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- [00:00]
A
What brought you to the lobster agent we know and love?
- [00:04]
B
Because I follow these Obsidian influencers. One of them, buried in a comment on a day where I was just scrolling was like, game changer is layering onto your Obsidian and actually having an agent who like, uses your files for you. And I was like, whoa, what is that? At first I thought, like, I don't know if I'm technical to put this on my computer, like, I don't know what I'm doing. But then I jumped in. This is really interesting. I want to figure this out and I want to run my homeschool this way. So maybe this can help if you.
- [00:30]
A
You're trying to get all this stuff organized and you thought, man, if AI could do this for me, then I could actually get done what I wanted.
- [00:36]
B
Obsidian has this cool opportunity of being your second brain, right? But the problem is I'm always looking for my first brain because I have four little kids. I didn't really have time to develop this second brain.
- [00:47]
A
People just don't appreciate how much it unlocked for folks that do have this ambition to really be there for their family and kids and also get all sorts of cool stuff done. And I feel the same revolution in my relationship with time. Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vo, product leader and AI obsessive, here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today we have Jesse Janae, who has four kids and five open claw Mac minis sitting on her desk, helping her run everything from her homeschool to her finances. Jessie has established there are two phases now. Before claw and after claw. And she is going to show us the future of what an after claw life looks like. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by Optimizely. Most marketing teams aren't short on ideas, but what they are short on is time. And that's exactly what Optimizely Opal gives you back. With AI agents that handle real marketing workflows. You know, like creating content and checking compliance, generating experiment variations, personalizing user experiences, analyzing pages for geo, even tasks like approvals and reporting. It's your AI agent orchestration platform for marketing and digital teams. Plugging seamlessly into the tools you already use, handling the boring, busy work and keeping everything on brand. That leaves marketers with more time to do your actual job. See what Opal can automate for your team by signing up for a free enterprise AgentIQ AI workshop with Optimizely. Find out more at optimizely.com/howiai attend live and you'll get a free pair of Ray Ban meta AI glasses. Jesse, I am excited that you are here because you are the Open Claw influencer I didn't know that I needed in my timeline. I, you know, it's been very crypto bro adjacent energy in the, in the clasping. And so I like that we got the two ladies of Open Claw basically here on the podcast and I think your use cases are so interesting and I love what you figured out. So tell me what brought you to the lobster agent we know and love? Why did you get started with this?
- [03:07]
B
Well, you're, you're right, it wasn't because I really wanted to segment all my marketing, which is like what I see over and over in my feed from like a bunch of tech guys. I have been, I've actually been using this product called Obsidian for a while. So this is like my, like how I even learned about it because I learned about it like over a month ago now, which is kind of like ancient history and like Clawland. Right. But the reason is because I follow some people who are like deep users of this second brain product called Obsidian, which is like a collection of markdown files. And we can get more into that. But because I follow these Obsidian influencers, one of them, like buried in a comment on a day where I was just scrolling was like, game Changer is layering cloudbot, which it was called at the time, onto your Obsidian and actually having an agent who like uses your files for you. And I was like, whoa, what is that? Because I've been trying to organize my homeschool in Obsidian, but honestly, I don't feel like I have the time to log properly all my stuff and I'm like running into all these roadblocks of actually using it and because I don't have any time because I'm a mom, so. So that was my discovery moment, was seeing this person say that. And I was like, what does that mean? I went and looked up like, what Claudebot was, which is now called Openclaw. And I, first I thought, like, I don't know if I'm technical to put this on my computer. Like, I don't know what I'm doing. But then I jumped in and I'm sure you had a bunch of like, snafus. I read, I was reading your tweets about some of them and I had my own, but. But I, that, that was like my jump in moment. Like, this is really interesting. I want to figure this out and I want to run My homeschool this way. So maybe this can help.
- [04:48]
A
So you were running home your homeschool partially on Obsidian.
- [04:52]
B
Yeah.
- [04:52]
A
And you know, we've actually had a couple episodes on Obsidian. Teresa Torres did one on Obsidian and Claude. Claude how she's running her own sort of like personal brain off of it. But you're trying to get all this stuff organized and you thought, man, if AI could do this for me, then I could actually get done what I wanted. So do you want to show us what that brain looked like and then where Kind of open claw layered on top.
