How Andrew Wilkinson Uses Opus 4.5 in His Work and Life

Entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson used to sleep nine hours a night. Now he wakes up at 4 a.m. and goes straight to work—because he can’t wait to keep building with Anthropic’s latest model, Opus 4.5. Two years ago, Wilkinson was obsessed with vibe coding on AI software development platform Replit. It was thrilling to describe something in plain English and watch an app appear, less thrilling when the apps were always broken in some way, often full of maddening bugs. So he set his app creation ambitions aside until technology caught up with them. Then, a few weeks ago, he started playing with Claude Code and Opus 4.5. It felt, he says, like having a “$100,000-a-month payroll of engineers” working for him around the clock. Wilkinson is the cofounder of Tiny, a company that buys profitable businesses and holds them for the long term. The Tiny portfolio includes the AeroPress coffee maker and Dribbble, a platform where designers can share their work and find jobs. Dan Shipper had him on AI & I to talk about the automations Wilkinson has built for his work and personal life, including an AI relationship counselor, a custom email client, and a system that texts him outfit recommendations each morning. Wilkinson revealed how all of this individual exploration has changed the way he thinks about buying software companies at Tiny. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! Want even more? Sign up for Every to unlock our ultimate guide to prompting ChatGPT here: https://every.ck.page/ultimate-guide-to-prompting-chatgpt. It’s usually only for paying subscribers, but you can get it here for free. To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Ready to build a site that looks hand-coded—without hiring a developer? Launch your site for free at www.framer.com, and use code DAN to get your first month of Pro on the house! Timestamps: 00:00:00 - Start 00:01:07 - Introduction 00:02:48 - Why Opus 4.5 feels like the iPhone moment for vibe coding 00:08:31 - Why designers have a unique advantage with AI 00:14:10 - How Wilkinson built a custom email client with Claude Code 00:18:13 - An AI trained on your relationship that predicts your fights 00:30:40 - Using AI meeting notes to make your life better 00:35:11 - Don't inject your opinion into prompts 00:40:21 - Wilkinson’s Claude Code tips and workflows 00:47:59 - Your personal stylist is a prompt away 00:53:17 - How AI is changing the way Wilkinson invests in software Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Andrew Wilkinson: Andrew Wilkinson (@awilkinson) The book Wilkinson references in his prompts, when writing copy with AI: Made to Stick Every’s compound engineering plugin: https://github.com/EveryInc/compound-engineering-plugin

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Over the last two weeks, I've been playing with Claude Code with 4.5 and I am just blown away. It literally feels like I have like 30 free employees and they're just working 24/7 and I'm paying them like $40 a day. It's crazy. It's almost like everyone is using the Yellow Pages and you're like, dude, just use Google. I built this tool that tells you the problems in your relationship and how to solve them. And it was scary. I'm realizing like I have a software company here that I just dreamed up out of nowhere. There will be no programmers, not in the way that we understand them in two or three years.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  The moat for software used to be that it's very expensive to hire them and now it's basically free. And so your moat has to come from something else because I just don't see them being very good businesses in the long term.

• 1:07Dan Shipper?

  Andrew, welcome to the show.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Great to be here, dude. Big fan.

• 1:11Dan Shipper?

  Good to, good to see you again. Um, I, we've spent like a good amount of time over the last like six months or so, which has been really nice. You've been kind enough to invite me to a couple of different things that are, were really, just really fun events. So I'm really glad that we get to take this relationship to the pod. Um, I love the facial hair and the haircut. You look great.

• 1:32Speaker 00

  Thanks, man. Thank you. I've been growing it out. You know why I grew out facial hair?

• 1:36Dan Shipper?

  Why?

• 1:37Speaker 00

  I had ChatGPT do an analysis. I put my face into Pro and I said, I want you to look, look smacks me. And it told me to grow a beard and now I'm refining the mustache length versus the beard length and dialing it all in. But uh, yeah, it's, it's, uh, it's pretty crazy how much of my life is now AI automated.

• 1:58Dan Shipper?

  That's really interesting. I gotta, I gotta do that. I've done that for coloring. So like, you know, I'm wearing these greens and these browns because apparently that's like good for my hair color, which has a little bit of red and brown, whatever in it. But I have not asked it to look, looks max me like that. So I'm down.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  Dude, I mean, for beard grooming alone, like I have a little blank spot where I can't grow. And so it was like, oh, take a tiny amount of tinted gel and just put it over there. And I was like, oh my God, I don't have the spot anymore. And then it was like, oh, you want to cut your beard in this particular way. And it's, it's unreal. I'm so, I'm so excited to tell you about all the weird little automations I've built because most of them have been in my personal life. And then there's a bunch of other ones that are, that are work, but man, it's so fun.

• 2:42Dan Shipper?

  What's the next one on your mind? Like, what are you, what do you want to tell me about? What are you working on? What are you thinking about?

• 2:46Speaker 00

  Um, so I would say about a year and a half ago, two years ago, I got obsessed with Replit and it was like seeing the future, but it was using like a palm trio, right? Not an iPhone. And I found that it was, I mean, it was so exciting to just be able to say what you want and manifest it and have something come out that worked. But it was always impaired in some way, or it didn't work, or it'd be in a bug loop. And so I kind of put vibe coding aside and mostly focused on Lindy and more kind of traditional AI agents and stuff over the last year and a half.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  But over the last two weeks, I've been playing with Claude Code with 4.5 and I am just blown away. I feel like I have a hundred thousand dollar a month payroll of engineers working for me 24/7. And it's really confirming, like, I have this whole thesis that basically all the tools are going to go away over time and it'll increasingly just be a single command line. And then eventually it'd be a single voice that you interact with and Claude Code, because it's so extensible and can access your system and configure things and run MCPs. I'm just finding I'm using it for almost everything now, uh, work wise. And, and I'm just blown away. And so the thing I've been hacking on is,

• 4:08Speaker 00

  Me and my girlfriend were talking about how nice it would be to have like a GPT that's trained on our relationship. And so I asked, I said, look, if you were a therapist and you wanted the best picture of a couple, what would you want? And so it listed this huge, like, it was like 20 different tests, like multiple choice tests and inventories. And so I just went to Claude and I built this tool that basically, I called it deep personality, and it does a deep analysis on your personality and your relationship. And then it tells you the problems in your relationship and how to solve them. And it was scary. Like, we sat down and we read it out together, and we were laughing because it predicted every

• 4:50Speaker 00

  single fight that we have in our relationship. So I've just been loving that. And I'm actually releasing that to the public really soon. So I'm excited to do that. But dude, I'm just having so much fun building.

• 5:02Dan Shipper?

