Latest / Reframe First / Dusty Gulleson, CEO at Tectonic | How Empathy Will Win in the Age of AI

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Dusty Gulleson, CEO at Tectonic | How Empathy Will Win in the Age of AI · Reframe First

• Oleksij Rak: Hey guys, welcome to another episode of FreeFrame First. I'm Alexi and let me welcome our today's guest, Dusty Gallison, founder and CEO at Team Tectonic. hi Dusty, great having you here. Dusty Gulleson: Nice being here. I appreciate it very much. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, well we're next really looking forward to an interesting discussion today. So today is an Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: usual one. We came with cigars and probably let let's let's light it up and and start discussion. Dusty Gulleson: You know, I find cigars to be a best way to start conversations. It's it's very relaxing. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, it is. What can we got today? Dusty Gulleson: I've got a let's see, it's La Polina bronze label. I'm a big fan of La Palina. Let's see if people can see that. it's a wonderful well, it's in the morning here, so it's a breakfast cigar. It's my first cigar of the day. it goes great with coffee. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, I got Nick Perdomo. Perdomo Maduro, twelve years old. Yeah, yeah, yeah, go ahead. Dusty Gulleson: Fantastic cigar. You know, Perdomo Perdomo comes out with a lot of great cigars. they do a good job. Quality's consistent. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, but it's strange they are not appreciated by sil the cigar c A website, the CA journal, Cigar Aficionado. because they are not rated Dusty Gulleson: You know. Oleksij Rak: in Euro. And while I f I find them really, really, really great cigars. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, I I think cigar ratings are sometimes they're good. But generally my my favorite people to talk to are the people that work in cigar shops. that day in and day out manage a quantity of cigars and whenever I travel I stop by a cigar shop or cigar lounge and I just talk to the person that works there and they have the best suggestions on what's what's smoking really well. And like I was telling you yesterday or earlier, I mean When I find a cigar I really like, I try to buy a couple of boxes and throw it in my humidor, as you see behind me. Oleksij Rak: You show me oxygen dirt just before the call. it's it Dusty Gulleson: Ha ha ha. Oleksij Rak: it looks big. Dusty Gulleson: It's about I don't know what is it? Maybe twenty feet by twenty feet wide by about f twelve feet tall. But it you know, at one time I was telling you earlier, f fit about twenty thousand Oleksij Rak: Run two by twelve. It's like it's six Dusty Gulleson: cigars at some time. Oleksij Rak: It's for us it's it's what six meters by three point six. So it's huge. Dusty Gulleson: Well, I bought it from a cigar lounge that went out of business. And I went to a their auction to see what they had and they had this and I it's all custom made, beautiful. Got it for six hundred and fifty bucks. It was a steal. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: Anyway. All right. Oleksij Rak: How how how do how do you keep how do you keep humidity in it? Dusty Gulleson: I actually have a whole I have a system that it's plugged into my plumbing. So there's a humidifier that I have downstairs in our in our one of the closets and I pipe water up and I have two big humidifiers at the bottom of this that Oleksij Rak: Uh-huh. Dusty Gulleson: pump out humidity. And then I have it re Oleksij Rak: And someone to write it. Dusty Gulleson: it's regulated by a by a humidifier and temperature gauge. So it goes up, goes down. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: But yeah, I I distill water downstairs and then I pump the distilled water up. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah, it makes Dusty Gulleson: But yeah. Oleksij Rak: sense for 'cause cabin that size. Yeah, for sure. So that's the let's chat, let's Dusty Gulleson: Exactly. Oleksij Rak: talk about business a bit. So tectonics, team tectonic, how how did you start it? It's like twenty five years of history from what I read. And Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, yeah. So In nineteen ninety nine, I had just become newly married. And had some friends on the west co east coast say, Hey, help us with Y T K stuff. so I flew there. and then I left that company in six months. it didn't work out. And so not knowing what to do, I I was waiting tables at night and decided I'd start a company, you know, doing some consulting. I thought, How hard is it? You know, it was the dot com boom, right? So I jumped on the dot com boom and started working with some associations that I met. then start building custom content management systems. So and then I hired my first employee, because I grew up overseas in Indonesia, one of my childhood acquaintances. I flew him over. I got an H one B for him visa, flew him over and was me and him for a couple of years. He'd program, I'd sleep on the floor, he'd wake me up, I'd get up, test it, and do design, he'd sleep on the floor and we'd go back and forth for a while. I I remember after two years he asked me if he could take Sunday off. And I was like, Maybe. You know, it's it's w there's just so much business, it's so much opportunity, you know. It's kinda like now with AI, it's just so much going on. So we built CMSs and then Our clients liked our work and web stuff and they said, Can you handle our infrastructure? So I said, Sure, and expanded to infrastructure and we started our own MSP then. and then one of our projects with one of our clients ballooned into a workflow application management system. And so that became our first SaaS product orchestrate. And then after that we had People that were like, hey, you grew up overseas. Do you have any offshore labor we can use? And I say, sure. So I started I our offshore arbitrage of labor. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Dusty Gulleson: and that that was both in programming, but it really went more into back office processing. So we have a lot of bookkeepers and back office processing folks offshore in our on our environment there. And then it just kept on going. So as we grew and clients l wanted us to do different things, we just kept expanding our service base. And now we're about 80 people in the States, about 130 offshore. we originally started as a company called eResources, and we just Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Dusty Gulleson: rebranded in January to Tectonic. And our URL is Team Tectonic because we couldn't get that URL tectonic.com. And yeah, we we serve multiple verticals. we do about 15, 16 million a year. that's where we're pegged at for this year. And we grew largely through acquisitions for from two thousand fifteen to now we acquired about five companies and integrated them into our in our company. And we're constantly looking. We're looking at acquiring a a couple more right now. So seems like a natural progression for us. We've been able to master that process. It's not easy, but it's it's fun. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. About vertical integration. So you'll your LinkedIn says that all this company and these companies are vertically integrated. How do how does it work for you? What does it mean? Dusty Gulleson: So Virtually Integrated Technology Company, a lot of companies come to us and we're their technology partner. They don't come to us for just one little service. Sometimes they do. But generally speaking, a lot of our clients come to us and say, Hey, we have this problem we need to solve. And we're like, Great, Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Dusty Gulleson: that problem includes, you know, your digital presence, includes your line of business software, SaaS products you're using, your hosting environment, your DevOps. your infrastructure. And so we're able to tackle all the things that surround a company's technology needs. And again, sometimes people just come and say, Hey, manage our infrastructure. But generally speaking, over time, our clients are very much looking for a partner in technology that understands the whole scope of a technology implementation. And that's what we do. So that's why I say vertically integrate from infrastructure to digital to strategy to to management and DevOps. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, you you mentioned like in our precall, a new business niche is human QA for for for Yay agents. Dusty Gulleson: What's what's that? Say one more. My you're cut off. Oleksij Rak: You mentioned dur during our pre-call a new business niche for human QA for AI agents. How do you Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Oleksij Rak: see how do you see it? Because it starts making sense and no do do you have any advancement in that in that direction or is that just new idea? Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: On AI agents. Yeah, we we we definitely we're constantly creating them. and we're constantly learning from our mistakes and creating them. having a good harness and good scaffolding is definitely, definitely necessary when you're doing an agent. I I think a lot of times, and I think this is true with anything, a lot of folks when we start to create any technology, we don't really understand the problem we're trying to solve. We we think we do. we we say, yeah, this is the problem I try to solve, but not a lot of time is spent historically and even now describing the problem, understanding the problem. And more importantly, I think describing the outcome you want. I think people are very knee-jerky in their problem solving. They're like, I need to have an agent scrape the stuff off the internet, right? But they don't really talk about what's the problem they're really trying to solve. What's the problem and it's usually there's a bigger problem underneath, which is I'm not generating enough leads in this specific thing and really starting to understand that. So I think a lot of AI development, a lot of agent development, a lot of gentic work is really centered gonna be a lot of human restructuring of how we think and being more clear about it. It just takes more clarity to do good AI work, to be honest with you. Because otherwise you Oleksij Rak: Yeah, I think. Dusty Gulleson: just have sh shitty agents. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, you know, crap in, crap out. Awesome. twenty five years of history. How how did business change over these twenty five years? So you started from Dusty Gulleson: man. Oleksij Rak: dot com bubble, so and it it did change a few times. How did it change and Dusty Gulleson: So good question. yeah, the more it changes, the more it stays the same in some ways. I think. I think that the change is in the speed of change right now. the dot com bubble, yeah, it was fast. But with in this AI world, the speed of change is so fast, it's hard to keep up with like I was just reading last night and I'm like, I shouldn't change this because I built something on Thursday and it's obsolete on Monday, you know? Not obsolete, but it's there's a better way of doing it, you know. I I'm spending a lot of time Building a second brain structure for me with obsidian and and yeah. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, we will chat about that for sure. Dusty Gulleson: so I've been building that and then I I ran across a guy last night who's building he built one for scratch and cloud code and it solves some of the problems of obsidian. I'm like, that makes so much more sense, you know. I think also nowadays, compared to dot com, that what's changed is there's so because of social media and because of influencers and whatever. There's so much exchange of ideas right now that didn't Oleksij Rak: No. Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: occur back in 2000. Like people are much more generous with their ideas, either be out of selfishness or out of they're just generous people. But you know, you can go on and get get repos, do it at your own risk, of course, but people are constantly sharing their knowledge. And I think that's increasing the rapidity. of change. So I would say that's the biggest change is speed and information sharing is so rapid nowadays. Whereas back then in dot com it was a much, much slower event. the way things haven't changed is that, you know, I think there's a lot of innovation that was there in dot com and that same spirit of innovation is still here. It in fact it's it's grown in some ways. People are just it's it's fun. It's a lot of fun right now to try things. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, for sure. And since you mention you already mentioned it that like you build something on Thursday on Monday it's obsolete or maybe not obsolete, but there is a better idea or better way to to do to do things. And how do you even keep up with all of that? How do you s stay you know on the edge of of current advancement? Dusty Gulleson: you know. Oleksij Rak: Because y you know, it's it's constant formula, it's like feel fear of missed opportunity because you're constantly seeing that already s something's happening. You don't know everything. And it's it's Dusty Gulleson: You know, Oleksij Rak: it's weird. Dusty Gulleson: yeah, I I early on, I mean, I'd be I remember I was in Costa Rica for a conference and I was working on another agentic tool I was building. And you know, I'd leave the c you know, people would go out and eat and I'd run back to the my room and start working again. And maybe three or four nights in a row, I'd start hearing birds. I'm like, What where are these birds? And it was like six in the morning. I'd worked all night. doing some work. And so there there is this like I probably slept three, four hours that week just just because you're constantly finding stuff and learning. But you can't keep that up. That's you know, I'm an old man. I'm I'm in my fifties here. So I you you can't keep that up and it's not healthy. But I I was reminded, I remember thinking there, I'm like, man, I fear of missing out. I'm like but because change is happening so fast, you're gonna miss out regardless. You're you're gonna You're gonna be leapfrogging your work every like week. You're gonna leapfrog into another snare. So you you're not gonna miss out. You're just it's it is what it is. The train's going at a you know, five hundred miles an hour and wherever you get off that evening, it's gonna be, you know, you go to bed and you're gonna be another thousand miles down the road a little later when something else changes. But I remember someone telling me about Google and it's always stuck with me that Google was the eighteenth search engine. That ever got developed. You know, you you I don't know if you remember Yahoo or Alta Vista or all those names. You know, when it came to search engines, Google's number 18. It's number one now. It's not about being first all the time. It's about doing a good product. And sometimes sitting back a little bit and going slower and absorbing is gonna be better. So I think you still keep plugging forward, but I I think having that anxiety is is not helpful. Personally. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, absolutely. I I hear you because I have the same. So sometimes you you just stay with Claude until five five AM. Even just with your phone you got a lot to do with your second bread. Dusty Gulleson: That's the worst thing about it, is my clouds on my phone. And I've created a through Slack I can chat with Claude on my desktop now. And I'm Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: like, I need to I need to turn that off. Because what do I do when I get home? My wife's like, What are you doing? Because I'll be ta I talk to it. I don't I don't type very much anymore. I talk. My Oleksij Rak: Mitte. Dusty Gulleson: wife's like, Who are you talking to? And I'm like, I'm talking to Claude. She's like, It's not a person. It's Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: like, okay, fine, I'm talking to the software. She's like, put it up. She's very much my my wife's not anti technology, but she does see the danger of it really taking over. I mean, we have three kids. One of 'em's a big gamer, so it it can upsc it can consume you. And, you know. It is what it is. It's just like Oleksij Rak: How how do you like we discussed like about keeping up? It's not possible. But still, you know, the the the train is moving really fast and technology is moving really fast. And it it's it's weird because the the whole w the whole world is not keeping up. All the people in the world they are not keeping up with the the advancement of technology or fewer frontier labs and this gap is growing and and what what what then? Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, it's Oleksij Rak: What what's next? Because I I know that I am constantly learning. I am learning with a pace that was not possible like even a year before. And co constantly checking, Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: trying something new, but I'm not keeping up. I I see that I'm not keeping keeping up. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. I I think those frontier labs are great and everything, but at the end of the day, wherever they're going It's kind of like a a flash flood, right? I feel like that's what AI is. You're in the desert and this wall of water is coming and it's going in, but it doesn't it just keeps going. It doesn't get to soak in. And what really needs is time for some of this stuff to soak in. And I'm not worried about I like, yeah, yeah, Frontier Labs keep on going. But adoption of it is gonna be very it's gonna take time. People are not gonna adopt it. And I also think when you go very fast. You make a lot of mistakes and and you can see that happening right now. I mean, what was I looking at the other day? Like some forty percent of new hacks are all AI generated daily. You know, it's just like so a lot of this is me just sitting down and and going, Yeah, it's going fast, but if for it to ever really work, it needs to be absorbed by people. It needs to the the relationships have it. So I'm not worried in the short term. I think I think if you're a a CEO of a company and you're not in it every day and working on it and thinking about it, you're in you're not necessarily a hundred percent in trouble 'cause you can always hire people. But you should be knowing that this is coming down the road and you should find ways to integrate it. Oleksij Rak: Every CEO is every f no maybe not CEO but every founder is thinking about it. I I've had about sixty interviews this year already. And like every every single one is if it comes down to founders, you know, every single one is is worried and is is is is is is searching his and is is experimenting. Because as a founder as a entrepreneur, Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, I I I wouldn't be worried. Oleksij Rak: yeah. Dusty Gulleson: I wouldn't be I'm I wouldn't be yeah, as a founder I'm not worried. I'm I am my anxiety comes from are we making the right investment of time in in this area? I we're making investments in AI, but there's so many areas to invest in AI. I mean so many opportunities, you know. Should I spend this week building this agent? Is it really gonna actually move the needle? Or and then sometimes I'm like, I'm gonna build this agent because it's gonna be a learning experience for me. Cause I need to like learn this and this concept and everything. and you might not use that agent. Like I I have a pipeline agent for making content right now. It's eight agents working together, building content. And I paused it for a while because I just don't have the time to focus on it. But But it's it's a important thing to know, you know. Content is king. at the end of the day. People that's how we get all anxious about AI is we're reading other people's content. So yeah, it's it's hard to know where to invest your time. Oleksij Rak: It is. what do you think the future of services are? Like both of us love run some services companies and and especially engineering services companies and and they are changing. So they are changing a lot nowadays. but Dusty Gulleson: They are. They're changing how you do work, right? Oleksij Rak: yeah, but but still, you know, like the the pace of the technology advancement and the remain the majority of people in the world, you know, it's the gap is growing. Probably there is some space for technology companies, but it's not necessarily in in pure engineering anymore. Dusty Gulleson: No, it's not. I mean the fact that I'm coding stuff is ridiculous, to be quite honest with you. Oleksij Rak: Same same here. I haven't been Dusty Gulleson: It's Oleksij Rak: coding for fifteen years and nowadays I'm acclooded coding. Dusty Gulleson: I I've I put stuff into production for clients that I have no Maybe six months ago I couldn't even know how to do. But I have a personal agent that just trains me and then you can set it off on its own task and then come back and check on it in three hours and it's like, that looks pretty good. Now is the coding perfect? I don't know. Does it work? One hundred percent. You know, and then I every every week I learn about a new way to audit your own code for security or whatever. But you know, I I have my own super base. I have Git, I've got, you know, a render account. I've got all this stuff that I never would have had six months ago. Like I didn't even know what those things existed. I would have to, you know, talk to one of our developers and say, Hey, I need this, and it would take six months to get done. Now I get it done in a week. It's that's you're right, it's changing rapidly. And if your team is not using AI to develop code or at least help them, I think you're screwed. quite honest. I I the most valuable people are the people that know how to use AI in conjunction with their software development. Like I wish I was a software developer because it's like having an excavator as opposed to, you know, using a shovel. It's crazy. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, and you can do a lot and like all the business owners are nowadays looking for efficiency, especially in certain issues, like mm we work a lot a lot with travel and in travel margin is really thin. So everybody's trying to look for some operational efficiency. And seeing that that Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, he Oleksij Rak: a lot of work can be done with AI and probably they don't need the the teams of that size, you know, that that that brings trouble to to the industry, to the services industry. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, it's it's funny, there's so many opportunities. Like I I I know our our legal council uses AI to go through sixty page contracts within five minutes and it redlines exactly and it knows the law. It knows the state law, it knows, you know, what the industry standard is, like we've trained it with skills, and so what would have taken like five thousand dollars with a legal fees now takes us maybe 400 bucks, you know, where we get a final sign off from our lawyer who takes, you know, 30 minutes on it and goes, Yeah, that looks good. Whereas before it would be like back and forth and back and forth, and ugh, it's what a pain. What a pain. So yeah. Yeah, I think legal's the first place that every owner or founder should you know, spin up a skill for their quad and Cut that out of the way. That's such a junk amount of money. And I I mean, Oleksij Rak: Yeah, for sure. Dusty Gulleson: I don't hate lawyers, but man, I I I hate the law fees. