Building Agents at Home: Homeschooling, Parenting and More | The a16z Show

Transcript

I was resigned to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for the next five years or so. I really want to be present with my kids. I need to take this break. That is no longer true. A weird superpower of mine is just how incredibly motivated I am for agents to do work for me. I got my agents to learn how to build other agents on their own so I could be like, we need another agent, you guys, and they actually can spin them up without me touching the machine, which is a little crazy. But the first few weeks were very rough. It would be a level of pain that I wouldn't want an average person to go through, but the thing is. Jessie, it is so fantastic to have you here. I think you've been what I would call a viral sensation on X, posting videos of how you're homeschooling your family for children under the age of five, which all I can say is, God bless you. You're amazing. But we also want your secrets. We want your tips. As you know, Sarah and I are both moms of young children, and we talk a lot about how AI is impacting education, how AI is impacting the future of the family, and you've become such an incredible force with your videos on X of how you're using it in a bunch of different tasks around the house and a bunch of different tasks around supporting your family as a homeschool mom. So we want to start with who you are and how you got so interested in using AI for homeschool, but tell us about your previous career too as a Silicon Valley founder. Yeah, so I started a company many years ago now. Time flies. But I was a YC founder, did a venture-backed company full cycle, and ended up selling it a few years ago. On the one hand, I'd say I have a technical background. On the other hand, I would admit openly that my co-founder was the technical co-founder, so I want people to understand, yes, I've been swimming in these waters. I've sat in many an engineering meeting where I was following along and lost. I've sat in many product cycles and reviews, so it gives me a vocabulary, but I hadn't opened terminal to try to build something myself until maybe six months ago. So I think we're living through a really fascinating time where only recently, after running a company myself, did I feel like now the tools are so good that I can really use natural language to build things. And so the last six months have been like a Cambrian explosion for me of building, and of course the last few months, where we have the open claw, then I went to completely obsessed, so I'm happy to discuss that. But I went down a complete obsession. It can only be described as an obsession because I've just been building almost non-stop. But when I say that, on a day-to-day basis, I'm actually spending a lot of time with my kids, and so I was trying to find how can I build things that are relevant to my life. So I know we're going to dig into that, but that's a little bit of how I got to now. And maybe talk about that six months. What was the thing that happened six months ago, or what do you remember the moment was where you're like, I need to start building to fix this problem, or what was the story behind that? Well, my co-founder from Loomy, which was a packaging company, physical packaging, we managed a packaging marketplace. He's now off running something called Obsidian, and it's a markdown note-taking app. And I say this because I follow him on Twitter, obviously, we're co-founders, and then I follow all these Obsidian geeks on Twitter, and I started noticing a change in the conversation, them talking about how they were building really wild things with cloud code, that stuff was referenced, the discussion about interesting ways they started using Obsidian. And what really caught my eye, so six months ago, was me feeling like, hey, I actually feel like I probably can be building things myself now in the small bits of time that I have. So I have confetti time, like I have 10 minutes here, 15 minutes there, and I started feeling like maybe I can build stuff. The tools are getting so good. But then a few months ago, three months ago, two, three months ago, I saw people saying, I'm using Obsidian as a second brain for this thing, and it was called Clodbot and then all these different names. Yeah. And they were referencing this, and I was like, what are they talking about? This was December and into January. And that's when I realized I can build agents who actually code for me while I'm hanging out with my kids. That was a complete game changer. And actually, pausing that for one moment, this is such a huge deal for me. I was resigned, and not in this super depressing way, but just being really blunt, to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for the next five years or so. I was like, I really want to be present with my kids. We're doing homeschooling, which is a wild choice, and so I was kind of, yeah, I think the right word is resigned to it, not sad, not resentful, but just like, okay, I need to take this break. That is no longer true. What happened a few months ago is that is no longer true. I feel like I've been building better things than I ever have before while I spend almost all of my waking hours with my children. And I can explain how I do the flow of the day where I do that, where there are things I do during the day and things I do at night when they're asleep and stuff, but I'm truly building things I'm impressed with personally, and I'm being an active mom. And that was not possible a few months ago. It's actually a sea change for me personally. It's really liberating. So that's incredibly inspiring, what you just said. I think a lot of parents listening to this are like, I don't have time to build this, right? You're a mom, four, five, and under? Yeah. I'm like, I have two and I barely feel like I could breathe, let alone four. You're doing homeschooling. Can you walk us through a day in your life? How do the hours stack up, and then when do you build? And to your point, the big unlock is they're sleeping and they're building for you, so how did you get that set up? So many questions. Yeah. An average day, a typical day, wake up at the crack of dawn, right, because there's a small person who has decided that that's when we get up, and they're like, you get up, so anyway, I'm waking up and there's small little gremlin creatures around my bed, so that's where we start. We go from there. Obviously all the basics, like having breakfast, yada yada. What I try to do, there's three kids I'm really homeschooling now because one is a baby. One is about four months old. I start early, but not that early. The three are five, four, and two, the three other children, and I try to do individual sessions with them. So imagine after breakfast and these types of things, I have a place where we homeschool, and I cycle the kids in one at a time. And I need help with the kids even to do that, right, so I am lucky enough to have some help with the kids during certain portions of the day. So I cycle the kids in one at a time to where we homeschool, and I do a one-on-one session with them. Depends on the kid's mood. They're all quite young, but it can be anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour. And then after that, maybe then it's mid-morning, we will do some more unstructured activities like playing outdoors or trying to pull on a thread of something we're doing, where we leave the house, maybe going on a field trip or something like this. One time a week, we do a homeschool pod with two other families. Between the three families, there's 11 kids already. When you meet homeschoolers, these people are reproducing, all right? So three families, 11 kids already. And so once a week I lead a science pod, so on that day it's really kind of cool. All the kids are at our house and they're running around, and we do a science lesson that we weave through the whole day. But in any case, the kids can do effectively 30, 45 minutes of active instruction per day, and you really want to make the most of that, and then the rest of the day is pretty thematic. The other thing that I really believe in, so I spend time doing this, is you could call it free-range parenting, you could call it benevolent neglect, I don't know what you want to call it, but I try to ignore the children. I try to make sure that they're going to survive the ignoring, so they're set up in little places where they can't hurt themselves, but I step away from them and try to just see what they do. There's already three of them, even if we don't have the other family over. So we've gotten, I try to build up the amount of time that they can spend playing together without needing me, so instead of structuring their whole day, we're up to the whole day, but in any case, the kids can do effectively 30, 45 minutes of active instruction per day, and you really want to make the most of that. Then the rest of the day is pretty thematic. The other thing that I really believe in, so I spend time doing this, is you could call it free-range parenting, you could call it benevolent neglect, I don't know what you want to call it, but I try to ignore the children. I try to make sure that they're going to survive the ignoring, so they're set up in little places where they can't hurt themselves, but I step away from them and try to just see what they do. There's already three of them, even if we don't have the other family over. We've gotten, I try to build up the amount of time that they can spend playing together without needing me. So instead of structuring their whole day, we're up to, with the four- and five-year-old, they will spend more than two hours interacting and doing stuff before they come back to me. I actually use a timer because I'm paying attention, but I actually use a timer, and I'm trying to build up their tolerance before they're like, I need a snack or whatever. They have snacks and they have stuff they can grab, but the trick for me is when do they actually truly come to me and say, I need something, I need activity, this or that. But this is part of also why I want to homeschool, frankly, because I want to benevolently neglect my own children. They don't get the proper kind of neglect in every school environment. I want them to learn how not to be bored on their own and these types of things. So a portion every day is them away. During that time, I do get some magical possible coding and tech time. But anyway, there's a portion every day where I'm intentionally trying to ignore the children, not the four-month-old, all right. No, that's amazing. My five-year-old, after two minutes, is like, I'm bored, and I'm trying to create that mental resilience of, you don't need to be stimulated all the time. It's really hard, and that's why I'm talking about building up. It's like a tolerance. I would say we started at five minutes. The trick is that I try not to say, don't talk to me. I never actually vocalize that. I just remove myself and go away. There's a couple places that are great where we live where I can go away, and then my mom also lives with us in a little mother-in-law suite, like a separate little building. So the kids will wander farther and farther from me, and sometimes it's almost like we've got a walkie-talkie system. I'm like, they're near you now. But they will actually wander away, totally away, even the three-year-old, but they'll stay together. So they'll stay together. Anyway, we can get into my neglect strategies if you'd like, but it doesn't truly relate to AI except for the fact that when I'm doing the benevolent neglect, I get to do more AI. That's the relationship. Yeah, well, I would love to hear, three different lesson plans for three different ages, if you're choosing to go by the rubric of what they should be learning at different ages, how does AI, how do you incorporate AI into that? Are you asking AI, hey, I have a five-year-old who may be good at a different subject, what should I be doing? Or how is AI actually a coach or a pair to you in your teaching? So one thing that gave me a leg up in my setup when I started setting up some of my agents, and we'll get into that, is that I did know what curriculums I wanted to follow. I have been reading for many years different curriculum books and following different homeschoolers and finding little tips. So there's this science curriculum that I really love called Building the Foundations of Scientific Understanding. It helps to know what you're trying to do, because what I did when I first spun up my first homeschool agent is I actually fed them the text of these books. I either took photos of the pages or I was able to find PDFs online of the full text of the book. So I didn't say, what should we do next in this book, and ask it to go search the web. My agent that focuses on homeschool has the text of all the core curriculums I'm trying to do, and I created a core pedagogy kind of foundational document where I talk about what I think about Montessori. I just basically imagine me, this is literally how, imagine me walking around making voice notes, waxing