The Fastest Way To Make Money & Save Time In The New Era Of AI Agents (For Non-Technical People)

1. 0:00 – 1:34

   Intro

   1. JRJack Roberts0:00

      It's tough not to make money doing this if you apply the correct steps in the right order. Just think of Hermes as your personal assistant, and Claude is the place where we go to build things on your desktop.

   2. CJCalum Johnson0:09

      You said $10,000 websites. That's actually the easiest way to get your first paying client.

   3. JRJack Roberts0:15

      Is because it's something that AI can produce extremely well, and this is the kind of thing that it can build. As it builds these beautiful graphic websites, and Claude did this entire thing.

   4. CJCalum Johnson0:25

      Can you kind of take us behind the scenes and, like, how you're doing this?

   5. JRJack Roberts0:30

      So the first thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna grab a prompt. So I actually spent so many hours on this prompt and so many dollars doing it, it's crazy.

   6. CJCalum Johnson0:39

      Before we get into the episode, I have to say that it's pretty surreal to me that I get to do this and record this show for you guys, and so many of you tune in and leave comments and likes on the content. The reason why I do this show and I record every single week is that I want to show that anything is possible. Any dream, any delusion that you have in your mind right now, you can bring it to reality. One of my goals at the moment is that I have this crazy delusional dream that this time next year we'll reach a million subscribers on this channel. And so if you click that subscribe button, the promise that I'll make to you is that we're gonna improve this show every single week. And so I wanna take you on that journey with me. So hit that subscribe button and let's get into the show. You actually said this in one of your recent videos. I wanted to give it back to you. You said, "Hermes Agent is the best agent on the planet, and it just got

2. 1:34 – 5:14

   The difference between Hermes Agent and Claude Code

   1. CJCalum Johnson1:34

      even better." And so Jack, where I wanted to start is where you started. What is Hermes Agent, and what makes you say that it's the best agent on the planet?

   2. JRJack Roberts1:45

      This question comes up quite a lot actually, 'cause we talk a lot about Claude Code, we talk a lot about Hermes Agent. They are... They're different. So i- if you think of Hermes Agent is a personal AI assistant. I think everyone maybe watching this has seen Iron Man with Jarvis, kind of does everything, talk and stuff like that. So the idea and the philosophy behind Hermes, which is now worth over a billion dollars, by the way, $1.5 billion, is that it's your AI personal assistant. And the more that you use it, the better that it gets. It can check your emails, check your calendars. It can build things for you. It can do research. You can chat to it on your phone. Essentially anything that you want to it. And then we have Claude Code, and Claude Code traditionally is a place where we build websites, applications, SaaS, um, do deep research. Any problem that you have, you want to solve. Now, you can effectively build anything you want to in Claude Code, but Hermes is designed to be a personal assistant. So they're, they're different in that sense, but you c- there's a little bit of overlap, which is why it kind of confuses people a, a little bit.

   3. CJCalum Johnson2:50

      Yeah. You know, I, I'm, I'm curious about your journey and your transition even from Claude Code to Hermes Agent, because from watching your content, it seems that you kind of started more so with Claude Code and then have moved over more to using Hermes Agent. Is that the case? And then even in your own journey, like, what kind of prompted you to make that transition?

   4. JRJack Roberts3:17

      I actually started on YouTube three years ago, uh, about two and a half, three years ago, and when I did that, we were talking about a website called make.com. You may have heard of it. And also then something... And then effectively what happened was it was this beautiful drag and drop system, so if you wanted to automate your emails. And then something huge happened. Claude Code came around, and what happened is that no one really anticipated that Claude Code would cross over into the masses, and it would be something that everybody could potentially use. Claude Code is literally creating code. I mean, I didn't come from a technical background. Uh, you know, and it's like, it's something that you basically are creating apps and code in natural language. So that was the idea of Claude Code, that if you can imagine it, you can build anything. And Hermes Agent is a series of tools and systems and prompts and code effectively that is completely free and open source, which is designed to be the, the ultimate AI personal assistant. So I love this technology. I t- I just go with, like, what is the ultimate useful thing that's actually gonna work and move my life forward and move my business forward or the people that I help teach? Like, what's actually gonna deliver it, that is actually working, and is... and we can explain in a super simple way.

   5. CJCalum Johnson4:27

      Yeah. No, so it, it's really good. Just to make this kind of more tangible and real for people, because I know that in, uh, one of your videos that I was actually watching this morning, you kind of describe these seven levels of using Hermes Agent. And so can you just describe-- Just go super high level for us for a second. If we take it all the way to level seven, what is possible in terms of what you can do, what you can build, the value that Hermes Agent could give to the people that are listening right now?

   6. JRJack Roberts5:04

      One thing that's really important to understand is there's something called a model and a harness. Think of this like a formula racing team. We

3. 5:14 – 13:35

   What can Hermes Agent actually do?

   1. JRJack Roberts5:14

      have the driver and we have the car. So Claude Code, for example, is a, is a harness, but you can actually switch out the individual driving it, and this is why Hermes Agent is so cool, because it is what we call model agnostic. You can have the best ChatGPT model in there, DeepSeek, Claude, Gemini. Whatever the best thing is, we can have running Hermes. So if I had to go big case, what can it do? You can build apps. You can build websites. For me personally, every single day I wake up, I get a morning brief from my Hermes Agent. It's gone through my entire emails for the entire week. It's gone through my whole calendar appointments and gives me a crisp breakdown of, "Jack, here's exactly what you need to be aware of today. FYI, do A, B, and C." It also has, which is an incredible feature, the ability to dream. So overnight, Hermes Agent will actually look at our entire conversation, and using an au- an agentic operating system also, every conversation I've had with Claude, every conversation I've had with Hermes, all of my emails, all of my calendar appointments, everything I've said to it, and actually think of ways that it can improve my life and little features and, and things that I might not be aware of. So even when I'm not using this agent, it is literally working in the background, if I want it to, twenty four/seven, thinking of ways that it can improve things. So you literally name it. It's becoming almost like the interface for essentially anything that you like.

   2. CJCalum Johnson6:39

      Mm.Mm-hmm. That is good. And especially the, the analogy, I think about what you said of like the, you have the Formula 1 car and then you have the driver. And so just to put a point on this, in the way that you think about it, Hermes Agent isn't replacing Claude or Claude Code. It's more that you're, you're using them together. Is that correct?

   3. JRJack Roberts7:02

      Yeah. It's like ... So the way that I think about it is because Claude Code can build anything, anything that you can do in Hermes Agent, you can say, "Well, can't I just do this in Claude?" And the answer is yes. But eventually you just find yourself building Hermes Agent inside Claude. So Hermes Agent's this open source thing. It's got hundreds of developers working on it, and their only position is how do we make this the best personal assistant on the planet? What code do we need? What systems do we need? What integrations can we make available? How can we make it super easy? And they're just building it probably in Claude Code. They're all using Claude Code to build Hermes. So that's kind of the ... If you think of Claude Code as like a Lego set, right, where you can build any Lego that you want to, and Hermes is just something that's already built to be your personal assistant. So if you like, you can build your own personal assistant in Claude. It's just that we've got a really great team that have spent a lot of time building this thing, and you can modify it and change it in any way that you want to. Practically speaking, the way that I use it too, and there's no right or wrong answer to this, if I'm building apps and websites or I'm trying to build something for my community, for my audience, and I'm sat down at my computer, I will often use Claude Code, but if I'm out and about, I'm mobile, that's when I like to use my personal assistant. I might drop ideas down there. So if I'm browsing the internet and I find a really interesting article, a very interesting video, I'll just say, "Hey, hey Hermes, remind me of this later." So just think of Hermes as your personal assistant, and Claude is the place where we, we go to build things on, on your desktop.

   4. CJCalum Johnson8:31

      Yeah. It's really good, and it, it reminds me of, of what you said right in the beginning of Hermes Agent being similar to JARVIS in Iron Man. And I think about that visual of like Iron Man's flying somewhere and he's like talking to JARVIS within his helmet and it's like sorting things out and giving him information. It feels very similar to that. Um, you know what, Jack? Here's where I wanna go, 'cause I just ... We're gonna get in and we're gonna show people some of the most valuable like workflows and things that you've built using Claude Code and Hermes Agent respectively, especially things that will help people make more money or save time in their work, in their job, in their business. But before we do that, I wanna zoom out, because you have a very relatable story. And so I wanted, I wanted to read this, because today you're, you're a full-time entrepreneur. You've sold a startup. You wo- You're building another AI app. You have a large community. But just a few years ago, you were at this point. You said, "I was working at one of the biggest energy companies in the UK with 20,000 employees and a good strategy role. However, I got to this moment where I was like, 'I can't keep exchanging time for money. I need to build a vehicle and an asset.'" And so Jack, I just wanted you to, to rewind for us and give us that context. How do you arrive at this moment where, in your words you say, "I can't keep exchanging time for money. I need to build a vehicle and an asset"? How do you get there?

