Latest / Startup Dad / Build an AI-Powered Parent OS | Aakash Gupta (Dad of 2, Author/Podcast Host)
Transcript
- [00:00:00] Aakash Gupta: What do you actually want to do as a parent? You want to be more present. You want to make sure that your kids get access to the right opportunities. [00:00:07] Aakash Gupta: AI has been one of those little techniques, kind of like Excel earlier in my career, where all of the sudden having to read all the school emails, having to stay on track of when baseball signups come out, AI can handle most of that for me. And so that has been a huge unlock [00:00:24] Adam Fishman: Welcome to Startup Dad, the podcast where we dive deep into the lives of dads who are also leaders in the world of startups and business. I'm your host, Adam Fishman. The most powerful parenting tool you could be using isn't a book or a philosophy. It's the same AI that's quickly reshaping our industry. [00:00:45] Adam Fishman: Today, I'm joined by Aakash Gupta, creator, product advisor, and author of the AI Product Manager Interview. Aakash built a following of over 350,000 on LinkedIn over six years of daily posting. He now runs one of the most popular newsletters on Substack, podcasts, and a set of social accounts for product managers and AI builders. [00:01:08] Adam Fishman: A few years ago, he made a pivotal decision to walk away from a VP of Product role and bet fully on himself so that he could actually show up for his family. He's a husband and dad of two young kids. Today, we talked about why Aakash considers Claude the most powerful software ever invented, and how he's built a parent operating system on top of it. [00:01:31] Adam Fishman: The moment three months after his daughter was born that made him realize he couldn't keep running at VP of Product speed. How trading a corporate career for the creator path gave him back something no salary could buy. Using AI workflows and automations, not to stare at his phone more, but to do less screen time in front of his kids. [00:01:49] Adam Fishman: And how he uses tools like parallel AI agents and automated reminders to handle the relentless logistics of family life before they ever show up in front of him. As part of today's episode, he's also open-sourced his parent OS so you can make it your own. The link is in the show notes. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to Startup Dad on YouTube or Spotify so you never miss an episode. [00:02:13] Adam Fishman: You'll find it everywhere you get your podcasts. I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Aakash Gupta Welcome Aakash Gupta to Startup Dad. Aakash, it is my pleasure having you here with me on the show today. Thanks for joining me [00:02:30] Aakash Gupta: No, thank you. I've been following your content since before I got into content. You are one of my original inspirations, so it's an honor to be here [00:02:38] Adam Fishman: Oh man. Well, that's very flattering. of course, you're on like a rocket ship trip trajectory with your business and your content and your podcast, which I understand you're gonna start building a studio behind you and stuff. So like, damn, can't wait to see that. every episode of this show ends with a very tiny segment that I call the AI Corner, which is one question that I ask people about the most creative use of AI that they've found as a parent. [00:03:04] Adam Fishman: when I talked to you about that, you thought about this, and you were like, "Let's make the whole episode about this, because this is a big part of my life." And so for the listeners, buckle up, because AI Corner has consumed this entire episode. That's what we're talking about, which is like an enormous part of your life, your professional life, apparently your personal life. [00:03:24] Adam Fishman: So let's start with my opening foray here, which is like, why did you go all in on this? Like, what did you find about AI that's just like, this is the future? [00:03:34] Aakash Gupta: I don't know that it is the future of everything. It's definitely not the future? [00:03:38] Aakash Gupta: of parenting or product management. But to me it's like I remember when I learned Excel when I first got out of college. That became a little superpower of mine as a product manager. [00:03:50] Aakash Gupta: I could build a really quick impact sizing model. I could download all of our support ticket data and quickly categorize what they were talking about. That became my own little superpower. AI is like that in the sense that it is one of those technologies that gives you leverage to do what you actually want to do. [00:04:11] Aakash Gupta: What do you actually want to do as a parent? You want to be more present. You want to make sure that your kids get access to the right opportunities. You want to make sure that if there's a special event happening at school, like my kids had last week where they were singing and showing off what they'd been singing for the last three months, you don't have any meetings and you have the right buffer time to get to school, right? [00:04:32] Aakash Gupta: And so that's what we care about as parents. And for me, AI has been one of those little techniques, kind of like Excel earlier in my career, where all of the sudden having to read all the school emails, having to stay on track of when baseball signups come out, AI can handle most of that for me. And so that has been a huge unlock that I think a lot of people could benefit from [00:04:55] Adam Fishman: Yeah. So you told me that Claude is the best software that's ever been invented. Sort of ranks up there with like the browser, the spreadsheet, the search engine. Has it really become that big for you? Like using Claude and I don't know if you're also using Codex and stuff now, but has it become like the top tier product in your arsenal? [00:05:15] Aakash Gupta: Yeah [00:05:15] Aakash Gupta: totally. And I think how I use it has evolved a lot too, based on what people want out there in the world. Like in 2023, in 2024, [00:05:25] Speaker 2: in 2024, [00:05:27] Aakash Gupta: I would use it more to write content even through 2025. Now we look at like 2026, like people are pretty against what they call now, like AI slop content. In fact, the chief product officer of LinkedIn, Hari Sreenivasan, slapped on a, "This seems like AI slop" button to LinkedIn, right? [00:05:44] Aakash Gupta: And so now it's much less about let's use AI to write content. It's about figuring out what are the right things it can do and how it can give me leverage. And so for me, running podcasts, newsletter against parenting, which in and of itself is a full-time job, what I want to do is I want to find places where it can really save time for me. [00:06:07] Aakash Gupta: Like what would be a high leverage activity for me writing a newsletter? Talking to my newsletter subscribers. It's a similar thing for any product manager or parent spending time with their kids. And so if I can get more of those high leverage things, that's where I find it's really, really powerful. [00:06:22] Aakash Gupta: And I do stand by this idea that Claude is literally the most powerful software ever invented. Of course, ChatGPT came first, but even now Codex, they haven't learned the harness and engineered the harness nearly as well as Claude. And so today I'll show you a couple things that you can do inside of Claude Code. [00:06:42] Aakash Gupta: And the harness in particular is gonna enable a couple things, whether that's sending me text messages or sending me Slack messages. So meeting me where I am or editing Google documents or editing spreadsheets that already exist. [00:06:56] Aakash Gupta: Those types of capabilities, living where I am with a centralized AI makes it incredibly powerful. [00:07:03] Aakash Gupta: And unlike the spreadsheet example, it isn't really limited. Like you can use it for anything. And so really it's up to you to figure out what are the right things to use it for [00:07:11] Speaker 2: for. [00:07:11] Adam Fishman: Yeah. You told me that it's fairly underused for parenting. and if I think about like the entire parenting discourse right now, it's sort of running in the other direction from that. It's all like screen time limits and chatbot anxiety, and we got to protect the kids and stuff. Your kids are younger, right? [00:07:30] Adam Fishman: So I don't imagine that your kids are running rampant like, with chatbots. You're using it more for your own benefit and being a more effective parent. but if your take is families aren't using it enough, like why do you think that is? And tell me a little bit like what you think families are missing out on in the year 2026 by not using AI or by sitting it out. [00:07:50] Aakash Gupta: So I think that every parent is gonna have a different take on how much screen time kids should get exposure to. So let's just put that aside for a second. Leave that hairy debate aside. For you as a parent, whether you're spending three hours on your phone or six hours on your phone, I personally am at like three and a half hours of screen time on my phone, right? [00:08:14] Aakash Gupta: If you are whipping out your phone, let's say, you know, one time I recently had to sign up for swim class, which opened at noon. So I was with my kids, so I was on my phone. You want that to be the most effective use of time. You don't want it to be just random stuff. And so AI can literally send you a text message