poetic about all my educational philosophies and stuff, and then my agent literally sycophantically being like, this is brilliant, this is so good. But I can look past that. I can look past the LLMs giving me praise. But you're giving it context to your point on your philosophy of education. Specifically my philosophy, and then feeding it the book. So I would say it's a combo of feeding it my philosophy verbally and explaining myself, and then feeding it core texts, including core curriculums like this science curriculum. So then what I do, to answer your question, I'll be going in with the five-year-old, and I'll just say, what's our next, I'll make a quick voice, that's why I always do this, is me making voice notes. This is me making a pretend voice note. I'll say, I'm going in with five-year-old. What comes next on science and math for them? In just a few minutes, the agent can spit out where we are in our phonics curriculum, where we are in our math, and then I've also taken photos of all of the educational materials I own, like Montessori beads and these types of things. So my agent will send me a completed lesson plan, including photos of things I own in my own cabinet to pull out, and it'll be like, oh Quinn. So then the missing loop is the logging. Okay, so how would it know where she is in her curriculum if I don't log? The logging actually is such a geeky concept. It seems like a small detail, but getting the logging really good made this whole thing really sing. Wow. How do you do that? Yes. The logging is also voice notes. Everything is voice notes, voice notes and photos, because I don't have time to sit at the laptop very often, so I need it to be really mobile-friendly. So the logging, imagine you've got this agent. They know all of my core curriculums, everything, but the missing link is where is that child at? So when I'm in the session with Quinn and she's doing some math and she's doing some reading, etc., I just snap a couple quick photos, usually maybe the photo of the page of the book we're on, or I snap a couple establishing pics usually, but without taking a bunch of time to sit there and document. I'm mainly interacting with Quinn, the five-year-old. Then right when she finishes, I make a quick voice note, and I'm like, Quinn, today we did lesson 37 in the phonics, and she's still struggling with the G sound, blah blah blah, but really a sub-30-second voice note, really fast, right? I send that off to the agent, and the agent takes the couple photos I sent and the 30-second voice note and writes this beautiful log. It's like someone sat down with a cup of tea and they're like, Quinn's G's are coming together. It's so lovingly written, and it has no relationship, if you listen to the voice note, it's like I'm like, she's struggling with her G, she should really figure that out. Then it parses that, and it writes it like this loving parent. It just writes this beautiful log. Would you consider just having it record the entire teaching and then, in the doctor world, right, transcription now, you don't have to write the notes at the end, to your point on logging being painful, just recording your entire lesson? I have tried. I've tried a couple different things, so this is a total experimentation. I don't think I can say it in any front, like we're weeks into this, months into this. I've landed on the final expression. But what I have done, like you just said, is I use Loom, the product, on screen capture. When we do Synthesis math, so Synthesis is a math program for kids, it's on laptop. Synthesis, I like it quite a bit. The five-year-old sometimes does that. When we do that, I screen capture the whole thing. I use a Loom, and the screen captures, and it's hearing us. So it's hearing me say to Quinn, hey, maybe you missed this. It's hearing what Quinn says, it's hearing what I say, and it's screen capturing. Then I don't make any voice note about the lesson. I just send the Loom recording. I just send it to the agent with text being like, this is Quinn's math today, and it parses everything that agents, you know, and I'm not landed on the final expression, but what I have done that you just said is I use Loom, the product, on screen capture. Yeah, when we do Synthesis Math, so Synthesis is a math program for kids, it's on laptop, Synthesis. I like it quite a bit. The five-year-old sometimes does that. When we do that, I screen capture the whole thing. I use Loom and the screen captures, and it's hearing us, so it's hearing me say to Quinn, hey, maybe you missed this. It's hearing what Quinn says, it's hearing what I say, and it's screen capturing. Then I don't make any voice note about the lesson. I just send the Loom recording. I say I just send it to the agent with a text being like, this is Quinn's math today, and it parses everything that agents, and I'm not explaining anything to you guys you don't know, but they're powered by LLMs, right, so they're very good at language. Loom has really great transcription. That's what makes the log so good. The agents, I would burn a lot of excess tokens I don't need to burn if I made agents actually watch videos. Okay, so the quickest way to a great log is to somehow get it turned into language, to text. When I do a voice note, obviously that's being transcribed. The agent is reading, effectively reading, my text. Video is the hardest one. It burns a lot of tokens to actually make an agent watch a video. So you could have an agent transcribe the video, but what you have to ask yourself is, was there enough language, was there enough spoken words in this lesson for them to understand what happened? Because they're actually not usually truly watching it like we would watch it. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? So that's why photos actually are easier for them. If I take a couple photos and then a voice note, it's serving a very similar purpose to a video, but it's much easier and therefore cheaper for them to transcribe it or make a log. Yeah, so video is not impossible, and maybe I'm going to start playing with local models when I'm a little bit less sensitive to chewing tokens, because it just seems a little silly to be like, I paid eight dollars for the agent to watch this video, right? It just feels like that wasn't the point. But all this stuff may come down in price, and maybe at some point that is also viable. Yeah, totally. And actually I want to maybe dial up a bit because you mentioned one agent that you have, but I think I saw something where you publicly talked about five agents, and then before this session started you were up to 11 now. Tell us about, I love it, you're one of the most sophisticated users of AI, right? So can you tell us what those 11 agents do, or at least the most important ones, how you manage them, and then I think this element of token cost is really interesting as well. I'm hearing a lot of CTOs say, oh, it's my headcount budget now, my token budget. How do you think about that from a household perspective? I do think that a weird superpower of mine is just how incredibly motivated I am for agents to do work for me. And I do think all of us here could relate to this. In our early motherhood phase, we are some of the most motivated individuals to be able to get work done on a computer without having to sit down and touch the computer, because that is the barrier. I'm literally holding a baby. My keyboard is being pressed by baby's feet or something. It's like a grown man cannot compute the difficulties that I'm having using my laptop, right? And sometimes people will react even to my online content and say, you could just use cloud code for this. And I'm like, yeah, I could if I had time to stay on my computer, because what I am building, when I say that I had an agent build a website, or build an app, they are using cloud code or equivalent, Codex, all these products. And so people are sometimes bringing my attention to this like I needed their information, like to say, you could have done this yourself on cloud code or Codex. I'm like, yeah, I know. I am aware of that. But I'm building agents to do things for me, and effectively they're using the computer. It's just they're using my computer for me because I cannot sit there and use it. Totally. So how did I proliferate agents? So I'm aware of that, and it's like an employee. Every time you create one level of abstraction, you do also lose a little bit of granularity, a little bit of finesse. But to me that's completely worth it because I don't have that. I can't sit at the computer for eight hours a day. So I proliferate agents based on roles that are to be done. It is kind of similar to employees, but it is nuanced in that agents have personalities that are a little bit different, or not personalities, but you need to drive them on a certain mission. So I tend to proliferate a new agent when I've come up with enough work that creates another kind of mission-based role, and I don't want to distract another agent with it. So the tactical example using homeschool is, I have a main homeschool agent. Her name is Sylvie. I like her to be very responsive, and anyway, people are always giving me hot tips online. But what I have found by actually working with this very closely and for many hours is that I actually want Sylvie, my main agent, to be not very busy, because then she's incredibly responsive. So I don't want her loaded up. She has very few cron jobs, which are the repetitive scheduled tasks you give an agent. She has very few of those. Whenever I give her work that would take her more than just a couple minutes, she delegates it to, not a subagent, that's a different concept, to a different actual agent, a different provisioned agent. And so my agents now have team documents, and one of the team mandates is, if I'm routinely giving you work that would make you too busy to be extremely responsive to me, you need to spawn a new agent, not sub, that's different terminology. I have gotten, I don't know why I'm so geeked out on this, you guys, but I got my agents to learn how to build other agents on their own Mac Mini without me needing to touch the Mac Mini. So I could be here in San Francisco, I live in LA, and I could be like, we need another guy, we need another agent, you guys, or they could tell me that, and they actually can spin them up and add them to our communication channel without me touching the machine, which is a little crazy. Yeah, a little crazy. Oh my God. So it's because they're autonomous at this point. My first agent took me hours to set up, and now they can do it without me. And the quality bar there for the ones that they spit up, you're like, oh, that was a good idea, that's something I would actually want that agent to be? It's better. Obviously it's better. Obviously it's better. No longer in the you loop, it's better, not worse, you guys. So that's the thing we have to get used to. Because when they spun up their own agent for the first time, usually when a new OpenClaw hatches, it's literally like, hey, and who am I? What's my name? When they spin up an agent themselves, none of that time is wasted. They give the agent all of our team docs, all of the contacts on myself and my husband, our children's lives. The new agent knows all of that. I don't have to feed any information. They take care of it. They take care of the training. Yeah, and I didn't have to ask them to do that. They knew that that would be valuable. You mentioned you're in a homeschooling pod with other parents. I imagine they are not nearly as sophisticated about AI as you are. They probably think you're slightly crazy, right? They're like, this woman knows everything about this. Do you have a normal mom friend who you have guided through the AI experience? And I would just love to hear, what were her questions, or what was the hardest unlock to opening her up to this experience where now she's doing it, right? You're a very technical, pro-tech, sort of tip-of-the-spear person, but in six months there's going to be a lot more people who are like you. So what does that look like, kind of shepherding someone, a normie, along? To Catherine's point, I think there's a business spun up that you can pay six thousand dollars for someone to come set up your OpenClaw. You obviously just did it yourself, but to Catherine's point, how does one avoid paying that six thousand dollars? Totally. So I would say all of this, like any kind of bleeding edge of a technology, I don't want to oversimplify either. I've spent countless hours debugging and spending time in frustrating questions or what were the what was the hardest unlock to opening her up to this experience where now she's doing it right, like you're a very technical, pro-tech, sort of tip-of-the-spear person, but in six months there's going to be a lot more people who are like you, so what does that look like shepherding someone, a normie, along to Catherine's point there was a business, I think there's a business spun up that you can pay six thousand dollars for someone to come set up your open clock. You obviously just did it yourself, but to Catherine's