Episode 105 – Who's Watching Your AI Agents?

Scott: Friends with Brews

Donnie: [laughs]

Scott: Friends with Brews.

Donnie: I love

Scott: Different

Donnie: it.

Scott: Friends with Brews. Hi, can you please tell me who you are because I don’t remember seeing your face on Friends with Brews before.

Donnie: Oh yeah, I’m not Peter. Um,

Scott: Oh,

Donnie: [laughs]

Scott: you’re not Peter, so, so I can’t say, “Hi, Peter.”

Donnie: not this time. I mean, I,

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: as my, as my southern grandfather used to say, “You can call me anything you want, just don’t call me late for dinner.” [laughs]

Scott: That’s right.

Donnie: no, I’m Donnie Adams. I’ve known Scott through, you know, back at the App.net, not the App.net .net days,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: but

Scott: [laughs]

Donnie: the [laughs] , but the original App.net days, uh,

Scott: Yep.

Donnie: through Ronnie and various other people. Um,

Scott: Yep.

Donnie: so yeah, I’m happy to, happy to be here and, drink some beer and talk some AI stuff.

Scott: Awesome. Awesome. All right, first things first, let’s introduce our drinks. So go ahead and

Donnie: Perfect.

Scott: show me what you got.

Donnie: This is, Maple Warlock. It’s by Southern Tier Brewing, uh, which is local brew out of Cleveland, which is where I, I live in a suburb of Cleveland.

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: Um, it’s a Maple Warlock Imperial Pumpkin Stout. really good, brewery. I have not had this one before, but maple, it’s fall, it’s Cleveland.

Scott: Yep.

Donnie: Ohio loves their maple, so this is,

Scott: Yep.

Donnie: this is what we’re, we’re gonna have tonight.

Scott: I will tell you, after Peter talked about his non-alcoholic pumpkin Athletic Brewing beer, yeah, the other day, I went looking for pumpkin beers, and I– usually they’re everywhere. I can’t find them. so anyway…

Donnie: Well, yeah, it’s, I mean, the, the big brewery around here is Great Lakes, and they have a lot of… You know, they’re, they’re gonna tap their Christmas ale pretty soon, and that’s what everyone talks

Scott: Wait,

Donnie: about. [laughs]

Scott: are you sure they aren’t supposed to be renamed to Great Lakes of America or something like that? [laughs]

Donnie: That’s true. I do live, I do, I do live– They haven’t changed the name of Lake Erie yet, so [laughs]

Scott: They will. If, if he at all suspects that it’s Canada-related, he’s gonna change it.

Donnie: . Well, there is Canada between me and more United States, so

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: there you go.

Scott: Awesome. All right. Let’s get a review. That, that looks good.

Donnie: Oh, wow. It’s very dark.

Scott: Uh-huh.

Donnie: Uh, it is a little bit sweet,

Scott: Yeah, that’s

Donnie: but

Scott: what

Donnie: for

Scott: I was

Donnie: an,

Scott: wondering.

Donnie: for an imperial stout, it’s not super thick. Uh, it drinks easy. It’s a good maple,

Scott: Nice.

Donnie: you know, sweet beer. Almost has kind of like a… There’s other beers around here that they age in bourbon barrels. It almost has

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: that, because of the maple, it kind of has that taste to it, but it’s really good. I-I, I approve this. I don’t– What’s the,

Scott: I–

Donnie: what’s the rating scale that we use here?

Scott: Thumbs

Donnie: Thumbs

Scott: up?

Donnie: up. This is a thumbs

Scott: Yes,

Donnie: up, for

Scott: thumbs

Donnie: sure.

Scott: up. Awesome. Okay. I like that. I should– I guess you should try that. Yeah, I, I’m not a huge fan of the ones that taste super bourbony I’ve found, but I still think I might like that one. All right, I have an Ancestry… Come on, phone, focus. I have an Ancestry Irish Red. I don’t know why it’s Ancestry, although given the state of all the food products in our country, it’s possible that after I drink this, I’m gonna be sent to my ancestors. I don’t know. but this is an Irish Red. I’m gonna give it a shot here. Oh, [laughs] I don’t need… In the old days, I had to find my mic, and my mic’s right here.

Donnie: Oh, there you go. There it is. [laughs]

Scott: Yeah. All right. Here we go.

Donnie: Mm.

Scott: That looks

Donnie: That’s a…

Scott: about like a red, doesn’t it?

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: It’s– it looks a little darker on camera

Donnie: Look…

Scott: than it looks to me looking

Donnie: Okay.

Scott: through it ’cause I have the light shining through it from this

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: way. Ah. That’s not bad. It’s a little… They say it’s light-bodied malty ale with caramel and a touch of roast. You know what’s weird? I would actually agree with all of that, and that’s unlike me. Usually, I’d know they’re just making s*** up. But I would agree with that. I would agree with that. So there you go.

Donnie: Perfect.

Scott: Cheers. [imitates explosion] Yep. Awesome.

Donnie: This is a, this is actually a glass that I made.

Scott: Is it really?

Donnie: It is, yeah.

Scott: That is very cool. Oh, that is very cool.

Donnie: Yeah, this is my, my official beer-drinking glass because I made it.

Scott: That’s the way to do it. If you ever break that, you’re gonna be heartbroken, though.

Donnie: I,

Scott: Did you

Donnie: yes.

Scott: make a whole set?

Donnie: No,

Scott: And you told

Donnie: just

Scott: your

Donnie: the,

Scott: family,

Donnie: just,

Scott: “Don’t

Donnie: [laughs]

Scott: ever touch these“? [laughs]

Donnie: just the one. I have to hide it from my son so he doesn’t pull it off the, off the table, but yeah.

Scott: You, you tell them this is only for beer, and you can’t drink beer, so.

Donnie: That’s right, a little young for that. [laughs]

Scott: He’s a little young for that, yeah. Awesome. Considering he’s in bed right now, I’m guessing he’s a little young for that. Although he could be old for that ’cause I’m getting old, and I’m starting to wanna go to bed pretty early,

Donnie: That,

Scott: I tell

Donnie: that’s

Scott: you.

Donnie: true.

Scott: [sniffs]

Donnie: Before he was born, this was about my bedtime too, but no. He’ll, he’ll be seven months old tomorrow.

Scott: And now you’re staying up late because you just need time by yourself.

Donnie: Yeah, just to get the stuff done that you, you know,

Scott: Exactly.

Donnie: things get busy.

Scott: Exactly. All right,

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: Donnie, what, what are you all about?

Donnie: Yeah, so, I’ve kind of had an interesting career so far. Um, you know, I started in mathematical research and then started teaching. Uh, taught for a number of years and eventually decided to get into software. Um, you know, it took some time to do that, of course. But, uh, transitioned into software engineering, and I am working with a group now that I’ve worked with previously. Um,

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: we sold our previous company. Um, you know, I say “we” because I was part of the– But I didn’t, you know,

Scott: Yeah,

Donnie: I wasn’t

Scott: right.

