Tonya J. Long: 0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to Reset with Tonya here on a beautiful, sunny, not surprisingly gorgeous day in Los Gatos at Pirate Cat Radio, KPCR LP 92.9. We have Mike Prince in the house today and we've been talking for almost an hour already Because Mike has such a rich history. I met Mike, I'm going to say, six months ago and I thought he was just another founder and I was so wrong. We're going to hear more about how Mike started programming when he was 10 years old. Mike is one of the few natives, a native Bay Area man. He grew up in Los Altos and has had his journeys through tech, with a bit of a break to go to school down in San Luis Obispo Very fine institution. I can say all kinds of good things about SLO folks, but Mike is a serial entrepreneur founder. He's also worked in big companies like Nuance. Are they still around?

Mike Prince: 1:00

They were acquired by Microsoft for $20 billion.

Tonya J. Long: 1:03

Thank you. So Mike is a supporter of very successful companies and Mike is. He's a lot more technical than I realized, just to be honest. So this call is not about tech. These podcasts are about transition and Mike is all about the transition because he's doing some fascinatingly interesting things as a technical, as a technical expert. He is setting that aside and dragging some of us to the farm, to a ranch down in San Grigorio.

Mike Prince: 1:32

Exactly him.

Tonya J. Long: 1:34

So, without further ado, I want to introduce the lovely and articulate and amazing Mike Prince.

Mike Prince: 1:40

Mike, welcome to Reset with Tonya, thank you so much for having me here.

Tonya J. Long: 1:43

Very excited, so tell us more about what are you working on these days? What's bringing you joy?

Mike Prince: 1:50

Yeah, so in the work category we have two things actually. We have the decelerator.

Tonya J. Long: 1:53

I think we'll talk about that in a few minutes. It's not work.

Mike Prince: 1:56

Yeah, but it's true, it's very good, and so what we're working on is about seven, eight months ago, I'd been working on a project in a certain direction and you talked about the art of the pivot Community, but it still was community. It's bringing people together and I think it's. Jeremiah Owyang talked about agents, of course, and agent-to-agent communications, so I took a pivot on the product.

Mike Prince: 2:18

Actually, I took December and January off working on some other things and then came back with a fresh energy and I started saying, if we're going to solve our human business, all the things that go on, maybe we should entrust this to agents. And the theory, the larger theory on this is in the future, you're going to have a whole bunch of agents working for you Tens, hundreds, thousands of agents. Every business will have the same, every government will have the same. We can call it DHS too and when they start talking to each other and transacting each other and trying to do something on your behalf, the world's going to be an amazing place. So I started building that.

Tonya J. Long: 2:50

Agentic AI. We have a very we have a varied audience. You remember I'm from the South.

Tonya J. Long: 2:55

I came from Tennessee 12 years ago, but my folks back home watch this. We have people with varying levels of understanding about tech with varying levels of understanding about tech, and agentic AI is the. It's the focus I think that we're pivoting to right now in technology in the Bay Area because of what you just described, with all these digital agents out there acting on our behalf. It's going to fundamentally, I think, change the way we work with technology. Yeah, so what does your application do for people from an agent perspective?

Tonya J. Long: 3:29

just at a high level, because I want to help people understand this.

Mike Prince: 3:32

So we did a talk last night and we laid out the evolution of the system and in the old days, like this is actually from a consumer marketing perspective. A human would talk to a human. I'd try to talk you into buying something, whatever it happens to be.

Tonya J. Long: 3:44

I want to sell you solar panels for my roof.

Mike Prince: 3:47

Yeah, and then about 20 years ago, 25 years ago, we started putting automated agents in there. This is on phone calls, on chat, on email, and we have a human talking to an agent which might fall back to a human. And so now the evolution has happened recently is we're actually my human, me have my own agent that represents my best interests, my goals, and it turns and talks to your company's agent, which has your company's goals and best interests, and now we're fully delegating, and so this agent is going to be they're working on each of what we have trying to accomplish some transaction, and classic examples are I'm selling my car to you. I don't know how to negotiate car prices like that, and you don't maybe know how to negotiate prices either. And now we're in a fully transacted send that down to these folks and they're going to do the best job of it. And we did a. We did a meetup at Google, maybe two, three months ago, and the competition was Gemini versus DeepSeek.

Tonya J. Long: 4:37

Oh, and they were playing.

Mike Prince: 4:38

They were playing a game together and we saw who won and who won. And the question is who won? It was DeepSeek, because DeepSeek was more aggressive.

Mike Prince: 4:45

It wasn't about being smart or anything like that, it just tended to have a certain way. So in the future, when you pick your agents to do stuff for you, what's going to happen is that how much money are you going to spend on your agent? And if you have more money or more resources, you will get a better agent. Think of it as a lawyer or whatever thing in real life and you might have better outcomes. And I guess this is this really interesting thing of the people who can't afford good agents are their lives going to be as well represented as people who do have the money for the best agents to transact on their behalf? And the agents go across everything.

Mike Prince: 5:15

we're talking about voting now and that's tricky and this is an amazing one because the thing is like a politician is going to want to try to get my vote and traditionally right now they go out. They do outrage still to have people knocking on doors like that. The reality is me, as a voter, I don't know very like, bluntly, I can't track everything.

Tonya J. Long: 5:31

I can't there's so many issues that matter to you.

Mike Prince: 5:34

Yeah, and track everybody's position on all those and if, you, if you have an agent on your behalf not for the politics for years it can learn all the things I'm looking for, all all my sensibilities. And when you, as a politician, you actually have an agent talking to my agent and you are going to try to talk my agent into something, At the end of that my agent will come back to me and say Mike, vote for Tonya or not One of the two on that one. But the interesting thing about that, too, is that we're doing these. Transactions between agents are many times conversational. It's human language and we have a full audit of it. So what's going to happen is your agent is going to come and document or not just you a hundred other politicians. They're going to try to talk to my agents that are voting for you. At some point my agent will come back with guidance on who I should vote for and some context for why and all the context.

Tonya J. Long: 6:16

And now what happens?

Mike Prince: 6:18

next year, when you, as a politician, start voting on stuff, I will have more AI mapping what you promised me in that context back to how you're performing as an elected official, and that's when we get full accountability. So it's going to be a very interesting future.

Tonya J. Long: 6:31

It will. We've had a lot of data for a long time. We did a talk on wisdom and data at the AI Infra Summit that we were at and I help people understand. This year we're going to produce I think it was 180 or 150 terabytes no zettabytes.

Tonya J. Long: 6:50

It's not pet, it's probably zettabytes and I did this thing where I was in a boardroom and I had this 50 foot long whiteboard zettabyte. A zettabyte has 21 zeros after it, so I put the 150 or 180 and then I did my seven groups of three zeros as the audience really that fell on them.

Tonya J. Long: 7:09

The weight of that's how much data we're going to produce, and we use 0.5% of that data, but I think what AI is really going to do for us is allow us to distill and synthesize insights from that data that you talked about with the politicians, with that data, helping them know why you voted. I also think it's going to tell people what the constituency wants. The other side of it is better governance. Everybody wants the soundbite now. Everybody wants a quick answer. I think we're going to get to better quick answers by synthesizing all this data coming in and handing it to decision makers to say this is what the people are saying.

