- Waziri Garuba
SPEAKERS
Will Bachman, Waziri Garuba
Will Bachman 00:02
Hello and welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Waziri Garuba, based in Austin, Texas. Waz, welcome to the show.
Waziri Garuba 00:14
Thank you very much. Glad to be here, Will.
Will Bachman 00:16
So, Waz, I know that you’re doing a ton of work related to AI. You’re kind of a power user of a lot of different AI tools. You’ve presented on several cases, led sessions for the Umbrex community and Veritux community, and today you’ve kindly offered to or agreed to show me how you have been using AI agents, and I know that you’ve built a whole kind of tool on top of Innate In that you refer to as G.R.I.O.T. And let’s show it to me. And for listeners, we are going to put a video version of this on the Umbrex website. So if you’re listening on the podcast platforms, you’ll have the audio version. But in the show notes, we’ll include a link where you can go to the permalink for this and see some screenshots, as well as we’ll have the link to go and see the video, which will be just hosted on the Umbrex website. Okay, Waz. So, tell me a bit about what you’ve built here and how you’re automating a lot of aspects of your of your life and practice.
Waziri Garuba 01:28
Absolutely, yeah. So I think I’ll start. The inspiration for me was, you know, Siri actually utilizing Siri and just kind of witnessing all of the limits with all the things that Siri could not do so. I believe I’m sharing my screen. Now we
Will Bachman 01:43
are. Now we are. Okay.
Waziri Garuba 01:45
Excellent. So what happened was in the process of witnessing that I I thought how could this be more useful and of course I’m a Marvel fan so Iron Man’s Tony Stark came to mind. I dug a bit deeper and actually realized that one of my favorite characters, Black Panther used a character called G.R.I.O.T, and so I kind of built my own G.R.I.O.T, which, as I’m going to show you here, is really a persona that stretches across different platforms. Those four platforms are N8n.io,
Waziri Garuba 02:19
11 Labs, which gives G.R.I.O.T the personality and the voice and a lot of the things that you encounter, and then there’s Vercel, which is where all the things tie together, and then finally there’s the LLM of choice. I use Claude, and so what you’re looking at here is essentially G.R.I.O.T’s persona written out, and this enables the voice that G.R.I.O.T ultimately kind of expresses, and so there’s some instructions here. The most important instruction is anything that you can’t do or think through, route to NADN. So just imagine that the way Siri, you speak to Siri, and she doesn’t know who you are. You’re just a generic person. When you say route to NAN, what happens is, and I think I’ll show you when we jump into G.R.I.O.T.
Waziri Garuba 03:08
This brain is essentially like the main dashboard, and when you hear about agentic and agentic workflow, you’re really looking at an agentic workflow here. Whenever you speak to the platform, that being G.R.I.O.T, whether it be on your phone, on a screen, you’re really just sending ones and zeros, right? Because all the data-that’s ultimately what it is-to a webhook, right? And that webhook is sitting right here, and what it does is it takes that data in and it assesses-is this a question? So as you could see here, I had asked, when is the next game between the Knicks and the Spurs, and also who is playing in the World Cup tonight. So this is a question I’d asked a while back. I have it pinned, and what happens is very logically no different than your email. That information gets sorted into is this a question? Classify it, and classify it in one of four ways. It’s direct. Its tools. Its schedule is complex, and based on its classification, it winds up here, which is in the real first agent. And this agent’s entire task. This is Rio on the back end. It’s find the tool that will help us resolve this. So I like to think about it like a nervous system, right? You hear a message, “Hey, it’s time to eat, and your brain doesn’t like take your face and shove it in the food. It sends a message to the part that’s best equipped to get the food in your mouth, and that’s what this agent does. It identifies the best tool, and it looks a little hairy, but as you can see here the beauty of agents and agentic is that they’re. I won’t say it’s unlimited. I hate that word, but there’s a lot of things one agent can orchestrate. Let’s let’s put it that way, because what you will see and you’ll hear terms like MCP and you know APIs and webhooks.
Waziri Garuba 05:00
I can have this agent talk to any of many platforms. It can talk to Airtable. It can talk to Notion. It could talk to Monday. So all of the different subscriptions I have, and all the different kind of places where my data is kept, I have an agent that is designed to talk to that platform and do whatever it is I need. So I want to pause there because it’s people see this and go, “Whoa, that looks scary. But it’s again that analogy of like your brain knows that if you need to walk, it’s going to use your feet, and if you need to, you know, do something with your hands, you know, you’ll need your thumb and your finger, and that’s what this is really like illustrating.
