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- [00:01]
Kieran
Okay, the world is going crazy about openclaw, the most popular personal autonomous agent on the planet, rumored to be acquired by OpenAI for $1 billion. Not a bad outcome for a side project. But while all of those people are focused in openclaw silently, Manus, under the Meta brand, have launched a personal autonomous agent of their own that we think is pretty incredible.
- [00:33]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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- [01:20]
Kieran
Yep, I know we've been playing around with it and we've been whatsapping each other to death about this agent. Why don't you do this set up here and tell us why you love this agent?
- [01:28]
Co-host/Guest Expert
So, yes, there's a ton of buzz around openclaw because you can basically message it in your messaging platform like Telegram and have it go and do stuff for you and connect it to your services. The challenge is it's like, it's kind of complex to set up. There's a bunch of security risks, like you need to be a pretty technical person to use that. And I just quite frankly don't have the time to do a deep setup. However, there's this company, Mana im, and they recently, a couple months ago, got acquired by Meta and they essentially have released their own version of openclaw that I've been using that for me does everything I want without the hassle setup and with the same intelligence and autonomy. And really it's like you can go into Telegram, leave a voice note or a text message of what you want it to do, and it will go and do it and it'll come back to you. And the really cool thing, Kieran, and it has like memory and could do cron jobs and different things. So like, for example, I gave it a list of podcasts that I don't have time to listen to, but I think are really good and it will listen to them every week and every Monday send me a specific custom summary to me of all of the episodes from those podcasts that week. That's very different than using like Claude or ChatGPT to just kind of type in and get something right straight away.
- [02:43]
Kieran
So you can kind of lay it up there. Manus was launched in March 2025. Not that long ago, no beat GPT4 on Real World benchmarks. When it came out, it was called the second deep seat moment. Got acquired by Meta for 2 billion in December 2025. And now after all of the kind of Open Claw noise, they silently launched this personal agent to everyone. I think it was on February 6th. And your point is? Hey, this agent can do most of what Open Claw is. There's a whole bunch of skills that you can use with it, and we're going to show you those. You can access it through Telegram, you can access it through your email, and you do not have to worry about your computer getting hacked. There was a lot of great studies that showed there's a ton of security flaws and issues with OpenClore at large. And so it feels like if you were thinking, hey, I want to get set up with a personal autonomous agent to see what all the fanfare is about. This is like a first great step. Go to Manus. We're going to show you exactly how to use it.
- [03:41]
Co-host/Guest Expert
Couldn't agree more. And I just want to say shout out to our boy, Mark Zuckerberg. Zuck has one core skill and his core skill is to see what somebody has figured out that's really good and people love and to copy it. And that's what's happening here. It's like Manus took what people, and especially the tech community loves about openclaw, but delivered it in a web, easy to use. You don't need to write code, you don't need a Mac Mini or AWS or any of these things. You to run it, right?
- [04:11]
Kieran
And so when you come into Manus, you'll have this agent tab. When you go in here, it will ask you to connect your agent and set up your agent. So you'll get a QR code for Telegram and so you can now run it off your Telegram.
- [04:24]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And other channels are coming soon. Right now it's Telegram, but they're going to have WhatsApp and Slack and other channels soon.
- [04:29]
Kieran
I'm going to show you a quick use case and then we're actually going to allow you to be able to copy it.
