't even see this happen in the chat. And it just did that on its own volition, which was so awesome. So Great. So the recurring tasks, as I said, we have this morning briefing that shows me my aura scores, plus a curated X feed to kind of give me a pulse check and recommend some posts that maybe I could weigh in and give my thoughts. It pulls the Fathom meeting notes every day, saves to memory. So I can go and say, okay, I have a VIP call with this member of the lab today. I can ask claudebot to look at our last three VIP calls with that person and remind me what we talked about. I can see a future very soon where I create my own CRM that is updated all the time from transcripts from call logs, because that can just be so, so useful. It does a podcast transcript sync, the kit broadcast sync once a week, and it's also doing a weekly security scan because I've constantly been asking it security questions to ensure that it is not accessible outside of me right now. A lot of the conversation on X is like, here are the security vulnerabilities of cloudbot, which you should take seriously. And a lot of the reasons people are not secure is because they're running it on their main machine and not thinking about security at all. So having it on a separate machine, that's a good step. Having it in a remote virtual server, that's a good step. Today we did something called implementing tailscale, which makes it even harder to access. So anytime I see a thread on X about security, I send that to my cloud bot and say, hey, look at this and tell me if we have any of the vulnerabilities that are mentioned here. And it will do its own security scan and say, here's where we're already ahead of this. Here's where we might be able to harden this a little bit more. And so probably the most common conversation I'm having with it is, how do we secure this? Are there any risks involved with doing this thing? I'm asking you, and it's constantly telling me what we can do and it will just go and do it on its own. I just say, yep, please do that. So I would recommend, if you are going to set this up, keep that security mindset and keep talking to it about security. Ask itself to do an audit periodically. The biggest threat seems to be code injection. You know, malicious code injection, because you give claudebot access to files and the ability to search the Internet using the Brave browser. I created an API key to Brave. It can search the Internet using Brave, but if it comes across a prompt trying to tell it to do something malicious to my machine, if it thinks that prompt came from me. It could make bad moves, which again, if that's on your personal machine and has access to your credentials, it could go and log in as you to one of these websites that has your credentials, email those credentials to the malicious actor. Which is why I just don't give it access to my personal machine or give it any of my personal login credentials. It's all API access, but it's very intuitive to ask it about security threats. But then you're also trusting the AI to act in your behalf, which hopefully you can. You know this does not come without some level of risk, which is why just keeping as much distance from, from things that are very personal and risky is good. So here in a second I'm going to let you know how I'm thinking about using claudebot in the future and also break down whether I think you should use claudebot. But first we're going to take a quick break for our sponsors. 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