  That's awesome. Okay, so I want to talk about this thing that you built, but let's back up to just the Opus 4.5 thing. It is such a moment. And there are some people like you that just get it and just know that we've just reached this new level. And then I think there's like, most of the world, even people who are really into tech and AI that just have not felt it yet. And it's so interesting how long it takes for people to catch up.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  It feels like we've achieved AGI or ASI in programming, and it's just the first bastion of that. And so I think you get two different archetypes of programmers, those that lean into it and love it and realize this, that they've given up on the fact that they need to program themselves. And now they're just kind of an architect or an engineer, and they're excited. And then the other archetype I meet is, there's a good Upton Sinclair quote that hits on this. It's, "Never expect a man to understand something that his paycheck depends on him not understanding." And I feel like a lot of people are just kind

• 6:04Speaker 00

  of in denial. But I think Dario is correct. There will be no programmers, you know, not in the way that we understand them in two or three years.

• 6:15Dan Shipper?

  It's so interesting how fast it happened. And also, I think even the, there's this interesting thing happening with.

• 6:25Dan Shipper?

  Gemini three is out. You know, chat GPT five point two is out and those models are good. And they're really smart. And sometimes I actually use them for, you know, like a really hard bug fix that

• 6:39Dan Shipper?

  that Opus four five can't get, but it's it's wild how Anthropic seemed seems to have figured out how to simultaneously max the like engineering brain of this thing and also it's human empathy, sort of like common sense ness. Like I think a lot of the models, as they get better at programming, they've got worse at other things and that has held them back from being this sort of general purpose engineer. And Anthropic just figured it out in a way that it opposes just this sort of ergonomic human like thing that also doesn't get lost in bugs and just builds and builds and builds and builds. And I've been noticing for myself, I'm curious if you feel this, I have to like, I have to block Claude

• 7:20Dan Shipper?

  because I'm spending more time on Claude than maybe I would on X or like whatever, like I'm, I'm I'm not doing my other stuff because I can't stop being like one, one more prompt, bro, one more prompt.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  A hundred percent, dude. It's funny. You mentioned Gemini three because you know, there's this hilarious cycle that you're very familiar with every quarter. You look on X and suddenly all the, all the frontier models start releasing the new version. And it's like mind blown, you know, emoji, they cooked with this one, blah, blah, blah. And you know, I've seen a lot of them and don't get me wrong. They've been getting better.

• 7:57Speaker 00

  But I tried Gemini three and I used, I used it to build the first version of this app and it is incredible, but the tooling is just not as good. It doesn't sound right. It doesn't feel right to use. And I ultimately just switched Claude code and Claude code was so much better at understanding my intent and doing long run tasks. Like I feel like it can do, if I gave it enough instructions, it could work for four hours and keep going. And dude, I'm like, I'm with you. I, I've never been this excited about work. My, when I think about like originally, I don't know if people know my background, but originally I was a web designer. And my happy place was headphones on Photoshop and CSS front end.

• 8:40Speaker 00

  But I would always get so frustrated because from the moment that I produce the style sheet and the HTML, I can't do the follow through. I can't execute the web app. And now I feel like I can really move at the speed of thought. Like there was a great tweet by a guy. He said, I finally feel like AI enables me to move at the speed of my ADHD. And I feel that. So I've actually been, I'm someone who sleeps nine hours a night. And I wake up to pee at like four in the morning and I just get out of bed because I'm so excited to work on this. And it just feels like I'm, it literally feels like I have like 30 free employees and they're just working 24/7.

• 9:22Speaker 00

  And I'm paying them like $40 a day. It's crazy.

• 9:26Dan Shipper?

  It's crazy. This is actually one of my predictions for 2026 that I think you're an interesting case for is, I think the undersung group of people that are going to be most affected and empowered by this era of new software with Oculus 4.5 are designers. And there's this group of designers. So I think, I think you're in this category. There's someone that works for me, our creative lead, our creative director, Lucas, where they're like, I've been able to make beautiful things for forever, but I've always, as soon as it got to coding, like it wasn't something I could do. And so I had to depend on all these other people to do it. And especially in a world where code is cheap and anyone can make a vibe coded app, designers who know about like how to make a great experience that makes you feel something,

• 10:11Dan Shipper?

  now have these superpowers where they can just like take it end to end. And I think they're like, some of them are just going wild and they're so excited about it. And I think you're, you're one of those people.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Well, even, even if you think about chunking, like so, you know, I would do a wireframe and then I would do a Photoshop mockup. And maybe in the Photoshop mockup, I have filler content. And then I gotta spend four hours doing the copywriting and I'm really just doing the same principles. Like I've read all the books and let's say that I'm writing something, I'm going to be like, how would Jason Fried put this? Or, you know, what are the principles in Made to Stick or Near I Al Hook? I'm just gonna run that algorithm in my brain and then I'm gonna have to spend a bunch of time doing it. I'm finding the copy even is perfect. And so it just feels like, um, I, you know, I'm somebody that doesn't like coordination problems. I don't think anyone

• 11:00Speaker 00

  does, but I get particularly frustrated and I usually throw my hands up and don't follow through as a result. And the way that's played out in my business life is that I love building software, but I've ultimately decided that that's my hobby because I get too frustrated doing like one-on-ones and product management meetings and all that stuff. And so I've delegated that. And now I'm going like, wow, I don't need to delegate it. I can build automated systems to do all of these things.

• 11:30Dan Shipper?

  I'm curious, do you have, do you have other examples of creative people that you're hanging around with that are using AI in interesting ways?

• 11:37Speaker 00

  Let me think about that. Um, most people I know are still afraid or they don't know how easy it is. Like, I think, you know, when you talk to someone, even for me, I was like, oh, Claude Code, that's intimidating. I don't know how to set up like an environment or dev server. I don't understand any of that. And I think even like, um, I did a workshop for fun with a bunch of my friends where I invited the team from Linde to come to Victoria and we got a group of about 50 people together. And people were blown away by how easy it was to build automations and started building all sorts of cool stuff. But what's crazy is like Claude Code can build things that are a hundred times more powerful and it's

• 12:18Speaker 00

  easier, in my opinion. It's even easier than building a Linde automation. And I, I find that, that's the, the gap right now. It's almost like everyone is using the Yellow Pages and you're like, dude, just use Google. And they're like, oh, that's, I don't know, that's like for hackers.

• 12:35Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You're totally right. I, uh, so I taught this course maybe like three weeks ago for every people called Claude Code for Beginners. And it was just a one day course. And it, it was so cool, people, because it was really for people who are not technical, intimidated by the terminal from all walks of life. And Seeing people for the first time be like, uh, the demo app was make an expense tracker for me using my credit card data um to help me like budget and whatever. The first time people just like typed that in and like waited 10 minutes and then had a full featured app that was theirs. It was just like this mind blowing, I'm getting like chills thinking about it because it was just like such a beautiful, amazing moment.

• 13:16Dan Shipper?