   5. JRJack Roberts10:14

      So, so for those of you who don't know my, my background, I, um, I studied law at university. I, I really wanted to be a lawyer. I found out that wasn't quite the su- It wasn't ... Life wasn't quite like Harvey Specter in Suits. It was a little bit different. So I, you know, I went and did like a, a grad scheme and I, you know, I, I started climbing the ladder in this corporation. And I reached a point, and I, I think there was one meeting I was in that lasted for like three hours, and essentially it was the most boring meeting on the planet, and it started having me ask questions. And I, I got to the point, like, like you said, where I was like, you know, if I, if I wanted to have a million pounds or become a millionaire, I realized that I would get there eventually in the corporate world if I just kept my mouth shut and played all these stupid corporate politics games. But I was like, "Dude, this is gonna take me 20 to 30 years and so much grind." And I'd just read a book called Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, and it was one of the most fundamental mindset shifts for me, and one of the big messages in that book is that the rich buy assets, things that make them money, and the poor buy liabilities, things that cost them money. And he has this thing called the quadrant, and in it, it has two sides. On the left-hand side, we have basically being an employee, where effectively you're just trading your time for money. You give me 40 hours a week and I'll give you £50,000 or whatever the exchange rate is. The problem with that is it's very difficult to reach what I would call escape velocity, where you've made enough money that you can own your own time and your own location. And I found personally that it just ... I didn't like the fact that like it was like you need to be in Oxford for X days a week. And I was like, "I don't really wanna be in Oxford. I wanna be over here instead." And I just had this big desire to have time freedom and location freedom. And I knew l- next to nothing about being an entrepreneur, and I just realized ... I was like ... And then on the right side of this quadrant, to complete this important story, was basically owning your own business and being an investor. And the really important thing to remember is that on the right side of the column, the ceiling is uncapped. You can hit unlimited value. That side is unlimited. As an investor and as a business owner, there is no cap on your income. And I, I realized if I really wanted to make it and own my time and make money, I needed to become an entrepreneur, and that was what I decided to do.

   6. CJCalum Johnson12:39

      Yeah. There's a lot of people listening or there's someone listening, that everything you're saying makes logical sense. Like they've had that same realization. They've been sitting in the meeting or on the way to work in the morning or, you know, getting home from work at night and been like, "This isn't it for me. Like, this isn't what I want." But everything they've known up until this point has been around, you know, whether it was going to university to get the job, like everything led to, to get the job or to get the promotion. And so stepping out, like, like going in on building a business or owning assets really feels like stepping out on a ledge. And the reason why I even say in the beginning that your story is so relatable, I'm sure you had that same feeling to a degree. How did you overcome that? And for the person listening at home, like what would you say to them?

4. 13:35 – 20:37

   Granola: The AI meeting assistant

   1. CJCalum Johnson13:35

      Okay, so what you're looking at is a customer research document that I was able to build for our upcoming digital product release, and I used Granola's MCP connector with Claude in order to do it. And I can't tell you guys how excited I've been to share this with you. And so to give you the context, if you've clicked on this video, I'm assuming you're someone that wants to use AI tools that actually make your life easier, make you more productive, and most importantly, save you time. And so that's why I wanted to show you how I'm using Granola, because my team and I, we recently made the switch and it's changed things. And so for context, over the past couple of weeks, I've been on calls with people who watch the show to understand the exact problems that they're struggling with when it comes to using AI. And usually in these meetings I'd be writing down a ton of notes, and then I'd spend probably one to two hours going through them and spotting any useful patterns. But because I had Granola transcribing those calls for me, I didn't have to worry about capturing every single word that was said. And then immediately after the meeting, I was able to just connect Granola's MCP to Claude, and I was able to get this customer research document in under 10 minutes. And actually, one of my favorite parts of using Granola is that it has models like Claude and ChatGPT built directly into it, and so you can ask it questions from the meeting and it will give you direct answers. This feature alone has saved me so much time. And so speaking to you today, I use Granola in every single meeting and it's made me more productive. And so if you wanna do the same, just go to that link in the description and you will get 100% off your first month with Granola. Trust me, it's a game changer. Thank you to Granola for sponsoring this episode. Let's get back to the show. Okay, so this is Alice, my guest booking AI agent that I created with Hyperagent, the sponsor of today's episode, and she just sent me this beautiful brief for a potential guest that she think would be perfect for the show. And so if you've been thinking about building your first AI agent, I think you're gonna find it so useful to see the behind the scenes of how I built this. And so for context, this used to take me and my team hours and hours of research to find the best guest for you guys. And I can't tell you how much time that I'd spend looking through YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, doing background checks on Google, and now Alice does all of that stuff for me, and it was so easy to create inside of Hyperagent. I just came here, I clicked Create with Chat, and then Hyperagent will ask you some basic questions on what agent you want to build. I answered those questions within a couple of sentences, and then Hyperagent just went along and built this workflow. And so now once a day I get a Slack message from Alice with this beautiful brief on potential guest targets that she think would be a great fit for the show. And I'm telling you, it's made our process so much faster and saved us so much time. And she does all of this on her own. I don't have to prompt her. I don't even trigger her to do this. It feels autonomous and it saves me so much time and stress. And Alice is just one of a number of agents. I've got another agent that preps my episode outlines, and I'm building out a whole team as we speak. And so if you are listening at home and you want to create your first AI agent, hit that link in the description to get $500 of free credit with Hyperagent to do exactly that. Thank you to Hyperagent for sponsoring this episode. Let's get back to the show.

   2. JRJack Roberts17:13

      I, I just say that, look, I, I started off at McDonald's. I actually went out to get a job and I came back and said, "Hey, I've got a job, uh, and the pay is $0." I ended up working at a charity shop. That was like my first job. And then I, then I worked at McDonald's and I, I did these jobs, and one of the things I learned really early on is that I don't [laughs] ... I was like, it kind of was great motivation about, but that's not wh- where I, I wanna end up. Now, I, I'll give you like a high-level answer and some really practical stuff that was really valuable for me. Um, and that's out there that your day job is a superpower, okay? Your day job keeps the lights on, but your future is built in the evenings and weekends. That's what I realized. I realized it's something I had to do. You have to take a 10-year point of view, otherwise it's difficult to make it. You need a perspective that says, "I will do whatever it takes to make this work." And the reason why I, I highly recommend that you stay in your day job until you ... Basically what I did with my company is I got it to the point where it made as much money as me. And I actually remember I called my best friend, I said, "Dan, you won't believe this, but that thing I started like, uh, I don't know how many months ago or years ago it was, j- makes as much as I make now." I was like, "How crazy is that?" And I was like, "This is insane." And my rule was that it had to be up for three months in a row before I would leave and go into it full time. And then, and then it got to the point where it made like 10K a month and then so on and, so on and so forth. But it was like, it was good for me 'cause that was the shift. For me, I, I just had to do it. I did it even into weekends. I made every mistake possible. There were ti- And you learn very quickly about resilience, but i- if you surround yourself with the right people and you don't stop, you will make it eventually.

   3. CJCalum Johnson18:52

      Yeah. Y- y- you know what's interesting, Jack? So we have a, we have a similar story in many ways. So I, uh, I started this podcast in 2022 when I was working in marketing, like had a nine-to-five in marketing, uh, as a marketing manager. And then I did the show for a year, as you say, on nights and weekends, like that was where the show got built, and I did that for the first year and then I quit my job in 2023. I was a bit more of a, a risk- I was a bit crazy. I, I did it with a-- It was making nothing, like it w- but I just saw the, the vision with it. But you know what? It's interesting to me that s- I know one thing is that since I left my job in 2023, and I'm sure it's similar for you, the world has completely changed. Like to, to what we were speaking about in the beginning, it's like what you can build and how fast and easy in a lot of ways, especially when you look historically at it, is to build things today because of Claude Code and Hermes. It's like that would've actually changed the way that I would've even thought about leaving my job and what I would've built. And so I'm just really curious to ask you, Jack, if you're leaving your job today, like if we took you back to that moment today, can you describe and explain to people and make it real for people what the value of being able to use Claude Code or a Hermes agent, like what that would've meant? Like, what would you have even been doing from day one?

   4. JRJack Roberts20:27

      It's, it's unbelievable. So f- for those of you who don't know, the startup that I built went on to become a top 100 UK startup. That's like a list. We have some really cool companies in there that have done s- been that,

5. 20:37 – 25:27

   Why Claude Code is a cheat code for non-technical people

   1. JRJack Roberts20:37

      and I, and I made a, a, an exit on it. I brought on a CTO. We had about 3,000 new customers a month, and I was like, "Hey, we probably need a bit of a CTO in here right now." So I brought him on, and I remember one conversation I had with him, said, "Dude, we-- I want a dashboard. I wanna see-- I need to see this, this, this, this, and this." And he said, "Jack, no problem. That will be ready in three months." I said, "Three months?" "Yeah." I actually also remember very clearly having a day job and a developer charged me, I think it was £180 to add a date selector in a form. And I was like, "Really? £180?" He said, "Yeah, that took two hours." Fast-forward to today, I wouldn't need to hire the CTO for the startup is the reality in terms of what is possible now. And that dashboard I can build in 35 minutes, and it's not an exaggeration. I, I have messages from people in my community all the time that run very large businesses that are just starting out that have saved 50,000 plus, 100,000. Like, stuff that is unbelievable. Like, the capabilities that this has opened now, I-- This is an era for creative people, for non-technical people, where us- we used to have to hire a load of developers that we didn't really understand what they were saying or doing. Now, if y- if you can imagine it and you understand the basics, you can effectively build this sort of stuff. And there's still a point where you bring those people in, of course, as you reach scale. But in terms of building your actual prototype, building databases, building these things, you don't need to spend tens-- And it's one of the biggest disruptive changes. The AI automation development, Claude Code, Hermes Agent, is one of the most disruptive things that we've seen in the last 10 years. It blows my mind. If I had access to this when I started my startup, it would've been a complete cheat code. Like 100%. Would've saved us so much money.

   2. CJCalum Johnson22:22

      Yeah. Yeah. You know what? It, it's, it's, uh, it's so good and, and it's, uh... We're really in a new era in, in a lot of ways. I think the-- [smacks lips] one of the things that I've learned from doing this show is like the mentality, like the way we, that we even think about our careers and building things has to like completely change as a result of this technology. And so Jack, one of the things that I've heard you say in multiple videos is you spent hundreds of hours in Hermes Agent, you spent thousands of hours using Claude Code. Can you just talk for people about that first kind of light bulb moment that you have where you start to see the power of this technology? And then when we talk specifically about your business today, what does that look like?