one minute before that opens with the URL, with exactly the steps you need to do to get signed up for that swim class, 'cause here in Santa Monica, those are like scarce resource. [00:08:45] Aakash Gupta: And [00:08:46] Aakash Gupta: so for me, it's actually about using the screen less in front of my kids because whatever thing I have to do for them, let's say we're out and about on a trip and I need to find a place to eat dinner, AI might have already thought ahead on that and made a reservation for me. And so for me, it's actually a tool to do less screen time in front of the kids, which is my ultimate goal. [00:09:12] Aakash Gupta: And I think each families, they're gonna have their own goal when it comes to like learning, people are gonna have to make a decision. When it comes to when to give kids access to it, people are gonna have to make a decision. But I think one decision they should all make is, I personally am using AI, all parents are using AI, let's use it the best we can [00:09:28] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And also sounds like learn it as a parent because it's not going away and eventually you are gonna have to make those other decisions, around it. Like this technology is here to stay. So, it sounds like this is more than just like tech optimist dad rationalizing his favorite hobby, [00:09:45] Adam Fishman: you're getting real pr-productivity gains out of this as, as a parent, which is pretty awesome. I'm gonna ask you a little bit later in the show about one kind of cool thing that you did. AI helped you get like a free museum day when you were on a trip in Poland, and you would've spent like hundreds of dollars otherwise. [00:10:02] Adam Fishman: So like, hold onto that one 'cause we're gonna come back to it. but I wanna actually go back in time a little bit. so I'm taking you back, and listeners, we're going back to May of '25. So you published, I would say, and I've read a lot of your stuff, the probably the most personal essay that you've ever written. [00:10:18] Adam Fishman: It was like an introduction to yourself or a reintroduction to your- of, to yourself to, at the time you had like a quarter million followers. Now you're north of 350,000, I think. and they only knew the AI and product, version of you. and the heart of that essay was that you were a father first and then a creator. [00:10:39] Adam Fishman: What was the motivation behind writing that? [00:10:42] Aakash Gupta: We all have different sort of points of view about whether we should be putting our kids on social media, and so you need to make your own decision on that point. But for me, when I think about what I wanna put out online, and this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, like AI slop content people are really worried about. [00:11:03] Aakash Gupta: In a world of infinite AI slop content, what you actually wanna do is somehow figure out like how to put out the authentic version of yourself. And so that was the goal with that post and why I made that post. Like if you look at my feed, the last 364 posts are like just PM, growth, AI, and then there's this one personal post. [00:11:26] Aakash Gupta: And so it's still a really small percentage of what I might talk about online, but occasionally I think it is worth giving people that inside look about, "Hey, this is what I actually care about. This is why things are the way they are, why I do everything." Sometimes people ask me like, "Aakash, how have you managed to post on LinkedIn every single day for like the last six years?" [00:11:48] Aakash Gupta: that includes the birth of my kids. Plenty of times they were both sick, and I had to take the whole workday off, but I still found time to post on LinkedIn. And so for me, like fundamentally, that's how I fund the entire family. The whole business runs through LinkedIn. Every product, every newsletter, every podcast gets promoted through LinkedIn. [00:12:07] Aakash Gupta: And so because that's such an important channel, I've been able to make that commitment. And I thought that maybe people could see behind the curtain a little bit. I think if it were just me, I would've skipped some days here or there in the past six years. But I literally have not skipped any days, and that's primarily because I know there are two little ones that I wanna support and provide, you know, a certain level of support. [00:12:28] Aakash Gupta: for. [00:12:29] Adam Fishman: Yeah. And you were a VP of product at some point before that. You describe this idea of working 60-plus hours a week and having a packed calendar, and your passport's over there in the drawer gathering dust. in that article, you talked about what pulled you out from this wasn't just the exhaustion of being a product executive, it was this kind of moment of clarity about your life and the life that you wanted. [00:12:54] Adam Fishman: did that coincide with, your kids hitting a certain age or just some sort of realization that, like, time is very fleeting? Like, what was the thing that, like, smacked you upside the head and said, "I gotta make a change here in my life"? [00:13:05] Aakash Gupta: when my first kid was born, I actually took the entirety of my paternity leave. all my performance reviews at that job were always like exceeding expectations. I got promoted. And yet all of the sudden, because I had taken that paternity leave, I noticed there was a huge impact on my standing within the company, the type of how big my product team was, all sorts of real negative career repercussions. [00:13:34] Aakash Gupta: So when I had my second kid, they were like, Yeah. you can take as much paternity as you want. We offer three months." I took two weeks. [00:13:41] Speaker: Mm-hmm. [00:13:41] Aakash Gupta: I was a VP of product. I was like, "I'm Not, gonna let that prior career mistake happen again." And then she was like maybe like two or three months old and I was reflecting and I was like, "I'm doing this whole VP of product job," as you said, it's like roughly a 60-hour-a-week job. [00:13:57] Aakash Gupta: So in and of itself it's full on. On top of that, my side project, it's earning as much as my VP of product job. So do I really need to be earning this much? Like definitely not So if I just need to be earning half as much as I'm earning either one of these, which of them one is gonna be better? And for me, being essentially just betting on myself, I have full control. [00:14:22] Aakash Gupta: So for a month every year we take a family vacation in Europe. I couldn't do that if I were a VP of product, but as a creator I can. And I think the moment of clarity really happened like she's three months old. I'm reflecting like, "Geez, like with my other child, I'd spent the first three months entirely with them. [00:14:40] Aakash Gupta: With this one I only spent two weeks." And so that was when I decided to full-time bet on myself. [00:14:45] Adam Fishman: Yeah. not to encourage people to come into the competitive environment, that you're in, and be a creator. But if you were talking to a new dad who's in your audience, who's following your stuff, reading your content, would you tell them to do the same thing or consider a similar path? [00:15:03] Adam Fishman: Or do you think that it was just something that really happened to work out for you, like right place, right time, right motivation? Like, what would your advice be to a, to another dad who's like Aakash many years ago, [00:15:16] Speaker 2: Honestly, [00:15:17] Aakash Gupta: I would recommend they do what I did. And I wouldn't have recommended they do what I did when I was doing it [00:15:23] Speaker: Yeah [00:15:23] Aakash Gupta: Because when I was doing it, for example, when I was on that three-month paternity leave, I was still posting on social media, and people in that job negatively perceived it, because I wasn't sending, like, two hours worth of emails to the company, but I was apparently finding two hours to write a quality social media post. [00:15:42] Speaker: Mm. [00:15:43] Aakash Gupta: that led me to have a pretty negative view about product managers or people in tech writing on LinkedIn, because I was like, Oh, it can be destructive to your current job, and why would you ever wanna do that?" Now, actually, I'm writing this book, "The AI Product Manager Interview," and so what I've been doing is I've been interviewing a bunch of hiring managers. [00:16:03] Aakash Gupta: I just interviewed this guy this morning, Vishal Bolani. He's a group product manager at this company called Skip, which is like a, sort of like a DoorDash in Canada. And he's hired a couple AI PMs. I was asking him, like, "What do you think about a PM posting content on LinkedIn? What do you think about them posting memes?" [00:16:22] Aakash Gupta: We literally pulled up some meme posts, and he loved it. And I think that there has been a huge change from back when I was posting content in 2022 and 2023, and people had a negative perception of me posting content online, to now posting content. Now, PM hiring managers, people in tech, they almost expect to see that you have some presence online beyond your resume. [00:16:47] Aakash Gupta: They would like to see that you have a couple extremely well-written blog posts. I think a great example of this might be like Dwarkesh. When he publishes a blog post, everybody is like zeroed in. It's like fascinating. Or there's another guy, to