don't walk away from ai w/ mark hinkle

full transcript

auto-generated from the audio, so expect a few typos. the audio is the source of truth.

All right. Alrighty. Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. We're live with Mark. We're live with Mark. Hey, Taylor. It's good to hang, brother. It's good to hang. Um, I'm excited for this episode. Uh, you know, this kind of goes into the this wasn't planned. I mean, you know, actually Mark, you know, we're talking about AI today. My AI actually was like, "Hey, you should hit up Mark because because I asked it." So, so I'm using Instinct as one of my many drivers. And I, you know, I told Instinct, I was like, "Hey, I want to bring more people on the pod to talk about AI to break it down to to to the normies, as people say on on X." And uh, Instinct was like, "You should hit up Mark." I was like, "You know what?

That's a great idea. I didn't even think about that." So, uh, so again, um, uh, shout out AI for getting this on the books. Um, but again, I mean, this is what we're going to talk about today. and and you know, Mark, you know, kind of our partnership with all things open with Todd and you know, Mark's Mark's been doing a heck of a job with all things AI. I was I was out there speaking in March. Um, and it was a heck of an event. Um, and so excited to bring Mark on the show today to talk about AI and and and you know, one one of the things that, you know, I always ask guests, I I I don't come prepared.

Um, I should probably use AI for that. But the the the the reason why I don't come super prepared with all these questions is because I I really want to make it a conversation and I really want to get what's on people's brains. So, I was I was chatting with Mark backstage for a brief minute. I was like, Mark, what is burning on your brain that your community is talking about? And he said something that was so good. He goes, don't walk away from AI. And so, that is the title of the show for this morning. And you know, I'm I'm I'm going all in on AI here, right?

And you know, for me, um, for those of you who may be new listeners or new viewers, I've been doing this show now for over six years. Um, and you know, I brought on a slew of guests. For the first, you know, five, six years, it's or for the first five years, it's been very focused on the job search. And I'm still doing that. But I think the reality of the situation, as we'll talk with Mark today, is that AI is here. It's not going anywhere, and it's only going to get better. And so, how can we incorporate AI into your career, your job search?

How do you use it? I mean, to be honest with you, I got my wife finally sold on AI, Mark. I got my wife finally sold on AI. She's using a bot. Um, and I got my dad on it, right? So, it's like, you know what? Like, talking just to my family, I'm like, you know what? But I think there's more here that we need to share. And so, um, that's kind of what my, uh, thesis is going to be for the next however long. Um, I've spun up a new series. It's called AI and YAP on Thursdays. It's just me. I'm actually going over, uh, my my first episode is is this Thursday.

Um, and we're going to kind of break down like AI assistants versus bots. What should you use? What I like to use because I'm out here sharing all this content with my wife and my mom and my dad and my brother and I'm like, I should probably share this like with the world. So, uh, that's where we're going. So, again, if you are tuned in, welcome. It's good to see you this morning. Um, kind of a few more housekeeping things before obviously uh, we kick it off to Mark. Um, listen, I I just texted this number. If you want if you need job search help or you want updates of when I go live, text me on this number.

This is actually me. I manage it. Um and so would love to have you. I know a lot of people have questions for me. Um and so I always check this number. Um also too, uh we're going to start dropping episode recaps on torque.devisord. Um we will uh drop the episode on here um on the Discord. So, if if you want to get in the community and see kind of what we're doing, um, sign up to the platform, jump into the Discord. Um, and then finally, um, I I I want to give a shout out. We have not only partnered with All Things Open, right?

Um, but we have inked some new partnerships I want to talk about real fast. First off, I want to give a shout out to Slashy. If you have not seen Slashy, Slashy is an email that actually searches correctly. Mark, you can actually ask the email, hey, what about this email from a year ago? And it finds it. Imagine that. So, I I actually interviewed Harsha, the founder, last year on my show. Um, and he hooked the Torque community up with a free month. Um, so jump into the Discord and get that. Want to give a shout out to Skydive. I actually use Skydive. The Torque community team uses Skydive.

It's like Grockbot in my in my perspective. It's a little bit more enterprise friendly. It integrates in Slack directly. uh they gave $10,000 worth of credits. It's a the first hundred users uh in our community that wants to take advantage of it. Um and uh so uh shout out to them. That's a heck of a a partnership right there. Uh Momentum Conference is next month. Um they got $30 off tickets for Torque community members. So if you use torque.dev, um that information is in our Discord as well. Um, and then finally, my buddy, uh, Caleb, who's a coffee founder here in Nashville. He's got a coffee company and he hooked the Torque community members up with 15% off coffee as well.

So, lot going on in the world of Torque. So, jump into our Discord uh, if you want to get more information. All right, enough with me yapping. Mark's like, why am I even here? So, Mark, give an intro about yourself, man. Who are you? What do you do? And we'll go from there. Well, that is the question that I've been trying to answer for 55 years. Same, man. Same. Um, so what I do for work or what I've done for my career, I have about 30 years in as a tech executive starting out in the internet space early on. And then um, you know, I I was an executive at cloud.com, one of the early cloud providers.