   3. JRJack Roberts23:11

      I, I was building automations at, with AI eight, eight years ago. Claude Code is just Cowork with no limitations, and it works exactly the same way a- and it's got way more cool things in it as well. So just to say that don't be put off by code i- if you're not a coder. Th- this-- Honestly, anyone can do it. What really blew my mind was, honestly, one of the coolest things was websites, which I, I think we can get into. It's g- it's gonna blow your mind on stuff like that, but its ability to build apps, its ability to... I could say to it, for example, "Hey, I wanna start a business." Maybe you say, "I wanna start a digital agency." Claude, from just one command, can go out, it can do research, it can find thousands of leads, it can set up automations, it can, um, build your website, it can build you a backend, it can build you anything. And for me, the ability to actually speak to it and it go ahead and build it was the moment where I was like, "This changes everything." Like, this is actually wild. But here's the thing. If you're somebody listening to this podcast, you are unbelievably ahead. Like, if you've made it this far into podcast, I just wanna say this because everyone thinks, "Isn't everybody doing it?" They're really not. My dentist said to me recently, she said, "Jack, have you ever heard of something called ChatGPT?" I said, "I've never heard of it." And she said, "Well, I just found out and it can summarize documents." I said, "Interesting." People are just figuring out this, this information, this technology, and if you're even thinking about using it to build stuff or even know the word Hermes Agent, you are very, very, very early. It's, it's the best time now to be getting involved in it, for sure.

   4. CJCalum Johnson24:38

      Yeah. You know what? When, I-- It's funny, Jack, so when you look at the data on this, it's crazy because if you're watching videos like this or you're like in these sort of conversations or you're like on the AI side of social media, you think everyone has like 10 agents like running their life right now. But if you look at the data- I think it's, um, just over 50% of people in America have used ChatGPT at least once. So they've just used it. They're not even like regular users, they've just used it. And then if you even go for the statistics for something like Claude, it's a far smaller percentage. Hermes Agent, like I haven't even... I haven't used Hermes Agent. Like that's probably even a more minuscule percentage. And so you know what? I wanted to start with the websites because you and I had a conversation

6. 25:27 – 34:43

   How to make $10,000 websites with Claude Code

   1. CJCalum Johnson25:27

      before this, and you said something that was interesting to me. You said the ability now to create websites, $10,000 websites, that's actually the easiest way to get your first paying client is building them a free website. And so I, I know that you've done videos with, uh, building websites specifically with Claude, um, and like the newest models on Claude, like Fable. Can you just show people and share your screen and show people in terms of like how the website looks, can you just show people what's possible to begin with?

   2. JRJack Roberts26:01

      Absolutely. I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen with us. And I just wanna say, I, uh, I have sold websites for over $10,000. I have one of the largest communities on the planet where so many people have done this. So it's something I know super well. Let me go ahead and share my screen so you can have a look at the wonder and the magic of this, because I think it's really important to understand. So this here, for example, is built with something called One Shot, which means I gave Cl- And I'm gonna give you, by the way, this entire skill completely for free in this video, so you can literally follow this exact process step by step. But this is built One Shot. So this is the kind of thing you can build with it, is it builds these beautiful graphic websites, and Claude did this entire thing, all the videos, all the text, everything down together. And I basically said, "Hey, I want you to go ahead and build me a free website." And this is the kind of thing that it can build. Really beautiful, um, you know, web optimized. It can also optimize for mobile websites. I'll show you another example. I asked it to do a different variation of it. So maybe you want a little bit more of a, a version like this where it's kind of a bit more in a box. And you can see it. You come down. It is gorgeous, it's slick, and it's doing a lot of things right. And this is using the, one of the best design models on the planet right now, which is called Fable 5, which is part of Claude. It can design so many different kind of websites. Like this is one here, for example. It's got this kind of Ghibli style, um, animated graphic in the background. Um, it has this kind of thing here which is cool where you can zoom in. And as you zoom in, you see different things. This was kind of inspired by quite a famous website. But again, all designed by Claude in one shot. Um, you know, here's another example, and it can essentially understand any design systems that you like and use that kind of thing to build anything that you want to. Um, you can go ahead, and there's another example. We down- dive into the clouds. And I haven't gone back and forth on these. These are like one-shot things. You can build apps, for example. Like this is an app that will let you go ahead and understand like outliers in your niche. So let's say you were growing on Instagram or LinkedIn or YouTube, you can find outliers. You can build different softwares. There's a million different things that you can go ahead and do with, with this technology. It's, it's really incredible.

   3. CJCalum Johnson28:02

      Yeah. You know, it's like, uh, oh, you used the word incredible. And, and that's my first time even like seeing like the websites that you've actually built. And I think to myself, we live in such crazy times. 'Cause like I told you, I used to work in marketing. The company I would work at, you'd spend tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars going to agencies or developers to build you a website that just looked like what you showed. Um, the point that you make on giving away like free websites could actually be the p- the easiest path, is the easiest path to getting your first paying client. Can you describe what you meant by that?

   4. JRJack Roberts28:46

      When we talk about websites as well, th- there's two big components. There's like how it looks and does it accomplish its job? So w- you know, there's systems that, for example, let's say that we speak to, uh, as a good example, a pool cleaner in Texas. What we would do is go out and find, uh, 100 pool cleaners in Texas online, and Claude does this entire process for us. And it would find the top 10 pool clean- or the top five, and it would find the bottom five. It would find out who has the best sales, which are the most successful, and we reverse engineer those websites. Well, did you realize, Jack, that every single pool cleaner in Texas that's making a million dollars a year actually has a website that has these five things in it, right? They all show before and afters. Awesome. Write that down. They all have a contact form. Write that one down. They all have a phone number. So the first thing we do is we find best in class, what do the winners do, and what do the losers do, and therefore what the, the buttons that we need to press. So we have the structure that converts. Then we ne- then when we've got that, then we sprinkle on the, the beautiful design. Now, I, I have taught thousands of people this. Um, I've met with many of the largest AI creators, um, multiple times a year to talk about what is the stuff that's actually working. And one of the easiest ways right now to get your first paying client, if you wanna make your very first digital dollar, it's websites. The reason for this is because it's something that AI can produce extremely well. Uh, it's not that difficult to learn. If you grab one coffee and watch this podcast, you'll get it. And the third thing is most people don't know how to do it, and it's, it's insane. And also most websites suck as well. [laughs] They're not great. So it's so easy to add value. Now, the strategy, if you wanna get a little technical, a little, uh, tactical here, is you effectively find niches that are cash rich but technology poor. So these are businesses that are making money. Uh, maybe they've got a Gmail, uh, maybe they've got poor websites, and you build them the website completely for free. And by the way, you can automate that as well, so you can do loads at the same time. And the idea here is you give that website for free, and you build a relationship. The goal is to build a connection and relationship. And then the conversation sounds something like Awesome. You wanted a website for a reason, right? Is that because you wanna get more customers, you're trying to increase your click-through rate, your signup rate? What is it? And then you can start to sell other services. So for example, "We've got your website, but let's get you ranking on Google," or, "Why don't we actually work on getting you a chatbot that can close customers?" Or, "Why don't we work on building you out a dashboard so we can capture leads, get them an email list?" There's so many different things, and you start to build monthly recurring revenue off the back of that. Now, the, the deal is amazing. It's an incredible offer. It's basically I'm giving you a free website. And if for some reason they don't want that, you can say, "Awesome. Do you know any other business owners that would really benefit from a new website?" And they'll say, "Yes, I do." And then you've got this introduction. So the goal isn't to hit 10 out of 10, but if you do this meaningfully, it's such a good lead magnet that you can give to them. It's unbelievable. And what happens as well is you kind of become known as the AI guy for that business. And it certainly happened with me as well, where I built something. They're like, "Cool. Hey, could you also do this thing, this thing, and this thing?" Nobody's willing to lead with this much value upfront. You do it without the expectation of an ask. You get testimonials even if they don't work with, work with you, which is awesome, so you build up credibility. And if you're just starting, I honestly-- Just give these websites away. Get testimonials and you will be amazed. You have to-- It's tough not to make money doing this if you apply the correct steps in the right order.

   5. CJCalum Johnson32:15

      Yeah. You know what? I just think it's such a, it's such a unique value proposition. Like I was, I was, um, I was watching one of your videos. Uh, some of the websites that you even just displayed, it took you 21 minutes to build it-

   6. JRJack Roberts32:28

      Mm

   7. CJCalum Johnson32:28

      ... uh, on Claude. And it's like how many times-- And I'm just thinking about the experience for a business owner of like how many businesses do we even come across that have a legitimately like a great website, like a beautiful website even in 2026? And then the start of the relationship is actually you giving them a beautiful website. And so, you know, actually, because you said this and I, and I wanted you to, to go deeper because I think a lot of people, and myself included, will be enamored visually with how the website looks. But you mentioned a second part, which is actually the functionality. And something you said, you said Claude Code builds beautiful websites, however, 95% of them are complete garbage. And that's not your fault. Can you kinda take us behind the scenes? And I'm thinking about even showing us some of the prompts and like how you're doing this, where you're not just generating a beautiful website that actually has no functionality, no value to it. How do you generate something that's actually would be useful to business owners?