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Well wha what what other industries can be disrupted besides legal? What what other industries especially since you're Dusty Gulleson: Well I I think the Oleksij Rak: sitting here you can build any product in the world nowadays and in quite fast and what would you do? Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Yeah. I think I think the baseline is any industry that has objective data like syntax, content that's consistent, that has structure and process that's defined can be completely upended right now. I I think marketing companies are screwed, to be quite honest, because everyone's just gonna have their AI do their marketing for them. And constantly work it. Like those people that send you five million in you know emails a day. Hey, I can get you ten more leads. I'm like, I don't need you anymore. I just don't need you anymore. I can do that just fine. I I'll have my AI go out to LinkedIn and go into Apollo I.O. and enrich my own data for me. I don't need these companies. so I'd say marketing definitely easy from a service industry standpoint. content companies, I still think you need content people to sign off on it and and make sure it's humanized correctly. But all the research that goes into it, you know, we have one agent that uses perplexity to to go out and research all the stuff around a topic. I have another s agent that's a strategy agent that goes and looks at all our competitors and what they're ranking for and what we're ranking at and comes up with an idea. We should write content on this topic. And I know from and it looks at our tickets and our system and goes, I know we solved these problems and these five clients. And then it says, Here's the brief. And then have Perplexity take it and enrich it with content from from the you know, third parties that are, you know, ranked pretty high. And then I have a writing agent that takes that brief and the strategy and writes the brief. And then, you know, you keep on going down the pipeline. And that stuff used to take weeks. You know, weeks. But there's so much data that we have that you can mine. Data mining is gonna be huge. Yeah, there's a lot of data people already have in their company and they're thinking that they have to create content. You already have content. You just need to organize it correctly. that's one. I think the gaming environment is gonna be disrupted. I think gaming's such a big industry that now creating engines for gaming are gonna be very easy to do. Are even Great games on top of engines that already exist. You know, you can tell an idea to an AI. I was childing my son this. I'm like, you know, you love gaming, let's let's disrupt some games. You know, and you know, he's he's seventeen. He's like, That sounds interesting. So I think gaming is a big one. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah. Dusty Gulleson: I I I have some ideas on that. But yeah, there's what industry can't be disrupted. I mean, even like a like a roofing company, I was thinking the other day, try to sell my company one day, you know, in ten, fifteen years and buy like a labor-based company, but soon you're gonna have robots that are gonna embody AI and that's gonna take a lot of that stuff off. What did I see the other day? I saw a robot laying tile. Crazy. Laying tile perfectly in a house. I mean, that's that's used to be a real big skill, tileing, you know, making sure it's correct and level. This robot had it completely done. It's crazy. I don't know, you're you're having my mind work now, like and I'm just gonna keep just thinking out loud here. I mean, you've seen it with music too. Music's been disrupted. Yeah, people making new songs and and new versions of stuff. It's crazy. Oleksij Rak: There is a big trend nowadays, emerging trend that people people want to consume human content. I've seen that a lot in like in different areas, especially like since I mentioned travel. In travel the peop people want to hear to see and hear content from from other people. People kind of feel this AI generating content and are looking for for for another human being instead of behind the content, you know. So no, what happens if everybody is using this like a manch in marketing? what what happens if everybody will be having t this kind of agents that doing marketing job? So you know it's agents fighting with agents, competing with agents so Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. I think the diff the differentiation that's gonna ha be in the future here is you're gonna ha it's gonna be an arms race with AI, right? People are gonna constantly build more and more AI agents and it's gonna be just kind of a war in that. But the ones are gonna win out are the people that actually have the AI lead people to the actual human and the relationships are gonna be the ones that that went out. Being able to talk to someone and understand their situation, be able to empathize with them, those are the people that are gonna win at the end of the day, I think. AI is just a tool. It is not is not the the relationship builder. The person still has to build that relationship, still has to make sure that people feel understood and heard. The nuance that a human has, you just can't get that from an agent in some ways. Just the the idea of an embodied person. Maybe one day it'll get there. Maybe. I'm not a big believer AGI will will will come out, but maybe. I'm I'm not as not as confident as Elon is. But he knows more than me. He's a smarter guy. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Dusty Gulleson: Maybe, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know. I I think the relationship centric organization is gonna win in the long run. and using AI to get you to those relationships is is probably gonna be the the combination factor. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, kind of. The the content creators industry right now is booming, so it's getting bigger and bigger. then Dusty Gulleson: You it's Oleksij Rak: yeah. Dusty Gulleson: It's funny 'cause I I remember like five years ago I had a friend of mine, very forward looking. He's like he he sold his company and he's I was like, What are you gonna He's like, I'm gonna just make content. It's like what are you talking about? So I he said the future's content. I was like, Really? He's like and you know what? He's doing great now. He's been making content like crazy. And he was right. Because people people are hungry, super hungry. To consume new, interesting, you know, content that's relative to them, targeted content, right? And so if you're in a niche, I I think that's what all those influencers are, they're in a very small niche that people are looking at and they s they want that. And so if you can create a bunch of content that's niche driven, you're gonna be really good. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. I'm seeing the same. So there are friends friends of ours who are who are doing content in some business content in like specific niches and selling horses, I don't know, educating people. So it just works. So I they're doing quite quite well. Dusty Gulleson: You know what's gonna be disrupted when you talk about that? Education. I think Oleksij Rak: for sure. Dusty Gulleson: the I think the university is almost dead in the future. Because you can build your own university. Overnight. Your curriculum, you can you can I had an agent create so I'm taking my daughter to Japan. I were leaving Wednesday and we're gonna go for 10 days. And just she loves all things Japanese. So We're actually going to a stationary festival of all things. so we're going there and I wanted to be educational. And so I've been working with Claude for the last couple of months, getting the schedule, getting things back and forth. And so last night I was working and I was like, Hey, I want you to create a brief each day based on where we're going, give some historical context, some education. And then I want you to weave all our sites that we're going to over next 10 days together in a comprehensive kind of educational framework. It was amazing. It's amazing. Like I have a brief each day that we'll both get a brief emailed to us about what we were doing that day, what we need to look for, what we're learning, some of the questions we're gonna be answered when we go to like a temple or a museum or some kind of experience. So I I think education in the future is a kid is gonna be assessed by agents with their capabilities, their standards, and then they're gonna you're gonna sculpt their degree for them or their learning experience for them. And the the idea of of like a Harvard will be more of a a university would be more of a Oleksij Rak: Networking. Dusty Gulleson: Like a concierge. A concierge Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: and a networking environment. You're you're gonna go and learn custom things in that niche at that kind of university and they're gonna help you with the relational. It's gonna be more of a nonlinear, non non you know, stair step kind of thing. Everyone's gonna learn at their own their own speed. So I d I don't know if the degree is gonna be as as mm as important, I think. You might have the university being the certifier of your education. You know, hey, yeah, you did this custom thing, blah, blah, blah, and you meet certain standards, but you went about it totally different. We're gonna certify it and we're gonna introduce you to this network of people that you're gonna be part of. You you grew up with them. So I I think that's education, honestly, is is gonna be wild. I think the American public school system. is terrible. Terrible. Don't even have and we could overnight changes to where a kid comes in through at kindergarten, gets assessed and starts being get custom learning environments set for them. I'm excited about that. I'd love to see that change. Oleksij Rak: I think it's if even bigger, so it's If before access to education was based on on the finance you have, right now you can Dusty Gulleson: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: like easily access any kind of information. Right now it's like your education mostly depends on your willingness to to to learn. And if you're eager to learn and to to advance, you you will be. If not, then you won't. And Dusty Gulleson: But I think I I think a lot of that though, Alexi, is eagerness to learn. Like my son, super smart kid, very smart, has ADHD. If he doesn't find something interesting, it doesn't matter what you do or say, he just won't do it. I mean, he he he takes advanced chemistry classes, advanced math classes, advanced all his classes, but one class doesn't work for him. He's like, I don't care. And he He he is smart enough to have straight A's and everything, but it's a matter of interest. And I think what you're gonna have in the new educational system is the idea of being interested in learning is completely related to the the the topic that you're offering and also how you're delivering that educational experience. I don't think I think we are natural learners, human beings want to learn. We absorb things. You know, look kids from an early age just absorb, absorb, absorb. But I think the education system in the States is like, no, no, you have to absorb this crap. And a lot of kids are like, I don't even care about that crap. I'm not gonna even try to absorb. So it kills their desire to learn. And so I think the education system in the future is gonna be like, Hey, we're gonna customize your experience. So that you are ready to consume this. And yes, we'll stretch you. There's there's times you need to stretch someone and go learn something that's outside your spectrum. But how you deliver that. And my my son will tell you, he's like, he had English teach English classes, you know, in high school, which were terrible. But when he got to an English course where the teacher was good and they taught it in a way he could consume it, he's got a straight A. It's crazy. But his other English classes were like, Oleksij Rak: Yep. Dusty Gulleson: sees because they're just horrible. They weren't customized to So yeah, that's I I agree with you. I think the future of education is definitely the learner, but I think we can help learners that have a hard time it's absorbing get on a on ramp. A lot of kids are being left behind because they're being forced in a one size fits all kind of environment. That's terrible. Oleksij Rak: And especially nowadays with like you can make one person business and w which was quite complicated before. nowadays you can like run as a person or group of two or three people, you can run a business and quite quite a big and successful one. So it really you know, the ent entrepreneurship also changes. And this Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: it's if this education will be like moving towards like well what what you want to achieve. 