Cortex

00:00:00 ◼   ► Where's my vlog, Myke?

00:00:02 ◼   ► Uhh...

00:00:03 ◼   ► It's been, as far as I can tell, it's been a month.

00:00:07 ◼   ► Yep.

00:00:08 ◼   ► And I have to say, I'm severely, severely disappointed in you.

00:00:12 ◼   ► After all of the lectures I have had to receive behind the scenes about the importance of schedules for growing podcasts.

00:00:21 ◼   ► And it's like, hundreds and hundreds of lectures I have received about how the schedule is super important, you must stick to the schedule.

00:00:29 ◼   ► We always have to upload on the schedule.

00:00:31 ◼   ► Like this is, in my mind, this is like one of the most important things to you.

00:00:35 ◼   ► And then here we go. We have this vlog that you've started.

00:00:38 ◼   ► You just passed a momentous moment in the vlog.

00:00:41 ◼   ► Where is a new episode? Nowhere to be seen.

00:00:44 ◼   ► Disappointing, Myke.

00:00:45 ◼   ► I am working on one.

00:00:47 ◼   ► That's not uploaded. That's not what I'm hearing.

00:00:49 ◼   ► House stuff. It's really getting in the way.

00:00:52 ◼   ► It's like every minute that I'm not doing my actual job, I'm dealing with something house-related.

00:00:57 ◼   ► It's annoying me, honestly, like I'm frustrated about it

00:01:00 ◼   ► 'cause it's something that I really do want to do more with

00:01:05 ◼   ► and I think I've shown it like so far that like,

00:01:08 ◼   ► it's something I wanna keep doing

00:01:09 ◼   ► 'cause I've produced a lot of them.

00:01:12 ◼   ► But it's just been the case of right now,

00:01:13 ◼   ► I'm just, every spare moment that is free,

00:01:17 ◼   ► I feel like I'm talking to a plumber

00:01:20 ◼   ► or going to a furniture store or packing boxes.

00:01:25 ◼   ► So I've kind of had to put it on ice a little bit.

00:01:28 ◼   ► Interestingly, I'm working on a vlog episode,

00:01:31 ◼   ► which will be out not too long after this episode

00:01:34 ◼   ► comes out, hopefully, which is kind of like addressing that.

00:01:36 ◼   ► So talking about the fact that the vlog hasn't been there.

00:01:39 ◼   ► And then actually the good thing about the vlog

00:01:41 ◼   ► is I can show people why.

00:01:42 ◼   ► I can show people Cortex Cottage.

00:01:44 ◼   ► - Ooh.

00:01:45 ◼   ► - And show them what it is that's taking my time.

00:01:49 ◼   ► Like our friend the boiler.

00:01:51 ◼   ► So yeah, I have to say that this is one

00:01:55 ◼   ► of those things which has been a frustration for me because it's a side

00:01:59 ◼   ► project and a creative outlet that I'm very excited about but life has got in

00:02:04 ◼   ► the way and it's been really annoying for me because this is something that

00:02:09 ◼   ► has not happened to me before like with all of my other side projects like when

00:02:14 ◼   ► I was podcasting on the side I never let anything get in the way I always just

00:02:19 ◼   ► got on with it so this has been particularly difficult for me because I

00:02:24 ◼   ► I haven't been able to put the focus in that I've wanted to.

00:02:28 ◼   ► And I also feel like I'm kind of letting people down in a way,

00:02:33 ◼   ► even though like no one is saying this to me, like nobody's really being like,

00:02:38 ◼   ► oh, well, you know, except for you.

00:02:40 ◼   ► I was going to say, there's one person who is actually.

00:02:43 ◼   ► And when I said it, like, I don't think to myself

00:02:45 ◼   ► that there isn't anybody in the world that doesn't want it.

00:02:48 ◼   ► Like, I'm not when I think of that, it's not like, oh, nobody's saying it

00:02:51 ◼   ► because nobody wants it.

00:02:52 ◼   ► Like, I don't actually I don't think that's the case.

00:02:54 ◼   ► But it's just, you know, I'm not getting people that are super upset about it.

00:02:57 ◼   ► I have this like feeling of, you know, there are people out in the world that

00:03:01 ◼   ► are enjoying this and I'm not living up to my end of the bargain.

00:03:04 ◼   ► It's frustrating.

00:03:06 ◼   ► I have a lot of sympathy for that situation.

00:03:09 ◼   ► It's interesting to hear you say that, that this is the first time that like a

00:03:14 ◼   ► side project has had to be put a little bit on ice because of just the rest of the

00:03:19 ◼   ► world intruding and that definitely is a thing that happens.

00:03:24 ◼   ► And I think especially given the, from my perspective, extraordinary number of podcasts that you do,

00:03:31 ◼   ► and you need to keep all of that going while you are also attempting to buy a house

00:03:36 ◼   ► and deal with plumbers and electricians and boilers and falling pipes and all the rest of that,

00:03:40 ◼   ► it's not surprising that like something has to give, and this is the thing that has to give.

00:03:46 ◼   ► And I have to keep running my business.

00:03:48 ◼   ► When I was working for the man, I could just take my foot off the gas.

00:03:53 ◼   ► for a bit.

00:03:54 ◼   ► You know, this is something we were talking about

00:03:56 ◼   ► when I first started on the house buying process, right?

00:03:59 ◼   ► Of like, buying a house becomes like your job.

00:04:03 ◼   ► - Right.

00:04:03 ◼   ► - But I felt like I was just working two full-time jobs

00:04:06 ◼   ► because I wasn't able to take the pressure off

00:04:08 ◼   ► because I have this business that I run.

00:04:11 ◼   ► And if I don't run the business,

00:04:13 ◼   ► or if I don't run my parts of the business,

00:04:15 ◼   ► they just don't happen.

00:04:16 ◼   ► And that's not something that can happen.

00:04:19 ◼   ► So this is where I've been right now.

00:04:21 ◼   ► Like, I've had other things,

00:04:22 ◼   ► like other podcasts that I've had to put on

00:04:25 ◼   ► a little bit of just a short break,

00:04:27 ◼   ► things that are just kind of more fun things for me,

00:04:30 ◼   ► or I've had to skip episodes,

00:04:32 ◼   ► like I've had my co-hosts, I've had people fill in for me.

00:04:36 ◼   ► Like this has been, it's just been a weird time.

00:04:39 ◼   ► Like it turns out, turns out that buying a house

00:04:42 ◼   ► is really time intensive.

00:04:44 ◼   ► But we're nearly through the woods on the big parts, right?

