Loading summary
Transcript64 lines
- [00:00]
A
Today's episode is an inside look to how Andrew Wilkinson is using AI agents to run his personal and business life. This is a guy who has a great setup. He shows us exactly how he's using things like OpenClaw and AI agents to be more productive and to make more money, how he uses it with his family office, how he's using it to start a startup, how he's using it to think about where the next generation businesses and where he should be putting his money. This is an inside look and I don't think he shared this anywhere with how he's using AI agents to run his life and his businesses. By the end of this episode, you're gonna have your creative juices flowing. I certainly did. And I can't wait to see you in there.
- [00:45]
B
The startup ideas podcast. It's skipping time, baby.
- [00:53]
A
Andrew Wilkinson, I think third time on the pod. Welcome back. Good to have you, Andrew. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?
- [01:02]
B
Oh, man, they're going to learn that OpenClaw is hard but amazing when it works. They're going to learn whether they have ADHD or ocd, they're going to learn how to build a crazy vector database about their complex company and they're going to learn a few prompt tricks and whatever random other stuff we end up stumbling into.
- [01:27]
A
Okay, so for those of you who don't know, Andrew's a very curious guy and he gets deep into rabbit holes. So it sounds like what we're going to learn is a lot about how you're using AI in your day to day. The good, the bad, the ugly, and everything in between.
- [01:48]
B
Yeah, let's do it.
- [01:50]
A
All right, let's get into it.
- [01:51]
B
I would say I had this crazy moment like so many other people in December of last year who, where I played with Claude Code and all the AI tools like replit and stuff and they could kind of do stuff. It was interesting, but it wasn't there yet. And In December of 2025, I just literally like, I. I feel like I started shooting heroin. I started waking up at 3 or 4 in the morning, rolling out of bed with a big smile on my face and, and literally just sitting in terminal in cloud code with 10 tabs open. And I've been doing that ever since. And my goal, you know, I've had a bunch of different things I've been trying to do on the productivity side. Like I was basically trying to build an open claw agent before openclaw came out and doing a very poor job of it. So I was excited when I was able to do that, but I mostly have been excited as a business person. Um, for those of you, the listeners that don't know, I basically buy and start businesses. I mostly start businesses as a hobby for. For fun, but I buy a lot of businesses and I'm always astounded by the amount of administrative burden in, you know, a SaaS company. If you think about how it scales, you know, support accounting, there's all these, like, very boring, rote types of tasks that are now able to be automated. And so as a test, before I started doing this in our operating businesses, I basically built a business, a SaaS business, and then I've been running it entirely autonomously using OpenClaw. So that's probably a cool place to start. And I just want to say, like, with OpenClaw, I basically have been.
- [03:43]
A
We.
- [03:43]
B
We referenced heroin a moment ago. Um, you know, I have never done heroin, just in case anyone's concerned about me, but apparently when you do heroin, the first time is the best time. And they call it chasing the dragon. You're trying to get back to that special moment. And I had this special moment. I was traveling, I went to Arizona on a trip and I forgot to bring my laptop, but I'd set up an OpenClaw agent on my computer and. And I basically was able to run my entire business using OpenClaw in the back of Ubers. Like, I was going to this conference, it was super, super busy, and I was astounded by how competent it was able to be and that nobody picked up on the fact that, you know, every single email that I wrote was being written by openclaw. And so I've been chasing that moment ever since. And the problem is that I feel like I'm spending so long 50% of my time debugging it, and 50% of my time, maybe 30% of my time making it better, and then 20% of my time being productive. So it's like the classic productivity treadmill. But we have been able to build some pretty interesting stuff. So let me screen share with you and I will show you this app that I built. So this all started because I, uh, I wanted to build a custom GPT or chatgpt project for me and my girlfriend's relationship. The idea would be that we would be able to query it. Hey, we're having a fight about xyz, which we do. And I asked it, I said, hey, if I was to do a bunch of psychological tests, which ones would you want to see? And it gave me this list of like 15 different screens that it wanted me to do. And so I went to Claude Code and I said, hey, can you just put all these into a multiple choice test and set up scoring and then put them in a JSON file. And so both of us did that. It took about 40 minutes and we put the JSON files into ChatGPT and we said without knowing anything about this, this couple tell us about their relationship and we read it line by line and like our jaws just like dropped. Like it nailed every single fight that we have, every single issue at home. And so I saw the power of these multiple choice personality tests and so I saw the product opportunity and I was like, I'm going to build a business out of this. And so I started this thing called deep Personality. Let me just share my screen here.