Will Bachman 05:43
Okay, so I’m new to N8N. Tell us, just help us, help me understand what I’m looking at here. And you know, is everything N8N, or are some of these agents like do they kind of live elsewhere and they’re just referenced here? Explain to me the different systems you have connected to one another. And
Waziri Garuba 06:09
absolutely, what I think I’ll do is let me show you the first thing that I built, and I literally remember the first tool I built was an auto email response maker, so I’m gonna find it, and I think it’s right here. Now, to really walk you through what agent is, right? Let’s just move up here. If you want something to happen out in the internet world, yeah, you need to open up a port that allows you to see what’s happening. And so in this case, let’s just kind of build it. I want to have, I want to keep an eye on my emails, right? I want to know what’s going on in my emails, and so I want to. Let me see if I can find a trigger. This is a. This is actually trigger. So this is a Gmail trigger. What I did first was I want to be able to have emails that come in every minute get reviewed and go through a process. So anything is a platform where you say I want to look at what’s happening in my Google Sheets or on my Amazon platform. That’s what this platform is for. In this case, it’s Gmail. But I could also say any of these apps that you’re going to see here, right? You could say in Amazon, right, or in Google, I want to have a sense of what’s happening in Google Sheets or Google Drive. This is its superpower. This is what makes Zapier and a lot of these tools powerful. Is that they’re already integrated, and so there’s probably tools you use, HubSpot or other, where you want something to happen without you having to turn on and turn off or act, and so this allows you to authenticate so that access to that thing is essentially given to you here. And when you start thinking about the fact that there’s hundreds of applications out there, it starts to follow a bit of like the Moore’s law. Like the more things you have access to, the more you can do between them, and take yourself out of the mix. So, does that make sense?
Will Bachman 08:11
Okay.
Waziri Garuba 08:12
Yeah. So in this case, I set up the first one that said you have access to my Gmail. Every minute that a message is received in my inbox and is unread. I want you to capture it and I want to look at it, right? And so that’s what this does. This is essentially on and it’s active. When you see it in published mode, it’s active and it’s watching what’s going on. Now, when that email comes in, what it’s going to do is it’s going to run through this agent. And agents are prompt driven, so when we think about people sitting down and writing a prompt and being impressed at the outcome, this is like a 24/7 prompt, and so it’s sitting there and it takes that email and it says, review the email, and draft a response in my name. Here’s some examples, or in my style of writing, here’s some examples, and here’s what I want you to do. I want you to draft a response to that to the email using these parameters: the subject, who it’s from, the message, etc. Now, if this email is not worth responding to, just say don’t. No response necessary. Now, this was my very first one, so it wasn’t like phenomenal, but it worked. I also said create a spreadsheet so I can log exactly, you know whatever it is response I gave, so I could kind of error check, and then finally create a draft and put that draft in my inbox. And so what this did was, I’ll I’ll show you how it’s evolved. But this thing essentially saved me a lot of time. This was the first real time saver because a lot of emails that like I didn’t need to pay attention to, I’d open up and it would just say no response necessary, no response necessary. I’d delete those, and then some emails that I wanted to respond to, the draft would be done, and I could copy and paste it and just plop it in there and send it, and so it started acting as my first kind of introduction to. Automations and we understand. Okay, the information comes in here. Now my job is to modify it, and I do that with prompts. I tell it what to do. I tell it, hey, if you get this kind of email, junk it because it has these words. And so what has happened over time has been this evolution to let me see if I can find it here. This is my current email auto response. It’s a little bit more complicated, but what it does now is it reads contacts. So I have a contact map. If if somebody’s already approved in my contact map, the email is going to go through. Otherwise, it’s going to kind of flag it, and it’s just constantly logging. Right? It knows who it should respond to. It shouldn’t. It also has a shadow log, but it’s regularly helping me manage my inbox. If it’s shadow mode, it logs it. If not, as you can see here, is the agent. It classifies it, labels it, organizes it for me. So you want to start small with these tools. I started with that simple automation, but over the years, I’ve gotten to the point where like my inbox is kind of the easiest part of my day. Right, things are auto drafted, they’re ready. But this platform gives me access to Notion, Gmail, Outlook, all of them. So now they can all play well together in the sandbox.
Will Bachman 11:26
Okay. So these these sort of connections to your Gmail or to the Google Sheets, those are sort of existing in this innate environment, and you connect them and plug them together. Yeah.