Donnie: part of the founding group. But we sold that company and then, uh, worked at that place for about a year and a half afterwards, and then started this new thing, and this new thing is evolved and it’s called Obot AI. And it’s a product that- Helps, you know, it’s more focused towards enterprise, um, but, you know, users can use it as well. We have n- a number of, open source users as well that use it, but it helps people manage their MCP servers. Um,

Scott: Hmm.

Donnie: you can ac- manage access, you can manage, uh, you can see audit logs.

Scott: Hmm.

Donnie: Um, you can combine MCP servers into one, um, and kind of expose, you know, little bits of this server and that server, um, all from one URL, where we handle the OAuth and we connect you and configure everything so that, you know, you can just plug it into Cursor or Claude or Codex, whatever you wanna use and, and it has access to, to your stuff. So it’s

Scott: Um,

Donnie: been a, a fun, a fun project to build. So yeah. So this is, this is our repo, Obot Platform Obot. it’s all open source and, and completely free, so you can download it. you know, we give a little blurb of the architecture, but the most important piece is kinda down here, the getting started. Um, you can just copy that command, um, put in your own bootstrap token. you know, you don’t have to put in the bootstrap token, but if you don’t, then you have to find it in the logs and whatnot. But you just

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: start it up and, uh, once you do that, I can actually, since I think I started this up, I should be able to just show you what it looks like. So now we finally got logged in here, and so you drop into this, [clears throat] to this view and, uh, a vMCP is kind of what I talked about. Um, it’s the default where you can create virtual MCPs. So this is where you combine multiple MCP servers into one. Uh, so you can just drag, let’s say, Gmail over. and at this point, we’re creating a vMCP, so I can just call it, friends test and, uh, you know, talking to Scott. Uh, we can– It’s kinda weird. You have to put in a description. I wish it was optional, but MCP has a registry feature as well. Like, uh, they have a registry, specification, and descriptions

Scott: Hmm. Yep. Yeah.

Donnie: are required there. [chuckles] So we have to require subscriptions.

Scott: That makes sense. Yeah.

Donnie: And

Scott: That’s

Donnie: then

Scott: fair.

Donnie: I can…

Scott: Anyway,

Donnie: [clears throat]

Scott: it probably helps to be in the habit of it– putting something meaningful in there.

Donnie: [chuckles] Exactly. Uh, yeah, and then you can, you can set up, um, so where you can manage the tools directly, or can give direct access, or I can just say, “Give it to me as is.” I’ll just do that. Um, and there it is, and I can drag over any other ones that I want. Let’s say a Google Drive, same thing. I can say as is, or if I go in here, I can, modify the tools And now I can select which tools I want to include. You know, it’s got a whole bunch of them. So maybe I don’t, [clears throat] you know, maybe I only want this to have access to just, like, listing my emails, listing drafts, listing labels.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: I don’t want it to actually create anything or delete

Scott: It–

Donnie: anything. [laughs]

Scott: You don’t want it to talk to your customers on your behalf. [chuckles]

Donnie: Yeah, or read emails, things like that.

Scott: Yeah, exactly.

Donnie: And then confirm. So now I’ve got four of those selected, and I can do the same thing with Google Drive. And then once I’m ready to go, I can hit connect. Uh, we give you some, like, quick links. If you have VS Code or Cursor installed, you can just click these, and it will automatically install the MCP server in for you.

Scott: Hmm.

Donnie: Or if you have Claude or Codex, you can copy these commands. [smacks lips] Of course,

Scott: Nice.

Donnie: I’m using localhost here, but you know, if you actually deployed this, it’ll be something fancier.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: or you can just copy the URL and drop it in wherever you want, and, and we’ll handle the access. And once you do that, there’s a little inspector here. Let me just kick off the inspector. and here are all my tools.

Scott: Nice.

Donnie: Um, and

Scott: Okay,

Donnie: it…

Scott: so

Donnie: [clears throat]

Scott: now you’ve got MCPs to two different things combined into one basically.

Donnie: Yep.

Scott: Um,

Donnie: [clears throat]

Scott: is that the main– So How would you– let’s say… Hmm, I don’t know what I’m trying to ask here. Is this– What about for stuff that you want to have be shareable, let’s say, across your company? I’m thinking of, because Peter and I both have, like, Friends with Brews MCP. We both have MCP to some other things that we both work on, and it would be really cool if that management was really just in one place so that anybody who connected to Obot, for example, would be given access to those MCPs with the same permissions, is

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: what I’m thinking in my case.

Donnie: Yeah, no, that’s exactly– So that, that, that fits into this paradigm fairly well. So this, this, since I’m an admin in this particular, setup ’cause it’s brand new, um,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: these are, these are shared with anybody. So I can come here to Profiles, and you can see here that what this does is it shares with other admins. And so I can change that. I can say Share with everyone

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: and save that. And then I can just give, I can give anybody this URL. It doesn’t matter who it is. I can give, uh, let me, this URL now. Let’s say, you know, you, Scott, set this up and you wanna share it with Peter, you just give him this URL, and when he connects, then

Scott: He

Donnie: he

Scott: gets

Donnie: will,

Scott: all those MCPs.

Donnie: he’ll get

Scott: Oh,

Donnie: the,

Scott: that’s

Donnie: he’ll,

Scott: beautiful.

Donnie: he’ll get the same setup, but he’ll have to authenticate with his things, and then he’ll have, you know, it’ll, it’ll be his Gmail and his Google Drive and not, not yours. [chuckles]

Scott: That is beautiful. I like that. [clears throat]

Donnie: Yeah. And that’s actually our most popular feature. So a lot of enterprises, you know, with Fortune 500 companies, you know, they give you a computer, and they kinda lock it down.

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: And they don’t want you just putting anything into Claude or anything into, um,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: into

Scott: Right.

Donnie: Codex. And so, they can, they can give you a pre-configured Claude, config as part of your, your company-wide, I forget the name of it, but like, you know, the various like, programs that, uh, distribute software and, and whatnot to com- to company laptops.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: They can

Scott: Like your

Donnie: give that to you

Scott: MDM

Donnie: and…

Scott: or whatever. [clears throat]

Donnie: MDM, yeah, exactly. And they can just, they can drop that config in, and it already has the URL. And now because it already has the URL, you, you can connect to it and authenticate, and it works.

Scott: Hmm. That is cool. Now, can you– What about, so you’ve got a bunch of different third-party ones in there, which is

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: cool.

Donnie: Yep.

Scott: these are all frequently used things. But what about things like, I have my Friends with Brews MCP server. It’s, it’s hosted on my Linux box or whatever. How would I go about setting that up in here?