not be like Dwarkesh level, there's this guy named Daniel McKinnon. [00:17:04] Aakash Gupta: He was a PM at Meta on the Llama models. He was a PM at Google on the Gemini models. He has, like, three or four blog posts. Like, one is like PM at Google versus PM at Meta that went super viral. Another one is like how to write evals that was super viral. So now, I think having an online track record of really high-quality stuff, not stuff that you generated with AI in 15 minutes, but stuff that you maybe worked on 15 days and then post online, I think that can be hugely beneficial. [00:17:37] Aakash Gupta: You can generate potentially a side business like I did off of that, or it'll just help you in your current job, and so you can get the best of both worlds. [00:17:44] Speaker: Yeah. So, [00:17:46] Adam Fishman: you [00:17:46] Adam Fishman: know, you've posted on LinkedIn every day for six, six straight years. I also read something you wrote where you said that you drafted essays while you were at the Trevi Fountain and your kids are napping, and you take your family abroad for a month at a time. I read your recent post about that. [00:18:02] Adam Fishman: when you think about your calendar and sort of your day-to-day life, like what are the things that you put on that calendar that are like non-negotiables, with your family or, or even professional non-negotiables? how do you balance that stuff? [00:18:13] Aakash Gupta: So for me personally, like my life is just like family, work, and friends. And so those are like the only three things, and I try to keep all three of them non-negotiable. And I guess, I'd add a fourth bucket really if I think about day construction, which is like exercise, right? [00:18:28] Aakash Gupta: 'Cause that kind of feeds into everything. [00:18:30] Aakash Gupta: And so for me, like when my business is doing really well, I do try to go on like a eight-hour sleep and I am wearing the Whoop Band so that it can keep me accountable. But realistically, that means like sleep is very often the first thing that I can cut so that I can go hang out with a friend after the kids go take a nap, or I can go catch a workout in the morning. [00:18:53] Aakash Gupta: And on top of that, [00:18:55] Aakash Gupta: always [00:18:55] Aakash Gupta: be available every morning, every evening. I take almost no work travel, like a lot of people really do that. But for me, because my kids are three and four, I just feel like they're never gonna be three and four again. And I traveled a lot for work before they were born, and I'm sure I'll travel again once they get a little bit busier. [00:19:10] Aakash Gupta: There's like the Sahil Bloom chart you've probably seen, like time with kids I think it's like at 38 roughly when my kids will be like six or seven, it really declines and it's just on a never-ending decline. So currently I'm in the high part of the graph and I, wanna like get the most out of it. [00:19:26] Aakash Gupta: And so for me it's like I always am available pretty much from like 4:30 to 8:30 while they're awake in the evenings and in the mornings getting them ready from 6:30 to 8:30. So I then work for eight hours, 8:30 to 4:30. So I already have these six hours with the kids and I work for eight, eight hours, so that's 14 hours taken. [00:19:47] Aakash Gupta: We only have 10 hours left, need some time for my wife and my friends, so that ends up taking two to three plus a workout, which is why sleep is always cut. Like sleep is like at a like a seven. But usually I have goals at work. Like yesterday I worked for three hours at night. And so I usually have goals at work that'll cut down sleep a little bit more, but that's how I personally plan it. [00:20:08] Speaker: Yeah. [00:20:08] Adam Fishman: you mentioned your wife she's a associate professor at UCLA's Medical School. and academic medicine not exactly famous for its flexibility. and so I'm curious how that dynamic works in your household. You've got the kind of flexible creator schedule that things can change and move around and stuff, and then you have something that's maybe more rigid and focused on the academic calendar. [00:20:32] Adam Fishman: Like, how do those two things interlock in one household? [00:20:36] Aakash Gupta: Luckily, we both really value flexibility. I think that's why I ended up as creator and she ended up in this job. So she kind of has this unique job where she doesn't teach [00:20:47] Aakash Gupta: anything. And so her entire job is just based on research and she has a lab, but all of her research isn't like in a lab like pipetting or titrating or something like that. [00:21:01] Aakash Gupta: All of her work is computational. So actually they're like programmers and math people and they actually, like their field hasn't really adopted AI that much because they like really care about handcrafting [00:21:14] Aakash Gupta: the code and handcrafting the models and everything like that. But what's cool is like since we both value flexibility a lot, We probably travel like three months out of 12, so we're only in LA like 9 out of the 12 months. [00:21:29] Aakash Gupta: We're traveling a ton. So we kind of architected our life so that we have max flexibility. [00:21:35] Adam Fishman: That's great. What a great position to be in to, to be able to do that too. and like you said, it helps that she doesn't have to be like chained to a desk in a lab or anything like that. different type of academia. I wanna ask you about AI storytelling, 'cause this is sort of an interesting, interesting use case. [00:21:51] Adam Fishman: So you've got a four-and-a-half-year-old and a three-year-old. That's like peak story demanding age, right? Like kids have an unquenchable thirst for storytelling at this age. so I'm curious, like what does AI storytelling look like in your house? 'Cause I think you mentioned building like sort of elaborate, you know, stories within an AI universe. [00:22:10] Adam Fishman: so tell me a little bit about that. [00:22:12] Aakash Gupta: I can just show you maybe. So, like, everything I do, like, I have either a Claude code operating system or a Claude project. So in this case, like, I have both. So I have a Claude project here that I could open up, and that's like kids storytelling project. Or what's, like, more interesting is I'll go on my phone, I'll click the Claude Code tab within Claude, then I'll navigate. [00:22:40] Aakash Gupta: So like I click like which repos. you can kind of choose which repos. So now I'm gonna search like for my parent OS. So now I'm inside my parent OS. So what this parent OS [00:22:51] Aakash Gupta: has, [00:22:52] Aakash Gupta: has like a context library, who my kids are, how old they are, what stories. It also has outputs of every story it's ever written for me, and it's probably written hundreds of stories at this point. [00:23:09] Aakash Gupta: So now if I give it a prompt like this, so I'll just hit like the dictate icon. Give me a five-minute story on Tom and Jerry at a six-year-old reading level. [00:23:24] Speaker 2: So [00:23:24] Aakash Gupta: all of the sudden, if I hit it with this prompt, it knows a couple things, like Tom and Jerry, very violent media. [00:23:32] Aakash Gupta: We personally don't like to tell stories about, like, whacking Jerry across the head and flying across the room with a frying pan, Right [00:23:41] Aakash Gupta: So it already knows that. It knows how I like my Tom and Jerry stories. And on top of that, it has the outputs of the other hundred Tom and Jerry stories it's written for me, so it can write me a brand new one. And if I wanted, I could just say, "Hey." If I want it to go even faster, I could just say, "Give me one of the Tom and Jerry stories we've written in the past," and it could pull that for me too. [00:24:06] Aakash Gupta: So I've started to move everything into Claude Code and this parent operating system. [00:24:11] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Do your kids ever participate in the crafting of the prompt or like, maybe not your three-year-old, although maybe, I don't know. but like who's in the driver's seat here? [00:24:23] Speaker: [00:24:23] Aakash Gupta: All them, like 100%. Like, I'll just be like, "What story do you want today?" And they'll be like, "I want Elsa to meet, [00:24:31] Aakash Gupta: Thomas the Train, and I want them to go to Disney World." And that'll be the prompt for the story. [00:24:37] Aakash Gupta: and it even knows like that I really hate stories without character development. And so it'll always build some character development. [00:24:45] Aakash Gupta: Like it just gets to know you over time. Because I'm doing it inside of a Claude Code operating system instead of just a regular Claude Chat window, which is just restricted by like memory, which is just a few bullet points it might write, it has all that scaffolding [00:25:00] Aakash Gupta: around it [00:25:00] Adam Fishman: Yeah. cool. One of the things that you've really developed like an expertise around, you've taught other people, is like how to teach writers how to hook a reader, right? You talk about this for LinkedIn. You talk about the like writing hooks, like writing and rewriting and rewriting. do you think any of that craft has transferred to like the preschoolers in your household? [00:25:19] Adam Fishman: Like are you teaching your kids about, writing and like how to get people hooked into a story in the