Waziri Garuba 11:40
Correct. And then, and
Will Bachman 11:42
then some of them plug into one of the dozens of tools that you have login for, and then they can go and they can do some action on that site.
Waziri Garuba 11:52
Yes, exactly, exactly. So you’ve got this first online layer. I will say that you know G.R.I.O.T. When you look at G.R.I.O.T, you can see that I’m talking to him. He’s got a brain online, but that’s where Claude Code really makes it way more powerful. So now we’re going to jump into this. Is not G.R.I.O.T online. This is G.R.I.O.T in my personal life. I actually have a story on my website. This. These are my field notes. This is just how I like log things that are happening that are interesting in my life. I call it Creo in the garage. I got like you know some blood work done, and the reports that came in were a bit concerning. So I realized, okay, I need to keep a better track on my health, and I also want to set some goals. Right before I hit 50, I want to you know be able to run X amount of miles in this time and so on and so forth. So what I did was I took all that information and I put it in Notion, right? So in my Notion there is a database that allows me to kind of just check in on my health, right? Like my health report, and G.R.I.O.T also has access to that database. So what’s good about it is that because he understands quite a bit about me and my health goals, right? And all this information is like in my health dashboard. I can say to G.R.I.O.T, like at the gym, “Hey, G.R.I.O.T, look at my reports and design a workout for me for Saturday morning, and he comes in, understands, you know, realizes where my goals are, and literally puts them on my calendar, like puts the workout on my calendar for me, and then checks in to see if I got it done. So this is what my calendar works out like looks like you can see that you know I had a workout on Tuesday that involved running and stretching. I did not. I skipped my workout on Wednesday, and today I’ve got a workout. I’ll probably have to get to it later, but involves a run, doing some Bulgarian split squats, and then push-ups. Right, stuff that’s age appropriate, but it literally is again me being like, “Ooh, I need to move that workout. And because G.R.I.O.T is again plugged into my calendar, there’s this ability for it to take things that I’m doing on a terminal and communicate them. Right, put it on the calendar, send me an email reminder and check in these other areas that you’re connected to, such that my health matters are being addressed. And so, any one of the databases that you plug into Notion, or that are on your hard drive, become sources of insight that your agents can use to help you with your kids, right? In one case, my son is now building video games using Claude, and he’s always telling me his ideas. So we built him a game site, and his friends are playing the games. All of this with Claude, right? But it’s me saying. Hey G.R.I.O.T, how do we make this work? And it’s literally they’re sitting talking with my son about how to develop his own HTML three files and then have Claude spin them up on Vercel. He doesn’t understand a lot of it, but he knows how to give me the HTML three file, right? He knows how to make it. So this is where it’s making personal life a little bit easier by allowing me to hand off these types of tasks and challenges.
Will Bachman 15:27
That’s pretty cool. Maybe we could go back to that innate in overview of G.R.I.O.T with the with the map, and we can kind of zoom around a bit on the map. So so we start. Let’s start on the very left. So there’s some kind of input that sort of starts it on the on the very left hand side, and is it kicked off by you, you know, speaking to it, or is it also have things that are just continually running?
Waziri Garuba 15:55
Yes, great question. So that’s a great one. So this is very, I’d say reactive, right? So this one is kicked off by me sending a message in, and then it does what it does, right? But let me see if I can find an old one. I’ll see if I can find a kind of simpler one. So this one has an execution, and you might-it’s not showing any of them, so in these cases or in with this one that’s live, yes, a message comes in and that message actually gets kind of driven through the process. So let’s go ahead and just we’ll run it, right? So let’s let’s actually send a message the way I would imagine that I was on writing this. So this is the story. It would take whatever I said. Let’s ask it a question. What is the weather going to be in Austin, Texas today? Right tomorrow. Can you put a calendar event on my calendar tomorrow from 12 p.m. to 1230 p.m. saying run? So I’m asking it two things here, and what we’re going to do is we’re going to walk it down the chain so you can see every single step. So imagine I ask those two questions as I’m walking down the street. What NADN does that’s really great is you see it. It takes that information. Now I’m going to run it. Any day now.
Will Bachman 17:39
Okay. Now would you normally input the query by typing in the HTML there, or would you speak it into your phone?