00:04:49 ◼   ► Like then it's just, this just becomes part of my life.

00:04:51 ◼   ► but like the idea of like getting a house ready to move in

00:04:54 ◼   ► and then moving in.

00:04:55 ◼   ► Once that's done, I feel like I'm gonna be

00:04:57 ◼   ► in a much better situation than I am now.

00:05:00 ◼   ► So I'm excited to get the vlog up and running again.

00:05:03 ◼   ► Like, you know, talking about that,

00:05:04 ◼   ► like the office, mega office is painted now.

00:05:07 ◼   ► - Oh.

00:05:08 ◼   ► - And the broadband's in.

00:05:09 ◼   ► - Well, what more could you possibly need?

00:05:11 ◼   ► - Exactly, which is why I'm now working on a video.

00:05:14 ◼   ► But like, the office is being set up in some ways

00:05:19 ◼   ► with video in mind.

00:05:20 ◼   ► when I originally started thinking about what my office was going to look like,

00:05:24 ◼   ► it was what is the perfect office to record podcasts in. But now I'm also thinking about

00:05:29 ◼   ► it from a visual perspective. What do I want to be in the office? Because I have these ideas of

00:05:36 ◼   ► it becoming the main place where you'll see a lot of the vlog stuff. It's in this office and the

00:05:43 ◼   ► things that will be on the walls behind me. That is all part of the visual idea of how the vlog

00:05:49 ◼   ► will look after that, which I'm excited about.

00:05:51 ◼   ► I feel like for vloggers, that is probably a pretty big visual indicator, or like, what is it that they wish to visually convey about themselves is what's in the background of the vlog.

00:06:04 ◼   ► And I don't know for a fact, but I am very willing to bet that a lot of people's like, "Oh, look at my casual home in the background!"

00:06:12 ◼   ► background like there is nothing casual about that arrangement right like

00:06:15 ◼   ► everything is set up to be like oh yeah I just turned on a camera and you just

00:06:20 ◼   ► happen to be seeing all of my cool stuff in the background like I think I think

00:06:25 ◼   ► that is that is really it like a visual indicator like what do you wish to

00:06:29 ◼   ► convey about yourself to the audience as to like what is behind you when you were

00:06:35 ◼   ► talking to camera in just whatever scenario you're going to set up is like

00:06:39 ◼   ► Like this is my default place for recording and talking to camera.

00:06:42 ◼   ► There's going to be something behind you.

00:06:44 ◼   ► What is it going to be?

00:06:45 ◼   ► Yeah, because I've been frustrated that like in all of the stuff where I'm recording at

00:06:49 ◼   ► home, there isn't anything behind me that has anything to do with me.

00:06:53 ◼   ► You know, it's not my decoration.

00:06:55 ◼   ► It's not any of my stuff.

00:06:58 ◼   ► It's just like the stuff that's in this house.

00:07:00 ◼   ► So I've got a nice blue wall that I'm going to be putting some artwork on and then I'm

00:07:06 ◼   ► having these shelving units put in where I'm gonna put all my fun knickknacks, you know?

00:07:10 ◼   ► I'm excited. Fun knickknacks.

00:07:14 ◼   ► I got a sit-stand desk today, Gray. Oh, did you?

00:07:19 ◼   ► Yeah, I went to IKEA today. So you got a desk that you can move between

00:07:23 ◼   ► two positions, that's what you're saying? Between sitting and standing?

00:07:25 ◼   ► Yeah, it's an electric one that IKEA make. Oh.

00:07:28 ◼   ► So that's good, I'm excited about that. That is very exciting.

00:07:34 ◼   ► That would be good because I could set a camera up on it and just like raise the desk. Who needs a tripod?

00:07:38 ◼   ► Raise the desk

00:07:41 ◼   ► The desk is your tripod. The desk is my tripod and but that just you know launches into the idea of like I went to IKEA today

00:07:48 ◼   ► That's a horrible place man.

00:07:52 ◼   ► It's I don't agree with you. You think IKEA is a horrible place. I always like going to IKEA. So here's the thing

00:07:58 ◼   ► I was really excited about it this morning. Mm-hmm

00:08:02 ◼   ► And then just as the day continued to progress,

00:08:06 ◼   ► I just, it would just become more frustrating.

00:08:09 ◼   ► - Tell me, what was becoming more frustrating?

00:08:11 ◼   ► What do you mean?

00:08:12 ◼   ► - Well, like this is very specific to me,

00:08:14 ◼   ► but I just had some bad interactions with the staff there.

00:08:17 ◼   ► They just weren't very, they just weren't very,

00:08:20 ◼   ► they just weren't very nice to me.

00:08:21 ◼   ► And they would, you know, they were saying things to me

00:08:25 ◼   ► like I should know them.

00:08:27 ◼   ► My desk, right, it said, there was a little sign

00:08:30 ◼   ► on the desk that said, talk to somebody about this,

00:08:33 ◼   ► like you can't pick this yourself.

00:08:35 ◼   ► 'Cause you know, like if anybody doesn't know of IKEA,

00:08:38 ◼   ► with a lot of their stuff, like you choose what you want,

00:08:40 ◼   ► then you go down into the best part of IKEA,

00:08:42 ◼   ► which is the warehouse section,

00:08:44 ◼   ► where you get to pull big boxes off the shelves.

00:08:46 ◼   ► - Right.

00:08:47 ◼   ► - That's the part I actually really like,

00:08:49 ◼   ► because you just drive these big carts around

00:08:51 ◼   ► and you just pull these boxes out of a warehouse,

00:08:53 ◼   ► 'cause it's super weird.

00:08:55 ◼   ► Like you don't do this anywhere else.

00:08:57 ◼   ► So I just assumed, right, we'll go down to the warehouse

00:09:00 ◼   ► and we'll ask someone and they will get it.

00:09:01 ◼   ► I just thought it's big boxes, I don't know.

00:09:04 ◼   ► So we go and talk to the guy and he's like,

00:09:05 ◼   ► no, you have to talk to somebody upstairs about that.

00:09:08 ◼   ► And I'm like, why?

00:09:10 ◼   ► And he's like, oh, 'cause it says on the desk,

00:09:12 ◼   ► you have to talk to someone.

00:09:13 ◼   ► And I was like, well, you're someone.

00:09:15 ◼   ► It's like, no, it has to be somebody upstairs.

00:09:17 ◼   ► And we just had a bit of a heated back and forth.

00:09:21 ◼   ► - Oh, Myke, you can't fight the machine, Myke, right?

00:09:23 ◼   ► If the guy says he's not the guy,

00:09:25 ◼   ► you have to go and talk to the other guy.