Tonya J. Long: 7:51

But we don't have that right now it's the loudest one that gets through.

Mike Prince: 7:54

You're filling in the blanks right now, too, is because a politician can have a partially formed opinion what they should do. And then they can talk to my voter agent and refine that positioning and, prior to the election, determine what their real positioning should be at scale, at as much scale as they want. And this ending can happen during while they're an elected official. They can say let's do outreach right now. If you're out, what should I do? And if all of them respond in real time.

Tonya J. Long: 8:19

What topics are resonating most significantly, most strongly, with my population? Wow, now, we didn't get here overnight. You and I jumped straight into what the earth is going to look like. Apologies, but what I'm learning about you and that's the fun part of doing this podcast is there are people that I know that I have a drink with at Hapus for Founders and Funders Shout out to Ignite. That I see and I enjoy. But when I do a podcast with someone, I get to learn so much more about them and, like I started off with you are so much more than I knew. But you've been doing this almost all your life and this being technology and change almost all your life. And this being technology and change, how early did you start being a change maker through bits and bytes?

Mike Prince: 9:13

I'll go back to the very, very beginning. I think my first computer was an Atari 2600. Oh my, some of the audience just had a big blip yeah and what's fun about that is, beside games they had a cartridge called basic programming.

Tonya J. Long: 9:25

Okay.

Mike Prince: 9:26

And it's funny because a side thing I'm showing to my daughter right now is that I kept that cartridge from. I still have it and I showed my daughter the packaging on it. She actually for my birthday present this year. She actually hand drew the package for me to put on the wall, as soon as I remember where I started off on this stuff.

Mike Prince: 9:43

See, this is technology, yeah, fostering human connection it was neat though, like my earliest memory is, I wanted to program. I was learning BASIC on this cartridge and with a joystick. We didn't have a keyboard and so I had to joystick in all the letters Talk about patience, yeah.

Mike Prince: 10:00

And so I wanted to do a pyramid. Yes, and I didn't read the next page of the manual and that is four loops, so I could have done two. Four loops, like I learned very early on, is to try to balance how much you're trying to get done right now with how much to sharpen your axe, yep and half speed, and whatever you're doing how old were you when you were doing this?

Tonya J. Long: 10:20

maybe nine or something okay, wow, it's a long's a long time.

Mike Prince: 10:24

The next year, my parents bought me an Apple II.

Tonya J. Long: 10:27

Okay, actually, my brother and I, and so we had.

Mike Prince: 10:29

Our first thing is our timeshare, because he had half the time.

Tonya J. Long: 10:31

I had half the time. Oh, you had a contract.

Mike Prince: 10:33

Yeah, it was 50% and we had hours we had specific hours and it would strike right on the computer.

Tonya J. Long: 10:43

So two brothers sharing one computer yeah. Were you focused on the same things?

Mike Prince: 10:48

That's it Worked out very differently.

Tonya J. Long: 10:51

Oh.

Mike Prince: 10:51

So when I started programming and my brother started playing games and very early I looked at programming and I don't know why I internalized it this way. But I said I could teach one person to do a job and then have one worker. But computers are amazing because I could write a program and you could do the work of a thousand people.

Tonya J. Long: 11:09

You saw this at 10.

Mike Prince: 11:10

Yeah, and so I was all where should I spend my energy, of course? And I saw my brother playing games. So I vowed never to play video games. So I've never played video games, and so I spent all my time programming my brother. I spent all this time playing video games, and so I think I mentioned before Doria's like I want to learn machine language. So we went to Europe Our machine language book with me and, instead of looking at the sites, I was reading about 6502. And it's one of those things that just clicks you read something, that's just it's Greek.

Tonya J. Long: 11:35

Now what's 6502 for our app?

Mike Prince: 11:37

It's a machine language. So this is the original Apple. The Apple you had also was a 6502 processor, and so it's just you're in bits and bytes and you're literally talking directly to the machine.

Tonya J. Long: 11:47

You were a kid doing this instead of looking at the Arc de Triomphe.

Mike Prince: 11:51

And my parents were not as happy about that, but that was amazing.

Tonya J. Long: 12:07

They had their vision of what your time in community would be. That we that I think we both care a lot about is how we show up with people, how we help people show up with each other and do more. I think about your mom and I know I happen.

Mike Prince: 12:14

I can't lie, I happen to know a story about your mom.

Tonya J. Long: 12:17

That is about your focus on community, so I'm seeing you guys, you know, in Paris or London, wherever you went and her wanting you to do the tourist thing, wanting to read about machine language with. Apple. But how did your family experience inform and influence how much you care about community? Because that makes you very different than most engineering mindsets.

Mike Prince: 12:41

I think one of the things we did I think we taught this before was we had the dance studio in our house, so we taught the local community.

Tonya J. Long: 12:48

In your house, not just as a business. It was in your home.

Mike Prince: 12:52

We were lucky to move into a bigger house in Long Island, and so we had an entire area that we built into a dance studio, and my mom ran the dance studio there.

Tonya J. Long: 13:00

And she did that for years.

Mike Prince: 13:07

So you saw her creating, creating community with a dance studio exactly did you dance?

Tonya J. Long: 13:10

I did one recital, one. They talked to me and made her happy.

Mike Prince: 13:11

I think it was like, yeah, I forget what the song was, but they talked to me and did one recital with that good for you. But I was a classic boy and there's a house full of girls and I was oh, and I was running away from them and yeah, and that was a long time ago, but but good for you.

Tonya J. Long: 13:23

Good for you for trying. I used to do Bikram yoga in Tennessee with Eddie George. Do you remember Eddie?

Mike Prince: 13:28

George, I don't sorry.

Tonya J. Long: 13:31

Major football player back in the 90s. Yeah, that's how long ago I was doing Bikram. Yeah, but he was like the only man in the room and he was this enormous man. His biceps were as big as a tree trunk and we'd all go into form and then he would just he'd break a sweat just thinking about some of the form, but he was working so hard to improve himself and the things that yoga gives you, but I always admired him for being in that room with all those women and it was hard.

Tonya J. Long: 14:04

It was hard for his body to physically move into those positions, but it made him a better athlete. So you, I don't think dancing made you a better athlete. It certainly gave you the vibe for that community and the importance of bringing people together. Yeah, so you started all this when you were 10. Technical, I think you were getting this when you were 10.

Tonya J. Long: 14:23

Technical, I think you were getting the insights of the value of community. And then you started your work journey and you did $20 billion nuance corporate work. And then you've been an entrepreneur several times. Yeah, you've launched companies.

Mike Prince: 14:39

We started earlier than that too. It's in slow, what I did before. Slow, so launch companies. We started earlier than that too. It's in slow, it's what I did before. Slow, so move down to slow. I've been in computers for 10 years over 10 years at that point, and I was all and I was doing some class at the computer science department.