Waziri Garuba 17:48
I would usually speak it into my phone, but just because we’re here, it’s kind of awkward. So let’s see if that goes through. So let’s just see. So you can see that that query just came through here. So this this basically is saying was that a question or not? And if it is a question, then it’s not going to get dumped. And here it’s going to classify the question that I just asked. So every time I hit execute, imagine that it kind of went on. Here, what it’s saying is this was a text, so it recognized that I typed that in. And to show you what G.R.I.O.T looks like, this is G.R.I.O.T. I can also type in a question here, and you’ll see that end. So I can talk to it or type in a question. So now imagine whatever whatever I talked it in, it tells me that it’s typed, and it also tells me this is one that requires tools. Remember what I said about complex? No, there’s probably a tool for this. So we’re gonna move it down the line, and say, okay, we know that it’s one of these things. So when you execute this step, you’re gonna see it. It dumped. It moved it down here to asking if it’s a schedule. It’s not a schedule matter. So we execute again. It’s going to move it down here to tools. And once we execute it here, it’s going to move it into the brain. So you see that these measures are again because I could say I could cough, and it’ll be like, “Is this a query? No, and it dumps it, so it doesn’t start working on it. But if I ask a question that it can classify, it knows that sometimes the questions are about what’s on my schedule or what am I supposed to do, and it doesn’t send that to tools. It sends that to my calendar. But if I’m like, I need you to buy that building, that’s a complex question. It, you know, I don’t know if we’re using this tool. Like, what does he mean by this question? So that gets sent to, you know, you’ve heard of Open Claw. That gets handed off to a really smart system that can figure it out on its own. Because I already know what I generally, generally want. I have all tools aligned to make sense of it. So it’s going. Send it here now, and as you’ll see, this key agent is your job is just to find the right tool, right? What is the tool that can help resolve this issue? So now, when I hit execute step, two things happen. One is now it’s thinking, it’s using Claude, right? Claude 4.6 and saying, what’s the best tool for this? And as you can see, it’s working through it. It’s gone to Tavali. All right, and in Tabli, it’s asked the question. And Tavoli’s like, here, Austin, Texas. There’s all what
Will Bachman 20:36
is what is Tavoli?
Waziri Garuba 20:38
Tabli’s like Perplexity or Google. It’s like a search kind of tool that is great for developers because they don’t like bop you over the head for every search. It’s pretty affordable, but it’s like an AI-driven search kind of thing. So as you can see, I asked that question, and what my agent did was it turned on the LLM engine. I’m going to burn some of your credit swoz. That’s okay. It logged a little bit in memory for me, and then it went out and found the tools. and And the two things it did was it used to have to answer the first question, and then it went to my calendar agent. And I’ll show you, right, what it did. It went to my calendar agent and said, “Create a calendar event on august 1 from 12 p.m. to 1230 to the run, and it sent it to the agent, and the agent said the calendar event title run has been created. If you’d like to add attendees or make any changes, let me know. So now I’m going to jump into why you see. Like remember, I said like the brain. Imagine these are all appendages. Now I want to show you the fingers, right? Because what happened when it sent that when that agent sent it off to that calendar. Agent was this. Let me find my.
Will Bachman 21:46
Yeah. Can we maybe just we back up a step? Can we yeah look at the overall that that graph again that map of all the go back to that this one yeah let’s let’s just help me understand the landscape a little bit here. So let’s so let’s just drives and brains. Explain to me what are those four different things with the yellow background?
Waziri Garuba 22:10
These right here. Okay, great question. So I started very small with like the email agent, and then I realized very quickly I keep a lot of information in Airtable, and so I said I want my G.R.I.O.T to be able to access Airtable, right? And so to do that, I had to set up a sub workflow, which was I had to map all of the different things in Airtable that I wanted it to access, right, and then give it the key to get to those things. So what you’re seeing here is I disconnected it for a second, but I’m going to type in Airtable. I have a Airtable sub agent, right? That I connected to, and then it’s able to read all the things within that sub workflow. Similarly, I’ve got Google Drive. This is a great example. I’ve got a Google Drive agent, and that Google Drive agent is a credentialed agent that can go and do things in my Google Drive. Copy, delete, move, whatever it is. So if I say to G.R.I.O.T, can you upload that to my Google Drive? G.R.I.O.T can’t do it, but it knows that there is an agent, and that agent basically says, “Call this tool to find, read, or reference files in Google Drive, documents, decks, folders, or any attachment used when at when WAS asks about a file that might be in Drive. So that’s where the agent instructions are saying you’ve got all these tools. Look at what Wazari wants. Read the headers for each of the tools, and then select the tool that makes the most sense and send it the task. Right. So these tend to be places where I’m keeping a lot of valuable information, like hey, my Notion health database or information that relates to my CRM, and those things sometimes relate to elements such as my calendar or email, but they tend to kind of cluster together in these are the drives I access data in or put files in, but they’re not the places that I use to like contact people, right? Yeah, and just to
Will Bachman 24:30
read it, there’s Airtable agent, Monday agent, Drive agent. I guess that’s Google Drive and Notion agent. Okay, all right.