I ran the Node.js Foundation as their executive director. I worked at the Linux Foundation as their VP of marketing and I was a ventureback startup CEO and co-founder um Cisco uh Index Ventures and then uh about four or five years ago I decided that what I was doing was just not me and I started Peripity Labs. Peripity means when the hero knows he's wrong. And I just decided that, you know, I love technology. I like people. I got to figure this out. So for the last four years, I've been running AI meetups in the triangle. Last two years, we started I partnered with uh Todd Lewis, founder of All Things Open, and we started all things AI and we've done two soldout conferences.

Nuts. Nuts. They were nuts. Yeah. Actually, the last one, um, not intentionally, but in hindsight, the conference center said, "We think you broke a bunch of fire laws." That's what Todd said when I was out when I was out in Raleigh in in uh in August. He made a comment about that. I don't know if we we did, but we couldn't put any more in. So, in a couple weeks, we will be announcing our plans for 2027. I'm excited. Amazing. It's going to be bigger. It's going to be better. It's gonna be, you know, more people and it is the reason I get up every morning for the first time in my career.

I'm like last night I'm dream I actually had a dream about you speaking at all things AI on the stage because I was thinking about speakers yesterday. I'm like who's going to bring the fire in 2027. I'm like my man Taylor is. So yeah, dude that was crazy. people showed up. You know, it's always humbling. Um, you know, to to have people show up to kind of Yeah, I don't know. I kind of really kind of flirt with the technical non-technical talk and and uh it was it was humbling. So, I mean, it was just it was such a great event. And I think, too, I think one of the things that that you I think it's such a good like marriage between you and Todd because like I think your community is super active, right?

I mean, there is something, you know, Todd and I caught up at um the speaker dinner um at All Things AI and and you know, he he's from Columbia. I mean, he lives like 20 minutes from my like home house, like my like OG house and uh and you know, and we obviously both went to South Carolina together and and we both have said Raleigh is such a unique ecosystem. Like the the everybody shows up, everybody's engaged, everybody's nice. I mean, I I just think I I just think that marriage with you and Todd just made a lot of sense and and uh so shout out to you for that.

Oh, thanks. Well, you know what's interesting about Raleigh is I think it's a I forget how many million maybe four million person metro area across 80 miles. And we have great people here, but when you're spread out across 80 miles, like I I'm It's a Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. Like you got to consider that you got Winston Salem, Greensboro, Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill down to Greenville and it is just but we're spread out. Everybody here seems to be nice. We're happy. We're not paying California t taxes. No, jobs are pretty good and houses are pretty good. But um uh like there's still a lot that we could do because we're just spread out.

Like I don't like to go far farther than five mile radius from my house, right? And you know, I think Nashville is sort of like that. Nashville is pretty spread out as well. It is. I I mean, I live like an hour and a half from like technically another part of Nashville. Right. Right. Yeah. So, you know, the thing that that I've found that was interesting is a there's a big interest in AI and b it's sort of like the blind man and the elephant. I went to one group, Todd and I had this conversation yesterday. He's like I'm like there's a lot of people here that don't even know about what we're doing and he he's always been like he's a cautious guy.

He's like, "Hey, I I want to make sure we're taking care of our community." I'm like, "Sure, the best way to keep a community healthy is to keep bringing people into the tent and getting more perspectives." So, absolutely. But yeah, it's it's been fun. I I honestly I've been giving him a hard time because my career has been mostly open source. So sure 2000 till 2022 I worked in open source software. I'm an Apache software committer. I'm a you know Foundation former alumnist. I had cloud.com is a open source.

The Zen hypervisor no.js s and so but I keep saying to him I'm like man open source is awesome but what's awesome is no matter what the tech is is what you do with it and the sad thing is when there's these cool free easily accessible tools is if you don't use them you know if you could use them like I yeah obviously not if you're a plumber you're probably not going to download a large language model into your toolbox and but I'll tell you what when you're working on a piece of equipment and and I was a plumber or a plumber's helper in college

is like you can just take a picture of something you don't understand say hey give me some ideas to fix this like I'm not a and I so I think there's something for everyone there that can make their life better but when you turn on the news you get a little jaded with the uh you know Daario and and Sam Alman and Alon Musk this week are like poom which is the probability of like AI wiping us out and I'm like that is an op obviously is a risk But you know the one way you don't have a lot of risk is if you educate

as many people as you can on what the danger are.

And so yeah. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Yeah. So all right. So let's get into it, man. So kind of [clears throat] your Dario talk. I mean first off I think Daario hot take. He just needs to stop talking. like a lot of these guys like you know I listen to a lot of podcasts obviously as as we all do and for me it's like if they stopped running their mouths online I feel like there would be a better perception well yeah but you know two of those companies open AAI and Anthropic are are getting ready to go public right so you know show me the the incentive I'll show you the outcome and so I I think Daario is positioning it himself self for, you know, he wants to be the uh the safe version of AI and he puts a lot of that sort of pdoom stuff out there and I I don't think it I don't think he's disingenuous, but I do think that that does serve his purpose as well.