00:09:27 ◼   ► It's just, you should know this better than anyone.

00:09:29 ◼   ► can't fight the machine. He ended up doing the order for us though, Gray. Okay. So, you

00:09:35 ◼   ► know, that's what I'm gonna say. We'll see what arrives. We wanted to get

00:09:39 ◼   ► everything delivered, but they will only deliver certain things. Like, if it

00:09:45 ◼   ► can go in a blue bag, one of their big blue bags, they won't deliver it. Hmm. So

00:09:51 ◼   ► we ended up, there's a bunch of boxes arriving home tomorrow, and then we had

00:09:55 ◼   ► to bring this huge blue bag full of little items home. Frustrating.

00:10:02 ◼   ► Yeah, your IKEA experience...

00:10:04 ◼   ► It was not good.

00:10:05 ◼   ► It doesn't sound great. No, it doesn't sound great. I've never had that kind of experience

00:10:10 ◼   ► at IKEA, but also whenever my wife and I go, we do have a... I don't know how to put it,

00:10:17 ◼   ► but like optimized for grey experience at IKEA.

00:10:22 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:10:23 ◼   ► Because there are three phases to IKEA.

00:10:28 ◼   ► There's at least the one that we go to.

00:10:31 ◼   ► There's the upper floor, which is all the showroom stuff,

00:10:34 ◼   ► which I do think is fun to walk around.

00:10:36 ◼   ► They have their little layout, and you

00:10:37 ◼   ► can find little secret shortcuts around.

00:10:39 ◼   ► And you can see how everything looks.

00:10:41 ◼   ► It's like, OK, this is great.

00:10:42 ◼   ► I like this layer.

00:10:44 ◼   ► Everything is arranged nice and neatly.

00:10:46 ◼   ► Like my wife and I got essentially our whole kitchen

00:10:49 ◼   ► arranged by looking at all the kitchens on that top level.

00:10:53 ◼   ► this is great, which you said the warehouse level, that is fun.

00:10:57 ◼   ► This is the logistics level.

00:10:58 ◼   ► This is where IKEA makes their margins level.

00:11:02 ◼   ► That's satisfying.

00:11:02 ◼   ► It's like, ooh, we're hunting for these different things

00:11:05 ◼   ► and we're putting them on a big tray.

00:11:06 ◼   ► That's great.

00:11:07 ◼   ► There is, however, the worst part of IKEA,

00:11:10 ◼   ► which is not the showroom area, but downstairs, what to me,

00:11:16 ◼   ► in my mind, is just filed under the room with 10

00:11:22 ◼   ► million decisions. Yeah, this is, I think, what they call the market.

00:11:26 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, that sounds familiar. But it's like, would you like

00:11:30 ◼   ► to look at 40 different types of spoons?

00:11:34 ◼   ► Would you like to look at 17 different types of placemats?

00:11:38 ◼   ► Here are 15 different types of candle holders.

00:11:42 ◼   ► And what my wife and I have learned is that this is not a place for Grey.

00:11:46 ◼   ► That I should not go here because it ends

00:11:50 ◼   ► It ends up being that I use up all of my decision-making ability on the top level, and by the time

00:11:56 ◼   ► we get down there, it's like, I can't handle this.

00:11:59 ◼   ► There are too many decisions to make, and from my perspective, they're all too small

00:12:06 ◼   ► that I can't bring myself to care about.

00:12:09 ◼   ► I think my problems of everything that happened from Warehouse onward was because of the marketplace.

00:12:17 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

00:12:18 ◼   ► The marketplace is not necessarily a good place.

00:12:21 ◼   ► It wasn't a great part where it's like, "Well, we're going to get this thing, but we need

00:12:24 ◼   ► it in this color, but it doesn't match with this."

00:12:27 ◼   ► It's not...

00:12:28 ◼   ► I don't think it's my scene.

00:12:29 ◼   ► There is the restaurant, though, which I enjoy.

00:12:31 ◼   ► Yes, but this is why when we go to IKEA, what happens is when we get to the area of 10 million

00:12:39 ◼   ► decisions, what really happens is now it's restaurant time for Grey.

00:12:43 ◼   ► I go get some meatballs.

00:12:45 ◼   ► You get put in the playpen.

00:12:46 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:12:47 ◼   ► Like, I go get some meatballs, and then it actually works out really well, because when

00:12:52 ◼   ► my wife is done in that section, which she can handle much better than I possibly can,

00:12:59 ◼   ► when it's over, if there's any, like, major decisions or things that she can't decide

00:13:03 ◼   ► over, it's like, okay, I've had some food, I've recharged a little bit, and then I can

00:13:08 ◼   ► make ten quick executive decisions about, like, this one or this one, this one or this

00:13:12 ◼   ► one, this one or this one.

00:13:13 ◼   ► But, like, I cannot deal with the level one of this.

00:13:17 ◼   ► It's just like there's just too many things and they all seem too similar.

00:13:20 ◼   ► So that's that's the way to get through IKEA.

00:13:23 ◼   ► It's a problem because like I want to be there helping

00:13:26 ◼   ► and I want to be involved in it and all that stuff.

00:13:29 ◼   ► Yeah, I see. That's that's your mistake.

00:13:31 ◼   ► But it takes a lot out of me.

00:13:32 ◼   ► That's your mistake.

00:13:33 ◼   ► To the point where I will get really angry with people

00:13:37 ◼   ► when they when they don't give me the the the customer service that I like.

00:13:42 ◼   ► Yeah, but that's but that's exactly it.

00:13:43 ◼   ► Like you're going to be super grumpy after having to make a ton of decisions.

00:13:48 ◼   ► Like this is just an unavoidable thing.

00:13:50 ◼   ► This is like a reproducible under laboratory conditions kind of thing that like

00:13:54 ◼   ► just give people lots of decisions and they become frustrated.

00:13:57 ◼   ► So just try to avoid that as much as possible.

00:13:59 ◼   ► What I found really interesting though, for these two people in IKEA, is

00:14:03 ◼   ► neither of them rose to my anger.

00:14:06 ◼   ► They must see this a lot.

00:14:08 ◼   ► I imagine everybody in this area is used to people that are very angry and upset.

00:14:13 ◼   ► Right, coming bleary-eyed out of the marketplace, holding four different candleholders in their

00:14:21 ◼   ► hand. Yeah, I'm sure they see this all day long.

00:14:24 ◼   ► I did wonder what a grey IKEA experience would be like.

00:14:29 ◼   ► And now you know. Now I know.