Donnie: Yeah. So over here on, uh, the left, MCP servers, um, this is the curated list of all of our MCP servers that we, um, that we’ve, uh, tested. Uh, you can see some of them are deprecated because, uh, you know, we started this at the very early stages of MCP.

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: And so, we, like we created our own browser base, or we created our own Brave search, but now they’re coming out with their own MCP servers, so we’re, we’re replacing

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: them with, with, with their stuff.

Scott: The official

Donnie: But you c-

Scott: ones. Yep.

Donnie: yeah, you can come up here to Add MCP Server, and you have these two options, Remote or Hosted. Um, if yours is already hosted someplace else, you just need a URL, you would click Remote, um, provide the URL, give the name and description, and, uh, click Save. And then it would appear in the V-VMCP list as well.

Scott: Okay. And then when, if I set it up and I add it, then let’s say Peter gets this particular setup URL and he goes to authenticate, it’s still gonna authenticate against his token or

Donnie: That’s

Scott: whatever?

Donnie: right. Yep.

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: Yep.

Scott: Oh, that is cool.

Donnie: And if you,

Scott: That is

Donnie: if you,

Scott: awesome.

Donnie: if you did have one that was just like an STDIO server that you wouldn’t, you know, a lot of those are run locally, you could also

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: host those here as well, so we provide a number of runtimes where you can e- it could either be an npx, UVX, or, uh, a Docker container. And if you set those

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: up, we’ll run them. you know, if you’re running this as a, [clears throat] as an enterprise, most enterprises use Kubernetes as like their clusterization, so we’ll run it in Kubernetes so that way it’s isolated. Uh, if

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: you’re just running this on your local laptop like mine, um, these will be run in Docker. So Docker, uh, uh, you know, if it’s npx, like I always test the everything server, which is what you can see here, server everything. [chuckles] That’s their,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: that’s

Scott: Right.

Donnie: M-MCP’s like, uh, test server. And so you can just test that, and it will run it in a Docker, Docker container on your system, and you can talk to it.

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: And the nice…

Scott: Now…

Donnie: Yep,

Scott: Oh,

Donnie: go

Scott: sorry.

Donnie: ahead.

Scott: Go ahead.

Donnie: No, no,

Scott: Nope,

Donnie: go.

Scott: finish. Oh,

Donnie: Well,

Scott: well, I was just

Donnie: I was

Scott: gonna

Donnie: gonna

Scott: say,

Donnie: say

Scott: [sighs] the NPX thing brought up a question of mine, which is I really– I am in a mode right now where I’m trying to get away from supply chain stuff as much as possible. So how do you control supply chain? Like, how do you– do you pin versions and stuff like that? How do you control versioning and all that kind of stuff here?

Donnie: Yeah. So one of, for, for npx, if you’re gonna do it yourself, then yeah, you can

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: absolutely do it. So if you did model, uh, context, protocol, server everything, npx supports putting a version at the end of it. They use date-based versions for this, and I don’t know what the dates are, but let’s just say, you know, today’s date.

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: So you could do that, and it would pin the version, um, so it wouldn’t update. And every time it ran, 2016 of course is wrong, but anytime it ran, it would, it would just pin that version so that way you know you’re always, always getting the same thing. If you looked at our curated list, um- These versions are pinned and we test them. Uh,

Scott: Mm.

Donnie: so we have another, repo, So MCP, catalog. Um, so you can see here that these remotes, uh, these, these are all the remotes that we, that we saw, and then

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: any of the ones that are run as images, um, have pinned images. So let’s just take AWS, for example.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: Um, the image is pinned to a specific version, you can see right here. Um, and we actually, we actually host it, so we rebuild the images and repackage them so that way, you know, th- if, if they change something or if something breaks, uh,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: then, you know, we have the image hosted and, and it’s pinned and, and th- You could also take all of our images, like another thing that enterprises do is they, they like to air gap things and keep things away from the public internet. And so you don’t have to go find all the images, they’re just all there, and you can pull them into your own registry and host them yourself. [laughs]

Scott: Hmm. Hey, you should have some of those people talk to OpenAI about air gaps.

Donnie: Yeah, exact- yeah. We haven’t, we– I use Codex a lot like that, that has been my number one, my number one coding agent. Uh, and

Scott: Uh-huh.

Donnie: I have, I have not broken out of [laughs] any, any, uh, sandboxes

Scott: You haven’t?

Donnie: yet,

Scott: Are

Donnie: but…

Scott: you sure

Donnie: [laughs]

Scott: you haven’t hacked Australia yet? [laughs]

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: Maybe you have and you just don’t know yet.

Donnie: That’s, that’s true. I’m maybe getting a knock on the door here in a minute. [laughs]

Scott: Oh, that’s

Donnie: Um,

Scott: hilarious.

Donnie: but yeah. And then, uh, one other thing I wanted to show, ’cause this is actually like– This is, this is not, um, as trivial as it might look. Um, but you can see here we have audit logs. So you can

Scott: Yes.

Donnie: see all of the MCP traffic that comes through. You can see all of that happening in real time. Um, and this is accessed down a little bit. I’m an, I’m an owner. Um, and so I think, yeah, you can see here like some of this is locked down because the payload has sensitive information, and so I don’t have the respective privileges to be able to see like the, the request body and the request, headers. Actually, let me see if I can give

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: myself

Scott: So

Donnie: access. Go ahead.

Scott: are, are most of these transmitting plain text, like, but under– but using TLS or something like that? Like, they’re not– MCP servers in general aren’t basically encrypting their traffic.

Donnie: No, it’s, it, it is not encrypted. and you can see now, now that I’ve given myself access, you can see what it looks like. Um,

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: it’s just JSON. So this is,

Scott: JSON, yeah.

Donnie: MCP is, is mar- modeled after the LSP protocol, actually, the Language Server Protocol.

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: Um, and so it’s just, it’s just basically sending, uh, what is called JSON RC, R- RPC remote procedure calls, um,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: back and forth. And so that’s, that’s all that’s happening here when, when you make these requests. So

Scott: So

Donnie: you

Scott: really,

Donnie: can…

Scott: you’re just relying on the fact that you’re doing it through an encryp- you’re doing it through an encrypted connection, basically,

Donnie: That’s,

Scott: is what

Donnie: yeah,

Scott: you’re

Donnie: we’re just

Scott: relying

Donnie: proxying

Scott: on.

Donnie: the request

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: essentially. So instead of going straight to the Gmail MCP server, you’re hitting us first, and

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: because you’re hitting us, we, we can un-unencrypt the data because it’s our certificate. Yeah.

Scott: Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay.

Donnie: Yep.

Scott: Okay, so walk me through what this would look like in a corporate environment or give me some corporate use cases where, like, how do people use this to… And I guess my question is, how much– So this would only– So you only have insight into MCP per se, but– so everything an agent does outside of MCP, you guys have nothing to do with.