You know, you're like, "Hey, let's let's make sure that, you know, Anthropic, who has a pretty good track record, is your, you know, the safer AI choice." Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I love the doom and gloom. I love it. So, you made a comment. So, you know, again, I asked you what's burning in your community and the one thing you said is don't walk away from AI. So, let's go and dive in. I mean, what's the conversations that you're having? What are people saying? What's some encouragement to those folks? So, I think there's two camps. There's people that really really want to learn like like you see see these product demos.

You're like, "Oh yeah, I have 10 agents and they run my business." And you see these Instagram reels of guys sitting on the beach going, "Yeah, I just made a sale." And I'm like, "Yeah, you could get there." But that's like 400 level right now. Most people are like, "I got a job and I work, you know, in IT, I work in marketing. I work in finance and I turn on the TV and it's like AI AI is coming. I'm like well yeah it's coming but you know it's like having a Ferrari parked in your garage and you only drive it up and down your street.

That's sort of a waste. You have access to it but um you know unless you have access to a place to really enjoy it why have that? I think that's the same thing with AI is just because you have a hammer not everything is a nail. But okay, you know, here's something I do know. 28% of our time as an average knowledge worker is spent in email. And you know, I'm always behind email and I use AI because but I still like the personal touch. But if I could turn that into, you know, if I could take that down to 7% of my time, the other 50% of our time as knowledge workers just cutting and pasting stuff across systems.

How about, you know, create your TPS report? Oh, well, let's go look at my calendar. What did I do this month? You know, what emails? Let's go to my meeting transcripts. You know, that kind of stuff is just such an easy lowhanging fruit for a lot of people. And that's, you know, that's the average knowledge worker. But then, you know, almost anything that you do that requires some kind of processing of information could be done with AI. And then you got to look at, you know, when is it better for Mark to do the processing than it is for Grock or Claude or Chachi. And, you know, just don't look at it as, oh, I'm being pushed into this.

It's like, I have I have access to a lot of stuff here that can make my life easier. Yeah. Better. And just, you know, I think the problem is we're not as curious as we used to be, you know. I agree. I agree. No, I used to read a lot more books. I the other last night I'm sitting there [clears throat] dream scrolling Instagram for dogs. Of course, like one does 100%. Brazilian jiu-jitsu right before bed and then I get these random things that pop up. And so I think, you know, I used to read before bed and now I'm sort of becoming this vegetable right right before bed.

And uh I think that that during the day though I'm curious as I'll get out. I'm building stuff, breaking stuff, trying to figure out how to do things. And I I I think that that curiosity is powerful for me. I don't know that everybody is curious, but I'm sure everybody is curious about something, whether it's bass fishing or AI. I mean, everybody has something, you know. Yeah. Yeah. Let me let me ask you this, man. I mean, let's let's kind of break this down a little bit. What are some, you know, one of the things that, you know, again, my series on Thursdays that I'm going to start this AI and GAP is just literally going over what I'm doing, right?

That's just like so like what are what are some just basic things that you're using AI for where people go, "Oh, that's good." Because I feel like I feel like what I feel like the biggest problem with AI is you don't know how to use it because you don't know how to use it. So, I want to start bringing on people who use it just so other people can have a light bulb moment. So what are some things you've implemented using AI to help you move faster? So probably the biggest thing that I've done is I've always managed software but I've never written software and I have like just we'll just use all things AI as an example because it's example.

So I you know have been working and I'm looking at this from a technology standpoint. I've always been a sponsor, but I've never been the organizer of a big event until all things AI. That's sort of Todd's wheelhouse. And I'm like, dude, what you guys do with people is amazing and also super inefficient. Not because you're inefficient workers, but because there's solutions now that weren't there 14 years ago, right? So, I'm like, let's build an operating system for a conference. And Todd sort of looks at me like, "Yeah, buddy. I I think I can see I can see Todd looking." Yeah. Yeah. Todd's conservative, man.

I'm out there and every time we have a talk, I'm like, "I built this thing today." And he looks at me and he goes, "Really?" I'm like, "Yeah." I'm like, "I even tested it like 15 times." So, you know, like just doing the call for papers for we we I call conference OS and it's, you know, we're probably going to release it as open source software for anybody. Oh, that's awesome. Um, but I honestly probably one of the most substantial pieces of software I've ever written in my I've been involved in in my career just because you can and I think that's the that's the difference is you know before to do just a call for papers app or a schedulers app there's whole businesses built about around that but what makes it really cool is when all of those things work together so you know we're we wrote the call for papers the scheduler, it looks better than a lot of the paid versions on the market and it was custom to me.

Um, and so now like when I'm when I'm doing our planning, I don't like go fill out forms on a website or an app. I just talk to the agent and I build it as what I call um you know agent first software or you know things that the the first interface is now just Claude. I talked to Claude all day about all Well, I was going to ask you what like like like what did you build this OS in? Was was Claude your primary driver there? [clears throat] Yeah. So I'm actually um right now um so this is super geeky but for those of you I love man.