00:14:31 ◼   ► Yeah, it's great. I don't mind going to IKEA at all.

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00:15:56 ◼   ► I am excited about setting all the office up though.

00:15:59 ◼   ► - Are you gonna build it yourself?

00:16:01 ◼   ► - The IKEA stuff.

00:16:03 ◼   ► - Yeah. - Yeah.

00:16:04 ◼   ► - Good. - People will know

00:16:05 ◼   ► how well this went because my current plan

00:16:08 ◼   ► is to take a time lapse and be putting my desk together.

00:16:11 ◼   ► - Oh, okay.

00:16:13 ◼   ► For the vlog. - For the vlog.

00:16:15 ◼   ► It's all for the vlog.

00:16:16 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:16:19 ◼   ► - Well, this is what I was wondering before

00:16:21 ◼   ► was when you were saying like,

00:16:22 ◼   ► "Oh, there's all of these delays in your life and the house is causing all of these problems

00:16:26 ◼   ► that are pushing back the vlog."

00:16:28 ◼   ► I was thinking, "Yes, but also, aren't these all opportunities to film?

00:16:33 ◼   ► Has Myke gotten to the level of vlogginess where he's going to be filming the plumber

00:16:38 ◼   ► that comes to his house and talking with that guy?"

00:16:40 ◼   ► See, I don't want to do that.

00:16:42 ◼   ► Plus, it would have just ended up being just sorrow and despair.

00:16:46 ◼   ► It's like, the situation worsened.

00:16:50 ◼   ► Yeah, but you should get to the level, Myke, where you're just filming everything and then

00:16:54 ◼   ► you're pulling it together.

00:16:55 ◼   ► I don't think I ever want to do that.

00:16:58 ◼   ► I really don't feel that way.

00:17:00 ◼   ► You know, like the idea of filming everything always in my life.

00:17:04 ◼   ► No, you don't want to be that?

00:17:06 ◼   ► No.

00:17:07 ◼   ► You don't want to be having a Canon 5D on a gorilla stand in your hands every day, all

00:17:13 ◼   ► day.

00:17:14 ◼   ► That's not what you want to do?

00:17:15 ◼   ► Like the reference, like look at Casey Neistat, right?

00:17:18 ◼   ► He just gave up his vlog.

00:17:20 ◼   ► Like I can imagine, I can't imagine living that way.

00:17:27 ◼   ► Doing that every day.

00:17:28 ◼   ► It really seems just like a not far away to make you living.

00:17:36 ◼   ► Well it's interesting because it's surprisingly huge news that Casey Neistat decided to give

00:17:43 ◼   ► up his vlog.

00:17:44 ◼   ► It's massive.

00:17:45 ◼   ► You know, it is in the frame of YouTube, it's like one of the most, like the fastest rising

00:17:54 ◼   ► YouTube creators of all time probably, right?

00:17:56 ◼   ► Like his kind of rise to prominence was incredibly fast from where he was to now, and he's kind

00:18:04 ◼   ► of become like crown prince of YouTube, because he's very like, it seems like just from watching

00:18:10 ◼   ► his vlog, like he has been like a pseudo spokesperson for them.

00:18:13 ◼   ► Yeah, it's an interesting thing to see, but it's like he is the golden child of YouTube.

00:18:20 ◼   ► Probably because he doesn't edit together videos that depict YouTube board meetings

00:18:26 ◼   ► as Hitler Nazi rallies like PewDiePie does.

00:18:29 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:18:30 ◼   ► Right?

00:18:31 ◼   ► Which is an editorial choice that PewDiePie has made, but also might explain why it doesn't

00:18:35 ◼   ► feel like he is so much the golden child as far as YouTube is concerned.

00:18:39 ◼   ► But yeah, in the past year it feels like YouTube has wanted to show off or mention the existence

00:18:45 ◼   ► of Casey Neistat at every conceivable opportunity.

00:18:50 ◼   ► That he is like their unofficial spokesperson.

00:18:53 ◼   ► And I think that has been very interesting.

00:18:56 ◼   ► And you are right that he has, you know, got to be one of the fastest growing channels

00:19:00 ◼   ► in the last year.

00:19:01 ◼   ► It's just phenomenal.

00:19:02 ◼   ► It's absolutely phenomenal.

00:19:03 ◼   ► It just says a lot to me because, you know, I think we're going to talk about analytics

00:19:07 ◼   ► a little bit later on in this episode. But you know, whilst we've spoken about the fact

00:19:11 ◼   ► that YouTube ad rates are not amazing, if you have a video that goes up every day that

00:19:19 ◼   ► has like 3 million views a day, that's going to add up.

00:19:25 ◼   ► Yeah, that starts to add up. Yeah. So just my thing, like the way I've been thinking

00:19:29 ◼   ► about this is like, that shows how hard it is to do what he did. Because he's leaving

00:19:36 ◼   ► behind a lot of money. Now I don't know what he's going into, you know. I expect

00:19:41 ◼   ► that he's probably going back to do a little bit more of what he did before

00:19:44 ◼   ► vlogging, which was like advertising type stuff, because he seemed to

00:19:50 ◼   ► start moving into that a lot more. It seems like he was doing a lot of work

00:19:53 ◼   ► with Samsung. But it's like, you know, to tie it back around, like that's...

00:19:59 ◼   ► No, I don't think I could ever live my life like that. Like I like making

00:20:03 ◼   ► YouTube videos about specific things. I like coming up with ideas of things to

00:20:08 ◼   ► do and I'm in a vlog style because that's just for me right now that's the

00:20:14 ◼   ► stuff that I can conceptualize but I want to do different things as well you

00:20:19 ◼   ► know like I want to try and make better looking technology product review videos

00:20:26 ◼   ► as well like that's something that I want to do you know like I really love

00:20:30 ◼   ► that style of YouTubing as well, like with MKBHD, like I love his types of videos. I

00:20:35 ◼   ► was like, could I do anything like that? I don't know. Like, maybe one day? Like, so

00:20:41 ◼   ► these are the types of things that I want to do, but like right now, vlogging is just

00:20:43 ◼   ► the easiest to do because it's like, it's the style that you can achieve with the lowest

00:20:49 ◼   ► technology possible, right? It's easier to edit that stuff because I don't know any

00:20:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, it's one of the reasons why,

00:21:00 ◼   ► I was sort of giving you a hard time earlier

00:21:03 ◼   ► about not uploading, but I think it's,

00:21:06 ◼   ► like I am aware that I want to see where you go with this,

00:21:09 ◼   ► because I think even in the few videos that you've uploaded,

00:21:12 ◼   ► they are clearly different from each other.