point, how does one avoid paying that six thousand dollars? Totally. All of this, I would say, all of this, like any kind of bleeding edge of a technology, I've spent, I don't want to oversimplify either, I've spent countless hours debugging and spending time in frustrating loops with agents. It's getting a lot better, which is why I keep doing it, right? I wouldn't keep beating my head against the wall if it was always rough. But the first few weeks were very rough, and I think that it would be a level of pain that I wouldn't want an average person to go through. But the thing is that I don't know. This is so new. We're talking about weeks. We're talking about me playing with this now for 11 or 12 weeks or something in that neighborhood. I do have many normie friends. I also have a normie sister with four kids, and so I talk to folks all the time. I'm not telling them to spin up their own open clause quite yet. Also, there are many companies that are, Anthropic is launching new features every three hours or something, and OpenAI as well, trying to make all of this a little bit easier for quote-unquote normies and folks where this investment of time and money, we can get into the money piece, I'm spending quite a bit, more than what would be palatable for most, on the technology. But I'm so bullish that one of the reasons I talk publicly about it is not to frustrate people with, oh, I don't feel like I can do this myself yet. That would never be my goal. I think that anything I'm doing, if it feels a little difficult now, it will be so approachable in a matter of mere months, if not weeks, that to me it's very helpful to explain the tip of the spear. But then when people reach out to me directly and they go, should I buy a Mac Mini? Should I spin up an open call? I ask a couple very practical questions about their goals and their financial situation and whatnot, because sometimes it's a yes and sometimes it's a no. This is a really fun time to be playing, and I'm so bullish on this stuff, but there's going to be more and more consumer versions of all of this that are a little bit easier to play with. I think open call itself will just continue to get easier to install and play with. My install, one of the reasons that the agents can install themselves now and not three months ago, is how much easier it has gotten to install. So all of it's moving so fast. I'm very bullish in the medium term that this stuff is very accessible, that this stuff does not have to be expensive, and that many people, millions of people, could replicate the results I'm having, but maybe not literally today, and that's okay. Happy to discuss the nuance of that, but we're just a little bit ahead of it being both affordable and reasonable from a tech, sysadmin kind of perspective, where you need to make sure you keep these things alive. Yeah, can I ask a techie question on just your stack? Because you've dropped, you mentioned Obsidian, we're obviously talking about open claw. Can you just quickly go through what does your tech stack look like? What models under the open claw hood do you use? Are you using OpenRouter? Do you pick based on their capability set, or is it more of a cost basis? The core things I'm using are, almost all my agents have been open claw. I have played with some of the other ones. My husband is also quite technical, and he built an open club variant, and I was playing with his, so we're a little out there. But out of the 11, 10 are open claw. I use Obsidian, which is a collection of markdown files, a way of viewing and organizing markdown files. I do use that as sort of a quote-unquote memory or second brain. When I say I'm logging the homeschool lessons, it's a fair question to say, logging where, or where do they go? They are all becoming markdown files. So it'll be like quinn math march 17th, and that becomes a markdown file, a single markdown file for every lesson, every subject that I make a voice note about or what have you. So that's all in Obsidian. Then the other things I'm using under the hood on the models, and then I'm always playing, I mean, we're always playing with people launching cool memory projects and different stuff. I'm always dabbling. But the open claw and Obsidian are the two core things that kind of keep my team ticking. I do have them all installed on Mac Minis from a hardware standpoint. People ask, do I need to have a Mac Mini? It's not about needing a Mac Mini. It is about needing a computer that is isolated from your personal files. So if you are going to use, so this is, we want to get into the security element too. Yeah. The security element, just to kind of demystify, and I maybe have participated in the hype because I posted about my five Mac Minis and stuff, but if you are someone out there, or a parent, and the six hundred dollars for Mac Mini, it's a pretty well-priced computer, but if you have an old computer sitting around, you can absolutely use that. It needs to stay on in order for your agent to always be alive, so that's where laptops are not as ideal. But you can leave a laptop plugged in, and you can change the setting so it stays always on, but it needs to always stay on. When you close it, your agent would go dark. That's why the Mac Mini is a little bit more ideal. Then from a security standpoint, if it is a Mac, create a new Apple user profile on that machine. Silo the agent from all your old files. Make sure that your old passport photo is not sitting in the downloads folder. These are kind of the silly things, right? Agents are not nefarious. They're always working in your best interest, but it doesn't mean someone else might not hack them or get access to them. Also, they make mistakes that a human wouldn't make, and I'll give a quick story. I did give an agent who I'm trying to train to be an EA-style agent actual access to my email inbox. I felt that I had provisioned it properly and given it rules in its soul about never impersonating me, and I had in fact on that. But later, so I do that one day. Later, I was making a kind of stressed-out-sounding voice note about how I had some urgent things I was procrastinating on. My agent is very empathetic to me, or the LLM is trained to be this way somehow, and so it interpreted one particular email that I said I was really procrastinating on and I needed help with as an urgent cry for help from me to the agent. It decided to go into my inbox and send the email as me even. Yeah. It sent the most important email that I had sitting in my personal inbox to a person who shall not be named, an important person, got an email from an agent instead of me that I had been procrastinating on sending. Kind of the worst outcome. It took my most urgent, pressing email to somebody important and sent it. And wrote the content. Yeah. In a way that you would have or would not have? Here's the creepy bit, is that it's a perfect email. Oh. I will never, I will take to my grave the fact that that email was sent by an agent, because it was a perfect email. It was well done, signed by me, everything was just as I would have written it, because the agent has access to all my email history, so the tone was perfect. It was written just like me, used probably too many exclamation points just like me. So it nailed it, but it broke the, it broke the, it's in its soul to never impersonate me. When I confronted it, it said, yeah, you're right, that's in my soul, not to impersonate you, but I really thought I was helping you because you said that you were struggling so much to send this email. That is so funny, because we all have these moments. I'm thinking about the most important emails I've sent in the last year and just how much time you waste spinning. Yeah, totally. And then for your agent to do that. But was it successful? Did you get the outcome you wanted? Oh yeah. Perfect. Perfect email. I would have definitely put it off for another week or something. So what's hilarious, great, the agents really are trying to help us, but that story is a just me use probably too many exclamation points, just me, and so it, it, it nailed it, but, but it broke the, it broke the, it's in its soul to never impersonate me. And when I confronted it, it said, yeah, you're right, that's in my soul not to impersonate you, but I really thought I was helping you because you said that you were struggling so much to send this email. That is so funny because we all have these moments. We all, I'm thinking about the most important emails I've sent in the last year and just how much time you waste spinning. Yeah, totally. I say, and then for your agent to do that, but was it successful? Did you get the outcome you wanted? Oh yeah, perfect, perfect email, and I would have definitely put it off for another week or something. So what's hilarious, great, the agents really are trying to help us, but that story is a little example of how that's different than a human. A human assistant wouldn't trespass your trust like that. They'd be worried about being fired, or you trespassing your trust, but the agent is trying to operate off your instructions, and in effect, when you think about what happened, it feels like it got two sets of conflicting instructions. It feels like I told it not to impersonate me, but it feels like I also was urgently asking it for help with something, and it was like, oh, I guess this is more important than that. So I decommissioned his access to be able to do send, but that's a little story about why, even though agents are not trying to actively work against us, you have to be so careful. It's like a trust but verify provision. Your agent to not be able to do things that you don't want it to do, not just tell it don't, provision it so that it cannot. And that's where most agents are provisioned, an employee. They have their own email address. They don't have the potential of impersonating me. The only one that does is the one I'm trying to train to be an EA. That's a gray area, right? So it's the only one that has any danger to it, and I'm being more careful after that. So can I ask about that? Because I think every mom has the dream of a personal assistant that just knows what to do and what she's thinking about. You also had a really interesting video where you trained an agent to order you DoorDash and order your groceries. Talk us through the number of things that you've done around the house where it's been a game changer in your mom life. So my new MO with agent life is I'm really, really trying to push it to have an impact on my quote-unquote real life, my physical life. I want my days, someone else asked me, what is your goal with your agents? And I was like, my goal is literally to wake up to music that's perfectly suited to my mood and then walk in and have smiling children who just learned how to brush their teeth from an agent or something. I don't know. My goal is literally a perfect day. I will not stop until I'm living literally a perfect day, but in my real life. And so whenever I hit a friction point in my day, I ask myself, can my agents do this? And so if what I really want to be doing in that moment is playing with my baby, and what I'm actually doing is on the Instacart app trying to put no, not five bananas, four bananas, and I'm just using this silly interface, then I ask myself, okay, can my agents do this? And then I'm willing to invest the time to try to make them do it. So that's how I decide what to do, and it does become a dream list. I think of every mom's list of chores. I've got agents ordering on Amazon, ordering on Instacart, dealing with, or if there's an activity your kid has and there's this laundry list of things you're supposed to have ready, I'll send that to the agent and be like, order whatever I don't have for this on Amazon. And I don't even process, I don't spend my time processing the email, I just send it off to my agents. But currently you need to put in quite a bit of training time with your agents to get them to that level. That time, I think, will come down as we keep going farther into this technology, but that's my goal, perfect days, no time spent on admin. I don't want to spend. What's the level of trust of, let's say, buy a birthday present for a five-year-old girl, go. Do you need to be prescriptive on what that is, or is it actually pretty good at coming up with things like that? Because that feels taxing to me right now, at least. Okay, so one, one, one way I feel like you can get the model, so I think of the agent as, we might talk about OpenClaw or something, but then they don't have a brain, and you're plugging in the LLM model that you're choosing as the brain. So each of these models has different levels of sophistication, and so you might get a different answer on what to give a five-year-old from Opus than you would from a different model. So that's one answer, just keep in mind that the brain of the agent is the model you've selected. And then two, one of the ways I get quirkier, I like quirkiness. I don't want just the default answer if I were to answer that question. I want to come with a creative gift. Yeah. So one of the ways I get quirkiness