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Andrew Warner: Hey there, freedom fighters. This interview is a little more visual than our usual ones. I do my best to do play-by-play, so if you’re not watching, you can still understand what’s going on. But if you’re really interested in seeing the whole thing, go over to our YouTube channel to see it. It is at thenextnewthing.ai/youtube.
And here’s my interview with Shane Mac, founder of XMTP, which created the Convos chat app Convos is an app that allows you to launch Open Claw and Hermes agents on your phone.
Can you have it? Copy an app,
Shane Mac: just paste the link and tell your agent to copy it. It’s done. Let’s just do a screen share. I’ll just show you how you can do it.
Andrew Warner: Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. Shane, let me see how easy it is to create an agent on your platform.
Shane Mac: All right. I just opened convos. I hit start a convo.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Shane Mac: I can choose whether or not I wanna share my name with the agent, so I’ll throw it out. I need to swipe up, and then it joins. And so usually takes a couple seconds, it goes and builds everything in the background. So it’s provisioning an email address for this, a phone number, a web browsing capabilities, everything.
And then it just joins like a member in a chat.
Andrew Warner: And this is open claw, right off the bat,
Shane Mac: open claw or Hermes. So you get to pick your default.
Andrew Warner: All right. You wanna ask it? Just a quick question to see that it is an agent. What makes it an agent?
What makes it an agent? I, I didn’t mean to ask that, but let’s see. What makes you an agent? Oh, what do you want me to do? I, I was gonna say, like, I was gonna ask you to ask it a question that will have it prove that it is an agent. There we go. An agent is a model that could take ask it. What can you do?
This is not yet available to the public. You’re still rolling it out in, uh, small batches to a wait list, and we’ll have a link below in the show notes to ev anyone who wants it. Alright, so now we’ve got it up and running. Can you have it copy an app the way that you show it on Twitter?
Shane Mac: Yeah, so I was, I was talking to Robert Stevens actually, and he was like, I don’t even download apps anymore.
I just screenshot the app in the app store and throw it in a thing and go code the app, and then it just builds a personalized version of a, the app that I want. And I was like, that’s interesting. I wonder if I can make that so anyone in the world could do it.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Shane Mac: And so we, we made it where you can literally just take a photo, go to favorites.
And I was looking at this app. I have my phone, I pay twenty nine nine nine a year for Cal ai. I just, it’s so simple. I drop photos. It analyzes the photos, it tells me the calories in it. I love it. And I was like, can you, can you build this app into an agent? And I screenshotted the app store listing
Andrew Warner: Uhhuh.
Shane Mac: Drop this in and I had no idea if it was gonna work. I was just sitting there at a coffee shop Saturday morning. Robert said that to me and I was like, I wonder if it’ll like, these things are really powerful and it really just is an accountability coach, but it’s not even a good like coach Got a cali eye.
Calor me. Want me to build it out? Yes, please.
Andrew Warner: And this is Robert Stevens, a friend of yours, the founder of Greek Squad, who has told you that he is using this app in that way. And so you’re saying, okay, let me, let me demo it and see how it works for me. I. It did it. It’s got this Skill MD file and it says, snap a photo of anything you eat and I’ll log the calories and the macros instantly know.
App, no database. So you have a photo, I’m sure of food.
Shane Mac: Let’s go find a, let’s go find a healthy meal. Right? This one’s healthy.
Andrew Warner: I was hoping for a non-healthy meal. Okay. Yeah. And this one’s a little hard, hard to see what’s in there.
Shane Mac: Okay. And uh, you know, you always have the red states. What’s cool is it’s like an accountability coach too.
It’s not just an app and it lives inside of where all my other agents can live. And so it just broke it down. Carnitas plus lummi plus avocado. Here’s your estimate. What’s your daily target? So I can, let’s do 2200 a day.
Andrew Warner: Oh, I love that it knew to ask it now, not
Shane Mac: early on, and I wanna lose 10 pounds. Uh, and what’s cool is it like it starts with that app.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Shane Mac: And then it has access to everything in the world. And so what I actually did is I took this, the Cal ai, and I used to have a trainer with my body tutor. I used to pay $399 a month. His name was Kai. I actually loved this guy. So I took the Cal AI app as the seed of an idea, and then I took all my messaging logs of Kai from iMessage.
Put it, I just dropped it in here. I copied and pasted it in the chat, and then I said, the My Body tutor.com blog has all their philosophy, and I love that company. For what it’s worth. Yeah. I dropped the link in and said, go read everything about my body tutor. Here’s all my chat logs from Kai. And what he did is he’s a psychology coach about how you feel about food.
So I just built Kai. Yeah. I literally named it Kai. And it started with the Cal AI thing, and then it went into personalizing it more. Then I was like, I wonder if I could just combine it with fitness. It knows how I work out every day. It’ll always ask me, you know, are you playing pickleball? Did you do that?
This thing is the greatest thing I’ve ever built, and every single day it just gets better and better and better. And if I see something else, I’m like, yeah, you know what? I wanna add that to my program. I don’t like go download a new app. I just give it to Kai. And now Kai has become the best trainer I’ve ever had.