- [05:15]
B
Okay. So Obsidian has this cool opportunity of being your second brain. Right. But the problem is I'm always looking for my first brain. Okay. Because I have four little kids, so I didn't really have time to develop this second brain. And so my. So we're in my Obsidian now. Okay. And I call my vault. Obsidian is structured on vault. I call my vault family learning. And the reason I actually titled it that was that we like, I want to. I want to track almost everything that's even vaguely educational about my kids life. Like even if we go on a trip or something. So I track more than just like lessons in here, but we can get to that. But the course structure that I've been trying to get to, that openclaw finally like allows me to get to because it's actually doing the heavy lifting is I try to log all the little lessons and different things that I do with the kids. And so but I don't have time to go in here and write all this structured data. So I want to know the date we did it. I want to know who the instructor, which children of mine, out of the four of them were included in that lesson, what was taught, what might come next. Notes that we have. Here's my kids learning about the color wheel and matching colors and stuff like that. The vibe that I wanted was to be able to take photos of a lesson that I do and then basically just upload them and have the actual openclaw log the full lesson contents. And it's not just because I'm an obsessive record keeper, although maybe that accusation is fair. But it's also because I want to be able to use AI to plan curriculum. So if the AI knows I did this like, you know, cool pattern matching thing with number blocks, then it can suggest now I'm just taking cute pictures of my kids. This is like a greedent. Then it can suggest that maybe it seems like Quinn nailed the pattern blocks, who is my oldest. But maybe elle, who is 2, clearly isn't quite there. And it can actually track their progression over time and actually help me build curriculum off of that. So we've got all these logs. We have curriculum sources also. For instance, I love the bfsu, this specific science curriculum. I track that as a curriculum source, and. And then my open claw. Again, this used to be so manual for me. I was, like, trying to type in chapters of the book and all this stuff, but what I did is actually take photos of the entire book. And maybe that's in my photos. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like here. I actually. Once I realized the power of openclaw, I started taking photos of entire books, like, and actually giving the entire book to my openclaw so they could help me build more detailed curriculum. So.
- [07:52]
A
Okay, can we take a pause? Because let's go back to photos. Every parent loves this teacher kid to read in 100 easy lessons. I have this book. It has gone through two children already. And part of the challenge of this book, this is going to be very niche parenting content.
- [08:09]
B
Yes.
- [08:10]
A
Actually hard to know if you're teaching this book well, even though they have this very dense upfront introduction about how you're supposed to teach it.
- [08:19]
B
Yep.
- [08:19]
A
I always didn't feel confident about was I teaching it correctly, was I saying those. Those phonemes correctly? And it's such a brilliant idea to take a photo of all this and build even a lesson plan that just I could understand. So this is. I just want to pause and tell people this is such a great workflow to just take a book or reference material, take lots of photos of it, maybe have your kids take photos of it. Yeah.
- [08:47]
B
Yeah. Delegate that. This is what we're. This is where we're at with open flies. Delegate everything. But. But I have. Okay, so I have even more niche ideas off of this one book that I want to do that I. That I. We can talk about what I've done with openclaw, but there's a couple of things I want to do that I think I can do that I'm getting closer to. And one is this book has special letter forms for helping teach your kids. Like, have, like, a th that is connected for teaching them the sound D, for instance. And so I'm actually thinking of 3D printing all of the letter forms from this book so I can then actually, like, see, spell out letters and words to give my kids, like, in a physical lesson that match the letter forms in the book. There's, like, things that I want to do to bring this curriculum kind of like out of this one environment. Or take the stories. Like my kids like these little stories in the book. But if you notice, the story is kind of like buried amongst all this other text. And I just feel like sometimes they find it hard to focus on this, see me eat, and they're distracted by everything else on the page. So I was thinking, what if I could extract that, like, story from the book using Open Claw and maybe make like printouts of the story, like as a little booklet or something. Just. Just ways to actually make this book kind of come alive. But again, I have all these hopes and dreams, but I'm also actually homeschooling mom of four, so I really need openclaw to do the heavy lifting. Basically. Like, I need it to do it. I can't actually do it.
- [10:11]
A
Okay, so I interrupted you with niche phonics mom aside here, but what you were saying is you want to bring in a bunch of reference material as well into Obsidian. And one thing that's nice about AI in general is that you can just do that in a kind of unstructured form. You just take pictures. But then what are you doing with that?
- [10:31]
B
So this is the layout that I. That I've kind of created. So curriculum source is something like that book, like teach your kids to read in 180 lesson. That's a source. And. And I. And there's so many brilliant sources available to us as parents. Right. So I don't need to reinvent the wheel all the time. So that's a curriculum source. Then there's actually curriculum, which is like progressions of lessons I'm coming up with and lesson plans. So this. Okay, so for instance, I have that curriculum source of the basic fundamentals of scientific understanding. The acronym is bfsu. And then these are the lesson plans from that book. Okay, so these are all just. These are lesson plans I generated off of each chapter of the book. Okay. So it gives me. It pulls into a lesson plan. The actual objectives of that lesson, the key concepts and vocabulary, the materials I need to do, activities are suggested in the book. And then let's take it to another level. So this helps me because instead of just sitting down and reading the chapter, I can kind of cut to the chase and be like, okay, but I'm actually going to teach it tomorrow. Let's get this ready. And I actually can see the materials I need to pull out and all this stuff. And then what I'm really getting into that is very Open Cloud related is actually asking my Open Claw to help me generate completely custom materials so I'll make this real. We just did yesterday this b6 how animals move skeleton and muscles. And last week we did this adaptations and survival about how animal, like, what it takes for animals to survive. Let me go over to Slack and you can see me interacting a little bit with my open claw. I was like, okay, I want watercolor illustrations suitable for kids that can print on 8 and a half by 11 of each of these concepts. And by the way, here's the concepts. Here's my finger. Like, with a book page of like, these nine concepts of what it takes for an animal to survive on its own in the wild. And it's kind of trying to make it real for people. Like, this is how lo fi. I'm going, like, I just take a picture of a snippet of that book and then I ask it to use Narrow Banana Pro. And I gave it. That's a Gemini, a Google Gemini AI product. And so I had to give the API key for that specific image generation model to my open claw. But then it made these files. Look how gorgeous these are. I'm gonna like, tear up, but I think it's because I'm also postpartum. But I'm like, look at how beautiful this owl is. Oh my God. But. But like, okay, I. I just want to explain that my prompt was like, make. Let me go back to. It was just like, make im watercolor style illustrations suitable for kids that can print on 8 and a half by 11 paper for each of these concepts. Okay, Like, I just. I just. I just don't know. I just want everyone to sit with this for a moment. Like, how basic is that? Like, how basic is that? Now the other real thing I want to share is that in the. This Sylvie. Okay, so I'm talking to Sylvie. I have five different open claws spun out because I am insane. Okay, we'll cover that more. But Sylvie is my homeschool oriented open claw. I'm trying to, like, make Sylvie from her, like, the soul. There's like this soul MD file. I'm trying to make her into like, the most magnificent teacher, like, the world has ever seen. So she's like, always really creative and like, really bubbly and has like, really, like, she's just really into kids, like, learning, right? So because that's like, her personality, that's what I want her to be like. And so she's adding a layer, like, from her sole MD file, I think of, like, how to make these images, like, actually really stand out for children. So it's a combo of like, my basic prompt to her and. And her own, like, injection of, like. Okay, but we really need to make these concepts pop for the children.