  And by the end of the day, they had all pushed it in all these different directions that were for them, like one person. She built um this uh calendar view that tracked um her streaks of no spending days. And then other people had, you know, it was like, uh, I'm saving for the, for a couple of big purchases, like how close am I? Like, there's all these different ways that people make software their own, once they have these powers that are just not possible today. And it's so cool to see them be empowered in that way.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Well, I kept, I kept making the mistake when I started vibe coding of being like, hey, um, you know, I always joke like when you start anything, you don't want to be the guy who walks into the gym and tries to deadlift 300 pounds on day one. And I've been amazed, like, I try, I think in my early vibe coding, I would just be too ambitious and then it would be a disaster. And now I'm realizing that it can meet my ambition. So for a long time, I've struggled with email triage. I have a very, very particular way of doing it and I use Superhuman extensively, but it doesn't meet my needs. And so I've tried to build stuff in Linde, I've tried custom triage systems with my assistant. Finally, the other day I just said um to Claude Code, here's my Gmail credentials.

• 14:30Speaker 00

  I want you to build a email, email triager, here's how I want it to work. And it basically spit out a pretty simple version, web-based version of Superhuman that met my exact workflow, integrated with Google. It's not perfect, but it, but in like a week, it's gotten to the point where I can use it every single day. And that is astounding, like anyone who's technical knows how astounding that is and how frustrating it is to build an email client. It blows my freaking mind.

• 15:01Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I think for a comparison, Superhuman spent, and you know, if you're from Superhuman, you're listening to this and I get this wrong, please correct me in the comments. But I think Superhuman spent like five years in beta because like just getting to the point of, okay, where we've, we've gotten to, we've gotten the basics done of a good email client is so hard. So I think with the thing I'm curious about this email client is uh.

• 15:24Dan Shipper?

  Yeah. What is the workflow that you came to that is better for you in this new world that when you're able to invent your own email client? How does it work?

• 15:32Speaker 00

  So what I um, I get a lot of email. I get 200 to 300 emails a day. And so it previously was a full-time job for one assistant, sometimes two. And then it was a full-time job for me and I would wake up every day feeling like um, I don't know if you ever watched I Love Lucy, but there's that scene where she's in the chocolate factory and she's trying to keep up with the conveyor belt and she just gets so overwhelmed. I felt like that at all times. And so what I did that helped me a lot is I built a Lindy automation where every single email that comes in gets processed and routed. So depending on what it's related to, it gets routed. If it's a um, anything that's sales or or marketing or anything like that, it automatically

• 16:17Speaker 00

  gets archived. Um, and then the routing probably reduced my email load by about 50% because most things I was just sending on to other people. And then what it did for a long time was it would come up with a choose your own adventure. So let's say you email me and you say, hey, Andrew, um, I was thinking about coming and visiting you in Victoria, or you could come to New York, or we could do a Zoom. What do you want to do? It would just send me an email and say, here's who Dan is, here's what he wants. You can choose one, two, or three. And I would just respond to the email with one, two, or three, and the agent would send a really nice friendly email to you. That was good, but the problem I ran into is often there's edge cases or I want to tweak what it's going to say or whatever. And then for a more complex email, so let's say you

• 17:00Speaker 00

  sent me an email and you said, um, I want to come to Victoria, but I'm thinking about one of these five uh hotels and do you want to do a workshop? Or do you want me to maybe do some public speaking or should we do a meetup or whatever? Like, let's say there's like 10 questions embedded in it. There's a, so what I did is I basically created an interface where it finds all the emails that are in my email that are not archived, that require a response. It then ranks them based on priority and importance, based on time and kind of who the person is and what the request is. And then it gives me an interface where I can either multiple choice respond, or I can go into Q and A mode and it can say, here's all the questions Dan asked.

• 17:44Speaker 00

  And I can say like, yes, no, or put in my own thing. And then it creates the draft and does it. And so it just has, it's something that I wasn't able to create using Lindy, but now I can do it in my own web app.

• 17:56Dan Shipper?

  That's so cool. Oh, man, I want to, I'm, I'm excited to see this.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  I'll, I'll demo. Yeah, I'll send you a demo. It's really cool.

• 18:02Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 18:04Dan Shipper?

  Okay, awesome. Well, let's go back. I want to go back to the relationship thing. So, so just to like, make sure I understand. So basically you, you created a, I guess, relationship coach with Claude Code that you can load in all the context of your relationship. And then it did sort of a diagnostic about, you know, here are the, probably the, the main conflict areas that you're able to, that sort of like predicted them without you necessarily telling it that you're able to use in your relationship, or, or give me the, tell me what it is.

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Let me screen share. Okay, can you see this?

• 18:39Dan Shipper?

  It's loading. I can see it.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  Great. So, um, all this copy is written by Claude. So this started out as a bare bones, multiple choice quiz, and it would produce a JSON file. So where it started was, I was like, man, there's all these services out there where I can do a bunch of these tests, but they cost a bunch of money, or they're only available to therapists. So I just said, Claude, I want you to run me through the following tests, build a simple interface, and combine them all and make sure that it's clinically validated, and then spit out a JSON. So that's where we started. And me and my girlfriend both spent 40 minutes doing it, and then it's, it's spat out the analysis. So where I've gotten to today is, I'm going to sign in.

• 19:24Dan Shipper?

  Let me just, let me just stop you right there. So I want to go back. I want to go back to the, the homepage real quick, or just open up the homepage for people.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 19:32Dan Shipper?

  You can, yeah, cool. So first of all, for people listening, it's a, you're on an app. It's called Deep Personality. The first thing that jumps out to me is, is the headline. It says, "In 25 minutes, you'll understand yourself better than a therapist would after 10 sessions." That is a great headline. How did you get it to generate that?

• 19:51Speaker 00

  So I, I created a, or I just used a prompt. I basically said, "I really admire the writing of Jason Fried and Chip Heath. Chip Heath and Dan Heath wrote a book called Made to Stick. And the idea is that you have one shot to capture someone's attention. And the book is incredible for anyone who hasn't read it, Made to Stick. I still remember the first line of the book. The first line of the book is, "I woke up in a bathtub full of ice and realized that somebody had taken my kidney." Right? So it's, it's the most striking opening line ever in any book. And then it talks about the principle that you really only have a second to grab somebody.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  And so I used that as a prompt, and I said, "I want it to emotionally resonate." And so you can see in the background, it's added all these little, you know, why do I, what is it? What work would energize me? What do I actually want? What makes me unique? Why do I self-sabotage? So immediately, we're trying to grab someone and go, "Oh, I relate to this problem." And then a lot of people also are, A, intimidated to go to a therapist, but also they feel like their therapist maybe doesn't get them. So I felt this would grab me if I saw it. From there, it kind of breaks down, you know, reassurance, reassuring people, data's encrypted. It only takes 25 minutes, no payment. And then here's all the things you can discover. So why you love the way you do,

• 21:22Speaker 00

  why work drains, some work drains you and others, other doesn't. The gap between how you feel and how things look. And then it kind of shows a demo profile sample of what you get. So you get this crazy like forty five page AI generated analysis that breaks down all the gifts and challenges of your personality, your romantic partner, your ideal jobs, all that kind of stuff. And, and anyway, I mean, this is a, this is a website that I probably would have previously paid twenty, twenty, twenty five thousand dollars for, you know, if I had a designer work on it with me, you know, maybe, maybe less, maybe five grand if I was being really cheap. But I mean, I made this website

• 22:05Speaker 00

  in two hours, I think, just prompting while I was building other stuff. So let's go ahead and log in. So basically you do a big assessment. It's a multiple choice quiz and you can just see what it ends up giving you. So I've already got mine. So I'm gonna go to my results. So basically you get this huge document

• 22:33Speaker 00

  that analyzes you in crazy levels of depth. Wow. And then below it, you can see, let me show you. You can also train your personal AI. So it gives you prompts for chat GPT.