Donnie: Well, so that kind of go– leads into your question. So, we do have what are c- what’s called device management, um, So devices. So what, what you can do here is your, you set up your MDM and when you, when– If I’m an admin and I’m handing out a bunch of computers, I can, I can set up an MDM here with, any of the various providers, and that will give you a configuration that you can put into your MDM. And when it’s delivered to the laptop and you start up, say, you know, you know, everyone in your company uses Cursor because you have a, a Cursor, um, Enterprise license,

Scott: Right. Yep.

Donnie: then we can lay down the, Obot will lay down the, Cursor configuration. And then anytime any tool call is made, uh, whether that be an MCP server that goes through Obot or, you know, like a, the read tool that Cursor has built in or the write tool that Cursor has built in, we put in hooks before and after so we can capture that data and then that will go into, um, the audit logs themselves as well. So you’ll see local audit logs happening here as, uh,

Scott: Hmm.

Donnie: in addition to those MCP calls that I showed you. And

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: so that would be one use if I want to see like what users are doing. I, I want to see like what packages they’re installing for these MCP

Scott: Yes.

Donnie: servers and all that,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: and I want, I want a clear picture of that. That’s, that’s a great use case.

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: We’ve really seen like security as being the number one thing for a lot of enterprises, is they want to know, uh, what their users are doing, and they want to audit that and, and restrict that as much as possible.

Scott: 100%, yeah, 100%. If nothing–

Donnie: The…

Scott: I mean, just from the very most basic thing, even aside from anything else, one thing that agents love to do to get a task done is they’ll just go out and install anything.

Donnie: And any package, any third-party package, um,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: yeah, they’ll say: “Oh, I found this on NPM and this looks

Scott: Yeah, exactly.

Donnie: great.“ [laughs]

Scott: I know. I, I’m constantly telling Claude anytime– I have a standing rule with it, and it usually obeys it, and I yell at it if it doesn’t. But it’s like you have to tell me what you’re going to install. You have to do some due diligence and do some, searching on the internet to see what vulnerabilities have affected these packages and when, and, uh, you know, give me links to all your stuff. I want to know that these aren’t gonna be a supply chain compromise for me

Donnie: Yeah, yeah. And that’s a– Especially now in the age of AI where, where everyone can write any code that they want as

Scott: Yep.

Donnie: fast as they want, it’s,

Scott: Uh-huh.

Donnie: uh, it’s a real risk. My, my, my boss actually gave, uh… So we started our company, Obot AI, we started, the MCP Dev Summit, uh, conference, and we, we ran a couple of them before we eventually donated it, um, to the Linux Foundation, which the Linux Foundation runs a bunch of these, you know, open source type, conferences. They run KubeCon, which is the big Kubernetes one. They have an Open Source Con and d- various things like that. So we donated, donated a conference to them. But my boss actually gave, uh, a talk at one of the conferences about exactly that. Like, what type of risks are you, are you looking at when you, when it comes to supply chain attacks and how to mitigate them? Um, the various attacks that have happened, you know, in the wild, and what we’ve done or what people have done to kind of try to, stay away from those. So, it’s a real risk. It’s something that I think about every time I

Scott: Hmm. Yes.

Donnie: tell an agent to do something.

Scott: Yeah, I mean, way back when I first started using a lot of open source and a lot of, you know, different packages and so on, I thought about it, but boy, never have I thought about it more than recently. in fact, I migrated my personal website off of a– It was basically a node-based framework. It was Astro, and I took it off there just ’cause I’m tired of looking at all the updates all the time. There’s so many dependencies, it’s just unbelievable. And I migrated it to Zola primarily not because it, you know, not because their supply chain is inherently more secure, but because they have much less software and way fewer dependencies in that particular development framework than I had with Astro, and that was basically it.

Donnie: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, JavaScript is the most popular language in the world right now, and, and, you know, it’s kind of an entry-level language, so I’ll– It’s very prone to like, “Oh, there’s a package for that. I’m just gonna use it because

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: I

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: don’t, I don’t wanna spend the time to figure out how to do it myself,“ you know?

Scott: And Python’s

Donnie: Um. [chuckles]

Scott: another one. I use a lot of Python, and I have a lot of packages, and Claude is happy to go grab more Python packages. It just loves Python packages. It’s like, “G*** guy, you got to stop. You have to ask me. This is not up for debate.”

Donnie: Yeah. That’s, that’s one– So I– This is all written in Go, by the way. This, that’s, that’s our primary programming language, um, that

Scott: Oh,

Donnie: we

Scott: okay.

Donnie: use. [lip smack] And the nice thing about Go is, well, it obviously has the front end is written in TypeScript, but the back end is all Go. But, uh, the nice thing about Go is it has a very expansive, um, standard library, and so you get

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: a lot of that stuff, um, without having to install any packages which is, which is really, really nice.

Scott: Yeah. That is cool.

Donnie: Um, the last thing I wanted to show is like you asked, like how would an enterprise use this? So one thing

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: is profiles, and if I was using say Entra or Okta or any of the, you know, the big enterprise SSO providers,

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: I would hook that up, in the model providers here or the auth providers. So I’m just using local auth ’cause it’s just a test. Um,

Scott: Right.

Donnie: but if I wanted to use Entra or Google or any of these others, um, I could do that. And we will actually, like say, say you use Microsoft Entra, we would actually import the groups that you have in Entra, and you can use those to give access. So

Scott: Oh,

Donnie: if you,

Scott: interesting.

Donnie: if you had like an engineering group or like a, a sales group, then in

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: your VMCP, you can, in the profile, you could actually create another profile, and in here you could select the engineering group, and maybe the engineering group might have a broader access to these tools. You could actually limit. So I could actually limit, you know, say Gmail. I, I want to give you, you know, whatever. I don’t want you to list drafts or read email. I just want you to list emails and list labels.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: Um, and you could give that to the sales team, and then maybe the engineering team is slightly bigger or, you know, maybe the, the C-suite has everything and, you know, you kind of go from there. So that, that’s another, very popular feature of, of the platform.

Scott: That– Yeah, that’s pretty cool. I actually have a client who they are in 365, and they do have a bunch of developers that use AI, and as far as I know, they kinda do what they want. But my question is, can you, like, create an administrative person who can’t control everything, but what they can do is set up packages, or they can set up like a MCP server, including the MCP servers that it includes, and assign permissions to that? Like, could you have, like the programmer, not the IT guy per se, he would be responsible for handling the overall Obot instance, but then his programmers, he has one guy that’s basically his main guy. Could he assign that guy to kinda handle– He knows what their programmers need, and he could set up that part of it. Yeah.

Donnie: Yeah. So that’s a great question. We– The answer is a little bit unfortunate. We used to have that role or that

Scott: Uh-huh.