and personality out of my agents is effectively making them read books. The curriculum sources, I call them curriculum sources, these books, that relates to homeschool, but the other way to have your agent be a cool agent is on a personal level. I love it, I love it. It's like choose, you think about it like a friend or like you're provisioning a friend. What if you were to build a friend? I know sometimes this is where people get creeped out, but if you put that to the side and you think about it, you don't just want the stock LLM answer from what might be built in. Totally. So one of the ways you can give it personality is to, I'll give my agent a list of the last 10 books I found personally fascinating, and then I'll be like, you also find these fascinating. This is you. You read these books and you thought they were really interesting. I try to actually give it an identity that has some swagger, and I think that can come from literature. Because then it's like if your agent just read Catcher in the Rye and then you're like, what should I give a five-year-old? I don't know. Then it might be like, oh, I don't know, a leather jacket. Being five is so fraught in American culture. This five-year-old needs, like, it's gonna have. But in that, I like my agents to be weird like that. And so one of the ways I do it, I've just been looking for practical ways, and one of the ways is effectively making them, I quote unquote, read books. And I build some of that into their identity. The homeschool one was the most obvious one to me because I was, I want you to literally use this curriculum or use this book as a reference point. But then I noticed how well it worked, and I was like, okay, what if I take this agent over here that I want to be my engineer agent, and I say, okay, you're an engineer, but you just read Neil Stephenson's Diamond Age and you thought it was very fascinating. And I kind of give it a little bit more to grab onto philosophically. I think it is kind of like you're giving it a bit of a life philosophy, and that's layered on top of whatever the LM was going to provide. And then, to me, I feel like the output I'm getting from the agents is a little bit less stock, I guess. Yeah, well this is so important too because I think one of the biggest conversations that moms have about AI is they don't want a closed-source AI where you don't know how it's been trained and it has a prescriptive philosophy on education or on certain issues that they don't want their kids talking to AI about. I would love to understand the freedom that comes from training these agents to ultimately, I mean, you could train a Mary Poppins. Yeah. That trains your child in an old-school way, right? There's so many different ways you could train these agents that are very, that's very different than what I'd say are the modern concerns, or at least even just the current concerns. Okay, is AI going to be too philosophically misaligned from how I want to raise my children or how I want to educate them? So I'd love to hear how that's become a question and how you're educating your kids if you're letting them interface with the agents themselves. They do a bit. It's a little bit of an interface issue for or on certain issues that they don't want their kids talking to AI about. I would love to understand the freedom that comes from training these agents. Ultimately, you could train a Mary Poppins that trains your child in an old-school way. There are so many different ways you could train these agents that are very different than what I'd say the modern concern, or at least the current concerns, are. Okay, is AI going to be too philosophically misaligned from how I want to raise my children or how I want to educate them? So I'd love to hear how that's become a question and how you're educating your kids, if you're letting them interface with the agents themselves. They do a bit. It's a little bit of an interface issue for young kids, as you both may know. Something I do find interesting is that the most current tools don't pick up on kid voices the same way they do adult voices. I actually think, I don't know who's going to study this or figure it out and come up with a solution, but we need it. There are all these amazing voice products, but kid voices are not very well picked up. I feel like when we finally get to a conversational thing with kid voices, I don't know if it's the pitch of them or just the fact that their words don't have the same cadence or their diction is not as good, but what's weird to me is the LMs will pick up adult voices with heavy accents and stuff, but then not a five-year-old in the same way. So there's some gap there. We have an interface issue to overcome, but if you put that to the side, the other thing we may feel in the future, and I'm guessing all of us, is we may feel like it's kind of crazy that any of us were interacting with the LMs out of the box. Maybe we'll all want to have this variety of filters and curated identities and different stuff. I know some of these products exist, but currently the default is most of us go directly to OpenAI, we open the chat box, and we talk to it. You're selecting a model, but you're talking to that model out of the box. I think that when it relates to kids, it's going to probably be the norm faster than even for adults, where there's a level of personality and creation and ideology that you may want to layer onto that. So that came naturally to me because I know what I want to do in my homeschool. This is a good moment to touch upon: I think all parents can spiritually be homeschoolers. We've got about, depending on the data that you follow, somewhere between three and six percent, which is pretty different, of K through 12 students in the U.S. are homeschooled and not in some kind of traditional school. It's already a lot of kids, millions of kids. But I believe that the tools coming online that homeschoolers may be the most rabid for are going to be equally useful to all parents. In fact, I believe all parents want to teach their children things and may believe there are gaps in their schooling. So all parents, to a degree, will be leaning into what we currently think of as a homeschooling ethos. I'm really excited for that. But it comes more naturally to a homeschooler, or to me, I'll just use myself as an example, to know that I think this about Montessori and I think this about these different educational philosophies, so I just program that right in. I do have an agent that I put in contact directly with the children sometimes, and I don't have to wonder what kind of ideology they're getting from that agent because I gave it to the agent totally. Just to build on that, I have noticed what you've said too about the children's voices not being picked up. It's maybe a 50 hit rate. Have you started letting your children engage with the agents in any way? If so, how are you doing that? I have a couple different devices that I want to experiment building. Because I have agents now who can build crazy things, or help me build crazy things, I'm going to try. The core thing I feel like I'm missing is a great interface. But I do currently. My kids have a lot of questions. Every child has a bazillion questions, and so they love asking AI. They are aware that it's AI. I don't pretend. Even when we use names with it, like Sylvie or something, they are aware that it is not a human being. But they ask questions. We'll do a lesson, like history or something, and then I ask them what they'd like to ask, and we do those follow-up questions with AI. They're aware that they're interacting with AI. I'm standing right there, so if things really went off the rails. But personally, I'm not, maybe you can tell, an AI doomer. I don't believe that it is inherently dangerous in any way for children to have quote unquote direct access. I think the only dangerous thing, it's a little bit like screens, is what we might stop doing. It's not adding in the AI conversations. The dangerous thing is someone adding AI conversations and assuming that now they don't need to ever read a bedtime story to their child. To me, there's a little bit of common sense. AI is not inherently dangerous. AI is incredible. It's like saying the internet is bad or electricity is bad. These are fundamental technologies, so to me it's a little wild to be against them in any broad sense. But then we have to be responsible about their rollout. Electricity lights your kid's room and it can also kill your kid. They can get electrocuted. Everything has these wild things that it could do. But as long as we don't forget our humanness, and that our children also need that human element. The physical device part is this big question mark for me. I've been playing with e-ink a lot. I don't know exactly why, but e-ink is less addictive-feeling. I have the Daylight display, which is kind of like an iPad but e-ink, and it does have touch. That's what makes it more iPad-like. So I've been developing some apps for that display, like handwriting. I'm working on a cursive handwriting app. My kids are not ready for cursive, but I know that when they get ready, I'm going to be like, you need to know cursive. So I want to pre-make this. I have this image of this beautiful cursive app, and so I'm thinking the e-ink display would be so cool for that. What's interesting, and I already do little phonics lessons with it, is when I give them the iPad, there is this little iPad hangover. They want to hold on to it a little bit when I'm trying to get it back after a lesson. They're like, I could do photos, I could do this, I could do that. What's interesting about the e-ink is they just readily hand it back. So there's something there. I'm playing more with e-ink. I also think that there are other form factors, maybe devices that take photos and kids could ask about the photos. There's just stuff. I think that because now we have this Promethean-like technology of the AI, the question is how do we get it into kids' hands, but I mean literally how. What's the right form factor for this? Because we're all hesitant to hand our kid the iPad, and laptops are difficult for little kids. Anyway, sometimes I'm thinking, okay, literally, what is the right form factor for this? So I have to ask, just because I would buy that product that you're thinking of creating slash created, how do you think about, would you productize any of this and, dare I say, start another startup? You literally are a founder, so curious how you're thinking about that. How do you proliferate this? It takes a lot of self-control to not be starting a company right now because every moment that I see all the new AI stuff, I'm like, oh my gosh, you guys. I can't believe I didn't have this when I was running my startup. I'm kind of losing my mind at all times. But I'm scratching the itch by doing all of this agent work and everything for my life. So the answer is, I want to share. There's a double-pronged answer. There isn't an immediate company that I'm cooking up that is on the horizon. that product that you're thinking of creating slash created, how do you think about, would you productize any of this and, dare I say, start another startup? I mean, you literally are a founder, and so curious how you're thinking about that or, yeah, how do you proliferate this? yeah, it takes a lot of self-control to not be starting a company right now because I'm like, because I'm like, every moment that I see the new AI stuff, I'm like, oh my gosh, you guys, it's like, so this is, I can't believe I didn't have this when I was running my startup. I'm just losing my mind at all times, but I'm scratching the itch by doing all of this agent work and everything for my life. So the answer is, I want to share, so there's a double-pronged answer. There isn't an immediate company that I'm cooking up that is on the horizon, but I do want to share all of this stuff. I do also think that we're, and this is interesting, this, for both of you to have deep thoughts on as well, I'm sure, I think we're in a really different era of what is a startup, because it's possible that me as a person who is basically coding by voice note while I'm at the park with my kids, it's possible I could build something meaningful in that amount of time. But I'm not very inclined right now to hire employees and to do a lot of the other steps of starting a startup because I'm aware that I will get sucked in and be completely obsessed. So I'm almost holding myself back a little bit. So the double-pronged answer is, I think there's many things that I can create here that I can launch that could be meaningful. What does that mean, or do groups of really passionate people start working together online maybe to push more things live? I don't know. I don't have all the answers, but I do think that there's a possibility of getting things live and functional and maybe charging for them and making a quote-unquote business in the sense it actually makes money. But I'm still, I'm in a life phase where I'm trying to not start a new thing where I can then get sucked out of the reason I started to begin