   8. JRJack Roberts33:42

      What I'll do, I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen so I can kind of show you what this looks like in practice if, if, if that's helpful. So the first thing to th-think about Claude as a 1,000 IQ assistant, or you can think about it as, you know, um, Mozart but with no piano. So it's, it's the world's best design agent, but it does-- it needs the right tools and the right instructions to go ahead and build it because these AIs don't instinctively know what great design actually looks like. So what we need to do is give them examples, give them instructions, and help them guide to do that. Asking the right question is super, super important. So if I show you the process of if that's helpful, uh, to do, Calum, how you would build that in like three really simple steps so that people can follow along, if that would be valuable. Um, so let me go ahead and, uh, share my screen so I can do that. So the first thing I'm gonna do, I'm gonna grab a prompt. So I actually spent so many hours on this prompt and so many dollars doing it. It's crazy. And I'm gonna make the skill available for everybody down below, so you can just literally come ahead and grab this one whenever

7. 34:43 – 56:36

   [LIVE CLAUDE WEBSITE DEMO STARTS]

   1. JRJack Roberts34:43

      you're ready. So if I come over to this, and let me grab the skill for you. Now, the key thing here is we've gotta detail, um, what we want Claude to physically do. So let me come down and download this website skill. And there's a few different components if you want this beautiful scroll-stopping animation. For example, you need to get the frame rate right. You need to get the smoothness down. You need to use the right models. You need to think about the prompting and the sequencing and order. So the first thing we do is download the skill, and we'll put that down, down below, um, in this podcast subscription. Then you're gonna come over and download Claude Code. So to do this, you need to be on the $20 a month subscription with Claude. It is gonna be one of the highest ROI decisions that you make in your entire life. I don't want you to think about it like a Netflix subscription. I want you to think about it as an AI employee because this-- that's exactly what this is. It is one of the highest ROI things that you will ever do getting this thing. So then let's have a look at this one here. Once you're in Claude, all you're gonna do is come down and add that file in. Just gonna come to Add, and we're gonna drop into that zip file.

   2. CJCalum Johnson35:41

      That's the skill that you downloaded.

   3. JRJack Roberts35:43

      This is the skill. Okay? So we add the zip file, and then effectively on the models, if you come down, Fable Five is the most powerful. So these are the different models that you have. This is the most powerful model that Anthropic has right now, but it burns credits a little bit more. And then this is how hard do you want it to work. So for this one, you can do anywhere from low to high. Um, low is gonna be fine. Medium is okay. You can pick the one that you'd like. And then essentially you're gonna give it this prompt, which is gonna be, "Hey there. I would like you to install this skill and build me a website. Ask me the questions that are prompted." Okay? And effectively in this skill here, it's gonna run you through a series of questions, and you're just gonna answer those questions, and it's gonna go ahead and build it for you. So I can show you exactly what those look like. So everything is inside this skill. It's gonna ask you things like, "What do you want the website to be on? Do you have any existing, you know, logos or brand assets?" Now, what's happening here is Claude is reading the, the document. So the way that Claude works, generally speaking- Is that it runs on skills. So if you wanna do something, Calum, like maybe you wanna create invoices for your podcast, or maybe you want to create a daily brief, you can actually create a skill in Claude such that... And I do this all the time. This is one of the things that saves me hours every week, is I say, "Hey, create me an invoice for this company." And it already has my template for my invoice, and it just does it automatically. So inside Claude, we can build these unique skills that you can use across your entire business every single day, which is cool. And you can see how many tokens Claude is using when it's doing this. And Claude is just gonna be the, the engine in the background, um, working for us and building this. And you don't even need to sit on it, it can just build this in the background. So it's come down here and it's asking, "What are we building?" So we're gonna come down here and give it an answer. So we might say something along the lines of, "I would like to build a... I'm building a website to show honey, maybe honey from the farm, um, getting to, um, the final product." So let's do something really interesting around a product honey, maybe showing that journey. Okay, I'm gonna come down there and click on next. The journey, one continuous shot from top to bottom. Where does the camera start and where does it end? So let's just go from design. Um, I'd say, "You go ahead and pitch me a couple different ideas for it. You know, be creative." All right, I'm gonna come down. It says, "Or if you want to, you can also pick either describing the shot or design the art for me brand." That's completely your call. And then we've got real generative video or pure code motion. Now, this is basically saying, do wa- do you want a website that has a scrolling video, or do you want it to be kind of just like code and text? 'Cause sometimes it might be something slightly different. So I'm gonna come down and say, "I want real footage." And then finally, where does it live? And then you're gonna say, um, "Go ahead and publish it on Vercel." Okay, I'll explain what Vercel is in just a second, but you can see we've got this one here at the top, which is Vercel your designs. So the cool thing about Vercel as well, which is really important to understand, is tha- this is where our website's going to live. So if I come back over here, we're using three things. We're using Claude Code, which is the coding engine. This is the genius. We are using, um, Vercel to host it, so this is where our website lives. Now, all Vercel is, is just a place where your website lives. That's it. If you've ever used anything like, you know, WordPress or Wix, it's kind of what it is. It lets you go in and amend anything you want to, so you can click on the websites. Now, the really cool thing is you actually don't ever really need to touch this, 'cause you can connect all these things to Claude Code. And then we need something to generate the images and graphics, so we can use something like Higgsfield, we could use any individual API. Now, both these softwares here, um, Higgsfield and also Vercel, and something called GitHub, GitHub being, um, basically fancy word for just place where we store code. So GitHub is where your code lives. So any app you build, any website, is just a series of code, and GitHub is like the Google Drive for nerds, essentially. You basically upload it here in a private folder, and this is where your code lives. And then Vercel is just a mirror of GitHub, and that's it. So for example, what Claude will do here is it'll go ahead, build us a website, and the first thing it will do is store the code, 'cause w- we need to get it off your computer, right? If other people are gonna see your amazing website, we need to live online. So effectively what happens is Claude stores it in GitHub. That's it. And then Vercel is the website hoster, so this will just reflect what's in GitHub, and that's it. And then essentially you're at the point where you can say to Claude something like, "Hey, I don't like the color blue, change that to red," and it will do that for you instantaneously. So this is the only thing that you use when you're editing your website. You just chat to it in this box here. You can change the name of it here, you can pin it, and then when you wanna make changes to your website, you just have a conversation with Claude. That's literally how simple it is. So, um, I'll let this one cook in, cook in the background, but that's effectively the en- the entire process of building a website like that. And then we just connect everything we want to. So you would just say something like, "Hey there. I would like to connect to GitHub, to Vercel, and Higgsfield," if we're using Higgsfield, "and I'd like to do that via the CLI," the command line interface. "Please give me instructions on how to do that," right? And effectively Claude will tell you step by step how to connect Claude to those systems. We can also, if we want to... And look at this. It's now actually come back and given us three concepts, which I really wanted it to do. I, I really wanted it to say, "He- hey, here are three different ideas. What do we think about this?" So we have The Golden Thread, which is one unbroken macro bound dr- dawn mist over a wildflower meadow. That sounds cool. We've got The Golden Relay, and One Drop. I'm gonna go ahead with this recommended version here. We click on Next. And then credits, uh, I'm gonna come down and basically top this up so we can go ahead and do it, but effectively once we've done that, it will then go ahead and start actually building this for us, um, in the background, which is fantastic.

   4. CJCalum Johnson41:27

      You know, Ja- Jack, before we, before we go on, and, and that was such a good breakdown and such a fast breakdown, is just a f- a few quick fire points I wanna clear up for people. So first of all, the model that you were using to do that full process, you were using Fable, correct?

   5. JRJack Roberts41:47

      Yes.

   6. CJCalum Johnson41:48

      Yes. And okay, so because Fable's obviously the, the newest Claude model that's been released, it burns tokens. You even mentioned that in the beginning. To someone who's doing this for the first time, can you just first of all explain when people say, "Oh, it burns tokens," or, "It burns way more tokens," what does that mean and what's the significance of it? And then how does the final website build look using Fable versus maybe Opus or even a, like a less powerful model like Sonnet? Can you give us those break... that kind of picture for people?

   7. JRJack Roberts42:25

      Yeah, sure. Absolutely. So, um, we speak in words, but AI itself will speak in what's called tokens. Roughly speaking, um, 100 tokens is about 75 words. Uh, there, thereabouts. So and th- and then we have, if you think about it like this, like each model, uh, has better strengths than others, and there is currently always a number one model in the world, and that number one Model in the world right now is something called Claude Fable. Now, Fable's powerful, but it's also very hungry. [laughs] And what the consequence of that is that basically, um, the more token hungry a model is, the more tokens it consumes, the more expensive it actually is to use. That's the kind of trade-off, that's the upshot with these models. So what people sometimes do is you're trading off three things. You're trading off performance, cost, and speed. So based on what's most important to you, you can basically make that trade-off and, and judgment call a- as exactly as you would like to.

   8. CJCalum Johnson43:25

      And then I guess, okay, so that's a really good breakdown. In terms of the model that you're using, 'cause even what we described in the beginning of, like, if I was trying to get my first paying client, like I'm planning to give away these websites for free, I'm planning to use it as a relationship builder, maybe even like sell websites to businesses, would you recommend or would you be using Fable in order to do that? Or could you get away with using an Opus?

   9. JRJack Roberts43:54

      You, you can. You can build all of this stuff with Opus 4.8, 100%. So i- if you want the technical stuff, so if you, if you think about the AI models, right, we have America and then we have China. So if you're just getting started using ChatGPT and Claude, awesome. Just, just do that. Once you get a little bit more advanced, you'll find out these new, these new models that, that pop out. But the point is, like, these other models are coming up, which is amazing because, um, it means that there's way more optionality, loads of competitive pressure. But if you're somebody saying, "Jack, I want to make my very first dollar," get your ChatGPT subscription, get your Claude subscription, and with those two things, you can build out these websites. They're very generous usage and, you know, you can use Opus 4.8. You don't have to do this in Fable 5, but if you wanted to get just a tiny bit better design, we'd do Fable 5. So it's not gonna be the difference between it sucking and it looking like a piece of art. It's not like that. It's maybe like 8 to 10%, 15% better. It's, it's not gonna be a, a day and night thing. But if you can afford it, it burns more usage, so your, your credits will go down quicker, then go ahead and do it. And then what you'll find is that you'll reach the end of your $20 usage, and then at that point, you can get your $100 plan or your $200 plan. But it-- You should be able to build everything you need w- with your $20 subscriptions.

