Matthew: Welcome to the Restock Podcast by No Code Supply Co, where we highlight people and the things they build, useful tools, visual inspiration, and conversations to refill our shelves, our digital shelves, and ourselves. I'm Matthew, and with me is Corey. Hey, Corey.

Corey Moen: What's up? What's up, y'all? I'm Corey. we're stoked today to have Max Lind with us. He is a OG, especially of No Code Supply Co. Max and I were kind of jamming together when we first brought the site to life. And so like a very fitting guest. and his cinch, I'll let kind of let you set the context of what what you're up to these days and tools you're using and keeping up with how this industry is changing before our eyes. Max, welcome.

Matthew: Good to have you.

Max: Hello. Hello. good to see you all. Thanks for having me. man, I I OG is like very, you know, you're you're giving me too much credit. I just I just jumped in and tried to help push things along. but yeah, I mean I just quick intro for I guess for folks that don't know, I'm Max from Iowa. I always like to throw that in there. was a designer the first decade of my career and then was lucky enough to kind of switch gears and get into the marketing and community side and work for Tribble and abstract and webflow and we obviously all Corey, you know, Matthew and and I obviously all overlapped at Webflow. But yeah, these days I'm I lead the charge as a solo GTM marketing sales community social fill in the blank machine over at a company called Event Rise, ticketing platform that's just kind of trying to modernize the, you know, the event brights of the world. But yeah, just thanks for having me on. Excited to chit to chit chat about the state of things.

Matthew: Yeah. Excited to have you here. And I kind of feel like it's a bit of a misstep on our part for you not being the first guest, but hey, we we got we finally got got you on here. Yeah. That's right. That's right.

Max: Hey, all good. You got you got this thing warmed up now, so I hopefully that hopefully I can jump in. Yeah.

Matthew: And speaking of warming up, how about we actually look at some beautiful designs where I guess y'all can actually help me be the judge of whether these are good designs or not? Let's get your reactions to this.

Corey Moen: Whoa.

Matthew: I don't know if y'all seen this. I saw this during the World Cup and I wanted to share it, but the World Cup's now over. But hey, we've got lots of data about the World Cup. And this site does some pretty amazing things with the on-field data as far as tracking possession of the ball, you know, goals, of course, but just where players are on the field, and it actually turns that into like a Real time play out of the data like an area control game, basically. so I want to show that to you. Check this out. So you can see as

Corey Moen: I saw this, yeah.

Matthew: each team has

Max: Yeah, this is cool.

Matthew: possession and kind of control of different parts of field, it it moves back and forth. And then you can see the goal score. So this was a pretty exciting game between France and England. It was a high scoring game, which is kind of

Corey Moen: My gosh, it was nuts.

Max: this is the th the third place game, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Matthew: unusual for soccer and football. But

Corey Moen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Matthew: yeah. So I thought this was really interesting way to visualize data that I hadn't seen before.

Corey Moen: Did I I feel like I seen a like a couple iterations of something like this? Is this and I and I know I saw like the ball for FIFA World Cup this year had the sensors in it and all that. So it's like

Matthew: It did, yeah.

Corey Moen: it but did they expose data like in a public API for that or like how are people actually getting this data was the part that like I didn't understand.

Matthew: That is a good question. I actually don't know the answer.

Max: The I gonna say the players all wear that little like tracker device individually too, as far as like, you know

Matthew: Yes.

Corey Moen: Wow.

Max: you know, cause it that's the crazy thing about all this stuff nowadays. It's like A, as somebody that played soccer, it's cool to see these because people that have never heard of or never watched soccer, that enjoyed the World Cup, you realize like how the game progresses, why it's not slow, you know, like the change of pace, whatever. But also just the the reality that tech behind all of this stuff nowadays is wild.

Corey Moen: so what?

Matthew: Yeah. Yeah. So we ha there's all kinds of data, like you said, from the ball, from the players to obviously just the stats of the game. So yeah. Anyway, really interesting. it did say The data, there's not a link out, but it's from Foot Mob or Fot Mob and Who Scored.

Corey Moen: Mm.

Matthew: So So yeah. I I had been kind of thinking of a project around the World Cup. Like, is there a way I could do something cool with data? And I just never thought of anything. And then when I saw this, I was like, this is this is not.

Max: Yeah. The visualizations alone are interesting, I think. I mean, in a world of plenty of information, having yeah, having

Matthew: Like a three D heat map.

Max: more visualization is is sweet.

Matthew: Cool. All right. This one is actually whoops. Sorry. monologue. This is an agency site.

Corey Moen: So beautiful. I

Max: the logo.

Corey Moen: agency, I think it's actually just Hugh. Huey, I think is how you say it. Yeah, yeah. I think he's a

Matthew: Is it? Agency of one.

Corey Moen: Yeah, Agency of One. Because I I followed him on Twitter for a minute. Incredible designer dev. yeah, and I thought I saw him recently post the update of this and kind of shifting to that studio model. Yeah.

Matthew: Yeah, there he is. I really liked this part too, where he goes into like how he works and then actually visualizing it with these background

Corey Moen: Uh-huh.

Matthew: videos. yeah, he actually has YouTube videos that go along with each.

Max: This looks great. Snappy too.

Matthew: Right. Are either of you looking for some new like designer merch?

Corey Moen: Always.

Matthew: Check out outfit.hellohello.is.

Max: Mm-hmm.

Matthew: so yeah, some pretty cool

Corey Moen: I think this is an agency, right? Hello, hello. Yeah. It's

Matthew: Yes. Yeah, I actually have that pulled up. We can check them out in a second. But yeah, it's some kind of cool designer merch here. Prices aren't too bad. I'd say decent prices on the stuff. So kind of kind of Swiss style. Very

Corey Moen: Yeah. Golly. For sure.

Matthew: clean, minimalist.

Max: Exactly.

Corey Moen: Every time I see this stuff, I immediately I'm always like, I want to know how they're fulfilling this. Like I wanna know Dude, we

Max: Yes. I I was literally thinking the same thing. Where are they getting it from?

Matthew: sold out.

Corey Moen: I mean, also like we used to have merch on No Code Supply Co, you know, a couple years ago and it was just through like printful because Web Flood and integration and it made it really easy, but like the quality was just

Matthew: Yeah.

Corey Moen: so mid that I just couldn't sleep at night about it. And so I took it down. because I'm just like I I don't know, but like somehow people are pulling

Matthew: That is a challenging.

Corey Moen: this off. yeah, like I I just I just ordered a hat the other day from Fuzcos, another like agency out there that's a great yeah, great studio. And I forget what their merch store is called. It's something kind of funny and like tongue in cheek. but yeah, yeah, similar like, you know, minimal design, beautiful stuff.

Matthew: Yeah, what do you think about agencies having merch? I I mean, I'm for it. Yeah. Spread the Yeah.

Corey Moen: Same. Spread the brand. Yeah.

Max: Yeah, same.

Corey Moen: I think it's the same bucket of like tech companies or again directories or whoever having merch. I just think there's something to be said about like if you're willing to go to that point, you're passionate about like, you know, spreading your brand in a way that is just like things that people can enjoy and remember you by. And you know, there's no nothing else, like especially when they're priced like this and they're not like clearly they're not trying to make do this to make money. They're just doing it to like spread some community love. which I think

Matthew: Or well

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: I I see it as a

Corey Moen: Right then.

Matthew: great way, it's like a good team creative exercise. It's outside of your like normal like task type work. It's something where you can

Corey Moen: Mm.

Matthew: be more expressive.

Corey Moen: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Max: Yeah. That's what I was gonna say too. It's like there's probably a lot of times where I mean, designers clearly have a perspective or an opinion. And even if they've never done anything in the print or apparel world, they could probably figure it out outside of maybe some of the logistics, but like the idea of yeah, just challenging yourself to try something new is always always interesting.

Matthew: Yeah, that that's always a good idea. So I think when an agency can kind of bake that into their culture, finding ways where they can like stretch those muscles. it's a great thing. So yeah, that's from Hello Hello. They have a really nice site as well. y'all should check out. Okay. let's let's kind of speed through some of these. this is from Joseph Barry. This was kind of a a sample site for the MTA and New York City. One thing I liked on this one is the the actual subway chart, but actually if you click on a route, and of course I'm gonna click on ace, you actually see it kind of animate and play out. And you can zoom in and stuff too. So I thought this is a great way to visualize that that map in a different way. Then this individual, Abeto, so you can tell just by their kind of this is their whole site right here. Okay. So it's very, very simple, but just very beautiful, great design eye and aesthetic, right? So they released this, which is called Messenger. This is all done in 3JS. This whole site.