Mike Prince: 14:51

And the dean of whatever the head of that department was all. Why are you here? You've already been doing this work, clearly. And he said why don't you consider just going to the master's program? And I was all, can you do that? And he had me talk to the dean of students and he green-lighted me for just switching, jumping straight to master's. But at the same time, things conspire against you is I'd gotten to know the owner of a restaurant down there Hobie's. We have Hobie's up here. Back then, hobie's had more restaurants in their franchise and he asked me to run his restaurant and I was looking at the two options, saying back to the pivot you're talking about, because I have the option of going and learning more which I validated, I already know this stuff to actually learning how business operates, having employees taking care of customers, dealing with a franchise operation, legal, everything, hiring and firing. And so I took a restaurant job and I'd never run a restaurant, never bust a table never waited.

Tonya J. Long: 15:39

It's hard work, very hard work, and dealing with the public. I'm not being unpleasant. When I say dealing with the public is hard work. It's satisfying, but what you learned? I think there's two things that really teach you when you're young. It's either being in sales I sold Cutco knives. Do you remember Cutco knives, great knives, a lot of college kids do that. But sales and then restaurant work or anything that you're actually public facing.

Tonya J. Long: 16:08

I think in our technical worlds we care very much about the customer experience, but there's this veil where you're not actually exposed to customers as often unless you're in certain roles. Getting that restaurant experience was also community for you.

Mike Prince: 16:26

It was a great experience. I was very fortunate I got him. Alan Duncan was the owner, Okay, and he was a fan. He was God bless him, not a good business manager, but a fantastic people person, and so he'd come to the restaurant. He handed everything off to me and he'd come around and just made the customer so happy.

Tonya J. Long: 16:46

And so it was a really beautiful synergy there. So he, we did that for several years. How smart of him to augment his own skill set with what he needed, which was someone who could wire it together operationally and improve delivery. Yeah, so very smart of him. So you had the restaurant tour of duty. Yeah, all the while you're staying in technology, yeah, I've been programming the time management software, the payroll software, so I know the issues is you people staying in technology?

Mike Prince: 17:02

Yeah, so I ended up programming the time management software, the payroll software. So the issue is people come in, they don't clock in. They ask you to clock in the wrong time Every night, half an hour, the manager doing the payroll, and so I automated all that, so it was like two minutes. The manager is computerized system. I gamified it as well, of course.

Tonya J. Long: 17:19

Before that was a term. Yeah, I didn't I game-fired the whole experience.

Mike Prince: 17:22

I can talk about that more another time, and it's my. My thing was it's all about the training as well as how much training do you need from people? So it needed. It was toaster simple. There was no training. And my win was, a week later, a bunch of the guys who took the bus to come to work. And I looked down the street and they're all running and they're running to get to work, to tap on the computer so they clock in at the right time. And what I was doing is, every time I gave them a payroll check, I would staple to them their stats.

Tonya J. Long: 17:47

Oh, okay, including late and early and all that kind of stuff.

Mike Prince: 17:50

Yes, yes, I never looked at it, but they thought I did, yeah and it created accountability. It created accountability in the feedback loop and I did it was hands off. It just all worked magically off, it just all worked magically. Yeah, and you learned that, like in your early 20s.

Tonya J. Long: 18:05

Yeah, this is like in his 23 before. I did beautiful. We've already identified several pivots that you did like at 10 you were a technician, you were an engineer at 10 and then restaurant business, and we know you've had a storied technical career. How do you know when it's time for a reset?

Mike Prince: 18:21

I don't know. It's a great question. Maybe one way of answering your North Star is have a North Star and whenever you stop seeing your North Star, or whenever you stop seeing progress towards that North Star, no matter how much slant cost you have in it which I hear this from people quite a bit if there's not a there there anymore, it's time to look somewhere else.

Tonya J. Long: 18:40

I love it, and it's okay if your North Star changes.

Mike Prince: 18:43

Yeah, so we you know engineering, I really started enjoying a tempo. We'll talk about that a little bit. I took over engineering management there and that was the first time I really enjoyed engineering management. We had a bunch of really good tools at the time. But one of the things I did for engineering management we did sprints. Everybody knows about sprints agile and sprints normally are two weeks. That's one thing and this is a part of the math I didn't like, and the CEO inevitably will come in and ask you to change stuff. So what I did is I shrunk the sprint down to a week and there's a process for getting something into the sprint and now this is compatible with the CEO. The CEO comes in and says I'm going to do this. I'm like, okay, this is the process to get it into the sprint. It's going to take you this many days, which lines up with next sprint. So my engineers could be focused the entire week and get done what they were focusing on getting done, and it wouldn't distract them.

Tonya J. Long: 19:35

And.

Mike Prince: 19:35

I really enjoyed it. The process worked out really well. And the second thing is the arguments you have, because, just like in the Star Trek of the old days, it's like talking to Scotty and trying to get the Starship to do whatever it is and he's like I can't do it anymore, kind of thing, and your CEO will ask for more than you can do and you will say I can't do it and there's no math there. And the beauty of all the tools now is we have team velocity and so with team velocity we can go, we can expansion on the tickets and everything. And when they ask for what they ask for, you simply say the math says this. And when they say, no, do it faster, I can't change math, yeah, and so it's really fun, because then it gets into the thing. Either then they reduce their ask or they give you more engineers, and until the math works, and so it's really fun, there's just no more arguments. Arguments go away. It just works out really well.

Tonya J. Long: 20:21

It's brilliant.

Mike Prince: 20:23

But these are systems that have been existent for a while and they service really well.

Tonya J. Long: 20:27

I'm making a segue for just a moment on servicing because, I've been talking on my podcast in the last month about a new program we have here called the Signal Society. So the Signal Society is a membership program for the radio. We're a community-sponsored radio station and we want to give a quick shout-out public service announcement to thank City Lights Books in San Francisco for supporting the Signal Society. And if you guys want to know more, visit the Landmark Store at City Lights Books or look on our website at kpcrorg slash join and you can see more about the Signal Society and the businesses who have signed up to be part of that. Coming back to you, Mike Prince, on Reset with Tonya we talked about your North Star and purpose and you are highly technical, more than I realized. But I want to believe that community is even more important for you than technology. Technology is an enabler to bring community together. Tell us about what you've been doing to create new communities with technical minds here in the Bay Area.

Mike Prince: 21:33

I think you're probably referring to the decelerator. I'm probably referring to the decelerator, and for the audience that does.

Tonya J. Long: 21:40

I'm a farm girl from Tennessee.

Mike Prince: 21:42

I grew up on a tobacco farm and I have an.

Tonya J. Long: 21:44

Airstream. So the fact that Mike is doing this, I am grateful. So that's my kind of lead in for you to tell your story.

Mike Prince: 21:53

And we cannot wait to get you on the ranch too. We've talked about this.

Tonya J. Long: 21:56

If I hadn't broken this arm, I would have been there last weekend, yeah.

Mike Prince: 22:00

I'm trying to think the genesis of this is. It's like we care about people. I mentioned a 20% thing. One of my rules is to spend 20% just giving the people to help founders do their job, and so in the course of this, I go to a lot of events. I went to an event over a year now and I met a guy named Daniel Theobald Okay, and he's part of of our group of friends, and it turns out he bought a ranch and the ranch what's the definition of a ranch Animals or landmaps?