   10. CJCalum Johnson45:10

       Yes. Okay. You know what, Jack, let's do two things. So one, and you let me know if it's actually ready, I'm, I'm super curious to see what website Claude built. Um, and then two, let's go ahead and do exactly what you described and kind of share with people the differences and kind of how you're using Claude Code and Hermes Agent together even.

   11. JRJack Roberts45:34

       So first of all, what actually is the difference between a chatbot and an agent? So this on the left is what everyone's gonna be familiar with, right? A chatbot. Essentially, you ask it questions, and it gives you answers. The big difference between that and Hermes Agent is that Hermes actually does work for you. It has skills, it has capabilities, and it just does work for you in the background. For example, this very presentation that you're looking at right now was built by AI. It, it alters it for you once you kind of explain to it. It can plan, it can think, it can act. Hermes Agent can be proactive. My Hermes Agent can message me, "Jack, I need to see the weight today. Where are we at on the weight? How many reps of that bench press did you do, Jack? I need to know the specifics." ChatGPT's not gonna do that. You can build all of this stuff with an agent. It is something that actually does things for you. It is active and proactive. So couple things to bear in mind here. Um, i- if you're looking at, you know, building websites, like I showed you earlier, just to reiterate that process, we've got the skill, we've got the coding graphics that we're gonna get from different softwares, and then we've got the hosting. That's it. That's all you need. Essentially, when we built the website, we installed the skill basically onto Claude. We asked it to build it, and then it's going ahead and building right now and publishing it for sale, and hopefully we can share that later on and what the podcast looks like. So we talked about how do you actually monetize this, right? How-- What's the fastest way to get your very first dollar online? And we talked about websites. We talked about the fact that every business kind of wants and needs a website. It's very, very cheap to actually go ahead and build it. Um, we can make it look beautiful with the right skills and prompts, and you can actually genuinely charge it, um, f- for a good decent amount of money. Now, the strategy that works really well, and remember this, uh, everybody, that of all the things that you need to innovate on, funnel is not one of them. There are existing funnels, existing things that work to get your first dollar. This is the stuff, genuinely speaking, I wish I knew wh- when I got started. It is crazy. We build the website for free. We give it away. We ask them what they need. You then become the AI guy for this business, and then, then you get paid work, and then you get referrals. We did a big study in our community. We, we've got over 3,000 entrepreneurs in our community, um, all, all crushing it, sharing best practices and stuff. And I asked them, "Hey, how did you all get your first client?" And did you know that 80% of them told me it was from their personal network? So that's basically asking people, "Hey, I build beautiful websites that genuinely drive more conversions. Do you know anybody that needs one of those websites for free?" And oftentimes people will be like, "Hey, I'm that guy. I need a great website for free right now." And then you begin the conversations. Remember, success is often brewed in the dirt kitchen.

   12. CJCalum Johnson48:11

       You know, just o- one point on that, Jack, 'cause I think it's such a-

   13. JRJack Roberts48:13

       Please

   14. CJCalum Johnson48:13

       ... I think it's such a good, like, valuable, potentially something that someone could skip over, is the majority of people's first client comes from the personal network. And it makes sense to me just intuitively because to put your money and your time with someone as a business owner, it takes so much trust. And so it's like, okay, who are the people that are the most likely to trust you in your life? Well, versus like the random guy on the internet that just found you, which will happen eventually, especially when you have testimonials, it's much more likely to be that person that you, you know, you have their number saved. They've been following you for all of this time. You've met up a few times. They've seen you at event. Like, the personal- Network. I, I just thought that was such a, a sharp point. And then you layer that on with you could actually give them value up front by just the lead magnet of, okay, here's a beautifully designed website that's was built bespoke for your business. It's, uh, it makes sense how that all ties together.

   15. JRJack Roberts49:21

       What, 100%. And it's like the, the data's so clear on this. It's like over 80%. And again, the great news for you is that nobody bothers. Nobody asks that question. Wh- when you say to somebody, "Do you know anybody that needs a website?" They don't feel like you're selling to them. They feel like, hey, I'm genuinely... I'm like, "Look, I'll be honest, I'm a super nerd at this stuff, and I just love building freaking websites, and I've just obsessed over it for the past six months, and I just know it works, and I'm giving it away for free." And then you may say the only ask is if it blows your mind, just drop me a testimonial. So you wanna build those testimonials at the beginning. But use your personal network, drop that message, add va- lead with value, and they will reciprocate, and they will come back. It's so, so cool. And your confidence is gonna go through the roof once y- once you get those first things. A- and it's completely cool if you want to do the first couple for free. That's not the objective. The objective is data. The objective is the skills of building something for somebody. And money will flow where value goes. If you focus on value, money will flow and follow that. That's like the general rule. It's almost impossible to be extremely valuable and not make money. It's so difficult to do that.

   16. CJCalum Johnson50:27

       Yeah. And, and it reminds me, you know what? I was just thinking about this as I was listening to you. Nights and weekends.

   17. JRJack Roberts50:33

       Yes.

   18. CJCalum Johnson50:33

       Like, in, in the beginning, it's like your, your, um... [smacks lips] I remember we had a guest come on the show and say this. He said, uh, "Your, um, your nine-to-five is like your first investor." Like, that's your first backer. Like, they, they're paying you a salary, they're giving you, like, resource. It's like take that and then nights and weekends, and you're just building, building. You're getting better at that process of building, like in this example, websites, until you get to the point that you can actually sell off the back of this.

   19. JRJack Roberts51:06

       Evenings and weekends. I mean, I, I had a, I had a difficult conversation with somebody who, who was fairly close. And I, I basically... They said to me, "My dream is to own a coffee shop in Spain and spend out the rest of my days, but I've gotta wait X number of years to do that before I can retire." And I asked them a question. I said, "Would you be willing to trade your evenings and weekends for seven years if it meant that you could have everything you wanted?" He didn't have to wait 25, 30 years. And they said, no. And I was like, then that... It's like it's okay to make that decision, but just know that that's the, that's the trade-off. And, and all of that is possible i- if you stick and, and put the time and investment in. And y- you're a crazy person. You, you should feel a bit weird. Like, if your circle aren't saying, "Hey, what the hell's gotten into you? You're acting very strange recently," y- you're almost not doing it properly. Because it's not normal to start a business, and, uh, crush it, and have complete time and location freedom. You are an outlier. And to achieve that, you need to be doing outlier things. And when you find your, your network, your community, you'll realize, you'll have this sort of like, oh, wow, I get it. Like, there are other people that, that think and feel this way. That's now the new standard. That's what we now need to do. And it became the standard, and then everyone went on to, to do it. So it was like there's just something to be said about being around other people that are on the same mission of you. And if you start going off track, they can pull you back in. It's a mindset thing, but I, I would be doing a disservice if I didn't hammer this down 'cause this is the kind of information I really wish I knew when, when I was getting started.

   20. CJCalum Johnson52:38

       Yeah. You know what, Jack? 'Cause you talk about, like, uh, time and location freedom. I think, honestly, there's, there's a lot that comes with being an entrepreneur and, and building a business. But I think the most meaningful thing to me, [smacks lips] and it'd be interesting if you relate with this or resonate with this. I remember when I used to work a nine-to-five. And I didn't even have like a bad job. Like, it wasn't anything traumatic was happening. Like, people have genuinely, like, difficult stories with their work, and, uh, the manager, or the boss, or all of those things. I didn't even have that story. But I remember vividly every Sunday, and it would start like Sunday morning, this kind of knot and this feeling of anxiety that I would start to get just envisioning and, like, projecting forward for 24 hours from now I'm gonna be in that meeting that, like, really I just feel like a spare part in this meet- like I f- it's kinda useless. Um, or like thinking about the work that I would have to do that, that week. And it was funny 'cause I was having a call with my mom, and I was saying her, telling her, [smacks lips] and I even hate saying this to a certain degree-

   21. JRJack Roberts53:47

       [laughs]

   22. CJCalum Johnson53:48

       ... 'cause it sounds so like internet hype-y, entrepreneur hype-y. I actually look forward to Mondays. Like, we, we release epis-

   23. JRJack Roberts53:57

       Love that

   24. CJCalum Johnson53:57

       ... we release episodes on Mondays, and we have, uh, like our team meeting where we talk about the next episode on Mondays. So I, I now look forward to Monday, and it was like this crazy 180 where it was like I used to get anxiety 24 hours before Monday because I was like, "I don't wanna be in that meeting." And now I look forward to Monday. And it's, it's one of those things. It's like you just start, and I think in both of our journeys, it just started with nights and weekends. Um.

   25. JRJack Roberts54:27

       Yeah. And it's like I think a lot of people, and again, this, this is so standard. Like, it's, um, thank God it's Friday, oh God, it's Monday. There, there was a scene in one of the latest Masters of the Universe where it was a joke and it said, "Why can't you just be normal and live for the weekends and holidays like everybody else?" And [laughs] that, that is the prevailing advice that we all have. And if, if you apply yourself and learn... You know, th- I think the, the one quality that I've noticed most people who crush it have, they all have this one quality. And that is they have a very short delta between an idea and action I remember when I, I was hanging around with people like this where I was like, "Hey, I was thinking about starting my Instagram journey." And he said, "Dude, one thing you need to do is you need to go ahead and learn this thing here." And as he was talking to me, he was sending me WhatsApp messages. He's like, "This is the link that you need. This is what you need." And it was almost like the second they get an idea, they action it. And I think, you know, I remember my first tech startup, the amount of people that came to me and said, "I had that idea. I was gonna do that," and nobody did it. Well, you know, it's not that we weren't necessarily special, but we were the only ones who actually did the thing. So thinking and doing it are, are not always the same thing. So I think having a short delta between thinking and doing is probably one of the most important things that you could possibly hope to have. Like, back that skill and lock that in.