Max: Crazy.

Matthew: And it is actually this it is a whole world

Max: wow.

Matthew: and a game that you can walk around and do stuff.

Corey Moen: So well.

Matthew: So you can actually go and

Max: Ha ha ha.

Matthew: Interact with people and objects and stuff.

Max: Crazy.

Matthew: So and and they're like little missions where you go and accomplish things and yeah. It's a very different way to have a website where people can

Max: I like the the perspective. I wonder is that part of the way of like saving on some of the rendering so you're not seeing like depth of the world, but instead of having that like you know, that view that that curves over like that. There must be something to that.

Matthew: Yeah, it's it's it's It's a small world. So yeah, it's like the whole world is this globe and you can basically just go around the whole thing.

Max: Yeah, that's cool.

Matthew: But yeah, I do wonder you're you might be onto something as far as like rendering, like because of the curve of the the world here, that does give you a way to not have to render too much in frame.

Max: Yeah. I was I think of like, you know actually I just read an article about this recently about old well any game, but older games especially, like I think of some Resident Evil games when they were like rendering between scenes, you would go to certain points and your characters like squeezing through like a tight you know, tight cavern. But while they're doing that little animation of squeezing through

Matthew: It's actually a train.

Max: it's it's it's loading the yeah, the next like part of the level.

Matthew: transition to a whole new level basically yeah yeah

Max: Yeah, yeah. Very cool.

Matthew: cool one last one let's check this out i really liked this pixel animation here so it's interactive this kind of grid of pixels and it follows your cursor here this like fireball looking thing and interacts

Corey Moen: So fun.

Matthew: but it's not just here in the hero it follows you down the page And then interacts with different things. So you see it turns into a heart here where it's talking about Vienna. And then it changes and look at snaps to these other elements thrown on the page. So not only so

Max: Wow.

Matthew: not only is it a like it interactive cursor, but like it changes based on where the cursor is at. So I just thought that was

Max: Again, it seems so fluid too.

Matthew: mm-hmm. It's very responsive. And yeah, just the fact that it's not just following the cursor, but you're actually interacting with different objects within the page. And it's very seamless. Do yeah. All right. Well that's all I have to share today today.

Corey Moen: Max. yeah, getting back to what you've been up to and like even, I mean, to this point of beautiful sites and all that. Like you mentioned, yeah, you we were talking about EventRise and some of that, which is a gorgeous site, beautiful looking product. How's that been going? yeah, especially like what what's the landscape been of Yeah, shipping and managing and scaling stuff like that where you're at now.

Max: Yeah, yeah. And I can I mean, actually maybe I can just pull up Event Rise too for the sake of kinda talking

Corey Moen: Yeah, for sure.

Max: through. so yeah, I mean I joined Event Rise it's almost it's almost been a year now, which seems crazy because, you know, the way that you know Claude and OpenAI especially are changing everything exponentially every single day. You know, we I feel like our calendar is just based around, you know, the last couple of years basically. But Yeah, I mean I so I joined a little over a year ago. you know, EventRise is actually part of it's a product that came from an agency. So, you know, in kind of classic fashion, the agency had been doing a lot of work for clients over the years and kind of got to that point where they were like, why don't we try to actually build some products for ourselves because we're solving other pre people's problems, but we could totally solve our own problem. they actually this is also from so Creative South is a conference down in Columbus, Georgia. it's gone on for like fifteen plus years now. you know, Mike Jones here, pictured here, he's on he's on the the the the agency that I essentially work for is called Heyo. Anyway, Heyo had used, you know, ticketing platforms over the years and Eventbrite being one, and it's just did not like the options that they were given. You know, it's it's it's kind of one of those industries too where You know, there's quite a few players, but it's just like for the most part, it's legacy software, it's, you know, a lot of like rel old relationships. And anyway, so at some point in time, you know, in the last two years, they they were like really thought hard about like how how could we build our own own version of it and what would ours look like. So you can see, you know, the way that we pitch event rise is really this idea of like helping you sell more tickets and getting your time back. And we're trying to be very thoughtful about Yeah, when you look at the interface itself, it you know, it looks mostly like you'd probably expect. Actually, if I go to like the features page, there's a few more detailed photos and stuff. But it's like, you know, we have more recently launched things like seat maps or the ability to like embed you know the checkout experience on your own site. you know, like the the landing page itself is very simplified and beautiful, and the checkout experience is really seamless and you can do guest checkout. And like at the end of the day, we were just building something that we wanted for ourselves, but the reality was we did we realized that there was a lot of customers, both those that were, you know, hosting their own events, community conferences, workshops, whatever. But then even more recently, we've kind kind of gotten down the road of of supporting the smaller, like independent venues. So folks that, you know, don't want to work with Live Nation or Ticketmaster because, you know, they have their own problems for obvious reasons. But You know, local independent venues that might have, you know, the capacity of 300 people and they're just trying to survive and and do their own thing that kind of feels more like a, you know, a small business. So, but yeah, I mean my role at Event Rise is really, you know, a combination of things. I mean, it's it's it's it's all things marketing, all things sales. I work with the social team as well to to just, you know, get the word out. but a lot of it is what I would call like tried and true sales. community efforts where it's just like, hey, how do we, how do we show up in the right places? How do we you know, engage with folks in a way that does feel like, hey, I actually looked into your business and I understand what you're going through and here's why I think it would be a good fit for you kind of thing. and then yeah, on the marketing side, actually we we use Framer for our site and more recently, you know, with Framer three point have really leaned into using their agents and they have a They have a a new Claude skill that I use quite a bit too for things like actually just did a big accessibility sweep earlier this week to fix a bunch of of of issues that needed fixed. But yeah, I mean my role in a nutshell is just solo GDM guy that's trying to get more people interested in, you know, a new event ticketing platform that is all about fair fees and fast payouts and no contracts, which I mean that alone should hopefully sell a lot of people because also in this world it's like You get high fees, you get contracts and and you get slow payouts. So

Matthew: Yeah.

Max: yeah.

Matthew: Yeah. Big software wants to lock you in. But

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: I I I like products that are like that where it's like you're solving a as an agency or a company, you're solving an agent a problem that you have internally or that your clients customers have, and then you solve that and you're like, actually more people might want this or people are telling you, Hey, I want that too. And then

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: it's like, Hey, well, maybe we should start Packaging it up and selling it. It's like

Max: Exactly. And in in classic, you know, keeping up with the times fashion too, you know, our so we have more engineers than, you know, anybody else on the team, certainly, but you know, we're using at a very high level, you know, we use linear for all our our project and issue tracking, but then more recently had implemented Cursor agents into the mix. So, you know, we have we have a sort of EventRise V3 release coming out next week that just a handful of new features. and as part of sort of the QA process, you know, my boss Rob is like, hey, within Linear now, I set up all the cursor agent infrastructure. So if we have certain issues that are like, you know, hey, within the within the interface, We have a couple like copy changes or or simple things that need to be fixed. He's like, just throw it to the agent for now. Let's try to like get that muscle going of utilizing the agent to do a lot of those small hot fixes and things that clearly it can do. And then

Corey Moen: Thank

Max: keep keep pushing to stretch it to see how far it can go and to the point of like what you know where where we need to how much hu I mean, obviously we always have human intervention, but like to what extent can we, as we think about new features, like if I all of a I was like, hey, I've I've talked to a lot of customers that want you know, the ability to have sponsor logos on their event details page. Like how, you know, help

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Max: help me, help me build something like that. Like can the agent do it successfully or, you know, get it eighty percent of the way there? Probably. So that's the other other cool thing from you know from my perspective is, you know, I don't have a developer background. I have a design background and I'm curious. So for the most part, like we're really leaning into the fact that, you know, we're a small team, so let's work smarter, not harder kind of thing.

Corey Moen: This yeah this

Max: yeah, and that's that that's just been fun more generally.

Matthew: Yeah, the tools are perfect for teams like that now. Yeah.

Corey Moen: For sure.