- [06:16]
A
Quick break in the pod to let you know about a free workshop I'm doing that answers some of your biggest questions. The first is in the AI age, what are some categories that are, are ripe for startup ideas? I'm going to outline a bunch of those different categories, the ones that I think the most opportunity is. Second is there's a million AI tools out there which are the ones that matter when I'm trying to build a business. I'll walk you through that. And lastly, how do you actually build a business with some of these AI tools? So I'm actually going to show you live how I do this with my ideabrouser.com team and I can't wait to see you there. It's there this Thursday at 12pm Eastern. And if you go to the show notes, if you go to the description, you can click a link, RSVP and learn a few things. I hope it'll get your creative juices flowing. And I'll see you back at the pod. And you know, you could have, you know, you, you, you own an agency called Metalab. You could have called out Metalab to go and build this for you, but you decided, I'm going to do this all myself. I'm going to actually productize this myself. I'm going to design it myself, I'm going to build it myself. Why did you make that decision?
- [07:24]
B
Well, I think I love people. Like, I'm very extroverted. But the worst part about business is people, you know, if you think about using a, let's use a screenwriting analogy. So in Hollywood, there's all these brilliant screenwriters and they write these incredible scripts and so they have this idea and they know where they want it to Go right. So let's say they start here and they want it to go here. They want to make an incredible feature film. In between, all in between the script and the feature film are 100 people that they have to convince. $50 million, they have to raise a million middlemen and all that. And I think that creativity is just compromised based on how the number of people between your vision and execution. And so I think, like, writing for me has been a very like, pure pursuit where I can think about it and I can write it and I can work with AI to make it better if I need to. But it feels, it feels like so such a clear execution of your vision. And I feel like vibe coding is that like, finally I can do absolutely every part of it and I can do it at my own pace. You know, if I was using employees, they're unreliable. They don't see my vision, they don't understand every aspect of design. So you can have a great designer who sucks at front end, or you can have or doesn't know how to design something that'll work in a front end. You can have a great designer who doesn't know how to write copy. So there's just all these pieces that come together with vibe coding. And basically, like in a few manic days, I was able to build this pretty crazy app. So let me, let me show you how it works. So basically you do a personality test and it takes about 40 minutes. You're just clicking multiple choice answers and stuff. And. And then you get this report. And so here's my archetypes. It'll be like, you're the blazing architect. Here's your superpowers, here's your Kryptonite. This is just like the basic. And then as you scroll, you can see the AI has taken all of your answers and it's written like a hundred page report. So this report literally goes on and on and on and on. And it's written like Robert Greene. So it's like super impactful and deep and hits, you know, um, and it basically walks you through what you're great at and what you're terrible at. What job you should have. Is your relationship working for you. Do you have adhd, ocd? Are. Are you on the spectrum? Like all these different things? And so you can see. Let me get. Oh my God, it's so big all the way to the bottom. So you can see like these are my kind of personality traits, my attachment style, my internal family systems, like how much I people please all this stuff. So I built this thing. And usually what happens for me is I start something and then I don't want to finish it because I don't want to hire the people and deal with it. And so what I ended up doing is in this case, just building agents to do everything. And so I can show you, we're, we were using open cloud. We're currently using this thing called harbor that a friend of mine built. And it's basically a harness for agents so you can see all the different agents that are running here. So we have a dev, we have marketing agents, and then we have a support agent. And basically the way it works is somebody emails support and either support just tackles the ticket or it will actually fix the ticket. So it'll send it to the dev agent. If it's a P0, so like a Super scary security breach, it'll just immediately fix it and merge the pr. Otherwise it'll, we just wake up and have a bunch of PRs and then it'll email the person back and be like, hey, I fixed your issue, or whatever it is. That works basically perfectly. Like, it's shocking. Like, support to me is not a job very, very soon. The one that's really exciting is the marketing agent. So we basically have it, it's hooked into post hog, so it has all the data for the app and it actually manages a meta and Reddit ads account. And so it'll do multivariate testing, it'll create ad creative, it will set budgets and we basically just message it and we'll say, hey, can you increase the budget by $1,000? Or we approve a big SEO project or something like that. So where we're at with it is like we've done maybe like $20,000 of revenue. Like it's still small. And where I'm really excited to go next is like what happens when we give it like a hundred thousand dollar a month ad budget and we find ads and creative that actually work. So that's been, that's been insane. And I think that we're probably three to six months out from being able to just hand businesses off to AI to run at least basic businesses like
- [12:38]
A
this Harbor I've never heard of and I see a lot of stuff.