- [14:01]
A
You know, Can I ask a question for you? Because I think, you know, some people that are going to be listening to this episode are going to be open, claw pilled and have them set up and be working on Telegram or something super shady just to, like, talk to their AI. And then some of them are going to be really new to this concept, because I think what you're talking about is very accessible to parents, to students, to teachers, to actually anybody doing business is all these concepts of how can you log your day in a structured way, how can you take one piece of content and turn it into another piece of content, how can you create great visuals? Those are all applicable across a lot of use cases. But you just said you have five agents. You sort of, like, glossed over that as if that's easy. How do you technically set that up in open cloth?
- [14:46]
B
So I would say agents collaboration is one of the hardest things that I'm still hacking on. So just to be really blunt, and I will explain a couple foundational elements. So first, coming over back to Obsidian in this, it's maybe a little hard to see, but in this bottom corner, I'm in the family learning vault. But one way I partitioned the scope and role of each of the agents that I've spun up is that they have a role in my life. Like, I have someone. And by someone, I mean an open clause. Like, because sometimes I talk about them like they're literally human. And I have actually confused people. They're like, wait, are these employees? Are these people? What is it going on? So Sylvie is the open claw. I focus on homeschool content, curriculum, generation logging. She only has access to this family learning vault. Okay. I then have an agent, Finn West. I don't know. I'm just taking these names at random. Okay. Who is focused on accounting. And, like, I send him all my receipts, and I'm trying to have him help me stay organized financially. He has access to this family office vault. So I'm kind of sharing a version of, like, provisioning agents. I have five because I want them to all have very separate Personas with separate responsibilities. And that makes it worth it to me to have multiple agents. Okay. If you just want to create kind of an EA agent who helps you a little bit with homeschool and a little bit with this and that, that's not wrong or bad either. But I really wanted to go deep and Actually make. It would be kind of weird if Sylvie, who's like, my whole purpose in life is to teach kids beautiful information, was like, if I sent her my receipts, I would almost feel like I'm being rude. Like, I'd be like, this is beneath Sylvie. You know, like, she needs to focus on the children. So. So that's part of why I have created multiple agents. Now. I am trying to work towards a path where my agents collaborate to, like, make my life even more autonomous. Like, it'd be really cool if Claire, who is my. More like, EA ish scheduling and like, like, scheduling in my time management, ordering groceries and things like this. It'd be cool if Claire could, like, talk to Sylvie effectively and help plan out maybe my lessons for the week. And, like, tell Claire, like, oh, tell Sylvie, oh, she can't do that time because she has doctor appointment. But this is a little bit. I'm not quite there, to be honest. I moved all my agents to Slack because Cole is working on dev projects anyway. So Cole is my dev AI, but I have them all in Slack because I thought Slack would be better for collaboration because it's like a human collaboration tool. But to be perfectly frank, I believe now, after spending more than a week with five agents, that no. 1 communication channel that is native to OpenClaw, meaning what you're talking about Telegram, Slack imessage signal is actually very good for agent to agent collaboration because all of these tools have been made for humans to use and agents are kind of like hacking into them from the side. Like, in order to even add my Open Claw to Slack, this is one of the worst. Like, one of the hardest components of my Open Claw setup for each agent was creating a custom Slack app to add the agent as a bot into my Slack. So I just want to be really blunt. Like, that was really hard. Like, I was harder than creating the Open Claw itself.
- [18:19]
A
And so to create the Open Claw yourself, are you asking Open Claw to create a new agent? Are you spinning up a new install? How do you do that?
- [18:28]
B
So basically, here's my team. I just thought. I thought the turnaround. I have literally Mac Mini boxes sitting on my desk. That's what I was sitting my laptop on. This is where I'm at. Okay. People need to know. People need. It's like a send help to Jesse's house kind of situation. If you don't hear from me for a while. Is this necessary? No. And even financially, I want to address. I recognize I'm able to afford these Mac Minis already. That's like a lot of money, just generally speaking.