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: And this is why this is like definitely in that realm where I was fascinated to to hear more about how that's going, Max. Just cause like, I don't know. My own, my own probably biased opinion is just like more and more small teams like this have been, you know, they're so empowered to ship end-to-end products. Like I was just, you know, this morning getting coffee with a buddy that you know. Was building webflow sites, still does some of that, but then just has been having a blast building all these little apps and things. and doesn't just build the app, builds the marketing site, you know, handles support, all that kind of stuff, end-to-end, one person, and definitely not like a full engineer or anything like that. But especially, you know, most people that come even from like web flow environment and some of that, you end up learning so many technical aspects. even if you aren't physically writing the code. And so like it's just been fascinating to see those examples surface. And like your team and even more largely, I think, you know, if you mention this, like it's EventRise is one of a few products, right? That that the the broader HAO team has. And so like they've they've been doing that before maybe even some of this AI era more recently. But to your point, like how has some of these tools changed? And to be clear, not just AI. I think like the other part I'm curious is like, You mentioned Framer and like you, you know, are you also going in and making updates to the site completely without the need of the designer or developer to get in there and maybe even beyond like simple stuff like blog posts, like actually making changes on static pages and publishing and some of that? Like, how is that kind of life cycle starting to started to tighten even further? Obviously, you just mentioned the linear and cursor agents example. but like in some of those steps. Is there still in your example of even linear and cursor agents, like is is Rob still, you know, stamping and merging PRs that the agent creates? Like, or are you also able to fully self-serve and close that loop and deploy? Yeah, what what are some of those nuances?

Max: Yeah. I mean, to your your sort of first question about like, you know, am I jumping into to to Framer or Figma and you know, w

Corey Moen: Mm. Mm.

Max: where do I sit in there? Definitely yes. The way you know, we really have yeah, the broader HARO team has a collection of designers and developers, and then we have folks that are more specialized or focused on some of the individual products. So Kevin is the d one of the designers that I work with on the event rise side. Again, he works on other projects too, but yeah, I the our you know, our sort of like cadence is still very much traditional in a lot of senses in terms of he's still taking feedback, he's still doing you know first rounds of of mocks and prototypes and stuff in Figma. And then I would say you know, for the most part, we try to get things to like 80 or 90 percent done. And then depending on what it is, if it's you know if it's something for the website, he might only even get like 70%. start moving to frame quick you know quicker.

Corey Moen: Mm.

Max: if it's for the product speci specifically, Rob Rob likes things further along just because he would rather like we make a very specific point to have you know a polished product design wise. It's just, you know, it's one of the things that we tout in terms of our just general marketing. So on the product side I would say it's you w he likes to get things further along and then then yeah I mean obviously for as much as our engineering team is using Claude it like yeah we're still like we've we've described it even internally like like a like a like a dam. You can you can, you know, open the dam up and let as much water go as you want or you like crank it back

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Max: to like to to stop the flow to some extent. So we still are very much, you know, human in the loop. We don't want to like totally let the let things go. But I would say going kind of back to that and that that my point about utilizing linear and cursor agents, like Rob especially is very much like I don't necessarily want to just ship things fast, but I want to like move with pace. And I think I I say it that way because I personally hate the move fast and break things or wha whatever the the the

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Max: line is. Because it it it just lends itself to be, you know, kind of that old school mentality of fix it later, like we d you know, burn cash, just try to grow like a weed. The way things are trending, it's like, no, you can actually move with pace and do things right the first time around. So

Matthew: Yeah.

Max: that's actually, I mean, from our standpoint, a small team, but also like very capable, even in the time that, you know, we've we've been around now, call it, you know, six-ish months in terms of the product existing. But even in those six months, the amount of features that we've we've launched and the back end infrastructure needed to handle all like the weird instances of like how tickets get created and sold and we use Stripe for the back end and you know, transferring tickets. Like all like the hardest part is all those like back end logistics that you never even think about, you know, as somebody buying a ticket online versus all the fun stuff that you obviously see on the front end.

Matthew: yeah. Dealing with paywall infrastructure and provisioning the tickets and stuff. Yeah, that that's

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: the not so fun part, but that's the part that just has to work, like without thinking about it. Otherwise that

Max: Totally.

Matthew: you lose customers quick.

Max: And I mean the other thing too is just selfishly going back to my end of things, I mean I well here, I'll just I'll share my screen again. I have I guess just make sure that there's nothing to blur out here or anything. Super secret you know, code or something. But so

Matthew: wow.

Max: I like many other folks, I mean, I've created this, you know, event rise claw repo that essentially is just a handful of contextual documents and plugins and skills and all that good stuff. And really like what I'm what I'm trying to do as a solo person is and and actually let me back up slightly. When I first started, you know, I was mostly just working in claw chat. And at some point in time when cowork was more I I mean t again, the the the timeline of of dates is totally ha escaped me, but mostly working in chat. And then over the over the over the course of time kind of getting more into the code side. real reality that, hey, we should probably work smarter here about like how we're sharing information, let alone just, you know, letting code do more work based on the context that I'm helping give it. And it's not like I'm doing anything novel, but I feel like we're to the point though now where I have enough enough contextual information that I can give it to to actually do some some pretty robust things for me. I mean even like in the plugins, like I think I I think a lot of folks do something along these lines, but you know, having like an Orchestrator that lives above each of the plugins to help like dictate what work we should or should not be doing. you know, like again, it's not like overly novel, but it's it's things where A, again, as a solo person, how can I work smarter, not harder? But then B, realizing that over time how quickly things change, like I'm trying to build a structure that is still very like elastic. Where when I first started, I was like, okay. I I love Notion. I mean I still love Notion, but I'm like, I love Notion. Everything's gonna exist in Notion. We're gonna try to build some infrastructures and and cadences.

Matthew: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Max: And I used their, you know, AI for a while too, in conjunction with Cloud when it was free. And then I just realized I'm like, I'm to the point now where the some of the organization needs to happen, like what's going on issues-wise within Linear. But for the most part, I worry way less about the organization of all of this all of the information like Claude has it somewhere.

Matthew: the knowledge. Mm-hmm.

Max: You know, because it's just like if it's out of my brain and into Claude, that's ninety-nine percent better than anything else. And I I I really shouldn't worry about like aligning the boxes sort of mentality like I used to, which is so funny to think. But again, as a as a you know, solo person on the go-to-market side, it it's a heck of a lot easier to be able to, you know, kind of just continually build out this repo in a way that feels like it's beneficial for me. But then now we're to also to the point where, you know, others can utilize it as well. And it's like it's fairly dummy proof, I guess if that's the right way to put it.

Matthew: Yeah, others can step in and get consistent results based on what you've kind of built up here.

Max: Totally.

Matthew: And y you're really describing this shift, how we've gone in general from knowledge workers, you know, for the past however many years and to this to this new age. And I mean, I know I've heard Mason Poe call it well like wisdom workers, like we're just We're we're shifted to a layer above the knowledge. Like I said, we don't have to necessarily maintain and organize the knowledge anymore. And I think I know I'm still trying to feel my way through that. Like, how do I know what to save or have, you know, least knowledge from certain kind of connectors and things like be automatic and you know, which ones I have to kind of manually make sure are collected. but yeah, we don't have to worry about and which part of me is like. I ha I had fun doing the knowledge work, you know,

Max: Same.

Matthew: all those years. Like I enjoy like I still like enjoy making folders on my desktop and organizing files. Like, you know, sometimes I can have cowork, you know, do that stuff for me, but but yeah, what how what would you describe like since that we've had that shift of the more majority of work being like knowledge type work? what would you say the majority of your time? How would you if you're gonna put a label on it, how would you describe it?

Max: I mean I feel I because I'm doing multiple roles, I do try to still sort of like time block my days to some extent, you know, like all right, Mondays

Matthew: Mm.

Max: are probably more salesy and it's more, you know letting letting Claude run and do its sourcing. Actually here's a great example. It's like if I'm you know, I'm doing cold outbound email campaigns to, you know, email a venue that is search you know fits a certain demographic or ICP and I'll obviously have Claude help me do a lot of like the busy work to find those folks. But what I do is the going back to the human in the loop you know conversation and that idea of like the dam and turning on and off the water. I I have Claude run based on the you know the plugin that I've built thus far. And I say, all right, go out, you go out and find me ten new venues I can reach out to. It'll pull them into Notion

Matthew: Do the research, yeah.