- [12:46]
B
Let me just ask. So as my friend Gavin made it.
- [12:49]
A
Yeah,
- [12:53]
B
Yeah, it's Harbor.
- [12:56]
A
It reminds me a little bit of Paperclip. Have you seen Paperclip?
- [13:00]
B
Yeah, I have. So this is it. It's GitHub, geek for brains slash Harbor. And he's, he's a friend of mine that I've been working on this with and it's, it's working really well. We just found that OpenClaw wasn't quite deterministic enough. And the other issue with OpenClaw is because it's a text based interface, it was a little bit hard to keep track of all the agents and what's actually happening. Um, so it's worked really well for us.
- [13:29]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think what's cool about it is like if you're starting a company and you're thinking about org charts, roles, responsibilities, you know, you don't think about it within, within text, you know, back and forth. Right. You think about it as like, okay, I'm going to spin up this agent or employee to do XYZ and then how can I monitor what that XYZ employee is doing?
- [13:54]
B
Yeah, like, so basically like, it's just a, this is just a GUI basically for something like OpenClaw. And it's still running on Claude, but you know, you have all these documents with kind of like a knowledge base, you've got databases, you have all your environmental variables, etc. It's like, it's very similar to Paperclip. I think the problem, it reminds me a little bit of crypto, where crypto is not. Crypto is built by nerds. So they make it nerdy. And when I saw Paperclip, I got so excited because I was like, oh my God, I can. This makes sense to me visually. You like have this org chart, but it's clearly built by nerds because it's very confusing. And so my, I mean my kind of belief is like, pretty soon Anthropic and OpenAI are gonna launch like, basically like CEOs. So you just be like, I'm just gonna hire a CEO for my company. Give me your data, I'll figure it out, I'll run it, I'll run the whole business. And right now the problem, I, I feel like, you know, two years ago it was like we're, you get, you get five minutes with a super genius who has Alzheimer's. Like the context window is so small that you just have these brief moments. Now I feel like with the, the 1 million context window, they can like maybe remember a day, but it's like memento, right? And I feel like once the context window is like 5 million, 10 million, then we'll be able to run entire companies with this.
- [15:20]
A
Yeah, there's some people now selling autonomous companies. I don't know if you've seen this policy as one of those companies. I Think Pulse work.
- [15:30]
B
Like, I saw that New York Times story about that guy who like started the autonomous, you know, what is it like billion dollar business or whatever. But. And obviously that's real. New York Times is writing about it. But I, I can't parse what's real versus bullshit.
- [15:48]
A
I think, you know, we're recording this April 29, 2026. You cannot run an fully autonomous company in right now. That, yeah, that is going to get better. That you can just like, you know, go hang out on the beach 24 7. That being said, I think there's parts of the business that can be autonomous. Like, support is like a good, you know, area. But like, you're not going to outsource like product at this point, in my opinion, autonomously to something like Pulse today. You know, maybe that changes in six months, 12 months, whatever. But like, my take is the people that are selling autonomous companies today are just selling a dream.
- [16:36]
B
Yeah, I kind of agree. Like, I think Open Claw agents are still like zap. They're basically like zapier zaps, but that can make basic decisions and have intelligence. But you still have to tell them step by step, this is how I want you to think. This is how I want you to operate. Like, let's say you hired an intern and you gave them an email address. You would never have to say, you should check Your email every 15 minutes and you should reply. And when you do reply, you should, you know, think about the following things. Like, it feels very. It's like you're dealing with a baby, a genius baby, but you have to teach them how to do every single thing. Where I'm excited is when I can just have a model that's just like a CEO model or, or and just like delegate to them and they'll just figure it out. Which I think is kind of what everyone acted like openclaw was, but it's totally not.
- [17:30]
A
Yeah, I want to go back to go to the deep personality test. Can I give you unprompted feedback?
- [17:36]
B
For sure.
- [17:38]
A
So when you were going through this, I was like, like, the content looked exceptional. My, my, you know, my issue in general with like vibe coded projects is that because anyone could, you know, create apps and products like this, it's almost like you need to have some credibility layer in order to listen to the content. You know what I mean? So like, if I was like the PM or CEO on this, I would be like, how can I partner with someone who's credible in the space such that when I get this output, this report I'm going to take this seriously.