beginning? [00:25:25] Aakash Gupta: Shoot. [00:25:26] Aakash Gupta: Maybe I should [00:25:27] Adam Fishman: Oh, not yet though, huh? [00:25:32] Aakash Gupta: I don't know, maybe somebody who has three and four-year-olds can send me a message after this episode. I barely do any, like, deliberate teaching, although I take them to a lot of things, you know, like soccer and piano and whatever. And so I'm like trying to like take them to the teachers, but I haven't yet been like super harsh on teaching them much. [00:25:53] Adam Fishman: They've got time. let's talk some more about the Parent OS. I'm, like, very intrigued about this. This sounds like a massive universe that you've built. So you've published a PM operating system, a team operating system, I think a job search operating system. There's like hundreds of thousands of people have read them. [00:26:10] Adam Fishman: I don't know that you've shared the Parent OS online, or maybe you have and I just haven't, hadn't found it. But, like, tell me what else besides storytelling, like what else does the Parent OS do for you? [00:26:22] Aakash Gupta: Yeah [00:26:22] Aakash Gupta: let me just show you. So I saved this for this episode because we've been planning this episode for like three or four months, so I haven't written about this for, to anybody else. This is breaking in the episode, and we can like publish this if people want. We're happy to let-- I can just out open source this whole thing. [00:26:39] Aakash Gupta: So this is like [00:26:42] Speaker 2: the [00:26:42] Aakash Gupta: scaffolding. So what we're inside, if you haven't used this yet, this is Cursor. So you can see we're inside my parent OS. This [00:26:50] Aakash Gupta: is like a file explorer. So inside it, you'll see like a Claude MD, which many of you might be familiar with. This is the README. Of course, I had it work on the outline for our podcast today, and I practiced the six demos. [00:27:02] Aakash Gupta: So what's going on here is this is a terminal window. This is a viewer of the MD files. So basically, we have a file explorer, a viewer of files, and a terminal window. And inside of here are several terminal agents. So what I can do is, since I'm inside of that folder, I can spin up Claude, and then I can ask it something like, "What is this?" [00:27:24] Aakash Gupta: So it should theoretically read the README, go check all these skills, and come back with a fairly coherent answer. Let's see if it does a better job than me. A Claude code setup that turns me into a chief of staff for your family logistics. [00:27:41] Aakash Gupta: And so it's got the context library. Let's look at that. So what does the context library has? [00:27:45] Aakash Gupta: It has information on my kids, my family profile. What does the family profile have? Have things like who we are, what we do, all sorts of information, some personal-- [00:27:57] Aakash Gupta: Actually, what I did is, before this podcast, I asked it, "If there's anything in the context library that's very personal, just put it in private so I don't accidentally show it." [00:28:05] Aakash Gupta: So that's one of the coolest things about these Claude code harnesses in general, is that you can just-- Let's say after I get done doing something, like after I ran this fourth demo before the podcast, I actually noticed like, "Oh, I didn't like this and this. I want to change this and this." I just prompted it right then and there. [00:28:23] Aakash Gupta: And so when we run the demo now, it should theoretically be that upgraded version. And you can actually see what it upgraded because it's, like, in orange. So it upgraded my activity watch list, my goals, my reminders. So these registries here, what they are is these are YAML [00:28:40] Speaker 2: YAML files [00:28:41] Aakash Gupta: that drive automation. So the activity watch list, for instance, these are like registration windows to snipe. [00:28:49] Aakash Gupta: So if you live in, like me, LA or any big city, getting into, like, Westside Ballet is, like, a chore. Or, like, right now, like, we're applying to private schools. The application's open today. We need to submit the application literally today to one of these top schools. [00:29:05] Aakash Gupta: So it's gonna keep all of that information for me here. [00:29:10] Aakash Gupta: And this is YAML, because it's a YAML file, it's like a automated thing that can just happen every day So it's got, like, goals, reminders. It's even got subscriptions, which is really useful if you're like me and you're just piling up on various subscriptions, and you want to keep track of all of those. [00:29:28] Aakash Gupta: And so what is all powered by In addition to this context library is MCP connections, which everybody probably knows about, but I'll just show people some of the ones I have live. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Notion, Slack. These to me are like the essential ones. Then I have some other ones for work like Typefully, Canva, and Figma, but those aren't as important. [00:29:50] Aakash Gupta: And you don't want to like overload it with too many MCPs. there are hundreds more MCPs, but those are the ones I actively use, so those are the ones I keep connected. Here you can see this context window. So I'm using 4% of my context window. So it's kind of already a lot if you think about it. I already have 42K of context, so I don't want to load it up with too many more MCPs or too many skills. [00:30:10] Aakash Gupta: I just try to keep it to the most important skills. So I have some skills like Activity Radar, I have Booking Watch, I have all these different skills that are out there. So let's go ahead and let's do one [00:30:24] Aakash Gupta: live, Right? [00:30:25] Aakash Gupta: So we've been talking about this idea of, hey, the school registration just opened, right? [00:30:32] Aakash Gupta: How does that all get powered? Well, we have this Booking Watch. So I can run this Booking Watch, and what it's doing is it's looking inside my outputs. So inside of my outputs, it's finding, hey, I actually already pre-ran this demo just an hour before this podcast, and so I already had this activity alert. [00:30:51] Aakash Gupta: Because it's written to it, it works off that base. It's working off that base now to go check, Oh, the Clayton Museum has these special events coming up. My gym has these events. It's checking my email to see what I've already signed up for. Then it's going into the web search to actually figure out what other things I need to go do. [00:31:10] Aakash Gupta: And so what you're seeing here, and you can look inside the skill while this is all working, is that I've really automated the work that I would normally have to do as a parent. Like, normally when the kids go to sleep, you have to go deal with all this, then you put it in a calendar event. Here, it could just tell me, "Act today. [00:31:30] Aakash Gupta: Cayton parents' night out is now. This week, My Gym Santa Monica has this. Play LA has this fall thing coming up." And so that's how I really stay on top of all the events and for me, like keeping my kids busy is one of my priorities. I was really busy as a kid, and I feel like it helped me, and so that's what I'm trying to give back to them. [00:31:50] Adam Fishman: Oh, amazing. Amazing. What a cool system that you built. So there's bookings. I see, like, trip plannings, [00:31:58] Adam Fishman: subscriptions. [00:31:59] Adam Fishman: what's toy, Scout? I see Toy Scout on the left-hand side. Is that related to, like, kids' toys? [00:32:05] Aakash Gupta: Yeah, exactly. So for me, it's like understanding like what their current obsessions are, what they're thinking out of. Like, I don't know about you, but I'll constantly get from like my family group chat like, Oh, it's their birthday. What gift should I get them?" And I'm like, "I have n- I don't know, but I just ask Toy Scout." [00:32:25] Adam Fishman: Claude, knows? [00:32:27] Aakash Gupta: And it just tells me because it knows already the toys that I bought them. So it, because it has access to my Gmail, it has all my Amazon receipts, so it also knows everything that I've-- It has an inventory of all the toys we already have, so we don't get doubled up. I don't know about you, but when my first kid was one, we got three of the same balance bike. [00:32:45] Aakash Gupta: And [00:32:46] Aakash Gupta: we were like, "This must stop." And so because it's built inside of an OS, it has all this context versus like a one-off chat And it just has these super lightweight skills. Like you can see it's not like some 500-line skill. It's just a simple 20-line skill. helps it figure out, "Oh, this is where the context is. [00:33:03] Aakash Gupta: These are the kids." And then it can go find the [00:33:05] Aakash Gupta: proper thing. [00:33:06] Adam Fishman: Cool. That's amazing. How long did it take you to build something like this? A- and was it easier because you'd already done PMOS and, other things around that? [00:33:19] Aakash Gupta: Yeah. So anyone can build this themselves. Like, what I did personally is I said, like, "Take everything at..." By this time, I'd already released the PMOS. So take everything from my PMOS. But if you guys don't have, like, a PMOS or anything like that, you can just say, "Take everything from how people build PM operating systems in Claude Code [00:33:44] Aakash Gupta: and build me a parenting operating system." [00:33:48] Aakash Gupta: you can start with the prompt as simple as that And let's actually, like, see what happens when it does this. It should theoretically notice that it's already inside of an operating system and then come up with ideas about how to improve it. So we can test how it does, but if you're starting from scratch, it should theoretically come up and build you a lot of this. [00:34:09] Aakash Gupta: What is fun about Claude Code versus Claude Chat is you can prompt it and steer it mid-chat. I want it to have a context library, MCP connection to Gmail, and Slack, [00:34:21] Aakash Gupta: plus [00:34:22] Aakash Gupta: I want it to find toys and monitor bookings for me. So you can just hit it with these types of prompts even midway through. [00:34:29] Aakash Gupta: It's gonna go consider that information and what I love also is being able to see the context, how much I've used and how much I've used of my five-hour usage right here, so I don't have to be worried. And personally for me, I'm actually trying to get my five-hour usage to, like, 90% at any given time ' [00:34:46] Aakash Gupta: so that [00:34:46] Aakash Gupta: I know [00:34:46] Adam Fishman: you're maximizing your, your timetable, right? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Very cool. Wow. Well, we can let this cook for a little bit, but look it, uh, it says the skeleton's already here 'cause I think you're probably inside your [00:34:59] Aakash Gupta: Exactly. but [00:35:00] Aakash Gupta: now it's already ready to improve it. So it's figured out some stuff that I didn't have, like real sub-agent definitions. So I'm excited. Now it's going off and just building real sub-agent definitions. And [00:35:11] Adam Fishman: amazing. [00:35:13] Aakash Gupta: Yeah [00:35:13] Aakash Gupta: it's pretty autonomous, and you can just keep improving this harness live. [00:35:17] Aakash Gupta: We've already decided to improve it a little bit. You can keep going [00:35:19] Adam Fishman: Cool. How much trial and error did it take you to, like, get this pretty dialed in? Like, a decent amount of time just, like, prompting and then editing and sort of redirecting? Like, was that kinda how the workflow worked for you? [00:35:32] Speaker: you? [00:35:33] Aakash Gupta: So, like, [00:35:34] Aakash Gupta: it was as simple as, like, pointing it to my PM OS and creating the first one with this single prompt and then using it. And after every time I use it, so, like, for example, this one, like, "This is good, but you missed that JTD school applications open today, [00:35:53] Aakash Gupta: we need to not miss this next time. [00:35:56] Aakash Gupta: Update the harness, create a PR, merge to main." I will just give it all these steps Right [00:36:03] Aakash Gupta: then and there. And now what's really cool is I can go in outside of the Claude Code Harness. So Let's say I'm just trying to be really fast. So I could go to claude.web, I could open up my parent OS, then I could say something like, "Any applications I need to do today." [00:36:28] Aakash Gupta: And so now what this is gonna do is this is gonna go spin up a cloud container. It's gonna go clone that local repository that we were working in. Because we merged to main, it's gonna have that exact updated version that we just created. And it's gonna be able to quickly give me an answer. And I've just demonstrated this on web, but if you guys remember at the beginning, I also used it on my mobile, and that's the most powerful thing. [00:36:54] Aakash Gupta: Going back to, like, why would you even have this? You want to spend less time on your phone in front of your kids. You can just prompt whatever you need to do on your phone itself through Claude Code mobile. And I can even open up this specific chat. So if I go into Claude Code now, I actually see this applications to-do today is a chat here. [00:37:13] Aakash Gupta: And so I can see the exact same view that we're seeing on web on my phone. So you can take it from computer to phone or vice versa. So it's super powerful [00:37:23] Adam Fishman: Very cool. Wow. And it's basically in any environment that you want it to be in because they all stay in sync with each other now, and all powered by Claude Code in whatever form, either a desktop application, terminal, cursor, window, you know, web, like all the things. Amazing. [00:37:39] Adam Fishman: that's really something. what would you say are the family, like the couple of automations that you use the most with your family OS? [00:37:48] Aakash Gupta: Yeah [00:37:48] Aakash Gupta: So for us, one of the things that, we really need, like as a family, I think, is planning trips. Like I said, we spend three months out of the year away from home. And so I will use this plan trip a lot. And I haven't actually run this plan trip yet, but basically in December I'm doing a like work family trip in India. [00:38:15] Aakash Gupta: Uh, on the 25th to the 30th we're kind of free [00:38:21] Aakash Gupta: and you know what? This prompt is getting long, so let me just switch to, like, Whisper flow. I want to, create a plan to go to Taipei from the 25th to the 30th. I want you to help me understand, can we afford business class? 'Cause it's an international flight, it's from India, and it'll probably be pretty lengthy. [00:38:40] Aakash Gupta: Can you go check the 23rd, 24th, 1st, and 2nd, the days around it for Taipei for a nonstop flight? Check Delhi versus Bangalore versus Bombay. I want you to help me understand economy and business class options. Ideally, if we can find a day where business class isn't too much more than economy, that'll be perfect. [00:39:00] Aakash Gupta: And then I want you to plan the trip for us. So I just dictated this all into Whisper flow, and then I hit enter, and that is going to actually go spin off agents. And one of the Cool [00:39:14] Aakash Gupta: things I'll do is I'll, like, prompt it further. I'll say, "Use workflows and parallel sub-agents to go faster." And I can steer it midway through whatever it is doing. [00:39:28] Aakash Gupta: And so now hopefully what it will do is it'll build multiple different agents that are browsing the web and checking flights on these various days. Because if you've ever been to Google Flights and you've done the flexible dates, you notice that it's not actually as good as putting in specific date ranges. [00:39:48] Aakash Gupta: So now I can go have a Claude agent do all of that for me. And so not only save me time of looking up flights, which is really annoying, and I might even want to steer it further like, "Hey, use the information you have on my, uh, frequent flyers. I have like 80k United, 60k Delta, 30k American miles. [00:40:13] Aakash Gupta: those two. So then I can mid-steer it midway, add it to check in that. And like that, the trip planning is really, really powerful. Another one you had asked about was, like, automation-wise. So we use this one quite a bit, and we previewed it a little bit. But is this idea of, like, a subscription audit. [00:40:34] Aakash Gupta: this is an automation that just runs on its own. but I can trigger it for a manual run here with subscription audit. And so it's gonna go read my credit cards, my Gmail and what I actually use on my computer, those three data points. And it's gonna come back to me and say, "Oh, you accidentally haven't been using, you know, your Microsoft Workspace and your HBO Max subscription for the last two months, but you are paying them. [00:41:02] Aakash Gupta: So here are the things." And so you can see it's digging into my Gmail. Oh, looks like I have something like from apple.com, and so it'll go find that subscription for me. So that's like one example. Another thing we do is inside of these reminders, so I have this reminders.yaml file. And so what this does is this will send me a Slack message right when I need to do something or it'll push me. [00:41:30] Aakash Gupta: And so this is one of the most powerful ones, is I've created this reminder that will just send me a reminder. So that's another automation that I really like. And then there's a couple one-- the final one that's, like, really fun to do is family updates. So I can create a family update data. And notice how, like, you've probably heard, like, people talk about managing a bunch of agents. [00:41:51] Aakash Gupta: This is it, right? 