• 22:47Dan Shipper?

  Whoa.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  And it basically gives you a prompt that breaks down all of your scores and stuff that'll help create like a great virtual therapist. And then it gives you these cards that kind of explain, you know, the best way to work with you. You could give your boss, you could give your partner about what you need, your attachment style. And then here's just a bunch of stats about me. So, you know, I'm agreeable, very low conscientiousness, which means I don't like details, very extroverted, secure attachment, blah, blah, blah. And it goes, it goes crazy deep, like even like dark triad narcissism, all sorts of, all sorts of stuff. So it's just

• 23:29Speaker 00

  like, it's like the most personal therapy session you can possibly do privately with yourself in forty minutes.

• 23:39Dan Shipper?

  That's really cool. One thing that I, I, I kind of want is I want it to, in addition to my self-assessment, give me some prompts I can give to Claude or chat GPT to say like, based on what we've talked about, how, what do you think of Dan? So I can get a little bit of like an objective, not an objective, but like another source of information in there that's not just me.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, so here's, here's my girlfriend Zoe, so I added that. And then you can say analyze us as romantic partners or for everything. So romantic partners and then it'll go off and do this. And this was the scary, I won't, I won't show this just because it's private, but, but this was just so wild. I mean, we were, um, we were reading it out together and just laughing our heads off because it was like all the things we fight about perfectly laid out. And then when we put it into our GPT, we have had a few little arguments lately and it's been really helpful where I can go to it and say, oh, Zoe's upset at me about this.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  And the biggest problem in any partnership is, um, people fight you on the surface about other things where it's like, you know, the classic line is like, it's not about the dirty dishes, like it's about not feeling seen, or it's about some childhood thing. And so where it's been really helpful is building empathy for one another and putting that into words. So, you know, we did this and I, we were having a fight and it said, um, I was like, what can I tell Zoe that will make her get this? And it broke it down. It was like, Andrew, you know, when you do this, it triggers this. And because of that, um, it triggers this thing with his mom. And when he was a kid, he felt that when he did this, he was unlovable.

• 25:24Speaker 00

  And it was like, the moment I said that she softened and we're like, oh my God, like, that's crazy. So, um, it's just pretty profound. Like we're talking about the implications for programming. And this is obviously a great demonstration of its programming prowess, prowess. But even for psychology, therapy, anything. So here's, here's our relationship blueprint, how we match, where we're compatible, where it's difficult, that kind of thing. So it's just, it's super cool. And I'm really excited to share this with everybody because I think it's a super useful tool. Um, and I'm just trying to figure out like, what do I do with this? Do I, do I use it as like a, is it a corporate, you know, a tool you might use to figure out how to work together?

• 26:08Speaker 00

  Is it just about romance? Is it about everything? Do you use it to figure out if you should hire someone like, I don't know yet, but I'm, I'm realizing like, I have a software company here that I just dreamed up out of nowhere.

• 26:19Dan Shipper?

  Growth is good, speed is good, but there's a specific tax that comes with growing fast. Every campaign needs a new landing page. Every product launch needs copy updates. Every A B test sits in a backlog somewhere. Your site becomes the thing that slows you down and there's just not enough engineers to make up the difference. Framer is a website builder that works like your team's favorite design tool. With real time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO and advanced analytics that include integrated A B testing. Your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one. Companies like perplexity and Miro and every use Framer because it eliminates the bottleneck. Marketing can test ideas, designers can ship updates, all without touching the engineering queue.

• 27:03Dan Shipper?

  Changes go live in seconds. One click, publish and done. And it's built to scale with you. Framer offers premium hosting with 99.99% uptime SLAs and enterprise grade security. Whether you're launching your first site or migrating an established dot com, Framer turns your website from a constraint into an advantage. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/dan for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/dan for 30% off. Rules and restrictions may apply. And now back to the episode. That's really cool. I think the answer is probably yes. And it's really easy to spin up five different versions for different verticals, you know, which is, which is pretty cool.

• 27:48Dan Shipper?

  And yeah, I think there's, it's, there's something, it's something I've been doing like with G P T three. I was like feeding my journals into it or and stuff. I don't know if you remember that. And it's like, it's so interesting that I think the overall discourse is very, okay, chat G P T psychosis and all that kind of stuff. And

• 28:10Dan Shipper?

  Look, if you have real mental and emotional problems, ChatGPT should not be encouraging your delusions, for sure. And if you're thinking about a technology that can get

• 28:22Dan Shipper?

  the best that things that we know about relationships and emotions and psychology into everybody's hands, there's no better tool than this. I think I've seen a lot of therapists. I think that you've seen at least some therapists and like, it's hard to find a good therapist and a good one is 10 times better than than like your average one.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Well, a great one is about 300 bucks an hour too. If you go to like high end, it's very expensive.

• 28:48Dan Shipper?

  It's expensive and and even if it's expensive, it's not a guarantee that it's good. And I think these tools are the best way to get that kind of thing. It's not the same thing as therapy, but the best way to get that kind of thing, getting people into that pipeline

• 29:06Dan Shipper?

  that that has ever been invented. And it's also super useful. My experience is just taking some of the stuff to therapy and being like, hey, I was talking to my best friend Claude and like Claude said this. If you're some therapists are gonna be like, I hate this, you know, but at least my therapist is very open to it because I think he's realized over time that there's actually some really good insights there and you can use it at the time that it happens. Instead of a week later, you're like reporting it in therapy, you can just be like, you know, okay, this thing just happened. Yeah.

• 29:38Speaker 00

  Do you have a limitless pendant?

• 29:40Dan Shipper?

