Jesse: I was resigned to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for like the next 5 years or so. I really want to be present with my kids. I need to take this break. Basically, 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.

Host: Jesse, it is so fantastic to have you here. Um, I think you uh you've been what I would call a viral sensation um on X, posting videos of how you're homeschooling your family, uh, four children under the age of five, which all I can say is God bless you. You're amazing. Um, God bless.

Host: But we also want your secrets. We want your tips. Um, as as you know, um, 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 just such an incredible force with your videos um, 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 as a homeschool mom. So, we want to start with who you are um and and how you got so interested in in using AI for home school, but but tell us about your your previous career too um as as a Silicon Valley founder.

Jesse: Yeah. So, I I I started a company um many years ago now. Um time time flies, but I was a YC founder um you know um did did a venturebacked company kind of full cycle. Ended up selling it a few years ago. And so, I do you know on 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 I want to be like I want people to understand yes like I've been swimming in these waters. I've sat in many an engineering meeting where I was sort of following along and sort of lost. Uh I've sat in many you know product cycles and 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, you know, running um 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 um like a Cambrian like explosion for me of of building. And of course, the last few months where we have the uh open claw, then I went completely obsessed. So, I'm I'm happy to discuss that. But I went down a complete obsession. It can only be described as an obsession. Um because I I've just been building almost, you know, non-stop, but when I say that on a datab basis, I'm actually spending a lot of time with my kids. And so, I was trying to find like 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.

Host: Yeah. And maybe talk about that six-month like what was the thing that happened six months ago or what do you remember what the moment was where you're like I need to start building to fix this problem or or what was the story behind that?

Jesse: Well, um you know, my my my co-founder from Lumi, which was a packaging company, so literal physical packaging. We made we managed a packaging marketplace. Uh he he is now um off running something called Obsidian. And it's a markdown notetaking app. And I say this because I follow him on Twitter. Obviously, we're co-founders. And then and then and then I follow all these Obsidian geeks on Twitter. And I started noticing um a change in the conversation. uh changing the conversation, them talking about how they were like building really wild things with cloud code. Um that that you know that stuff was referenced the um discussion about interesting ways they started using Obsidian. And what really caught my eye so that the six months ago was me feeling like, hey, I actually feel like I should pro can probably be building things myself now in the small bits of time that I have. So I have like confetti time, you know, like I have like 10 minutes here, 15 minutes here. And I started feeling like maybe I can build stuff. The tools are getting so good. But then about few months ago, three months ago, two three months ago, I saw people saying like, "I'm using Obsidian as a second brain for this thing and it was called Claudebot and then all these different and and and they were referencing this and I was like, what are they talking about?" This was December and into January. Uh, and that's when I realized like, wait, I can build agents who actually code for me while I'm hanging out with my kids. That that was a complete game changer. And I and and actually just pausing at that for one moment. Um this is such a huge deal for me. I have I was resigned and not in this like super depressing way but just being really blunt to not challenging myself to build technical or hard things for like the next 5 years or so. Like I was like I really want to be present with my kids. I really we're doing homeschooling which is a w like a wild choice. Um and so so I was kind of yeah I think the right word is resigned to it. not sad, not resentful, but just just like, "Okay, I need to take this break." Basically, that is no longer true. Like, 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 like with my children. And I and I explain I can explain how I do the flow of the day where I do that where like there's things I do, you know, during the day and things I do at night when they're asleep and stuff, but I'm like truly building things that I'm impressed with personally and I'm being an active mom like and that was not possible a few months ago. Like it's it's actually a sea change for me personally. It's like really liberating.

Host: So that's that's incredibly inspiring what you just said. And um you know I think a lot of parents listening to this are like I don't have time to build this, right? And so, um, you're a mom four, five and under. Um, I'm like I have two and I barely feel like I could breathe, let alone four. You're doing homeschooling. Um, can you walk us through a day in your life? Like how do the hours stack up and then when do you build? Um, and to your point, the big unlock is like you're sleeping in their building for you. So, like how did you how did you get that set up? Um, so many questions.

