Code, Community, and Cowboy Boots

Episode Transcript
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Tonya J. Long (00:00):
Hello everyone and welcome to Reset with Tonya
here on a beautiful, sunny, notsurprisingly gorgeous day in Los
Gatos at Pirate Cat Radio, KPCRLP 92.9.
We have Mike Prince in thehouse today and we've been

(00:21):
talking for almost an houralready Because Mike has such a
rich history.
I met Mike, I'm going to say,six months ago and I thought he
was just another founder and Iwas so wrong.
We're going to hear more abouthow Mike started programming
when he was 10 years old.
Mike is one of the few natives,a native Bay Area man.

(00:41):
He grew up in Los Altos and hashad his journeys through tech,
with a bit of a break to go toschool down in San Luis Obispo
Very fine institution.
I can say all kinds of goodthings about SLO folks, but Mike
is a serial entrepreneurfounder.
He's also worked in bigcompanies like Nuance.
Are they still around?

Mike Prince (01:00):
They were acquired by Microsoft for $20 billion.

Thank you.
So Mike is a supporter of verysuccessful companies and Mike is
.
He's a lot more technical thanI realized, just to be honest.
So this call is not about tech.
These podcasts are abouttransition and Mike is all about
the transition because he'sdoing some fascinatingly
interesting things as atechnical, as a technical expert

(01:25):
.
He is setting that aside anddragging some of us to the farm,
to a ranch down in San Grigorio.

Exactly him.

So, without further ado, I want to introduce
the lovely and articulate andamazing Mike Prince.

Mike, welcome to Reset with Tonya, thank you so
much for having me here.

Very excited, so tell us more about what are you
working on these days?
What's bringing you joy?

Yeah, so in the work category we have two things
actually.
We have the decelerator.

I think we'll talk about that in a few minutes
.
It's not work.

Yeah, but it's true , it's very good, and so what
we're working on is about seven,eight months ago, I'd been
working on a project in acertain direction and you talked
about the art of the pivotCommunity, but it still was
community.
It's bringing people togetherand I think it's.
Jeremiah Owyang talked aboutagents, of course, and

(02:17):
agent-to-agent communications,so I took a pivot on the product
.
Actually, I took December andJanuary off working on some
other things and then came backwith a fresh energy and I
started saying, if we're goingto solve our human business, all
the things that go on, maybe weshould entrust this to agents.
And the theory, the largertheory on this is in the future,
you're going to have a wholebunch of agents working for you
Tens, hundreds, thousands ofagents.
Every business will have thesame, every government will have

(02:38):
the same.
We can call it DHS too and whenthey start talking to each
other and transacting each otherand trying to do something on
your behalf, the world's goingto be an amazing place.
So I started building that.

Agentic AI.
We have a very we have a variedaudience.
You remember I'm from the South.
I came from Tennessee 12 yearsago, but my folks back home
watch this.
We have people with varyinglevels of understanding about
tech with varying levels ofunderstanding about tech, and
agentic AI is the.
It's the focus I think thatwe're pivoting to right now in

(03:15):
technology in the Bay Areabecause of what you just
described, with all thesedigital agents out there acting
on our behalf.
It's going to fundamentally, Ithink, change the way we work
with technology.
Yeah, so what does yourapplication do for people from
an agent perspective?
just at a high level, because Iwant to help people understand
this.

So we did a talk last night and we laid out the
evolution of the system and inthe old days, like this is
actually from a consumermarketing perspective.
A human would talk to a human.
I'd try to talk you into buyingsomething, whatever it happens
to be.

I want to sell you solar panels for my roof.

Yeah, and then about 20 years ago, 25 years ago
, we started putting automatedagents in there.
This is on phone calls, on chat, on email, and we have a human
talking to an agent which mightfall back to a human.
And so now the evolution hashappened recently is we're
actually my human, me have myown agent that represents my
best interests, my goals, and itturns and talks to your

(04:09):
company's agent, which has yourcompany's goals and best
interests, and now we're fullydelegating, and so this agent is
going to be they're working oneach of what we have trying to
accomplish some transaction, andclassic examples are I'm
selling my car to you.
I don't know how to negotiatecar prices like that, and you
don't maybe know how tonegotiate prices either.
And now we're in a fullytransacted send that down to
these folks and they're going todo the best job of it.

(04:30):
And we did a.
We did a meetup at Google,maybe two, three months ago, and
the competition was Geminiversus DeepSeek.

Oh, and they were playing.

They were playing a game together and we saw who
won and who won.
And the question is who won?
It was DeepSeek, becauseDeepSeek was more aggressive.
It wasn't about being smart oranything like that, it just
tended to have a certain way.
So in the future, when you pickyour agents to do stuff for you
, what's going to happen is thathow much money are you going to
spend on your agent?
And if you have more money ormore resources, you will get a

(04:59):
better agent.
Think of it as a lawyer orwhatever thing in real life and
you might have better outcomes.
And I guess this is this reallyinteresting thing of the people
who can't afford good agentsare their lives going to be as
well represented as people whodo have the money for the best
agents to transact on theirbehalf?
And the agents go acrosseverything.
we're talking about voting nowand that's tricky and this is an
amazing one because the thingis like a politician is going to

(05:21):
want to try to get my vote andtraditionally right now they go
out.
They do outrage still to havepeople knocking on doors like
that.
The reality is me, as a voter,I don't know very like, bluntly,
I can't track everything.

I can't there's so many issues that matter to
you.

Yeah, and track everybody's position on all
those and if, you, if you havean agent on your behalf not for
the politics for years it canlearn all the things I'm looking
for, all all my sensibilities.
And when you, as a politician,you actually have an agent
talking to my agent and you aregoing to try to talk my agent
into something, At the end ofthat my agent will come back to
me and say Mike, vote for Tonyaor not One of the two on that
one.
But the interesting thing aboutthat, too, is that we're doing

(05:56):
these.
Transactions between agents aremany times conversational.
It's human language and we havea full audit of it.
So what's going to happen isyour agent is going to come and
document or not just you ahundred other politicians.
They're going to try to talk tomy agents that are voting for
you.
At some point my agent willcome back with guidance on who I
should vote for and somecontext for why and all the
context.

And now what happens?

next year, when you , as a politician, start voting
on stuff, I will have more AImapping what you promised me in
that context back to how you'reperforming as an elected
official, and that's when we getfull accountability.
So it's going to be a veryinteresting future.

It will.
We've had a lot of data for along time.
We did a talk on wisdom anddata at the AI Infra Summit that
we were at and I help peopleunderstand.
This year we're going toproduce I think it was 180 or
150 terabytes no zettabytes.
It's not pet, it's probablyzettabytes and I did this thing

(06:53):
where I was in a boardroom and Ihad this 50 foot long
whiteboard zettabyte.
A zettabyte has 21 zeros afterit, so I put the 150 or 180 and
then I did my seven groups ofthree zeros as the audience
really that fell on them.
The weight of that's how muchdata we're going to produce, and
we use 0.5% of that data, but Ithink what AI is really going

(07:17):
to do for us is allow us todistill and synthesize insights
from that data that you talkedabout with the politicians, with
that data, helping them knowwhy you voted.
I also think it's going to tellpeople what the constituency
wants.
The other side of it is bettergovernance.
Everybody wants the soundbitenow.