'Cause I'm constantly learning nowadays because I Dusty Gulleson: Yep. Oleksij Rak: have some vision, I have some goal and I'm just moving there because I'm entrepreneur. And you can do it nowadays from a young age. Quite a young age. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. I think you hit on something that's really important and you just said it. I think you can entrepreneurship is really completely dependent on your purpose. And if you don't have a purpose, you're not gonna with anything, learning with, you know, a job with anything the purpose really does drive it. And, you know, I'm not a you know, I like Simon Seneca and I don't wanna preach his the why thing all the time, but it is important to ask yourself, Why are you doing what you're doing? and sometimes a lot of people are just doing what they're doing because they gotta make a paycheck. And that's a good why. Sometimes, you know, you gotta pay the mortgage or pay for the, you know, your kids' schooling or whatever it is. But I think the more people I I think this where university can really help, or the education framework, helping kids understand their why and their purpose and their s and their skills. And I think once you get someone going You know, I wanna be a best chef in the world. Like I love cooking or whatever it might be. They're gonna take off and AI can assist that. But I I think the the biggest service people could ever get in this world of AI is someone that can help shepherd them and counsel them to find their purpose. 'Cause that'll that'll change everything. Oleksij Rak: Yep, for sure. Moving back to our services business. Have it your client. No, no, no, no problem. Dusty Gulleson: Sorry. Oleksij Rak: That's that's a great one. I I also have a daughter, so I'm I'm thinking over like what's next for her because I have no idea Dusty Gulleson: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: well where where to move nowadays. but back to our Dusty Gulleson: It'll be a lot different than you imagine, that's for sure, right? Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I c I cannot tell her go it's go into AT because what's AT nowadays? Dusty Gulleson: Ha ha ha. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah, back to yeah Dusty Gulleson: Sure. Oleksij Rak: yeah sorry, sorry, please. Yeah, Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, back to service business. Go ahead. Oleksij Rak: yeah. How did this client's landscape change change recently? Because for us for us it's changing. How how did it affect you? Affect you? What kind of clients are coming and and what kind of business what sizes and w what are the demands recently? Dusty Gulleson: I think the clients are shaking out for sure. There there's clients that are very forward thinking and trying to get ahead of certain things. And there's some clients that are I'm not saying they're they're ignoring things, but they don't know how to grasp it. So, you know, I I'm thinking of three or four clients right now that we have AI initiatives in front of that you they've been clients of us for a while. And we we did free, you know, a free assessment. Basically us going in and we know what they do in their business. And I'm like, hey, here's two areas that you really need to focus on and they all get very excited. They get right to the finish line. The statement of work is in front of them. And then they don't sign. So that's one group of clients is they see it, but they're not willing to grasp it. Because there's there's there's it's not an understanding and there's some fear and it's weird. Then you have the other clients, which are usually larger, that have more more to risk, right? You know, when you're a small company, mid-sized company, you can kind of swim in that area for a while. But the larger companies have a lot stiffer competition. And so they'll come to us and say, We have these eight massive initiatives that we have identified that we need to work on. It's almost like too much work, right? And and we'll say, Okay, let's start tackling. And they're like, We want it all done right away. And we here's here's a bucket, here's a bucket of money. Just do it, you know. And so there's the wait and see kind of clients that are interested. And then there's the clients that are like, we need to be there yesterday. And that's the tension for us is like as as a partner with these clients, our job is to help them focus. And the biggest problem that we're seeing in a lot of clients, regardless of whether they want to do it right away or or wait and see, is it's uncovering a lot of uncomfortable conversations for them. mainly around how they do business. because the first thing to do when you do any any AI initiative is let's look at your people and your processes. And when you start having that conversation, it gets very uncomfortable very fast. And the bigger firms are willing to have that because they have less of a of a personal loyalty to an individual. And but Also, the people that you're talking to in those big companies, when you interview them and you do your assessment, you find out they have never documented any processes. And they're like, no, no, we're a really world-run company. I'm like, No, you're not. Your your people are good. Thank God you have those people there, but you haven't documented if this person goes, you're screwed. You're gonna have to figure out things all over again. And so we spend a lot of time talking about processes, boring topics like governance. How do you manage your data? Who's in charge of data? Because if you don't have a a good compliance and governance structure in your organization, you're gonna and you let AI loose on it, you're gonna have drift so fast in your con in your in your organization, and you're gonna be like, this AI sucks. I'm like, no, the AI doesn't suck. You actually suck because you haven't done the hard work. And so a lot of the initial conversations that we have finds it we get to that point and they don't want to have that tough conversation. Usually the small ones. The big ones like, okay, we'll have that conversation. And we're like and we're working with some higher education institutions, which are very slow. And then we're working we're working right now with a big manufacturing company. And we're telling them like, before you can get the benefit AI, you have to start running your business like you should have been running it before. Let's let's do let's do process documentation. Let's do process engineering. Because AI is the smartest employee you ever had that knows nothing about your organization. Right. That's what I always tell them. And if you feed them bad process, you're gonna get bad output. But if you feed it good process, and you're gonna get much better output. So those are the first conversations. And I think that differentiates the smaller from the bigger companies overall is that the bigger ones are willing to have that hard conversation. Smaller ones, like we've been doing it this way for 20 years, you know. I just want you to make it faster. I'm like, I can't make this go faster if you don't understand how you do your own work. You know? And and then you start uncovering shadow data and shadow processes and all that stuff. And it's it's a lot of work to do it right. Oleksij Rak: You're stepping in to to to automate some of the processes and some data streams. So yeah, Dusty Gulleson: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: it in in this case yeah it makes sense. Now for us it's a bit different because we're seeing the bigger clients Like everybody's trying to build their own modes, you know, and then Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: so they are trying to secure their business by building the modes around and then like trying to keep their the knowledge inside, the the the the intellectual property inside. So they are not that eager to to like to to to give the work away. But there are slow there are other clients like you mentioned. They they're coming 'cause they so they have this formal and they like need everything yesterday. So they understand that they're miss missing out on this market. And they see seeing market is moving, competition is moving, and we need it yesterday, you know. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, I I I I agree more than that. the mode thing is a very interesting thing. I I I think Oleksij Rak: Something new. It wasn't here before. At least I I haven't experienced it. But nowadays I'm hearing mode, mode, mod. Everybody's talking about mode. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, yeah. I mean SAS SASPR the boat used to be, you know, they had this a process that was automated, but now you can automate that process, right? So that's gone. I you know, I always talk about how the software layer is collapsing. And, you know, it it's software is not what it used to be. And I almost think that screens are gonna be on demand in the future. It's not gonna be something that you go to this one screen and you have drop downs. You're just gonna ask questions of your AI and it's gonna produce a screen. So that you can digest the information, right? when I was talking to we were interviewing some other f folks the other day for some roles and they asked about the CTO role, and I said, I don't think the CTO role is gonna be around much longer. I don't think it's I think you need someone that's a director of development and a director of of agency services or something like that. But the CTO role because is not important. It's not it's a bottleneck now. It's not actually a an enhancement because AI gives a lot of the tools and stuff and analysis that CTOs would do and it sends it it sends it to the whole organization, right? So one of the things I I I the the change of work that we're trying to do is I want account managers and I think the account manager, project manager and the strategists are all going to collapse into one role. because project management what's go ahead. Oleksij Rak: So it means yes, sir. So it means CTO SRL is is not needed anymore. It's not engineering leadership, but it's CTO SROL. Dusty Gulleson: You're gonna have a different role. It's not gonna be what CTO was in the in the in the old times. I I don't Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: I I just I I just don't see it because you know in our company it's interesting to see people that rise and fall with AI. And I think the person in the company that's a strategist is the most valuable person in the long term. because they think about the problems. People that think about the problems and try to provide a solution are the most valuable people. And that's why founders do so well, because that's what we did, right? We we thought about problems and we thought about solutions for it. But in your organization, if you can find a good strategist, they tend to be almost close to account management, right? Because they they understand the client and working with the client. And I think the project management role is kind of going away in some ways. You're You're you're eliminating it 'cause you can automate project management. What's project management? But setting up meetings, you know? It's you can just eliminate that and go directly. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. It's an overcome. So right now one person can work as a as a team before and and only by that you eliminate a lot of communication, a lot of management, prioritization and all that kind of crap. So Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, you're you're flattening a lot of the organizational layer right now. A AI's doing that, I think, from just Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dusty Gulleson: a pure automation standpoint. Oleksij Rak: But you know, we call it like we think I I think that probably the future is some kind of engineering builders, like pe people who can build and deliver and who can understand what to build. It's it's kind of mixture of product engineering management skills in in one person. if if a person has this kind of mixture and has some clue in engineering, it's it's it's it's a really powerful employee. So Dusty Gulleson: No, especially if you pair it with a bunch of agents that are mature agents, development agents. you know, you you don't need CTO used to be, you know, security centric. You can have a security agent that audits everything and it's constantly updating itself against threats, right? You don't need a bottleneck of a CTO and everybody can a access that security agent in your whole organization. And before anything goes to production, it runs through that. same thing with, you know, compliance for Accessibility. CTO used to set accessibility standards based on WCAG and the states and all kinds of stuff. Now that stuff is flattened. It goes straight into the actual development right away. It's just it's baked in. So there's so many things the CTO used to have responsibility and control with, no longer is necessary. So I honestly think that role is just it's the same thing with chief information officer, right? I think chief strategy officer might be a more important role than all of them, to be honest with you. Because they're you have to be constantly learning and thinking and looking out there. But anyway, organizational s stuff. I I think about this a lot when I think about our our company. But yeah. Oleksij Rak: What do think the future of engineering is? Because like you know, Clo Claude says, cloud cloud developers, Boris Cherney is he said like with Cloud Cod we have solved programming. We we have solved cod coding, but you know, solving coding doesn't for me doesn't mean solving engineering. What's the future of engineering? And you know, especially Dusty Gulleson: That's a hundred percent true. Yeah, I Oleksij Rak: w when like so so sorry a year or two ago if an A ten was really popular. Well this like there were a lot lots of videos like okay engineer c programming is solved because because we have semi visual approach Dusty Gulleson: Well not so. Oleksij Rak: to to the to to combine APIs together with an A10 but Dusty Gulleson: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: but nowadays like we started this discussion after after cigar cigar talk. we started about building hardness and so on so forth. It it's already engineering, it's not so simple. It's not as easy as opening cloth and chatting with cloth. So build building a proper harness with especially lots lots of gauges that can be s should be orchestrated somehow and so on so forth. It it's it's it's complicated engineering tasks. It requires some engineering mindset. So what are your thoughts on on engineering in overall? Like what's the future of engineering? Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Yeah. I I agree that coding may be solved. Anything that's objective data and syntax. Yeah, sure, that's solved. But you but you're not solving problem solving. i engineering is about problem solving at the at its very core. What you've done with like cloud code and all these AIs is you've you've you've enhanced the tool the tooling set that you have access to. So you can do things faster, you can iterate faster, you can test faster. You all those things are helpful. If if you just look like a a at at a an engineering a physical engineering shop, it's like the difference between getting a a hand lathe and a power lathe, right? You you you immediately increase the ability to do more faster. And I think engineering, featuring engineering is gonna be very problem centric. Like understanding problems, jesting them, using AI to kind of test and iterate through solutions faster. And I think good engineers in the future are going to be ones that can iterate and use AI to iterate as fast as they can to try to eliminate the problems that they're trying to solve. I also think the future engineering is the ability to break down things far yeah and I I see this in AI. You know, you come up with a really good idea and you start creating your, you know, your MD file about the concept you're doing. So when I do a agent, I probably by the time I'm done, I spend maybe two days working with Claude and I have six thousand lines in my markdown file describing what I want, how it works. Then you take that to make it really effective, is then you tell Cloud, break this down into small working pieces, like one piece at a time. And after each piece, we're gonna test that piece and then we're gonna, you know, bake it in, then we're gonna test another piece. I think early days of Cloud is like Hey, build this whole thing. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: And you build all these things and it it's all clunky, right? And I think engineering is really about breaking things down into smaller and smaller pieces and understanding how those pieces interact and how they work. And so the future the future of engineering is bright. I think it's really I think being an engineer, really good. But it's gonna be more on understanding the problem and using the tools to help iterate out of that problem. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, rather Dusty Gulleson: In small chunks. Oleksij Rak: yeah, ro rather than moving pixels, you know. Dusty Gulleson: Exactly. Exactly. pi pixels are are so dot com, right? But Oleksij Rak: Yeah, probably pixels or solved finally. Dusty Gulleson: But it I I try to explain this to someone the other day. I was like, I think the screen is dead. having screens is just not important anymore. And I I see people working with Claude and and you know, Codex and they're building screens. I'm like, that's not the problem you need to be solving. You need to be solving what is the problem the screens are trying to show you. And you that I I find that even with myself. I I I can get lost down in a rabbit hole of how it's rendered. instead of focusing on the problem that's trying to render. Does that sense? You know, people Oleksij Rak: Yeah, okay. Dusty Gulleson: are like, I want to see this in a pie chart. Don't worry about the pie chart right now. Worry about the problem solving. And eventually you should have it. So you just talk to it and go, where are we on fourth quarter XYZ? And it'll just produce a screen for that conversation. You don't need to have a screen that you go to all the time. And it it dawned on me because I I built a A data reporting interface for one of our teams just because I wanted to know more stuff. So I got an API into this ERP software we have, and I wanted to find out certain things. And it just produces it all the time. I'm like, and what it's producing is an answer to a question. It's not producing a pie chart. And I think that's it's a different way of thinking. When you think about engineering, I I want it to produce an answer. I don't want it to produce a Web page. I don't want it to produce a screen. Does what it produced answer the question you actually have? And so from future of engineering is do I actually understand the question that's being asked? Do I understand how to answer that question? Those are really different skill sets than programming. Oleksij Rak: Absolutely. That's a really great point actually. I'm I'm hearing that a lot about about that future is not about screens or apps, future is about yeah, answering the questions because L L even nowadays can produce you any kind of report easily, you know. if you want to visualize some some data Dusty Gulleson: It's garbage. Oleksij Rak: and the data you just you just get this kind of report Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: visualization. So you yesterday s yesterday I was c trying to compare some numbers and so on. So I just asked like sh show me some charts. It did one time script. I've seen the chart and then that's basically it. It was thrown away. I got my information I got my answer. So I I didn't I don't need to be prepared Dusty Gulleson: Ex exactly. Exactly. And Oleksij Rak: to see that. Dusty Gulleson: you know what's interesting too, Alexey, on this is is historical data Be before we used to we we collected data so we could look at it over time in the past. And the screens were all about looking over time. I don't think you need that anymore. I think when you're like I'm looking at like some financial software that we have and I'm pulling data out of it. I focus more now on the question I'm trying to figure out from our financial data instead of going into the financial data and playing with it. Does that make sense? I d I it it's it's a different way of approaching problem solving. I'm thinking more about what I'm trying to understand. and sometimes it's good to look at a screen and play around with it and blah, blah, blah, I guess. But the more I'm working, the more I'm thinking about, I don't need the historical data, I need the context. historically for an answer. I don't need the data. I need the context and I need the the delta on numbers. Cause before I used to print out reams and reams of spreadsheets and look through them and stuff. And that's no longer necessary. And it takes up just lots of brain space to try to go through spreadsheets. Just go get to the answer as fast as you can once you understand the question. I don't know. I I might be rambling a little bit, but I I think f when it comes to screens and things like that, I think they've almost held us captive. Like you can only think in the context of that screen. And if you more you put that screen aside and start thinking the context of what you're trying to understand and solve, and then have it produce an example of it, the better. 