'Cause, like, I have, like, this live one. Do you want to edit this? Yes, I do. I have this build one. Do you want to make this edit? Yes, I do. So I'm now managing all these different agents. to Do at once. Look at that. So I just answered all this information. So we're now managing like five different agents at once. [00:42:08] Aakash Gupta: And so what was the last one we wanted to do? Like the family update. And because I build them all as skills, you saw I just hit slash the first letter and I can just hit Tab and it pulls up the skill. So everything comes up really quickly. the reason family update is automated is because I'll just run this like once a week while I'm like at the gym. [00:42:28] Aakash Gupta: And I'll have Whisper flow and I'll just be like, "Family update. Here's the debrief on the trip. We just got back from a month in Europe. I think that a month was too long. my business can only handle me being away for two weeks, so we should put that into my preferences going forward." [00:42:44] Aakash Gupta: And you know what? I put that into my preferences, and this came up when I was planning my last trip and I was like, "I completely forgot [00:42:53] Adam Fishman: It like reminded you Hey, Aakash, you remember? A month's a long time." [00:42:57] Adam Fishman: Yeah. [00:42:58] Aakash Gupta: exactly. [00:42:59] Speaker: Amazing. Amazing. [00:43:00] Speaker: So [00:43:00] Aakash Gupta: So that's, those are like all the automations and Yeah. you can just keep adding more and more. And so you can do things like /goals is one of my favorite. So you can set out like family level goals. Like a goal might be, let's have a goal that Aviv is a top 10 percentile chess player by age eight. And so then it'll start to go backtrack, research the people, and instead of just like parenting okay, you can kind of parenting supercharged. So hopefully create a little prodigy of your own. [00:43:38] Adam Fishman: Yeah. Oh, man. Is there anything you've built into the OS or attempted to build in the OS that just, like, couldn't quite get right or it kind of flopped, or you're like, "Eh, that's not gonna work that way, so let's not bother with that one"? [00:43:53] Aakash Gupta: Yeah [00:43:53] Aakash Gupta: So I actually originally wanted it instead of reminding me that these things are open, for instance, like the Dolly Parton Imagination Lab, I wanted it to just go book it for me. So I gave it all my credit card information. It obviously has access to computer use and browser use. If you install the Claude extension to your Chrome, it gets access to your browser. [00:44:15] Aakash Gupta: So I said, "Hey, go book this for me." That wasn't so great for three reasons. One, it took longer than it would take me, and a lot of these things are time-sensitive. So for me, it would take me 30 seconds. It took it like 12 minutes. [00:44:30] Aakash Gupta: figuring out what button to hit. Half the times it's making a mistake on what button it hits. [00:44:35] Aakash Gupta: It's like literally watching your parents use the internet in the '90s. And so it's not using the Computer as fast as us. And then it was making decisions for me, which is what I did want it to do. But when it comes time to, like, open your credit card, I personally still wanna have the final say. And so that is the reason, faster, token expensive, and money related that I ultimately rejected that use case [00:45:02] Adam Fishman: Yep, Yep, all right, I want to ask you a little bit more about like what's connected to this system. So calendar obviously, email, photos probably. But do you also have like, I don't know, the pediatrician portal or like the preschool app or maybe eventually the sports team apps and stuff? Will those all be plugged in here already? [00:45:22] Aakash Gupta: That's exactly what you wanna do. and so right now, like these are the only connectors that I have live, but I have this MCP setup markdown file that we'll ship to you guys, and you guys can just update this however you want, uh, and add more. And Adam's exactly right. Like, basically you wanna connect whatever you use. [00:45:42] Aakash Gupta: But if you're not using it super regularly, you may wanna turn off that MCP connection as well, just so that you're not like giving away tools to the AI that each time you run a prompt, it's considering, "Should I use this tool or [00:45:56] Adam Fishman: Yeah, and loading it into [00:45:58] Aakash Gupta: So I kind of keep it like relatively small, but I do think all the suggestions are great ideas, and theoretically they could be wired [00:46:05] Aakash Gupta: up [00:46:06] Adam Fishman: yeah [00:46:06] Adam Fishman: cool. So if you were to tell, you know, let's say there's a dad They're AI curious. They're not obviously as, dialed into this as you are. They haven't been using it as long. You know, they're probably using ChatGPT as a search engine or, you know, they're asking Claude to like, write something for them or edit something, whatever. [00:46:25] Adam Fishman: now they find themselves, they're watching this, recording and they're inspired, but they've got no coding background and they wanna like get cracking on the, family, like automating some of their family stuff. Like what are the first couple of things that you'd tell them to, to set up? [00:46:39] Aakash Gupta: So here you actually see Claude because we asked it, like, to be a top 10 percentile chess player, it has navigated using that Claude extension that you can see that little Claude icon next to my Quick devs icon at the top right. And so it's pulled up the Clever Fox Chess Club. It's studying their curriculum. [00:46:59] Aakash Gupta: It's coming back to me with its own curriculum. step one, download and install Claude Desktop. Step two, download and install the Chrome extension for Claude. Step three, make sure you're on a paid plan of Claude. So now you've got, like, the various things installed. Then if you wanna go further, I was showing you guys Cursor, which I do think is by far the best place to be running Claude Code out of. [00:47:32] Aakash Gupta: So you're gonna also download and install Cursor. So what's next? So when you open Cursor, it actually opens this thing called the Agents window. And so when you open the Agents window, you're gonna want-- There at the top right, it's gonna have this little button called Open IDE. So you're gonna wanna hit Open IDE. [00:47:51] Aakash Gupta: Once you get to Open IDE, you're gonna see this kind of alien window, which looks like this, and you're gonna be scared, but don't be. Just hit Open Project, create a new folder. So for me, like, it lives here in Repos. So inside of Repos, I could create a new folder like parent OS. So you create your folder, you hit Open, right? [00:48:16] Aakash Gupta: Now you hit Show Terminal, you hit Claude in order to get Claude going. You trust the folder, and then you say, "Hey, I want to build a parent operating system in Claude [00:48:30] Aakash Gupta: Code. Study the best harnesses, build it. Should have context library, MCP connections, and skills." So you just, That's it? That's how I would start and this prompt, and [00:48:46] Adam Fishman: so you basically download a handful of tools, Claude desktop application, you download the, Claude extension for the browser. You have a Claude subscription, you know, Pro, Max, whatever,Ultra. and then you maybe, if you're feeling adventurous, download Cursor and run Claude, in Cursor, and then just give it a couple sentences and tell it to get cracking [00:49:09] Adam Fishman: refine from there. [00:49:10] Aakash Gupta: This is all part of the harness. And you had asked about like, I've been using Codex or Gemini or... Those models on evals, they get pretty good scores. But inside of their harness, if you were to hit them with this prompt, they wouldn't be able to handle this prompt [00:49:28] Aakash Gupta: inside of Antigravity or Codex. [00:49:30] Aakash Gupta: Claude Code, it is purpose-built to be using skills, to be creating sub-agents. They invented MCP. all of the things that make a system truly compounding, it can set up the scaffolding super fast. Since we already ran this prompt, like let's not run it again. Let's go see how the other one did, because we had asked another one on this prompt, so the build prompt, I believe. [00:49:57] Aakash Gupta: So what you can see, what is, what did the build prompt do? I'm like super keen to see. So it's basically added in a bunch of upgrades to my harness. I don't even know what all the upgrades are. It's updated my Claude MD. Like what I, what you guys are gonna get shipped in the description of this podcast is gonna be more than I actually demoed on the podcast, 'cause it's just gone and improved the harness on its own. [00:50:22] Aakash Gupta: Okay, so it's gonna daily run my booking watch inside of my morning routine. You can see that's one of the changes. Eventually, if we scroll up far enough, there we go. What's missing is a layer that makes a PMOS automated actually run daily operating automation wiring, real sub-agent division. [00:50:41] Aakash Gupta: So it's basically doing exactly this, and at the end it'll give me a pretty good set of questions. So one thing that's interesting is it's asking me a lot of questions, So if you really don't like that, you can change what mode it is in. I have auto mode on, so now it should ask me slightly fewer questions and make slightly better decisions on its own. [00:51:04] Adam Fishman: Yep. Cool. And when you run, these models, so it looks like you're running Opus 5, so you're not running Fable, right? We're not, lighting a rainforest on fire with every, with every prompt. So you're running Opus [00:51:16] Adam Fishman: 5, and I think you're running like mid-level intelligence, like medium intelligence or high maybe, um- Yeah, medium. [00:51:26] Adam Fishman: Yeah, so you're-- It's doing all this with Opus 5 and not like the turbocharged version of, of anything, and it's still quite capable, [00:51:35] Aakash Gupta: I would honestly, if I was like, uh, Peter Steinberger says like, "A lion does not care about token costs." Sadly, I'm a parent like most of you listening, and I have to care about costs. But were I to not have to care about costs, I would use Fable. I think it's like way better at all of the stuff we just talked about, especially orchestration of sub-agents. [00:51:59] Aakash Gupta: Fable is just like always itching to like orchestrate a bunch of sub-agents to do work