Max: And it fills it fills in quite a bit of information, but not everything. So then and then from those ten, I'll look at and manually look at just confirm that they're they look good, and then I'll s I'll change the status to, you know, qualified. And then it'll do another pass and then go out and try to find the right contact. And then once it does, then I we use Adio internally for our our C R So then I'll say, all right, yep, this looks good. Now send it over to Addio. And then from Adio, I'll start, you know, I'll throw it into an email sequence based on, you know, is it a venue? Is it like an organization that like you know AIGA Atlanta is, you know, somebody we've talked to recently that's using EventRise now. Like that's a different sequence. And anyway, my point is, so even though that's a lot of like salesy work, it's more it's yeah, it's more like I'm just a human in the loop that acts as the orchestrator. So it's a lot more like, you know, checks and balances work, which I don't know about you guys, but it sounds easy enough. You know, one one once you have like a workflow that works and it's actually like functioning how it should, it sounds easy enough to just go through that. And you could see a world where, you know, once we do enough of them, I don't even need to be in the loop like to review them. I could just I could, you know, train it enough to understand exactly what I'm looking for. But in the short term, our thought is We're not playing like a quantity game, we're playing quality. So I'd rather reach out to ten folks that fit great. Because then, you know, with a venue, it's like they might have fifty shows a year, a hundred shows a year. Like that's ideal. But yeah, so I'm I'm far I'm far less worried about quantity over quality, but sort of that like context switching between, okay, so I'll do that task and then while that's running, I'll switch to something else, you know. yeah, I could go back to this blog post I was kind of working on. But then I'm also like having Claude help me write that. Or, you I'll I'll put comments and notion and then have Claude go back and look at the comments and then I'll get pinged again. I'm like, yeah I gotta switch back over here. And anyway, again,

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Max: I'm not it's there's nothing novel, but I'm like the context switching, I've I've n struggled with is the wrong word, but it's it's been hard and challenging for my end to be like, I need to take more brain breaks sometimes or or go on a walk just to like reset because there's times where I'm like, I'm The caffeine's not doing it clearly and I'm like I need to I need to just get into a mode where I'm either like solely focused on one thing or you know kind of take some some pauses where I'm just doing other manual work that's not the context switching between Claude you know sessions running.

Matthew: Yeah.

Corey Moen: I think there's something so key that obviously that that often gets overlooked there when you are it's great we can have a lot of you know agents go out and do multiple things at once, but they still have to come back and make some concise sense. Like I don't know about y'all, but like in that similar realm, I probably don't even do as much as as you're describing, Max. But it's like then when I get these long descriptions back, I'm like, no, like what like like two sentences at most. What do I need to do next? Or what's left?

Matthew: Yeah.

Corey Moen: Or what should I look at? Like, my gosh, especially if you're like long long recaps of multiple streams all at once. It's just like, I don't know. It Yes. my gosh. Yeah.

Matthew: Like reformat this to be in plain language and concise. Thank you.

Max: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, lately too, I've I've you know, the way that I work with the repo, it's like if I ask anything that is that's not just like a direct answer, it always outputs like a HTML artifact for me that tries to like simplify it and make it somewhat interactive if if need be. And I like that quite

Corey Moen: Right.

Max: a bit because kind of going back to the visuals conversation with the soccer stuff, it's like Because we're now bombarded with so much text information, creating those visuals to like highlight, you know, the the problem at hand or the issue it's trying to solve is like I f at least for my sake, has been, you know, a godsend in some cases because A, it's saving me time from having to like actually parse through all the information. But then B, it's like I can more I I can better understand what it's actually trying to trying to accomplish, you know, at a glance without having to, you know, totally dig in and and understand what it's what what it's spitting back at me.

Matthew: Yeah. Some of the stuff I have have to have Claude do is very technical, like systems architecture type stuff. And so I do the same thing where it's like I want it I'll I want an HTML artifact and I've actually had pretty good success lately of having it cr create from scratch SVG like diagrams and stuff that it embeds in those HTMLs. So not only do I have interactive information with call outs and you know, tabs and pages, but also, you know, the technical stuff. I was like, every time you can, you know, sometimes, you know, use ASCII art, that's fine, but it's also really good at at creating SVGs on the fly to convey information, break it down. Yeah.

Max: Nice. I this is kind of a side tangent, but related. you both clearly do this, but you know, so outside of Event Rise Claude Land, I have personal Max Claude Land. So that's the other thing too, you know, sometimes it's like I'm working here doing ten things, but then I jump over here and do a couple things quickly and I've been trying to build this whatever app idea, whatever it might be, called summarize visualize, but the idea is There's times where, you know, th there there's enough services now where if I said, hey, you know, look at this blog post or YouTube video or whatever and just give me like the Axios style summary. Like that's that's easy enough nowadays. But the visual aspect of those summaries sometimes still I feel like is lacking. So I'm trying to build again, this is probably more for me, call it like a curio curiosity project, but I'm trying to build this thing that can ingest links, podcast episodes, YouTube, whatever. And then give me both the TLDR text-wise, but then also, you know, add some visuals that help represent the data that's within the the text, or you know, explain what something specific means, some, you know, some random term I'm not familiar with. And it's going fine. But the idea that I I feel like I do that all the time where n now more than ever, where I'm thinking about something, and again, I just want to get it. ask the question to Claude and just get it out of my brain for obvious reasons first. But then second, to then start to scratch that curiosity itch of like, well, maybe I can quickly build this thing and or, you know, e even at the very least, like maybe I can just quickly spin up, you know, Bolt or Lovable or something and and try to like have Claude build the prompt of the of what I want and then just try to build the very simple prototype in in Bolt and see what happens. Because Yeah, th the the the curiosity in me y you know, always gets me. But again, like getting it out of my brain and into claw just so then it at least has that context is great because I mean, even for this conversation I was just asking, like, what are the things I had thought about and talked to you about lately that would be a good conversation for this podcast? And it was it spit out a bunch of stuff and I'm like, yeah, I totally forgot about that you know, that little mini iOS photo viewer app I was building, you know? but

Matthew: Right. Yeah.

Max: yeah.

Matthew: yes. One, I think everybody should be doing what you're describing and taking Whatever your personal kind of way that you absorb information or like like to learn or to consume things, you know, maybe it's not learning, maybe it's for fun as well. But yeah, if you enjoy visuals, you know, build skills or build it into your your settings that it like knows that and does that by default. Or, you know, if if you like, you know, audio recaps, you know, plug in a service that can that can output that for you, you know, or if you like visuals, you know, I don't know. You can use, you know, Google Notebook or other services, you know, to create like video versions, you know, of of whatever the information is, you know. So just you can really start to personalize these things for for how you like to learn and consume. So yeah. Build.

Max: Yes, exactly. And I think the other thing that kind of going down that rabbit hole a little bit, I was just having a conversation with a couple friends of mine that are they're you know, g this is gonna make sound, you know, not smart, but you know, compared to us having this conversation and where we're at with things, they're probably like a step back. They use these tools, they really only use like Claude Chat for the most part, a little bit of cowork. They understand the potential, but like, you know, we were having a conversation this morning about, you know, how they're using things and I was like, Well, are you guys you know, are you using code at all? Are you building skills? Like or are you just using project like what I was trying to get an understanding of of of how they're using Claude and it was still they were still like a step back, which isn't necessarily bad. but you know with to the curiosity point you know about me trying to build this summarized visualized thing, even like zooming out from from the idea of the app itself, I definitely think now more than ever, trying to do some little fun curiosity projects or side things is important because then you're forcing yourself to like take the next step into actually like you know using Claude to its full potential. Because that's the other thing. It's like, you know, tools back in the day used to be like, you know, driving a car. It's like, okay, you learn you learn to drive a car and then the more you drive it, the more the better you get. I feel like some of that still applies, but now the car like changes exponentially every day. It it can fly, it's a boat, and then now by the way it's like Transformer. So Like you can't keep up with the tool. So you have to you have to like kind of zoom out and have an understanding of like what you're trying to do with it. You know, so it's like, okay, the car that's now the transformer, that's now the boat. I just want to travel with it. Well then how you know, what what does traveling mean, you know, in that sense? And I the analogy doesn't totally hold up, but I think for their standpoint and for just generally anybody like trying to figure these tools out and understand where to go, like that I mean, talk about a crazy learning curve currently.

Matthew: Just have to get on the bike and start trying.

Max: Yeah, exactly. Or like I mean, you had we had mentioned something about skills and I don't use any of these very often, but are you gu are you guys like in on like, you know, browsing sites like this to to find skills? Are you trying to build your own from scratch or like what's what's your approach to like how much work I should do or just how much work I know somebody's done for me and then I should just utilize somebody else's hard work, you know what I mean?

Corey Moen: I mean sorry.

Matthew: go for No, go for it.