Let's get geeky, dude. Let's get geeky. I love it. Here's here's a couple things that I've come to realize is I'm not super deep into tech. So, I need somebody to check my work. So, what I created was um I don't know if you're old enough to remember the Do you remember the movie Hackers? No. Oh, Angelina Jolie, her first husband was uh uh uh Oh, hey Gant. I'm glad you could join, buddy. See you, buddy. Um, but uh the it it was ridiculous. Uh Lorraine Broco was in there. Uh Fischer Stevens is in there. And it was all about these kids hackers in the 90s and the supercomputer was called the Gibson.

So, and it's ridiculous. Uh Pen from Pen and Teller is like the the system administrator and it's basically an autonomous system. So, I wanted to build an autonomous system so I could build software and that is open source today. It's called the Gibson. And the whole idea was Mark needs two different things to check my work. So I write most of my software in Claude, but I use one of the higherend models like Fable to come up with a plan. So the planning part is super important. Then right now I have uh chatbt with the max plan as well and it uses uh the it was using soul um and Astra.

That's the other thing is like for planning, use that, but then drop down to something cheaper because I just did this sort of ROI on Oh, I love somebody said hack the planet was sort of the cost. Matthew Lillard was in it. He's screaming hack the planet. But um uh anyhow, uh the idea is that if you have two models checking each other's work, it can do a good job. So um uh then I just have Grock as a workhorse right now but you can integrate all three via the command line and it's not like you have to be a coder. I just said to like claude I'm like hey how do I in get you to talk to chat GBT and it did it and then I said how do you talk to my Hermes agent?

So I have an autonomous agent named Neuro and a whole team of agents that I'm training to do stuff. So, I'm glad I'm not crazy. I'm glad I'm not crazy because I have so many. So, I have and I'm gonna talk about this Thursday. I have Instinct going. Instinct's kind of like my main driver because it's free right now. I'm going to be screwed when Noah turns on the paid plan for Instinct, but I I'm driving everything. As much as I can't do Instinct, then I have Muse, which is obviously Facebook's new thing they just dropped that's running my Instagrams. Um, and uh, it's it's kind of keeping I I synced all my personal data to it and it's running checks on re-upping insurance and stuff.

And then obviously I'm in Claude as well. Um, and then I use Grockbot for all my content stuff. So, I'm going to talk about it Thursday, but I thought I was crazy having all these things going, but it sounds like I'm not. Well, you are crazy, but welcome to Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Conversation. Well, the thing is I think we can all see that that there's we're right on that horizon of a lot of these autonomous things. Like I'd love to talk to people on LinkedIn, but I would rather have an agent help me filter through the noise if possible. You know, for whatever reason, their algorithm keeps showing me Yeah.

you know, you know, robot videos from some guy in China that keeps following me and tagging me. And I'm like, ah, I I I can't wake up to 20 robot videos from China every day. I'm like, I'm glad that they're washing cars and cooking food and, you know, climbing buildings and cleaning windows. But I think the real interesting part about um uh this is there's certain parts of that information filtering that it can do. And yeah, you know, like you said, Grockbot's awesome because it's super easy. But it's But I'm burning through my tokens, man. I'm on like the 200 plan. I I've maxed out two days early.

Like I'm on hold right now. Like figure that out. Well, I think the problem is, and I'll give you what I think the cheat code is, is for whatever reason their um the video and the photography stuff uh burns a lot more tokens. That's right. So, here's here's what I do. Let's throw yet another service. I love it, dude. See, this is why I wanted to do this, man. So, Kai Kie.ai is a service that that has um models as an a as a uh sort of like open router has most of the LLMs. Kai is very much or like Higsfield in the fact that it does that, but Kai's sort of the cheapest.

Okay. And then what it does is is like you want a video um you can call seed dance and it's probably going to be a lot cheaper on your token usage than Grock. Could I integrate that into my Grockbot? So it then it just pulls it from there. Oh yeah, just create a custom MCP man. So just say hey say hey uh can you make sure that unless you're doing X like if there's something Grock does really well and they're probably like Grock does lots of things well but none of it's like nobody is really an AI polymath like Claude's super good at coding not great at images you know codeex yeah I think this is the problem and I'm glad you're verifying I'm like how come I can't use one thing for everything but I think that's part of figuring it out like that's the whole game it's just like coding like can't just write an entire full stack application in one language, right?

It takes everything moving together. So just and and you know that's that's why you love instinct, right? Is it's a central brain. It's digital brain that mirrors Taylor's brain for you know Oh yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm I'm pushing that thing hard right now. [laughter] So yeah, and one thing another thing just on that note is I built my own version of that. I call it Cortex. So I'm going to do that. Oh, really? And so what it does is it ingests my email, my drive, my meetings, all that stuff into a vector database hosted on Versel for, you know, pennies a day. And then all my agents, no matter what, is I have an MCP that connects them all.