- [04:36]
Sponsor/Ad Voice 2
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- [04:55]
Kieran
One of the things I was doing is I have it set up on my phone and I heard about the OpenAI acquisition of OpenClaw, rumored to be 1 billion. That guy, not only is he cashing out, I don't know if you've seen all the photos. That guy is also built like a tank so you can go to the gym and do work. That's what he managed to do. And so that acquisition went through and I was like, okay, that probably will make a bunch of great content. And so what I did was I basically voice noted my Manus agent. I basically said, hey, like, go retrieve all of the best threads on Reddit, all of the best articles that have been written about this acquisition stack rank them by those getting the most engagement and like, turn it into talking points for me. And I did that all through the phone, just left the voice message. I was actually out at the time walking my dog. Just send it a voice message. That is the kind of unlock with autonomous agents, right? All I did was send in a voice note. And so I come back after walking my French bulldog, who's an absolute nightmare to walk, and I come to my desktop and so this was done through Telegram on my phone. I now have this thread and I can go in here. This is a skill. We are going to show you how you can build these skills for, for yourself in that skill. It basically goes and it extracts all of that research and turns it into like quote unquote talking points, things that would make great content, and actually turns it into a little interactive website to make it easier for me to see what talking points it is extracted. And you can see here it understands what my audience is. CMOS founders, marketing executives. And then it pulls in these kind of talking points again, looking just from the last couple of days of what's going on around this acquisition and turns it into these categories. It says, like, here's some educational talking points you can turn into great content. Here are some spicy takes, right? And Tropic's legal team, this is a really good one, actually just handed OpenAI a 300 billion gift. And so why was that? Because Claude was the front runner of openclaw. People loved using it with Claude. And then what was their response? They tried to shut it down because it used a similar name. Openclaw used to be called Claude. And so the legal team got involved and that's rumored to be why he ended up selling to OpenAI. And so this is a great little talking point I could turn into Content. But just look how good this is, right? I wasn't doing anything.
- [07:03]
Co-host/Guest Expert
I just voice noted a voice note on your phone and you had set up a skill. We're going to talk about skills in a minute because they're really important part of building with these agents. But you can now take this and build or automate any type of like thought leadership or viral content you want to build here. Right?
- [07:19]
Kieran
You can get a great first pass when you are on your phone doing, doing any other thing and you just tell your agent to create it all and you come back to all of this work being done. As you can see here, all of the research is done. It built the interactive page and I can soon, because it's coming in Manus, which is agentic teams hand this off to another agent. So I can say another agent should pick up the best talking point and create a first draft. So that is, you know, the promise of these personal autonomous agents, right. You can just ask it to do something and it goes off and spends a bunch of time. And when you come back, all of this work is done like pretty, pretty incredible.
- [07:52]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Exactly.
- [07:52]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And the reason that the output you did Kieran is so good was something called skills. And I think Kieran skills are the most important aspect of learning AI this year. The reason for that is skills are the context for agents to do work at the level of quality that you need them to do.
- [08:14]
Kieran
So skills is basically a system, whereas prompt is conversation. What that means is you teach the AI a core skill that is a system skill and it actually has that knowledge and can repeat that task time and time again. One of my favorite films of all time, maybe my favorite film of all time, is that a matrix? And there's this incredible scene and Trinity needs to be able to pilot the helicopter and she just calls back to the AI and says, I need to be able to ride helicopters. And it basically teaches her that skill and puts it into her brain. Not too dissimilar from what skills are skills. You can find them here. You, you can manage your skills. You can see I've installed my viral talking points. But if we go into, let's say this similarwebs analytics and you can see here, a skill is basically an unborn document to teach you how to do something in the same way you would teach a human how to do a skill. You kind of teach the AI exactly how to complete a task. It lives in this skill MD file. And anytime you ask it to do something that involves that skill, it will call back to this file and so you do not get inconsistent results. You can continue to make that skill much, much better. It actually comes with a skill creator. So Manus in of itself can help you create skills for itself. And the one thing I would just say is skills are universal. This is not like a Manus thing, a claw thing, an OpenAI thing. If you create a skill MD file, which is how I teach the AI how to do something, I can use it in all of those different systems.
- [09:42]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
Correct.
- [09:42]
Kieran
And that is why to your point, skill is the most important skill to learn for AI this year.