00:21:15 ◼   ► Some of them are much more vloggy,

00:21:16 ◼   ► some of them are much more like a technology review.

00:21:19 ◼   ► And I think like you are still clearly

00:21:22 ◼   ► in the figuring out what you want to do phase,

00:21:25 ◼   ► And I think that's interesting to see.

00:21:26 ◼   ► Like, that's why I want to see, like,

00:21:28 ◼   ► what is the next thing that you're going to put up?

00:21:29 ◼   ► Like, how does it look?

00:21:31 ◼   ► What changes over time?

00:21:32 ◼   ► Like, I think it's, it's,

00:21:33 ◼   ► it is interesting to see that happen over time.

00:21:38 ◼   ► Like, and you're putting together good, interesting episodes.

00:21:42 ◼   ► So it's much better that I am harassing you

00:21:44 ◼   ► about where is the next Myke Hurley vlog,

00:21:47 ◼   ► as opposed to simply never mentioning it.

00:21:49 ◼   ► - I've just been like, that was a fun thing you did.

00:21:52 ◼   ► - Yeah. (laughs)

00:21:55 ◼   ► "Stopped already, okay, well, you know, not everything works out."

00:21:58 ◼   ► But that would be terrible. That's not what you want to hear.

00:22:01 ◼   ► A little thing with Casey Neistat though that I thought was just kind of funny and seemed very

00:22:05 ◼   ► very Casey, because you're talking about how you don't want to be filming

00:22:09 ◼   ► you know, the plumber in your house. You don't want to be filming everything all the time.

00:22:13 ◼   ► And when I got a

00:22:16 ◼   ► a bunch of messages from a bunch of people saying that Casey Neistat had

00:22:20 ◼   ► given up the vlog, I naively assumed that he probably

00:22:24 ◼   ► had some message up about how it was just too much work,

00:22:29 ◼   ► and it was too tiring, and it was just

00:22:30 ◼   ► taking up too much time.

00:22:33 ◼   ► But of course, no, because Casey Neistat is a total machine,

00:22:36 ◼   ► is like the literal reverse of that,

00:22:38 ◼   ► where he's quitting because doing his daily vlog has just

00:22:42 ◼   ► become too easy and too routine.

00:22:44 ◼   ► I felt like, you've got to be kidding me, man.

00:22:49 ◼   ► I just thought that that was really funny,

00:22:51 ◼   ► and it's just a case of--

00:22:53 ◼   ► I am projecting the reasons that I would want to stop doing a thing onto him, right?

00:22:58 ◼   ► But of course he has entirely different reasons because he's an entirely different person.

00:23:03 ◼   ► And for him it's like it's just so easy to do these million view daily vlogs.

00:23:08 ◼   ► I really do think it's a little column A, a little column B though.

00:23:11 ◼   ► I genuinely believe that he wants to do more.

00:23:15 ◼   ► That there is videos that he wants to make that are more than daily vlogs and that you

00:23:22 ◼   ► can't put together in a day. But I also do believe that maybe he just was a little tired of doing it.

00:23:28 ◼   ► Yeah, I'm suspecting that he wants to focus on bigger projects.

00:23:35 ◼   ► There was a tweet that he posted that really made me smile, which was like,

00:23:39 ◼   ► it was like, "So Casey," something along the lines of like, "So Casey, what does it feel like to not

00:23:43 ◼   ► be uploading daily?" And it's just a GIF of Zach Galifianakis driving down the highway with the

00:23:47 ◼   ► wind in his hair. That's a man who's got a new lease on life right there.

00:23:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I can see that. I'm thinking like compare and contrast with PewDiePie giving up just his

00:23:58 ◼   ► monthly vlog while he was in LA. I think like it was pretty clear from him that is like that vlog

00:24:05 ◼   ► was not doing good things for his life. Oh yeah, he was just like a broken man.

00:24:11 ◼   ► Yeah, that was terrible and uncomfortable to watch.

00:24:17 ◼   ► That's also weird for him, right? Like to make a video like that, especially because so much of

00:24:23 ◼   ► the content that he makes is making fun of people that do what he did.

00:24:26 ◼   ► - Right, yeah. - Right, which is to be like this raw emotional person.

00:24:30 ◼   ► - But that's why it's like, I think these two different, very popular, well-watched creators

00:24:39 ◼   ► had two very different going away messages. And I feel like I'm willing to take

00:24:47 ◼   ► both of them pretty much at face value, that Casey Neistat probably wants to work on just

00:24:53 ◼   ► different kinds of projects and that he felt like the vlog was becoming too routine. And

00:24:58 ◼   ► something about the daily vlog in LA just like broke PewDiePie in a way that even his talking

00:25:06 ◼   ► around it made it feel even more uncomfortable. Like on his return vlog where he sort of discusses

00:25:12 ◼   ► in a roundabout way, giving it up and then returning, it was like, "Oh god, it sounded

00:25:18 ◼   ► like that was really brutal, man. I am so sorry."

00:25:21 ◼   ► It just didn't fit with him. I have a million theories as to why that is, right? I just

00:25:27 ◼   ► think he put too much effort into it. Like, the years previous, I watched all of those,

00:25:31 ◼   ► and they were more like what I make, right? It's just like he's got his phone, and he's

00:25:36 ◼   ► just talking, and he's just walking around, and it's like, whatever. But this time he

00:25:40 ◼   ► like brought two people with him. They tried to make it this big thing out of it. They

00:25:43 ◼   ► made challenges. I think he put too much in. And maybe he didn't see the return from it

00:25:51 ◼   ► and that was upsetting and then it was just too much weighing on him.

00:25:56 ◼   ► That's an interesting theory. I haven't actually watched the most recent ones. When you mentioned

00:26:01 ◼   ► on a previous episode about how he'd done this a year ago, I've been working my way

00:26:05 ◼   ► through the back catalogue of two years ago PewDiePie being in LA and just kind of talking

00:26:10 ◼   ► about his daily life. And again, I really like those. There's something that's just

00:26:15 ◼   ► interesting about seeing this person talk about their life.

00:26:19 ◼   ► I think the key difference from those to this one is those vlogs were Felix. He was living

00:26:26 ◼   ► his life. In these ones, I think he was trying to be daily PewDiePie. It was way more like

00:26:35 ◼   ► the PewDiePie from his studio in the real world.

00:26:38 ◼   ► As opposed to just Felix living his life.

00:26:42 ◼   ► Which is what I like to see more of. Because I think it's funny,

00:26:48 ◼   ► I see this in the Reddit where people are like "look at Myke and Gray

00:26:51 ◼   ► discovering who PewDiePie is" which is kind of hilarious.