Corey Moen: I it it's funny, I it I think even a couple months ago I was definitely in this realm of like always looking at Twitter and directories and like what's the latest things, what are people using? And then what's I think I don't know what shifted other than like this general thing that I've seen a few prominent folks, especially in like the AI space. mention like like the one that really stuck with me for whatever reason was was Boris who created Claude Code was on the YC podcast. Long story short, the I forget his name, the like CEO of YC was like, I have this massive Claude MD file, like 2,000 lines. What should I do to optimize it? And Boris was like, you just delete it and start over. And I'm like, that that stuck with me in the re realm of like his point wasn't to just be brass. His point was that like In theory, the models should keep getting better and need less and less and less skill and guidance. And so ideally, skills are taste-based or preferential based, not like functional, you know, SOP-based kind of thing. And so, like, I almost like I don't maybe I've maybe overcorrected to be clear. I think I've like gone back to maybe I'll just like default to trying to do as much as I can without even skills, or the skills that I do have are just like. stored in my like local root level quad settings so that like quad will just pull them if needed. but I I don't as often find myself reaching for them and or like calling them individually unless it's something that's like functional. Like every time I create a PR, go make sure use this command to do all these specific things like formatting or whatever. So I don't know. It's I'm in personally in this weird realm but very much much empathize with the side of like I always am curious to see what people are doing out there. just like, I don't know. I maybe I'm a little jaded on the realm of like I'm I'm I'm forever cautious. Even like you all both know this about I think my my my personality I guess from like webflow and mask type of stuff around like I am Immediately a skeptic of anybody else's approach and doing anything because I've just had too many times in my past life of like getting obsessed with a specific way of doing something and then just getting completely burned by like assuming it was right because of somebody else's experience without fully understanding it myself. And so it's become this like maybe misguided passion of like wanting to understand the root of what I'm doing. so that I know if it's right or when it does go wrong, I know enough about like, maybe I should try it this way instead. And I don't know. That's bleeding into this like how I use AI realm as well, for better or worse. But yeah, I don't know.

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: Matthew, how about you? You are you a skill searcher or user?

Matthew: Yeah. not a searcher. yeah. Similar to you, like anytime I've tried other people's skills, it's like it doesn't stick because it's it it's like a black box of why it was built, how it was built, and I don't want to like go in and memorize like what's inside the skill. So the skills I actually use are ones I built myself, either because you know, things were repetitive and I'm like, okay, just turn that into a skill. Two that I use the most, one is called Think With Me. And so I have these books right here, which are called the Great Mental Models. And like I really mental models and frameworks really click with me on like how to think and break apart problems and see things from different angles. And so I created a skill based on those books and some other sources for for mental models. And so what it does is when I say, hey, I need anytime I say I need to think through this or help me think through this or think or I call it like it, it will actually call that skill. And then it will come to me and it's like, okay, what are you thinking about? And then it'll just ask me one question at a time, just to clarify my thinking. And it doesn't make

Max: Mm-hmm.

Matthew: any suggestions or lead me in any direction. It just asks me a very open-ended question based on my answer. It'll ask me a follow-up question and just keeps doing this until the thought is kind of fleshed out. and so I I use that one a lot. the other one I use is just slash communicate. And so in my obsidian library, I have a file that's basically my voice. And so every now and then I throw like transcript scripts from this podcast or my like Slack messages and things so it can actually get the words I use, the tone I use, you know, all and based on different audiences and things like that. so I'll actually use that skill to help me clean up kind of posts. before before I post them.

Max: Nice.

Matthew: or yeah, things like that. so those are the two main main ones I build. Other than that, it's it's more technical things like you said, like turning turning text spec into like some break breaking it down into both the engineering tasks, but then also I like Gherkin syntax, which is goes back to my QA days, but it's it's very much it's a behavioral test framework that's kind of like if this happens then that. so in plain language, so it's very readable. So I do my text specs in both the the technical breakdown as well as the behavioral breakdown like that. So I have skills that kind of do that automatically for me, which I've again It comes from sources, things that have proven themselves to me, like books, source materials. and then I take those and the way I use them and then translate that into a skill because it's something that I repeat often enough.

Max: Nice. Nice. Yeah, the think with me sounds great. I should I should look into that. I I mean, I'm definitely like you in the sense of even if there's hundreds of thousands of skills that are probably gonna do the thing I need, more often than not I wanna build it f for my own sake to understand like what I'm trying to get out of it versus trying to memorize what's what's inside. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I

Matthew: They feel personal, right? Like yeah.

Max: mean I two of the things I just thought of when you were s when you were talking. I and here's another random thing that I was trying to build one day. it's called Crowded Room. I feel it.

Matthew: just a hand raise, how many how many of us have like all of these things we start in, like projects or notes and the graveyards growing?

Max: Yeah. The the the graveyard of ideas now has to be like infinitely l infinitely long. But I I mean well two things actually backing up slightly, literally the so I have a a repo called Bellevue Group. It's just my like fictitious like umbrella organization for my my thoughts and ideas. But literally in it I I I kind of say like Hey, a bunch of these are ideas or curiosity experiments. Maybe they could make money someday, but the main point is to just like be curious, which is is kind of, you know, so it at least understands that this isn't like, hey, how do I scale this from you know zero to 20 million ARR in the first, you know, six months or whatever? but this was another random idea that I had been toying around with called crowded room. And the idea is this essentially is like, can you make Design taste like a codifiable constraint set. So the thought is I created like a handful of personas. So one of these personas is called Familiar. And Familiar kind of follows Apple's like human interface guidelines and follows the Apple aesthetic and everything. But I didn't give it any no like visual examples, but my thought was can I give it enough contextual information from me? And also things I like or things I've curated that I like from Apple. And this is a little easier because Apple's such a you behemoth to like pull information from. And then could I create a persona that essentially acts like a person to make it's design choices? But I think my point longer term was so could theoretically be familiar be a creative that can make choices for you beyond just like Building a website that looks like Apple or, you know, designing visuals for print that look like Apple. But like, could you kind of build this persona person in a

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Max: kind of like agency setting that makes choices that are very like constrained to certain decisions? Like it won't it tries to stay on its path and won't strafe too far from it, because that's the point, because I had this thought, like And I feel like Corey, we I had talked to you about this at some point in time. But this thought of sometimes people come to agencies because they're like, I love your work. I want you to build me a site like X. And I that's great. I mean, that's literally half the reason, or more than half the reason people would go to a certain agency to get their project fulfilled. But on the flip side, my thought was like, well, what if like the agency was just built around this idea of the agency itself had a variety of these like Personas or people that had very interesting takes and tastes and like imagine like a record label. A record label might be kind of like pop genre, but pop these days is like so broad that under the label they might have a hip-hop artist and a country artist and a pop artist and whatever. So that was the idea. Is could for for crowded rooms, like could you build an agency of personas to help build out, you know, these like these different angles of of design taste and aesthetic and again this is very much like a curiosity experiment at the best, but I would use I would build build the persona in you know back and forth with the Claude and then do my testing using paper. I don't know if you guys are paper users at all, but you know they have like a pretty robust you know MCP so then I'm going back and forth between like Asking Claude to build me a prompt for the sake of testing if my persona fits up to the criteria that I built it as, and then paper would build it out. And anyway, again, very much like a

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Max: a graveyard project at this point. But it was still like fun to do and it it helped me learn a lot about, you know, how do I actually work back and forth between Claude Chat and Claude Code and get you know the paper to actually build something out. And then from paper Could I build some of those prototypes in a way that actually felt more functional and and anyway, it it's not has not gone anywhere. But and then again, it's very much like a graveyard project. But the idea of e exactly. And then

Matthew: But you could always come back to it and pick it up if the spark arrives.

Max: the last thing I was just gonna show show too is you had mentioned obsidian, but I've been using this Kogito as my, you know, I guess source of truth for markdown files. And anyway, a good a good option for those that if you're Not quite. I I'll I couldn't just grasp grasp Obsidian.

Matthew: Yeah, I've seen this. who who made Who made Kagito? I forget. I

Max: it's the guy that did typefully. Do you remember typefully? It's like a yeah, it's like a social, you know.

Matthew: Typfully. That's right. That's right. Yeah, it's that's one that's been on my list to check out and I I still haven't so maybe another recommendation for it.

Max: Yeah, so far so far good. It's been great. But again, it's funny because it's like I barely interact with it. I mean I look at it sometimes, but you know, Claude is is is doing its thing.