Andrew Warner: Your company is backed by who,
Shane Mac: uh, with the investors. Andreessen Horowitz, USV, Fred Wilson is on our board. Uh, and a lot of other like, really, you know, awesome investors.
Andrew Warner: Let’s see some of the other use cases that you have here. Um, you told me that you use this for meeting coordinator and you also said that we can’t look at your private meetings.
Can I see something that’s not private? Um, to see how an agent in a chat helps. And by the way, the way you’re doing it is you’re saving each one of these conversations as its own app. Why are you, why are you flipping back the apps back and forth between them? You’re going, one
Shane Mac: is on Dev and one I’m showing you the new stuff on Dev.
Andrew Warner: Oh, got it. Okay. All right. So now you’re gonna show me, uh, an actual conversation. Let’s see a live conversation here with humans and agents together.
Shane Mac: Yeah. And I think coordination is one of the most challenging things in the world and is really unique to kind of groups of people. Mm-hmm. And so I, I love wake surfing and, uh, if you, you know, cal dot com’s great and uh, um, Calendly and all these things when it’s like one to one or even one to four, but when you’re like 10 people.
And it’s an opinion where you want to go, what people’s times, when are you available? It’s like it can take five hours of your day. Yeah. Like in, you know, my assistant used to try to do that, but not for your personal life. Or even most business happens in text now. So it’s kind of like you’re just in this chaotic text message.
So I add Laird Laird is Laird Hamilton. He’s the best big surfer in the world. An agent that, and what I did based,
Andrew Warner: it’s we’re talking about an agent that’s based on him that you added into this chat. Okay.
Shane Mac: Totally. And so I literally just tell Laird. At the beginning, like, here’s where, here’s where our boat’s at, here’s what we like to do.
We gotta be out before sunset. Make sure you look at sunset. Make sure you look at the weather. I don’t want a boat in the rain. I only have six seats and we always need people to bring waters and food. Mm-hmm. Or whatever. So that’s like, it’s, it’s just simple and you just talk to it and it goes and builds that agent for you, just from texting it.
And so then it comes back. Great. It renames itself layered in the chat. Now I have layered here and. All I say is April 15th, 4:00 PM. That’s all I say in the chat now. Mm-hmm. This used to take me hours and it’ll say, cool, I, this is me kind of training it. At first, this person says out for the 14th, fucking do the 15th.
So it starts tracking in out, et cetera. Okay. Adam’s in. Shane and them or not, and this starts asking other people, Hey, anyone else in, we gotta be off by six 30. That’s when the sun goes down. We have the sunset. It looks like it’s gonna be clear skies that day. Ooh, here’s the address
Andrew Warner: I wait. I like how it’s got a check next to, uh, Adam there.
And then I also said like how it says underneath it, drop your r rss VP and let us know who’s got, uh, whatever, soda, water, et cetera. Okay, let’s keep going.
Shane Mac: And, and then someone else dropped a photo of me surfing being a smart ass
Andrew Warner: Uhhuh.
Shane Mac: And it’s like, that’s what I’m talking about. Will Willie’s clearly in look at that form?
And I was like, that’s me. And it goes, oh, legend updated. Confirming Shane apparently the star of the highlight reel. So it’s like, it’s funny, it’s having a blast. People actually love it. I kicked it out of another group I have and they’re like, bring, bring it back. Oh wait, bring Billy ba back. Billy,
Andrew Warner: look at this.
I also like how it says under Willie. You in or just hyping Shane’s footage because, because of the photo. Okay. I got how this works. Let’s look at another one. What about something called radar? What is radar?
Shane Mac: Hold on, hold on one, I think. Get the screenshot out here. So it depends on the date. Well then it starts coordinating.
Okay. You in probably lemme check with my wife. I’m in for the 15th. And then literally it adds Willie pending wife approval
Andrew Warner: with, uh, with a laughing emoji at like, making fun of him.
Shane Mac: Yeah. So yeah, it’s great.
Andrew Warner: Okay. I got it. Let’s, let’s look at radar.
Shane Mac: Um, so radar is one of my favorite, so I.
I love songwriters. I love music, and there’s always these venues in town, and I’m like always trying to figure out how do I know if that venue has one of my favorite artists or a new artist I’ve never found. Um, and there’s also my favorite writers shit these days. They’re all writing from RSS. I don’t wanna download an RSS reader.
I don’t even know what R Ss means. And so I just drop in all my favorite website links. So my top five venues in Nashville, my top 10 songwriters, my top 10 artists. My personal friends who are actually songwriters, my top six writers that I love their blogs. I did one the other day. I took Patrick Collison.
The CEO of Stripe has a list on his website of his 89 favorite people that has links to all their sites. Okay. And I said, build me a reminder if any of his favorite people write any articles about tech AI or like, um, kind of the future of, um, um, it was like the future of. Technology.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Shane Mac: And so now it just goes and builds that and it’s now monitoring all of his site.
Then it’s monitoring my favorite writers. And then I said, every morning, send me a summary and I want you to tell me if a website’s updated, if there’s artists playing at venues, if there’s people that are folk or country or songwriters that are in my style that I like playing at a venue. And every morning I get this update of like people, I’m tracking writers, I’m tracking artists, I’m tracking, and venues I’m tracking.