- [18:23]
B
I think part of the problem is it's anyone who is a psychologist or someone who would be like, legit on this would never do it because it's a bit cheeky. Like, I'm using psychological screens that are supposed to be interpreted by a psychologist, but I'm not a psychologist. I'm using AI to do it. And I think it's incredibly accurate. Like, I've, I've hammered it on a million different models and I've looked at example tests and stuff. But that is definitely an issue. If there's someone listening who's connected to like a Jay Shetty type person, definitely let me know because I think it's perfect for that. It really is one of those like, one plus one equals five kind of things. But yeah, right now it's what I realized is like, I can, when I post this in my newsletter, it goes crazy viral, um, for a bit, but I don't have enough pull in that space where my audience is a bunch of like, tech bros. They're not gonna, you know, they're not gonna share this with all their friends and stuff. It does definitely need something like that.
- [19:27]
A
Yeah. And I, I, I also wonder, like, you know, I think about, like, who, like, what are influencers, celebrities, micro celebrities that people look up to. Like a couple, like even just a couple that like, has gone through this publicly maybe and have come out of the other side and they're just happier. And when people think of like, you know, a couple that's, you know, a dream couple, like, this is their, you know, they're involved in this in some capacity.
- [19:54]
B
That's smart. So you and your wife, you want to do it? Should we do it?
- [19:57]
A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, my wife is like very like private, you know, so I'm more of the public one. But I'll see what I can do.
- [20:08]
B
Same as my girlfriend. She hates, hates publicity and stuff. Let's see, what else can I show you? I mean, another big piece is just data. So I, you know, I feel really frustrated because at different times I've kind of standardized on different LLMs. Like, I'll get into the cloud ecosystem and I'll use the desktop app, I'll use ChatGPT, and I'll build out a bunch of projects. I've basically just accepted that I'm going to live in Claude code until somebody builds her, which I'm sure is coming in the next couple years. My strategy has basically been to take all the different data pipelines that I have and Put them into a centralized place. I have Fireflies record all my meetings. Every night a cron goes in to the API, builds an M markdown file, puts it into GBrain. I've built out vector databases for my businesses. This is a really cool thing. So you know, a vector database can store, you know, millions and millions and millions of tokens and you can basically, you can basically have like a service like Pinecone go and crunch through a large amount of data and, and it basically makes it highly searchable for an LLM. And so I can show you an example of that. Let me just switch the screen sharing. So, okay, so here's an example. So like I did, I trained a vector database on my family office Folly Partners, which is basically just my like personal holding company. And here I just asked it, what did I say? Break down how many minority venture investments I've made and how many are in the money, bankrupt or decline. And basically it went off and did this query and then boom, I can see that I've made 132 direct investments. I invested 16 million, it's now worth 36 million. And then it can break down all the different write offs, everything. And so this has been really, really powerful. So like, if you think about, I did it for Tiny as well. And in Tiny, I have man, 24 businesses or something like that, tons of historical data. And the challenge when you run a conglomerate is like, I don't know, like, are any of the companies spending too much money? Are any of the CEOs full of shit? Are any of the businesses trending up, down, expenses are going up. It's just too much data for one person to understand. And so I can't show it because it's all public company data. But basically what I can do in Tiny now is I can say, hey, review the last quarter and I want you to give me any icebergs or issues. Or I can ask a simple question like, how many accounting staff do we have in head office? Or whatever. And I've found this so useful. It's not perfect. Like it'll, it'll often like say the wrong person is CEO of a business or the numbers are a bit off. But in terms of being able to like be the eye of Sauron inside your company, I think it's like incredibly powerful.
- [23:21]
A
Mm. And, and curious. Like within Tiny, Like I see how you're using it to interface with Tiny and, and to, you know, be a better chairperson and give advice. But within Tiny, I imagine that there's like some efforts to make the company's AI first and stuff like that, right?