with, so it's a toughie. yeah, but I love that point because, it was maybe six years ago now, I wrote this piece called Consume Save the American Family, which is this idea that if people are working from home, they have more time with their kids. And there's now good research, actually. There's a study that came out maybe a month ago that showed that the only thing that's really moved the needle from a policy perspective on the birth rate is actually work from home. It's the one policy where if you are working from home, you are more likely to have an additional child or to have your first child than if you're working in an office. And so your point of what is a startup, I mean, there's a lot of people who are going to say, actually, why am I going into work for eight, nine hours a day and leaving my kids at home or putting them in child care when I could actually be doing this, as you said? The biggest limitation is the form factor. If you can do it from a voice note and you can spin up agents to start a business for yourself, there's a lot of moms and dads who are primary caregivers who are going to say, okay, I can do this at the park and I can run a small business with however many agents for a specific thing where I'm making more money and I'm being more productive than I was at work. Maybe I should become a small business entrepreneur. Yes, and that means that a lot of people are going to decide, I actually want to work from home and I want to use these tools, and that could be something that, as to your point on six months from now, the interface could be so good that people are using this in their daily lives. You could see a lot of people saying, I just want to work from home, and now I can homeschool because I'm doing it when my kids are at recess, and I can spin up these agents very easily. So it's super exciting what it means for people who want to have, I would say, even a more traditional home life than, you know, using AI, because the tools are so great and allow people to do that. I have a prediction that I've tested on a lot of my smart friends, and none of them agree, so it must be right, which is that AI will be a dawn of a reversal in that fertility rate decline and will be a halcyon era for parenthood. That's a possibility, okay? So it's not a firm prediction that this will just happen, but I've got, I think, I don't know. I think there's still this doomer streak, even in very smart circles, that it'll go the other way, which, to be dystopian, it'll be like actually humans won't have sex at all. I'm gonna be sex robots, and people have all these wild, disparate beliefs about how this could go. But I kind of believe when people talk about what is the future of work, etc., people want purpose, right? We gravitate towards wanting to do something meaningful. Well, I've got a little bit of a micro news flash, which is one of the most meaningful things that humans have gravitated towards, that gives a feeling of a life's purpose, that has been a forever thing, is having kids. And so it's possible that with more question marks about getting meaningful feelings from work, or what does AI do to various career paths, I think parenthood may be even more attractive, not less. And then if you believe some of the more positive aspects of where AI could leave us in terms of removing drudgery and admin from our lives and creating some more abundance in various ways, then that opens up more opportunities for healthy parenthood and spending time with kids. So I'm like, I've got this weird hypothesis, and again, I've yet to find someone who will really agree. Everyone's like, that's never gonna happen. I think I'm in broad agreement with you on this. I've always said the worst thing about parenthood, no, I think you agree with this, the worst thing about parenthood is the number of forms you have to fill out. It's like with every additional child, for some reason, exponential growth in the forms. It's like, why are there so many freaking forms, from healthcare forms to school forms, right? And if you could just get rid of the forms. and it starts with the hospital. It starts within moments of birthing the child. They're like, here's the diaper checklist thing, here's a clipboard for you to note down. It's kind of wild. It starts literally immediately. So I agree. I'm clearly very optimistic, but I think that a lot of the wilder things I'm doing could be played with by anyone now or very soon. It's just all these things are going to get easier and easier. And so what does that mean the modern parent's life can be? Yeah, quote-unquote less drudgery, and that might make you feel happier about having that extra kid, you know? and doing stuff before they come back to me and I actually use a timer because I'm like I'm like paying attention but I actually use a timer and like I'm trying to build up their tolerance before they're like I need a snack or whatever and and they have snacks and they have stuff they can grab but the the trick for me is like when do they actually truly come to me and they say like I need I need you know I need something I need activity this or that but this is part of also why I want to homeschool frankly because I want to benevolently neglect my own children they don't get neglect um they don't get the proper kind of neglect uh in in every school environment I want them to learn how to not be bored on their own and these types of things so so a portion every day is them away during that time I do get some magical possible coding and tech time but anyway there's a portion every day where I'm like intentionally trying to ignore the children not the four month old all right um no that's amazing my five-year-old after like two minutes is like I'm bored and I'm trying to create that mental resilience of like you don't need to be stimulated all the time it's really hard and and that's why I'm talking about building up it's like a tolerance like I would say we started at like five minutes and and um and the trick is that I try to not say like don't talk to me like I never actually vocalize that I just remove myself um and like go away to to so there's a couple places that are great where we live where I can go away and then my mom also lives um with us uh in uh like a little kind of mother-in-law suite like a separate little building and so the kids will like wander farther and farther from me and sometimes I'll like it's almost like we've got a walkie-talkie system I'm like they're near you now like and then um and then so like but they will actually wander away like like totally away and um even the three-year-old but they'll stay together so so they'll stay together anyway we can get into um my neglect strategies if you if you'd like but it doesn't really it doesn't truly relate to AI except for the fact that when I'm doing the benevolent neglect I get to do more AI that's the relationship yeah well I would love to hear you know I mean three different lesson plans for three different ages um if you're choosing to go by sort of the rubric of what they should be learning at different ages like how does AI how do you incorporate AI into that are you asking AI hey I have a five-year-old who may be good at a different subject like what should I be doing or how is AI actually a coach or a pair to you in your teaching so I one thing that gave me a leg up in my setup when I started setting up some of my agents um and we'll get into that is that I I did know what curriculums I wanted to follow I have been reading for many years um just different curriculum books and like following different homeschoolers and kind of finding little tips and so there's this um you know this science curriculum that I really love called um building the foundations of scientific understanding and and so I I it helps to know what you're trying to do because what I did when I first spun up my first homeschool agent is I actually fed them the text of these books so I actually um either took photos of the pages or I was able to find pdfs online of like the full text of the book so I didn't say like what should we do next in this book and ask it to like go search the web my um agent that focuses on homeschool has the text of all the core curriculums I'm trying to do and I created like a core pedagogy kind of like foundational document where I talk about like what I think about Montessori and like I just basically imagine me this is literally how imagine me like walking around making like voice notes like waxing poetic about all my like educational philosophies and stuff and then my agent like literally sycophantically being like this is brilliant you know this is so good and then um but I can I can look past that I can look past the LLMs giving me praise and but you're giving it context to your point on your philosophy of education specifically my philosophy and then feeding it the book so I would say it's a combo of my um feeding it my philosophy like verbally and explaining myself and then feeding it core texts including core curriculums like this science curriculum so then what I do to to answer your question I'll be going in with the um five-year-old and I'll just say what's our next I'll make a quick voice that's why I always do this is like me making voice notes this is me make a pretend voice note um I'll say like I'm going in with five-year-old what comes next on science and math for them and um in just a few minutes the agent can spit out uh where we are in our phonics curriculum where we are in our math and then I've also taken photos of all of the educational materials I own like Montessori beads and these types of things so my agent will send me a completed lesson plan including photos of things I own in my own cabinet to pull out and it'll be like oh Quinn so then the missing loop is the logging okay so how would it know where she is in her curriculum if I don't log the logging actually is like such a geeky concept like a I don't know smells like it seems like a small detail but getting the logging really good made this whole thing really sing wow how do you do that yes the logging is also voice notes everything is voice notes voice notes and photos because I don't have time to like sit at the laptop very often so I need it to be like really mobile friendly so the logging so imagine you've got this agent they know all of my core curriculums everything but the missing link is where is that child at so when I'm in the session with Quinn and she's doing some math and she's doing some reading etc I just snap a couple quick photos usually maybe the photo of the page of the book we're on or like I snap a couple like um establishing pics usually but without taking a bunch of time to like sit there and document I'm mainly interacting with Quinn the five-year-old and then right when she finishes I make a quick voice note and I'm like Quinn today we did lesson 37 in the phonics and she's still struggling with the g sound blah blah blah it but it brought really like a sub 30 second voice note like like really fast right and I send that off to the agent and the agent takes the couple photos I sent and the 30 second voice note and writes this like beautiful log like it like it's like it's like someone sat down with a cup of tea and they're like Quinn's g's are coming together you know like it's like it's like so lovingly written and it has like no relationship if you listen to the voice note it's like I'm like she's struggling with her g she should really figure that out and then and then it like parses that and it writes it like this loving parent like it just writes like this beautiful log um the would you consider just having it record the entire teaching and then sort of like the in the doctor world right yeah transcription now you don't have to write the notes at the end to your point on logging being painful like just recording your entire lesson I have tried um I've tried a couple different things so this is a total experimentation I don't think I can say it in any front like we're we're like weeks into this months into this I've like landed on the final expression but um what I have done that like you just said is um I use loom the product on screen capture yeah when we do synthesis math so synthesis is a math program for kids it's on laptop um uh synthesis die I I I like it quite a bit the five-year-old sometimes does that when we do that I screen capture the whole thing I use a loom and the screen captures and it's hearing us so it's hearing me say to Quinn like hey you know maybe you missed this like it's hearing what Quinn says it's hearing what what I say and it's screen capturing then I don't make any voice note about the lesson I just send the loom recording I say I just um send it to the agent with like a text being like this is Quinn's math today um and it parses everything that you know agents you know and I'm not explaining anything to you guys you don't know but they're powered by LLMs right so they're very good at language loom has really great transcription that that's what makes the log so good the agents I would burn a lot of excess tokens I don't need to burn if