Matthew: Just a yeah, these are just ways to view your markdown files, which nowadays most of us are syncing to GitHub

Max: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Matthew: to repo in one way or another. Yeah. when you're talking about kind of those personas, I mean, and what they do. And when I was a media director and I whenever I was looking for, you know, hiring somebody, either contractor in-house, you know, if they're motion designer or graphic designer, you know. It would be like, okay, we have this project and this is kind of the stylistic direction. And so I would look for artists, you know, who fit that style. Right. But then the other way that I would be looking for people to work with is it somebody I enjoy like just the creative process with? And it's like we don't always kind of work on the same kind of stylistic output, but it's like the process of working together is just full of sparks and collaboration and and all that. So yeah, I'm yeah, it would be nice i if we can find a way for that kind of taste and creative collaboration to get translated into agents.

Max: Yes. I I mean d yeah, totally. Well to

Matthew: Not we're not there yet, but might not be too far.

Max: to that point though, going back to like the record label analogy, I mean the other thing part of my point or

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Max: my thought with Crowded Room was like, you know, think of an artist like Post Malone, people know him post Malone. Pop artists more generally started as you know in rap and hip hop and has gone to the go to the like this country route. But the idea that like he's

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Max: clearly just like creatively curious for for lack of a better term and and can sort of like morph into different perspectives. So to that end, it's like, yeah, imagine being able to Yeah, you have these like codif codifiable personas, but Is there a way that you can also kind of translate the

Matthew: Yeah. And then what if you tell them, Hey, here's here's the brief and and you pick two of them or three of them and like, Hey, I want you to collaborate and go work on

Max: Yes.

Matthew: this and see what comes out of it. That'd be kind of fun.

Max: Yeah, exactly. So someday, someday it'll get all the graveyards.

Corey Moen: I think in some ways that stuff is happening. I feel like Yeah. The like agents collaborating on that. I feel like I've seen a couple of examples. Like the one that popped on mine is I forget what it's called. The some of the team at Sanity, I think, built like a it's like almost like a Slack type of product, but it's all only agents. You just like send stuff off and then they just start like talking back and forth and like, you know, planning for evil in the world. I don't know.

Max: Ha ha.

Corey Moen: It's yeah.

Matthew: Ha ha.

Corey Moen: Very interesting, but I do feel like some of that is is inevitably coming. Max, you even called out some of that earlier of like an orchestration agent versus the sub ones. Yeah. I don't know. Super interesting.

Max: feel like there was another I'm trying to quick find it. There was another remember you know, Pablo Stanley had a new service or app

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Corey Moen: yeah. Heel Helio Helio Helios? Something like that. that's

Max: Yeah, this one. Yeah, exactly. I I don't know a ton about it, but it was kinda it seemed like kind of that idea of like how do you how do you just get all of your

Corey Moen: yes, for sure.

Max: your people, your your AI, your agents, whatever in the same room to talk.

Corey Moen: Yeah, I think I think the key here too is like I think this is one of a few that are like the way I would describe it as GitHub and Slack having a baby.

Max: Yeah. Okay.

Corey Moen: Some people would say that's linear already. I've also, you know, I wonder if that will come out of like cursor bought graphite. you know.

Matthew: GitHub has this in their labs. It's called Ace. They have a product they're working on. Yeah. It's where

Corey Moen: interesting. It's like a like a chat experience. Yeah, yeah, nice.

Matthew: you are in there with the agents and you're chatting and working on code as in as like a Slack channel, basically.

Corey Moen: Mm-hmm.

Matthew: Yeah.

Max: I mean

Matthew: I do see that as becoming common soon.

Max: The the other thing about this

Corey Moen: Mm-hmm.

Max: too, okay, so this exact scenario. Here's an idea. GitHub and Slack had a baby. Maybe Linear is kind of fulfills that. There's the GitHub thing. It like we're back to that realm where the tools are kind of becoming agnostic in some sense. So then, like, what's the edge? I and I literally just had a conversation with somebody about this with bolt, lovable, base forty-four, replit, webflow to some extent, like If there if there's like generative app website tooling, you know, is the brand the edge? Features kind of become overlapping. Like it I it it is very weird to be in this world where, you know, you have abund, you know, infinite abundance of choice, but how are you actually making your choices these days, knowing again that things change so exponentially quick? Like I I mean, in LLM land, I just finally am like, I'm just claw-only. I could care less about what open AI is doing for also obvious reasons because now apparently, you know, Apple doesn't like open AI either, which is fine with me. But it's like you're as a consumer, is it just make make a bet and then just hope it goes or or or or what? But it is a strange time to like have to have to kind of like be in this world of picking and choosing tooling, especially.

Corey Moen: Totally. It's I've I've heard the camps too of just like, I'll just build your own stuff yourself. Like I saw somebody post on Twitter yesterday, I think it was, that they're like, I

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Corey Moen: just built my own design tool, I just use that. It's like that's cool. I think like the one thing I still wonder with that though is the feasibility of like growing and maintaining something. Like there is still forever this ease of use of getting something off the shelf. You know what I mean? Like just cause 3D printers have gotten epic doesn't mean everybody's three p 3D printing everything in their life. Like there's still the easy abuse of going to Target and buying something beautiful that's something, you know, o off the shelf or or convenient or whatever it is, like, and the costs that come with that. Like, I don't know. It's it's hard for me to imagine a world where it will all bleed towards like that as the one camp of thinking of like, we don't even need to choose now. You just do it yourself. And it's like I totally get the hobby side of that and the the exciting side of that. So I think to be clear, that will probably grow, but will that replace the need for like products that give you this stuff off the shelf with a couple clicks? Hard to imagine.

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: in my personal opinion, I guess.

Matthew: Yeah, because what if you move to a new job, you know, it's like

Corey Moen: totally.

Matthew: and they're like, We're using this tool that, you know, everybody or lots of people use, and it's like, well, I've been using my own tool.

Max: Mm-hmm.

Matthew: It's like, well, okay, great, but do you know how to use the one that everybody else knows how to?

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: Right, a hundred percent. Yeah.

Matthew: Yeah. You get you you put yourself in a silo.

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: maybe limiting, but but

Corey Moen: Weird one.

Matthew: like we have also talked on here a lot about, you know, building custom internal apps to solve, you know, needs that you have where it's maybe a little bit more custom and it's like it'll be interesting in a couple of years, you know, on on LinkedIn are people going to be really raving about, you know, how all these custom solutions and stuff I built, and how does that act is that transferable into new roles? You know, does that actually help you? Like are employers going to want to be hiring people that are going to want to build everything

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: themselves or just step in and start using the systems and tools that are already in place?

Max: Totally. Which I mean on that note, like I in the same conversation that I had with somebody about, you know, the sort of generative tools being somewhat agnostic, my my other point was like, okay, so as a generalist, I I've made a career on being a generalist. You look at my background and it's like three years in event world, three years in community, three like I so back in the day, it was kind of always if I'm the jack of all trades, it was sort of like a a knock. Like I'm not a specialist, so I'm not I don't really fit in anybody's puzzle. Nowadays, more than ever, it seems like the, you know, gen marketer angle is the thing, is the reason people want to hire you. Because, you know, being able to stretch both like vertically and horizontally within an organization is important because headcount and responsibilities and whatever. But to that point of like picking tooling, then it does seem like if you're really if you're if you're good at zooming out a little bit and understanding more broadly, like I mean, I'm being vague, but like how to prompt and prompt and interact with LLMs in a way that is feasible and how to how to understand, how to give it contextual information or pull from a repo or find skills, or whatever it might be. Like it is funny that like now the the the sort of yes, tools still matter very much, but also arguably more important is just your understanding of how you get all of these systems to talk to each other because You're just a human in the loop. You're not like, you know, being a I don't know, being a I'm I'm trying to pick a tool that's that's not gonna make people bad. Being a expert in Microsoft Word isn't necessarily as important anymore as it used to be. You know what I mean? It's it's kind of a funny thing to think.

Corey Moen: Totally.

Matthew: I mean it is if you're in the book industry, as far as I know. Like

Max: That yeah, that is true.

Matthew: it's it's very ingrained in there and be able to track versions and comments and all that kind of stuff for authoring. But yeah.