(07:38):
Everybody wants a quick answer.
I think we're going to get tobetter quick answers by
synthesizing all this datacoming in and handing it to
decision makers to say this iswhat the people are saying.
But we don't have that right nowit's the loudest one that gets
through.

You're filling in the blanks right now, too, is
because a politician can have apartially formed opinion what
they should do.
And then they can talk to myvoter agent and refine that
positioning and, prior to theelection, determine what their
real positioning should be atscale, at as much scale as they
want.
And this ending can happenduring while they're an elected
official.
They can say let's do outreachright now.

(08:15):
If you're out, what should I do?
And if all of them respond inreal time.

What topics are resonating most significantly,
most strongly, with mypopulation?
Wow, now, we didn't get hereovernight.
You and I jumped straight intowhat the earth is going to look
like.
Apologies, but what I'mlearning about you and that's
the fun part of doing thispodcast is there are people that

(08:40):
I know that I have a drink withat Hapus for Founders and
Funders Shout out to Ignite.
That I see and I enjoy.
But when I do a podcast withsomeone, I get to learn so much
more about them and, like Istarted off with you are so much
more than I knew.
But you've been doing thisalmost all your life and this

(09:02):
being technology and changealmost all your life.
And this being technology andchange, how early did you start
being a change maker throughbits and bytes?

I'll go back to the very, very beginning.
I think my first computer wasan Atari 2600.
Oh my, some of the audiencejust had a big blip yeah and
what's fun about that is, besidegames they had a cartridge
called basic programming.

Okay.

And it's funny because a side thing I'm showing
to my daughter right now isthat I kept that cartridge from.
I still have it and I showed mydaughter the packaging on it.
She actually for my birthdaypresent this year.
She actually hand drew thepackage for me to put on the
wall, as soon as I rememberwhere I started off on this
stuff.
See, this is technology, yeah,fostering human connection it

(09:46):
was neat though, like myearliest memory is, I wanted to
program.
I was learning BASIC on thiscartridge and with a joystick.
We didn't have a keyboard andso I had to joystick in all the
letters Talk about patience,yeah.
And so I wanted to do a pyramid.
Yes, and I didn't read the nextpage of the manual and that is
four loops, so I could have donetwo.

(10:07):
Four loops, like I learned veryearly on, is to try to balance
how much you're trying to getdone right now with how much to
sharpen your axe, yep and halfspeed, and whatever you're doing
how old were you when you weredoing this?

maybe nine or something okay, wow, it's a
long's a long time.

The next year, my parents bought me an Apple II.

Okay, actually, my brother and I, and so we had.

Our first thing is our timeshare, because he had
half the time.

I had half the time.
Oh, you had a contract.

Yeah, it was 50% and we had hours we had specific
hours and it would strike righton the computer.

So two brothers sharing one computer yeah.
Were you focused on the samethings?

That's it Worked out very differently.

Oh.

So when I started programming and my brother
started playing games and veryearly I looked at programming
and I don't know why Iinternalized it this way.
But I said I could teach oneperson to do a job and then have
one worker.
But computers are amazingbecause I could write a program
and you could do the work of athousand people.

You saw this at 10.

Yeah, and so I was all where should I spend my
energy, of course?
And I saw my brother playinggames.
So I vowed never to play videogames.
So I've never played videogames, and so I spent all my
time programming my brother.
I spent all this time playingvideo games, and so I think I
mentioned before Doria's like Iwant to learn machine language.
So we went to Europe Ourmachine language book with me
and, instead of looking at thesites, I was reading about 6502.

(11:30):
And it's one of those thingsthat just clicks you read
something, that's just it'sGreek.

Now what's 6502 for our app?

It's a machine language.
So this is the original Apple.
The Apple you had also was a6502 processor, and so it's just
you're in bits and bytes andyou're literally talking
directly to the machine.

You were a kid doing this instead of looking at
the Arc de Triomphe.

And my parents were not as happy about that, but
that was amazing.

They had their vision of what your time in
community would be.
That we that I think we bothcare a lot about is how we show
up with people, how we helppeople show up with each other
and do more.
I think about your mom and Iknow I happen.

I can't lie, I happen to know a story about
your mom.

That is about your focus on community, so I'm
seeing you guys, you know, inParis or London, wherever you
went and her wanting you to dothe tourist thing, wanting to
read about machine language with.
Apple.
But how did your familyexperience inform and influence
how much you care aboutcommunity?
Because that makes you verydifferent than most engineering

(12:40):
mindsets.

I think one of the things we did I think we taught
this before was we had the dancestudio in our house, so we
taught the local community.

In your house, not just as a business.
It was in your home.

We were lucky to move into a bigger house in Long
Island, and so we had an entirearea that we built into a dance
studio, and my mom ran thedance studio there.

And she did that for years.

So you saw her creating, creating community
with a dance studio exactly didyou dance?

I did one recital , one.
They talked to me and made herhappy.

I think it was like , yeah, I forget what the song
was, but they talked to me anddid one recital with that good
for you.
But I was a classic boy andthere's a house full of girls
and I was oh, and I was runningaway from them and yeah, and
that was a long time ago, butbut good for you.

Good for you for trying.
I used to do Bikram yoga inTennessee with Eddie George.
Do you remember Eddie?

George, I don't sorry.

Major football player back in the 90s.
Yeah, that's how long ago I wasdoing Bikram.
Yeah, but he was like the onlyman in the room and he was this
enormous man.
His biceps were as big as atree trunk and we'd all go into
form and then he would just he'dbreak a sweat just thinking
about some of the form, but hewas working so hard to improve

(13:55):
himself and the things that yogagives you, but I always admired
him for being in that room withall those women and it was hard
.
It was hard for his body tophysically move into those
positions, but it made him abetter athlete.
So you, I don't think dancingmade you a better athlete.
It certainly gave you the vibefor that community and the

(14:18):
importance of bringing peopletogether.
Yeah, so you started all thiswhen you were 10.
Technical, I think you weregetting this when you were 10.
Technical, I think you weregetting the insights of the
value of community.
And then you started your workjourney and you did $20 billion
nuance corporate work.
And then you've been anentrepreneur several times.
Yeah, you've launched companies.

We started earlier than that too.
It's in slow, what I did before.
Slow, so launch companies.
We started earlier than thattoo.
It's in slow, it's what I didbefore.
Slow, so move down to slow.
I've been in computers for 10years over 10 years at that
point, and I was all and I wasdoing some class at the computer
science department.
And the dean of whatever thehead of that department was all.
Why are you here?
You've already been doing thiswork, clearly.
And he said why don't youconsider just going to the
master's program?