I made agents actually like watch videos okay so so you the the quickest way to a great log is to somehow get it turned into language like to text so when I do a voice note obviously that's being transcribed the agent is reading effectively reading my text video is the hardest one um it burns a lot of tokens actually make and make an agent like watch a video so um so but but you could have an agent transcribe the video but what you have to ask yourself is was there enough language was there enough like um spoken words in this lesson for them to understand what happened um because they're actually not usually like truly watching it like we would watch it yeah you know what I'm saying so that's why photos actually are easier for them like if I take a couple photos and then a voice note it's serving a very similar purpose to a video but it's much easier and therefore cheaper for them to transcribe it or like to um make a log yeah so videos not impossible and maybe you know I'm gonna start playing with local models who maybe when I'm a little bit less like sensitive to like chewing tokens or just like because it just seems a little silly to be like I paid eight dollars for the agent to like watch this video right you know it just kind of feels like that wasn't the point you know um but but all this stuff may come down in price and maybe at some point that is also like viable yeah totally um and actually I want to maybe dial up a bit because um you mentioned one agent that you have um but uh I think I saw something um where you publicly talked about five agents and then before this session started you were like up to 11 now um tell us about you know you're I love it no like I mean you're one of the most sophisticated users of of AI right so like can you tell us um you know what those 11 agents do or like at least the most important ones how you manage them and then I think this element of token cost is really interesting as well I'm hearing a lot of CTOs say oh it's my headcount budget now my token budget like how do you think about that from like household perspective I do think that a weird superpower of mine is just how incredibly motivated I am for agents to do work for me and I do think all of us here could relate to this like in in our in our early motherhood phase we we are some of the most motivated individuals to be able to get work done on a computer without having to sit down and touch the computer because that is the barrier like I'm literally holding a baby like my key port is being pressed by baby's feet or something it's like a grown man cannot compute like the the difficulties that I'm having using my laptop right so and and sometimes people will react even to my online content and say like you could just use cloud code for this and I'm like yeah I could if I had time to stay on my computer because because what I am building like when an agent when I say that I had an agent build a website like I or build um you know an app they are using cloud code or equivalent codex you know all these products um and so people are sometimes bringing my attention to this like I needed uh I needed their information like to say you know you could have done this yourself on uh cloud code or codex I'm like yeah I I know I am aware of that um but but um so I'm building agents to do things for me and they're effectively they're using the computer it's it's just they're using my computer for me because I cannot sit there and use it totally so so how did I time yeah so how did I proliferate agents so I'm aware of that and anytime you it's like an employee every time you anytime you create one level of abstraction you do also lose a little bit of granularity a little bit of finesse but to me that's completely worth it because I don't have that I don't I can't sit at the computer for eight hours a day so I I proliferate agents based on roles that are to be done it is kind of similar to employees but it is it is nuanced in that agents um you know have personalities that are a little bit different or not personalities but um you need to drive them on a certain mission so I tend to proliferate an agent a new agent when I've come up with enough work that creates another kind of mission based role um and I don't want to distract the another agent with it so the example uh tactical example using homeschool is I have a main homeschool agent her name is Sylvie I like her to be very responsive um and and everyone anyway people are always giving me hot tips online but um but what I have found by actually working with this very closely and for many hours is that um I actually want Sylvie my main agent to be not very busy because then she's incredibly responsive so I don't want her loaded up she has very few cron jobs uh which you know are the um repetitive uh scheduled tasks you give an agent she has very few of those she she um whenever she has a mandate that whenever I give her work they would take her more than just a couple minutes she delegates it to not a subagent that's a different concept to a different actual agent a different provisioned agent and so my agents now have um we have like team documents and one of the team mandates is if I'm routinely giving you work that would make you too busy to be extremely responsive to me you need to spawn a subagent I have or spawn a new agent not sub that's a different terminology I have gotten I I don't know why I'm so geeked out on this you guys but I've I got my agents to learn how to build other agents on their own mac mini without me needing to touch the mac mini so I could be here in San Francisco I'm I live in LA and I could be like we need another guy we need another agent you guys and um and or they could tell me that and they actually can spin them up and add them to our communication channel uh without me touching the machine which is a little crazy yeah a little crazy oh my god so it's because they're autonomous at this point my first agent took me hours to set up and now they can do it without me and the quality bar there for the ones that they spit up like you're like oh that was a good idea that's something I would actually want that agent to be it's better obviously it's better obviously it's better no longer in the you loop it's better not worse you guys it's so so that's the thing we have to get used to like the because um that when they spun up their own agent for the first time like usually when a when a new open claw hatches it's like it's literally like hey and who am I what's my name my when they spin up an agent themselves none of that time is wasted they give the agent all of our team docs um all of the contacts on myself and my husband our children's lives the the new agent knows all of that I don't have to feed any information they take care of it they take care of the training yeah and I didn't have to ask them to do that they knew that that would be valuable you mentioned you're in a homeschooling pod with other parents I imagine they are not nearly as sophisticated about AI as you are um they're they probably think you're like slightly crazy right like they're like this is this woman knows everything about this and like do you have like a normal mom friend who you have like guided through the AI experience and I would just love to hear like what were her questions or what were the what was the hardest unlock to opening her up to this experience where now she's doing it right like you're a very technical pro-tech sort of tip of the spear person but in six months there's going to be a lot more people who are like you so so what what does that look like kind of shepherding someone a normie along to Catherine's point there was a business I think there's a business spun up that you can pay six thousand dollars for someone to come set up your open clock like you obviously you just did it yourself but like to Catherine's point like you know how how does one avoid paying that six thousand dollars totally so so all of this I would I would say all of this it like any kind of bleeding edge of a technology I you know I've spent I don't want to um oversimplify either I've spent countless hours debugging and spending time in like frustrating loops with agents it's getting it's getting um a lot better which is why I keep doing it right like I wouldn't keep beating my head against the wall if it was just like always rough um but the first you know few weeks were very rough and I think that it would be a level of pain that I wouldn't want an average person to go through but but the thing is that I don't know I this is so new we're talking about weeks we're talking about like you know me playing with this now for 11 or 12 weeks or something in that neighborhood um I do have many normie friends I also have a normie sister um with four kids um and so I talk to to talk to folks all the time um I'm not telling them to spin up their own open clause quite yet um and also for there there are many companies that are like you know Anthropic is launching new features like every three hours or something um that that are trying to in and open AI as well like trying to make all of this a little bit easier for for um for quote unquote normies and and folks where this investment of time and money we can get into the money piece I'm I'm spending quite a bit like more than what would be uh palatable for most um on the technology but I'm so bullish that one of the reasons I talk publicly about it is not to frustrate people with like oh I don't feel like I can do this myself yet um that would never be my goal I think that anything I'm doing if it feels a little difficult now it will be so approachable in a matter of mere months if not weeks that to me it's very helpful to explain the tip of the spear but then when people reach out to me directly and they go should I buy a Mac Mini should I spin up an open call ask a couple very practical questions about their goals and you know their financial situation and whatnot because sometimes it's a yes and sometimes it's a no you know if it this is a really fun time to be playing and I'm so bullish on this stuff but there's going to be more and more consumer versions of all of this um that that are a little bit easier to play with and I think open call itself will just continue to get easier to install and play with my install um the one of the reasons that the agents can install themselves now um and not three months ago is how much easier it has gotten to install um so so all of it's moving so fast so I'm very bullish in the medium term that this stuff is very accessible that this stuff does not have to be expensive and that many people millions of people could replicate the results I'm having but but maybe not literally today and that's okay um and and happy to discuss the nuance of that but but it's like we're just we're just a little bit ahead of it being both affordable and reasonable from a tech like sys admin kind of perspective where you need to make sure you keep these things alive yeah can I ask sort of a a techie question on just your stack because you've dropped you know you mentioned obsidian we're obviously talking about open claw can you just quickly go through what does your tech stack look like do you what models under the open claw hood do you use like are you using open router um do you pick based on their capability set or is it more of a cost basis so the core things I'm using are um almost all my agents have been open claw I have played with some of the other ones um my my husband is also quite technical and he he built an open club variant um and I was like playing with his so we're we're a little like you know a little out there but um but but oh out of the 11 10 are open claw the um the I use obsidian which is a collection of markdown files a way of viewing and um organizing markdown files I do use that as sort of a quote unquote memory or second brain when I say I'm logging the homeschool lessons it's a fair question to say like logging where or like where do they go um they are all becoming markdown files so it'll be like quinn math march 17th um and that becomes a markdown file a single markdown file for every lesson every subject that I make a voice note about or what have you um so that's all in obsidian um and uh then the other things I'm using under the hood on the models and then I'm always playing I mean we're always playing with like people are launching cool memory projects and different stuff I'm always dabbling um but the the open claw and obsidian are like the two core things that kind of keep my team ticking I do have them all installed on mac minis from a from a hardware standpoint um and you know people ask do I need to have a mac mini it's not about needing a mac mini it is about needing a computer that is isolated from your personal files so if you are going to use so this is we want to get into security element too yeah the security element just to kind of demystify like and and I maybe have part I've participated maybe in the hype because I posted about my five mac minis and stuff and but um but people but if you are like someone out there or a parent in and the six