'Cause I I can I can think of it dawned on me like maybe last month or so when I was just like going through rooms of spreadsheets on something. My my world was confined to that spreadsheet. You know, that's all I could see. I couldn't see all the other context stuff. And again, going to the the second brain idea with the contextual graph, when you when you start looking at things from a context basis and not being stuck in a screen, you're gonna see a lot more. I'm gonna have to refine what I'm trying to say, but I I think you understand what I'm trying to come across here. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, absolutely. Because yeah. You got a question and it's you need to have this kind of answer. to to to to move further. And if you are stuck into like analysis of a lot of data, you just lose the context. You especially nowadays with Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: the cur current advancement of of AI technologies, you you gotta keep moving really fast and and you you need to have quick answers to your questions. to to to move to move further, without fail, Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. So for my Oleksij Rak: yeah. Dusty Gulleson: the agent I'm trying to create for my second brain right now, I'm calling it the librarian. And Oleksij Rak: I got one. Yeah, yeah. Dusty Gulleson: You have a librarian too? So my librarian's job is to look for contextual relationships I don't see. and you know, I'm looking at my context graph and all the you know, it looks like a star chart, right? Of all the lines and stars and stuff. And I'm like, what am I missing here? And it it comes back with some really crazy interesting stuff. I'm like, I didn't see it that way. So I'm constantly being Moved my context is constantly being shifted and refined. But if in the past, if I just looked at, you know, a a a siloed data source, that's all I'm seeing. Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Dusty Gulleson: And I think having the second brain idea is more about learning more about what you're absorbing and being able to have a context for it that you never seen. It's it's really fun, to be quite honest. It's really interesting. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, I've I'm also obsessed with with this idea of second brain. I'm building it for a couple of months already. So maybe maybe let's Dusty Gulleson: I can't stop. I can't stop. Oleksij Rak: chat briefly about it. So we're using cloud and obsidian for what for what I understand to visualize the day. Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: That's that's my main thing. I I'm looking at another one. So for my semantic brain, I'm using Obsidian. And that's the most important part of the brain. And then I can't even think of the tool. I'm I'm looking at another tool that's gonna be more for episodic content. And I'm I I'm not sure how I'm gonna do it yet, but I wanna take episodic content and promote it into semantic when it's ready. I I'm using the the second brain concept, the para framework. I don't know if you're using para framework. The projects, areas. I I really like that framework Oleksij Rak: not true yeah. Yeah, there is possible Dusty Gulleson: actually. I I find it to be the best, simplest framework for me to use. but there's other things that are not that I need to add to that too. So yeah, I wrestle with this all the time. Oleksij Rak: I split it into domains, projects within these domains. Domains is basically what I'm dealing with, like both private and and work. projects with within those domains. Besides, I have some journals, like short term term memory and what else? Notes. I I use a lot of notes. Like any kind of videos that's any kind of article that that did touch me some way, I just throw it into code to cloud. It knows what to deal with it. It asks me some follow-up questions. We can discuss, brainstorm it, and it it gets stored there. So Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: and and and I got a librarian who is looking around and built all these connections between data points points. So that Dusty Gulleson: Yep. Oleksij Rak: but like two two or three months later it can remind me that by the way it's we've discussed that like two months ago. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. I have it take all my conversations, any videos, and it scrapes all that, throws it into a resources, you know, podcast, whatever. Like this podcast, when it comes out, it's gonna I I have a a a an ingest agent that basically goes through my email. My email is my primary source of content that that it comes in around. So every hour, like every hour it goes through it and goes, This looks like content and it creates a backlog of Stuff I have to review. Do you want this in here? Yes, no. And then it learns, right? That's no longer important. That's so important. I get tons of newsletters that I can't read all. But I'm like, hey, read them for me. Tell me what's relevant based on what you see me doing. And I'll be like, Yeah, Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: you should you should read this this section here. I'm gonna add it to your resources. And so it just starts building stuff. And the danger is you you can start ingesting so much content into that thing. And then I use Obsidian sync. So I have it I have a server that's my master. and that cloud's sitting on there always running, right? It's never off. And then my desktop I work on and then my phone, all that. So learning the infrastructure and how that all works together and having your agent read all that stuff and ingest it's been quite a journey for me. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, but I've you can do a lot with clouds and with proper agents behind to build your second brain. But I find obsidian to be limiting nowadays. It's it's always stuck in synchronization that kind of stuff. Because my brain has has grown a bit and you know it's it's always stuck in sync issues. So I d I d I don't know yet because Dusty Gulleson: What are you gonna move to? I I I I it's funny you mentioned that 'cause I just w saw a guy last night that used Claude Code and a week built his own obsidian version. Oleksij Rak: I also seen that I started using Obsidian because it's quite a powerful tool, but nowadays it's Dusty Gulleson: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: it's continuously stuck. So prob probably I need to visualize my d and Obsidian presents you data only in the way that it's structured in within the Obsidian, plus it gets you know get this graph, you know, but you can basically build something f by your own to to visualize the data the way you want. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I saw this guy build it last night. I spent a couple hours just walking through his stuff and it's like and he said it totally took him a week. I I believe it. Yeah, it doesn't take much. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dusty Gulleson: But man, it's it can be overwhelming, right? Oleksij Rak: Yeah. It is. And you know, s sitting on like I'm having this podcast, so it's like about sixty interviews, like and I'm chatting with founders and executives, all of them are dealing like working within some business segment and having some different problems. All of that together, you know, it came accumulates and I'm trying to to use aging to extract all the information, hypotheses, pain points, signals, whatever out of that and You you get a lot of ideas, you get a lot of hypotheses and I have no idea how to prioritize all of that and how to find time to to to deal with that. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. What what do you mainly work in? In co work or co cloud code? Oleksij Rak: Glad code. Co Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: cowork was limiting and so I switched to Glad code. Dusty Gulleson: It is very limiting. I I always I always it's interesting how you grow through that. There's some things I throw into cowork because in cron jobs Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: and stuff like that I don't mind co work doing some of that stuff. But cloud code at the end of the day is do you use a separate IDE? Like I I use Oleksij Rak: I don't know. Dusty Gulleson: warp I use warp quite a bit. I I like the warp structure. Oleksij Rak: No, if I use I use cloud cloud desktop cloud. Cloud code in in desktop version is is quite great for me. And you can access it nowadays from your phone. So all the sessions you can't have in your desktop cloud can be accessed access from your phone, so it's also great. So I can I can throw throw in few sessions and ask him to work on something Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: and then go somewhere and have have access to to everything from my phone. Dusty Gulleson: That crazy. That's Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah. Dusty Gulleson: just crazy. I love this stuff. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, and with with regard to to to yeah to the crone jobs I I have it's like two t every two minutes heartbeat. That it just I have some simple scripts that runs in crone and and it knows where to check if there is anything any task to do. And if there is it fires up the crone session and and then a c cloud session and then c cloud cloud does it work. So it's all Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Super Oleksij Rak: So otherwise, you know, fi firing up like a clot session every two minutes is costly. But but simple script, it's okay. So well when it sees that there is anything to do for for Clot, then it starts clot and Clot does the job. So yeah. So I absolutely hear you what you built with second Dusty Gulleson: cool. Oleksij Rak: brain because when the moment you start building it, you'll it really empowers you. It really opens up a lot of ideas and relations, interconnections between the data. And it's it's it's called second second brain brain within comes community, not Dusty Gulleson: Okay. Oleksij Rak: not for fun because it is a second brain. You see I just dump there everything I have in my brain and it it just Dusty Gulleson: Yep. Oleksij Rak: somehow collects it and matches it and I can access this information anytime. It's like a net network of information. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, I was I was having a debate, a bunch of my fellow CEOs were on a Slack channel at the Bureau, that's organization. But one of the debates was like, is it making us stupider? And my thing is like one one of the CEOs wrote, you know, I don't ride a bike very much anymore, but I can get back on a bike. It's not making me stupider. It's enhancing areas that I need to be enhanced in. And I I think that's the second brain is not a crutch. It's an enablement tool. And so I I think there's there's really two camps. People are like, it's you know, AI is just gonna make us dumb. I'm like, if you want to make you dumb, maybe, but it's not. It's it's actually something that's gonna make you far smarter and far better at solving problems. My biggest sh go ahead. Oleksij Rak: I've never built been more productive and more enabled in my life, probably as I'm now. Because it just Dusty Gulleson: Yep. Yep, agreed. Oleksij Rak: it just enables you. And it it depends on you. If if you wanted to just solve solve some simple problems for you and you the meanwhile do nothing, then you know Dusty Gulleson: Yep. Oleksij Rak: it doesn't make you smarter, but but it enables you to move first and explore deeper and to explore further, you know. You d don't need to you You keep l high level of context and you can like you know, in the past people used executives were used to to all especially founders were used to like take some break to just from a higher level of context Dusty Gulleson: Thank you. Yeah. Oleksij Rak: to th think something over, you know. Nowadays it you you don't need to probably because you d are not drilling down into all the every single detail. It empowers you not to do to do that. Dusty Gulleson: Indeed, Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: indeed. Very, very fun, man. I I love I love talking about this stuff. And I love learning from other people that are doing it 'cause I I think one of the good characteristics to have in this next it's even more, it's always a good character is have the humility to go, I don't know everything. I I I meet some people in the past that are like, This is how I'm doing it, this is the only way I'm doing it. And I'm like, Man, have a little humility, learn from other people and You're gonna be far more efficient. So I I think AI and this whole world is just opening up so many doors. And as long as you're willing to learn from others, you're gonna do great. It's just I I I remember when I first started thinking about even a little bit of AI like six months ago. And between now and then, it's like I don't even know that person from six months ago. I don't I don't even know how why why I was doing the things they're doing. It's like every day it's like something more multiplying. So yeah. Well, I'd be interested in what you're gonna do for your second brain if you're gonna go out of obsidian because I can see the limits too. it's it's starting for sure. Oleksij Rak: It is limiting. It is limiting in the way it pre presents data. It is limiting in the way it's it it's not it's not efficient. So you want it now and it's not there now. You need to wait for Obsidian to synchronize and it's like, come on. I know I have this information. for for me nowadays, like for mob my mobile it's easier to open Clot and ask Cloud, even though it takes Thirty seconds, you know, it gives me the answer. Even even though I know where the document is in the exit where I should look at it's it's first an open cloud nowadays. So yeah. And I also built you know the was the voice interface to Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. That's that's funny you said that. Oleksij Rak: the cloud. So I'm using some telegram, whatever, so where I can just send a voice message and I I get response back from Cloud. So it's also yeah. Dusty Gulleson: That's very, very cool. So you you you're just using Telegram as an agent, as a voice Oleksij Rak: Some sometimes for f for some one off tasks, you know, you don't need to open Clot and wait for it to check out like in the cloud to check out your your your whole vault and and run it. so it takes time. So I got clot running on my computer which is immediate and telegram is interface to it for some one off tasks like tell me something and it just goes and tells me something. And has like twenty messages of history so it can reiterate previous conversations. So it's just Dusty Gulleson: How how do you manage memory right now? Like when you're working? Oleksij Rak: which memory which memory? Dusty Gulleson: Like just memory within Claude. Are you constantly updating your memory and obsidian with what you're talking about? Or like the difference between episodic memory and like short term memory? Oleksij Rak: I have I have I have a couple layers of layers of memory. First is I've repeated completely redone clot's auto memory. because clothes auto memory is stored somewhere within clot, I want to store it in my in my my my knowledge base. So I just repeated it for my purpose and simplified it because clot memory is used for programming while at at I'm doing like my knowledge management, you know. So this is Dusty Gulleson: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: first one. second one is I have on s on schedule how it's c it's called journaling. So it Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: looks into th through all of my sessions, which sessions are news, it updates some Dusty Gulleson: And Oleksij Rak: database, local database, and it summarizes the sessions into into journal. That if within the sex sessions we we discussed this and that, this decision we are taken, this artifact was created. Dusty Gulleson: Uh-huh. Oleksij Rak: And artifact can be some markdown within the the vault or can be some separate just document. so this is the second one. Who what else? tools, skills, well other words. And besides, yeah, I store information with the within domains. So I work within domains, like one of the mains is cigar, so every cigar Dusty Gulleson: Exactly. Oleksij Rak: I smoke I can just tell it some my feedback and it collects the feedback and I'm trying like to to to to b to using some regression algorithms. I'm trying to understand like if I throw it in another cigar, if if it's a good fit f for me or if it's not, based on all the parameters of cigars that it collected from internet. So Dusty Gulleson: And you just use telegram and go, Hey, I just smoked this per Domo. It was okay. I didn't like it that much. And then Oleksij Rak: If I if I'm at my PC, you know, if at my Mac I I just open new session with Cloud and tell it. If I am just on on on the move, I I I just send one message, voice message via Telegram. So it's one off it's Dusty Gulleson: That's awesome. Oleksij Rak: for me it's simple easier than opening clot clot app, going into clot tap, clot cloud tap, you know, starting a session. It's it's faster. That way. Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. That's really cool. Love it. Love it. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah. So n nice to find somebody who who who has the same ideas and like and and likes building his second brain because not not too many people do that nowadays. But but people will start doing it. Dusty Gulleson: You know, people will. People will for sure. People will. I think it's gonna be I was just thinking about it with my son. I was like, man, it'd be so awesome if he would just automatically just have a second brain going into school, right? it would help him dramatically. People with ADHD. I I I know I struggle with it. I forget things all the time. but that's gonna be the big, big shift coming down the road is having tools like that. Oleksij Rak: with a DHD for sure. That's for sure with HDHD because peop people cannot focus for too long. And Dusty Gulleson: Yep. Oleksij Rak: this kind of like agent being nearby can really I I call it like assistant for myself because I try to Dusty Gulleson: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: make it an assistant. So it reminds Dusty Gulleson: Mm-hmm. Oleksij Rak: me. So like one one one of like things I implemented is like Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: reminding me on on schedule. So I just tell it tell it like remind me tomorrow. that I need to do this or and it just sends me a telegram message. And so I get a push from from the agent. So it it was inspired by by the open claw, but I didn't want to go into open claw and so it's absolutely doable. Yeah, it's doable this clock. Yeah. Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: think you need to. I don't think you need to open quality to be quite honest. I think it's overkill. That's been my my impression so far. I could be wrong, but I think it could be real, real overkill. The interesting thing about like I had like I use the daily notes just as a structure for me sometimes. and I almost think I'm outgrowing that to some degree. but I have it it does all those transcripts and sets up and puts in my to-dos list. And so I have this backlog of to-do list and it constantly goes back through that to do list. It's it's probably like 300 to-dos, right? Based on things I said in transcripts and stuff. And it'll be like, hey, you can go ahead and delegate this out to this person, this person, this person. And my my next iteration of my open brain is I really want to see how this works organizationally amongst multiple people, giving them all their open, their second brains. And having an agent facilitate it, facilitate solving problems across everyone's to do list and stuff like that. That's where I really Oleksij Rak: I was Dusty Gulleson: want to go. Oleksij Rak: I was thinking it over but I have no but pe people need to start having second brains first and then you can think about sh Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: sharing certain parts of the brain between people. Dusty Gulleson: I use tagging, right? I do private company. Like I do domains differently. Like domains are based on access for me. So I I'm using the the projects, the areas, the research and the archives. I'm using the para framework just because Oleksij Rak: Yeah, yeah, I know. Dusty Gulleson: I needed a framework to to work on. But I think if we can get everybody if I can figure out how to like dish distribute a second brain to every employee and then having the linkage, I think you'll be a powerful company. Super powerful company. Just you get rid of project management. You don't need project management anymore. You have someone that's that's orchestrating tasks already. And all you really do is have account management meetings going, this is what we've done, this is where we're going, and it's a fifteen minute call. And it and if you can get clients using a second brain, you don't even have have those calls. I mean it's just The calls are mainly for a relationship, not for solving problems. I can't tell you how much how many meetings. I think that's the big the big change. Meetings are gonna go away and you're gonna just have like the project management meeting, what a waste of time in some ways. Getting everybody to get on the same schedule. Can you man, that drives me crazy. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, that's true. Dusty Gulleson: Anyway. Oleksij Rak: I I haven't experienced that yet myself, but like I'm hearing from my partner that he is he used to to like short meetings, you know, to s to synchronize face to face with the with some person. But nowadays, with some of our clients nowadays, he since he's using his own like second brain, cloth with second brain and the client is using something similar, they're exchanging emails because it's much easier. He's getting email Dusty Gulleson: It is. Oleksij Rak: from from the client, like Claude reads it, analyzes based on his knowledge and asks him what to do, how how to react. He tells tells it like do do do this and that, though these are decisions, and it composes email, sends it back to the client. The client's like Claude does exactly Dusty Gulleson: Sends it back to to his agent. Oleksij Rak: the same, you know. It's just back and forth exchange of free emails between people. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Yeah, I think I think AI re re reduces the amount of friction in solving problems and and communication 'cause I think that's the biggest it's the biggest suck on time is all these meetings. it's such a waste. I mean, have meetings that are important, sure. Like when you come to a crossroads or something, but just to get a daily a weekly update on a project, I don't need to be in that meeting. No one needs to be in that meeting. We should all be able to just see what the status is and move on. So yeah. I'm looking forward to when Second Brains or whatever it's gonna be called in the next, it's gonna change next month, I'm sure. Whatever it morps into is just gonna be a standard app. Oleksij Rak: I I think some something something's gonna emerge from that and it will not be as comprehensive as you try to build it for yourself, but it there will there will be something that people will start using finally. Some some Apple Dusty Gulleson: You know, back in Oleksij Rak: or Google or something will come f finally c come up with solution and you will have it in your in your phone. Dusty Gulleson: In you know, Lesky, back in two thousand I came up with an I I had this idea I was gonna build this company called My Id. You are the id is the it's from psychology, it's like your your other person that's in you, your your ego. And I wanted to create something that would just do everything we're doing in the second brain, basically. And I think what's gonna come out is everybody, whether call it an app or call it whatever, it's gonna be a standard And it might be just bu built into the new iPhone because it's gonna have its own AI chip in it. It's just gonna be something that just sits on your shoulder basically and listens and learns from you and starts categorizing and start that's gonna be a standard implementation and technology. And I'm sure Elon has that for his chip that he's gonna put in someone's brain. It's gonna be like, yeah, I've Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: got I've got your second brain. It's implanted right there on your brain and learning from your brain and what you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're talking about. It's gonna start just categorizing everything for you. So I think that's where it's gonna go. Oleksij Rak: Me too, me too. Especially since I now feel the power of it, you know, by building it for myself. And you just evolve it. You just okay, I need something different. Okay, I added this layer, added that layer. So th the information is structured in multi multiple different dimensions and it's easily accessible. So right now I know that it's has grown to to the extent that it's not easily Clot sometimes loses the track, so I need to bring some some semantic search, maybe not semantic search, some some some comprehensive search layers that it can easily extract information. So, you know, that it will automatically feed it with like, okay, there there is that reference, even though it's not interlinked, but it can it can easily find it. So I'm thinking thinking over building something like that because it has grown to like Dusty Gulleson: Okay. Oleksij Rak: two maybe more thousands of documents already. So it's it's quite big. Dusty Gulleson: Okay. How many do how many documents do you have in it right now? Oleksij Rak: A thousand plus, I think. Dusty Gulleson: I I have a friend that imported three thousand transcripts from calls over the last five years. And but Oleksij Rak: I'm not yeah. I start I started building it three months ago and it's it's all fresh, you know. But it's already thousand plus. Dusty Gulleson: I know. I'm I'm curious about that. He said I I haven't talked to him yet, but he's in Australia. And he's got these 3,000 transcripts and he's like, I'm looking for I I I don't know what he said. I think it's something to the extent as I'm mining for gold. Because there's 3,000 transcripts, there's tons of interesting information in there from all these calls with clients and stuff like that. That's gonna be super amazing. Here's the stuff that the NSA used to have, now we have. Oleksij Rak: It's easier to to To make system that finds needed information when you've when you've needed. If even within conversation, when you have some conversations with the cloud, it it has some semantics, and based on that semantics you can easily extract relevant information. It's not record, it's something more advanced, but still. But the the real mining for gold would be when you when when the agent can, based on all the this information, based on knowledge about you, can find something in interlinked between all of these discussions that it's really really really powerful which you have missed. So like when you know Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: what you want to extract, it's easy. The hard part is how to extract something from all your information that you have that is really beneficial and good for you, but which you have no Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. Oleksij Rak: idea about yet. And then this this is the next big step. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah. But I think I think your second brain can kind of validate your intuition too, or invalidate it. Yeah. man. Now I want to go back to my clock hood right now. Have some ideas. Oleksij Rak: Awesome. Awesome. don't don't wanna waste your time. That was a great discussion. Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: you're wait you're not wasting my time. These are these kind of conversations are really helpful for reorientation, restructuring how I'm thinking about things. it it's it's the same thing that you do when you sit on your deck and stare out into space and try to think about some stuff. I think the conversations nowadays are so enriched with ideas like this and who you talk to is is really important. How you spend your time. Because you know, I'm in my fifties. I I don't know how many more years I have left. But yeah, you you time has compressed for me. And so AI definitely is almost expanding that compression so I can do more. Because, you know, if we didn't have AI here, I I I could see a time horizon that's coming sooner. Now with AI I can do a lot more and I can maybe add another. ten, twenty years of productivity into a shorter period of time. I don't know. It's it's something to think about. Oleksij Rak: And you're way more effective. Like from my perspective, this year, like in this year of these five months of the year, I've done more probably than in in previous two or three years. So it's the the level of productivity is quite different. And if like Dusty Gulleson: You know what's also helped me maybe be productive is it's impacted my habits quite a bit because Oleksij Rak: Mm-hmm. Dusty Gulleson: it's reduced like health almost is more important to me now than it ever has been. Because I find that if I don't drink, right? And if I exercise, I'm actually more productive when I'm working with my Claude. And I was I Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: was talking to another CEO about that. He's like 100% like I don't know how many CEOs I've talked to have given up drinking lately altogether. Just they'll have wine once in a while, you know, things like that. But a lot of are like, No, it's so important that I show up in front of my computer and work and be clear headed so I can do a lot more things. So it's interesting how it's impacted. When you have tools that are exciting, it can impact your other behavior quite a bit. Oleksij Rak: Yeah, for sure. Dusty Gulleson: Wine wh wine is not alcohol, by the way. I know that's what Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: you think, Alexe. Do you have a favorite varietal? Oleksij Rak: That's not outcome. Dusty Gulleson: Do you do you have a favorite varietal that you you drink? Oleksij Rak: I I drink a lot of wine. I finished wine school so to to to know what I drink. Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: You went to wine school? Are you are you a Some Some Yeah? Oleksij Rak: No, I I did it for myself. Dusty Gulleson: Really? Oleksij Rak: I want to know what I drink, so I just I drink a lot of wine. I I I I live wine. Dusty Gulleson: So how good are how good are you let's see if if I gave you a wine, are you able to identify the varietal? Oleksij Rak: Maybe, yeah, potentially. The variety mm, Dusty Gulleson: Region? Even? Oleksij Rak: not really. I I'm not that good, so but but maybe. I didn't know. I I never tr I drink it for for myself, for my pleasure, and I want to understand what I'm drinking. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oleksij Rak: I I I always want to know what I'm drinking. So I I do like alcohol and and I s I finish fine school school and on purpose to understand what I'm drinking. So like it Dusty Gulleson: That's amazing. Oleksij Rak: Seven or y eight years ago, since then I'm I'm just continuously experimenting with mine. But I'm I'm not some year, so that's not my per target to to like no variety. No Dusty Gulleson: So of of your two thousand documents in your second brain, nineteen hundred are wines. Oleksij Rak: not really. I got cigars in my second brain. I I do not have wine there. So I started like recording all the wines in Vivino many years ago and it's still there. And you cannot extract this information from Vivino's a locking it. Dusty Gulleson: I have Vivino too. I use that quite often. Are you religious about taking a picture of it and then storing it what you have in your tablet? Okay, so you really are in the process. Oleksij Rak: Yeah. And that that's why Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, see see that's where Vivino Vivino has a moat for you. You can't get it out. So Oleksij Rak: Yeah, you can get out of here. Dusty Gulleson: I do have an idea though. Let's see, and I just and we can end with this. I want to I can I can emulate my phone on my computer. I got that working. But what I wanted to do is I want it I want to create an AI that looks at my phone and moves my mouse cursor on the phone. to automate interaction with it. That's what I'm my next thing I wanna do. So I want the AI to be able to go into one of my apps and click through everything and extract all the data. Oleksij Rak: And excited so much. Okay. That that's a good one actually. Dusty Gulleson: So that I I'm I'm I'm playing with that right now. And I I I love a lot of strategy games and stuff with my son and stuff. So there's some games that I've downloaded. I'm like, I wanted to learn how it's how this gameplay is working, why is it good, what the structure is, and to be able to develop more games. Because he's really into that stuff. So that's my biggest my next like side project is like app inner. having my my phone be emulated and have an AI play on it. Oleksij Rak: Awesome. Dusty Gulleson: Screw that moat. All right. Oleksij Rak: Great idea. Well let's let's wrap it up here. It was really a great discussion. Yeah. Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, it's fun. Yeah, we should check in every so often. I'd love to hear your progress. Oleksij Rak: me me me too. I'd actually love to to check in some policy ev even quite soon and just have another call and work through each other walls. Look. Who is building like Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, yeah, let's do it. Oleksij Rak: short share thoughts because you know I'm I'm continuously searching for something new that I can build for my second brain and have where I can evolve it. That it like benefits me and and helps me and I I'd love to share so Dusty Gulleson: Yeah, I'd love to learn from you. You obviously Oleksij Rak: Yeah. Dusty Gulleson: are deep in it. And the problem is the biggest thing that gets in between me and working on AI stuff is running a company right now. It's it's like Oleksij Rak: You need to do work sometimes. Dusty Gulleson: yeah, I have to work at some point. So it all Oleksij Rak: Yeah, absolutely. Dusty Gulleson: works. Anyway, it's been a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much, Lessie. And I I hope Next time I'm in Europe, maybe I should pop by Lviv and grab a grab a cigar Oleksij Rak: Sure, sure. Looking forward to that. Dusty Gulleson: and a a bottle of wine with Oleksij Rak: Okay, fine. Dusty Gulleson: you. Oleksij Rak: Yep. Awesome. That's for sure.