(15:00):
And I was all, can you do that?
And he had me talk to the deanof students and he green-lighted
me for just switching, jumpingstraight to master's.
But at the same time, thingsconspire against you is I'd
gotten to know the owner of arestaurant down there Hobie's.
We have Hobie's up here.
Back then, hobie's had morerestaurants in their franchise
and he asked me to run hisrestaurant and I was looking at
the two options, saying back tothe pivot you're talking about,

(15:21):
because I have the option ofgoing and learning more which I
validated, I already know thisstuff to actually learning how
business operates, havingemployees taking care of
customers, dealing with afranchise operation, legal,
everything, hiring and firing.
And so I took a restaurant joband I'd never run a restaurant,
never bust a table never waited.

It's hard work, very hard work, and dealing with
the public.
I'm not being unpleasant.
When I say dealing with thepublic is hard work.
It's satisfying, but what youlearned?
I think there's two things thatreally teach you when you're
young.
It's either being in sales Isold Cutco knives.
Do you remember Cutco knives,great knives, a lot of college

(16:00):
kids do that.
But sales and then restaurantwork or anything that you're
actually public facing.
I think in our technical worldswe care very much about the
customer experience, but there'sthis veil where you're not
actually exposed to customers asoften unless you're in certain

(16:21):
roles.
Getting that restaurantexperience was also community
for you.

It was a great experience.
I was very fortunate I got him.
Alan Duncan was the owner, Okay, and he was a fan.
He was God bless him, not agood business manager, but a
fantastic people person, and sohe'd come to the restaurant.
He handed everything off to meand he'd come around and just
made the customer so happy.

And so it was a really beautiful synergy there.
So he, we did that for severalyears.
How smart of him to augment hisown skill set with what he
needed, which was someone whocould wire it together
operationally and improvedelivery.
Yeah, so very smart of him.
So you had the restaurant tourof duty.
Yeah, all the while you'restaying in technology, yeah,
I've been programming the timemanagement software, the payroll
software, so I know the issuesis you people staying in
technology?

Yeah, so I ended up programming the time management
software, the payroll software.
So the issue is people come in,they don't clock in.
They ask you to clock in thewrong time Every night, half an
hour, the manager doing thepayroll, and so I automated all
that, so it was like two minutes.
The manager is computerizedsystem.
I gamified it as well, ofcourse.

Before that was a term.
Yeah, I didn't I game-fired thewhole experience.

I can talk about that more another time, and it's
my.
My thing was it's all about thetraining as well as how much
training do you need from people?
So it needed.
It was toaster simple.
There was no training.
And my win was, a week later, abunch of the guys who took the
bus to come to work.
And I looked down the streetand they're all running and
they're running to get to work,to tap on the computer so they
clock in at the right time.
And what I was doing is, everytime I gave them a payroll check

(17:45):
, I would staple to them theirstats.

Oh, okay, including late and early and all
that kind of stuff.

Yes, yes, I never looked at it, but they thought I
did, yeah and it createdaccountability.
It created accountability inthe feedback loop and I did it
was hands off.
It just all worked magicallyoff, it just all worked
magically.
Yeah, and you learned that,like in your early 20s.

Yeah, this is like in his 23 before.
I did beautiful.
We've already identifiedseveral pivots that you did like
at 10 you were a technician,you were an engineer at 10 and
then restaurant business, and weknow you've had a storied
technical career.
How do you know when it's timefor a reset?

I don't know.
It's a great question.
Maybe one way of answering yourNorth Star is have a North Star
and whenever you stop seeingyour North Star, or whenever you
stop seeing progress towardsthat North Star, no matter how
much slant cost you have in itwhich I hear this from people
quite a bit if there's not athere there anymore, it's time
to look somewhere else.

I love it, and it's okay if your North Star
changes.

Yeah, so we you know engineering, I really
started enjoying a tempo.
We'll talk about that a littlebit.
I took over engineeringmanagement there and that was
the first time I really enjoyedengineering management.
We had a bunch of really goodtools at the time.
But one of the things I did forengineering management we did
sprints.
Everybody knows about sprintsagile and sprints normally are

(19:04):
two weeks.
That's one thing and this is apart of the math I didn't like,
and the CEO inevitably will comein and ask you to change stuff.
So what I did is I shrunk thesprint down to a week and
there's a process for gettingsomething into the sprint and
now this is compatible with theCEO.
The CEO comes in and says I'mgoing to do this.
I'm like, okay, this is theprocess to get it into the
sprint.
It's going to take you thismany days, which lines up with

(19:26):
next sprint.
So my engineers could befocused the entire week and get
done what they were focusing ongetting done, and it wouldn't
distract them.

And.

I really enjoyed it .
The process worked out reallywell.
And the second thing is thearguments you have, because,
just like in the Star Trek ofthe old days, it's like talking
to Scotty and trying to get theStarship to do whatever it is
and he's like I can't do itanymore, kind of thing, and your
CEO will ask for more than youcan do and you will say I can't
do it and there's no math there.
And the beauty of all the toolsnow is we have team velocity
and so with team velocity we cango, we can expansion on the

(20:00):
tickets and everything.
And when they ask for what theyask for, you simply say the
math says this.
And when they say, no, do itfaster, I can't change math,
yeah, and so it's really fun,because then it gets into the
thing.
Either then they reduce theirask or they give you more
engineers, and until the mathworks, and so it's really fun,
there's just no more arguments.
Arguments go away.
It just works out really well.

It's brilliant.

But these are systems that have been existent
for a while and they servicereally well.

I'm making a segue for just a moment on
servicing because, I've beentalking on my podcast in the
last month about a new programwe have here called the Signal
Society.
So the Signal Society is amembership program for the radio
.
We're a community-sponsoredradio station and we want to
give a quick shout-out publicservice announcement to thank

(20:49):
City Lights Books in SanFrancisco for supporting the
Signal Society.
And if you guys want to knowmore, visit the Landmark Store
at City Lights Books or look onour website at kpcrorg slash
join and you can see more aboutthe Signal Society and the
businesses who have signed up tobe part of that.
Coming back to you, Mike Prince, on Reset with Tonya we talked

(21:12):
about your North Star andpurpose and you are highly
technical, more than I realized.
But I want to believe thatcommunity is even more important
for you than technology.
Technology is an enabler tobring community together.
Tell us about what you've beendoing to create new communities
with technical minds here in theBay Area.

I think you're probably referring to the
decelerator.
I'm probably referring to thedecelerator, and for the
audience that does.

I'm a farm girl from Tennessee.

I grew up on a tobacco farm and I have an.

Airstream.
So the fact that Mike is doingthis, I am grateful.
So that's my kind of lead infor you to tell your story.

And we cannot wait to get you on the ranch too.
We've talked about this.

If I hadn't broken this arm, I would have
been there last weekend, yeah.