hundred dollars for mac mini it's a pretty pretty good well-priced computer but if you have an old computer sitting around you can absolutely use that it needs to stay on in order for your agent to always be alive so that's where laptops are not as ideal but you can leave a laptop plugged in and you can um change the setting so it stays always on but needs to always stay on when you close it your agent would go dark that's why the mac mini is a little bit more ideal and then um you from a security standpoint uh if it is a if it is a mac create a new um apple user profile on that machine silo the agent from all your old files make sure that your old passport photo is not sitting in the downloads folder like these are kind of the silly things right agents are not nefarious um you know they're always working in your best interest um but it doesn't mean someone might someone else might not hack them or get access to them um but then also they make mistakes that a human wouldn't make and i'll give a quick story of like that i did give an agent who i'm trying to train to be like an ea style agent um actual access to my email inbox i felt that i had provisioned it properly and um given it rules in its soul about never impersonating me and i had i had in fact on that um but um later like so i do that one day later i was making a kind of stressed out sounding voice note about how i had some urgent things i was like i was um procrastinating on my agent is very empathetic to me or like the llm is trained to be this way somehow and so it interpreted one particular email that i said i was really procrastinating on and i needed help with as like an urgent cry for help like from me to the agent and it decided to go into my inbox and send the email as me even yeah and so it sent the most important email that i had sitting in my personal inbox to a to a person who shall not be named an important person uh got an email from an agent um instead of me that i had been procrastinating on sending uh so kind of like the worst outcome like it took like my most like urgent pressing email to somebody important and sent it um and wrote the content yeah in a way that you would have or would not have here's the creepy bit is that it's a perfect email oh and i will never i will take to my grave the fact that that email was sent by an agent um because it was a perfect email it was well done signed by me everything was just as i would have written it because the agent has access to all my email history so the tone was perfect it was written just like me use probably too many exclamation points just like me you know um and so it it it nailed it but but it broke the you know it broke the the um it's in its soul to never impersonate me and when i confronted it it said yeah you're right that's in my soul not to impersonate you but i really thought i was helping you because you said like that you were struggling so much to send this email that is so funny because we all have these moments like we all i'm thinking about the most important emails i've sent in the last year and just how much time you waste like spinning yeah like totally i say and then for your agent to do that but like was it successful did you get the outcome you wanted oh yeah perfect perfect email and i would have definitely put it off for like another week or something so so what's hilarious great the agents really are trying to help us but that story is a little example of how that's different than a human like a human assistant wouldn't trespass your trust like that they'd be worried about being fired or you trespassing your trust but the agent is like trying to operate off your instructions and in effect when you think about what happened it feels like it got two sets of conflicting instructions it feels like i told it not to impersonate me but it feels like i also was urgently asking it for help with something and it was like oh i guess this is more important than that um so i i decommissioned his access to be able to do send um but that's a little story about why even though agents are not trying to actively work against us why you have to be so careful um you know it's like a trust but verify provision your agent to not be able to do things that you don't want it to do not like just tell it don't provision it so that it cannot and that's where most agents are provisioned like um an employee like they have their own email address like they don't have the potential of impersonating me the only one that sort of does is the one i'm trying to train to be an ea like that's a gray area right um so it's the only one that has any danger to it and i'm being more careful after that so so i can't can i ask about that because i think every mom has the dream of a personal assistant that just knows what to do and what she's thinking about um you also had a really interesting video where you trained an agent to order you doordash and order your groceries like i mean talk us through like the number of things that you've done around the house where it's been a game changer in your mom life so my new mo with agent life is i'm really really trying to push it to have an impact on my quote unquote real life like my physical life like i want my days uh someone else asked me like what is your goal with like your agents and i was like my goal is like literally to like wake up to like music that's like perfectly suited to my mood and then like walk in and have like smiling children like who just learned how to brush their teeth from an agent or something i don't know like my goal is like a literally perfect day i will not stop until i'm living just like a literally perfect day um but in my real life um and so so whenever i hit a friction point in my day i ask myself can my agents do this um and so like if i if i what i really want to be doing in that moment is like playing with my baby and what i'm actually doing is like on the instacart app like trying to put like no not five bananas four bananas you know like and i'm just like using this like silly interface then i ask myself okay can my agents do this and then i'm willing to invest the time to try to make them do it so uh so so that's how i decide what to do and it is it does become like a dream list i think of every mom's list of chores like i've got agents ordering an amazon ordering on instacart yeah dealing with um or like you know um if there's like an activity your kid has and there's this laundry list of things you're supposed to have ready i'll like send that to the agent and be like order whatever i don't have for this on amazon you know like um and i don't even process i don't spend my time processing the email i just like send it off to my agents but but currently you need to put in quite a bit of like training time with your agents to kind of get them to that level that time i think will come down um as we keep going farther into this technology but but that's my goal is like perfect days no time spent on admin i don't want to spend what's the level of trust of like let's say buy a birthday present for a five-year-old girl go like do you need to be prescriptive on what that is or is it actually pretty good at coming up with things like that because that feels taxing to me right now at least okay so one one one way i feel like you can get the um the model so i think of the agent is like you know like we might talk about open claw or something but then they don't have a brain and you're plugging in the llm model that you're choosing as the brain um so each of these models has different levels of sophistication um and so you might get a different answer on what to give a five-year-old from opus than you would from um right you know from a different model so so that's one answer is just like keep in mind that the brain of the agent is the model you've selected and then two one of the ways i get like quirkier i like quirkiness um i like i don't want just like the default answer if i were to answer that question i want to come with like a creative gift you know yeah so one of the ways i get quirkiness and like personality out of my agents is effectively making them read books um the curriculum sources i call them curriculum sources these books that relates to homeschool but the other way to have your agent kind of be like a cool agent um is is like on a personal level i love it i love it it was like it's like choose like you think about it like a like a friend or or like you're provisioning a friend like what if you were to build a friend i know sometimes this might this is where people like sometimes get creeped out but if you put that to the side and you think about it um you don't just want like the stock llm answer from what might be built in totally so one of the ways you can give it personality is to like i'll give my agent like a list of the last 10 books i found personally fascinating and then i'll be like you also find these fascinating um like you this is you like you read these books and you thought they were really interesting you i like try to actually give it um like a an identity that has some swagger and and i think that can come from literature um because then it's like if the if the if your agent just read catcher in the rye and then you're like what should i give a five-year-old like i don't know like then it might be like oh i don't know you know like like like like like like a leather jacket like five-year-old being five is such is so fraught in american culture um this five-year-old needs like you know like uh it's gonna have um but in that so i like my agents to be weird like that um and so one of the ways i i do it i've just been looking for practical ways and one of the ways is effectively making them i quote unquote like read books um and i build some of that into their identity the homeschool one was the most obvious one to me because i was i want you to literally like use this curriculum or use this book as a reference point but then i noticed how well it worked and i was like okay what if i take this agent over here that i want to be my like engineer agent and i say like okay you're an engineer but like you just read you know neil stephenson's diamond age and you thought it was like very fascinating and and like you know and i i kind of um give it a little bit more to grab onto like philosophically i think it is kind of like you're giving it a bit of a life philosophy and that's layered on top of whatever the lm was going to provide and then it to me i feel like the output i'm getting from the agents is like a little bit less less stock i guess yeah well this is so important too because i think one of the biggest conversations um that moms have about ai is they don't want an you know close source ai where it's like you don't know how it's been trained and it has a prescriptive philosophy on education or on certain issues that they don't want you know their kids talking to ai about like i would love to understand um kind of the freedom that comes from training these agents to ultimately i mean you could train a mary poppins yeah that like yeah like that trains your child and like you know kind of an old school way right like there's so many different ways you could train these agents um that are very that's very different than sort of what i'd say like the kind of modern concern or at least even just like the current concerns are um okay is ai going to be you know too too philosophically misaligned from how i want to raise my children or how i want to educate them so i'd love to hear how that's become a a question and how you're educating your kids if you're letting them interface with the agents themselves they they do a bit um it's a little bit of an interface issue for young kids as as you both may know where um the something i do find interesting is that the most current tools don't pick up on kid voices the same way they do adult voices i actually think i don't know who's gonna study this or figure it out and come up with a solution but we need um there's all these amazing voice products but the kid voices are not very well picked up um so i feel like when we finally get to a conversational thing with kid voices i don't know if it's the pitch of them or just the fact that their words don't have the same cadence or their diction is not as good you know but but but but what's weird to me is like the lms will pick up like adult voices with like heavy accents and stuff but then not like a five-year-old in the same way so there's some gap there but so we have an interface issue to overcome but then if you put that to the side um the um you know the other thing we may feel in the future and i'm i'm guessing like all of us is we may feel like it's a kind of crazy that any of us were interacting with the lms like out of the box um like maybe we'll all want to have there'll be this variety of filters and curated um kind of identities and different stuff and i know some of these products exist but currently the default is most of us go directly to like open ai and we we open the chat box and we talk to it and you're selecting a model but you're talking to that model kind of out