I'm like, "Okay, if I I'm like I'll just say, hey, check cortex 4." If it doesn't automatically pull it and it'll say like, "What am I doing on Tuesday?" I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to be on guidance counselor 2.0 and we're going to talk about AI." And it'll know that whether I type it in claudin probably awesome informs all your stuff. But I I think it's really important to own your own data. Um Yeah. Uh yeah that's that's somebody goes somebody goes technically you can code everything on C++. Yeah. All right. Okay. Well actually you can do the new the uh C++ I think is what's uh you can run a stream down version of GLM 5.2 on a much smaller machine than ever before.

So yeah it's you can do anything. You just got to know how. Well, and I think too I if there's so one so one of the ways I've got to use AI and and and I've talked to my dad like like my dad was like so my dad text me the other day he goes hey your mom said I can use AI to look up cars and I was like I mean yeah you can use like AI to do a lot of things. Um, and and I think like what I think I've gotten very disciplined on everything I do now, can I do it with AI?

Right? So, you know, one of the things we've been chatting about internally on the community team is going more AI native next year. And what we realize is that the people who press the buttons are the most important part because I think especially when you work in an enterprise environment, you know, not all the systems can talk together. And so for us, it's like if there's admin work that needs to be done, can we leverage AI to get it out the door or at least get it surfaced to us for for be us to be able to press the buttons? Does that make sense? And and and it's like, you know, like for example, um my boss messaged uh me and Brianna Homestead.

He goes, "Hey, can you do you guys do you have a breakdown of like how we run events?" So I went in to my chief of staff using Skydive and I said, "Hey, I know we've worked on this. Do you have it, the the bot sent it to me and I immediately put it in the chat." Right? I mean, it's it's just crazy how stuff works. I think training your brain into going AI first for everything is really the new unlock. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. I think it's not can but should is the I would change it over. So you can do anything that you know you know like I can ride a unicycle to the gym.

I will probably end up with broken teeth and a great big concussion. But um should I do that? I'm like, "No, I should just drive the truck and take the dog so he has somewhere to sit." Yeah, but yeah, I could do that. But the could the could or the should is really like doesn't make you better, faster, stronger, like is, you know, is using that for one thing. I I have my Gmail hooked up. I a lot of times I just chat with my mail instead of going in there. It's a really hard thing to break because 30 years of a very specific you know anal retentive multi-layered fun folder system that I but but honestly the more I do it the more it learns and then it can take Mark's you know there's no value in me dragging the you know the invite to guidance counselor into my podcast folder so when they could do it for me valuable is me having time to think about what I'm going to talk to you about today or you know doing something other than that.

So I think the Ken is like just think about what you do every day and say do I add any value here like responding to emails maybe sometimes creating an you know a report you know doing the the reach the outreach to people that I couldn't normally do even if AI you say hey look at five people I haven't talked to in a while and write them a note that says hey I'm thinking about them hope like what's going on in your world because I want to stay close to them because we end up being, you know, I'm in my office with my dog. I don't like to laugh to leave unless or laugh laugh.

Yeah. I don't laugh. No, Mark's not a big laughing guy. Yeah. Yeah. I I am such a serious guy. Yeah. Yeah. That's why they call me the, you know, the Tommy boy of AI. So, I love it. I love it. But, no, I uh but uh I mean, just think about what would Don't think about what can it do. like think about what would you do and um you know just start chatting with AI. You'll be surprised. I fixed I was so worried about my microphone not working today because I've been doing You sound great. You sound great. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. I have this like super setup from my buddy and I used to do a podcast called AI Confidential and um anyhow I'm like every Tuesday I do a lunch and learn for all things open and the the microphone won't work and I'm sitting there like an idiot now 30 years into like doing this like we used to do video conferencing over ISDN lines TVs and like PTZ cameras in the 90s and uh I'm like, why can't I still make my like video conferencing and webinar system work well?

And I ask Clyde and it's like, oh, you you know, you have Whisper Flow in the background. He keeps grabbing your microphone. And I'm like, okay, so today I'm getting on after this a half an hour early to test with my uh um admin. I'm like, "Okay, let's just make sure it works today." But what would you do before? You'd look at 50 pages. You try You I would be Yeah, I'd be screwed. I would that that would be an entire morning right now. I just say hey troubleshoot this problem and I have computer use turned on and like you know anything from why is this all of a sudden screen number three I have three screens is screen number two and screen number three is you know number two.

Now I'm like like why did it do that? Turn it back. And I just told it to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Let me like you know. So, I I I got a text [clears throat] from that community member, um, one of the guys I know, he's a staff engineer here in Nashville, and he he brought something interesting, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on. He was like, he was like, "Our company lets us spend like pretty heavy AI usage." He was like, you know, between $1,500 to $2,000 a month, like per individual. And he was like, I'm going to be honest with you. He goes, I don't know if you've talked about this yet, but he goes, I feel like that's going to start being a thing of why people move.

Yeah, like for jobs like like that's going to start becoming part of like would you consider leaving? Because I'm going to be honest with you like if I were to jump to another corporate entity and they're like hey like you know we're not going to we're not going to use all this stuff I don't know if I'd make a jump at this point to be frank. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I honestly um I would put them on blast, but I know someone very well who works in a big company here locally, and she has access to co-pilot and Claude, but not Claude Co-work, just like Claude, the the base model.