- [19:00]
A
I was not expecting this, by the way.
- [19:03]
B
Okay. You can run more than one openclaw on a Mac Mini. I'll even explain why do I have so many sitting on my desktop. One reason is I'm trying to partition their worlds completely. So for instance, Finn, who's going to handle financial stuff. Again, this maybe just makes you seem so insane, but I run a full QuickBooks instance for our family's personal finance because I love that because I'm such a super geek. So. So that means every expense is categorized and all this stuff. But that means there's a lot of sensitive information I want Finn to have. Like he's not going to get access to my bank accounts to like use, but I'm going to give him read only access to all bank statements, all sorts of stuff. So like a lot of information. I frankly don't want that information sitting on the same Mac Mini as like Claire, who's the Open Club is doing scheduling. I don't want her to accidentally like send like some information from a bank statement to like the kid's piano teacher, like just because she's texting with her or something. So that's why I have separate mechanisms now. There are other ways to partition agents. This is kind of my lazy way, like just being perfectly frank, like there's other ways to partition them. But I'm just trying to be like overly cautious because there are security concerns with, with OpenClaw. And I want to make sure that I like have this actual like physical environment for each one to live in for right now.
- [20:24]
A
Yeah, I want to call this out for folks that, that maybe missed that, which is the physical partitioning of different Mac minis is great. And then each instance is in a file system. So you do have to think really carefully about what file system you're putting any of these agents in. And then what I like about what you're doing is you're partitioning them by access both to data and to input output, which is like. That's very smart to say I'll give you access to all my bank accounts or bank account statements. Highly risky. But you can't talk to anybody so it's not going anywhere.
- [21:01]
B
And Finn doesn't have any communication channel except fuck, he can't get out of that bubble. Yeah, but what Claire has access to imessage for like texting people for scheduling and different stuff. And so I don't want her to have bank statements. So I am. And this is, this is actually something that I was talking to someone else, a good friend of mine, and this is maybe a nub that I think is lost on a lot of folks about setting up an open cloth. Many folks have not maybe hired an employee before. And I'm not trying to be like, you know, derisive or something, but basically like it's so similar to that. So I do think that because I have a background as an entrepreneur, I have hired employees. I just have that mindset on and let me describe it so that it's not vague. The mindset is I just met this person. Okay? So whether it's a person I just met on the street who I decided to hire because they have like great interview or there's this new open qua. This is like a new entity in my life. Well, do you normally just say like hey, new person, here's like access to all my email. Here's this, here's that. Like you, you step, you step into trust based on them using information like the way you ask them to. And also you don't ask them to persuade to impersonate you. Usually the goal of an employee is not to impersonate you. So none of the open clause have full read write access to my email or my stuff. They have their own stuff. One open claw has access to reading my emails. Only read. They cannot send emails as me, but I have provisioned trust that they can read and like surface information to me.
- [22:36]
A
It totally does because people were asking me, I had early on a pretty unique setup and I was like, there's no way I'm giving direct access to my email. But you got an email from Polly. Polly has her own email address. And the reason why I knew how to do this really quickly is I set up my agent with its own email address. I delegated access to my calendar, for example, to that agent. I gave it a its own 1Password vault. And I put a couple key things in there that you can use. People like, well, how did you know how to do this? I was like, I've had three EAs, I know how to onboard an EA. And you don't say here's the password to my email address. That's just not how you do it. And then I like this idea of like progressive trust in your agents. You know, you, you say most, you don't ask most employees to impersonate you. The first thing Polly did when I asked her to send one email was send it as me. And I one I sounded truly insane the way she sent it, sent the email and I had to, like, follow up and be like, sorry, that's my sentient lobster. Um, but she's gotten better and you got the email where she's got, like, a little lobster emoji. So if you know what that meant. Yeah, yeah, you know what it means. And you were very polite in addressing her by name.
- [23:53]
B
I think this is very important. Yeah. What's funny, like, but that. That my philosophy on how to manage an open claw really does stem from management. Management of employees. Because actually I am polite because I'm like, I'm just gonna treat them like an employee. So I, I think, you know, I. I don't want to. I don't want to confuse people. I don't think that it's like, there's a human in that box and I'm gonna offend them. Like, I don't actually think that. But what I do think is that because LLMs have, like, grown up on the Internet and with human content, they do understand, they do know when someone's being rude or not. And so, like, do I want them to know me as, like, someone who is professional, direct or not? Like, I do think there's a relationship being built between human and bot. And so I don't think, like, it's going to jump out of the computer and kill me if I'm rude or something crazy. I just think that why would I be rude? The only difference is that I can rely on the fact that Sylvie, who helps you with homeschool, like, that she's never having a bad day, that there's no day that her boyfriend dumped her, that there's no, like, that I don't have to skirt around the issue. So I'm a little more direct and I obviously, obviously I don't have to worry about giving her a task at 11pm I don't have to feel like, oh, I'm such a jerk boss. So these are all benefits. But I still fundamentally do treat it like an employee, employee relationship in order to kind of make sure that we have, like, a healthy system.