Waziri Garuba 24:40
So you’re you’re thinking, and this is where I mean, like if everybody’s gonna do it differently, but like again, the I was pre med, but I’m like these are my arms. They’re very good for doing things, not so good for holding weight, right? That’s what legs are for. These are so like everything’s broken up in the way that I work, and you, for example, see these. Here, these are my searches, Perplexity and Tavly. I’m kind of like you have both of them. Pick whichever one is best. You can see in this case it picked Tavly, but I’d be fine if you use Perplexity. I don’t care. Just answer the question, right? What’s the weather going to be tomorrow? And so I give it enough tools to get done, get the job done, right? And when I am giving it the tools back to where I was kind of going, you see these sub workflows right here. I showed you Google Drive. This is the Google Drive. Well, where is that? That’s missing. Let me find one that I’ll find one that is oh version 2.0. Sorry. So this is the Google Drive. So when it sends that message, that agent sends it here. So what it was pointing at really was to this one. Search for any documents related to the operator’s map. So it sends the message here, and that message would then come to this agent, and this agent says, “Look through Google Drive, right? Go through the folder, try to match whatever this person is asking for as well as possible, and send them back the information. And so, what happens is, what I said to G.R.I.O.T is getting routed through all those chains coming here, and then this thing is going to go in and search, and if necessary, download for me whatever it is from Google Drive. So this is like now saying, “Hey, you two fingers, this is what you do, right? Do it and get me back the file. And every sub, every single circle that you see there has one of these, so this is how my email works. That sub agent right here that says email, right? It sends the message here. This is actually what’s happening. The message is coming to this email agent, and it’s saying, “Does Woz want to send an email? Reply, label, create a draft, get email, get labels, or mark on red, right? So all of these are just stacking, and what you see is this, right? But when you’re looking at Siri, right, your your Siri could have this level of complexity, right, with your information. I want my calendar, my you know sales coach, etc. So all of these things are they are all driven by agents, but like one agent is the one that’s picking the tool, sending it in, and then identifying if the answer is appropriate.
Will Bachman 27:38
Okay, so in terms of the key tools, we have calendar agent, task agent, email agent, contact agent, and and calculator. Okay, so like what what a and then under finance tools, we have debt agent, finance log, finance query, finance report agent, QuickBooks full purse log, income agent and purse confirm set aside agent okay creative tools rober agent content creator agent and blog post X okay and then you have sales workflows sales coach network agent intro agent reference agent and health okay
Waziri Garuba 28:21
remember the nurture engine I spoke about. Yeah, it’s doing that.
Will Bachman 28:26
Okay,
Waziri Garuba 28:27
there goes
Will Bachman 28:27
right. Okay, maybe we can talk about some of these particular. Like, let’s go through the key tools. Like your calendar agent. What are the types of things the calendar agent is doing for you?
Waziri Garuba 28:38
Absolutely. So remember, I asked it. I asked Rio. I was like, “Hey, can you book a run for me tomorrow? Let me see if it. I don’t know where I put it, but it just it should have logged the run. I gotta find where. I don’t know what date I put it on, but it it allows me to basically check what’s on my calendar, right? So speak to my calendar. What’s on there, and generally like log things. Like, can you please go ahead and just put a workout for me at this time, or move this appointment from this time to the other, right on my behalf. And I really find that helpful when I am working in terminal, and you know I’m working through prospect a project, and it says you need to do this thing. I’m like, can you put a reminder for me on Saturday to do it? And by the way, put the prompt in the description so we can just pick up from where we left off. And so by having it MCP’d in or having it G.R.I.O.T in, the things that I need to kind of access on my calendar are kind of always there. And I think more importantly, because it’s able to look at my calendar in terminal, it’s able to take things directly from any one of the platforms it’s connected to and move them entirely. So, like, I don’t have to like actually manually put something in my calendar. I could say, “Can you just add that and put everything that relates to it in the calendar? So when I see it on Sunday, I know it needs to happen.
Will Bachman 30:00
Now, when you say you can just ask it, are you typically typing those words, or are you just speaking to your computer all the time?