   26. CJCalum Johnson55:47

       Yeah. You know, I, I, I love that point of just, like, reducing the amount of time between when you have the idea and the action. And so with that spirit and that spirit of, like, speed, that mentality of speed and moving fast, Jack, could you describe to us someone that's looking, maybe they're already using Claude Code or Claude whatever, and they wanna start using Hermes. Like, they've got excited even from hearing what you've said in the beginning of this conversation. What is, like, the fast path to, like, start using Hermes, like, build your first workflow? Like, how are you even starting that process?

   27. JRJack Roberts56:27

       Essentially, Hermes can run in a couple of different locations, right? So if I come down and explain this, for example, um, let's have a quick look. We'll deal with it.

8. 56:36 – 1:02:36

   How to set up Hermes Agent

   1. JRJack Roberts56:36

      Hermes itself, um, can run on your computer. It c- which means your own hardware, right? And a lot of people do this because it means it's literally on your MacBook Mini. So Hermes c- Hermes runs on my desktop 24/7. I'll tell you right now, having your local AI is one of the funnest things ever. So we can run it there. We can run it on a VPS, which is basically just renting somebody else's, um, computer, and it can run anywhere you want to. It's completely free, and it's open source. Um, how do we actually do it? Well, you're gonna head over to the Hermes website, okay? And on Hermes website, um, you're gonna see this code here. All right? And all you're gonna do is come down and copy this code, right? And then effectively on your computer, you're gonna open up what is called the terminal, and I just Command+V. That's it. And then all of a sudden this will install Hermes, and then you have Hermes on your computer. That is how simple this is. So it looks like we're seeing the matrix fold be- before our very eyes here, and we kind of are in a way, but that's how you get Hermes running on your computer. And then all we're gonna do is connect it to something that we wanna connect it to. So for example, you can connect Hermes to, if I come over and show you this one here, um, Telegram, you can connect it to WhatsApp, you can have it in your agentic operating system, which is what I've got mine connected to as well and people in my community. And effectively what that then means is I can drop it messages and ask it questions. I can drop it voices. I can do anything with it. That's essentially how straightforward it is. Then what this will do is then ask you through what do you wanna set up. So this is saying, "Great, we've got Hermes on your computer now. What model do you wanna use?" So if you're following the advice I gave you earlier, which I highly recommend, you're gonna choose OpenAI, right? OpenAI means that our ChatGPT subscription powers it, which is such an unbelievable dea- deal 'cause it's $20 a month, and then effectively you get to chat with it. And then OpenAI is, is in your Hermes agent, and you can go through this whole thing by going up and down and Enter to go to the next one and things like that. And you do the-- you're gonna do it for the OpenAI Codex, okay? And then it's gonna ask you to authenticate, and then it opens up a browser, you connect to it, and you just go through the setup menu, and then effectively you're, you're rocking and rolling. And remember, Hermes is a beast mode 'cause it can do things like reminders. It does work when you sleep, and it's amazing. And you can connect it to, and this is a really important point I wanna draw here, your knowledge base. So it can connect to Notion. I can say, "Hey, go send a message on Slack." I had my entire team, Calum, update their priorities and what they're working on inside ClickUp. And my Hermes agent, when I ask it a question, will check what's happening in the business and give me advice on that. So for example, this right here you're looking at is my, is the, my memory system that we built in the, the agentic operating system with Hermes. And effectively it's all the knowledge I have. It's all of my Obsidian information. It's all of, um, my files, all the chat histories, things like that. And the really cool thing about Hermes agent, 'cause it's got so many sick features, I ha- I have to explain a couple of them 'cause it's ridiculous. You can select the model you wanna do. So for example, here in Hermes, I may not wanna speak to ChatGPT. Maybe I wanna speak to Claude Fable 5. Maybe I wanna have a conversation with DeepSeek V4 Pro. Maybe I wanna speak to Kimi. Maybe I wanna speak to Grok. I just simply select, and now I'm having a conversation with that model. I can check here, for example, the context window that I'm using. Um, I can do goals. I can create personas, so this is what we call the Pantheon. So in the Pantheon you can make different things. So let's say for example, Calum, that one of the things that you wanna do with your podcast is to do deep research on a guest. I could create a skill that does that exactly, a persona. And let's say I go with Athena, for example. I could say this one is podcast research, right? If we could spell, that'd be fantastic. You describe the skill, the system prompt, and then you pick the model you want to do it, and then you create this. If you have an operating system, which I highly recommend because, Calum, this connects Claude with Hermes. So anything I talk about on Claude, I can now understand and link them together. And y- again, you can open up and have a look at this. So this is a comparison that I made with Hermes agent comparing models, and it, it's all visible in one location. So the, the, the key message here is that Hermes can effectively do anything that you imagine. It's super simple to set up, and you just explain to it what you want it to do. And you could literally be like, "Hey," you know, I could give it a command, for example, that says something like, "Hey, at 9:00 PM every day, I want you to round up what are the top three priorities for ne- for tomorrow." Right? If I did this and send this off, Hermes will create a proactive skill and message me at 9:00 PM every single day. Like, that's how simple this thing is to set up.

   2. CJCalum Johnson1:01:08

      Yeah. Okay, okay, Jack, this, this is really good. And, and- You know what? Let me give this disclaimer. It, it-- Excuse me, because this is my first time... I'm literally seeing Hermes Agent for the first time with you right now. And so I'm gonna ask the, the dumb questions that I'm thinking, but then also probably the person at home's thinking that's seeing it for the first time. So that's the disclaimer. To, to begin, because I saw two things, right? I saw you pulled up the actual website, like the Hermes website, and then you also have the terminal that you're working in. And it, and it looks like you were kinda like typing between... Sometimes you're using the terminal, sometimes you're like typing directly into the website itself. Can you explain, in terms of just like the base functionality of how it works, on the website it's almost similar to ChatGPT or Claude, where you have like an account with Hermes that you've set up, and then how does the term- Like, how are you splitting between the terminal and then just on the website? Like, just give me that breakdown of like how the beginner should kind of start by interfacing with Hermes.

   3. JRJack Roberts1:02:27

      Okay. A- awesome question. So when I'm out and about, I am personally, and I recommend that everyone does this, I'm using Telegram. Telegram--

9. 1:02:36 – 1:08:47

   How to use Hermes Agent from your phone (no code!)

   1. JRJack Roberts1:02:36

      You can use WhatsApp, but Telegram is the most... Think of it as the most friendly chat interface that is 100% private, by the way. It's crazy. The, the privacy settings here are nuts. That you can use any way you want to. So for example, in Telegram here, for example, I might just say, "Hey, which model is this?" Okay? I can ask it any questions I want to and have a conversation with Hermes. So what I highly, highly recommend that you do is go ahead and download Telegram, and you connect it. Now, what's cool is the... You see this? You see this right here, right? This is GPT 5.6 Sol, okay, running through OpenAI Codex Oauth. Amazing. So download Telegram on your phone, and you can connect it with Hermes Agent. And let's be honest, this looks a million times better than the terminal. So I never want you to use the terminal. You don't need to use the terminal. That's just to set it up. Once we've done that, the work either happens in Telegram or in your agentic OS if you're using an agentic operating system. So this is where you would use it. You download Telegram on your phone, and then I can drop voice messages. So I could like come down here, for example. Uh, let's go ahead and record one, shall we? So if I hold onto this. Hey there. Um, could you do me a favor? Go ahead and find out for me, who was the tallest man to ever live, and then go ahead and make for me a really simple, beautiful HTML overview of what that looks like, please. Uh, explain the top five tallest people ever. Very random question. I could be out and about, and maybe you've got an idea. Maybe you've got an idea for a presentation or a project, or maybe you want to pitch something. I can drop these voice notes, right? And this is why I really like running it on my computer, 'cause it's running 24/7. I can see it, I own it, um, and it all stays on my computer. I could if I want to, for example, Calum, if I'm out and about and I've got Telegram here, I could be like, "Hey dude, you know, what was the last thing that I downloaded on my computer?" Or, "I saved some notes yesterday to this thing. Could you go ahead and grab them for me?" And Hermes can go ahead and do this. Now, you'll see Hermes working in the background here. Hopefully, you can all see it very well. I'm gonna see if I can zoom in a little bit, um, so you can kinda actually see what's going on here. And there's so many cool commands that we can do. Um, if you wanna do a follow-up command, for example, and not disrupt the flow, w- we could do, for example, queue, which means that, "Hey, when you finish that thing, do something else." I could do something like steer. So steer is, I've got a follow-up command. So I could say, "Hey, make sure it looks beautiful," okay? Whatever it is. And now that will steer the conversation. And Hermes now is just gonna work in the background, Calum, so you just crack on with anything else that you're doing, and Hermes will go ahead and do this. It can search the internet. Um, it can build you things. It can do anything you want it to. So practically speaking, um, you could just give it anything. Another example is, um, I could give it videos. So if I do /learn, okay, and then I drop a video link in here, uh, which I, I'll show you in a second, it will go ahead and learn that right there for me, and then I can ask it questions if I want to. I mean, that, that's how incredible it is. Does that kind of answer the, the, the question a little bit?

   2. CJCalum Johnson1:05:26

      Interesting. Okay, so-- And you let me know if I'm understanding this correctly. The only reason, especially for a beginner, someone beginner, non-technical, the only reason that you're using the terminal is just to get it set up and integrated with a WhatsApp or a Telegram. Once it's integrated, the way that you're interfacing with it is not through the terminal, or giving it instructions is not through the terminal, it's through Telegram, in this example, or WhatsApp. And then-- So, so that's number one. And then the second thing that kind of popped in my mind is the way that you're using it is almost as if it's like a, like a digital employee. So the same way that you might have someone on your team and you're like, they're a human, you're messaging them on Slack, and you're like, "Oh yeah, can you look through this and do this and do this?" It feels like you're doing the same thing, but it's just the per- or the thing, I should say, that's executing it is Hermes. Is that correct?