I'm trying to think the genesis of this is.
It's like we care about people.
I mentioned a 20% thing.
One of my rules is to spend 20%just giving the people to help
founders do their job, and so inthe course of this, I go to a
lot of events.
I went to an event over a yearnow and I met a guy named Daniel
Theobald Okay, and he's part ofof our group of friends, and it
turns out he bought a ranch andthe ranch what's the definition

(22:24):
of a ranch Animals or landmaps?
This is fun.
So this is an 1838 ranch, so itwas Rancho San Gregorio.
It was originally 17,000 acres.

I have some friends in San Ardo with 8,000.
I can't imagine 17.

And over the years it got smaller and smaller as
ranchers grew and developed.
But he bought it nine years ago, now 127 acres, and he's a
robotics guy, but he's beenputting his heart into it for
the last nine years, bringing itback to life.

Wow, what a love project, yeah, and it's
traditional.

The ranch house itself is from part of it is
from 1838, with still theredwood beams on the ground.

Oh amazing, it's neat stuff.

There's a full traditional barn there and
everything.
And what?

he, you say the word barn as if it's this
anomaly.
Well, we don't get enough ofthat around here, but you go out
there.
We don't.

And it's amazing, so he's been restoring it for
this nine years now.
Daniel and I started getting toknow each other.

You met through networking events.
To me that's a great call outbecause we do a lot of that and
it changes our lives.
It's not just about doing deals.

Yeah, so even reinforcing that more, is that
the reason I love this?
I'm so fortunate.
I grew up around here and inthe intervening years we've been
a magnet for amazing peoplefrom all over the world.
And these people, when theytell you their stories, they
didn't just jump on a plane andcome here.
One of my friends, an Indianguy, said he'd go to the
consulate, went in line for days.
They get to the front line,they're all sorry.

(23:59):
No more people this year Goback.
The next year did it again.
Oh my, and just that amount ofeffort to come around.
These are top IIT people fromIndia.

Yes, IIT, famous university system, it's amazing
people come out of there yes.

A really talented person and we wouldn't even let
him in the country, which iscrazy, wow.
But this event you'resurrounded by these people and
it's just always an interestingconversation.
I love that.
So this is one of the manyevents like that across Daniel.

(24:31):
I got to know him over time andthen we were batting back and
forth online and I was like,yeah, you should do events at
your ranch.
He's like, yes, we should Mikeorganize it.
And so I'm like, okay, okay,and so we started doing that.
We started doing that aboutthree months ago and we just did
our third one just a week agoand we're figuring out the
formula.
But in the first weekend there,we did a Jeffersonian style

(24:53):
dinner.
Gotta be around the table.
We're out in the garden, so Ithink it was almost two acres
out there just big FOMO yeah, no, you absolutely need to go.
It's amazing.
And he has a vegetable gardenout there.
It's over an acre, probably twoacres of vegetable.
We need more onions.
Just go out to the garden andpick them.
We need more kale, whatever itis, just go in the garden and
pick it.
He has, I think, almostthousands of chickens there,

(25:14):
literally not exaggerating.
Fresh chickens, fresh gooseeggs, fresh duck eggs,
everything it's amazing, butwhat we did is we started, we
got some people together andtried, and in that first weekend
we realized that what peoplereally loved was being around
the campfire, and that was justthe magnet Everybody's around
the campfire.
And during that weekendsomebody came up with I forget
who it was right now said thisis really more of a decelerator,

(25:35):
and so we all get to sit down,it's totally stuck.
And so we just had because ofthe valley.
Here we attracted amazingpeople, but they all sat around
the campfire and had greatconversations and great food and
they relaxed.
We have hikes we do around theranch.
We have a balcony up on top.
He has a hillside, he's built abalcony up there and you watch

(25:56):
the sunset go down and it's justthe whole thing's very magical.
He has a barn there and I'lltell you, the other side of it
too is he's an MIT robotics guyand so his barn is full of
manufacturing robots.

MIT, another very famous, very high-end
intellectual school.

He's one of the very talented people from MIT,
yes, and so he is buildingagricultural robots for
sustainable farming and hiswhole farm is around
sustainability, and so you talkto him and he knows every bit
about that His robots.
There he has a manufacturingcompany called, or a development
company called, rotate.

Aid run by Katie and so she is developing these
robots.

You go to the ranch .
You see them on the ranch.

Nice.
I've done wine tastings in Napaand asked about robots, and
those people almost ushered meaway from the tasting table.

Yeah.

Because I think it is the future of sustainable
farming.

Yeah, it's many things you want to enable.
The whole point of automation,whether it's robotic automation
or knowledge automation orwhatever it happens to be, is
that we can only do as much aswe can do with our hands and our
mind, and we augment that withthis additional automation, and
our lives should be better,whatever that means.
And in their case they're sayingthey want to enable farmers
anywhere in the world to havethese robots which are easy to
manufacture anywhere in theworld and they work.

(27:10):
As long as there's sunlight,there's solar on the top, they
run around and do their stuffand this enables a farmer out
there who couldn't produce asmuch to produce more.

And to plan and to be with his family and to
have those sunset momentsExactly, I love it.
Now, these are my people.
These are my people here in theBay Area.
I think I know all thedifferent profiles of these many
of them and, without speakingpoorly of any of my people, I

(27:39):
know a lot of people who'vealways lived in the city, who've
always, it seems like,especially people that are
younger than you and I are thesame age, but people that are
younger than us grew up in urbanenvironments, academic, worked
hard on academics and now haveworked hard on producing things.
These aren't people who workwith their hands.
What has it been like to pulldozens of engineer or

(28:01):
engineering-oriented people ontoa farm?
What's it been like for them toget their hands dirty?

Everybody loves it.
It's one of those things I'mnot just saying they're running
it.
But every time people leave,they're so appreciative of it
yeah.
And it's getting to do thingsthey haven't done before,
Everything from small thingslike he has spinning wheels for
doing clay kilns he has.
Last time on the ranch we'redoing horseback riding.
We did the mill.

(28:27):
He has a sawmill there, so wethought I posted the saw you
milled redwood.

We're milling redwood planks out there yeah.

so we grabbed one of the tractors and ran around
and got a huge chunk of a hugetree that had been down and we
milled some planks out of it andit's none us, the other thing
about the ranch is it's anexperiential weekend.
Yeah, it's a.
The ranch way to do it is Ialways post a tentative schedule
with the important word beingtentative, and the idea is when
the guests arrive, we do whatthe guests want to do.

I like how I do it with our guests.

Yeah, it's very dynamic and it works it
magically for everybody.
We didn't know.
Also, for us, if you invitesomebody to do something, you
have to take care of them, andwe didn't want to group those so
large that we can't give theattention to everybody to make
sure they're taken care of.
We also didn't know how longpeople would come, whether they
would camp, whether they'd stayup until Saturday or stay
overnight.
All fun and also whether peoplewho say they want to camp

(29:17):
actually enjoy the camping part.
So enjoyed the camping part.
So all these things we didn'tknow.
So we start off with 12, wentto 20 the next time, went to 30
this last time and we're tryingto figure out what the right
size is there and also, you'regoing to have to throttle it at
some point.
Exactly, and so we already havelots of inbound and we're trying
to pick, also through ourquestionnaire, find the people
that would have the right kindof energy for the ranch Cause we

(29:38):
want to have one old want tonourish each other at the ranch.
And yes, so we were at 30 thistime and it seemed like a pretty
good number.
Maybe we'll stick around there.
We'll see what happens.