Waziri Garuba 30:08
It’s a blend. So one of the things that I found is I don’t know if you use um, is it terminal? It’s an it’s like a Telegram. Sorry. So with Telegram, I’ve got an instance of G.R.I.O.T on Telegram, and I talk to that a lot. That’s what I’m usually at the gym or on the road, and so that is probably the most productive. Just because, like, I find like when I’m on the treadmill doing like a three mile run, I’ll have an idea, be like, hey, you know what? Put something on the calendar for me to follow up with this, or like all those ideas that happen when I’m like working out are like literally placed, or the email is sent, or the draft is created because I can very quickly like pick up the Telegram app, hit the microphone button, and talk to my entire brain, right? Check Notion and tell me if there is this thing I’m supposed to do, and then you know, send Jim an email that I won’t make today’s 9o’clock calendar meeting. Is there better available time? Every single one of these things becomes accessible to me while I’m on the go, and that is where for me it’s beneficial. Like, who haven’t I followed up with recently in my nurture engine? Can you send them an email? Let’s and let them know what days I have available that they can figure out on its own.
Will Bachman 31:31
So you’re sending effectively a voice memo as if you were sending it to a person.
Waziri Garuba 31:37
Yeah, I’m sending a voice memo to my agent, and then the agent is executing right for me, whatever it is I wanted to within. But your
Will Bachman 31:44
agent on tele, the Telegram app is like another contact that you have. Just
Waziri Garuba 31:51
no, it wires into G.R.I.O.T, so it’s like I’m talking to G.R.I.O.T.
Will Bachman 31:55
Okay, but like G.R.I.O.T is a contact on your.
Waziri Garuba 32:00
Yes, yes. It’s literally like my first. Well, it’s it becomes like a chain. So yeah, he basically you set it up in Telegram. Yeah,
Will Bachman 32:11
yeah, and and why why Telegram, by the way, instead of WhatsApp or something else.
Waziri Garuba 32:18
Great point. So what I’ve learned is that platforms are evolving and they’re doing their best, but many are not yet really serving in the best interests of the user. So it’s really difficult, for example, to set up your WhatsApp account and just kind of easily integrate. At least I found it to be similar with Twilio. The most difficult was I showed you QuickBooks. That took me like three to four hours, and for good reason, right? That’s your financials. You should be very like even as a developer. I I had a difficult time getting everything wired up because they don’t really want you kind of like kind of having your information out there. And so I just found that Telegram really makes it just like N8N versus Zapier. They really make it easy for you to figure out what you need to do so you save time. And so I don’t want to spend six hours figuring out what’s up in order to save two hours kind of texting, right? I want to spend an hour figure it out, and then I can get that time back with N8N. And the reason I really love this tool is that you could say, “Hey, Waz, I want to copy Ralph, and I could say, “Hey, I’m going to download it and give it to you. Right? You can’t do that with Zapier. They want you to pay your $49 a month and blunder your way through building it. And I’m like, “Here’s the code. Go and replicate this, and then you can start saving time. So the tools that are really-it’s like the early internet days and the you know the the like the coffee clubs or whatever in San Francisco. Like the folks who make it easy for us to adopt and use are the ones who are going to get adopted, and so Telegram makes it very simple to set it up so that you are all of a sudden communicating with your LLM, and that is getting work done for you, right? And I think I shared with Megan that one of the really interesting things it had done for me recently was help me log my productivity, and it gave me a pretty great kind of 2.49x. So it was logging how many hours I spent on my keyboard, you know, and how many churnals I had running, and it was getting I was getting about 102 hours of work done. So oh, I need this thing done. Hey, you know, start working on it. Download this. Da da. You turn to the next one, and by the end of the day, you’ve gotten twice as much done because you had a clean slate of things to do, and then while you’re at the gym, it says, “Hey, would you like me to go ahead and do that research? And you hit yes, and you’re still working, but you’re not, right? It’s it’s a it’s it’s delegating it to systems. So think that my agent can keep delegating. I think that that’s where the productivity. We’ve been promised comes from, and it’s really now how do we track it? So as you can see here, this actually logs, and I spend most of my time on systems and meta work, followed by client engagements, and that systems and meta work starts paying off over time because next Wednesday it’s going to do the thing and save me time.
Will Bachman 35:20
Okay, let’s go back to the overall map there. Okay, so we talked about the calendar agent. Tell us about the task agent, like that next one over to the right.