00:26:55 ◼   ► But I think it's because both of us are kind of fascinated

00:27:00 ◼   ► in Felix and I will butcher his surname. I can't say it's like

00:27:05 ◼   ► Kjallberg or something like that. I'm sorry. I'm kind of just fascinated in his, the way

00:27:11 ◼   ► that he approaches things, because I consider him to be an incredible businessman, but I

00:27:17 ◼   ► just think people don't see it.

00:27:19 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we've said it 100 times, but I really feel very strongly about that,

00:27:24 ◼   ► that he is dismissed as a clown and people don't see the cleverness in lots of the stuff

00:27:31 ◼   ► that he is doing. And so yeah, that's one of the reasons why I find him very interesting

00:27:35 ◼   ► to watch.

00:27:36 ◼   ► It's like Dismissed as a Clown actually a genius. Which is why the vlog, the Birdabo

00:27:40 ◼   ► thing, it had elements of his genius in it. But I think the problem was is it was too

00:27:48 ◼   ► much creation. It was trying to sustain that level out in the real world, trying to make

00:27:56 ◼   ► things happen I think it ended up maybe being too much.

00:28:01 ◼   ► Yeah, and let's also just mention while filming a television show.

00:28:06 ◼   ► Yep, which seemed to be incredible. Like again, when if you compare the videos, like and even

00:28:13 ◼   ► he talks about this, like that the Scare PewDiePie, it's a much larger production now. And it

00:28:20 ◼   ► like they show some clips of it and it really does. I mean, I haven't seen Scare PewDiePie

00:28:24 ◼   ► because I live in the United Kingdom so we don't deserve YouTube Red.

00:28:29 ◼   ► Yeah, not for us.

00:28:31 ◼   ► But just from comparing and contrasting the shots of the sets from year to year, what

00:28:37 ◼   ► he was able to show, it looks more like he's actually shooting a real TV show or a movie.

00:28:42 ◼   ► Interesting, that's interesting to hear.

00:28:44 ◼   ► So I think that maybe took him by surprise as well, I think.

00:28:49 ◼   ► I cannot imagine, I mean this again, this is why these are people at the absolute top of their game, but it's like the the amount of

00:28:57 ◼   ► Incredible work and

00:29:00 ◼   ► Effort that that Casey Neistat and PewDiePie do is just like is incomprehensible to me

00:29:06 ◼   ► Like you're filming a TV show while also trying to do a daily vlog like even if you had to give up halfway through

00:29:13 ◼   ► I'm still astounded that you could do it at all like yes

00:29:17 ◼   ► It's unreal. But this is also why you're at the top of your game.

00:29:24 ◼   ► Why you have 5 million or 44 million subscribers. It's astounding.

00:29:30 ◼   ► He's close to 45 now.

00:29:32 ◼   ► Does it even matter?

00:29:34 ◼   ► At this point, it'll only be remarkable when he crosses 100 million.

00:29:40 ◼   ► While we're going down this train,

00:29:43 ◼   ► you want to talk about someone who is a victim of the algorithm?

00:29:46 ◼   ► Yeah. Like look at PewDiePie, right?

00:29:48 ◼   ► You know, his videos, they tend to range in like the two and a half to three million.

00:29:53 ◼   ► Where is the where are the 47 million more?

00:29:56 ◼   ► Nick, you can assume that there is a percentage of them that are not real or

00:29:59 ◼   ► people that don't use YouTube anymore.

00:30:01 ◼   ► But like those statistics are so wildly off because like his view numbers aren't

00:30:06 ◼   ► increasing massively, but your subscriber count continues to grow.

00:30:09 ◼   ► It's a thing that doesn't make sense.

00:30:10 ◼   ► And he is a fantastic example of it not making sense.

00:30:13 ◼   ► Yeah. Like I don't I don't understand.

00:30:16 ◼   ► His current pictures, his current avatar on YouTube is Mark Zuckerberg.

00:30:24 ◼   ► Is he still Zuckerberg? Yeah. I know.

00:30:27 ◼   ► I don't know how he always manages to pick something that's just funny.

00:30:32 ◼   ► Like I don't know why it's so funny, but it just is.

00:30:35 ◼   ► But talking about that algorithm, and it's like I look at PewDiePie,

00:30:38 ◼   ► it's like all of your videos should have 10 million views, right?

00:30:41 ◼   ► It doesn't, if these subscriber numbers keep going up, I don't understand what's happening.

00:30:45 ◼   ► happening, like why people are cycling through the system like this, it just...

00:30:48 ◼   ► you know, I would just so love to be able to understand what the algorithm is up to and

00:30:55 ◼   ► understand like, okay, but you have millions and millions of people subscribing to See This Guy's

00:31:02 ◼   ► videos, but his actual video viewership numbers stay remarkably consistent. It's weird, like,

00:31:08 ◼   ► it's very strange. I only ever look at this and think it's like arrogance?

00:31:15 ◼   ► YouTube's part? What do you mean? You are showing an intent. You were saying I want

00:31:20 ◼   ► to see this person's videos and they're like no we'll show you what you need to

00:31:23 ◼   ► see mm-hmm don't worry about that like don't worry yourself we got you

00:31:29 ◼   ► 49 million people said yes please let me see this person let's say that 25

00:31:35 ◼   ► million right? 25 million people in the world have said I want to see PewDiePie's

00:31:40 ◼   ► videos and youtuber like we'll show you what you need right it's it's a strange

00:31:46 ◼   ► thing and it is this weird as discussed many times it's this feeling like

00:31:50 ◼   ► YouTube puts a lot of emphasis on the subscriber numbers and in my mind

00:31:56 ◼   ► they're a number that is very hard to understand what it what it still means

00:31:59 ◼   ► right it's like I don't understand the part of it where it continues to get

00:32:03 ◼   ► weirder for me is I don't think I miss any of the videos to the channels I

00:32:06 ◼   ► subscribed to. So like I don't know what the rest of the world is seeing.