Donnie: ability,

Scott: [gulps]

Donnie: but we’ve removed it, um, ’cause a lot of what I’m showing you here, so like this whole VMCP thing,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: this did not exist last week. [chuckles] this was all, this is all like brand new. Um,

Scott: Uh.

Donnie: we just published this. So, in the previous iteration, if we go to Identity Access and I show you the roles, we have these like Power User and Power User Plus. [clears throat]

Scott: Right.

Donnie: That’s essentially what those were is you could, um… They’re regular users, but they can actually create their own custom MCP servers that they could share with other people. Um, so we just have not incorporated those roles into this vMCP just simply because, um, our customers haven’t asked for it. Like,

Scott: Yeah

Donnie: you know, we had, we had some level of that previously, and now our customers are– you know, they really want this virtual MCP experience,

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: and so we b- we built it for them, but they just haven’t… You know, anyone that they, want to do that, they’re already admins or, or

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: a lot of people create their own catalogs and just import their own catalogs, and then they don’t

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: have to worry about that.

Scott: Actually, the admin role would probably work for that, to be honest. Like, if the IT guy was owner or whatever,

Donnie: Mm-hmm.

Scott: and then he could make, his main programmer guy that he trusts admin, and

Donnie: Mm-hmm.

Scott: then

Donnie: [laughs]

Scott: have conversations with him about what they’re doing, but that guy could probably be admin. [sighs]

Donnie: Sure, sure.

Scott: That’s interesting. Wow, that’s really cool. Do you guys have somebody that does demos for people who are interested?

Donnie: Yeah. our website is obot.ai. Um, you can definitely, um… [keyboard clacking] there’s a Contact Us page. Uh, you can

Scott: Okay.

Donnie: actually try for free. So what this will do is if you give us a little bit of information here, um,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: we’ll actually spin this up in like a more production environment, [clears throat]

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: um, that we host and we pay for. So you get access to, um, everything in a, in a more, you know, full-featured environment, and you get that free for two weeks. Um, of course, when you do that, we get your email, so we can reach out to you and kinda gauge your interest. Um, but if you wanna schedule a demo, you can absolutely do that by contacting

Scott: Nice.

Donnie: us. Um, the guy you’ll– The guy that’s most likely to reach out to you, his name is Tim. Super nice guy. Um, I worked with him at, at our previous company as well. but, but yeah, that if you wanna get in contact with us, that’s how, that’s how you do it.

Scott: Yeah. This is interesting to me.

Donnie: And of

Scott: Interesting.

Donnie: course, it’s all, it’s all, it’s all free open source. That’s like when we, we give the demo too, like if we go to these conferences and we give this demo and, you know, our salespeople have, have it all worked out exactly. You know, they have this script that they go through, and then at the end of it they say, “Now it’s all free and open source, and you can download it and use it wherever you want.” That’s usually the kicker, like, “Wow, this is… [chuckles] I was not expecting that,” you know? Um. [laughs]

Scott: S- so how do you– Obviously, you guys need to feed your families. I assume your little son wants a future of some kind. So how do you, how do you make money then?

Donnie: Yeah. We sell, we sell contracts to inter- large enterprises essentially. so what happens there is, you know, a, a company might pay us in a certain amount to host it for them. We do

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: that. We have a hosted, uh, option where, you know, you don’t have it– You, your company might not have, the Kubernetes experts, and you just don’t wanna deal with the infrastructure

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: and the servers and the databases and all that. And so we have people to do that. That’s actually our background. So our previous company was a Kubernetes company, so we’re,

Scott: Ah,

Donnie: we’re very, we’re very comfortal-

Scott: okay.

Donnie: comfortable with that.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: and so that’s one way. Another way is just, sort of s- what they call service contracts. So we’ll host it ourselves, but if there are any issues, you know, there are certain SLAs and, and things that, uh, you know, if you bring us a bug and label it as a sev one, then we’ll fix it within a certain period of time and so on and so forth. And we’re, you know, we have PagerDuty alerts and things like that to be on call so that we, we can help you with issues and, and things like

Scott: Hmm.

Donnie: that.

Scott: That is cool. So, steering aside from the product just a little bit, it sounds like you’ve been working with some of the people that you’re working with for quite a while.

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: Um, are you able to work remotely, or do you hop into a car and drive into town?

Donnie: So we, we used to live in Arizona. Um,

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: and when we lived in Arizona, the previous company had an office in the town that we lived in, Tempe, where we lived. but during the pandemic, like most, uh, tech– like a lot of tech companies, I shouldn’t say most, but like a lot of tech companies, we went fully remote, and we just embraced it. So once I kind of realized that, you know, we were gonna be remote for an extended period of time, we j- we just kind of picked a place to live, and we ended up moving here. So, uh, this

Scott: Yeah. Nice.

Donnie: is, this is where I sit, this is where I work, this is my,

Scott: Nice.

Donnie: my home office

Scott: Nice.

Donnie: and, and all that, so.

Scott: So I’m guessing, this is pretty sweet then. This is a nice– Sounds like you have a nice situation. Sounds like you have people you like to work with, you have a job that you like, and you have a pretty good work situation.

Donnie: Yeah, you know, any startup, it gets a little bit stressful at times, but,

Scott: Yes. Yeah.

Donnie: you know, uh, it’s a great, you know… I can work, I can live where I want. Um, I can, for the most part, I can work when I want. Like, I also coach, boys high school basketball, in my free time. [chuckles]

Scott: Uh-huh.

Donnie: and so, you know, they give me the, you know, practice is at four o’clock, so they give me the time to, to take off and go do practice and, uh, come back if, when I can and, and

Scott: Hmm.

Donnie: things like that. So it’s, it’s a really great gig. you know, I’ve learned a lot from these people. I’ve,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: you know, my, my boss and our chief architect, uh, have impacted my career greatly. So it’s, it’s just

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: a, it’s an awesome group. It’s a really awesome group.

Scott: Yeah. Yep. Yeah. I’ve never understood, like… Well, first of all, I guess for me, it’s not an issue ’cause I’m never, I’m, I’m never in danger of being the smartest guy in the room, so I’ve never had to worry about– I’ve never had an ego about that. But I guess I always am interested in people who want to be smarter than everyone else, because I find it so much more fun to be learning from just the incredibly smart people that you get to work with. so yeah, I’ve been there. Okay. So tell me, how did the company move from– You guys were doing Kubernetes-related stuff before. How did you then make this particular pivot?

Donnie: Yeah, so our, our CEO, a really bright guy, he is actually

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: one of the lead developers on the JDK, and the Java runtime and the J- Java development kit back, um, back in when he was actually programming.

Scott: Hmm. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Donnie: Super, super bright guy. Um, this is his third or fourth company now,

Scott: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Hmm.