Waziri Garuba 35:31
Oh yeah. So the task agent is, as you can see, sub workflow, and so whenever I say, “Hey, do this thing for me next week, set this up, etc. the task agent sends that message to a sub workflow that I I believe this one’s connected to a here we go it’s connected to a Google Sheet and or no it’s it’s in my Notion. What it does is it creates that Notion task inside like this table I have that basically logs all of my whatever tasks need to be done, and so that way it’s like tracking them, letting me know when things are done, and I can kind of get rid of them. And so this just winds up being a. Let me see if I can find it in my in my notion, so so just like you would send this out to Google Google Sheets, it’s all just relational databases, right? So I could have my task tracker, and that task true, yeah. So it feeds into here. It keeps track of it. If I add something, it’s going to ask me the necessary questions. It’s tracking the task ID. So now, when I’m speaking to Greer, I’m like, “What was that thing I was supposed to do that relates to X, Y, Z? This is where it’s coming, and then it’s going to identify or find in this database the thing of relevance. It’s going to mark off right when it’s done. You can see that I did something, and it it marked it as done on these dates, but then there are things that are pending. So if I said what’s pending, it’ll just tell me. And so, and that’s why I say, like, kind of, you want to be agnostic on the which platform is it? Google Sheets or, in this case, I use Notion because Notion’s a real good central brain, but as you can imagine, you can see that there’s a Notion database here, and the task agent is pointing at that, or pointing at a specific page in Notion. This will give me access to all of Notion. This right here is going just to that task table, and so I’m not dealing with too many different, you know, places of where my stuff is. It’s just kind of buried in there.
Will Bachman 37:50
Terms of the email agent, do you have it set up so that right now it’s sending out any emails just automatically without your intervention, or is it always human in the loop for you?
Waziri Garuba 38:02
Ooh, that’s a great question, and and yes, it does send me emails without intervention, right? A lot, and then one of my clients, where sometimes I have it do research and just send them information. Now I’ve had this client for six years, so like very comfortable with you know the information being sent and that ongoing relationship, but for the most part, it’s mostly drafts. So I’ll just show you my inbox right now. These are all drafts.
Will Bachman 38:28
Okay.
Waziri Garuba 38:29
Oh, so things are con oh wow, has replaced this or send this to this person. My nurture engine, my sales, everything is just it’s just pending. So I don’t have to come in and follow up. So, for example, Megan actually introduced me to somebody, or and so it’s drafted the email for once that goes through, right? And so I don’t need to like follow up whenever that goes off. I can come in here, and the email is sitting there ready, and so it it allows me to also keep my inbox clean. One of the key things I found is I call it the the guilt pile. I get a lot of really good newsletters, including yours that I really love, and I’m like, oh, I don’t have time. And what it does is it regularly goes in there and it’ll clean it up and say, hey, here’s some really great topics. Let let me show you what Will has done in like the last two weeks. So instead of like having to read every single one, I can kind of go into my knowledge base and say, “Hey, what’s Will been writing about? And oh, I like this PDF. This is kind of in line what I wanted. It helps me manage just the overwhelm that comes with like having an email. Period. Right.
Will Bachman 39:35
Okay. Tell us about some of the finance tools that you’re that you’ve got.
Waziri Garuba 39:45
So the finance tools are the really interesting. There’s a story that I share. I started reading the other day the the richest man in Babylon, and I love the book. I was like, okay, I want to start a dear. To some of this, so I basically said I want to create. So this is actually the blog story, something that helps me work through stage one. Right, start that purse to fattening. A 10th of everything is going to go into this account first, and so this is one kind of test run where you call you see the purse log income and purse confirm. I now have a system that’s watching my payments, and it’s like, you got paid this much. Let’s confirm and move that money aside. So these are kind of sub workflows that I’ve given access to track funds as they come in, and then kind of be annoying and say, hey, let’s move that 10% here, and you’re gonna have to cut expenses in other places. But like, we’re sticking to this, right? And so this is a behavioral kind of agent that I am. I’m tracking the story of like, what if I automated away the task of you know you know I’m getting paid these four or five times a month. Let’s put the money in here, and then there is a very interesting setup I have here that looks at all of my debt, student loans, credit cards, and regularly gives me a report on like what I’m bleeding out in interest and which payments or debts I should take care of first. So all of these are in the finance tools department because I have access to my my finance logs. That’s a Google Sheet type QuickBooks thing, so it knows what I’m spending. And if I, you know, do any of the things that I am unhappy with myself about, it’s like there’s a bit of accountability. That’s the best way to put it. So this is a savings mechanism. These ones are just basic. They give me reporting, and then this is really looking at how I can, you know, cut expenses to pay down those really onerous debts faster. And G.R.I.O.T is the one that’s sending me all these reports regularly.