00:32:11 ◼   ► Yeah you don't know what's happening. No. Like is it because like

00:32:15 ◼   ► is it like a self-perpetuating thing? Is it because I always watch the videos of

00:32:19 ◼   ► some of the channels I subscribe to that therefore I always see them? Like I don't

00:32:22 ◼   ► know. It's so confusing. Yeah it is very confusing. I did notice though again this

00:32:27 ◼   ► is this is one of the cases like if you pay attention you can see the algorithm

00:32:30 ◼   ► picking stuff for you where on on my account where I actually have a like a

00:32:34 ◼   ► a ton of channels that I'm subscribed to,

00:32:36 ◼   ► I noticed, like, boy, I haven't seen a video from a couple of people in a while, and I went and looked through and it's like,

00:32:42 ◼   ► yeah, sure enough,

00:32:44 ◼   ► YouTube just decided for whatever algorithmic reason that I no longer wanted to watch whatever channel, right? And I click on it and I see,

00:32:50 ◼   ► oh, they've uploaded five videos and I've seen none of them.

00:32:52 ◼   ► It's like, so it's like, this is clearly a thing. Like, it obviously is a thing that YouTube is deciding what you want to see.

00:33:00 ◼   ► And

00:33:02 ◼   ► it was just weird to notice

00:33:04 ◼   ► to notice from that other end, like, "Oh, okay, here's a case where I am subscribed to a few people's channels,

00:33:11 ◼   ► but I would be showing up as a kind of fake subscriber because YouTube decided for whatever reason, like,

00:33:15 ◼   ► 'Oh, we're not gonna actually show you their videos anymore on that home screen.'"

00:33:18 ◼   ► It's like, "Oh, okay. We'll all just cross our fingers."

00:33:24 ◼   ► It's the other side of what I consider to be an amazing thing, right?

00:33:27 ◼   ► Like, I can open YouTube anytime now because I'm putting more time into it

00:33:33 ◼   ► And there's always something.

00:33:35 ◼   ► There's always something.

00:33:37 ◼   ► But then on the flip side of it, there's stuff that they're taking away.

00:33:41 ◼   ► Although while we are talking about subscribers,

00:33:45 ◼   ► I do want to quite seriously congratulate you on crossing the 10,000 subscriber threshold.

00:33:51 ◼   ► Thank you. Well done there, Myke.

00:33:52 ◼   ► I am really pleased about that.

00:33:54 ◼   ► I am really pleased about that. You should be super pleased about that.

00:33:56 ◼   ► It's a lot faster than I would have expected, genuinely, for that to occur.

00:34:02 ◼   ► So I assume that I genuinely think that every single one of those people listens to this show.

00:34:09 ◼   ► So I will take this time to thank all of you for subscribing. It really is a very interesting

00:34:17 ◼   ► thing and this is another thing why it's been hard for me mentally to not have anything that

00:34:21 ◼   ► I could put up because I have these people there now that I want to give them the content that they

00:34:27 ◼   ► that they have shown the intent to see before the algorithm disregards me for all of them.

00:34:32 ◼   ► Right, I think we can safely assume that at this level

00:34:39 ◼   ► there is a high degree of interest in those subscribers and seeing all of your videos.

00:34:44 ◼   ► I hope so.

00:34:45 ◼   ► And it matches up pretty well because I'm looking at your numbers here on vidstatx.com

00:34:52 ◼   ► which I don't know how much you ever look at your own numbers, but I can see that

00:34:57 ◼   ► You you're closing in on a hundred thousand views also quite a milestone. That's great. You have

00:35:03 ◼   ► 98,000 and 11 views right now and

00:35:06 ◼   ► that works out to be an average of

00:35:09 ◼   ► just under

00:35:11 ◼   ► 9,000 views per video so I think like that that's matching up in an indication very clearly that like your subscriber base is

00:35:19 ◼   ► Very much watching your videos. Yeah, right like that those numbers are highly lined up right you know you know PewDiePie

00:35:26 ◼   ► who's getting like 5% of his subscribers to watch those videos.

00:35:31 ◼   ► So I think it's interesting to see.

00:35:33 ◼   ► I'm flying just below the system. It's not chewing me up yet.

00:35:36 ◼   ► Like, I'm still at the level where we're all good.

00:35:39 ◼   ► But yeah, I think I just wanted to take a little moment to note that on the podcast.

00:35:47 ◼   ► I think it's really well done.

00:35:49 ◼   ► What I'm waiting for, and for anybody who wants to check on Myke's stats

00:35:54 ◼   ► every once in a while on vidstatx is you don't yet have a ranking in the system.

00:36:02 ◼   ► This is one thing that I have been checking.

00:36:05 ◼   ► Oh yeah? You want to see when you get a ranking?

00:36:07 ◼   ► I just want to know what level that puts you at.

00:36:10 ◼   ► Yeah. So here is the thing that I think is interesting to see for

00:36:14 ◼   ► newer YouTube channels when they begin is on vidstatx you can look up any channel

00:36:23 ◼   ► and you can see the statistics that they have about it.

00:36:26 ◼   ► And what's particularly interesting is at the bottom they show you two tables.

00:36:31 ◼   ► One is subscriber ranking and one is view ranking.

00:36:35 ◼   ► And they'll show you, here's your channel,

00:36:37 ◼   ► here's the 10 channels above you and the 10 channels below you.

00:36:41 ◼   ► And they'll show like what's the gap between each in terms of subscribers and views.

00:36:46 ◼   ► And a thing that I always find is fascinating

00:36:48 ◼   ► and is just a such a reminder of how many YouTube channels there are

00:36:55 ◼   ► is how long it takes for there to even be a difference between the channels above you and the channels below you.

00:37:05 ◼   ► So for example, if you are a YouTube channel and you have like 3,333 subscribers,

00:37:12 ◼   ► Well, it turns out there's like hundreds of YouTube channels that have that exact number

00:37:18 ◼   ► of subscribers.

00:37:20 ◼   ► And it actually takes quite a while before you start getting into the range where you

00:37:26 ◼   ► have a unique number of subscribers.

00:37:29 ◼   ► And it looks like you are right on that range right now.

00:37:33 ◼   ► Just over 10,000 is where the numbers start actually being a little bit close to different.

00:37:39 ◼   ► As of today, when we're recording, there are only five YouTube channels in the world with

00:37:44 ◼   ► 10,147 subscribers.

00:37:46 ◼   ► Right.

00:37:47 ◼   ► Woohoo!

00:37:48 ◼   ► But, like, I think it's really interesting to see, and what this is evidence of is a

00:37:54 ◼   ► power law distribution.

00:37:56 ◼   ► That there's a small number with a large number of subscribers, but that you mentally underestimate

00:38:01 ◼   ► the enormity of the numbers on the other end of the spectrum.

00:38:06 ◼   ► But I find that fascinating that even with 10,147 subscribers, there are five other channels

00:38:14 ◼   ► that have that exact number of subscribers.

00:38:17 ◼   ► And so I'm curious to see when you get a ranking on VidsteadX.

00:38:22 ◼   ► I'm like so eager.