Mike Prince: 22:27

This is fun. So this is an 1838 ranch, so it was Rancho San Gregorio. It was originally 17,000 acres.

Tonya J. Long: 22:38

I have some friends in San Ardo with 8,000. I can't imagine 17.

Mike Prince: 22:42

And over the years it got smaller and smaller as ranchers grew and developed. But he bought it nine years ago, now 127 acres, and he's a robotics guy, but he's been putting his heart into it for the last nine years, bringing it back to life.

Tonya J. Long: 22:58

Wow, what a love project, yeah, and it's traditional.

Mike Prince: 23:03

The ranch house itself is from part of it is from 1838, with still the redwood beams on the ground.

Tonya J. Long: 23:08

Oh amazing, it's neat stuff.

Mike Prince: 23:10

There's a full traditional barn there and everything. And what?

Tonya J. Long: 23:14

he, you say the word barn as if it's this anomaly. Well, we don't get enough of that around here, but you go out there. We don't.

Mike Prince: 23:23

And it's amazing, so he's been restoring it for this nine years now. Daniel and I started getting to know each other.

Tonya J. Long: 23:28

You met through networking events. To me that's a great call out because we do a lot of that and it changes our lives. It's not just about doing deals.

Mike Prince: 23:38

Yeah, so even reinforcing that more, is that the reason I love this? I'm so fortunate. I grew up around here and in the intervening years we've been a magnet for amazing people from all over the world. And these people, when they tell you their stories, they didn't just jump on a plane and come here. One of my friends, an Indian guy, said he'd go to the consulate, went in line for days. They get to the front line, they're all sorry. No more people this year Go back. The next year did it again. Oh my, and just that amount of effort to come around. These are top IIT people from India.

Tonya J. Long: 24:05

Yes, IIT, famous university system, it's amazing people come out of there yes.

Mike Prince: 24:11

A really talented person and we wouldn't even let him in the country, which is crazy, wow. But this event you're surrounded by these people and it's just always an interesting conversation. I love that. So this is one of the many events like that across Daniel. I got to know him over time and then we were batting back and forth online and I was like, yeah, you should do events at your ranch. He's like, yes, we should Mike organize it. And so I'm like, okay, okay, and so we started doing that. We started doing that about three months ago and we just did our third one just a week ago and we're figuring out the formula. But in the first weekend there, we did a Jeffersonian style dinner. Gotta be around the table. We're out in the garden, so I think it was almost two acres out there just big FOMO yeah, no, you absolutely need to go.

Mike Prince: 25:00

It's amazing. And he has a vegetable garden out there. It's over an acre, probably two acres of vegetable. We need more onions. Just go out to the garden and pick them. We need more kale, whatever it is, just go in the garden and pick it. He has, I think, almost thousands of chickens there, literally not exaggerating. Fresh chickens, fresh goose eggs, fresh duck eggs, everything it's amazing, but what we did is we started, we got some people together and tried, and in that first weekend we realized that what people really loved was being around the campfire, and that was just the magnet Everybody's around the campfire. And during that weekend somebody came up with I forget who it was right now said this is really more of a decelerator, and so we all get to sit down, it's totally stuck.

Mike Prince: 25:41

And so we just had because of the valley. Here we attracted amazing people, but they all sat around the campfire and had great conversations and great food and they relaxed. We have hikes we do around the ranch. We have a balcony up on top. He has a hillside, he's built a balcony up there and you watch the sunset go down and it's just the whole thing's very magical. He has a barn there and I'll tell you, the other side of it too is he's an MIT robotics guy and so his barn is full of manufacturing robots.

Tonya J. Long: 26:08

MIT, another very famous, very high-end intellectual school.

Mike Prince: 26:13

He's one of the very talented people from MIT, yes, and so he is building agricultural robots for sustainable farming and his whole farm is around sustainability, and so you talk to him and he knows every bit about that His robots. There he has a manufacturing company called, or a development company called, rotate.

Tonya J. Long: 26:30

Aid run by Katie and so she is developing these robots.

Mike Prince: 26:33

You go to the ranch. You see them on the ranch.

Tonya J. Long: 26:35

Nice. I've done wine tastings in Napa and asked about robots, and those people almost ushered me away from the tasting table.

Mike Prince: 26:43

Yeah.

Tonya J. Long: 26:43

Because I think it is the future of sustainable farming.

Mike Prince: 26:48

Yeah, it's many things you want to enable. The whole point of automation, whether it's robotic automation or knowledge automation or whatever it happens to be, is that we can only do as much as we can do with our hands and our mind, and we augment that with this additional automation, and our lives should be better, whatever that means.

Mike Prince: 27:05

And in their case they're saying they want to enable farmers anywhere in the world to have these robots which are easy to manufacture anywhere in the world and they work. As long as there's sunlight, there's solar on the top, they run around and do their stuff and this enables a farmer out there who couldn't produce as much to produce more.

Tonya J. Long: 27:18

And to plan and to be with his family and to have those sunset moments Exactly, I love it.

Tonya J. Long: 27:24

Now, these are my people. These are my people here in the Bay Area. I think I know all the different profiles of these many of them and, without speaking poorly of any of my people, I know a lot of people who've always lived in the city, who've always, it seems like, especially people that are younger than you and I are the same age, but people that are younger than us grew up in urban environments, academic, worked hard on academics and now have worked hard on producing things. These aren't people who work with their hands. What has it been like to pull dozens of engineer or engineering-oriented people onto a farm? What's it been like for them to get their hands dirty?

Mike Prince: 28:07

Everybody loves it. It's one of those things I'm not just saying they're running it. But every time people leave, they're so appreciative of it yeah. And it's getting to do things they haven't done before, Everything from small things like he has spinning wheels for doing clay kilns he has. Last time on the ranch we're doing horseback riding. We did the mill. He has a sawmill there, so we thought I posted the saw you milled redwood.

Tonya J. Long: 28:32

We're milling redwood planks out there yeah.

Mike Prince: 28:34

so we grabbed one of the tractors and ran around and got a huge chunk of a huge tree that had been down and we milled some planks out of it and it's none us, the other thing about the ranch is it's an experiential weekend. Yeah, it's a. The ranch way to do it is I always post a tentative schedule with the important word being tentative, and the idea is when the guests arrive, we do what the guests want to do.

Tonya J. Long: 28:54

I like how I do it with our guests.

Mike Prince: 28:55

Yeah, it's very dynamic and it works it magically for everybody. We didn't know. Also, for us, if you invite somebody to do something, you have to take care of them, and we didn't want to group those so large that we can't give the attention to everybody to make sure they're taken care of. We also didn't know how long people would come, whether they would camp, whether they'd stay up until Saturday or stay overnight.

Mike Prince: 29:14

All fun and also whether people who say they want to camp actually enjoy the camping part. So enjoyed the camping part. So all these things we didn't know. So we start off with 12, went to 20 the next time, went to 30 this last time and we're trying to figure out what the right size is there and also, you're going to have to throttle it at some point.