She can't do any of the like automation, the co-work, the Claude code stuff. And um I'm like she's I I think she's three months into the appeal process to get like Clyde code. She writes Python code for a lot of like stuff. She's in an T- roll and uh you know I I feel like I feel like I've got a flamethrower and she's sitting there with like two sticks rubbing them together and the only reason why she doesn't have the flamethrower is because um permission like she would be 10 she's very productive person 10x more productive and so I hear what you're saying. I also think that the this sort of token economy that we're going into is really interesting.

Like I right before this I was analyzing my 30-day usage. Yeah. And I was shocked a at how much of I mean it it it was truly I I looked here at I had almost done a uh hundred thou 100 million tokens in and out this year or this month. And I'm like and then but then I said that just seemed like too much. And I'm like why? And then apparently I had automated some stuff and I was just sending a lot of stuff into my LLM that I didn't need. So I mean not only to your point of the staff engineer is he wants access to be able to use what he wants to use.

There's also going to be this sort of we we heard about token maxing which is like maxing out your account like you and I do proudly every week. But I think token minimizing is going to be a thing where right now we're just basically got we got a bulldozer to go out and plant our garden. You know [laughter] I got a true I got a bulldozer I got this huge bulldozer and I'm sitting in like Raleigh, North Carolina in the suburb and the I'm playing a rose bush. Exactly. So So that's where I think we are today. So, do you think companies going to put caps on it?

I mean, like like what do you I mean like again this is like hot take holistic across the board. Like where do you think that's heading? Like do you think I mean are we going to start hiring AI audit roles where they're going to be looking at your token usage and what models you're using and checking you against it? Like like where do you think we'll head? Well, I think we got to solve the sort of the problem right now is we we do there are solutions like Microsoft has a pretty decent solution in Azure to allow you to create different levels of usage and have have sort of like I call it enterprise GPT and that's basically you have sort of a front end that you say hey for everybody in the company let's just send them through what looks like a chat GBT but is their own their own portal.

So let's just call it you know Willy Wonka company portal and it looks like chatbt and then I think in the back end they have to have some kind of controls because right now it's crazy the you know we are in the the uh um step and woof stage of AI. There's an old song called the the pusher man. You know, the dealer's the man with the love grass in his hand, but goddamn the pusher man. You know, the the uh Frontier Labs are the dealer right now. They got this great stuff and they're going to give you a free t a very highly subsidized taste, but it it doesn't do anything to help you um you know, optimize your token usage.

So what's happening is we're all going down, you know, through our development in bulldozers instead of Teslas, right? And that's that's that's the problem is we're just, you know, pushing through things when really we should be, you know, um it's not in it's not a slam on them. It's not in their interest to to optimize usage so you get the highest value. But I think it will. market pressure will do that like it did for the cloud in the long term. But for now, it's just a matter of, you know, do I have access? And am I actually using it effectively? I uh I mean I I've been shocked.

[laughter] I love it. Let me let me ask you this. Let me uh so there's just kind of this I don't if it's a theory but it's kind of this mantra I have in my in my mind where it's like you know people are people are like how should I use AI you know and you know how should I implement it or like what's the end goal here and like my kind of I'm not saying this is right but like I've been kind of on this train where it's like can I do my entire team's work just myself? And I'm not doing that to put anybody out of a job.

I'm doing that to prove to myself that I can be fully AI fluent. And I feel like because again going back to the I mean like when it came out the anthropic growth marketer like he did everything by himself. He they had some contractors obviously. Um, but the reality of it is is you can cover a lot of ground. So, I don't know. I've been saying like in my talks when I spoke at all things open in August, like I think you need to be like, can I not put myself out of a job, but basically get to the point where I'm doing 10x the work?

I mean, I don't know how else to describe it. What are your thoughts? I think you're you're hitting on the thing that people don't get. Yeah. is, you know, right now how and there's very few businesses like this, but do you know people that have a business that ever get all the things done they want to do? No. I mean, it's just so what what you got to think about is not what can I replace, but what could I do if I didn't have to do TPS reports? If I didn't spend 28% of my time in email, if I didn't spend 50% of my time cutting and pasting between Google Docs, Slack, email across different things, and I could actually do the thing that you know, like it's a shame for you to be doing reports because you're an entertainer kind of guy.

It's a shame for me to try and do anything in finance because I hate it. and literally right right I'm like expense reports you know logs for my tra for my you know mileage for going to all the events I get to things like that so what could I be doing instead of that instead of sitting there doing reports could be doing one more webinar where I can help people and it gets the word out about my business you know I could be doing you know I want to write this software me if I can figure out how to write the software ware that I want to write.

I think it would be a better for my entire team at all things AI. I think it'd be better for my sponsors, my attendees. So, but if I didn't have AI and had to hire someone, what I wrote this in the last four months would have costed at least half a million dollars. I mean, that's not hyperbolic. It's just what the economics would have been five years for me to do that. I would hire to hire a UX guy, a gal or a front end, backend, you know, architect. Well, now I can create stuff that I couldn't create before because, you know, my TPS reports and all that stuff are there.