Max: I

Corey Moen: I think what will take time in in this, though, is like, or at least I maybe again speaking for myself, still still struggle with it, is like having this assumption that if there's some tool I need to use or want to use, that I have to go learn. And I can't just ask AI to teach me or do some of it for me if it's possible, or whatever. Like there, and so in other words, like immediately thinking, like, I, you know, I need to use Word. Wait, I gotta go learn how to use Word first before I can actually do it. It's like, no, just instead, will we shift to this habit of just start, just like try? Like, and I think even those building all these little side products and all that out there are, I guess, my observation, more often the ones that are willing to just ask. Like, maybe I don't know if Claude can do or judge T or whatever, like I'll just ask though. And and sure enough, yes. And wow, now this, yes. And like it just like waterfalls from there. I don't know. Super interesting.

Max: Yeah. Well, the I mean, to that point too, the the not so great thing about the current state of of the world and the way that information gets around, and especially like AI related content on YouTube, for instance. It's like if you built a matrix of you know, doomer to overly crazy fanboy and then, you know, like technical to creative is on the other side. I feel like most people go to one direction or the other. Like we need more people that are in in you know, like I'm personally an optimist. I'm not like AI pill, but I'm an optimist that wants to have some safeguards and, you know, like some reality of of the the next wave of what work looks like in twenty twenty six and beyond. But I wanna do it in a way that does still feel true to who I am as a designer first, to your point of like, you know, actually just trying some of these things and playing with them to to see How they work and function. And I I just wish there was more people that were kind of writing that line of the middle of optimist with reality, re like real ex expectations backing their decision making. Because I also think, I mean, it's not yeah, yeah, exactly. It's it's who's gonna want to watch that? I I mean, like

Matthew: It's just not flashy to talk about that, right? On social like

Corey Moen: But then social media denders. Yeah.

Max: I I seriously have I mean it's not a spicy take by any means, but or a prediction, but it's like I I seriously have. some irrational fear or worry sometimes that we're sort of we're building this we collective we are building this world where there's gonna be people that catch up and keep up with adopting AI. I'm just being very vague. And then there's others that just like literally are not. It's not it you know, imagine going back to like the smartphone. My parents eventually got a smartphone 'cause I was like, I'm not I can't help be, you know, IT for you from afar if you don't have an iPhone because it's just it's too hard. And then once they got it, you know, the adoption curve's impossible and whatever. I think there's gonna be a world where it's like there's just one group that does not adopt at all forever. And that it's not necessarily age-wise, but it's just like that's how it is for whatever reason. And there's obviously gonna be a group that adopts, but like you know, if that's the case, how do those two worlds interact, you know, in a world where clearly, you know, Silicon Valley and you know, anywhere else that's driving all of these new AI related products, They're they are trying to dictate what the future looks like, but it's like, well, yeah, but sorry San Francisco, but you you definitely live in a bubble, right or wrong, compared to like Iowa,

Corey Moen: Totally.

Matthew: Mm-hmm.

Max: like I mean it's that's not and that's not necessarily like a knock in either either of those communities. But is the future driven from Silicon Valley or is the future actually just driven from the you know, the majority of quote unquote real folks living in worlds that aren't, you know aren't just

Matthew: huh.

Max: full of V C funding and and Burning cash left and right. And again, I'm being very like extremist here, but I like it is a weird spicy take to think about. It's like, what

Matthew: Yeah.

Max: does that look like when those two worlds do not have the same views on the future? You

Corey Moen: All the same.

Max: know what I mean?

Matthew: Well, the tech world likes to get way ahead, like move so fast that like law and regulations and society can't even keep up, right? Eventually there are reckonings or realignments,

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: right? And so we still haven't had time for that to happen yet. So especially on the societal front. I mean, we have people who are very averse to AI and those who are pilled, whatever.

Max: Ha ha.

Corey Moen: Yeah.

Matthew: but think people who are just like handing off tasks to a to the AI and just not thinking about things, they're gonna be the ones who are easy to replace. It's the ones of us who are actually thinking thoughtfully through things and trying to translate skills that we had before. I l I worry about the younger generation because they're

Corey Moen: Mm-hmm.

Matthew: just the ones who are just gonna prompt and b accept whatever comes

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: out. Where those of us who've been around longer, we have intuition and and skills where we can like see see things that they can't like you know this is inaccessible or you know whatever.

Max: Yeah. Yeah.

Corey Moen: Hmm. Right.

Max: The the other thing I was curious both of your takes on, and you can defer to some extent, but I feel like so, you know, f f on the web for the longest time it was kinda like static to some degree, and then we kinda got into a world where it's more personalized. And now it kind of seems like the next wave is sort of like this dynamic web. Meaning

Corey Moen: Mm.

Max: Yeah w the site that I see and the th the the what's fed to me is is, you know, based on a lot of like variables that, you know, somehow the the website I'm visiting is able to

Matthew: Well, I think websites will be visited less or like visiting a whole site is not necessarily gonna be the only experience people have with your site, but pieces of your site are going to show up and be embedded dynamically in other places and other platforms. You know, think of it like an HTML embed like into a social feed or something like that.

Max: Yes, exactly.

Corey Moen: Mm-hmm.

Matthew: It hasn't come come to fruition yet. But I think that's where everything is going. So you'll have to build your site, so to speak, and your brand, so to speak, that it is mobile and dynamic and can just appear anywhere and can appear in different orders, you know, based which pardon me, I always never liked the trend of personalization for the

Max: Yeah, same.

Matthew: web because I liked the consistency of knowing if I go to a site, it looks like this for me and it looks like this for let's if I send my parents to that site, I know they're seeing the same

Max: Yes.

Matthew: thing. But in this new world, everything is hyper personalized and even contextual to the day or the week, you know, whatever, even if you're the same person and the same device. So it's like that lack of consistency, I think erodes trust. So when we get to this world where everything's more dynamic and personalized, how do we actually retain trust in what we're what we're seeing?

Max: Yes, totally. Well, I mean, on that note, yeah, I totally agree with you. Part of part of the draw of going to I don't know, whatever, some random new restaurant here in town and I go to the website, they're trying to like paint me a picture in so many ways of why I should go, right? That totally makes sense. And then on the flip side, you know, this new like dynamic world, what you're describing totally makes sense to me. And I also think I mean, know there's some browsers that do this to some extent. I dunno I mean, I've kind of played with Dia a little bit and stuff, but like it seems like we're getting well, I let me back up. If we're if the web is essentially just a a bunch of databases at the end of the day, then the browser shouldn't like render the the information based on how the the you know the restaurant wants it to be rendered. I should just be able to like go to the website and To your point, Matthew, like pick one of the directions. Do I want to see the actual old school website? Or do I want it just to like distill the information and feed it to me in a way that makes sense for me? It's like a modified take on RSS that like, like, hey, mi, you know, Max likes the Apple aesthetic. So anytime he goes to a website with his new agent browser thing, whatever it is.

Matthew: So every website you visit's gonna have the same aesthetic?

Max: Exactly. Yeah. So then it's just like I don't like all you w I give me, you know, Max likes an

Corey Moen: What was

Max: Axios

Matthew: So dull.

Max: style summary. He wants to see all of your pictures, but just like a nice grid that I can scroll through. You know, like it does seem like there's a world where a modified RSS approach and then you were kinda describing it though too, where it's like you build things in a dynamic way that they just fit into the containers that we use, you know?

Matthew: But think about the restaurant, right? Okay. The a website is a restaurant and every time you go to the restaurant, the menu's different or your favorite dish is different every time you go.

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: It's like you go to a restaurant because the quality's the same, services the same, you know, the food is you know what you're what to expect, right? And so I think with the web it's like all expectations are gonna get thrown out the window and

Max: Yeah. It's it's it's it's I mean, it's a very weird time to think which direction things will go to some extent. 'Cause you I mean, to some degree, because n because building websites or apps for the most part, I not to the quality bar that most people expect, but to your point, Corey, of like anybody can build something nowadays. If you can type a sentence into a prompt box and hit go, you can build something. But does that mean we'll just, you know We'll have more of that sort of like angle of the web of just things that are generated based on, you know, whatever the person added into the prompt box and then whatever the tool distilled that and spit out. Or is it like, is there some new, you know, variation of what it what it means to have a website or an app? I mean, that that's the other thing too. It's like when you think about websites and apps these days, it's like,

Corey Moen: Yeah, yeah. I

Max: well, they're kind of not becoming obsolete, but they're just like they're changing exponentially too, where it's like we kind of just have artifacts or things that exist in on the internet more broadly speaking, which is funny to think about.