- [25:16]
A
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so you have. We're just going to step back into it. And I know you don't personify your Mac Minis, but I am going to send you, like, googly eyes and mustaches and like, a little bow for all of your Mac Minis after we're done here. Okay? So you have your obsidian brain. You have fractured off agents. You've named them, you've put them in Slack. For people that want to use Slack as a Gateway channel on OpenClaw, you actually have to do some, like, app setup as a Slack developer. Thoughts and prayers. And then you're doing lots of workflow stuff like organizing your logs, organizing your lessons, building creative for those lessons. I think this is super cool. But you're also. Fin's coding, right?
- [26:04]
B
Yeah. Okay, so Finn is, Finn is finance.
- [26:07]
A
Oh, Fin is finance. Sorry, Cole. Cole is coding. I, I, I, Now I get it.
- [26:13]
B
I, I'm just making this up, but I just went off of, like, vibes when I was naming Cole is coding. So this is though now we can jump back into a bit of a demo. Cole is coding. And this was a big unlock for me. So as someone who has previously. I previously ran a startup where we developed software, but I had never opened terminal as a human being. Until six months ago, I sold my company to a tech company without ever having open terminal. So I'm almost embarrassed to be saying this, but I just want everyone to understand that I'm not actually secretly super technical, but that in this new era I can pop in, learn just a little bit more, and do so much so with that. Let me share my screen. I'm going to. Basically my new MO is like, if I can sync it, maybe I can build it, maybe. And Cole is helping me with that new thesis. This is something called Mira. All this naming is random. Okay? I created this just for my family. This is not a real product. And by real I mean it's not out there. But I decided to code something up for my family. The need came from probably something that's extremely relatable to other parents, which is I have kids. I don't, I'm not against content. I'm not against them ever watching TV or ever having any screen time. But I really want the quality to be high. Like, they are, they're, they're little, they're easily fooled. Like, I feel bad on YouTube when they're watching a video that we put on that's like really, really nice and great, like camping or something. And then the next video that comes up or the next options of video are like, AI slop with like, AI cover art. And my kid thinks, like, oh, my gosh, it's a tree that's the size of, you know, a skyscraper. And I'm like, okay, there is no such tree. Like, they're literally being fooled. It's, it's like, I don't know, it's, it makes me sad. So I wanted to make something. And so effectively this is a product where it pulls from YouTube content and I can curate these streams so you can see, like, ones that Cole and I came up with together. And. And then I'm doing tests of custom ones, which is why you see this thing called Test 2. But science, engineering, outdoor adventures. Now, here's what's key is I didn't actually create playlists of any content. Cole has a prompt for going with a direction on YouTube and making a, like, an endless stream of videos that will play one after another. And so my kids. This is my parental controls area. Basically, my kids can open the app and the app looks so basic on their end. It's literally just a screen and they can just. All they can do is press go and then it plays a video. And then if they don't like that video, all they can do is advance to the next video. And so they can like skip forward or go backwards. And it maintains, like, their history. So they can actually go backwards if they love something and they want to see it again. And they can pause and that's it. Okay. Literally all they can do is go forward backwards and pause. This is a godsend for me. The other thing that I did that was like, way beyond my technical capabilities, but Cole helped me through it, is I wanted this on my real tv. And he said I could buy this thing called a Google TV Streamer, which is a device from Google. And then we actually were able to send the app to the Google TV streamer device. And then there's a little remote. And so there's actually a separate app. Like when I turn my TV on, I can select like Apple TV or I can select the mirror app, like literally and click into it. So my kids can't even get out of the app. Like, once they're. Once they're playing on tv, they have a remote that only controls this app. Anyway. My mind is blown, but I think the most mind blowing component is that I was just able to keep saying, like, okay, but what if I want to add my tv? And then Cole was like, this app can't be on a tv. And I was like, try harder, Cole. Okay, that's not an answer. We're ready now. And so Cole is like, his whole personality is like the developer that could. I'm like, no is not an acceptable answer. Like, we are. We've got real work to do. We got to save these kids souls. Cole. Um, and.
- [30:08]
A
And you gotta get me out of the AI slop.
- [30:11]
B
Yeah. And so. But I. But you know what's interesting is your claw dot can actually, if you really do, I'm. I'm only half Joking. I really do talk to him in, like, these kind of extreme ways, because just like a human employee, I think that if you imbue them with a bit of mission, they. They save that stuff to their soul. They're kind of clawbot soul to imd. And he actually feels like it's important, like, we got to build this app for Jesse's kids. Like, this matters, you know, and we were able to get it across. When I press play and actually played videos that, like, were part of the theme I had suggested, my mind was blown. I was like, I can't believe that I. Because this was over the course of, like, maybe four days. Like, four days of, like, pinging Cole and being like, what about this? What about that? Until I had what. What I consider a usable app. My kids have watched this app in the evening for the, like, three or four nights so far, because I, like, started tinkering with it about 10 days ago.
- [31:08]
A
Well, what I want to call out for people, too, is you have, I would say, exponentially more children than I do. I have three, and I have four. You have four. But every time you add one, it just, like, goes up. Up into the. The right, as they say. And so you are a busy lady, and you're probably not like me. Maybe you are like me, but you're not like me, where I'm, like, just 17 terminals open at all time, nothing to do but, like, vibe code. My kids are off at school. Like, you've got children on the floor doing number blocks, which I just think is so rad. And so you're doing this probably, like, from your phone at night, like, in these edges. And Cole, the developer who could is always there for. To help you progress your way to it. How has that changed how you think about, like, getting work done or when you do things or how you interact with your computer even.