Will Bachman 42:00
Okay, and I guess you’re using it for QuickBooks to add expenses or add revenue.
Waziri Garuba 42:08
Yeah. Any questions I have? That big ugly QuickBooks thing that I showed you-it was me wanting to explore it. I had a client bookkeeper, and we just we dove down the rabbit hole of how do we QuickBooks work for us, but yeah, it’s good at it’s good at letting me know where I’m being irresponsible with my money, and at the same time, giving me alerts like you don’t really think about maybe student loans or something when you own when you owe six figures, it’s like that’s almost like 600 bucks a month. Yeah, and yeah, it’s it’s it starts to really add up. So you you it’s 6.875% on 150,000. My wife owes, you know, a bit for law school. So we just decided to keep an eye on that number, and have every additional dollar go to like just beat it down. And that is the mechanism that we’ve leveraged to do it. Like we’re aware, very aware, and then credit cards come in with a score rating, right? Like this one’s bleeding you dry too. Let’s get rid of it, and so it’s just kind of falling it all the way down. But yeah, this QuickBook one is a great example of can you access every relevant feature in the tools you use and not have to log in every time you want to get information? Yes, you just have to set it, and then I could share this with you, for example, and save you the time.
Will Bachman 43:27
Cool. And just give us one minute, Waz, on telling us a little bit about your practice. Are you setting up systems like this for your customers, or what? What kind of what kind of clients do you serve and what sort of projects do you do?
Waziri Garuba 43:42
Yeah, I serve operators, so that’s the decision makers who really have got to get the work done because we oftentimes are the bottleneck. And so I really serve as time-sensitive folks, and that, of course, is CEOs to you know high-level executives. I I teach and I build or co-build, so I don’t want to build things for people outright and say here you are because I’m not there to maintain. I am here to say this is how it works, and if you want to own the solution and truly be the person that is able to leverage AI in your operation as it should be moving forward, then we have engagements of retainers that are monthly or kind of a six week with the operators map eight week course that enables people to understand those ones and zeros, see and develop the map that they use to actually move forward into leveraging AI. I think people are too excited about what they can do without mapping what they need to do, because as you can see, that’s where the value comes from. Knowing I need to pay off debt, knowing that I don’t want to log into 10 different tools, is why I’ve done all of this. And so I help people understand what they can do with it, and then bring that into reality by spinning up the tools that they manage.
Will Bachman 44:58
Okay. And I think you have a course coming up that you’re offering.
Waziri Garuba 45:04
Yes, I do. It’s the Operators Map. That’s at theoperatorsmap.com. It’s really me wanting to dive in. I’ve served several different businesses successfully, but I really want to start working with you know groups, getting more exposure, and really testing the pathway I’ve discovered, which is let’s focus on governance. Let’s move into what I call defense versus offense. Understanding how to save time, how to block your time instead of jumping into let’s let’s bury people in emails and sell a lot. I like to focus on again the time that you can get back by having automations running good parts of your business or helping you with your your personal and professional goals, because I feel that the people who get that now and have ownership of it will be the ones who can successfully turn that time into money in the future when it becomes kind of more clear how AI can create jobs and can be used in sales. And so the operator’s map is eight weeks of digging into and helping people understand how to map out what they need, and then how to design the tech stack. As you can see, I use Zapier, Monday.com. I use Make and N8n. I just prefer N8n, but I’m familiar with all the tools because I’ve spent years working with pretty much every single thing that came out. It was my job for a while to kind of track which tools really mattered, and so it’s these are this is the outcome of all of that time.
Will Bachman 46:30
Amazing, fantastic. Well, Woz, where can listeners find you online if they wanted to follow up with your firm?
Waziri Garuba 46:36
Yeah, harlemlabs.com. That’s H A R L E M L A B s.com. long story behind it but got my MBA in New York and used to work a lot of small business owners in Harlem and so my little lab has followed me across the country I also have a I call my my field notes wazirigaraba.com if you just want to see what I’m experimenting and playing with building like websites with my kids with AI. I put a lot of my experiences on there, and a lot of my business stuff is you can find at HarlemLabs.com.
Will Bachman 47:08
Amazing, Woz. Thank you so much for joining us today.
Waziri Garuba 47:12
Thank you very much. Was a pleasure speaking. Looking forward to speaking more. Have a good one.