Mike Prince: 29:30

Exactly, and so we already have lots of inbound and we're trying to pick, also through our questionnaire, find the people that would have the right kind of energy for the ranch Cause we want to have one old want to nourish each other at the ranch. And yes, so we were at 30 this time and it seemed like a pretty good number. Maybe we'll stick around there. We'll see what happens.

Tonya J. Long: 29:49

It's fascinating. I have another question, but first a quick station ID. The bottom of the hour we are at Pirate Cat Radio, that's KPCR LP, 92.9 FM out of Los Gatos. We also have sister station KMRT LP, that's 101.9 out of sunny, fabulous wave-creating Santa Cruz. So back to the farm. You've got a lot of technically oriented people mindset at the very minimum, mindset at a farm. And how do you think that these physical analog experiences help us all navigate the digital transformation that's happening today? What do you think it does for people when they're in that experience?

Mike Prince: 30:36

I think I don't exactly know how to answer this. Two parts I'm thinking right now. One is the stepping back part, the decelerator part.

Tonya J. Long: 30:44

The decelerator part is huge, I agree.

Mike Prince: 30:45

Is that you step back and step away from everything and when we cook there. The first time we cooked, we cooked. He has a proper kitchen and all that kind of good stuff, but the second time we cooked over the fire, we're actually literally with cast iron pans in the fire. And Daniel loves cooking. It's like part of me. I always reflect I'm all. Are you sure? This is okay? He loves cooking for the large group. That's one of his joys, and so we're cooking literally in the fire, in the coals, with dinners wrapped in tinfoil and in the hot coals or cast iron pans, and it really connects you back with the old fashioned ways of doing things and also makes you step away from what you're working on. We do music there too. I didn't mention that. Oh, we're always. One of the things we push for is a good mix of artists there.

Tonya J. Long: 31:30

They sound like my Airstream rallies.

Mike Prince: 31:32

Yeah, except in a far more interesting environment.

Tonya J. Long: 31:36

Yeah, keep going.

Mike Prince: 31:38

And we just feel very fortunate that and it's these unexpected outcomes and Daniel plays guitar a little bit. He'll bring your guitar down and play, and then somebody else will be oh, I know a little bit, and they'll start playing and they're amazing. And then another woman who's I think it was a Persian woman last time she's all. Can I sing some traditional songs? Oh lovely, so just amazing singer. I did not expect that at all. No, Another time he flew in a yoga instructor from Cabas San Lucas and while she's there, she's beside teaching yoga lessons for folks. She's like oh yeah, I record. I'm an artist that records songs at a studio, or can you play for us? And she starts playing. The other people were playing covers, she was playing her original music, Fantastic voice, fantastic guitar, and so we did not expect that it's an entertainment session.

Tonya J. Long: 32:26

I don't want to cheapen it by saying that, yeah, it's just. It's just. People like experience.

Mike Prince: 32:30

It's like it was 200 years ago. We would go sit as a village around and have people perform music. This last time, a woman in cheleste came out. She's a she's an awesome pianist. So we went into the house and she played piano. She has an incredible voice and people are just sitting around enjoying her perform. And so it's each time. We don't know, it's just these amazing people show up. But then you're asking also with the digital stuff, is that it turns out you're all, and the point is you shouldn't be talking about what you're doing for a job. At some point you figure out what do you do and they're all. Oh, I am talking to the horse, right, it's like I get the story from how it works, like. So, besides reflecting back and stepping back and enjoying music, you also talk to amazing people out there, and so every time we go out, it's just, it's so nice this is coming in for me pretty hard, I have to say it.

Tonya J. Long: 33:24

I think a lot of times we act like we can't be our work selves. When we're doing personal things we say, oh, we shouldn't be, because there's an unwritten rule in the Airstream world.

Mike Prince: 33:35

You don't talk about career, you don't talk about work.

Tonya J. Long: 33:38

Yeah, but I'm leaning more into. If it's so a part of who you are and what you value, then I think that you are missing an opportunity to share with others what you cherish, and so I think that blend. I've never thought about work-life balance. I've always treated it like work-life integration and I think there is. We've all met the person who just can't stop talking about or stop selling you on the purchase or whatever.

Tonya J. Long: 34:11

But I think, especially where we're located, the people that we tend to be in this beautiful bubble with all have deep interests in what's happening in the world, and when you share what you're doing in the world and it happens to be quote work it gives them an opportunity to connect more deeply with you on what matters to them, I think it should be perfectly normal to be putting a bridle on a horse talking about the new meta AI layer in their rebands.

Mike Prince: 34:44

Yeah, I think there's different things going on, so one of the things is that we're passionate. Back to the North Star.

Tonya J. Long: 34:49

Yes.

Mike Prince: 34:50

The North Star and some set of people had these amazing North Stars, yeah, and they're passionate about it and you're able to meet these people who are agents of change and it's early in the game of some of this stuff. You have access to this early vision of how things are changing. One of the ways I like the way I went to, I'm sorry last time Mike Mabel's talk at Nick Larson's event.

Mike Prince: 35:12

And the way that Mike described it is there's an inflection in the world as a way, and it inflects a certain way and there's just massive opportunity in that. And by being around these people, we see that inflection early and that's amazing. And there's some set of people who are so amazingly passionate. I think you said a second ago, there's marketing people who are trying to get you to buy something, whatever. Okay, ignore those people for a second. There's other people who are sharing this inflection and sharing this passion, sharing this vision.

Tonya J. Long: 35:37

And they're experienced.

Mike Prince: 35:39

And we get to talk to them and start to understand how the world's going to go, which I think is an amazing thing. I think there's also there's a camaraderie part. I was in a bunch of events in December and the same thing as being a founder is hard.

Tonya J. Long: 35:52

It is.

Mike Prince: 35:52

And a bunch of people were going to events in December and they just simply wanted other founders around to commiserate with and to say it's I'm in the journey and you're in the journey, and let's just support each other a little bit, so I think there's a lot of that there as well.

Mike Prince: 36:10

And then there's like the change the world for the better We've talked about that a little bit is that with the technologies here with I mentioned with the digital dark ages before we've been in a period for maybe even 20 years now where the agents have been operating for companies on their behalf, with the people interest being far down the list, and we've been in this for a long time now.

Mike Prince: 36:29

And now we have an opportunity to come out of this into an enlightened period where we have technology that we know what's better for us, we have technology that will service us better, and we have an opportunity to figure out how we're going to make that evolve. And that's going to be amazing. So I want all of us to support ourselves in that journey. And it goes back like the stuff that I'm working on. Also is what I'm curious about. I'm doing a human to agent to human, and the whole point of separating the agent is no longer an agent working for the company, that's working on the company's behalf. It's that you have an agent working for you benevolently that'll look out for your best interests, and we're coming into the age of that Very excited about it.

Tonya J. Long: 37:05

Let's talk about work a little. I could like literally talk to you for hours about the ranch, about transformation, about people connecting over a multitude of things, but let's allow ourselves to talk a little about and you just gave a great segue into this agentic AI era that we're entering. A lot of people who are listening to us still don't really understand that and be undervaluing it, to call it hyper automation, but that might be one of the easier ways to describe it. Do you have a better way to describe?