Donnie: and he’s worked with a lot of the same people. So our chief architect, Darren Shepherd, um, he created K3s, which is the most popular, distribution in my opinion. Uh, probably objectively, but in my opinion, absolutely the most popular distribution of Kubernetes. It’s used by a ton of people. A lot of enterprises use it ’cause again, it’s free and open source. Um, so I think even like DigitalOcean, if you– they’re hosted, um, might run on K3s. I think that’s right, but, you know, don’t quote me on that. But anyway, so because we, we built Rancher and, um, had a lot of success with that, the, the next, opportunity was something similar. Like, so Rancher was a platform to help people, help enterprises manage their Kubernetes clusters. And we had some, you know, very good customers, customers that you’ve, you know, companies you’ve heard of and companies you undoubtedly use all the time. And, it was a lot of fun and, uh, you know, a lot to, a lot to learn there. And,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: but we– But the thing that was missing is like the app deployment. Like how do you manage… Okay, you can manage your servers and your clusters, but how do you actually manage the applications in a more understandable way? And so we actually started Acorn, which was, you know, Acorn turned into Obot, but Acorn was an app management platform. How, you know, how can you actually solve this problem? And it ne- never really took off because at that point that we tried to build it, most of the enterprises that we focused on, like they already had Kubernetes experts in the building, and so they didn’t see the advantage to, to that. And at that point, like AI was starting to take off. It had been about nine or 10 months since ChatGPT really like, you know, took the world by storm. And so

Scott: Uh-huh.

Donnie: our CEO was like, “We have to do something with AI. We have to do something with AI.” And our chief architect is again, very, very bright guy. he actually came up with something called GPT Script, which was a precursor to MCP. So it was, it was a very similar idea where, you know, you can do these tool calls and you can provide access to, to LLMs to, you know, do things on your behalf. and we built a whole– We built several products on this idea of GPT Script, and then MCP, you know, everyone kind of started adopting MCP, so we switched to that and we, you know, we transformed all of our products to that. And then we kind of hit on this, you know, plat man- platform management is, it has been our, our bread and butter.

Scott: Hmm.

Donnie: And so we hit on this story and it, and it kind of stuck. And that’s, that’s where we, where we landed. And then we named the product Obot, so then we named, we renamed the company to Obot. [chuckles]

Scott: Yeah. Hmm. That’s

Donnie: That’s about,

Scott: cool.

Donnie: that’s about it.

Scott: I like it. I like it a lot.

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: yeah, I– It’s interesting because in some of the computing interest, you know, not work-related, but just computing interest circles that I am familiar with, there’s a lot of people that are kind of upset that AI is what everybody’s talking about now, and they wanna go back to the old days of talking about apps and computers and all that. And I’m like: Look, I get it. I like my Mac too. I like some of the apps that I use. I, h-heck, I like some of the apps that I’ve vibe coded quite a lot. but the problem is, is this is where the computing industry is.

Donnie: [clears throat]

Scott: This is where everything’s happening. And I don’t partic– you know, personally, I don’t see it as a huge problem because even though there are serious problems with it, fundamentally, there are serious problems with the frontier AI labs. But the technology itself, it just becomes better and better and better, and it is useful, and it does help me get a lot of work done. And I don’t– What am I gonna do if I’m not– if I don’t talk about AI or I don’t think about AI? What do, what do people want? Do they wanna talk about changes to Finder or something? There’s nothing going on in computing outside of AI, to, to be honest.

Donnie: I mean, don’t you, don’t you feel empowered? Like, don’t you feel like you, you can do

Scott: Absolutely.

Donnie: way more things? Like,

Scott: Absolutely.

Donnie: yeah.

Scott: And even just simple things like throwing log files at it, throwing a bunch of data at it, it will see things that I miss because my eyes are glazing over or whatever because I’m human and because looking at walls of text inevitably causes me to miss things. AI don’t miss things when you give them a wall of text or you give them a screenshot or whatever. There’s so many different use cases where it doesn’t have to do all the thinking for you, but boy, can it sure save you a lot of time and help you catch things that you would have missed otherwise. so yeah, it, it is a huge productivity gain. In, in my work that I do, just in the past two weeks, I’ve automated a whole bunch of stuff, and the automations themselves don’t really make use of a lot of AI, but I used Claude Code to connect– I, I did s– I did a bunch of automations under n8n just because it’s very resource, friendly, and I can run a server on it and have n8n stuff running where I can see everything together. I can see how they are all tied together. And I’m not really using– I’m not really going in there and moving the nodes around and clicking on the nodes and entering all the stupid parameters myself. I’m just having Claude write everything in JavaScript and importing that into n8n and letting it work, and it’s great. And all of the– You know, I can see what it’s doing. I can go audit it all for myself. I can go look at it for myself, but that is a time saver when I can say, “Look, uh, you need to ingest all these tickets, and here’s the things you need to look for,” and so on and so forth. And then it can go do it, and the proof is in the pudding. It either works or it doesn’t. So Why would I spend hours doing stuff like that if I don’t have to? You know, it just doesn’t make sense. So yes, I, I definitely do feel empowered by it. Yeah, for sure.

Donnie: Yeah, and I think, you know, as you pointed out, there are issues, but I just– If I think about kind of how my career has, has progressed, at this point, if you’re not using it, like, are you falling behind? Are you, are you slow? Like, I don’t– Are you familiar with Zig at all?

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: Yeah. So Andrew Kelley, the founder of Zig, he’s very anti-AI.

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: Um, and the diff- I guess the difference between me and him is he’s just super bright guy [chuckles] and just eats, breathes, and sleeps computing constantly. And, you

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: know, as I said, I, you know, I guess he learns Japanese too, but I just, I’m just, maybe I’m just not… I, I guess I’m not that bright, and I, I appreciate having, like you said, you know, the ability to just say: “Hey, can you– There’s something I’m missing in this.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: Can you just, like, find it

Scott: Yep.