So, I think it's it's not a matter of can you replace everyone. It's what could you do if you could replace all the mundane work because, you know, that's the thing is everybody's going to have powerful AI. So that's an option for everyone. The people that succeed are going to be the ones that can spend more time being creative and doing new things and growing their business or organization or if they're in government, you know, wasting our tax money less or if they're in education doing a better job of teaching kids because they have more resources at their disposal. I love that. I love that.

Let me as as we kind of round out [clears throat] the time here, this has been such a good chat. Um, and you know, you more or less just affirmed I'm not super crazy. Um, what you know, the original thing that you submitted as being analog in in this AI world. I do want to bring it back. You run a conference. I run a community. We're out here talking about how to AI the ever living daylights out of our jobs. Talk about the inperson. talk about and again I know people are tired of hearing this stuff but I feel like it can't be overstated enough right now because I think you can live in both worlds so can you talk about that I do think that [clears throat] I think you're going to lose touch if you don't have access to other you know warm bodies so I I think that um you know I have been doing live events and speaking all over the world for most of my career And uh what has made it possible to survive in the digital world are the relationships I made in the analog world.

And so I think that that um you know co was the big illustration for us that you know you can't just have everybody locked up in their houses and not see us go crazy. Sure. So I think you know it's super important to talk with people and you know realize that we're like-minded. Nothing's more polarizing than being on the internet today. I mean, no. I spent some time with uh Britney Kaiser this summer um who was the whistleblower at Cambridge Analytica and the the Netflix uh movie The Great Hack uh or the hack I think it was the great hack about all of that stuff and how manipulated people are by online and you know the the big uh Facebook or Meta settlement this past month about you know all of those things.

I'm like the one thing that that will never replace is going to be you know the judgment um um the sort of taste the people have. But the big thing is that um the two other things that I think are so important are empathy towards each other. It's hard to be empathetic towards an agent. It's not as easy to be an empathetic to somebody on a screen as when you're sitting there. And I think that's that's that's super important for us to like keep moving us along as a species. And then the other thing is trust. And I think those analog events, yeah, the empathy and the trust aspects are so important.

And that's where they're built versus, you know, if I'm listed as, you know, Tommy boy AI 666 on Reddit, You know, I half the time you talk to somebody on X and you're like, are they real? Are they a bot? Yeah. you know, do they have a blue dot on their profile, right? Like, yeah, exactly. All of these sort of qualifiers, you're going, well, I want to trust people. I think we intuitively, but, you know, after, you know, so many gray hairs, you're like, well, I have to have a heristic around that. And I think analog live events, getting, you know, putting, you know, people in the same room is the way that you do that.

Yeah, I agree. My kind of thought is like you [clears throat] use AI to build the stage of the next part of your career, but then you actually get to that next stage in in in person. I feel like I feel like that's kind of where it's at. Um, you know, I think people I think there's a lot of people that can be extremely successful navigating on, you know, your career virtually. I mean, my brother, for example, he doesn't go to events, right? He I mean I think he does a great job networking online. I think he's the consmate. He always interviews to network. Um but you know he doesn't go to events and he does well but but but but I think I think right now in the sea of fake resumes and AI slop out there I think going to a meetup and shaking somebody's hand could do more for your career than you know obviously mass supplying your resume everywhere.

Yeah. Yeah. I actually that's the a lot of people I talk to are looking for jobs right now and they're looking for They want to do AI because that's, you know, the next big thing. But, um, I think history also doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. And so, I think a lot of people Oh, that was Mark Twain. Actually, I just, uh, still like, but Mark, Mark Hinkle, Mark Hinkle, Mark Twain. Um, but, uh, the thing that's that's interesting is I I don't what I don't I think people need to understand history because this isn't the first time something like this has happened. Now, just think about the Gutenberg printing press.

Before that, the only way people got to communicate was pretty much word of mouth or flyers that were handwritten. All of a sudden you have like a newspaper and like publications that can be mass- prodduced and that that platform that you were talking about. Well, you know, you could become an author and that author would start to have an audience and then, you know, go a little bit farther and then we had, you know, telephone and we could start smiling and dialing and we had, you know, the internet to send email or well, you had faxes for old people like me. You used to have this fax machine that would go off all day long because people get your fax number and send you advertisements.

Like now all AI is doing is the same thing that's been happening slowly for you know hundreds of years but at machine speed instead of human speed. And so, you know, you're building your platform, but that platform doesn't mean so much unless a what you're putting out there is good, true, or actually it matters because sometimes it's pervasive. And I think there's a lot of bad information out there and bad actors on the internet, nation states like, you know, manipulating elections and public opinion and things like that. Sure. Sure. It's not new. It's just it's just that platform allows you to go out and actually go see more people and make more connections or not even more, but you can go through more data to get to the right connections.