- [23:41]
B
Yeah. And that's one of those challenges that I think everyone can relate to where, what is the saying? It's never expect someone to understand something, that their paycheck depends on them not understanding. So you have a lot of people that are living in the old world and need to be upgraded in their understanding. And often they're very attached to the old way of doing things. And so to be honest, like, the challenge in Tiny is that we are generally pretty hands off. And where we're really leaning in is in a lot of the software businesses, because those are the ones that are at the most risk. I think we've talked about this before, but it's not like software is dead. If anything, software is going to thrive way more. But it used to be like the newspaper industry where it's like, in order to compete, you have to assemble this incredibly expensive group of people that's very rare to find. Right. You need like great programmers, great designers, et cetera. And that, that was like a very finite resource. So it's kind of like the newspaper industry where you had to be rich, you had to buy like $2 million printing press, and then once you have it, you actually have a competitive advantage. Now I just think software is free. Anyone can make it, anyone can rip it off. Like my personality app. It's cool. Does it have a moat? Absolutely not. Like, maybe if to your point, I had John Legend and Chrissy Teigen backing it or something, maybe there'd be something there. But I think pricing pressure is just gonna go crazy because it's like the restaurant industry, like, you know, restaurants are not a bad business. They're bad because there's too much competition.
- [25:23]
A
So if you're listening to this and, and you know someone's listening to this, they're watching this actually, and they're saying, like, okay, I like what Andrew's doing here with like, you know, this fully advisory thing. I like what he's doing with Personality Test. He. I feel like he has a good sense to where the world's going. You know, where, what, what, you know, what would you be building now if you're, if you, you know, if you're, you want to be building something, it. Right.
- [25:51]
B
I think we talked about this a year ago, and if anything, I've become more concerned when I look around. I'm. Don't get me wrong, I'm not, not concerned. I just say it's getting harder and harder and harder. Like, I think we've all been Astounded seeing how good Claude has gotten and how much it can do and how quickly it can do it. And from my perspective, I think that if I was somebody who is obsessed with Vibe coding and is 20, and I would say the goal should be like, make one to two million dollars by building a product like Deep Personality or something like that, which is pretty straightforward. Try and make a million or 2 million bucks. And this is such a sad answer, but I'd be like invested in data center stocks or invest in tsmc, because to be honest, that's what I'm doing. Like, I am, I'm either buying like something with a moat, which is very, very hard to find certainly in technology right now. Home services, businesses, like, very, very brick and mortar kind of stuff. But even that I think is at risk with robotics over the next 10, 20 years. But I honestly, all I can really recommend someone does is like, by Iron and tsmc.
- [27:09]
A
Yeah, I think with, you know, with respect to like the gui, the graphical user interface, like, it just feels like we're the, you know, I always, I think about it as like the arrow of progress. Like the arrow of progress or, you know, deep progress is that the UI is going away. And like, I don't know about you, but I'm spending more and more of my time in Codex. I'm spending more and more time in Claude code. Like those have become my operating systems. So I'm spending less and less time in apps and it's easier than ever to create apps. Therefore, like, yes. Pricing pressure, competition, harder to get mind share.
- [27:48]
B
Well, I mean, it's an interesting, like someone asked me, like, is Adobe fucked? And that's an interesting one because, like, I'm a pretty avid user of Lightroom and I love, I've got a Leica, I love editing photos and stuff. And while I do put my photos into Gemini sometimes for like recoloring or retouching or something, I still really enjoy the process of like moving the sliders and making it exactly the way I want it. And so I think, you know, it's a question of like, does this being the standard matter or will someone just vibe code an even better Lightroom and everyone will switch to that because they're, you know, a big, slow incumbent and someone else will do it faster. I can't answer that question very well. All I can say is software is a worse business now than it was five years ago. I mean, look at Constellation Software. Their stock has been cut in half like that. That's crazy. Like, I, and I don't know if that's correct because they own like the most boring software businesses ever. But yeah, dude, it's like a brave new world. And it's so depressed. I hate to give such a depressing answer because your show is all about entrepreneurship and like, I just want to say, like, I'm more excited than ever. There's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur and build stuff. It's just you are picking up pennies in front of the steamroller in most industries.
- [29:06]
A
It's also hard to predict what's going to happen in 12 months from now because, you know, or 18 months from now, 24, 24 months from now. So, like, my advice to people is just build now knowing that, you know, you're a big Buffett guy, right? So like, you know, what does he say? You know, there's only so many puffs you get on the cigarette or whatever. What is it?
- [29:30]
B
Yeah, you can get. Well, he's, he's more talking about cigar butts, right? So you find a cigar butt on the street and you can get one puff out of it for free. And I think a lot of previously high quality businesses that would be like a gourmet cigar from a cigar shop are now cigar butts, right? Yeah.
- [29:47]
A
So my take, my, my, you know, glass half full take is you, you can get some puffs out of it and, and it might turn in like your personality test might be like, oh, a 1 to 2 million dollar a year business for three years or it might turn into like a media conglomerate somehow.