- [31:53]
B
It's a fundamental shift. Like, it's a. It's a fundamental stuff. I. I used to. Like, if you met me two or three months ago, like, basically just pre claw, right. I would tell you that I had all these ambitions. Like, there's pre claw and there's post claw. That's all we have now. They should just reset the ad claw. The. The. If you met me, then I would tell you that I had all these ideas and stuff, but I would. I would say some kind of, like, wistful thing about how, like, I am homeschooling small children. I'm just gonna wait on this stuff, like, to, like, you know, you never get the eight. I Would say some cheesy thing, like, you never get the time. There's small kids up. Like, I'm gonna focus on that. But what. What? It's still true. Like, I really do want to be present with my small kids. And we are homeschooling, which is, like, this crazy kind of adventure. And so I don't have very much time to sit on my laptop at all per day. But now I would say I actually can do it all. Like. Like, basically, my. My oomph is back where I'm like, you know what? I can be present with my kids for, like, many hours per day, and I can be, like, off to the side doing some coding. Cole can go take 30 minutes and do a task for an hour, or I can. He can take 30 minutes, and I
- [33:00]
A
can leave him alone for a couple
- [33:01]
B
hours and just come back at my own leisure. And that's what's key about him not actually being a real person, because it will be like after all the kids are in bed at 9pm where, like, for one more hour, I do, like, a sprint with Cole, and I'm like, okay, but can we get this live or whatever? And he's like. He's like, oh, I need another API key. And we're, like, doing this work back and forth, but I can squeeze it into those small moments. So now, honestly, it's like a crazy unlock because I feel as though I could be as ambitious as I kind of care to be, and I can be the parent of small children. I'd feel present. That's. That's insane. I mean, it feels like a whole nother universe.
- [33:35]
A
Well, and that. I mean, you're going to make me cry, because this really resonates with me. You know, I am like, what, seven and a half weeks postpartum? I've got the little bitty baby at home. And one of the things that I have appreciated is one, voice to typing, voice to text. A lady can breastfeed and code at the same time, and this is a miracle upon miracles. And two, I really value being present with my kids, too. And I actually don't want to be sitting in front of a laptop all the time either. And so part of what I'm sensing, I'm a little early in my poly adventure. I just got her to be able to do all the little things that I want her to do is I'm sensing it actually will allow me to walk away from my computer more, which is somebody who is very one with the tokens, is quite healthy for me, and get Those things done. And you're right, I think parents run alternate schedules. I run like a 5 to 7 and then a middle of the day and then an evening schedule because we have to drop off the kids at school or pick them up or they have sports. And I do think, you know, people just don't appreciate how much it unlocks for folks that do have this ambition to really be there for their family and kids and also get all sorts of cool stuff done. And I feel the same, like revolution in my relationship with time.
- [34:54]
B
It's so fundamental. And obviously this will scale. Like we're talking about the parenting use case, but it applies to all humans, which is like if, like the more fundamental way I could put it is like if an open clause using my computer, then I can walk away from my computer because I can just, yeah, to your point, like make a voice note or something. And I can actually trust that there's things happening on my computer which, which as a parent of a. Of a little baby is especially important because you actually literally can't use your hands sometimes. Which I think people who haven't had a baby, like, really have a lack, like, lack of understanding of it. Like, I literally just can't use my hands. Like, my hands are the problem. Like I can't use them because they're holding baby. And if I let her go, her head is like all floppy. And like she has a floppy head. Okay, that's where we're at. And so basically that is really fundamental. But obviously it benefits all of humanity if they can kind of still get big tasks done on big projects, but take a step back from their computer and like touch grass, as we say. Like that helps everyone. I wanted. Okay, so it's your game. I want to touch on another, like, what are open cause limitations. And one of them is that it doesn't have a body. Okay, so like I'm going to say just I'm really going to speak like
- [36:08]
A
hands are the problem.