Donnie: for me really quick?“

Scott: I don’t know if it has to do with intelligence, and honestly, there are some people who are just reflexively anti-AI, and I think that a lot of people who are anti-AI are also thinking more about the cases like, “Oh, they’re stealing people’s work. they’re, they’re putting writers and so forth out of jobs,” and that’s true. And I don’t use AI for those cases, and it is unfortunate that those things are happening. Again, there are huge problems with the industry, but what’s interesting is that I don’t think– And, and it’s inefficient, right? Like, it’s using tons of resources. I don’t think it has to be that way forever because it is getting more efficient because costs are actually going down over time. I think we will, I’m hoping we’ll look back and see this period as a terrible time in AI where we wasted a lot of resources and people didn’t care and they were spinning up, you know, coal, mines and so on to… You know, I’m hoping that’s, that’ll be a thing of the past at some point. I, I, I do believe it because they’re gonna get more efficient. They’re gonna be… And I– But I guess what I’m saying is any pushback on them that makes them think about improving this stuff is fine with me. I, I really don’t mind it. And I do understand some of the arguments where it’s problematic and so forth. Where they lose me is the people that are still s– And there’s smart people saying this, but the people that are still saying it’s just a stochastic parrot, it’s just, it’s just, probability, blah, blah, blah. And I know that’s how it works, but the thing is, it actually gets stuff done, and it actually gets stuff right. So okay, maybe it is a probability engine, but it’s actually coming up with solutions for me, so why would I not use that probability engine? I don’t know. I, I feel like some of the people that are anti-AI haven’t used it. Obviously, in the case of Zig that you were talking about, that guy’s smart enough to understand. so he’s got other reasons, and that’s fine. But I don’t know. It’s a– There’s not a right answer. Like, I don’t judge people who– I’m not a AI bro who gets all mad at people who are anti-AI or whatever. Not, not one bit. And because I think tech companies have proven themselves to need to be doubted. But like, a doubt of a tech company should be the default, not the, not something we eventually fall into.

Donnie: Yeah, and I think, you know, the dot– I, I, I think about the dot-com b-bubble a lot nowadays, like with everything that’s happening with AI and, you know, they, uh, the dot-com bubble was a bubble. It burst and a lot of people, you know, there were a lot of problems that happened after that, and

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: maybe, maybe we’re gonna go through something similar. I don’t know. But there was also a lot of good that came out of that. You know, like

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: the fact that y-you and I are talking right now on this, or even the fact that I can host a website for free,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: um, someplace, like all those things, like you said, costs are going down. AI, I, I kind of see AI and LLMs going the same direction as, yeah,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: it’s really expensive and, you know, resource-intensive now, and people hate it, but eventually it’s gonna become a, a commodity that, you know, people really use a lot and get a lot of value out of, and the cost will go down, and it will be cheap. And I’m not saying it’s gonna be free forever, but,

Scott: No. Right.

Donnie: you know, a lot of these local models are getting really, really good. Um.

Scott: Yeah. And this is where I hope that the– This is where I hope the frontier labs don’t win in their, in their doomsday scenario things where they’re, they’re basically just attacking open models for the most part. And I don’t like that, and I hope they don’t succeed because I don’t know exactly what the future’s gonna look like, but it might just be that most people don’t use a Claude or an OpenAI or a Codex or whatever, and they’re using some kind of local models for a lot of stuff, and then maybe they’ll use the frontier models for other things. But yeah. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s– This is early days. This is like infant stage.

Donnie: Yeah. Did you– have you watched the AI doc that was on Netflix?

Scott: Oh.

Donnie: No, it’s, [clears throat] you know, it’s a documentary that this guy, I don’t really know. Like, he’s a filmmaker and been doing various things, and he kind of got wind of AI and, and, and this doomsday idea, and he decided to interview a bunch of experts. And, and surprisingly, he got Sam Altman and, he got Sam Altman on. I think he got Dario on as well. He didn’t,

Scott: Hmm.

Donnie: he didn’t get Zuck, and he didn’t get Elon.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: But, [clears throat] you know, he got them to sit down and talk about their concerns and, and a lot of, like, the, the doomsday scenarios and what those look like. And he also found people on the other side, which is like, “This is the greatest thing since, you know, since

Scott: Right.

Donnie: the, the printing press.“ And, uh, it’s a super– Like, you know, my wife, who is not a, a tech person, she’s a nurse, she just started using ChatGPT, uh, because, you know, with pictures of our son, [chuckles]

Scott: Yeah

Donnie: she wants to, like, make him fancy and whatnot. But, uh, you know, she watched it, and she got a little bit concerned. But, uh, if you go into it with a level head, it’s, it’s a pretty interesting, you know, to kind of hear their perspective in a more detailed manner and, and

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: what they’re actually thinking about. It’s pretty interesting.

Scott: For sure, yeah. I’ll have to watch that. Yeah, it is interesting, and it’s interesting to me, like, my daughter’s generation, she’s 20. I think a lot– So every– When she was in high school, her senior year, she said tons of kids were just using ChatGPT for everything, and they didn’t understand what they were doing at all. But then there’s people like her that basically have zero interest in AI, and they’re just kind of checked out of certain whole segments of technology because to them it just seems like it’s a scam or something. I don’t know if that’s the correct phrase, but there, there is some skepticism there, and I think that’s fine. I think that’s healthy. I’m always of the opinion that if 100% of humans say something is good, somebody should be skeptical of it. [chuckles]

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: Uh, but on the other hand, yeah, I, I don’t know. I feel for people who wish to return to a simpler time in computing, but it hasn’t been that time for a long time. And I’ll also argue, companies have been evil. Silicon Valley, first of all, as a old school semiconductor guy, it pains me to hear it called Silicon Valley now. There’s nothing silicon about that valley. San Francisco is not silicon… Um, anyway, whatever. Um,

Donnie: Well, I used

Scott: but…

Donnie: to live, I used to live right down the street from the Intel factory in Chandler, Arizona.

Scott: Oh,

Donnie: Like,

Scott: did you?

Donnie: like right

Scott: Oh,

Donnie: down the

Scott: okay.

Donnie: street.

Scott: Yeah,

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: yeah. That place is huge.

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: anyway, Silicon Valley has been trending… Uh, was it the influx of, of capital? I don’t know, because, venture capital’s been around for a long time, even since the very beginning, but I think the role that venture capital plays has changed. Anyway, even well before AI, trust me, Silicon Valley has been tending towards evil. I mean, it just is not… I don’t know what it is about American tech companies, but they by default kinda can do whatever they want, and we kinda just let them do whatever they want without getting a policy shaped around it because, hey, these are our tech guys. These are, you know. I don’t know. It’s uniquely American that way, I think.

Donnie: Yeah, I mean, kind of give the benefit of the doubt to the visionary, and it’s,

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: you know, sometimes it works out, sometimes it… You know, with– I would argue that Apple with Steve Jobs, like, he was a visionary, and things kind of worked out pretty well for them. But, you know,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: he had– The, the difference, I guess, is, you know, I guess Bezos is always does this too, but they’re having the customer in mind when you make decisions. It’s, it’s a little bit different than, you know, the customer is the product, and

Scott: Yeah. Right.

Donnie: we’re gonna sell your data and, you know, spam you with ads and things like that.

Scott: Yeah. One of– It’s interesting. I was listening to something about Facebook today, and it occurred to me, I mean, there’s a lot of stuff a-about Facebook that you know that 100% that product feature is trying to get clicks or whatever. w-what I never thought about for some reason was when you’re tagged, people who are tagged are the most likely. That is a huge traffic driver.

Donnie: Hmm.

Scott: And so undoubtedly, somebody was like, “Hey, we should just let people get tagged, and they will come to the site. We don’t have to do anything. All, all they have to do is get a notification that somebody tagged them, and boom, they’re there.” So it’s stuff like that that bugs me, I guess.