Corey Moen: Totally. I in this topic, I think I where my brain usually goes first is back to like, you know, I maybe I'm misremembering this 'cause it was definitely younger years, but when the internet when I was first getting into like internet and I don't know, all all that and building websites and all that, I feel like over time I've heard the the, you know, even before that, like early internet days was like This this this thought of well, we don't even need storefronts anymore. Everybody will just shop online, experience online. But like, I don't know, fast forward 30, 40 years, I there's still storefronts more than ever before. And I think they're just more indexed on brand experience and especially like e-commerce or just shopping in general, it feels like maybe a little hanging fruit. Maybe this is also coming from a biased US perspective of consumerism. But

Matthew: Mm.

Corey Moen: You know what I mean? Like there's something, those things still stand and they're still in heavily invested in, not because people feel like it's cool, but like clearly it works. Clearly it's driving business. You know, otherwise I don't think companies would invest in these things. And like if anything, some of the models just slowly change over time, like cars, right? Like, you know, Teslas have stores instead of dealerships,

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: you know, where it's it's creating efficiency there, but there is still that in-person. Visceral experience in some realms. So it's like, I guess, am also of the belief of just like it's hard for me to imagine a world where the internet is completely gone in the realm of like a visual branded experience. Yes, I think it will iterate and change and become more personal. But even in that, like the, you know, we already have the whole like just throw a chat bot on my site and people don't even need to browse it. They can just, you

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: know, ask the ask the chat. And that was like, you know, intercom and some of that has existed long before any of these last few years of models getting really good and at like knowledge work and all that. And so it's like, I don't know if that's existed and it hasn't replaced like branded beautiful sites, especially for some of the world's biggest brands. Like, what does that alone say? You know what I mean?

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: Like people still want that smooth, trustworthy experience. Like if anything, it just feels like with the rays of noise because it's so much, you know, the Everybody's like, the floor is raised, you it's so much easier to ship a website and this and that. Like, if anything, it feels like we're just gonna have to find better ways to verify legitimacy on the internet more and more into the future.

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: Like, dare I say no, totally,

Matthew: Shi shipping is not the point, right?

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: totally. Like, dare I say, you know, remember like minting and NFTs and all that, like, I think that's probably still a thing. But like from my to be hyper clear, limited understanding, because I never really like fully went into that. The baseline premise was you have a unique idea or visual or thing that you can officially mint or define as like your own original thing. And so it's like, well, whatever that underlying technique or or legitimacy be, just become more prevalent or have some other ways to make things legitimate, especially not just to users, but also to models that are getting information and answering questions. For people asking them, you know, like to to better verify. Like I personally still find myself going back to Google to ask very basic questions that I don't want to wait for Claude or you know, some like I I've never really been a perplexity user. I think Max, you at one time at least were like I I still like the convenience of Google ask the

Matthew: Duck duck go. That's that's where I'm

Corey Moen: question and I can immediately see the source. I don't want to just take it for what it is. I wanna see like the actual

Max: Sure.

Corey Moen: source. Thank you so much, my family bringing me lunch.

Max: Ha ha ha. Yeah.

Corey Moen: so anyways, yeah, two cents. But yo, this has been so fun to chat. Yeah.

Max: One one last thing one last thing on that note about you you brought up models in there in somewhat in some sense and obviously source material.

Corey Moen: Yeah.

Max: It's like that's the other thing I've s I've slowly started to dabble in is, you know we're hearing way more about open weight models these days and catching up and you know what capabilities look and sound and feel like. And on one end, I'm like I have a general understanding, but I'm still like Pretty, you know, novice. On the other end, the idea that like models can get to a point that can fulfill, I don't know, 70% of my needs when it comes to like quick information and those sorts of things that you're describing, Corey. Like it, you know, even yeah, exactly. It's like I I love the idea

Matthew: We're th we're there for most people, yeah.

Max: of where again, Apple fanboy, so take it grain of salt, but the the the angle that they're going with the new Siri. And utilizing, you know, Gemini models that are on device and in the cloud. Like, I love that angle because it's like at the end of the day, I don't really even want to choose different models and have to have a better understanding of what's it's good at or bad at or whatever. I just like want to be able to trust again, I trust Apple. I want to be able to trust and just like ask a single source and then it'll divert it to whatever it needs to. But it's also the idea that a good chunk of that is potentially on device is extremely interesting because we're obviously getting there with

Corey Moen: Well cool.

Max: the models l and then the hardware and it's like that alone then completely changes the landscape, you know, and that's like we're going back to my friends, we're just trying to keep get these people to catch up to just understand like, hey, there's more than just Claude Chat, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Matthew: And that's gonna do a lot to help them. Yeah, the new series really good. I have it. test yeah.

Corey Moen: for sure. Yeah. It's I mean I I don't know why I've been I've been trying to make sense. I always make sense of the world through a metaphor or examples in the past. And it's like in this realm of like adoption and cost of using tokens and all that kind of stuff, I still always come back to the analogy of electricity and assumably when electricity was early and it was very expensive and limited use and now it's like we at least in a developed world you don't even think about it. You plug something in and it's just gonna work. And the local electricity model of batteries, right? Like it's I've I like am laughing because I've never really thought about that way. That like a battery in your phone is a is local electricity, right? Like and think how many things are moving to like yeah, battery power or whatever, whether there's cars or anything else. so I I couldn't agree more. Like I think that is absolutely an inevitable path. We're already seeing through Apple and other means of like local models being fully in your control and fully secure. Like what is that, yeah, what does that mean for more adoption and all that and just like experimentation? I don't know. Seems super, super interesting. so we'll see how it we'll see how it comes to life for sure.

Matthew: Yeah, that I think we'll see harnesses, you know, like Claude, you know, is

Corey Moen: Mm.

Matthew: Claude is already, I mean, how many versions of Claude do we have? We have, you know, we have chat, cowork, code, design, right? So you're gonna see these different harnesses that are for different kind of industries or disciplines. that's where kind of people like us will live on the frontier and but will have very specific tools for different things. But for For most people, yeah,

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: it's just gonna be baked into their operating system and it's just gonna be it's most likely local and will reach out to different tools, connectors, and the web when it needs to, and you won't have

Corey Moen: Yeah.

Matthew: to think about it and and you shouldn't for that

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: kind of everyday type use stuff.

Corey Moen: Right. Or like a whole this is way deep hole, and I know we're like way over time. But it's like I also am in awe of the stuff that's happening in robotics right now, you know,

Matthew: Mm.

Corey Moen: and and so much of that, maybe ignorance assuming, is also going to be very contingent on local models existing in these robots, right? Like that they can't they c if it's something so sustained on actual humanoid activity. Like it can't rely on having a stable internet connection all the time. Even though again, even that world with what's the is it Skylink or whatever the yeah, the the SpaceX satellite internet and all that, like that is becoming more and

Max: yeah.

Matthew: Start link, yeah.

Corey Moen: more stable. Starlink, thank you. I just think you know that whole realm is also exploding and is going to be in itself a massive demand for you know sustainable local models. But yeah, I don't know. Exciting times.

Matthew: well, sustainable locally, but then what are we doing to the orbit, you know, up in space, you know, with that that mesh of Starlink?

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: I mean, we're making it harder and harder to leave the planet because we're basically putting

Corey Moen: I mean, have you ever seen Wally? yes.

Matthew: this metal shield of satellites around.

Corey Moen: Right. I mean in Wally though the spaceship just goes blast right through the satellites, you know what I mean?

Matthew: I mean, that's

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: it. We are headed there. We are headed towards that

Max: Yeah.

Matthew: picture. Well

Corey Moen: I what I saw I saw the other day to this point, not to keep talking on SpaceX, all that, but like CyberCab they announced that like Cybercabs have a a built-in Starlink unit now by default. And so like the first thing that popped my head was also WALL E where like all the people are just like blobs in the

Max: Yeah.

Corey Moen: floating chairs and the screen is just in front of you, like and it just takes you everywhere you need to go. And like it's just like we're getting we're seeing more and more glimpses of these types of things. For better or worse, you know, just like, you don't have to worry about transportation anymore. You just get in, you know what I mean? Like, I it's yeah, it's wild. my goodness, yes.

Matthew: Wally was a very prophetic movie.

Max: Let's let's just hope that there's a Wally and an Eve somewhere out there in the real life that are gonna save us all is is really like the the the bow on it. Yeah.

Corey Moen: this this this this

Matthew: All right.

Corey Moen: I love it.

Matthew: Well, with that, I think that's a good place to wrap it up. Thank you both for a great conversation today. And to everyone else watching, we'll see you next time.

Max: Thank you.

Corey Moen: Thank you.