  I don't, but some people that I work with do.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  You gotta get one. I've been wearing this thing. So it's a little, I don't have it on me, but it's this little black circle. And you just pop it on. I usually wear it on my jeans pockets all day. And you know, a lot of the time I do meetings in person and I'll be working with somebody and I have ADHD, so I have very bad memory. So like my girlfriend, for example, will say like, oh, There'll be something, let's say something around the house, right? And I talked to the contractor for 20 minutes and he says, oh, we gotta do this in the plumbing or whatever. And then Zoe says, oh, what did you talk to the contractor about? And I'm literally like, I have no idea. And, and so having this perfect memory at all times has been incredibly valuable.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  I've done that same thing sometimes with therapy or if me and my business partner are dealing with a hard thing, I'll record it and then I'll put that into AI and say, what do you think he's getting at or what do you think he needs to hear in order for us to resolve this or whatever it is? And so I think over time, you know, you can just see this world where right now, I mean, it first of all, I just want to say it's hilarious that people are getting caught up on the psychosis stuff. It reminds me a little bit of like, uh, when the iPhone came out and it didn't have an app store and people are like, well, it's never going anywhere because you can't build, you can only build web apps on it. And it's like, hmm, I think they might resolve that, you know, technology might get better. But I can see a world where we all get very comfortable wearing an Apple Watch that records

• 31:11Speaker 00

  everything all day and or, or the new OpenAI device or whatever it is. And suddenly we have complete context on all of our, um, all of our lives. And I think the challenge right now is the context window is too small. I'd say like Claude Code does a very good job of context window management, but and so does ChatGPT, but it loses the plot too quickly. And I'm excited when we can have a five million, a 10 million context window because then you're going to be able to really incorporate every conversation you've had this year.

• 31:43Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I think, um, the thing that I use for this mostly is granola. And, um, have you used them or heard of them?

• 31:50Speaker 00

  No, I use Otter. I actually built a custom Lindy, which I'll, I'll talk about later, but for meeting notes as well, but I generally I use Otter for recording meetings.

• 31:59Dan Shipper?

  Got it. The, the interesting thing about granola for me is, I mean, they did the whole thing where it just records everything you're in and there's no extra bot or whatever, just recording on your computer, which is really nice. But the interesting thing about Otter is it has like a really good, pretty good AI assistant inside of it that, um, You know, I can put something in that's like, I did this the other day because you know, we're we're about 20 people at every and so I'm starting to think about, okay, what does like onboarding new employees look like and what is our handbook and like, what is our culture and whatever? And so I just asked Granola, like, if you're gonna write a handbook for new employees with, here's how stuff works at every that no one will actually say, but is like definitely how things work, what would you write and use like my last 25 meetings to do it?

• 32:45Dan Shipper?

  It was pretty good. Like, I probably wouldn't just like put it into every employee's hand like immediately, but you have the ground truth for it to start working from and and so it's amazing for that. It's it's really good. Like you said, you know, if you have a real personality issue, it's like these conversations are so difficult and you're always wondering as a CEO or any sort of leader, like, okay, how did I handle that? And is there a way I could have done better there?

• 33:13Dan Shipper?

  And and and maybe and that's so that's like the post-game analysis and then there's also the pre-game analysis, like, take a look through our previous conversations, like, what should I think about or how should I, how should I handle this kind of situation? And it's, it would, you know, executive coaches are like 5K for a session or whatever, like to get someone really good. And it's so good for that. Like, I'm such a better manager than I would be because I don't have to make every, make things up all the time.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  I have two things I think would would you would get a lot of value out of. I don't know if you're already doing this, but so one is I created a custom Lindy agent that records all my meetings, so it takes meeting notes, but the most useful feature that I added was I do a lot of meetings with people that are pitching me on things or I don't know. And I have a tendency to really enjoy narcissists. I don't know why, but I really love narcissists. I'm drawn to them and you know, I've dealt with all sorts of interesting characters over the years in business where, you know, psychology is probably the most important skill in business and flagging something like.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Covert or grandiose narcissism, or a paranoid personality, or someone who's being manipulative is very important. And so my Lindy agent actually texts me after a meeting if there's any red flags. So recently, I had a meeting with a contractor I was working with, and I was quite upset because he had said he would deliver something on a schedule. And then he didn't, he didn't do it. And instead of, and I was pretty calm, but I was just holding him to account. And instead, he started like, you know, you've really, you know, you were so rude and kind of, you know, really, really harsh to me back, back about it. And I actually

• 35:07Speaker 00

  left the call feeling really upset at myself. And then I got a text from my Lindy agent about a minute later, and it said, hey, I just wanted to make you aware, this person was using some manipulation tactics. They were gaslighting, they were reframing in this particular way. And it was really helpful. And I've used that a couple of times where I'm interviewing somebody. And it just says, hey, this person is highly, highly, highly anxious and needy. And that's okay. But you should know that that's going to be part of working with them, or whatever it is. So I found that incredibly useful. On the flip side, for employee feedback, I use Super Whisper. And so I have the action button on my phone, launch Super Whisper. And I don't know if you've used it, but you can

• 35:52Speaker 00

  basically, and I think you guys built a tool like this.

• 35:55Dan Shipper?

  We did.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  So I should switch to yours. But basically, you can create prompts. So, you know, the most simple one is just like, hey, turn this into a good text. But I have one called Good Boss. And so I basically can go into it and just be like, what the fuck, you know, you didn't do this thing, you said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the like harsh stuff, I think. And it converts it into what a good boss would say. And it just tones it down, and it makes it more mature. And I've found stuff like that really, really useful.

• 36:22Dan Shipper?

  It's the best. I love it. On the narcissism thing, to go back there, A, that sounds awesome. B, I'm curious, you know, for myself, one thing that I've noticed, which I think is sort of important, because I'm, I'm currently grappling with this, is sometimes I'll put it in for maybe an interpersonal situation in my personal life, or in my work life, and You know, maybe I'm feeling upset about something and I've noticed that it will maybe subtly reinforce my interpretation of things. And then something will happen later that is like breaks my interpretation. I'm like, oh, wow. I was thinking about that totally wrong.

• 37:04Dan Shipper?

  And then I go back to it and I'm like, what the fuck? And it's like, oh, yeah, you're totally right. Like blah, blah, or whatever, you know? And there's something about that that I think is an interesting, there's an interesting question of AI hygiene, right? Like when we have these things that can't, that can do some, do this identification and also it's, it's really hard. Even if it's super smart, it's really, it's really hard with a limited set of information to be able to draw like lots of conclusions. And that doesn't mean you shouldn't use it, but it does mean there's, there's this thing of how do I hold what it's giving back to me? So that I, I think of it in a, in a skillful way where it's like, sometimes they were actually being super manipulative.

• 37:47Dan Shipper?

  Or, you know, in my case, maybe it's like there's, uh, there, uh, they don't want to be friends with me anymore or something like that. Like it's, you know, our relationship is strained. And sometimes it's like,

• 38:00Dan Shipper?

  it's something else that, that a further conversation or more, more context would like, would reveal that. How, have, have you noticed that? And how do you deal with it?