Mike Prince: 37:38

Yeah, I think the challenge right now is that everybody has their own definition.

Tonya J. Long: 37:41

Oh, a hundred percent.

Mike Prince: 37:42

And so when you say agentic, every company now is now an agentic company, because you have to say that Six months ago it was an AI company and now it's an agentic company and the way I probably define the agentic stuff right now is that it's just like usually I do is I take the technology away? Let's skip technology.

Tonya J. Long: 37:59

Yeah, yeah, but what's the outcome? That's what it should be, what happens for me.

Mike Prince: 38:03

So the correlation is assistance. If I gave you 10 assistants, and they never slept, never took vacation never got upset because something was going on with their spouse and maybe it's 10 or 100 or 1,000, but I'm going to give you assistance now and they can do two kinds of things.

Mike Prince: 38:18

They can do things with their hands, and those are robot assistants. And they can do things with their brain or knowledge, and those are the traditional AI assistants. And so that's the world we're going into, and all of us will have all these assistants doing stuff for us. And the way I visualize it is it's like a sea. So you're sitting here with a sea of assistants running around below you and the other person next to you has a sea of them. Every business has a sea of them, and it's this huge sea, and these pieces of intelligence will then interact with another one to get stuff done. And I would call that transaction, not business-wise, not dollars. The thing is, what I'm really curious about right now is that I want to improve the human condition, and one of the ways I think about this is I like the Star Trek Vulcan saying which is live long and prosper.

Tonya J. Long: 39:05

Oh yeah, you do.

Mike Prince: 39:05

That's in a lot of your LinkedIn posts, exactly, and so I think that really is a good motivation for all of us right now. Living long is the Harvard study.

Tonya J. Long: 39:15

Yes.

Mike Prince: 39:15

The Harvard study said, the number one indicator of your longevity is the circle of people you surround yourself with. And so we, as humans, don't do a good job of this. We have so many biases that work against us, and the prosper is the same thing. But for business, whoever you decide to do business with has an enormous impact on how well your life goes. And so in the old days, meaning, like now still, is that I still rely on my human qualities to find these people, to search out these people, to engage these folks, and in the near future, I will delegate that down to an agent which is just really good at it, and it will find those people for my personal life, it will find those people for my business life and it'll get me into the same room and the same conversation.

Mike Prince: 39:58

I think at the very beginning we talked about is, I think, in real life is amazingly important. And when I look at this automation, if I'm going to have eight hours of my day and let's say six hours was doing work and I had two hours disposable for whatever happens to me, and I can do two hours in real life, if I can shift those four hours down to an agent which happens in one second. Now you've given me six hours to spend with people in real life and enjoy the company of other people, and so I think that's the future we're moving towards.

Tonya J. Long: 40:23

You've described it beautifully and people who are listening that aren't familiar with it might be a little frightened Thinking about giving over authority discernment to something else, not some other human. You might abdicate decisions to a spouse or a partner as an adult, but to give it over to a digital decision maker is hard. One of the things that I think you're working on is trust yeah. Trust protocols inside the technology yeah. Why is trust such a critical piece with what we're moving toward?

Mike Prince: 40:58

Yeah, I heard a description. I can't remember exactly right now but in order to transact business, you must trust the other party, whether it's a bank, whether it's a person, whether it's anything. And it seems obvious. But it's not baked into so many things Like you. Look at the AOA protocol right now from Google. It doesn't have authentication built in. It delegates that to a third party. It says just make it happen, kind of thing.

Mike Prince: 41:19

And so there's things it says I'm a layer below this. Somebody else will figure it out and they're doing some work around it, but it's very light right now and so one of the things I'm very interested in is making sure that we can trust, and one of the things I talk about this is an example I give quite a bit is when I go to a conference I ask the speaker I'm all literally right now, I'm in this room and you're in this room how does my agent find your agent prove they are who each other and transact something and, for example, a speaker gets swamped at the end. There's a few people you should talk to. You should really let your agents figure this out and say by the way, you have coffee with four people this afternoon and it just magically happened, but our agents have to find each other, and when I ask them these questions, they draw a blank because they're all.

Mike Prince: 42:01

I don't know how my agent would find your agent now I don't authenticate, and so that's what we're working on protocols for that, and so there's a specification. What I did is I started working on this about six months ago and I just did everything from scratch. I've done blockchain companies in the past. I've done cryptography for the armed forces. I've done a bunch of stuff. So, I knew roughly how to wire it together and I did scratch and then I stepped back and said somebody's already done this.

Tonya J. Long: 42:31

So I looked around and it turns out there's the decentralized ID protocol. It's a W3 spec. It was funded by the Department of Homeland Security. We have it.

Mike Prince: 42:35

We've had it for three years now, and so it has this. One of the structures in there is service, but it really means agents, and so now what I can do is I can take this structure and say I'm not going to represent actually an agent with, I'm going to represent a person, represent Tonya, and now you have this nice structure so I can, you can, pass around this ID. It's a unique ID globally and I can use the ID to resolve for this big structure and tells me who your agents are. Now, the second thing that happens in this is that with this ID, now, once you have an ID that represents you, we do magical stuff.

Mike Prince: 43:02

So another thing I'm working on is presence engines. The presence is where are you? But presence is more than that. Presence isn't that you and I are here right now or that you're in downtown las gatos or whatever it is. It's also that tomorrow you'll be an event in the city and next week you'll be in and then context across those multiple environments all that, yes, and so now that we have that, now we can basically say, oh interesting, this is one of my dreams.

Mike Prince: 43:22

I presented this back in November of last year, saying that your phone has a GPU that does nothing most of the time, and AI loves GPUs, and so, with ID, now what we can do is when you go to sleep at night, you will plug your phone in and the number one promise from Apple or whoever you have it did charge me up Boom.

Tonya J. Long: 43:39

So now you're charged up. That's all you expect while you're asleep.

Mike Prince: 43:41

Now you're charged up and now you have the rest of the night. You have seven hours that your phone's just doing nothing.

Tonya J. Long: 43:46

Not considered. Yeah, I love that you're thinking about that and we go back to the agent stuff.

Mike Prince: 43:51

Every time before it's like your assistant. Your phone is acting as one of those assistants. Now and now what happens is your phone wakes up and says, huh, who will I be around in the next several weeks? Tell me everybody. And you go to a presence engine. It tells everybody and now, with that presence engine there, all those IDs flow in. It starts doing all these conversations all night long it talks to everybody and in the morning you wake up.

Tonya J. Long: 44:14

Everybody being other digital, the other digital agents, exactly.

Mike Prince: 44:17

So now it's your agent on your behalf talking to their agent on their behalf and you're seeing if there's a synergy. This is where the fun stuff beside the obvious matching, which is non-AI once you get past those guards then actually wow, this is a good candidate. Let's actually talk to them and get to know them and then it gets really interesting. What happens? Two things. In the morning, when you wake up, your phone says guess what? I found some people, and the neat thing about it is it might not be for even an event. He says you want to get coffee with them, you want to get dinner with them. And that's where I think our lives are moving towards.