- [09:48]
Co-host/Guest Expert
Yeah. And so you do need to go into settings if you're just getting started with Manus and turn on skills and then some of these are pre made skills and then you can make your own. But Kieran, to your point, you can make a skill in Claude or ChatGPT or Claude code and then use it in manas or vice versa because all they are is MD files or markdown files that have these instructions that run with your agent when you're asking it to do something specific and to go and use that skill. The thing I will say, Kieran, is creating skills is real work. In the future, a lot of products are probably just going to be really awesome skills because getting skills right are so challenging. I mean, I could show you Kieran, probably for an hour, hour and a half on an ad optimizer skill. Let me walk through this with everybody. Okay? You'll see how crazy long this thread is because I'm essentially starting off the process and telling it to make a skill. And this skill is to make it really easy to analyze data for a product, understand where there might be an arbitrage opportunity for advertising, meaning where's there less competition. And I have the ability to buy ads cheaper and get customers cheaper because of that, and then identify that placement opportunity and then design the creative to be placed in that opportunity. So this is a pretty advanced skill and something that would be really awesome to get done. And I probably still have a couple hours of work before I'm really, really happy with it. But what you'll see is I've given it different instructions around the platforms about looking at data on similar web. And every time I do that Kieran, I basically install the skill, add the skill and I run it and test it and I find out all the things that aren't good with the output and you'll see like, look at how bad this output is bad. This is for HubSpot's customer agent product. And so I did this and eventually Kieran I had to go and do a bunch of research. I did one of my favorite advertising copywriters. I built a detailed style guide for HubSpot. So I've built this so that it does this for HubSpot products. I'm not gonna bore everybody with the amount I have gone back and forth, but I have made a very in depth skill. But now that I have that skill, I can do some very cool things.
- [12:01]
Sponsor/Ad Voice 2
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- [12:44]
Co-host/Guest Expert
I want to show you some of the ads that I made with my most recent version. You tell me if they're good or not.
- [12:49]
Kieran
And so how did it know to run this specific skill? Like, you basically tell it to do a certain task and it goes to look in your skills library and says, oh, I have a skill to do this task right?
- [13:00]
Co-host/Guest Expert
Well, it will look for those skills. But then you name your skills and this skill is named Adoptimizer. So you know if you're on telegram like you were just showing at the beginning, you'd say, hey, using the ad optimizer skill, do the following and then.
- [13:13]
Kieran
You come back to this, right?
- [13:14]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And so you can call the skill. So these are some of my most recent ads, Kieran. So like we're starting to get the illustration style right.
- [13:21]
Kieran
Pretty cool.
- [13:22]
Co-host/Guest Expert
This copywriting's getting good. Like this is really good. Classic basic copywriting and design. They're still not fully there, but these are pretty close now.
- [13:33]
Kieran
Yeah. Good first drafts.
- [13:35]
Co-host/Guest Expert
They're at minimum good first drafts. I think if I keep hammering on the skill I can get to like, creative that you would at least run and test. Right.
- [13:45]
Kieran
Why does it see these as the arbitrage opportunity?
- [13:47]
Co-host/Guest Expert
So I keep working through the math. It did a full report for me, but it's basically running math saying we should spend $10,000 on Meta on Facebook and Instagram because our competitors for this product don't allocate that much social media, that meta ads are cheaper than LinkedIn and cheaper than Google. And so it's identifying that for this product relative to competitors. And I don't believe the math here. Right. Here's one thing, context is so important that one thing I haven't done is I haven't uploaded any of our historical advertising and real results.
- [14:21]
Kieran
Yeah.
- [14:21]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And so if I did that, that's the next part of this. That would be really, really great. I just haven't had time to do that yet. Yeah. And so in absence of that, it's going to make up some numbers. But if you've got any real ad data to add into something like this, it's going to be much better, much effective. But the, the logic is sound. I like that it's looking at channels relative to the competition for this product. Right.
- [14:41]
Kieran
Yeah. And because they're owned by Meta now, you can just quickly integrate it with your Meta ad platform. And so I suspect this is going to be deeply intertwined with your Meta account. And so you're going to be able to do a ton of cool paid optimization and things like that through this agent.
- [14:55]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And if you're new to paid, something like this is a real cheat sheet because one of the things I've added, Kieran, is that it has to give me a detailed targeting strategy for each recommendation. So it's telling me to build lookalike audiences interest targeting what those interests are custom audiences like web retargeting and current customers. So like this is something like if you haven't done a ton of advertising, like these are things you probably necessarily know to do and it's giving you a great first place to start. Yeah, right.
- [15:23]
Kieran
Yeah. So basically you can kind of ask it to do it on the desktop app, but one of the cool things is you can voice note it, you can ask it to do things in Telegram. Walk away, come back.
- [15:32]
Co-host/Guest Expert
I did this like just a minute ago I found an Instagram ad of this pillow. It's from this pillow company my wife loves, Verba Studios, Shout out to Kimberly and her pillows. And I just left an 11 second voice memo saying like, hey, I like this ad. Can you do an ad for customer agent like this ad? So I literally screenshotted and left a voice memo and sent it in Telegram. Right. That's what I did. And it came back with a couple different creative ideas.