• 38:08Speaker 00

  Well, the, you have to be very careful to your point where you can't inject any of your own opinion into the prompt. So for example, the prompt that I'm using is very much like high bar. You have to analyze every single word in this thing and you only flag it if it reaches a critical point where, like I get one of these notifications maybe once every two to three months, right? So it's a very high bar. And I think it's a little bit like body language. Have you studied body language at all? So there's a, there's a, um, it's all about patterns, but it's like, if you, I, I studied it a lot because I do a lot of in-person meetings and stuff. And, you know, really my job is to assess people and then try and figure out what they're thinking.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  So for example, I'm meeting with a founder and when I ask them about a certain thing in their business, they're scratching their neck. A lot and they're crossing their arms and you know, getting defensive or whatever. You have to also understand their pattern of behavior in general. So for example, my dad, he just always crosses his arms all the time. So if I met with him, I can't say, oh, he's closed off. It would just be, he crosses arms probably because he's a big guy and it feels good or something like that. So I think it's, it's just data, but I think over time it just as, as the thinking models can do more and more analysis and have more and more data, I think it's just going to get better and better. And I, I'd say like, I probably wouldn't make a hire and fire decision entirely on that, but it will often confirm a feeling.

• 39:35Speaker 00

  It's, it's usually like, I feel like a cognitive dissonance and then I get one of those texts and I'm like, okay.

• 39:41Dan Shipper?

  That's what's going on. Yeah.

• 39:44Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I think there's also that thing about usually it's working from transcripts and there's a lot that's not in a transcript about how something was said or like how long the pause was between certain words or between when someone stopped speaking and someone started speaking, like all that stuff gets lost. Or like what's on the person's face, like all that kind of stuff, which I think we're, we're getting there. And there are some models that are actually doing, they can do real time detection of emotion, which is pretty cool based, based on your facial expression and how you say things. And they're, they have an API. So I think you would probably be into this. It's called Hume.

• 40:21Dan Shipper?

  And I think that's, that's another level of, yeah, they're crossing their arms and obviously you have to take into account what are their personal habits and, and what's the context of the situation. But also, yes, in general, crossing your arms, like there's something you're, you're closed off and, and maybe that's about this person or maybe there's something else going on. It's, it's such a fascinating world.

• 40:40Speaker 00

  I've had times where I'm depressed or anxious or vulnerable or sleep deprived or just stressed out about business and I make bad decisions usually during those times. So to me, it's like that extra. Buddy who's sitting there watching and maybe watching out for me a little bit, but yeah, I don't, I don't know. I would make a lot of decisions entirely based on AI analysis. Like recently I was like, oh, can you audit this company? And just look for any suspicious transactions. Like I, you know, I realized we hadn't done an audit on it and you know, hadn't been paying attention to the company or whatever. And I made the mistake of prompting it as if I was suspicious. And it was like, oh, there's like mass fraud in this company. There's been 90,000 dollars of fraud.

• 41:23Speaker 00

  And I looked at it and it was like, it was like an employee has purchased a bunch of Starbucks gift certificates. And it's like, no, the, a bunch of employees went to Starbucks and bought coffee. You know, they like prompted it the wrong way. So you gotta, you gotta be really careful with this stuff.

• 41:39Dan Shipper?

  Do you have any like Claude code workflow things that you've, you've picked up over the last couple of weeks that have helped you or things that you've learned not to do?

• 41:48Speaker 00

  I would say the thing I'm playing with a lot right now is skills. You know, skills, basically for those that don't know, you can kind of say like, whenever you do a thing like this, reference this skill. So a skill might be copywriting. So some of the principles I talked about earlier, I've been thinking about turning into a skill where every time I ask it to write copy, it just knows all the books I like and the tone I like and that kind of stuff.

• 42:15Speaker 00

  I'm trying to think of what else. I mean, the biggest thing I've done is I've created a sync across all my computers so that a cron job runs on every Mac that I have. And just make sure that if I open Claude code, it gets back to where I was on any computer. And that's been huge. And then I've been using all sorts of MCPs and stuff. I mean, MCP like I find it, it's still early and some of the integrations suck and they're too slow, but you can really see how it's going to be this kind of tentacle monster that touches all of your software. And what I wonder about is like, for example, like, why do we need software at all eventually?

• 42:56Speaker 00

  Like Claude will be capable of building anything you need and probably doing anything you need. And so will ChatGPT. And so ultimately, I really wonder what, what software continues to exist versus just gets built on the fly for you.

• 43:13Dan Shipper?

  It's a really good question. Obviously, I think the rules are changing a lot. On the skills topic, do you, have you tried our compound engineering plugin?

• 43:22Speaker 00

  No, I just read about it yesterday, actually, but I was like, I don't do a lot of like pull requests and stuff because I'm just working by myself. So I was like, it's probably overkill and I'm going to mess my system up, but I'd love to hear about it.

• 43:33Dan Shipper?

  You should check it out. I think you could use it for specific things that won't mess your system up. So specifically, for example,

• 43:40Dan Shipper?

  as you're getting more complicated in your app, planning is really important and the plan function in this thing is like, it spits off like five different subagents that

• 43:51Dan Shipper?

  that research all the best practices for the problem that you're working on and research your current code base and like find other code examples from like open source and kind of puts it all together into this big plan that has, you know, technical requirements and acceptance criteria and all that kind of stuff that helps kind of keep it on track as you're getting, it's overkill first for, you know, the first 20 hours of a project, but as you're getting into a big code base, it can be, it can be really helpful.

• 44:14Speaker 00

  So it'd be like, it'd be like, keep security in mind, write tests, that kind of, oh, that's cool. I'm definitely going to check that out.

• 44:20Dan Shipper?

  Check that out. And yeah, I think to your point on like future of software stuff, my, my like quick, quick take is that there are these, there's a new architecture for software that I've been calling agent native architectures. And you can think of that as being every piece of software is just Claude code and a trench coat. Where when you are using an app, you are, you know, you press a button in the UI, that's just kicking off an agent to go do the thing in the background. And the really interesting thing about that kind of software is that every feature is a prompt. And if every feature is a prompt, then it's much easier for users to customize their features.

• 45:03Dan Shipper?

  And it's much easier for developers to make their software more flexible and grow. Because, you know, you can be like, okay, like I'm seeing a lot of people are customizing our software in this particular way with these kinds of prompts. I'm just going to build that as a feature and really all I'm doing is taking the prompts that they've created and pushing it into main and pushing it out to everybody else. So there's this whole new kind of like more flexible way of building software that's, that's really agent native where anything that a user can do in an app. The agent can do. And once you're there, it just opens up this whole new thing. And so that's that's kind of like all we're doing in 2026. It's like agent native architectures. And I think that's, that's a big thing. And then, yeah, which, what needs to be software versus what should

• 45:46Dan Shipper?

  just be something that chat GPT does is another really interesting open question.