Jesse: Yeah, let's let's an average day, a typical day, um you know, wake up at the crack of dawn, right? Because there's a small person who has decided that that's when when we get up. Um and they're like, "You get up, you know." So, anyway, I'm like waking up and there's like small, you know, little gremlin creatures around my bed. So, that's that's where we start. Um we we go from there. Obviously, all the basics like having breakfast, yada yada. What I try to do, um there's three kids I'm really homeschooling now because one is a baby, one is about four months old. Um I start early but not that early. Uh we have a 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 child I need help with the kids even to do that, right? So I do 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. You know, depends on the kids' mood. They're all quite young, but it can be anywhere from like 20 minutes to an hour. Um, and then after that, maybe then it's like midm morning, we will just, you know, do some more unstructured activities like playing and and um playing outdoors or trying to pull on a thread of something we're doing um where we um leave the house, maybe go on kind of a field trip or something like this. One time a week, we do a homeschool pod with another with two other families. Between the three families, there's 11 kids already. Um, when you meet homeschoolers, these people are reproducing. All right. Um, so three families, 11 kids already. And so, uh, 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 like running around and we do a science lesson that we weave through like the whole day. But in any case, the kids can do effectively 30 45 minutes of like active instruction per day and you really want to make the most of that and then the rest of the day is pretty like thematic. The other thing that I really believe in, so I spend time doing this is um uh you could call it freerange parenting, you could call it benevolent neglect. I don't know what you want to call it. Um but I try to ignore the children. Um I try to make sure that they're going to survive the ignoring. Um, so they're set up in little places where they can't um, you know, hurt themselves, but I 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. But so, um, we're 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 5-year-old, we're up to like they can they will spend more than two hours uh, interacting and doing stuff before they come back to me. Wow. 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.

Host: 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 5-year-old who may be good at a different subject, like what should I be doing or or how is AI actually a coach or a pair to you in your teaching?

Jesse: 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 Monasuri 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 sickopantically being like this is brilliant you know this is so and then um but I can I can look past that. I can look past the LLM's giving me praise and but you're giving it context to your point on your philosophy of education. Yeah, 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 text including core curriculums like the science curriculum. So then what I do to answer your question, I'll be going in with the um 5-year-old and I'll just say what's our next I'll make a quick voice. This way I always do this is like me making a voice note. This is me making a pretend voice note. Um I'll say like I'm going in with 5-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 in our math. And then I've also taken photos of all of the educational materials I own like monatory 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 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 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? Yeah. the 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 stab 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 5-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 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 secondond 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 and you're 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.

Host: ...before this session started you were like up to 11 now. Um tell us about you know your 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...

Jesse: 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 keyboard is being pressed by baby's feet or something. ...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 the 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 missionbased role. Um, and I don't want to distract the another agent with it. So the example tactical example using homeschool is I have a main homechool agent, her name is Sylvie. I like her to be very responsive. ...Whenever she has a mandate that whenever I give her work that would take her more than just a couple minutes, she delegates it to not a sub agent, that's a different concept, to a different actual agent, a different provisioned agent. ...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 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.

Host: Can I ask sort of a a a techy question on just your stack because you've dropped, you know, you mentioned Obsidian, we're obviously talking about OpenClaw. ...we want to get into the security element too.

Jesse: ...isolated from your personal files. So if you are going to use ... Silo the agent from all your old files. make sure that your old passport photo is not sitting in the downloads folder. ...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 done 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 ... 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. ...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."

Host: ...how does one avoid paying that $6,000 ... and I would just love to hear like what were her questions or what were the what was the hardest unlock to to opening her up to this experience...

Jesse: My goal is like a literally perfect day. I will not stop until I'm living just like a literally perfect day. ...whenever I hit a friction point in my day, I ask myself, can my agents do this? ...Like I've got agents ordering on 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 they'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... I have a prediction that ... AI will um be a dawn of a of a a reversal in that fertility rate decline and will be like a houseion era for parenthood. ...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 ... that opens up more opportunities for healthy parenthood and spending time with kids.