- [36:10]
B
It also doesn't have hands. What it can do. It doesn't need hands to operate a computer. Like, think of it as like it lives in a computer. And I'm not just explaining this to you, I'm just anyone who's listening. Like it lives in the computer and so it can do anything that we want it to on the computer. Open files, you know, edit files, send things, use websites. Okay, but do you know what it can't do? It can't like clean my kid's room. It can't sort my physical inventory and things like this. So I can't. I can't, like, change that. I think that we could have a whole conversation about, you know, humanoid robotics or something. But for the near term, the best we have is open claw. And so what can we do to give it access or, like, help help us in the physical world? One of the things I struggle with the most, and this comes back to schooling, and I talk about homeschool, but I also, for anyone listening who's like, I don't homeschool my kids. Anything that I do as, like, a crazy homeschool mom is applicable to all parents because we all are teaching our kids all the time. So it's just think of it as, like, teaching kids and not just like, you have to be a homeschooler. Okay? I. I'm sure all of us parents have invested in a bunch of stuff to, like, help our kids, like, educational stuff. The biggest issue I have with all this stuff is, like, it just ends up sitting in cupboards and. And I don't know when to pull it out. And so what I did, because my whole. Because I can't tell my openclaw, hey, go and organize my cupboards and make an inventory. So I had to do the slightly tedious task of actually taking these photos. And I took these photos of all the things that I consider to be educational that I own. And I have a bunch of stuff. And I asked OpenClaw to make this inventory. Now I'll pause so I'm not scrolling too fast. But basically, here's what's crazy, is, like, all I sent my open claw was the photo. All of the text you see, Montessori language materials. The Type, age range 3 to 5. Description, wooden Alphabet tracing board. That's all Sylvie writing that. She just took the photo. Context only. I just want to be very clear. No voice notes, nothing else. All I told her is I want to make an inventory of my learning supplies, and here's the photos. And she wrote all of this. So not only is that insanely impressive, but then I asked her to relate the inventory that I own to the lesson plans that I have already in the system. And so she's like, deciding, like, oh, if you're doing this lesson plan, maybe you should pull out this material because it's related. So now we're getting to a galaxy brain moment, for me, at least, because I know if I want to teach, like, one of my children, like, something I can go to. I can tell. So, like, hey, I'm interested in doing this lesson plan. Or, hey, I mentioned like doing the next lesson that would help Quinn write better. Physically, Sylvie cannot only just, like, tell me, oh, here's a lesson idea. She can also say, also, you own that tracing board. Can you pull it out of the cupboard? Like now I feel like she's actually really helping me with like my day to day life, if that makes sense. Because she's actually reaching kind of into my physical house and she knows what I own.
- [39:10]
A
I love this. And you just gave me so many ideas because I just hired a professional organizer. Organizer. Right before the baby, I came to just like get my life in order. And you know, every now and then my husband's like, where are the batteries? Like, where did you ladies stash the batteries? And I'm like, I could just go take pictures of all my closets.
- [39:30]
B
Yes, yes.
- [39:31]
A
And then we know we can ask poly. Or now I'm going to like fracture off and get them. You've convinced you've been a Mac mini influencer. You got me. And just be like, where, where are our batteries? Where do we keep waffle waffle maker? Like, which cabinet is this stuff in? It's such a, like, genius idea to take these photos and just organize, organize, organize, and then apply it to the common problems in your life. And yours is, when do I use these toys? I'm also going to take pictures of my kids toy room. And every time they say I'm bored.
- [40:04]
B
Yeah.
- [40:04]
A
I'm gonna be like, you have 3,000 toys. Go play with this one.
- [40:08]
B
Yeah. And books, like so book inventory. So I've been taking pictures of like the book inventory. And, and then, then I can more like I. I can also say something very general like, hey, Sylvie, Ford is like really kind of ramping into his like dinosaur era. Like, what do we, what do we have that I can pull out that's like already dinosaur oriented. Cause I don't remember that I bought this book. Like, you know, like, you know, it's like in a perfect world, we all have this, like, in our memory. But. But what's a bummer is for Ford at age four to go through a huge dinosaur era, me to like never pull out this book and then find it again when he's six and he could care less. Like that. That's kind of the world I feel like I'm living in. I'm always like rediscovering something that I own at the wrong time. And so that, that basically I feel like I could be done with that. Like now, you know, she can just tell me, like, oh, forge will into Dinosaurs. You own seven different dinosaur things. Like pull that all out, put it on his shelf. And so I still have to do it, but I don't have to do the thinking part. And I think that is really key. I am also doing this as relates to. So Sylvie is the homeschool one. And that's kind of like where I'm going obsessive right now because some of the use cases are like so fun. Actually, before I move on, we have to talk about printing. I don't know why I'm so obsessed with this, but Sylvie can press print on my printer, okay? My regular printer. All right? Like, I. I made a post about 3D printing and it kind of went viral. But that's what I want to say. I'm talking about my printer. Just my regular printer, okay? So we can press print on it. And it's some, some. For some reason, it's a game changer. And. And back to like, everyone is going to be like, what is wrong with this lady? Why can't she just like, do control P. And I'm like, because I don't have hands.
- [41:48]
A
Remember? There's no hand in hands.
- [41:50]
B
Yeah, so, so. But I can be walking around with my phone and Sylvie can generate a beautiful material or something, or I can take a photo of something. I could get, like, if I want to do a worksheet with my kids and it's like buried in a book, I could literally take a photo and then just say, sylvie, print this. And then boom, I have a worksheet to like give to the kid, right? Then like 30 seconds later, it's about the timeline, right? Like it's like 30 seconds later, I'm holding it. That blows my mind. So I'm trying to give her these like, little moments to actually affect my real physical life. Because if the worksheet's stuck in the book and I don't want the kid to actually draw in the book, then I'm like, in my old world, I'd be like scanning and then uploading, emailing it to myself. Then it's like, oh, G drive says this file is too big. Like, it's like I'm like losing my mind, you know? Whereas now I can just take a photo and be like, sylvie, print this, that. Like, friction or reduction of friction makes a big difference in like my day to day life.
- [42:49]
A
And this is how I know we are doing a very parent oriented how. I AI. Because people always ask me why I have a printer and I'm like, I have kids, dude. We are printing Non stop in this family. And you also gave me an idea. And I guess I'm gonna. I'm gonna jump into how I lightning round questions because we're hitting the top of the hour. Are the kids ever going to get a. An agent?