Like like you can go through a hundred people. Well, if a hundred people follow you and all of a sudden some cool person starts commenting on your post. That's cool. But then what makes it really cool is when you finally meet them in person. Oh yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Meeting meeting the tour community in person at all these in person events just really, you know, it it it it um really incentivizes me to wake up in the morning. For sure. Yeah, for sure. All right, last little bit before we wrap up here. Rapid fire, overrated, underrated, and then give me why in 10 sec in like 10 seconds or less.

You ready? Yep. AGI by 2030. overrated because I don't think that's the point. I think it's how powerful the tool is. It's just this non-aggreed definition that don't be scared. Control your architect. I love it. Prompt prompt engineering as a title. Um way overrated. I think it's context engineering. Prompt the the models actually are helping you rate the prompts. What's really important is giving them context. I love it. Um, going back to our start of the conversation, AI doomers overrated, underrated. Uh, over listen to I I think the problem is that like don't just talk about the outcome, but talk about the solution and the process that that would happen.

Like that's the problem is if it's un not understood, it's big and scary. I love it. Overrated, underrated. AI won't take your job. Somebody using AI will. Um, I used to say both. Right now, I think they're both overrated. I think it's just like, you know, I think skills training and continuous learning is important. No matter whether it's AI or you're, you know, a woodworker. Yeah. Yeah. AI influencers on LinkedIn. Oh my gosh. Get rid of them all. Yeah, I I mean the the the the ones that all have follow the ones in the engagement groups that all follow each other and echo like their their wins versus I'd rather see somebody, you know, I don't like I think Ali K.

Miller is an influencer and a great and so is Ethan Mollik. But, you know, someone that actually has never shown that they built anything other than an influencer platform. Overrated. I love it. Uh chat GPT is a therapist. overrated. I don't think that that's a as a therapist, I think you need a human. Agreed. The phrase, "We're all going to be prompt managers." Uh, way overrated. I think we're all going to be in [clears throat] managers, but I don't think we're going to be prompt managers. AI generated podcast. Have you seen those? I have one. Rogue agents, buddy. Look, it it's been it was an experiment to take my newsletters and automatically create the podcast and I was getting crazy amounts of traffic.

No way. Yeah. So, I cloned myself and I had two agents just to see. The first one was terrible about the 10th one and I'm getting ready to re restart it, but it's called Rogue Agents. And I love it. I think that I think the key though is because I write the newsletters. Um and I have about you know I write four a week. I think it had enough context to do it decently. Oh yeah. You don't have context then it's just you know two people yelling each other. Yeah. Exactly. I love it. I love it. Last question that I always end every episode on.

The show's called Guidance Counselor 2.0 because we had guidance counselors in middle school, high school, and college. But now as adults we don't really necessarily have a guidance counselor to turn to. What would be your biggest piece of career advice to somebody right now? This is not just AI centric that you got to be a continuous learner and I know I think that my grandfather I gave the keynote at Fanny May's AI conference a couple months ago and he was a bank manager and throughout his whole career he had three tools. He had an adding machine like the the crank. I think he eventually got one with like the paper reel and the the LCD, but he had a calculator.

He had a phone and he had green ledger paper. That's why the Excel logo is green is these they had these old ledgers and he had a he was a bank vice president his whole career on three tools. today with technology and just the speed of the way the world changes um I think you can't be like my grandfather anymore with three tools you got to be continuously learning if you want to have a good career um you know and that and actually that doesn't even mean tech like if you're an artist you got to get better at your art through your career I mean the first person that does a paper or you know builds a you know a table or clay pot or whatever whatever they're doing.

You know, I I like the craftsman mentality. Even if it's tech, you still have to refine your craft if you want to succeed in the long term. It's, you know, and it doesn't mean tech. It could be just being better with your customers. And that's the thing I don't think people I think people like to be comfortable. And that's the worst way to prosper as any spec species is to get too comfortable. Yep. Agreed. Agreed. All right, y'all. Well, Mark, thank you, my friend. Where can people find you? Get just How can people get to you? Uh, probably the easiest way is um, uh, Mr.

Hinkle is on all the social. Mark Rhinkle on LinkedIn. I'm on LinkedIn the most. Um, yeah. Um, I am the anti-influencer. You'll get a dog pick, a AI post, and an old man rant in the same day. Right now I don't do a whole lot on social because I've been coding a lot but uh yeah LinkedIn or all thingsai.org it's my passion project. Um we have newsletter passion project. It's a very big passion the aie.net. We have about a quarter million subscribers. Um about 80,000 every week get um emails from me about AI if you're interested. But yeah um but yeah. No, this has been great man.

I can't wait to see you and uh next month at All Things Open. Uh we're gonna have, you know, see some real live people that that we haven't seen in a while. So, I'm excited about that. Yeah, buddy. Same. Same. All right, y'all. Well, have a good one. I am back live Thursday. That is two days from now. Um it's just going to be me talking about my AI workflows and what I'm doing. Um so, see you there. 9:30 a.m. Central, Thursday morning. Otherwise, connect with Mark. Y'all have a good one. Mark, stay on so I can say bye to you backstage. Peace.