in a parallel way. So it's an excellent model. Like you can see how th- how long this ended up taking. How long, 10 minutes. Because it did these one, two, three, four, five, six things on its own. Although I love all these six things, Fable would've been smart enough to say, "Let me go spin up six sub-agents to do each one of these." [00:52:23] Aakash Gupta: It might've come back to me in three minutes. And so it can actually be a lot faster [00:52:28] Aakash Gupta: of a model, even though it is technically, when it actually works mechanistically, it actually works slower. It's a bigger parameter model, but it can complete a task faster. [00:52:37] Adam Fishman: Cool. So bringing this all together back to kind of the Family OS and an outcome from that, If folks who've been listening from the beginning, I teased the, museum in Poland that you got a ticket to for free, basically. uh, it would've cost like 100 over, well over $100 to take your family there. [00:52:54] Adam Fishman: So what happened? tell that story for folks. Like, why did the, the Family OS, Parent OS work better here than like a Google search, for example? [00:53:03] Aakash Gupta: So I used the trip planning, which we should go check and see how our trip planning did. so it looks like it was looking for some user input, so I've just submitted the answer, so we'll see at the end of this. But I used the trip planning, so I said, "Hey, we're in Poland for these five days. What should we be doing with kids?" [00:53:19] Aakash Gupta: Our kids love, like, train museums, and so it is a lock that at some point we'll be going to their famous train museum, which is, like, in the center of Kraków anyway, so pretty much everybody goes. We would've just gone on any random day. I think the tickets are, like, $24 a person, so roughly $100. It would've been $96. [00:53:39] Aakash Gupta: It found that, hey, there's a free day while you are going to be there. You should just go on this free day. And that was huge, where now it's found me the free day that-- to go to the museum. You can use this in your own city. You'd be surprised how many of the activities you pay for, they do have, like, a bonus or a promotion or a free day or something. [00:54:03] Aakash Gupta: And so here we can see our s- our travel agent's doing pretty well. It found, like, a, a pretty cheap, flight for business class, which is what we were looking for. And so Yeah, if you're like me and you can't really always afford to fly business class, but you'd love to if [00:54:21] Adam Fishman: Yeah, it's [00:54:22] Adam Fishman: real nice when you [00:54:23] Aakash Gupta: can. [00:54:23] Aakash Gupta: it'll find it [00:54:24] Adam Fishman: Yeah, that's awesome. That's awesome. okay, so that's the Poland story, so congrats. I hope the muse- was the museum fun? Did the, did the kids like the trains? [00:54:32] Aakash Gupta: Yes. Although they're like kids, you know? It's like you take them to something that you spend so much time finding, and then they just like behave the exact same way [00:54:40] Aakash Gupta: they always [00:54:41] Adam Fishman: so I wanna bring it back to your wife for a second. So you're over here just like hammering on a Parent OS and you're like, "I've automated everything in our lives. This is amazing." Where does your wife sit with all of this? [00:54:54] Adam Fishman: Is she like a, a user of the Parent OS? Is she a,co-admin of it or is she sort of like on the side like, "I don't know"? [00:55:03] Aakash Gupta: that's the best part about this is you should add your partner to the repo. And so she doesn't use Cursor as much. She uses Claude Code on her phone a lot. So, but the greatest thing is like, let's say she has a conversation with it, I get updated with the context without her even having to update me. [00:55:24] Aakash Gupta: So she tends to be, let's be honest, in our relationship a little more proactive about some of this booking stuff. So it, it will tell me like, Oh, and Amy's already done that." And I'll [00:55:36] Aakash Gupta: be like, Oh, [00:55:38] Adam Fishman: Nice [00:55:39] Aakash Gupta: a coordination mechanism between parents, [00:55:42] Adam Fishman: it's like Toy Scout except it's Wife Scout. it knows if Amy's already done something. Amazing. okay, so on your household, so I, I mentioned this before, your kids are four and a half or five, getting to be s- school age, and then your, your other one is three, three and a half. [00:55:58] Adam Fishman: is there an age in your household where you've decided that your kids could talk directly to AI, or when you would bring your kids into the family OS maybe instead of the parent OS? [00:56:12] Speaker: OS? [00:56:13] Speaker 2: Yeah [00:56:14] Aakash Gupta: I'm actually eager to, like, bring them into it. [00:56:18] Speaker 2: basically [00:56:18] Aakash Gupta: they need to learn to read and write, and then we'll teach them how to use it. And we'll have to, like, make sure that there isn't, like, anything in here that they shouldn't have access to. Although I can't think of anything, I might want to scrub it. [00:56:30] Aakash Gupta: And so what I would do to do that, by the way, Right So let's say you're ready for that. I would just say, "Hey, I want to upgrade this to a family OS so kids can get benefits too. [00:56:46] Speaker 2: what [00:56:46] Aakash Gupta: do we need to do?" Like, if I was just at, at a question, I'd just ask it, and then it could start to go update itself, This is why it's the greatest software ever invented, right? [00:56:55] Aakash Gupta: What other software can it just go patch itself? Can it go upgrade itself? Can you just go ask it, "How should I go upgrade you?" So now it's gonna go take some revs on it. And this might actually be a good example where maybe you want a smarter model. Maybe you ask Fable to do this task. But I think this is okay. [00:57:16] Aakash Gupta: Like, this is fine. And so now what is it asking us? What does kids get benefits mean? Things they receive, things tracked for... it's all of the above actually. you can give it that question. Plan first. Yeah. just the plan for now. And so you can interact with it like I just did, and it'll give you a little bit of questions if it's unclear, and go build it after it's actually ready. [00:57:40] Aakash Gupta: And for-- in this case, I chose just plan because I don't want it to go spend... You know, it's Wednesday and the event is Thursday at 6:00 PM. So I'm at like 88% of my all model usage on the $200 plan. So I don't want it to go just burn the other 12% and then I'll be back on overages tomorrow. [00:58:00] Adam Fishman: Yeah, the saddest thing is when it tells me I have 3% left and it's gonna reset at like 4:00 PM in the afternoon and I'm like, I'm never gonna make it to 4:00 you know? all right, this has been amazing. I wanna end, so we'll do a quick lightning round here in a second. But I wanna end with something that's actually, very memorable to you. [00:58:19] Adam Fishman: somewhat memorable to me too actually because of where it takes place. So you grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan, if I'm not mistaken. I am also from Michigan. I grew up on the east side of, of Detroit. And Kalamazoo, Michigan, for listeners who don't know, is home of a thing called the Air Zoo, which is an aviation museum that has like real military planes, and you've loved going there since you were a kid. [00:58:43] Adam Fishman: this doesn't have a whole lot to do with AI, but you know, you've written that it is now a favorite of your kids too. So my question to you is like what has it been like watching your two kids fall in love with the Air Zoo in Kalamazoo? [00:58:58] Aakash Gupta: Oh, that's a well-timed question 'cause we just got back from Michigan and took them there too. It's, we basically take them there like, you know, once a year or whatever when we head home to Michigan. And it's fun to see how they experience it each year differently as well, although we skipped one or two years in the middle. [00:59:17] Aakash Gupta: But I can't believe it, like, you know, it's such a small place. I think there's maybe like 100,000 people, but it has a world-class air museum. And so whenever people are, like, in the area, like they're like, "Oh, I'm going to Grand Rapids," I'm like, "If you want, you could drive an hour to my hometown and there's this really Cool [00:59:34] Aakash Gupta: air museum." [00:59:35] Aakash Gupta: I don't know if anyone's ever taken me up on that, but I will still recommend it to you guys listening. If you're ever driving from Detroit to Chicago, it literally falls on your drive. Maybe Adam's family listening, they're doing-- making that drive sometimes. they want to stop at the Air Zoo, I highly recommend it. [00:59:51] Aakash Gupta: it's so fun and it's huge actually. It's like gigantic. You'd think it's like in a, like a metro city or something like that. Yeah [00:59:58] Aakash Gupta: it's just fun to see. Like, airplane technology, I think hasn't changed as much as, like, AI technology has just, like, completely changed in the last three years. Like, the fastest planes, they could build those in 1962, and so they actually have versions of those that you can see. [01:00:14] Aakash Gupta: I had no idea, like these technically like invisible planes that you guys have probably seen that can elude radar. If you're like me, you probably thought like, oh, it's like