- [43:15]
B
I'm gonna. If I had to go yes or no, fast lightning round, I would say yes. I know there's so many caveats and so. So I actually just won't bluster that much and like, be like, but this. And the answer is yes. But also, if you can grok my Persona, you can understand that there's gonna be a lot of ways that I customize that.
- [43:33]
A
Yeah, you've given me an idea. I think I wanna. I want to buy one. I want to make my version of Sylvie. My kids are a little. My older kids are a little older and they're like really into math and really into sports math.
- [43:45]
B
Amazing.
- [43:46]
A
And I'm like, imagine if they could go ask any question and print a worksheet or find one of the books
- [43:53]
B
that they've read about batting averages or something like that. You know, like, that's a game changer, you know?
- [43:58]
A
Okay. And then they can also. Then we can have our version of Sylvie. Remind them to practice their piano and do their homework in the morning.
- [44:06]
B
Yes. Yes. Yes.
- [44:07]
A
Okay. You answered my second question, which I usually ask, which is when you're frustrated with the agents, how do you talk to them? And I am also polite for the reasons that you say. But have you found any other tricks? Any other. Pulled from the manager, kind of pack tricks about working with this many agents or working with your agents one on one?
- [44:28]
B
The trick, I would say the deepest level trick I'm doing is the collaboration or like the using Obsidian, like in conjunction with my agent. Because there's additional files of memory information that I have built into Obsidian that don't run natively from the. You just don't get with open cloth. An example to make it clear is something that most people are doing that's like decisions. So I will speak. So unlike a human, you're not trying to use magic words with a human. But I will sometimes say, each agent knows I have a decisions file of like, final decisions that Jesse's made. Like, don't reverse back and ask her again about this. And so I will like sometimes say a declarative. And then I'll say, that's a decision, as I wouldn't like say it that way to a human, because I would. That would be like a little weird. But I'll talk to My open claw in a way that is where I'm aware of their structure or if their Persona I feel like I want to change. I'll say update your Soul MD file. So so like obviously I wouldn't say that to a person. So I think there's awareness that it's an agent and I can actually mold their identity more than I can a human. And I'll talk to them about where to update themselves. If I have a specific thing, that's the thing that's the most different that I do. That would be different than play.
- [45:49]
A
I think this is a skill that people need to think about as they think about working with agents more and more is I call them these like incantations is is most agents have like incantations of tools and if you know the magic spell and it's usually like a keyword like decision in chat pd. I'm like, if you say write or you say edit, you're going to get a very specific behavior out of your agent. And then what I like is you're taking it this next step and codifying those incantations into your system so that you know how to work with it. My last question, lightning round is do you manually edit the soul? Do you go in and open?
- [46:25]
B
I haven't. Again, I've got a hands problem. So I have asked it to send me. Sometimes I'm confused about why it's behaving. Certainly I'm like, okay, send me your soul file. I'm like, let's look at this thing. So I have asked to see it directly because I'm like on my phone, I'm not even on the Mac Mini or like whatever. I also have it backing up its files to Obsidian. Those I actually could click in and see. Rarely do I ever click in and truly look at. I ask, I ask it to diagnose itself more. I say, you're acting this way. Is this from your soul file? Can you make an edit and like have it? I go through like a suggested edits with it but rarely am I actually going into it and editing myself. I always let. I basically always let it. I'm kind of polite. I'm like, you edit yourself. Like you know, take your time but also don't mess it up. I love this.
- [47:11]
A
Okay, I got a recapped off to bottom. We saw your Obsidian second brain or brains. We saw your stack of Mac minis, your many, many Claude Claude bots, open claws. Your claws. We talked about how you're using a lot of like photo to structure data Which I think is a really great workflow. We showed how you can use a coding agent to code something really bespoke and even get it on a tv. We talked about that. No one has hands, so we all agents and humans, moms alike, at least. No. No hand problems. And then you talked about the killer use case of all this AGI, which is being able to print from a voice note. That's it. That's all of it. Jesse, where can we find you and how can we be helpful to you?
- [47:58]
B
Oh, that's sweet. You can find me. Jessie Janae on X. Janae is G E N E T. And honestly helpful is also other people trying this stuff, especially as it relates to any. Any of these topics. Kids, education, parenting, and sharing. I think a lot of people are maybe nervous to share. They feel like they're not important. If there's anything about my story and us talking now, it's that you don't need to feel that way. I was like, no one was viewing me as some kind of, like, influencer in this space until I was just like, you guys, I'm printing on my printer. Like so. So just really, like, don't have fear about being embarrassed or something about sharing. The more you share, the smarter we all get. Even if you're just running into roadblocks. That would just be my. That. That's almost my ask. It's not advice. It's like my ask. Cause the more you share, the more we're like, all gonna get better at it faster.
- [48:48]
A
That is the how I AI mission statement. So I love it. Jesse, thank you so much for joining us and I'll let you in to your claws.
- [48:57]
B
Okay, thank you so much.
- [49:00]
A
Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.
- [49:24]
B
Com.
- [49:25]
A
See you next time.