- [30:06]
B
Built it, I built it for, you know, I was pretty irresponsible because I'm like using fast mode and going all out with all the cost. But I could probably build it for 10 grand, 20 grand of tokens or whatever to get to where we got to. I probably spent like 80 or 100, honestly, because I've been so. Dude, I'm. I'm spending like our family office. So basically like I have tiny. And then I have my personal holding company and you know, family office, the just the rich person word for personal holding company. So I, I'm sorry for being a douche, but, but basically like we have been, instead of scaling employees, we've literally just been scaling Claude. And so I'm so lucky. Like, my CFO and president have both become obsessed with cloud code, but they're actually just scaling the API cost. So instead of a payroll, we just have a $40,000 a month cloud bill. And it's doing, it's doing everything. Like I'd Love to show you some of the stuff that they've built. It's just crazy.
- [31:06]
A
Yeah, I would love to see it.
- [31:09]
B
Here's an example of software being completely fucked. So there's this product called Addepar. Have you ever heard of it?
- [31:17]
A
Nope.
- [31:17]
B
So Addepar is basically software for rich people to track their portfolios, and they charge 50 to $100,000 a year. And basically what it is is it pipes into your bank, it pipes into your accounting, it pipes into the public market data. And it just tells you, like, here's how much. Here's how much money you have, here's your personal net worth, here's all your assets, here's your balance sheet, et cetera. And so what we did is my CFO just said, fuck that. I don't want to pay those guys all that money. And we can actually build something that is way more customized to us and integrated into all of our data. And so he said that. And like, the. You know, the. You remember, like, five years ago when one of your engineers would be like, why are we paying Slack all this money? Let's just build it ourselves. We all know that's like a fool's errand, right? Like, that's insane. And so when he told me he was just going to build it, I was like, first of all, you're a cfo. Like, I'm a little skeptical. But two, I was like, look, do we really, you know, is that actually going to work in like, two weeks? He built this. And so, you know, you can see, like, it basically breaks down all of our holdings visualizations. It's got like a full global balance sheet that's always up to date at any given time. I can see, like, my real estate holdings, my stocks, everything is like completely live. And then it has this AI assistant. So this I can query. Let's see, like, what's stress test? What is this? So basically, it's like the. Basically like a anthropic API, but it has access to all of our data. So, like, okay, here's one. I screwed it up. Bad demo. Steve Jobs would be yelling at me right now. So this is going to go off and query this. Let's see what it does. But anyway, this was built by my cfo. He's never coded in his life. Like, when I told him about Claude code and that he should check it out, he's like, I don't know how to code. Like, I'm not technical. And literally within like a week, I'm so lucky that he's the kind of person that would do this, but he built this and it's just, it's insane.
- [33:30]
A
Going back to the glass of half full of entrepreneurship. You know, I've been seeing a lot on Twitter lately of like services is the new software. So I could imagine, I know this is you built this for yourself, but I can imagine a product like this and then you sell services on top of this. Right. Like if you actually wanted to sell this to other family offices and stuff like that. Whereas like, right. Like a weekly call or maybe it's like all, you know, add skills every single week or help you do xyz.
- [34:01]
B
Yeah, I mean I think it, the way I look at it is I always give the example of funeral homes. So funeral homes are a very unsexy industry that nobody wants to work in. And so you don't have that much competition. And so if you build software for, let's say like some guy who owns a funeral home has like a web wiz nephew like you or me in like 2010, and he's like, hey, can you build software that's custom for funeral homes for me to manage mine? And then you start the software business and you're the only game in town like no other. No other person owns a funeral home and has a web wiz nephew who's going to do that? And so you have a monopoly and you become the default. And I think the new world is, you know, if 400 people in the United States own funeral homes, let's say like 20 of them are smart and no AI, they're all going to build their own software. And so what does that do? That means it's great for the consumer. There's now 20 different software choices that they can use. Someone can build their own custom thing if they want to, but pricing comes down big time. So like, you know, add a par. The company I mentioned before, they're charging 50 to $100,000 a month. I don't think that they're going to be able to do that for too much longer because there's going to be a lot of competition that comes out. Hopefully somebody watches my video and says, I'm going to build this too and then go crush, add a par. Because like, it's not particularly good software in my opinion. So you can see. Okay, so for some reason I can't scroll. Still vibe coded, but you can see. It's like given me an analysis of like how I could rebalance my portfolio. It can do all sorts of stuff. Stuff like it can track risks and be like, oh, hey, you have XYZ Risk in your portfolio. It's very cool.