paper thin and it's like super small. No. These things are fricking huge, like 40 feet long. [01:00:32] Speaker: Yeah. [01:00:33] Aakash Gupta: And so you can actually go see it, you can go walk up to it, you can touch it. [01:00:38] Aakash Gupta: Some of them you can sit in, like that, like the fastest plane, I think it's called like a Blackhawk or something like that. I'm probably wrong on the name. [01:00:44] Adam Fishman: Wow. Okay. Well, hey, now I got to get on a plane and go see the Air Zoo real quick. last couple questions for you. so your audience is full of a certain type of person, PMs and founders, and many of them, they're builders. Many of them are about to have their first kid, certainly a lot of people listening to this show, I would say, are parenting curious, right? [01:01:06] Adam Fishman: They're on the cusp. What do you tell people who are about to have their first kid that are also builders and entrepreneurs or creators and founders? Like, what's, what is that conversation like or what advice do you have for them? [01:01:19] Aakash Gupta: Well, [01:01:19] Aakash Gupta: at least for me, the way I experienced it, it kind of reminded me of like high school. Like when you start out, ninth grade is like a shock. And then you realize to get into college, not only do I need to be able to handle homework and tests that are like actually real now, but I need to have these extracurriculars. [01:01:39] Aakash Gupta: And so you layer in these extracurriculars. But I don't know if it was like, if you guys all experienced this like I did, but when I layered in the extracurriculars, my grades actually went up. [01:01:49] Aakash Gupta: When I had more responsibilities, my performance in the individual areas actually improved. And somehow like putting more on your plate, like I know people talk about taking a step back in your career, those kind of things. [01:02:03] Aakash Gupta: I personally haven't had to experience that. Since I've had kids, my earnings have only gone up. If I look at like how much I was making pre-kids to now, I'm probably making six times as much per year. and they're three and four, so this is like, these are technically the years where you're supposed to take a step back, and I've been able to really improve how much I'm earning. [01:02:23] Aakash Gupta: So I think you can achieve as much as you want out of your career. For me, obviously, sleep has been like a consistent trade-off, and so maybe some of you guys don't wanna make that. Maybe you make it in the workout area or the friends area. Those are other places you could also make cuts. But treat it like high school. [01:02:40] Aakash Gupta: Like, oh, you just layered on this extracurricular. In this case of kids, as you guys heard from my calendar, it's like roughly six hours a day. And so you're adding in six hours a day, plus not to account for, oh, your nanny is sick, or She wants to take her kids to their first day of school, like happened to me this morning. So it's only six hours of a workday. So you'll even get that with kids where they keep compressing. For me, the biggest thing has been like, personally, we've always had like a nanny on top of school or daycare or something like that, so that I really do get my 40 hour cleared out. Like somebody is responsible for the kids for 40 hours a week, and so I can have 40 hours. [01:03:18] Aakash Gupta: For me to achieve my career goals, 40 hours is very rarely enough. And so taking a little bit of time at night after they go to sleep. Because they sleep for like 12 hours, you need like six, [01:03:30] Aakash Gupta: use that time. So [01:03:31] Adam Fishman: Yeah. [01:03:32] Adam Fishman: Cool. All right. That's fantastic advice and a great place for us to stop. To end, how can people follow along or be helpful to you? You've been so helpful on this show [01:03:42] Aakash Gupta: Oh, I don't know. What we'll do is, um, I'm gonna ask Claude right after this to create a sanitized version of the PM OS so that all of you guys listening can just fork it on GitHub, and we'll put that link in the show notes. And so you can go check that out. Use the Parent OS. [01:03:58] Aakash Gupta: If you see something, that could be improved, submit a PR, pull request to me, and we'll improve the Parent OS as a base for everybody listening, and we can create a little Startup Dad Parent OS to help everybody. And as you said, Yeah [01:04:12] Aakash Gupta: of course, we already talked about it. I'm on LinkedIn, so you can find me there [01:04:15] Adam Fishman: All right. I will send everybody to The Parent OS. Thank you for agreeing to do that, and also to you on LinkedIn, and you've got a newsletter. We'll link to all the places that people can get fully Aakash-pilled, uh, online. So, do you have just a couple minutes for lightning round? This'll be quick, uh, and painless, I promise. all right. What is the most indispensable parenting product you've ever purchased? And you can't say Claude subscription. You have to say something else. [01:04:43] Aakash Gupta: Oh [01:04:45] Adam Fishman: [01:04:45] Aakash Gupta: I feel like toys, I don't know about you guys listening, but toys have like a two-month half-life in [01:04:50] Speaker 2: house. [01:04:50] Adam Fishman: They do. They don't live very long. You're right. [01:04:53] Aakash Gupta: my house. They don't live like a long time at all. I mean, I think that, uh, [01:04:57] Speaker 2: one [01:04:58] Aakash Gupta: that I would recommend to a lot of people, and it doesn't act- it's not like indispensable in that like we're not using it anymore, [01:05:04] Aakash Gupta: but is night nannies. [01:05:07] Aakash Gupta: And [01:05:07] Aakash Gupta: what this did is like, you know, the first six months or something when the husband is trying to help but can't really offer much help to the wife who is bre- if she's breastfeeding [01:05:17] Aakash Gupta: at night, night nanny was one way I could help, [01:05:21] Aakash Gupta: where the night nanny is changing the baby, bringing the baby to mom, so all mom has to do is just feed mo- the baby. [01:05:29] Aakash Gupta: She doesn't have to do anything else. Well, for the first six months of life, if you buy a night nanny, one of my close friends was like, "Just don't even think about the cost. Like your wife is gonna be so much happier with that extra hour or so of sleep. Just do it. So that is, I think, one of the best purchases to make [01:05:48] Adam Fishman: Okay, awesome. True or false, there's only one correct way to load a dishwasher. [01:05:54] Aakash Gupta: False [01:05:56] Adam Fishman: Just throw it all in there, who cares? if your kids had to describe you in one single word, what would it be? [01:06:03] Speaker 2: Energetic [01:06:04] Adam Fishman: Okay. What is your all-time favorite kids movie? [01:06:09] Aakash Gupta: I am like a kid, honestly. Like, I love almost all kids movies. I think one of the ones that is probably the best is "Inside Out." [01:06:17] Adam Fishman: That is a great one. I had a dad tell me the other day that they watched that in the delivery room when their wife was in labor, and I was like, "That's amazing." so okay, awesome. Now on another note, do you have a nostalgic movie that you will force your kids to watch with you once they're old enough? [01:06:36] Aakash Gupta: " Alien," the first one. [01:06:38] Adam Fishman: Okay. [01:06:39] Aakash Gupta: I could rewatch that movie. It's from, like, the '80s, but it's, like, the best depiction of space, and it's an actually good horror movie. And if you don't like the horror genre, like, there's only, like, one or two jump scares, so you can handle it. [01:06:50] Aakash Gupta: I think everybody should watch it [01:06:52] Adam Fishman: Okay, cool. And now to wrap our final question, what is your take on minivans? [01:07:00] Speaker 2: Ooh. [01:07:02] Aakash Gupta: Personally, for me, I don't know why I care about what my car looks like, but I do. And so we just have, like, seven-seater SUVs. I really recommend the Kia Tailride or Hyundai Palisade. It's so affordable. Like, it's like 40K I think we spent on it. and seriously roomy third row. We've had three adults sit back there even just like two weeks ago when I had a bunch of family over. [01:07:30] Aakash Gupta: So it's a legit competitor to like the much more expensive, like Suburban, Escalade, Nissan Armada class of car. People always think like, "Oh, I need a minivan to get that third row." But now with this like new third-row cars, and I think the Grand Highlander is also a competitor in this space, you can get like a roomy third row in an SUV, and so it doesn't need to look like a mom car. [01:07:55] Adam Fishman: Okay. So you don't have to be on team minivan to get the benefits. So, all right. Well, Aakash, with that, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for walking us all through the Parent OS. I can't wait to push my first pull request to update it. I wish you and your family, all the best, and I look forward to continuing to follow you on LinkedIn and, and read all your stuff. [01:08:17] Adam Fishman: So thank you very much [01:08:18] Adam Fishman: Thank you for listening to today's conversation with Aakash Gupta. You can subscribe and watch the show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Visit www.startupdadpod.com to learn more and browse past episodes. [01:08:32] Adam Fishman: Thanks for listening and see you next week