Tonya J. Long: 44:47

is this curated existence where it's a benevolent, it's in your interest.

Mike Prince: 44:52

Yes, and it knows what's best for you. And what's best for you is not having 20 coffees a week, having four. I'm going to find those four of the best coffees, and so I think that's the really amazing future we have ahead of us.

Tonya J. Long: 45:08

I love it. I love it. I'm going to do a very hopefully quick station identifier for KPCR 92.9 FM in Los Gatos and KMRT 101.9 FM out of Santa Cruz, and I want to mention that we are a voice for independent music, local stories and real-time emergency updates and thank goodness I've never been on air when it's been time for an emergency update. We do those as well. Without public funding, community radio faces rising costs and fewer ways to serve, so your donation today helps keep us strong, independent and on the air when it matters most, like the conversations I'm having with Mike Prince. So if you're interested in supporting Pirate Cat Radio, just go to visit sorry, just go to donatekpcrorg. Having all these agents doing the work amongst themselves and you waking up to a menu of opportunities to see people, how do you think we will maintain human connections with AI as?

Mike Prince: 46:09

it becomes more prevalent. This is a great topic. This is an amazing one. Have you played with Omi yet?

Tonya J. Long: 46:14

No, I saw it, but I have not. I've not brought it in. It looks too good to be true. On the Instagram ad.

Mike Prince: 46:22

Very neat. And then, with all shout out to Meta and their glasses and all this tech is that we sometimes don't do the best job for ourselves. And we it's like the way we treat people in relationships, the way we talk to them the way we act, the way we show up. It's in everything from our business, to our friendships, to dating. I was working on a service last year, a year and a half ago. I called it Ready to Date.

Mike Prince: 46:49

And it says that people fail in dating because they're not ready and they need to spend some them time. I'm 100% with you, yep, and figure out the framework for what to bring to the table, and so we all need to do a better job. We're not perfect, and I think it's what you said before is the growth mindset and this goes back to the enlightenment we were talking about too Is that some set of us will realize that we're not perfect and we'll adopt the growth mindset and we'll leverage tools.

Mike Prince: 47:15

And some of these tools will be AI and agents, and so I brought it. Omi is not going to go.

Tonya J. Long: 47:23

So, omi, what it does, is it?

Mike Prince: 47:23

records all the conversations, and what it does is. It records all the conversations, yes, and what it does is. Then it attributes who's saying what yeah, and then it has what they call apps and they can analyze the conversations and give feedback and it's all these neat things. And so you take that plus everything else. We have all the communication.

Tonya J. Long: 47:35

So it's insights not just into what's happening but how you're interacting in the situation, Like one of their apps is called.

Mike Prince: 47:41

Girlfriend Keeper. It's like if you're not treating your girlfriend, do these things to be a better boyfriend.

Tonya J. Long: 47:46

Wow.

Mike Prince: 47:46

And they have hundreds and hundreds of apps and, if we look, none of these are perfect right now, but we're moving in that direction of being better, and so the notion is. But also it's not just the conversations, it's. We have my watch, my watch measures my heart rate and all this bunch of feedback, and so also I've accessed your communications. I know who talked to, I know who called you, and intelligence can look through your day and make heads and tails of stuff, and when you talk to that person, you get stressed, your voice elevated, maybe talk to them less. That's one thing, fair, yeah. And then this other person they're actually really good and they maybe you actually stopped your conversation early. You should really reach out to them and so it can help you massage your life towards a really good outcome.

Mike Prince: 48:32

Another one I'm hearing is what is it? It's for seeing people as good. I think we agreed on that earlier in real life, and people struggle with getting these things moving during the week. So I'm talking about tools right now, saying saying I'm going to know your week, I'm going to somehow figure out what is good for you between you and me, kind of thing, and then I will proactively try to get those to happen, whatever that means. And one of the things we look at it, I think you mentioned before, is like utility, and if utility is if I take it away, there's pain If I take away your electricity or the gas at your house, whatever. And so I think that at some point these tools and this answers a question you had earlier, which was who will use this, who will not use it, who will use technology and you will see people who are using this utility like electricity, except it's actually a life improvement thing and after a week of this, if you take it away from them, I take your phone away and you feel listless because you're all.

Mike Prince: 49:24

Oh my God, it was giving me. It was. I was meeting these amazing people, I was eating in amazing places, I was getting the rest I needed, I gained the sleep I needed. It told me, it guided me on how much sleep to get and exercise and everything, and you just live a better life.

Tonya J. Long: 49:38

I'm sure there are people who are listening who are like I will never, but actually what we're finding? I'm a type one diabetic and I'm pretty out about it, and my endocrinologist at Stanford. We don't talk about my illness, we talk about like technology around it.

Tonya J. Long: 49:54

Two type A women just every time I visit with her. That's what we talk about, but what they're finding at Stanford is that patients will talk to their digital tools easier than they'll talk to their doctors. They feel judgment when they talk to people, but if your phone says your blood sugar spiked after breakfast this morning, so whatever you ate tomorrow, consider a different path.

Tonya J. Long: 50:17

They're finding that quote treatment, when it's recommended by a phone, is better received, and that patients are more willing to be more forthcoming with information because they won't feel judged by their devices. So I think that we are gravitating, as mankind, toward seeing tools for what tools bring value for.

Mike Prince: 50:39

Well, they're also better.

Tonya J. Long: 50:40

There's some studies earlier last year, which is saying like.

Mike Prince: 50:42

Two of the questions were if you have a diagnosis for something not great like cancer, would you rather have a computer, tell you, or a doctor tell you? And the study came out and said the computer, because the computer doesn't have bad days.

Tonya J. Long: 50:54

That's right.

Mike Prince: 50:55

And being grumpy with you when you're heartbroken it can know. It can literally, if you let it, it can know you and what language works best for you to describe this thing. It will have infinite patience to walk through and talk to you as long as you want to. When you wake up at two in the morning and are stressed out, it's there for you again. It's just like it's better at that, and so we're finding we're going to move towards that direction.

Tonya J. Long: 51:16

I think it's going to be more natural, dare I say, than at first blush. When people look at it and go no never, but we're going to find how it simplifies and enhances and we're going to migrate there.

Mike Prince: 51:28

It's not for everybody. Some people start and then, over time, more and more people get on board.

Tonya J. Long: 51:32

My uncle Ronnie uses Alexa like a madman, I bought them the first hockey puck like eight or ten years ago and he would speak so slowly. People in Tennessee right now are laughing. But he would speak so slowly. Alexa would butt in and try to not answer. He would get so frustrated. But now he uses that thing for the weather, for timers, all of the simple things that still, and he loves it. And I don't even know that he carries a smartphone.

Mike Prince: 51:58

Yeah, but it's interesting when it goes to the more complex interactions, where there's like theoristic, like medical. You're finding out with doctors. Right now people chat GPT before they get there. They show up with a full list and they're asking the doctor all these questions.

Tonya J. Long: 52:09

And the next step on that is going to be chat, gpt, answering those questions and then taking conclusions to the doctor to validate.