So it’s like third and Linley tonight. Is one of my favorite venues in town and it’s really hard to always keep up with like what they have. Yeah. And all this is coming together to a little daily summary every day. Um, that can also be about, you know, you can do this for work, you can monitor all of your network.
I can say, here’s my social network. Look at everyone I follow track, everyone, if there’s anything interesting they post or going viral, like you can do all kinds of things. But it all comes back to this radar chat. And then I can just keep personalizing it every day you
Andrew Warner: proactively and it says, Hey Shane, this thing just happened.
I want you to come back into the chat and see it.
Shane Mac: Yep. And then you can keep talking to it. Ask him more ques like, today, I did this at 8:00 AM and it’s, you know, my buddy Morgan Evans just dropped his album. He’s touring in Australia. And I texted him, literally, I was like, oh dude, congrats on the album launch.
That’s amazing. Um, and so I’ve been kind of obsessed with that idea for a long time, but it’s never been where you can take all of the internet and all these different use cases and then personalize it into one chat also, where I’m already building all these agents.
Andrew Warner: Let’s look at, uh, how about a personal one, a relationship, you and your girlfriend.
Shane Mac: Yeah, this one is one of my favorite ones. So we dropped in our whole calendar, RSS, and just did a, a calendar feed, and then we dropped in a note we have that is every day and all the people that we care about, and we just copied and pasted it in here and said, always give us a day of what’s going on. And then every Sunday give us a summary of the week ahead.
Okay. And so last Friday was a really cool, when I got this in the morning, Friday night rundown, here’s the weather. And I always tell it to, it’s all about like coordinating multiple services into one thing. Yeah. That’s what makes it so powerful. So it’s like, here’s the weather for the day. Um. Here’s what it’s gonna be, but also, here’s your dinner tonight.
Here’s the phone number, here’s the directions. Here’s the best. Five things I’ve found through all the reviews on Google. Here’s a little happy hour special. Also, I went and researched the parking. Here’s where to park and make sure you arrive early afterwards. It’s gonna go to Bluebird. Bluebird starts at seven 30.
Here’s the link there. Here’s the songwriters that are performing. Here’s their biggest hits. Here’s like things about them, and then getting there. It’s then like, Hey, here’s the distance from your house to the restaurant. Here’s the distance with a rush hour from your restaurant. To the other venue, here’s where to park once you get to that venue.
And then here’s the suggested timeline schedule of the night. Um, okay. And then,
Andrew Warner: alright, I’m seeing this. Let’s take it off screen share and just now talk about where this is all going. What’s coming up? So it’s still not available to the public. People can’t go to a website and get it. Of course, we’re gonna have a link in the description where people can add themselves to the wait list.
And how many people are you letting in a day?
Shane Mac: Probably like 50 or so. Um, so the, the app is out there. You can work at you just unlocking the agents, uh, takes an invite code.
Andrew Warner: Okay. All right. And we’ll help you all get there. Um, you told me in the future or in the near future, you guys are working on app Connections.
We’ll Notion be one of them. I need to update my notion docs.
Shane Mac: I think all of the things around, um, like documents mm-hmm. Calendar. The general workspace make a lot of sense. Uh, and this overlap of work actually is personal. A lot of people do work in iMessage or Signal or WhatsApp, and so being the messenger that actually integrates to all of our kind of workspaces, I think is gonna be, uh, high on the connections list.
Andrew Warner: Can I suggest one thing, Shane? Yeah, my sponsor, yeah, Zapier. They’ve got Zapier, SDK one Connection, and then let them go handle all the other connections instead of you all building it individually. And maybe you focus on the key ones yourselves, but let Zapier just bring in everything else.
Shane Mac: We’re thinking about as convos connect is an is an SDK layer, but we are not gonna be responsible for it.
We, we need the developer ecosystem and the builder ecosystem, or just the Zapier of the world to let everyone connect whatever they want. It’s just bring in your own personal data and you should control that.
Andrew Warner: When you and I talked, you said that one of the benefits of this is that two agents can talk to each other.
Give me an example of where my agent would want to talk to someone else’s agent, like your agent, and why would they need privacy for that?
Shane Mac: Everyone’s gonna have a personal agent. So we’re gonna be in a group of 10 people, and 10 people are gonna have their own personal agents. They can make that group chat noisy as hell, or they can literally.
Just create a side convo. It’s actually in the app. You can click and create a side convo, but it’s programmable so agents can do it, not just humans and all those agents can go coordinate. It has access to your calendar. Mine has access to my calendar, but we don’t want to share. I don’t wanna give you my whole calendar.
I don’t wanna give you my whole workspace. So those agents can protect us, protect our attention while coordinating. And they can negotiate. They can find times together. They can do briefings. You can,
Andrew Warner: alright, it’s convos.org for anyone who wants to go download it now. And if you want to get on the wait list and get fast access, we’ll have a link in the show notes.
Shane, thanks so much and everyone else go subscribe because I’ve got more interviews with founders who are doing incredible things with AI that you need to know about ahead of, uh, even release. Bye everyone.