• 45:49Speaker 00

  You guys are building in production, and I know you guys have a whole suite of software. What are you guys finding is the current gap at 4.5? What are you hoping for five or six to be able to do?

• 46:01Dan Shipper?

  I don't think that, I don't think that we know what the gap is yet, because we are just like, holy shit, we're just flying. I would guess the, one of the bottlenecks right now is you can produce so much code that the bottleneck is reviewing what it built to make sure it works. And a lot of what we do is, you know, today, for example, I have, I'm building this like personal reader app to help me read better. And it's an agent in a app. It's super cool. I built it myself in between meetings. Like, it's, it's the best. And, and I have all these like little things that as I'm using it every day, I'm like, I want this to be better. So I have a Apple Note

• 46:44Dan Shipper?

  with like a bunch of little things. And I was at breakfast today. And before I started eating, I just like popped off a bunch of Claude codes on my phone to like, do like 15 different.

• 46:53Speaker 00

  You just SSH into your computer? What do you do?

• 46:55Dan Shipper?

  So we have that, but the Claude code, like Claude and the Claude mobile app, there's a code section. And you can just like, talk to it and say, hey, I want you to go do this. And it will pull down your repo and start it in a virtual machine and then like create a pull request for you.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Oh shit, I haven't tried that yet.

• 47:14Dan Shipper?

  You should check that out. It's pretty cool. It's, I think what you have is actually, it's actually a bit better. But for quick things that you want to do on your phone without like messing around, it's, the Claude app is actually pretty good. So I spun up a bunch of parallel things to fix a bunch of little, little bugs that I found and little features that I wanted changed. And I finished breakfast and I was like, cool, like now I'm going to test all this. But it's, that's a lot of work to test everything and to make sure each thing is like done right. And so, especially for our mobile app. It's like hard to wire that up where Claude tests itself, but I think Claude is good enough to do it. So I think the big bottleneck is closing the loop on everything that you build so that by the time it reaches a human, it's pretty much good and

• 47:59Dan Shipper?

  and it's working as intended and it's, it's, you know, it used to be the bar was can it get to the human without any errors? And that's like basically solved and now it just has no errors. But the next bar is, um, does it actually work well? And that's a, I think that's still an open question.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it seems like the big problems that I notice are like, like right now I'm using um, SupaBase and Vercel and it's just like, there's things that you still need to go and configure. And I do wonder if over time Anthropic can just launch their own database product and their own hosting product. And then you just have this one sandbox you work in and it does absolutely everything. That would be really incredible.

• 48:43Dan Shipper?

  I think they probably will. One thing that I've, I love is, um, I've been using ChatGPT's Atlas browser. If you've never tried it.

• 48:50Speaker 00

  I love it. I use it every day.

• 48:51Dan Shipper?

  Isn't it sick? And so for anything where you're like, oh, I'm configuring Vercel, I just open up the HMO and I'm like, go do this thing. And I just never touch a settings dashboard ever again and it's so good.

• 49:02Speaker 00

  It's amazing. It's so cool.

• 49:04Dan Shipper?

  Alice is amazing. Everyone should try it. I know you have a couple of more automations to show. I'd love to see them.

• 49:10Speaker 00

  Sure. Um, here, let me. Can you see my window?

• 49:16Dan Shipper?

  I can.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  Have you seen the movie Clueless?

• 49:20Dan Shipper?

  No.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  So Clueless, it's like this rich girl and there's this funny scene where she goes into her wardrobe and she has this computer and the computer automatically matches all her outfits and stuff like that. And I basically created the modern AI-enabled version of that. So it's called Personal Stylist.

• 49:43Dan Shipper?

  Amazing.

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Let me pull it up here.

• 49:50Dan Shipper?

  You're really good at doing this for your personal life.

• 49:52Speaker 00

  Dude, I, it's really where I use it the most. So, so one problem I've had is I, like so many guys, you know, you want to look good, you want to dress well. I don't understand color theory. I don't know what fits. I don't know what looks good. And so probably four years ago, I was newly single. I got divorced and I was like, I gotta, gotta look good. And so I hired a personal stylist, which is actually not that expensive. It was like a couple of thousand bucks and this lady basically made a bunch of outfits and sent me stuff, but it was a total pain in the butt because she's shipping me stuff. It doesn't fit. I, you know, I'm not choosing any of it. And so what I did is I basically created this AI automation. So you can see every day at seven in the morning,

• 50:36Speaker 00

  it goes to, it goes and checks the weather in Victoria and then it generates outfit recommendations. And it has access to a Google Sheet called Andrew's Wardrobe. And you can see in here, I basically just took photos using Claude and then had it turn it all into a CSV file. So you can see, these are all the, all the clothing that I own. And then what it'll do is it goes to Nano Banana. It creates four outfits. It goes to Nano Banana and then it generates a rendering of those outfits. Let me see if there's one. Here's, here's one with me. So I basically gave it reference images of me.

• 51:19Speaker 00

  And then it sends me this. I get this as a text using Twilio and it says, wear this watch and this outfit. And here's the different clothes. And it has really helped me up my game. It's been, it's been awesome. And it's just one of those really dumb, fun things that, you know, everyone kind of goes, man, I wish, I wish I could do that. And now it's like, it's like Uber. It's like everyone has a personal driver now. Well, everybody has a personal stylist if they want one. So that's been a really fun one.

• 51:47Dan Shipper?

  That is amazing. And I will say, you dress well.

• 51:51Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 51:52Dan Shipper?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Thanks to ChatGPT though.

• 51:56Dan Shipper?

  Chat GPT has got your wardrobe, got your face, yeah, it's amazing.

• 52:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, I've also got a custom GPT and so I can just take a photo of like, hey, what goes with these jeans? Or tweak this outfit or tell me, it'll be like, oh, you should French tuck that shirt or do these things. So that's been, that's been really, really cool. Another one that I created that I absolutely love, so you don't have kids, right?

• 52:21Dan Shipper?

  No.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  Those of, those of listeners with kids will relate to this, but my kid's school, it is a full-time job keeping up with the emails. There's emails about, you know, trips and things I need to sign and lunch on certain days and all this stuff. And I really get overwhelmed by it. And so as part of my email automation, I basically have it ingest all those emails. And then it texts me and says, hey, heads up, you know, Peter needs a packed lunch tomorrow. And here's the link to sign the, you know, the, the field trip notice. And then it also puts it all on my calendar. And having it just automatically get added to our parenting calendar and everything being organized is just been incredible.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  And it's one of those things where you probably don't get it, but like, if you talk to a parent, they're just like, shut up and take my money. Like, how do I do this?

• 53:11Dan Shipper?