- [35:45]
A
Awesome. We only have a few minutes left. What? Anything. Well, I actually have a question. You mentioned GBRAIN before and I haven't gotten around to using it. How have you found it? Can you explain what gbrain is for people who don't know?
- [36:04]
B
Yeah. Well, so Gary Tan is a friend of mine and he basically built this vibe coded project where he wanted a vector database for personal kind of knowledge base. So really quick ability to draw from a large base of markdown files on your computer. So basically trying to solve the problem of memory. And because he's a friend, I was like, oh, I'll install this and try it out. And actually it's really, really awesome. There's a few different people kind of competing in the open source world for this, but I've been really impressed with it. I don't want to do a demo because it's like actually a really boring demo. But basically what I did is I ingested all of my email and I said, hey, I want you to go through my email a thousand at a time and I want you to draw connections and I want you to build pages for everybody that I know. So basically I have a page on every person that I know. And then I can say something like, hey, I'm raising money for our yerba mate business. Who do I know that would be good for that round? And then I can say, okay, now go and draft a powerful email to them and make a deck and send it to them. And so I just find that what is, what this has enabled me to do is like, have a task that would otherwise take like eight hours. Like, I do these like men's groups and we rent boardrooms and I need to charge everyone because I pay, I end up paying for dinner in the boardroom. And so I was like, okay, I gotta, I gotta send everyone stripe links. I have to get everyone on a subscription. I have to send all the emails, I have to hector them. And I just had that as a single task to my OpenClaw agent and it went out, went in the Stripe API, sent the emails, did everything. So like, there are these magic moments using stuff like gbrain and, and openclaw. I want to, I want to show you two really cool, actually three really cool things before I go. So, one, so I mentioned this guy, Gavin Vickery, who built Harbor. So we were doing a vibe coding retreat at my, my cabin and I was talking about how sad I was that the limitless pendant Sold to Meta. So it was like this little pendant. I think I showed it last time I was on. You just wear it and it would record your entire day and build transcripts of it. And I was saying, I'm so annoyed because the iPhone has a microphone on it. Like, why can't the iPhone just record all the time? And he just went, well, I can build that. And 24 hours later he had this app called Hearsay and basically can't really see it. But what you do is you say what times of day you want to trigger it. And so you can be like, oh, I'm, I'm in meetings in the afternoon or, or, you know, I wanted to record all day. And then it literally just records your entire day and builds transcripts and then sends them to your icloud. And so you just have context on your life. And so I record my entire day and then gbrain ingests it and it just knows context. And then my openclaw agents have full context. Let me show you also a couple cool things I've been doing with openclaw.
- [39:12]
A
You've been busy, Andrew.
- [39:14]
B
I have been very busy. I mean, this is all, all I do. Like, this is just like a complete obsession. And it is kind of sad because I'm like, let's see. Because I'm always spending my time, I'm always spending my time tweaking my stuff versus doing actual work. So basically like, it does, it reads all my email, triages all my email, and then it figures out automatically what projects I have going on. We might have to blur some of this, but here, so it's, you know, I'm on your podcast and it's telling me, oh, you need to prepare for it. You know, it randomly was like, oh, your airtable account is going to go out. It's my brother's birthday, I'm bidding on a building. Like, it just figures out all of those things. And so every day I get this report and then you can see that it gives me next steps. So I can say like, don't worry about it. Or I can say, hey, send an email to my, my admin asking her to remind this person that. So that's pretty cool. I also get emails. So this is like it's identified a high priority email. Again, we're going to have to blur this because this is someone's comp, but this is somebody saying, oh, hey, I'm owed a bonus, right? So, and then it drafts in my voice different response options so I can just respond in line, in telegram and say 1B. And so it turns your entire business into a multiple choice quiz basically. So every day I just get like 20 different messages, their emails or it goes in my imessage and identifies things I need to respond to. And I can just say like 1A, 2B, 3C. And. And that saved me a shitload of time. Another cool thing I'm doing, I've built a brief. So basically this goes into my Readwise reader and my email and it looks at which newsletters came in and then it based on what it knows about me. So I prompted it. I kind of said like I'm interested in AI and health and certain things. And then it chooses a few stories and then check this out. Do you ever listen to the Daily on New York Times?
- [41:27]
A
Yeah.
- [41:28]
B
So listen to this.
- [41:29]
A
Here's what landed in the inbox and reader today. Tuesday, April 28th, we have a special forces soldier who bet on an operation.