   3. JRJack Roberts1:06:29

      Yes. Exa- ex- exactly right. So for example, one of the things that I might, I might say to Hermes Agent, um, I might say something like this, right? So I could do queue. Let's do queue here. Hey there. I want you to go ahead to Calum Johnson's YouTube channel. It's a brilliant, very educational podcast. Take a look through the videos. Take a look through the comments. Let me know what the comment sentimentality are. Let me know the ton- type of- ... topics that Calum covers. And why don't you go ahead and write for me a brief message that would resonate with Calum that includes personal information unique to him that he, that maybe he shared in an episode that would enable me to build a relationship with him, right? Bam. That's the kind of thing I can say to Hermes Agent and send that off, and Hermes will do that and come back with a message. And if I, if I wanted to reach out to Calum Cole, for example, I could just do that. Now, maybe Calum, you mentioned deep in a podcast like an hour and 20 minutes in, "I really love McFlurrys." Now I know that information. I say, "Calum, love the podcast." Okay. Obviously, don't say this if you haven't actually watched it, but I'm, I'm just trying to demonstrate, like, how powerful this is that you can find out this kind of information. Like, what's something that Calum really likes that I, I could think about if I were reaching out to him? And I just bang that to Hermes Agent, I crack on with my day, and it comes back to me. So think of it, it is literally your AI employee, and it will work for you in the background and do anything you ask it to do. And we'll, we'll start to see some of these results coming in shortly from Hermes too.

   4. CJCalum Johnson1:07:56

      Yeah. That's, uh, that's, that's really interesting. It's interesting as well 'cause I'm starting to think about how, how I would use it in my business, and even just that, that interface of it, like you can just message it, um, is very interesting. Jack, if you just had to estimate, and obviously this is an estimate, rough estimate, like, how many hours or the amount of time, or even like from like having to hire people, I'm thinking about, uh, like solopreneurs or like freelancers that don't wanna have like huge teams that they're, uh, have to employ. How much time even people hiring would you say that using this in the way that you are is saving you?

   5. JRJack Roberts1:08:37

      Oh, insane. It's, it's insane. It's insane. Well, well, well, well over 20 hours, no question about it. But the true impact is much higher than that if you really get down to it because

10. 1:08:47 – 1:15:18

    How to save 20+ hours a week with Hermes Agent

    1. JRJack Roberts1:08:47

       stuff that I would ordinarily ask... Let me give you a good example again. I hired someone for, uh, a couple of $2,000, $3,000 a month. Within two weeks, we'd essentially replaced the entire role with an AI agent to the exact... I- in fact, potentially even better quality, to be honest with you, because it was all automatable. So it's not just time it saves you, it makes the quali- Okay. Two ways to assess this. Does it save you more time? Yes, of course it does. But does it also incru- improve the quality of what you're doing? It do- it makes the stuff you do way better. Like I have-- We live in an age of informational abundance. Jensen's one was talking about this concept. Like, you know, we talk about wouldn't it be great to live in a world where everyone drives Lamborghinis. You have access now to something that, you know, 200 years ago, you had to go to a library, and there was one dusty librarian that knew all the information. They were like the Oracle. You have the answer to any question you want to, and you have these super powerful 500 IQ interns that will research and find anything out for you. So we're not limited by info right now. So I found that the quality and the strategy, like for example, we're gonna start growing on X, right? So I just asked Fable 5, I asked Hermes Agent, "Go and do some deep research. Go through my entire X account, find out what we're doing incorrectly, and I want a game plan of 30 days." You gotta give it the right questions. Go ahead and first do the research. You may ask it a question like a meta prompt, which is, "This is my stated objective. What would be the best way to approach this?" And then based on that, you ask it the questions. Um, and it comes back with unbelievable stuff because if, if you, if you were listening to this podcast and, and you wanted to start a podcast like, like Calum's done so successfully, you may say, "Great. Well, I probably need advice on that, right? So let me go and find out who are the best podcast instructors." Well, I would just kind of instruct Hermes to do that. I'd be like, "Dude, go and find for me the best 10 podcasters and their advice on podcasting. And then I want that in a succinct bulleted list, and then take a look at my stuff and tell me what are three things we need to focus on." Like, that's where we're at right now, and no one's using this technology. It's, it's actually crazy. In 20 years' time, in five years' time, we will look back and be like, "This was obviously the most important thing that we all should've been doing."

    2. CJCalum Johnson1:10:55

       Yeah. You know what, Jack, is, uh, one of the things as I was listening to you, it came to my mind, I'm like, uh, we- we'll have to do a follow-up episode at some point going deeper on this. But just quickly for the person that's listening at home, if someone wanted to... Because even one of the things that y- you said earlier, it's like you've spent hundreds of hours, right, using Hermes Agent and, like, kinda coaching it, and the skills, and everything, and getting like a comfortability with it so that you can get this level of output. And I think if someone is looking to get to that place, maybe not exactly where you are, but is looking to get to a place where they're productive, like their Hermes Agent is doing productive work for them. They're looking to do it fast. How would you recommend or some of the ways, like even you learnt quickly, like what was... What gave you the best ROI on your time in terms of getting up to speed with Hermes Agent fast?

    3. JRJack Roberts1:11:57

       Okay. The, the honest answer, and this is not meant like... Obviously, you can learn this anywhere, but I, I did a video which was 100 hours of Hermes in I think it was like 12 minutes. Like, that, that's exactly where I'd start. Real distinctive stuff. You want to, and I'll, and I'll summarize it here for you. You're gonna download Hermes Agent. You're then basically gonna do a couple of things. The first thing you're gonna do is connect your world. So what are all the apps that you use on a day-to-day basis? You use Google Calendar, you use Gmail, you do, I don't know, Slack. You connect that to Hermes, and then what I would strategically do is think about what's the stuff... What, what's the biggest limiting factor I have in my life, and how can Hermes Agent help with that? So you can brainstorm with it. You can say, "Hey, I want you to be as valuable as possible. Ask-- Interview me. Ask me questions about what I do on a day-to-day basis, my life, what my current goals are, and I want you to brainstorm and tell me ways that you could help me." And Hermes will tell you this stuff. It's... This is why ChatGPT reached a million users faster than anyone else, is 'cause it's the only product that explains itself Hermes Agent can do this to you as well. So that's what I'd be talking to about. I'd be setting up a morning brief. I'd be setting up automations, and listen and hear what Hermes Agent's going to tell you about how it can improve your life. The key thing is, good model, GPT 5.6 Sol, um, which you wanna be using in Hermes Agent, and then get it to interview you. And just say, "My stated intention is to," insert the thing that you want. "I wanna, I wanna double the size of my audience. I want to save more time. I wanna be more productive. Uh, I want you to look around corners." And by the way, Hermes Agent has this Sol, okay? We call it Sol the MD. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll share the link with you. You can use it. Effectively, it's an incredible series of questions you ask him, which is, "Tell me about you, uh, your goals, your personal goals, physical goals, your business. Um, where's your business at? Who's your customer? What are their problem statements?" And you can feed all this information to Hermes once, and it has all of this context. So whenever you ask it a question, it knows all this stuff. It's already saved into its memory, and you never have to re-explain it. And the cool thing is, you can literally voice note it and say, "Cool, let me give you the full rundown. Uh, I've, I've got a full doc that runs through it. I'll, I'll share it with you." And basically say, "Great, my business is this. These are my goals." And then you can say, "Hermes, keep me accountable. Like, keep me on track with this stuff," and it will come back and do that for you.

    4. CJCalum Johnson1:14:12

       Yeah. The, the voice note part of it I love, 'cause that, that's literally how I communicate a lot of the times with my team.

    5. JRJack Roberts1:14:18

       Yeah. [laughs]

    6. CJCalum Johnson1:14:18

       I'm like speaking to it. It's so good. Okay. You know what? Just one, one thing before we get out of here, Jack, 'cause I know that when you and I spoke before this, you were like so excited about it, and it's something that you briefly kind of showed my audience. And in many ways I think it's the future. And obviously because of what you do and where you spend your time, you're right there right now. But can you just show people and walk through ... You s- You were like, "It's visually beautiful," and it's like, I think you even said it's like the AI of things. It's like the thing of things.

    7. JRJack Roberts1:14:54

       Yes.

    8. CJCalum Johnson1:14:54

       Your agentic OS. Can, can you just share for people ... First of all, just show it to people. But then why do you get so excited when you talk about the agentic OS?