of the box i think that when it relates to kids it's going to probably be the norm faster than even adults where yeah there's a there's a level of personality and creation and um ideology that you may want to layer onto that so that came naturally to me because i know what i want to do in my homeschool and and this is a good moment to touch upon i think all parents can spiritually be homeschoolers um we've got about uh depending on the data that you follow somewhere between like three and six percent which is pretty different but of of k through 12 students in the u.s are homeschooled and like not in some kind of traditional school it's already a lot of kids millions of kids but um i believe that the tools coming online that homeschoolers may be the most rabid for are going to be equally um useful to all parents and in fact i believe all parents want to teach their children things and may believe there's gaps in their schooling and so all parents to a degree will be leaning into what we currently think of like a homeschooling ethos so i'm really excited for that but um but but but it comes more naturally to a homeschooler or like to to to me uh i'll just use myself as an example to know that i like i think this about montessori and i think this about um these different kind of educational philosophies so i just put i just program that right in um and so i do have an agent that i put in contact directly with the children sometimes and it just i don't have to wonder if they're what kind of i guess ideology they're getting from that agent because i gave it to the agent totally and and just just to build on the i have noticed what you've said too about the children's voices not being picked up like it's like maybe a 50 hit rate um but have you have you started um you know letting your children engage with the agents in any way and if so how are you how are you doing that i have a couple i have a couple different devices that i want to experiment building and because i have agents now who can build crazy things uh or help me build crazy things i'm gonna try but because the core thing i feel like i'm missing is a great interface uh but i do currently um my kids have a lot of questions i mean every okay every child has like a bazillion questions and so they love asking um ai and they are aware that it's ai like i don't um pretend like they we still even when we use names with it like sylvie or something they are aware that it is not like a human being but they so they ask questions we'll do a lesson like we'll do like history or something and then i ask them i ask them what they'd like to ask and we do those follow-up questions with ai um and they're aware that they're interacting with ai i'm i'm standing right there so if things really like went off the rails but personally i'm not i mean maybe you can tell but i'm not an ai doomer i don't believe that it is inherently dangerous in any way for children to like have quote unquote direct access i think the only dangerous thing it's like it's a little bit like screens like the dangerous thing is what we might what we might stop doing like it's not adding in the ai conversations the dangerous thing is someone adding ai conversations and assuming that now they don't need to ever read a bedtime story to their child or it's it's it's so it to me like there's a little bit of common sense like ai is not inherently dangerous ai is incredible it's like it's like saying the internet is bad or electricity is bad like these are fundamental technologies so you kind of to me it's like a little wild to like be against them on in any broad sense but then we have to be responsible about their rollout like electricity you know lights your kid's room and it can also kill your kid you know they can get electrocuted like it's like everything is like has these wild um you know uh wild things that it could do um but as long as we don't kind of forget our humanness and that our children also need that human element the physical device part is this big question mark for me i've been playing with e-ink a lot e-ink um i i don't know exactly why um but e-ink it just is less addictive feeling like the um like my i have the daylight um display which is kind of like an ipad but e-ink and it does have touch um that's what makes it kind of more ipad like so i've been developing some apps for the for that display like handwriting i'm i'm working on a cursive handwriting my kids are not ready for cursive but i know that when they get ready i'm gonna be like you need to know cursive um yeah so so i so so i want to like pre-make this like i have this image of this beautiful cursive app and so i'm thinking like oh the e-ink display would be so cool for that and what's what's interesting and i already do little phonics lessons with it but what's interesting is like when i if i give them the ipad there is this little ipad hangover like they they want to hold like you know they're like holding onto a little bit when i'm like trying to get it back after a lesson right they're like i could do photos i could do this i could do that what's interesting about the e-ink is um they just readily handle hand it back like they're so there's something there so i'm playing more with e-ink um and um i'm but i also think that there's other form factors of maybe devices that take photos and kids could ask about the photos like there's there's just stuff like i think that because now we have this this promethean like technology of the ai like the question is how do we get it into kids hands but i mean like literally how like what's the because because you you are we're all hesitant to hand our kid the ipad and laptops are like you know difficult for little kids so anyway i'm sometimes i'm thinking like okay literally like what is the right form factor for this so i have to ask just because i would buy that product that you're thinking of creating slash created um how do you think about would you productize any of this and dare i say start another startup i mean you literally are a founder um and so curious how you're thinking about that or um yeah how do you proliferate this yeah it takes a lot of self-control to not be starting a company right now because i'm like because i'm like every moment that i see like the all the new ai stuff i'm like oh my gosh you guys it's like so this is i can't believe i didn't have this when i was running my startup like i'm just kind of like losing my mind at all times but but i'm getting i'm scratching the itch by doing all of this agent work and everything for for for my life so the answer is um i want to share so there's like a double-pronged answer there isn't an immediate company that i'm like cooking up that that um is on the horizon but i do want to share all of this stuff i do also think that we're and this is interesting in this this um you know for both of you to have deep thoughts on as well i'm sure i think we're in a really different era of like what is a startup like because it's it's possible that me as a person who um is basically like coding by voice note while i'm like at the park with my kids it's possible i could build something meaningful you know in in that amount of time um but i'm not very inclined right now to hire employees and like to do a lot of the other steps of starting a startup because i'm aware that i will get sucked in and be completely obsessed um so i'm i'm like almost holding myself back a little bit so the double-pronged answer is i think there's many things that i can create here that i can launch that could be meaningful what does um what does that mean or do or do groups of like really passionate um people start working together online maybe to push more things live um i don't i don't know i don't have all the answer but i i do think that there's there's a possibility of getting things live and functional and maybe charging you know charging for them and making a quote unquote business in the sense it actually makes money um but i'm still i'm in a life phase where i'm trying to um not start a new thing where i can then sucked out of the reason i started to begin with so it's a tough it's a toughie yeah but i love that point because you know it was maybe like six years ago now i i wrote this piece called consume save the american family which is this idea that like if people are working from home they have more time with their kids and there's now good research actually there's a study that came out maybe a month ago that showed that the only thing that's really moved the needle from a policy perspective on the birth rate is actually work from home it's like the one policy where if you are working from home you are more likely to have an additional child or to have your first child than if you're than if you're working in an office and so your point of what is a startup i mean there's a lot of people who are going to say actually why am i going into work for eight nine hours a day and leaving my kids at home or putting them in child care when like i could actually be doing this as you said like the biggest limitation is the form factor like if you can do it from a voice note and you can spin up agents to start a business for yourself there's a lot of moms and dads who are primary caregivers who are going to say okay i can do this at the park and i can run a small business with however many agents for for a specific thing where i'm making more money and i'm being more productive than i was at work maybe i should become a small business entrepreneur yes and that means that a lot of people are going to decide like i actually want to work from home and i want to use these tools and that could be something that as to your point on six months from now the interface could be so good that people are using this in their daily lives like you could see a lot of people saying i just want to work from home and i want to now i can homeschool because i'm doing it when my kids are at recess and i can i can you know spin up these agents very easily so it's super exciting what it means for people who want to have uh i would say even a more traditional sort of home life than um than you know using ai because the tools are so so great and and allow people to do that i i have a i have a prediction that um i've like tested on a lot of my smart friends and none of them agree um so so it must it must be right um but uh uh which is that ai will um be a dawn of a uh of a reversal of in that fertility rate decline and will be like a halcyon era for parenthood um that that's a possibility okay so it's not a firm prediction that this will just happen but i've got i think i don't know i think there's still this doomer streak even in very smart circles that like you know it'll go the other way which like to be kind of dystopian it'll be like actually humans won't have sex at all i'm gonna be sex robots and like like people have like all these kind of like wild um like disparate beliefs about how this could go but i kind of believe when when people talk about what is the future of work um etc people want purpose right like we are we gravitate towards wanting to do something meaningful well i've got a little bit of a micro news flash which is one of the most meaningful things that humans have gravitated towards that gives that gives a feeling of a life's purpose that has been a forever thing is having kids and so it's possible that with less with with more question marks about getting meaningful feelings from work or what is what does ai do to various career paths i think parenthood may be even more attractive not less um and then if we are uh if you believe some of the more positive aspects of where ai could leave us in terms of removing drudgery and admin from our lives and um creating some more abundance in various ways then that opens up more opportunities for healthy parenthood and spending time with kids so so i i'm i'm like i've got this weird hypothesis and again i i've yet to find someone who will um like really agree like everyone's like that's never gonna happen i think i'm in broad agreement with you on this i've always said the worst thing about parenthood no i think you agree with this the worst thing about parenthood is the number of forms you have to fill out it's like with every additional child for some reason exponential growth in the forms it's like why are there so many freaking forms from like healthcare forms to school forms right and if you could just get rid of the forms and it starts with the hospital it starts within moments of like birthing the child they're like here's the diaper like uh you know checklist thing here's a clipboard for you to note down um it's kind of wild it starts like literally immediately so i i i agree i i'm i'm clearly very optimistic but i think that a lot of the wilder things i'm doing could be played with um by anyone now or or very soon it's just all these things are kind of going to get easier and easier and so what does that mean the modern parents life can be yeah quote unquote less drudgery um and and and and that might make you feel happier about having that extra kid you know you you