- [41:37]
B
So it basically makes a custom podcast using Gemini Voice. And I just listen to that every day in the shower. And it's so cool because one of the reasons I stopped listening to podcasts like that was because the they would be depressing or I, you know, it's just stuff I don't care about. So I have it prompted to like only tell me things that are gonna make my day better or are relevant to, to my own life or my city or my businesses. And then I also have it do a countdown. So it says you have this many more summers with your kids, you have this many more days to live. Here's a quote from Seneca, you know, to give you like a sense of purpose today. So it's just incredibly cool how you can basically make your media diet whatever you want in a custom way with this.
- [42:24]
A
I mean that's a product in itself, right?
- [42:27]
B
Like honestly, the seven minute until OpenAI
- [42:30]
A
does it, you think, well, you think they would do it like the seven minute podcast? Like I would subscribe like if you, if it was $10 a month to the seven minute podcast that's going to make you more productive, happier and healthier. And that is personalized to me. Like I would pay for that.
- [42:54]
B
Yeah, I think, I think it's kind of like the other day I taught my Open Claw agent, I said whenever I tweet, I want you to create an Instagram story. So it creates an image that's perfectly scaled for Instagram and I want you to put it into the Instagram creator thing, right? So basically schedule it. And that was a product before. So there's this company called Tweetshot, and they basically automate that. It's just dead. You know, it's like anything that could be an API call is just cooked. So to me, that's like an API call business. That's like the first thing to get run over, but for, like, normies. I agree. Like, if I told my dad about it and I could be like, hey, what topics are you interested in? Create me a daily podcast and text it to me. Like, I do agree. That is a cool idea. Someone should build that, by the way. And me and Greg will back you. Yeah. So here's another one. So. So I have two open Claw agents running on a vps, and Ava is kind of my personal assistant that I just showed you. This is Mara. This is my. My doctor doctor agent. It also helps. I've made them very attractive women, so I always want to talk to them and I'm always flattered when they message me. But this. This is really cool. So I have it. I have all my Apple health data from my Apple Watch, my eight sleep, et cetera, and it uploads into a Google Drive. So I have a JSON file of all my health metrics. And then every morning it sends me a health summary. So it looks at my hrv, resting heart rate, respiratory rate, tells me about my sleep. And then I have this weird viral nerve pain that I get. And it looked through my data over the last five years and said, oh, I've correlated it. And I see that every time you get that flare, your wrist temperature changes for three days before. And so it tells me in advance that. And then it also tracks, like, my medication adherence and all that kind of stuff. So it's just stuff like I. And then the other thing is, like, if I ask it a question, it's prompted to use max intelligence. So let's say I said, hey, should I take this medication? It will spin up a rheumatologist, a, you know, internist, like, every type of doctor as a cloud expert with extra high thinking, and it will do a team of experts for like, 10 minutes across my G brain and all my medical data, and it'll give me a really informed answer. So I am, like, just blown away by some of this stuff.
- [45:32]
A
Andrew. We covered a lot of territory, like, way more territory than I even thought was remotely possible. But that's why I love having you on. I appreciate it. We did pretty much everything. We did agents, we did running your business, we did family office, we did health, we did personalized health, we did living happier and Healthier. So I want to thank you for coming on. I'll include links on where to find and follow Andrew on the Internet, where to take the deep personality test, where to find tiny if you're ever interested in selling a company. And Andrew, is there anything you want to leave people with?
- [46:09]
B
Yeah, I have one prompting tip I want to give people. That's changed my use of cloud a lot. So I will say this is my goal. So let's say real estate example, I'm thinking about buying this building. I want you to interview me, ask me. I'll literally write ask me a shitload of questions to determine your prompt and use question tool. So it'll pull up multiple choice questions. It'll interview me for sometimes five or 10 minutes. And what I found that it does is just give me like an incredible breadth of basically building perfect prompts. And I think this is like the thing that everyone misses because people are always like, oh, like you know, there's always going to be jobs because someone needs to build the prompts and it's like, no, nobody needs to build the prompts. The AI should just interview you. OpenAI just doesn't want to spend all the compute at this point, but it is fully capable of just interviewing you to figure out what you need. So I love that. And I also highly recommend using agent teams. So I'll say always use a team of agents of eight sub agents and I find the answers are just easier. Incredible.
- [47:16]
A
I like that. Good tips. Andrew Wilkinson, thanks for coming back on the pod.
- [47:21]
B
Of course, dude. Always fun.