It's fascinating.
I have another question, butfirst a quick station ID.
The bottom of the hour we areat Pirate Cat Radio, that's KPCR
LP, 92.9 FM out of Los Gatos.
We also have sister stationKMRT LP, that's 101.9 out of
sunny, fabulous wave-creatingSanta Cruz.

(30:09):
So back to the farm.
You've got a lot of technicallyoriented people mindset at the
very minimum, mindset at a farm.
And how do you think that thesephysical analog experiences
help us all navigate the digitaltransformation that's happening

(30:33):
today?
What do you think it does forpeople when they're in that
experience?

I think I don't exactly know how to answer this.
Two parts I'm thinking rightnow.
One is the stepping back part,the decelerator part.

The decelerator part is huge, I agree.

Is that you step back and step away from
everything and when we cookthere.
The first time we cooked, wecooked.
He has a proper kitchen and allthat kind of good stuff, but
the second time we cooked overthe fire, we're actually
literally with cast iron pans inthe fire.
And Daniel loves cooking.
It's like part of me.
I always reflect I'm all.
Are you sure?
This is okay?

(31:05):
He loves cooking for the largegroup.
That's one of his joys, and sowe're cooking literally in the
fire, in the coals, with dinnerswrapped in tinfoil and in the
hot coals or cast iron pans, andit really connects you back
with the old fashioned ways ofdoing things and also makes you
step away from what you'reworking on.
We do music there too.
I didn't mention that.

(31:26):
Oh, we're always.
One of the things we push foris a good mix of artists there.

They sound like my Airstream rallies.

Yeah, except in a far more interesting environment
.

Yeah, keep going.

And we just feel very fortunate that and it's
these unexpected outcomes andDaniel plays guitar a little bit
.
He'll bring your guitar downand play, and then somebody else
will be oh, I know a little bit, and they'll start playing and
they're amazing.
And then another woman who's Ithink it was a Persian woman
last time she's all.
Can I sing some traditionalsongs?
Oh lovely, so just amazingsinger.

(31:59):
I did not expect that at all.
No, Another time he flew in ayoga instructor from Cabas San
Lucas and while she's there,she's beside teaching yoga
lessons for folks.
She's like oh yeah, I record.
I'm an artist that recordssongs at a studio, or can you
play for us?
And she starts playing.
The other people were playingcovers, she was playing her
original music, Fantastic voice,fantastic guitar, and so we did

(32:22):
not expect that it's anentertainment session.

I don't want to cheapen it by saying that, yeah,
it's just.
It's just.
People like experience.

It's like it was 200 years ago.
We would go sit as a villagearound and have people perform
music.
This last time, a woman incheleste came out.
She's a she's an awesomepianist.
So we went into the house andshe played piano.
She has an incredible voice andpeople are just sitting around
enjoying her perform.
And so it's each time.
We don't know, it's just theseamazing people show up.
But then you're asking alsowith the digital stuff, is that

(32:52):
it turns out you're all, and thepoint is you shouldn't be
talking about what you're doingfor a job.
At some point you figure outwhat do you do and they're all.
Oh, I am talking to the horse,right, it's like I get the story
from how it works, like.
So, besides reflecting back andstepping back and enjoying

(33:15):
music, you also talk to amazingpeople out there, and so every
time we go out, it's just, it'sso nice this is coming in for me
pretty hard, I have to say it.

I think a lot of times we act like we can't be
our work selves.
When we're doing personalthings we say, oh, we shouldn't
be, because there's an unwrittenrule in the Airstream world.

You don't talk about career, you don't talk
about work.

Yeah, but I'm leaning more into.
If it's so a part of who youare and what you value, then I
think that you are missing anopportunity to share with others
what you cherish, and so Ithink that blend.
I've never thought aboutwork-life balance.

(34:00):
I've always treated it likework-life integration and I
think there is.
We've all met the person whojust can't stop talking about or
stop selling you on thepurchase or whatever.
But I think, especially wherewe're located, the people that
we tend to be in this beautifulbubble with all have deep

(34:21):
interests in what's happening inthe world, and when you share
what you're doing in the worldand it happens to be quote work
it gives them an opportunity toconnect more deeply with you on
what matters to them, I think itshould be perfectly normal to
be putting a bridle on a horsetalking about the new meta AI

(34:43):
layer in their rebands.

Yeah, I think there's different things going
on, so one of the things is thatwe're passionate.
Back to the North Star.

Yes.

The North Star and some set of people had these
amazing North Stars, yeah, andthey're passionate about it and
you're able to meet these peoplewho are agents of change and
it's early in the game of someof this stuff.
You have access to this earlyvision of how things are
changing.
One of the ways I like the wayI went to, I'm sorry last time
Mike Mabel's talk at NickLarson's event.

(35:12):
And the way that Mike describedit is there's an inflection in
the world as a way, and itinflects a certain way and
there's just massive opportunityin that.
And by being around thesepeople, we see that inflection
early and that's amazing.
And there's some set of peoplewho are so amazingly passionate.
I think you said a second ago,there's marketing people who are
trying to get you to buysomething, whatever.
Okay, ignore those people for asecond.

(35:32):
There's other people who aresharing this inflection and
sharing this passion, sharingthis vision.

And they're experienced.

And we get to talk to them and start to understand
how the world's going to go,which I think is an amazing
thing.
I think there's also there's acamaraderie part.
I was in a bunch of events inDecember and the same thing as
being a founder is hard.

It is.

And a bunch of people were going to events in
December and they just simplywanted other founders around to
commiserate with and to say it'sI'm in the journey and you're
in the journey, and let's justsupport each other a little bit,
so I think there's a lot ofthat there as well.
And then there's like the changethe world for the better We've
talked about that a little bitis that with the technologies

(36:13):
here with I mentioned with thedigital dark ages before we've
been in a period for maybe even20 years now where the agents
have been operating forcompanies on their behalf, with
the people interest being fardown the list, and we've been in
this for a long time now.
And now we have an opportunityto come out of this into an
enlightened period where we havetechnology that we know what's

(36:35):
better for us, we havetechnology that will service us
better, and we have anopportunity to figure out how
we're going to make that evolve.
And that's going to be amazing.
So I want all of us to supportourselves in that journey.
And it goes back like the stuffthat I'm working on.
Also is what I'm curious about.
I'm doing a human to agent tohuman, and the whole point of
separating the agent is nolonger an agent working for the

(36:56):
company, that's working on thecompany's behalf.
It's that you have an agentworking for you benevolently
that'll look out for your bestinterests, and we're coming into
the age of that Very excitedabout it.

Let's talk about work a little.
I could like literally talk toyou for hours about the ranch,
about transformation, aboutpeople connecting over a
multitude of things, but let'sallow ourselves to talk a little
about and you just gave a greatsegue into this agentic AI era
that we're entering.