  How is, okay, so now I'm, I'm, I think we can get a little bit philosophical. How has this changed your whole view of the world and of software and of businesses? So a couple of things that I think I'm interested to hear from you. One is, you know, as we've talked about this over the last six months, I think this is actually the first time we've talked about it, where you seem so energized and so psyched. And most, most of the other times, I think that, I think you've always been excited about it, but you've also been anxious about it. Like, how does this affect the world and how does this affect business? And are things changing in a way that like, our job's going to exist in five years, more or less?

• 53:55Dan Shipper?

  So how do you feel right now about that? Like, how is your, how is your position? How's your? How's your thinking evolved? And then how does that layer down into software businesses? And how you think software businesses are gonna exist or work? And and what that means, for example, for Tiny, where you own a bunch of software businesses? So I'd love to hear your take on all that.

• 54:17Speaker 00

  So, yeah, I think I talked to you maybe a year ago. I called you and was like, dude, like, are you freaking out or what? And I think I was really struggling with the idea that all knowledge work could go away or radically change. And so I carry two different feelings. One, as a creative person and entrepreneur, I'm incredibly energized and excited. I feel like I'm more competent and I can create so much more and I can communicate better. And and so I'm very excited about building things and how we can use these these tools in our businesses. But it definitely changes things in terms of buying businesses.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  So we have really slowed down on buying technology companies and software companies. I think unless you have a distribution mode or a hardware mode or something like that, I think most software businesses are just thin wrappers. Like if your business is like a database call or an AI call, I just, I think it's not that it's gonna go to zero. It's just it, there's gonna be a lot of competition. And I think about it like pizza restaurants, right? So pizzerias, are they, are they? Well, let's say that somebody makes a machine that can create incredible pizza, the world's best pizza, and anyone can buy it for $10,000. Are there never gonna be any more pizza restaurants?

• 55:45Speaker 00

  And will the world of the pizza business go away? No, consumers will benefit because there's gonna be amazing pizza everywhere. But business owners will really struggle because the margins will go down, right? Maybe you used to be able to charge 10 or 15% margins on a slice of pizza. But when the cost of the pizza goes way down and the quality goes way up, the consumer benefits and the business owner, you know, their margin goes to like 1% or 2% basically. And so. I think that's going to happen all over the place. I remember like a year and a half ago, people were getting very excited about all these like calorie tracker apps like, you know, kid vibe codes a calorie tracker and makes a million dollars a month. And it's like,

• 56:29Speaker 00

  that's fine. Like he picked up some pennies in front of the steamroller. But what happened in the next three months? Everyone who could just copied him. And the the moat for software used to be that there's only so many programmers. Programming is hard to learn and takes a long time to learn. And it's very expensive to hire them. And now it's basically free. And so your moat has to come from something else. You have to have a brand or a distribution mechanism or hardware lock in or something, because I just don't see them being very good businesses in the long term.

• 57:03Dan Shipper?

  I think that makes sense. I really like the um,

• 57:07Dan Shipper?

  I like the pizza analogy.

• 57:10Dan Shipper?

  Especially because like, what constitutes great pizza is also sort of up for debate, you know? And yeah, maybe you can make great Neapolitan pizzas, but maybe you're you like deep dish. And so there's like endless complexity to the economy. And so it doesn't get rid of pizza restaurants. But yeah, it sort of changes the landscape. How do you think about that? You know, I think probably a lot of people listening are own software businesses or are five or 10 years into software businesses that are not necessarily AI native. How do you think about for for your own businesses? How to face that future where things change like this?

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Well, I think it's a little bit like owning a water powered factory, you know, if you have something that's powered by, you know, a windmill, you better convert it to electricity pretty quick. Otherwise, you're going to be out of business. And it's really hard to do that because you have a lot of sunk costs. The beauty of a software business is you can actually replace a lot of the human work, but The question is, where do the humans go? And who are the consumers that are going to be buying all this pizza and all this software? And how do they make money? And in, you know, historically, the way that it's worked is that the bar just gets raised. So in the pizza analogy, pizza, you know, pizza shops all look the same.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  But someone's really creative and they spend more money and they make an amazing space and they get on TikTok. And, you know, they're able to kind of build something different. And the standard of what people expect when they enter a restaurant just goes up. So that's certainly a possibility. But the problem is that AI compounds in all industries at the same time. And so what I worry about is not so much long-term. Like, I think in 20 years, we're going to be fine. What I worry about is another Great Depression, where you have suddenly all these white collar employees getting laid off

• 59:06Speaker 00

  from previously very lucrative jobs, like lawyers, you know, probably not doctors, but maybe doctors, anything that is knowledge work, programmers. And where do they go? I think a lot of them will probably go to blue collar work, right? So maybe you go start an HVAC company because people need air conditioning. But what happens in HVAC when 100 people all start an HVAC company in your city at the same time? Because they've all been laid off? Well, the margins go to zero or they go very low. So again, they'll have jobs. And then you start thinking about robotic automation and you can go down a whole other rabbit hole. So I'm not there yet.

• 59:47Speaker 00

  I'm, but I am thinking about, how do you protect yourself from that? And I really believe that if you have money to invest, I think owning compute is probably, or computer power is probably one of the only ways to own a toll bridge to the future. So I think part of the reason I feel calmer is I've also made a bunch of investments in frontier models and in data centers and that kind of stuff. So I think my, my butthole relaxed a little bit, but you know, I was pretty, I was pretty freaked out. And I think a lot of people should be pretty freaked out. But, you know, I live in the Pacific Northwest and there's, everybody knows there's going to be a super thrust earthquake.

• 1:00:32Speaker 00

  Some point in the next fifty to a hundred years, we live with that every single day, but there's very few people I know who are obsessing over it. You know, in my basement, I've got earthquake stuff. I've got a Starlink dish. I've got food. And so what I've realized about AI is all you can really do is educate yourself and prepare and then not worry about it. And so that's kind of what I've been doing and just enjoying it.

• 1:00:57Dan Shipper?

  For someone who like maybe has some money to invest, but does maybe doesn't have access to a lot of private deals that you might have access to, what are the ways to buy, for example, compute?

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  So I actually just made a large investment in a company called Iren in January. And Iren is just a, it's actually a Bitcoin mining company that had a shitload of data centers and power. And they realized, oh, my God, this is really valuable for AI. And so they pivoted to AI. And so I was able to buy it at a valuation where it was being valued like a Bitcoin miner, not very highly. I think I invested at a $10 share price and now it's at 35 bucks. And recently it was at 70. So that I look at as a bit of a hedge that anyone can access. And there's a lot of those, a lot of those businesses, you just got to be careful to figure out which ones are real and which ones are kind of made up.

• 1:01:54Dan Shipper?

  I love that. Andrew, I love hanging out with you. I always learned so much from, from our conversations. Thank you for sharing and would love to have you on again soon.

• 1:02:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was awesome, dude. Anytime.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

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