Mike Prince: 52:17

We're already there. Yeah, one of the one of the groups I was talking to. I think they're installed 2,500 locations, 2,500 hospitals in the U. They have MRI hooked to AI and their problem statement was that you've had a head injury or some bad accident and you show up at the hospital, we need to treat you.

Mike Prince: 52:32

If we treat you with medication in five minutes, life's going to be okay. If we wait 30 minutes and if they had a human process, that it's not going to change. The outcomes are much, much worse, and this is one of the things where just a human couldn't even do it. They give it an output in a few minutes and you get life-saving treatment. So I feel like that's already happening now.

Tonya J. Long: 52:48

Yeah, I love it. I hate that we're almost out of time and I have some lightning round questions for you.

Mike Prince: 52:54

You're fun.

Tonya J. Long: 52:54

Okay, beautiful, let's do it so let's spend our last five minutes with these fairly quick answer questions.

Mike Prince: 52:59

Unfortunately I'm complex, so I ask complicated questions.

Tonya J. Long: 53:04

What's the most important question? We are not asking about AI.

Mike Prince: 53:14

Oh God, sorry, I think we're not asking about AI. I don't know there's so many I think this goes back to. It'll warm you up better. I didn't prove this, sorry. I think the dystopian stuff is. One of these things Is that things are going to change massively in the next two years, like my guess is the next election cycle in California, and that we're going to have. What I say is, the trend lines will be established well before the election. All the humans are going to have very strong opinions at that point and the election will be decided around that.

Tonya J. Long: 53:42

Yeah, yeah. I think social policy is going to be the big shift. The technology, to me, is easy. It's just growing and how and what we're capable of doing. But the social policy change and how we interact is those are. That's the direction for the questions that we will get to. We have to. So, yeah, okay. So what human skill will be most valuable when AI agents are handling our transactions?

Mike Prince: 54:09

Yeah, I think it's. What we talked about earlier was domain expertise.

Tonya J. Long: 54:13

Thank you. That is that perfect? That is a perfect answer. All right, so how do you personally stay human while building AI systems? The ranch.

Mike Prince: 54:25

I do two things. I meditate, but I don't meditate sitting on a carpet. I garden, I do things called vigorous gardening. So I don't go to a gym, I just go into the yard and do work. But in the course of doing these things I reflect the entire time and I come away from gardening knowing what I want to do in business next, away from gardening knowing what I want to do in business next.

Tonya J. Long: 54:46

You're good at this. How has community shaped your approach to innovation?

Mike Prince: 54:52

I think there's probably two directions on that. One One is a care for community, so I simply care about people. I want people to be better, whatever that means, and so a lot of what I work on if it provides good value to those folks, I'm 100% for it. And then the second part is how has community helped me further my goals? And like we were talking before is we have a fantastic community area here, so I try to spend enough time going to events.

Mike Prince: 55:19

I try to spend enough time getting to know the people at the events, and I'm also doing more LinkedIn these days, too, to try to, because it's fun. I'm also doing more LinkedIn these days, too, to try to, because it's fun. I'm getting outreach. I got any outreach from a guy. I talked to 10 years ago Wow From another company.

Tonya J. Long: 55:30

Yeah, yeah.

Mike Prince: 55:30

And he's he'd been following me on LinkedIn and he wants to do some work now too, so I have all these inbound. People have been tracking me. Linkedin, thankfully, draws them in and helps us get stuff done together.

Tonya J. Long: 55:40

We're able to show up for people we don't even know are watching. That is. A lot of people give grief to LinkedIn, but I think it is a different way for us to be accessible, and so that's a great story about the guy you worked with 10 years ago. So what is your favorite moment from the ranch weekends so far?

Mike Prince: 56:00

Probably the sawmill, because that was totally unexpected. It started off by a guy named Evan who's working at the ranch there and it's all community too. It's like they needed a tractor. So Evan just went and bought a tractor, brought a brand new tractor back just to help. He's a volunteer there, he's all good to ride the tractor. So we went out. We got to see everything he's building. He's all. Have you milled logs before?

Tonya J. Long: 56:22

No milled logs before no, let's go over there. We've got a sawmill.

Mike Prince: 56:25

And we just fired it up and two people went and made wood planks. That was unexpected.

Tonya J. Long: 56:35

I didn't expect that at all. I love that there's this very analog memory that you cherish, because you don't get to do that just any old day. That happened. So with that, the last question I have you and I mentioned this earlier you are uniquely bridging the analog to the digital. You tremendously value both your analog and your digital life. More people are going to have to make that bridge from the analog into more of the digital. What would you want people to remember about how to navigate that bridge?

Mike Prince: 57:05

I think it's what we talked about before. It's embracing change.

Tonya J. Long: 57:08

Yeah, don't be scared of change Good.

Mike Prince: 57:10

I think it's change will give you more time back.

Tonya J. Long: 57:13

Yes, when we automate it correctly.

Mike Prince: 57:14

Yes, it's going to get us out. God. What is it? Shinrin-yoku, remember this.

Tonya J. Long: 57:19

Yes, that.

Mike Prince: 57:20

Okay, and so it's Japanese for forest bathing. Yes, and we need nature. We do need nature. And so if we embrace technology in the correct way having it being benevolent to us. It'll give us more time to be human and to talk to each other in real life and to go out to nature.

Tonya J. Long: 57:35

I would add I think you said it in your way. But I would add, none of us are doing this alone. So when any of those elements present you with pause, connect with other people to get to help you in that journey across the bridge. If the technology is challenging, if the community part is challenging, if the nature part isn't something you know how to do.

Tonya J. Long: 57:57

there's so many ways that you can reach out and build your life. There are people there for you. Yeah, I love it. We're going to do this again. I commit to you, I will bring. Bella to the ranch and we will host a podcast with you and Daniel from the ranch and I think we will have an amazing amount of fun. So I look forward to that.

Mike Prince: 58:16

That'd be fantastic, wonderful. Thank you so much.

Tonya J. Long: 58:19

Thank you. So people are going to listen to this and they're going to be like I have to know this guy. I want to follow this guy. I want to know what he's working on and when the next ranch trip is. So how is the best way for them to be in touch with the work that you're doing?

Mike Prince: 58:32

LinkedIn. I love it, or just Mike Prince at LinkedIn.

Tonya J. Long: 58:35

We can probably share a link to that one.

Mike Prince: 58:36

Yes, and then I have another, I have a blog, oh, Good.

Tonya J. Long: 58:41

So, for those who are interested in the more technical aspects, I'm sure there's public and community aspects that you write about, because you can't just be all technical these days. You have to be considering how the impact on people falls. Yep, 100%, deeply communicate with Mike Prince. So we are signing off today from Reset with Tonya here at KPCR LP 92.9 in Los Gatos and Sister Station KMRT LP 101.9 in lovely Santa Cruz. Everyone, Mike, thank you.

Mike Prince: 59:18

Thank you.

Tonya J. Long: 59:19

I have adored this. Thank you so much, everyone. Have a wonderful day and we will see you next Thursday at 11 am. Take care.