(37:25):
A lot of people who arelistening to us still don't
really understand that and beundervaluing it, to call it
hyper automation, but that mightbe one of the easier ways to
describe it.
Do you have a better way todescribe?

Yeah, I think the challenge right now is that
everybody has their owndefinition.

Oh, a hundred percent.

And so when you say agentic, every company now is
now an agentic company, becauseyou have to say that Six months
ago it was an AI company and nowit's an agentic company and the
way I probably define theagentic stuff right now is that
it's just like usually I do is Itake the technology away?
Let's skip technology.

Yeah, yeah, but what's the outcome?
That's what it should be, whathappens for me.

So the correlation is assistance.
If I gave you 10 assistants,and they never slept, never took
vacation never got upsetbecause something was going on
with their spouse and maybe it's10 or 100 or 1,000, but I'm
going to give you assistance nowand they can do two kinds of
things.
They can do things with theirhands, and those are robot
assistants.
And they can do things withtheir brain or knowledge, and
those are the traditional AIassistants.

(38:24):
And so that's the world we'regoing into, and all of us will
have all these assistants doingstuff for us.
And the way I visualize it isit's like a sea.
So you're sitting here with asea of assistants running around
below you and the other personnext to you has a sea of them.
Every business has a sea ofthem, and it's this huge sea,
and these pieces of intelligencewill then interact with another

(38:46):
one to get stuff done.
And I would call thattransaction, not business-wise,
not dollars.
The thing is, what I'm reallycurious about right now is that
I want to improve the humancondition, and one of the ways I
think about this is I like theStar Trek Vulcan saying which is
live long and prosper.

Oh yeah, you do.

That's in a lot of your LinkedIn posts, exactly,
and so I think that really is agood motivation for all of us
right now.
Living long is the Harvardstudy.

Yes.

The Harvard study said, the number one indicator
of your longevity is the circleof people you surround yourself
with.
And so we, as humans, don't doa good job of this.
We have so many biases thatwork against us, and the prosper
is the same thing.
But for business, whoever youdecide to do business with has
an enormous impact on how wellyour life goes.
And so in the old days, meaning, like now still, is that I

(39:38):
still rely on my human qualitiesto find these people, to search
out these people, to engagethese folks, and in the near
future, I will delegate thatdown to an agent which is just
really good at it, and it willfind those people for my
personal life, it will findthose people for my business
life and it'll get me into thesame room and the same
conversation.
I think at the very beginning wetalked about is, I think, in

(40:00):
real life is amazingly important.
And when I look at thisautomation, if I'm going to have
eight hours of my day and let'ssay six hours was doing work
and I had two hours disposablefor whatever happens to me, and
I can do two hours in real life,if I can shift those four hours
down to an agent which happensin one second.
Now you've given me six hoursto spend with people in real
life and enjoy the company ofother people, and so I think

(40:21):
that's the future we're movingtowards.

You've described it beautifully and people who
are listening that aren'tfamiliar with it might be a
little frightened Thinking aboutgiving over authority
discernment to something else,not some other human.
You might abdicate decisions toa spouse or a partner as an
adult, but to give it over to adigital decision maker is hard.

(40:47):
One of the things that I thinkyou're working on is trust yeah.
Trust protocols inside thetechnology yeah.
Why is trust such a criticalpiece with what we're moving
toward?

Yeah, I heard a description.
I can't remember exactly rightnow but in order to transact
business, you must trust theother party, whether it's a bank
, whether it's a person, whetherit's anything.
And it seems obvious.
But it's not baked into so manythings Like you.
Look at the AOA protocol rightnow from Google.
It doesn't have authenticationbuilt in.
It delegates that to a thirdparty.
It says just make it happen,kind of thing.

(41:19):
And so there's things it saysI'm a layer below this.
Somebody else will figure itout and they're doing some work
around it, but it's very lightright now and so one of the
things I'm very interested in ismaking sure that we can trust,
and one of the things I talkabout this is an example I give
quite a bit is when I go to aconference I ask the speaker I'm
all literally right now, I'm inthis room and you're in this
room how does my agent find youragent prove they are who each

(41:47):
other and transact something and, for example, a speaker gets
swamped at the end.
There's a few people you shouldtalk to.
You should really let youragents figure this out and say
by the way, you have coffee withfour people this afternoon and
it just magically happened, butour agents have to find each
other, and when I ask them thesequestions, they draw a blank
because they're all.
I don't know how my agent wouldfind your agent now I don't
authenticate, and so that's whatwe're working on protocols for
that, and so there's aspecification.

(42:08):
What I did is I started workingon this about six months ago
and I just did everything fromscratch.
I've done blockchain companiesin the past.
I've done cryptography for thearmed forces.
I've done a bunch of stuff.
So, I knew roughly how to wireit together and I did scratch

(42:30):
and then I stepped back and saidsomebody's already done this.

So I looked around and it turns out there's
the decentralized ID protocol.
It's a W3 spec.
It was funded by the Departmentof Homeland Security.
We have it.

We've had it for three years now, and so it has
this.
One of the structures in thereis service, but it really means
agents, and so now what I can dois I can take this structure
and say I'm not going torepresent actually an agent with
, I'm going to represent aperson, represent Tonya, and now
you have this nice structure soI can, you can, pass around
this ID.
It's a unique ID globally and Ican use the ID to resolve for
this big structure and tells mewho your agents are.

(42:56):
Now, the second thing thathappens in this is that with
this ID, now, once you have anID that represents you, we do
magical stuff.
So another thing I'm working onis presence engines.
The presence is where are you?
But presence is more than that.
Presence isn't that you and Iare here right now or that
you're in downtown las gatos orwhatever it is.
It's also that tomorrow you'llbe an event in the city and next
week you'll be in and thencontext across those multiple

(43:16):
environments all that, yes, andso now that we have that, now we
can basically say, ohinteresting, this is one of my
dreams.
I presented this back inNovember of last year, saying
that your phone has a GPU thatdoes nothing most of the time,
and AI loves GPUs, and so, withID, now what we can do is when
you go to sleep at night, youwill plug your phone in and the
number one promise from Apple orwhoever you have it did charge

(43:38):
me up Boom.

So now you're charged up.
That's all you expect whileyou're asleep.

Now you're charged up and now you have the rest of
the night.
You have seven hours that yourphone's just doing nothing.

Not considered.
Yeah, I love that you'rethinking about that and we go
back to the agent stuff.

Every time before it's like your assistant.
Your phone is acting as one ofthose assistants.
Now and now what happens isyour phone wakes up and says,
huh, who will I be around in thenext several weeks?
Tell me everybody.
And you go to a presence engine.
It tells everybody and now,with that presence engine there,
all those IDs flow in.
It starts doing all theseconversations all night long it

(44:11):
talks to everybody and in themorning you wake up.

Everybody being other digital, the other digital
agents, exactly.