- [15:57]
Kieran
Very cool. This is why people are going crazy about autonomous agents, because you can just interact with them through many different channels. I want to actually show you one of the things that we really were excited by in terms of Manus, because we talked about Telegram and voice notes, but actually one of the killer things you can do here is you can email your agent.
- [16:15]
Co-host/Guest Expert
I would just say what you're about to show is the most underrated AI feature that nobody's talking about.
- [16:21]
Kieran
Yeah, it's a game changer. It has an inbox. So basically you have this email address and you can just email your manus bot. Now one of the other things you can do is you can set up workflows. So if I go here, one of the ones I'm going to set up is deal flow. Because I get a lot of companies looking for investment and whenever dealfo comes in, I'm going to say research the company looking for investment and give me the bull and bear case. So whenever an investment comes in, all I'm going to do is forward it to this bot and then you'll see that bot will do that work and it will be in your inbox. So yesterday I was on email, I saw some news in a newsletter about Bitcoin and I was like actually forwarded at the newsletter and said, can you do some analysis on what they're saying about Bitcoin here? And that is pretty incredible, right? That you can actually just forward emails to different inboxes and have workflows set up to do things with those emails. And I think that's actually one of the wildest unlocks.
- [17:19]
Co-host/Guest Expert
I have a couple set up, Kieran. One like to draft responses to people. Another is any email newsletter I get that I don't have time to read. I can forward it and it'll give me a personalized summary of that email newsletter for any action items or things that are relevant to me.
- [17:33]
Kieran
Yeah, this is super cool. So again, you're seeing the evolution here of a personal autonomous agent can do tasks all the way to their outcome and is deeply intertwined to all your workflows. Email messaging. So what's coming here is not going to stop at Telegram. They're obviously going to start to launch other ways to communicate with your personal agent. I think the most obvious being WhatsApp. That would be my messaging platform of choice. I think Slack is coming and so it's going to be like intertwined across all of your channels over the next 30 days. And the other thing is what you actually have right now is you have one personal agent that you talk to. You are going to be able to create different agents who are specialized in different areas. And so if I want a content agent, I can just talk to them and a different chat than I would talk to my investor agent. So you can actually start to build teams of Autonomous agents that can all talk to each other and you can talk to those. And that I think is going to be insane.
- [18:31]
Co-host/Guest Expert
Kieran. And one other thing on the email that you may not have seen, but you can also CC anybody on that email and like you could forward that to Manus and CC me and it will also put me on that thread with you.
- [18:42]
Kieran
Oh yeah.
- [18:43]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And we'll both be able to see the bitcoin results that you analysis that you did and we could collaborate on it together if we wanted, which is really cool.
- [18:51]
Kieran
That's a great growth hack for Manus. That's a great way for it to expose itself to other folks.
- [18:56]
Co-host/Guest Expert
It's a great growth hack for them.
- [18:58]
Kieran
I think all in all we are impressed by Manus. You can go get set up now. There's not a lot of like technical capabilities you need to be able to do that. Just connect to telegrams. Soon you'll be able to connect Slack, WhatsApp, go email it. Set up a couple of skills. If you want to set up a skill really quickly, just tell Manus that I want a skill that can do this thing and it will create the skill for you. You install it in the way that you've installed skills anywhere else and then you can join the party. Then you have a autonomous personal AI assistant. You've joined the party and you can start to see what all of the hype is about.
- [19:31]
Co-host/Guest Expert
It's totally true. The only caveat I'd give Kieran is you will probably spend some money if you really start using this heavily. Especially if you're making any images or if you are accessing data from similar web. Anything that Manus has that's really valuable but also has like a real cost associated to it. I burnt through probably 20,000 credits just iterating through my ad optimizer trying to get that right.
- [19:54]
Kieran
Yeah.
- [19:54]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And so you can get started doing everything we're doing for like very cheap to free. I forget if this is all in the free version or if you have to get the base paid version, but if you start using it a lot you're going to spend some money. And I would just warn everybody about that.
- [20:08]
Kieran
That's the one downside of Manus is it is pretty token hungry. Yes. And so you do want to use it for, you know, strategic worthy things. I not just send in every email and say what do you think my mom really means by this email? It's probably not going to be the best use of it.