Donnie: Yeah. Yeah. It’s the, the attention hogging. But, you know, it’s funny, like, so I mentioned I have a– my son, Lyle,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: he, he’s seven months old, and if I’m sitting him on my lap and I take out my phone just to look to see like, you know, we use an app to track, like, his sleeping and his feeding and things like that. If I take it out just to see like, “Oh, when’s, when’s the last time you ate and how much did you eat?” He’s glued. At

Scott: Oh,

Donnie: seven

Scott: yeah.

Donnie: months old, he’s glued to that screen, and

Scott: Well…

Donnie: it’s just so fascinating that, you know- You know, he hasn’t been around that long. If we turn the TV on and it’s like, “Oh, you gotta watch it,” you know? It’s, it’s very…

Scott: I think there is something about screens that as adults we’re so used to them that we don’t think about it, but they’re unnatural in a weird way that just draws your attention. Heck, with, with my cat, I can freaking turn on my iPhone, and he’ll sit there and stare at it like, “What are you doing? Why do you have your phone on?” He knows that something has changed and that this thing is a focus grabber.

Donnie: Yeah.

Scott: It just is unnatural. It, it’s not something that occurs in nature, and our biology just automatically reacts to it and stares at it. It’s, it’s wild.

Donnie: Yeah. Yeah, it’s super interesting. I mean, you know, growing up, I think you’re– you might be a little bit older than me, but, you know, we kinda transitioned from the analog age into the digital age, and it’ll be very interesting raising a, a child in the complete digital age. [chuckles]

Scott: Yeah. One thing that’s interesting, though, is a lot of kids are into a lot of analog stuff, and I think that’s cool. obviously you want your son to know how technology works, be fluent with it, use it, be good at, with it, and that’s true. But there’s also opportunities for him to get involved in analog stuff too, just to balance things out, which is pretty cool.

Donnie: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Scott: That’s one thing I like about like, um… I, I need to get back to Japan, but one of the things that I like about Japan so much is they still love their analog stuff. They love their analog stuff. They are all about the process of making it. They are about the, the process of using it, and I wish Americans were a little bit more like that still.

Donnie: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just happen to know, like, the golf culture in Japan is that way. Like, you get

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: handcrafted clubs, and it’s

Scott: Mm-hmm.

Donnie: very meticulous and detailed

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: and things

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: like that. Yeah.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: Yeah. Yeah.

Scott: I guess

Donnie: [chuckles]

Scott: that’s– I guess, you know what? If you want something to do, you’ll never be bored if you create a system where mastering something takes your entire life. [chuckles]

Donnie: That’s true. That’s true. Yeah.

Scott: You’ll always have a job.

Donnie: [chuckles] Yeah.

Scott: All right. Well, this is interesting. I seriously am going to talk to a specific client about, about because I think they could benefit from it. Uh, it’s fascinating. I didn’t… Yeah. I kinda didn’t understand what it was all about at first, but having seen it, that is super, super cool. I see this guy, so I went to look at the MCP Dev Summit website, and I see your CEO and co-founder, Sheng, on there.

Donnie: Yeah, Sheng. And Shannon, and Shannon is the other, uh, person who’s heavily involved in, in the– or was heavily involved in the Dev Summit.

Scott: Uh-huh.

Donnie: Um, he, he’s our president. and, uh, so again, super nice guy. He, he’s, he’s the one that had the context in the Linux Foundation and where we ended up donating it, just from

Scott: That

Donnie: our

Scott: is

Donnie: previous

Scott: cool.

Donnie: days with Kubernetes and stuff like that.

Scott: Yeah. That’s cool. All right. Well, thank you. I appreciate that.

Donnie: Yeah. Thanks for

Scott: Uh,

Donnie: having me on, Scott. It was

Scott: yeah,

Donnie: nice

Scott: absolutely.

Donnie: to talk to you.

Scott: you have a standing invitation, by the way. You can just invite yourself on at any time if you want to. And by the way, we do need to get you back on at least once because, Peter wasn’t here. He was rudely driving from Boston to Vermont or something like that while we were doing this podcast, so.

Donnie: Well, he was in, w- he was in Europe not too long ago, wasn’t he?

Scott: He was,

Donnie: He was.

Scott: yeah, but he’s been back in town for a while.

Donnie: Okay.

Scott: but yeah, he lives in Boston, but he also lived in Vermont for a long time, and he still has a home there. So he’s driving back for the weekend, I guess.

Donnie: Cool.

Scott: So

Donnie: [chuckles]

Scott: we will have to, when you have time, no pressure, but we will have to get you back on, and you can yell at Peter about… On behalf of me, I’ll, here, I’ll give you a script, and you can yell at him about how fnMute is terrible [laughs] and nobody should use it.

Donnie: Yeah. I, I, uh… No, I appreciate it, and I’m happy to come on and talk. I– These types of things, like, having these types of thought conversations about, uh, technology and its daily use and kinda how to manage it in a healthy way, I mean,

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: super interesting stuff. So appreciate

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: it, man.

Scott: Yep. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Donnie: Yep.

Scott: I will play the final Tell Your Friends. Tell your

Donnie: Tell

Scott: friends.

Donnie: your friends. [chuckles] It’s so– You know what’s funny? I typically listen to the podcast at, like, one and a half speed, and so

Scott: Uh-huh.

Donnie: that’s usually, like, really fast. Tell your friends.

Scott: Yeah.

Donnie: [laughs]

Scott: Tell your friends. I know.

Donnie: Yeah. [chuckles]

Scott: The f- the funny thing is, is like, I think that’s, um… What is that in the background? Tell your friends. Oh, I guess nothing. There was another, there was another Saul Goodman clip I had where you could hear a copy machine or something going

Donnie: Oh.

Scott: crazy in the background. I don’t remember which one it was. It wasn’t the Tell Your Friends one, but yeah. I always

Donnie: But

Scott: thought

Donnie: [chuckles]

Scott: I was gonna get takedown notices ’cause Saul Goodman’s yelling, “Tell your friends,” in the background, but [laughs]

Donnie: I didn’t

Scott: so

Donnie: even

Scott: far,

Donnie: know, I didn’t even know it

Scott: yeah.

Donnie: was Saul Goodman until you just said

Scott: Uh-huh.

Donnie: something, but now it makes sense.

Scott: Yeah. Tell your friends. Yep. All right. Well, I will let you go because you have a life, and, presumably your wife wants to see you tonight before bedtime, so I will, uh, let you go. But I really appreciate this. This was a lot of fun. Thank you so very much.

Donnie: Yeah. No, thanks. I, I had a lot of fun too. Thanks, Scott. Appreciate it.

Scott: Yep. No

Donnie: Bye.

Scott: worries. Talk to you.