So now it's your agent on your behalf talking to
their agent on their behalf andyou're seeing if there's a
synergy.
This is where the fun stuffbeside the obvious matching,
which is non-AI once you getpast those guards then actually
wow, this is a good candidate.
Let's actually talk to them andget to know them and then it
gets really interesting.
What happens?
Two things.
In the morning, when you wakeup, your phone says guess what?

(44:38):
I found some people, and theneat thing about it is it might
not be for even an event.
He says you want to get coffeewith them, you want to get
dinner with them.
And that's where I think ourlives are moving towards.

is this curated existence where it's a
benevolent, it's in yourinterest.

Yes, and it knows what's best for you.
And what's best for you is nothaving 20 coffees a week, having
four.
I'm going to find those four ofthe best coffees, and so I
think that's the really amazingfuture we have ahead of us.

I love it.
I love it.
I'm going to do a veryhopefully quick station
identifier for KPCR 92.9 FM inLos Gatos and KMRT 101.9 FM out
of Santa Cruz, and I want tomention that we are a voice for
independent music, local storiesand real-time emergency updates
and thank goodness I've neverbeen on air when it's been time

(45:31):
for an emergency update.
We do those as well.
Without public funding,community radio faces rising
costs and fewer ways to serve,so your donation today helps
keep us strong, independent andon the air when it matters most,
like the conversations I'mhaving with Mike Prince.
So if you're interested insupporting Pirate Cat Radio,
just go to visit sorry, just goto donatekpcrorg.

(45:53):
Having all these agents doingthe work amongst themselves and
you waking up to a menu ofopportunities to see people, how
do you think we will maintainhuman connections with AI as?

it becomes more prevalent.
This is a great topic.
This is an amazing one.
Have you played with Omi yet?

No, I saw it, but I have not.
I've not brought it in.
It looks too good to be true.
On the Instagram ad.

Very neat.
And then, with all shout out toMeta and their glasses and all
this tech is that we sometimesdon't do the best job for
ourselves.
And we it's like the way wetreat people in relationships,
the way we talk to them the waywe act, the way we show up.
It's in everything from ourbusiness, to our friendships, to

(46:44):
dating.
I was working on a service lastyear, a year and a half ago.
I called it Ready to Date.
And it says that people fail indating because they're not ready
and they need to spend somethem time.
I'm 100% with you, yep, andfigure out the framework for
what to bring to the table, andso we all need to do a better
job.
We're not perfect, and I thinkit's what you said before is the

(47:05):
growth mindset and this goesback to the enlightenment we
were talking about too Is thatsome set of us will realize that
we're not perfect and we'lladopt the growth mindset and
we'll leverage tools.
And some of these tools will beAI and agents, and so I brought
it.
Omi is not going to go.

So, omi, what it does, is it?

records all the conversations, and what it does
is.
It records all theconversations, yes, and what it
does is.
Then it attributes who's sayingwhat yeah, and then it has what
they call apps and they cananalyze the conversations and
give feedback and it's all theseneat things.
And so you take that pluseverything else.
We have all the communication.

So it's insights not just into what's happening
but how you're interacting inthe situation, Like one of their
apps is called.

Girlfriend Keeper.
It's like if you're nottreating your girlfriend, do
these things to be a betterboyfriend.

Wow.

And they have hundreds and hundreds of apps
and, if we look, none of theseare perfect right now, but we're
moving in that direction ofbeing better, and so the notion
is.
But also it's not just theconversations, it's.
We have my watch, my watchmeasures my heart rate and all
this bunch of feedback, and soalso I've accessed your

(48:07):
communications.
I know who talked to, I knowwho called you, and intelligence
can look through your day andmake heads and tails of stuff,
and when you talk to that person, you get stressed, your voice
elevated, maybe talk to themless.
That's one thing, fair, yeah.
And then this other personthey're actually really good and
they maybe you actually stoppedyour conversation early.
You should really reach out tothem and so it can help you

(48:30):
massage your life towards areally good outcome.
Another one I'm hearing is whatis it?
It's for seeing people as good.
I think we agreed on thatearlier in real life, and people
struggle with getting thesethings moving during the week.
So I'm talking about toolsright now, saying saying I'm
going to know your week, I'mgoing to somehow figure out what
is good for you between you andme, kind of thing, and then I

(48:50):
will proactively try to getthose to happen, whatever that
means.
And one of the things we lookat it, I think you mentioned
before, is like utility, and ifutility is if I take it away,
there's pain If I take away yourelectricity or the gas at your
house, whatever.
And so I think that at somepoint these tools and this
answers a question you hadearlier, which was who will use

(49:11):
this, who will not use it, whowill use technology and you will
see people who are using thisutility like electricity, except
it's actually a lifeimprovement thing and after a
week of this, if you take itaway from them, I take your
phone away and you feel listlessbecause you're all.
Oh my God, it was giving me.
It was.
I was meeting these amazingpeople, I was eating in amazing
places, I was getting the rest Ineeded, I gained the sleep I

(49:31):
needed.
It told me, it guided me on howmuch sleep to get and exercise
and everything, and you justlive a better life.

I'm sure there are people who are listening who
are like I will never, butactually what we're finding?
I'm a type one diabetic and I'mpretty out about it, and my
endocrinologist at Stanford.
We don't talk about my illness,we talk about like technology
around it.
Two type A women just every timeI visit with her.
That's what we talk about, butwhat they're finding at Stanford

(50:00):
is that patients will talk totheir digital tools easier than
they'll talk to their doctors.
They feel judgment when theytalk to people, but if your
phone says your blood sugarspiked after breakfast this
morning, so whatever you atetomorrow, consider a different
path.
They're finding that quotetreatment, when it's recommended

(50:20):
by a phone, is better received,and that patients are more
willing to be more forthcomingwith information because they
won't feel judged by theirdevices.
So I think that we aregravitating, as mankind, toward
seeing tools for what toolsbring value for.

Well, they're also better.

There's some studies earlier last year, which
is saying like.

Two of the questions were if you have a
diagnosis for something notgreat like cancer, would you
rather have a computer, tell you, or a doctor tell you?
And the study came out and saidthe computer, because the
computer doesn't have bad days.

That's right.

And being grumpy with you when you're heartbroken
it can know.
It can literally, if you let it, it can know you and what
language works best for you todescribe this thing.
It will have infinite patienceto walk through and talk to you
as long as you want to.
When you wake up at two in themorning and are stressed out,
it's there for you again.
It's just like it's better atthat, and so we're finding we're

(51:15):
going to move towards thatdirection.

I think it's going to be more natural, dare I
say, than at first blush.
When people look at it and gono never, but we're going to
find how it simplifies andenhances and we're going to
migrate there.

It's not for everybody.
Some people start and then,over time, more and more people
get on board.

My uncle Ronnie uses Alexa like a madman, I
bought them the first hockeypuck like eight or ten years ago
and he would speak so slowly.
People in Tennessee right noware laughing.
But he would speak so slowly.
Alexa would butt in and try tonot answer.
He would get so frustrated.
But now he uses that thing forthe weather, for timers, all of

(51:53):
the simple things that still,and he loves it.
And I don't even know that hecarries a smartphone.