    9. JRJack Roberts1:15:08

       Absolutely. Okay, that's such a good question, and this is something I genuinely believe everybody needs. So whether you're selling this to clients or not,

11. 1:15:18 – 1:19:54

    How to build your own AI operating system

    1. JRJack Roberts1:15:18

       you can have so many conversations with AI. It could be Hermes, could be Claude. This brings everything together. Like for example, I actually spent, uh, seven hours specifically on onboarding. So if you're installing for clients and stuff, and all of this by the way is built with Claude Code. You could build it with Hermes of course, can, 'cause you can do similar things, but the point is you can build all of this sort of stuff. And the idea with this is that we grab your name, we grab your pro- you grab your profile photo. And imagine running a client through this for example, and it will find automatically all the different tools that you have on your computer. Have you got Antigravity? Do you have Claude? Do you have Hermes Agent? And you can select those things dynamically. So you can come through, and then this is the really cool thing I love, and this is one of the biggest trends in AI you need to know about, and it's called context engineering. It's about how well does AI know you. And by connecting things like your Obsidian memory, w- which is basically just like the ability to grab any articles and save it on your computer and, and see it visually. Maybe your Notion databases, anything like that. Um, you can connect all of your AI models so you can track your usage live. You can actually allocate your hourly rate, so you can calculate what this looks like, and it can dream for you, Calum. Th- this is one of the coolest things about it. So this will look at things like conversations you're having, um, how much money you're spending on AI, the skills you've got, your memory health, um, session hygiene, workflow patterns, external opportunities, and will at, on a day-to-day basis go ahead and create that for you. And then you can pick the engine that runs this room. So it could be Hermes Agent, could be Codex, could be anything. Um, and the cool thing about this, this whole system here, and I'll, I'll show you this for example on the left-hand side. We can talk to Hermes Agent, we can talk to Claude Code. We can switch by that very easily. And on the dashboard I can see in dollar and cents, pounds and pence how much money am I spending on AI, how much money am I saving with my skills. I can see my usage directly. I can get these dreams, which essentially is, "Hey Jack, we've noticed that you're doing XYZ." This will search the internet. It will check your skills. It will do everything for you. You can create goals. You can see your skills. I've got a visualization of my entire memory system. I can query folders. I can see all of my skills. It's essentially a location, a dashboard that just brings everything together. You can ask it questions, build on your memory. And the cool thing is when you, when, and you know, grab one of these, build one of these, whatever you do, the cool thing is that you can actually build on this that you want to. Say for example that, hey, I want a section on here for YouTube intelligence. I want a section on here for, uh, my clients, right? For building my website business. Well, you can just add that on. You just go over to Claude and say, "Hey, add me a section that is websites," and it will then show you, "Cool, what do you want in the section?" And maybe you have five columns on there, right? That's like clients and, you know, offers made, websites built, to-do lists, and it becomes your central operating system for everything that you're doing inside your business. It, it, it is your, your operating system for your world, and it just brings everything into one location. The ROI from it is al- is also crazy.

    2. CJCalum Johnson1:18:14

       Yeah. You know what? It, it, it's, uh ... First of all, it just looks really cool. Like visually the way it looks is really cool. And um, I think one of the things though, because it's kind of like your ... It feels like it's like your interface with AI. Like it-

    3. JRJack Roberts1:18:29

       Yeah

    4. CJCalum Johnson1:18:29

       ... it's kind of put everything in one. Like this is how you're interfacing with AI, which is such a powerful like thing to be able to have. But my, my question to you, Jack, is I'm so cognizant, and I think largely because I'm also this person, of the non-technical person that's listening. Like they're not a coder, they're not a software engineer, and it's, it's so easy for AI to become overwhelming, especially when we hear about all of the, the new agents, new features, new models. Oh, news, job like, like ... It's so easy for it to become overwhelming And even in that, the OS that you have, there's so many, like, different parts of it and the time that it took you to build.

    5. JRJack Roberts1:19:10

       Yes.

    6. CJCalum Johnson1:19:10

       Is there, if someone's like loo- seeing that for the first time, and they're like, "Okay, wow, that, that looks amazing," is there a certain point in someone's journey when you would recommend that they even start thinking about building like an agentic OS? Like, is this something that you do in the beginning? Is this something that you do once you've been using, I don't know, Claude Code for a few months? Is it something that's like for advanced people that already have agents running? Like, who are you recommending this for?

    7. JRJack Roberts1:19:44

       Well, i- if you want to be as valuable as possible, you'll want one, for sure. So the, the, the cool thing is, I mean, like I, I built it in my community specifically for this reason,

12. 1:19:54 – 1:27:06

    Do this first if you're non-technical

    1. JRJack Roberts1:19:54

       but if you're starting out, the thing that you kinda wanna do is get your first win under your belt. So that's downloading Claude and having fun. Like, I... My belief about the world is that, yes, you should crush it, but we also wanna have a great time doing it. It's gotta be fun. It's gotta be enjoyable. And just, b- like, with Claude, just say, "Hey, I..." Use your imagination. Just say, "Wouldn't it be really cool to build, I don't know, what will my dog look like in five years?" Or, or, you know, well, whatever kinda question you wanna do. Well, like, what's a dream coffee? And just get into the experience of building with Claude. And you said earlier, Calum, this idea of like that magic moment where it like clicks, you get that then. Get your first, get your first win and download it, ask it a question, and you'll see it go live and like, "Wow." And honestly, it's like adult Lego. It's the best way to describe it. And once you understand the basics, you just put one foot in front of the other, and then these skills just compound over time. Remember, I don't come from a technical background at all. I had no technical background. I just piece this stuff probably the long way, probably the hard way. Um, you know, if you just apply these principles, you'll crush it. And remember, if you're ever unsure, you can just say, "Hey, Claude, I don't know the answer to this. How do I, how do I fix it?" And Claude will actually also explain that. So not only is it your builder, it's also your teacher and your educator. So the most important step is the next one, and that is to download it, get started, and enjoy the wonderful world. And you don't need to be building cra- you know, world-changing applications by Tuesday. Just focus on learning how to build one thing, uh, and just ask it questions.

    2. CJCalum Johnson1:21:19

       Yeah. You know, it's so good. Before, before we get out of here, Jack, 'cause you've been amazing. Um, and I, and I love that example that you gave earlier or that, uh, stat that you gave where you said, uh, the reason why ChatGPT got to a million users so fast is because it can explain itself. And it's like, uh, the fact that... And, and it's something that I do, which is like whenever I get stuck with using an AI, I just ask it like, "Okay, can you explain what's happening? Like, what are the steps? What should I be doing next? What is it that I'm missing?" Um, but Jack, you know what? I go back to exactly what we were speaking about in the beginning, and that quote that you have where you, you're working in corporate, and you have this realization and this moment, and you say, "I realized that I could get to the goal that I wanted to get to in the corporate path. I would get there eventually in corporate, but it would take me 30, 40 years." Like, it would just take too long. And so I think about the Jack Roberts of that moment and in that time, who's working in that corporate, like, strategy role. And then I think about who you are today and, like, the way that you're working, the things that you're working on, even where you're working from. And so before we get out of here, Jack, if you had to give like a message or just something that you would tell that earlier version of yourself that I'm sure had like a certain level of self-doubt, a certain level of just, "I've been working this job for years and years. Like, am I really gonna put all of that to the side and like start from scratch, like start new?" I'm so curious to know, what would you say to that earlier version of yourself?

    3. JRJack Roberts1:23:09

       Man, that's such a good question. You know, there are so many things that pop into my head, and I think some- sometimes it's, it's tough to know, like, w- you know, y- you can judge somebody by the yardstick of your years. And I think if you go back in time to that moment, um, the amount of stuff that you know today that you didn't even realize is pr- is probably wild. The, the one thing I'd probably say to myself is I would've told myself to be... Honestly, there's two answers to the question. One is I would tell myself to create content as soon as possible. That would be the first thing I'd tell myself because I, I think that's so important in the future as, as a tactical level. But on an overall level, I think the most important message would be to think more boldly, think bigger. I think the ri- risks, we perceive risks, we perceive the downsides of risks to be greater than they are and the upsides to be less than they are. In reality, I think it's completely the inverse. I think, like, if you think more boldly and take those risks and learn it, then I, I think that that would, that would be, that would be the core thing that I would tell myself is like believe in yourself and back yourself and do it. And you know, you're gonna have so many different emotions like self-doubt. You're gonna have things like imposter syndrome. You're gonna have times where you're like you're... I, I had one story where someone was promising like a 30K a month contract, and we're like, "Man, we can finally quit our jobs and do this full time," and for it to turn out to be like $120. And we were like, "That really sucks," because we'd emotionally built it. So just to kind of steady yourself and get ready for the journey is, is, is everything. But it's like I'm so glad that I started, I made the decision. It was, it-- I made the decision in my heart and my head before I did anything physically. I turned down promotions at work so that I could really focus on this. So it's like know that your sacrifice is, is, is gonna pay off. And I know I'm not perfect at all, and I'm just trying to get better every single day. I, I'm, I'm a student of this whole thing. Um, and I'd say keep that student mentality.

    4. CJCalum Johnson1:25:22

       Yeah. No, it's so good. You know, and it, and it reminds me of, um, I remember hearing Jeff Bezos, obviously founder of Amazon, say this, which is, uh, "We dramatically like overestimate the risk." You know, it's like we, we dramatically overestimate the risk and underestimate the upside. Like, we ... And it's something that you feel so viscerally when you're working a job. It's like, "Oh, no, but this is such a ... Like, I can't do this. Like, this is- that would be crazy to do that." And it's like, uh, it's funny 'cause I even remember it from my story. I think it was my mom that told me. She was like, "If it doesn't work out, you could just go get another job." And it's like we, we don't, we don't think about that, though. Like you, you're, you're like, it feels so crazy. "Oh, I'm gonna leave my job to do thi-" Yeah, you could just go back and get another one.

    5. JRJack Roberts1:26:09

       It's, it's the ... 'Cause hey, I've got the news is they're not running out of jobs. There's gonna be plenty of jobs in the future, and people will respect you for taking the risk and doing it. And it's so important. And remember, like, people in your office aren't doing it. They- I remember people, I really wished I could do that. They, they all secret- a lot of people secretly wanna do it, but to have the balls to build something by yourself, do it 100%. And, and don't listen to other people in that office environment that say that you should just be a project manager, you should just be stacking shelves, you should just be doing whatever things you're doing. You can effectively build and do anything that you want to. You just gotta back yourself, try it, and you, you'll figure it out eventually. So have confidence and, and go for it. It'll be the best decision you ever made, for sure.

    6. CJCalum Johnson1:26:53

       Yeah. Jack, you've been awesome, man.

    7. JRJack Roberts1:26:55

       Oh, thank you, bro. I appreciate that.

    8. CJCalum Johnson1:26:56

       So if you enjoyed this conversation and you wanna hear even more stories like this, then just click here. And also my team is gonna put some more videos that you can watch here. Thank you.

Episode duration: 1:27:07