- [20:23]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And the reason for that though that is good is that Amanda is a super agent. It uses all the different AI models out there, so it uses Nano Banana to make ads. And there's just real costs associated with using all those models. What's great is you don't have to go and go to all those individual models and do all this manually, but there is a cost for that convenience. Yeah, my usage moves very fast to whatever. The best thing is, I used to use ChatGPT all the time. I couldn't tell you the last time I logged into ChatGPT.
- [20:50]
Kieran
Same.
- [20:51]
Co-host/Guest Expert
Right? Like, I literally could not tell you.
- [20:53]
Kieran
Yeah.
- [20:54]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And I would just say all of my usage now is Claude and Manus. And that, I think, tells you a lot of where things are going. And part of that's because Manus has a better user experience to even access, like the Gemini models and like Nano Banana. It's like I'd much rather be be able to just telegram a screenshot and a quick idea and have it draft something up for me, then go into Gemini or Google AI Studio.
- [21:17]
Kieran
It also tells you that memory wasn't as sticky as we maybe thought it was. I thought it was going to be pretty sticky, but it was pretty easy for me to just start using Claude again. And Claude does have memory, but ChatGPT has a lot of memory on me. But I think if you actually had to look at those two things, I just think core value of the output is going to outweigh the stickiness of memory. And they all do have memory, so you'll have some semblance of memory across all of them. But I agree, I don't think AI users are loyal in any way. I think we will just gravitate towards whatever the best model to use is. Yeah.
- [21:46]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And if you look at what we said on the show, one of the things I really encourage everybody to take away from today's show, beyond some of the tactical agents you can go and set up that we showed you, is that skills and building skill files are going to be so important to getting better quality output from any of the AI work you're doing. And the great thing about skills is they're totally portable. As we said, you can use skills everywhere. And so given that that's going to be such big part of AI, you'll see everybody moving from product to product because they can take their skills with them.
- [22:16]
Kieran
The ecosystem around skills is just becoming huge. This is one of many, many websites, but this one here alone, 47,000 skills. This is really intelligence for free. Yeah. So all of these things that people used to have expertise in or they were core skills, you can literally just go down and start to install them. And so the challenge is not how do I build skills or get them, it's going to be how do I choose the right ones and integrate them into my workflow and kind of adapt them for my needs.
- [22:47]
Co-host/Guest Expert
And that's why the best people are actually going to be at a premium, because the best people are going to be able to make super unique skills and scale their work. You know, if you are 10x better than everybody else at something, you can now make a skill around that and get 10x more output at a 10x quality, which is really, I think, the magic of, of skills and something that I'm sure we'll be talking a lot about in future episodes.
- [23:07]
Kieran
Right, so that's the episode.
- [23:09]
Co-host/Guest Expert
Awesome.
- [23:10]
Kieran
Set it up in Telegram, get some skills, use it via voice notes, use it via the desktop app, use it via email, whatever works for you. And start up your personal autonomous assistants to start doing some tasks today.
- [23:23]
Co-host/Guest Expert
Drop some comments around the skills you're building or any cool agents you're building. Hit like subscribe and we'll see you again real soon. On Marketing against the Grain. Hey everyone. You know Kieran and I have been doing the podcast for a while now. We've been at this for a couple years. We love it. We could not be happier to be doing this, but we wanted to take things to the next level. We want to level up the impact we're having with Marketing against the Grain. So the next step of our journey is something we're really, really excited about. We're going to launch the Marketing it's the Grain newsletter. And Marketing against the Grain newsletter is going to be amazing. If you are a marketing leader practitioner, you're in the trenches doing marketing every day. This is for you. We're going to deliver right to your email inbox and you're going to get all the behind the scenes frameworks, practices, tutorials from us, from guests we have on the show, and from people even beyond the podcast that we think are going to be helpful and really have an impact on your day to day, week to week doing marketing. You're going to love it. It is something we've been talking about for a while. We're really excited to have it out in the world. We've already got 100,000 marketers who are on this newsletter. Please join. It's completely free. We'd love to have you as part of the Marketing against the Grain community and it's easy. You can click the link in the description below, or you can head to marketing against the grain.com subscribe.