Yeah, but it's interesting when it goes to the
more complex interactions, wherethere's like theoristic, like
medical.
You're finding out with doctors.
Right now people chat GPTbefore they get there.
They show up with a full listand they're asking the doctor
all these questions.

And the next step on that is going to be chat,
gpt, answering those questionsand then taking conclusions to
the doctor to validate.

We're already there .
Yeah, one of the one of thegroups I was talking to.
I think they're installed 2,500locations, 2,500 hospitals in
the U.
They have MRI hooked to AI andtheir problem statement was that
you've had a head injury orsome bad accident and you show
up at the hospital, we need totreat you.
If we treat you with medicationin five minutes, life's going to
be okay.
If we wait 30 minutes and ifthey had a human process, that

(52:38):
it's not going to change.
The outcomes are much, muchworse, and this is one of the
things where just a humancouldn't even do it.
They give it an output in a fewminutes and you get life-saving
treatment.
So I feel like that's alreadyhappening now.

Yeah, I love it.
I hate that we're almost out oftime and I have some lightning
round questions for you.

You're fun.

Okay, beautiful, let's do it so let's spend our
last five minutes with thesefairly quick answer questions.

Unfortunately I'm complex, so I ask complicated
questions.

What's the most important question?
We are not asking about AI.

Oh God, sorry, I think we're not asking about AI.
I don't know there's so many Ithink this goes back to.
It'll warm you up better.
I didn't prove this, sorry.
I think the dystopian stuff is.
One of these things Is thatthings are going to change
massively in the next two years,like my guess is the next
election cycle in California,and that we're going to have.

(53:34):
What I say is, the trend lineswill be established well before
the election.
All the humans are going tohave very strong opinions at
that point and the election willbe decided around that.

Yeah, yeah.
I think social policy is goingto be the big shift.
The technology, to me, is easy.
It's just growing and how andwhat we're capable of doing.
But the social policy changeand how we interact is those are
.
That's the direction for thequestions that we will get to.
We have to.
So, yeah, okay.

(54:03):
So what human skill will bemost valuable when AI agents are
handling our transactions?

Yeah, I think it's.
What we talked about earlierwas domain expertise.

Thank you.
That is that perfect?
That is a perfect answer.
All right, so how do youpersonally stay human while
building AI systems?
The ranch.

I do two things.
I meditate, but I don'tmeditate sitting on a carpet.
I garden, I do things calledvigorous gardening.
So I don't go to a gym, I justgo into the yard and do work.
But in the course of doingthese things I reflect the
entire time and I come away fromgardening knowing what I want
to do in business next, awayfrom gardening knowing what I
want to do in business next.

You're good at this.
How has community shaped yourapproach to innovation?

I think there's probably two directions on that.
One One is a care for community, so I simply care about people.
I want people to be better,whatever that means, and so a
lot of what I work on if itprovides good value to those
folks, I'm 100% for it.
And then the second part is howhas community helped me further
my goals?
And like we were talking beforeis we have a fantastic

(55:15):
community area here, so I try tospend enough time going to
events.
I try to spend enough timegetting to know the people at
the events, and I'm also doingmore LinkedIn these days, too,
to try to, because it's fun.
I'm also doing more LinkedInthese days, too, to try to,
because it's fun.
I'm getting outreach.
I got any outreach from a guy.
I talked to 10 years ago WowFrom another company.

Yeah, yeah.

And he's he'd been following me on LinkedIn and he
wants to do some work now too,so I have all these inbound.
People have been tracking me.
Linkedin, thankfully, drawsthem in and helps us get stuff
done together.

We're able to show up for people we don't even
know are watching.
That is.
A lot of people give grief toLinkedIn, but I think it is a
different way for us to beaccessible, and so that's a
great story about the guy youworked with 10 years ago.
So what is your favorite momentfrom the ranch weekends so far?

Probably the sawmill, because that was
totally unexpected.
It started off by a guy namedEvan who's working at the ranch
there and it's all community too.
It's like they needed a tractor.
So Evan just went and bought atractor, brought a brand new
tractor back just to help.
He's a volunteer there, he'sall good to ride the tractor.
So we went out.
We got to see everything he'sbuilding.
He's all.
Have you milled logs before?

No milled logs before no, let's go over there.
We've got a sawmill.

And we just fired it up and two people went and
made wood planks.
That was unexpected.

I didn't expect that at all.
I love that there's this veryanalog memory that you cherish,
because you don't get to do thatjust any old day.
That happened.
So with that, the last questionI have you and I mentioned this
earlier you are uniquelybridging the analog to the
digital.
You tremendously value bothyour analog and your digital
life.
More people are going to haveto make that bridge from the

(56:58):
analog into more of the digital.
What would you want people toremember about how to navigate
that bridge?

I think it's what we talked about before.
It's embracing change.

Yeah, don't be scared of change Good.

I think it's change will give you more time back.

Yes, when we automate it correctly.

Yes, it's going to get us out.
God.
What is it?
Shinrin-yoku, remember this.

Yes, that.

Okay, and so it's Japanese for forest bathing.
Yes, and we need nature.
We do need nature.
And so if we embrace technologyin the correct way having it
being benevolent to us.
It'll give us more time to behuman and to talk to each other
in real life and to go out tonature.

I would add I think you said it in your way.
But I would add, none of us aredoing this alone.
So when any of those elementspresent you with pause, connect
with other people to get to helpyou in that journey across the
bridge.
If the technology ischallenging, if the community
part is challenging, if thenature part isn't something you

(57:56):
know how to do.
there's so many ways that youcan reach out and build your
life.
There are people there for you.
Yeah, I love it.
We're going to do this again.
I commit to you, I will bring.
Bella to the ranch and we willhost a podcast with you and
Daniel from the ranch and Ithink we will have an amazing
amount of fun.
So I look forward to that.

That'd be fantastic , wonderful.
Thank you so much.

Thank you.
So people are going to listento this and they're going to be
like I have to know this guy.
I want to follow this guy.
I want to know what he'sworking on and when the next
ranch trip is.
So how is the best way for themto be in touch with the work
that you're doing?

LinkedIn.
I love it, or just Mike Princeat LinkedIn.

We can probably share a link to that one.

Yes, and then I have another, I have a blog, oh,
Good.

So, for those who are interested in the more
technical aspects, I'm surethere's public and community
aspects that you write about,because you can't just be all
technical these days.
You have to be considering howthe impact on people falls.
Yep, 100%, deeply communicatewith Mike Prince.

(59:03):
So we are signing off todayfrom Reset with Tonya here at
KPCR LP 92.9 in Los Gatos andSister Station KMRT LP 101.9 in
lovely Santa Cruz.
Everyone, Mike, thank you.

Thank you.

I have adored this.
Thank you so much, everyone.
Have a wonderful day and wewill see you next Thursday at 11
am.
Take care.

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Tonya J. Long

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