00:38:26 ◼   ► Where do I show up?

00:38:28 ◼   ► How many hundreds of thousands am I off the top?

00:38:31 ◼   ► You know?

00:38:32 ◼   ► know when it begins and I wonder if it begins when you actually get into the numbers of uniqueness,

00:38:38 ◼   ► right? Like where do you get a unique listing for the number of subscribers?

00:38:44 ◼   ► Honestly, I would be surprised if it happened before a six figure number.

00:38:50 ◼   ► Yeah, but the thing is with the power law distribution, the slope keeps increasing,

00:38:55 ◼   ► and so I think if you are already in the range where we're looking at a table and we're seeing,

00:39:00 ◼   ► Okay, yes, ten above and ten below, we're already beginning to see a couple of people with unique numbers.

00:39:05 ◼   ► I think you close in on unique numbers faster.

00:39:09 ◼   ► So I wouldn't be surprised if by the time you get to 12,000 at the latest,

00:39:14 ◼   ► that you're actually looking at a table of 20 subscribers above and below,

00:39:19 ◼   ► everybody has a unique number of subscribers.

00:39:22 ◼   ► But I do think it is just so interesting to see.

00:39:27 ◼   ► Even on the view ranking thing here,

00:39:31 ◼   ► there's another channel that has the exact same number of views as you.

00:39:34 ◼   ► Like 98,011 views?

00:39:36 ◼   ► It's like, well, there's one other channel that has an exact number of views.

00:39:41 ◼   ► Right? But it's just...

00:39:43 ◼   ► I guess what I'm trying to get here is like, it's just...

00:39:46 ◼   ► The size of YouTube is mind-bogglingly large.

00:39:51 ◼   ► Like, it's just incomprehensibly large at all scales.

00:39:57 ◼   ► And I find that just...

00:39:59 ◼   ► I find that just fascinating.

00:40:01 ◼   ► This real feeling like the YouTube world is so much...

00:40:06 ◼   ► bigger of a planet than the TV planet ever was.

00:40:11 ◼   ► And it's huge at all scales.

00:40:15 ◼   ► Like, that was the thing I was also just so aware of at VidCon,

00:40:18 ◼   ► was this weird phenomenon of running into and talking to people who have channels with

00:40:25 ◼   ► sometimes millions of subscribers and it's like, I have no idea who you are.

00:40:29 ◼   ► Like I've never heard of you and like, but it's just like our little worlds don't overlap

00:40:35 ◼   ► and it's just enormous.

00:40:36 ◼   ► >> The kind of the size that YouTube is at, I can't conceive of there ever being a platform

00:40:42 ◼   ► that could be more bigger and vibrant than this.

00:40:44 ◼   ► It is very hard to imagine another platform ever dethroning this just

00:40:50 ◼   ► just because of the huge size of it and all the inertia that implies.

00:40:55 ◼   ► So what else could there be, right? You know like in forms of entertainment

00:40:59 ◼   ► there have been all of them and there are democratized platforms

00:41:03 ◼   ► for all of them. Anybody can have a blog, anybody can have a podcast, like

00:41:08 ◼   ► these things exist. They are audio and written word. And now everybody can

00:41:13 ◼   ► put themselves on camera or they can make videos and it's clear that the

00:41:19 ◼   ► game is over, the video platform won, but only one website, only one platform

00:41:27 ◼   ► out of this entire genre is there, right? It's YouTube on nothing.

00:41:32 ◼   ► Which is also the weird thing compared to other mediums. Everything

00:41:37 ◼   ► else is there is more balance, right? Or like there is the ability for somebody

00:41:42 ◼   ► to own their own corner of the internet for this.

00:41:46 ◼   ► But no, it's YouTube. You're either on YouTube or you're not on YouTube.

00:41:50 ◼   ► Yeah, it's very interesting to see and it's very

00:41:54 ◼   ► interesting to think about and the dominance of it is striking

00:41:58 ◼   ► and checking up on your channel stats occasionally just

00:42:02 ◼   ► reinforced quite strongly in my mind, just like

00:42:06 ◼   ► how many YouTube channels there are

00:42:10 ◼   ► Mm-hmm, just just from that self-similarity thing if I can how long it took to even to even see a point where it's like

00:42:15 ◼   ► 7,543 subscribers is like yes, but there's at least 20 other channels with that exact same number like it's crazy. It's it's crazy

00:42:25 ◼   ► Incomprehensible just just how enormous it is. Yep, but you're rising fast in those ranks Myke. Oh, yeah

00:42:32 ◼   ► You'll have it. You'll have a ranking number soon. I can't wait people keep an eye on it tweet Myke when he gets his ranking

00:42:38 ◼   ► Yeah, tell me. I don't know.

00:42:40 ◼   ► Yeah, get screenshots. I want to see.

00:42:43 ◼   ► Today's episode is brought to you by Tracker. With smart cars, smart phones, and smart homes in our lives these days,

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00:43:47 ◼   ► so you know if it's on the move or you can get an even better idea of the precise location.

00:43:53 ◼   ► And now you can personalise your tracker as well with a laser engraved message or custom

00:43:57 ◼   ► printed image. And tracker is enabled by Bluetooth LE so the battery lasts up to 1 year.

00:44:04 ◼   ► I am very happy with my tracker devices because they give me the peace of mind that I need

00:44:08 ◼   ► for some of my most important items. I put them in my bags and in my luggage because

00:44:12 ◼   ► they contain all of my important things when I'm out on the road. The tracker is so small

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00:44:46 ◼   ► This is a last call for t-shirts Gray. Last call for t-shirts. We are currently selling

00:44:53 ◼   ► Cortex t-shirts with the lovely monkey brain on them. They will be available until December

00:44:59 ◼   ► the 8th and then they're gone.

00:45:01 ◼   ► Alright people, very little time.

00:45:05 ◼   ► You gotta buy Cortex Monkey Brain t-shirts for you, for every member of your family for

00:45:14 ◼   ► Christmas, for everyone you know for Christmas.

00:45:16 ◼   ► Yep, people you don't know.

00:45:18 ◼   ► Yes, people you don't know?

00:45:20 ◼   ► Myke is very encouraging of all of the people, get them a Monkey Brain t-shirt.

00:45:25 ◼   ► We have lots of colors, so you know, you could have more than one color.

00:45:31 ◼   ► If you wanted, like if you really want.

00:45:34 ◼   ► It's a really nice t-shirt.

00:45:35 ◼   ► It really is.

00:45:36 ◼   ► It really is.

00:45:37 ◼   ► I have to say, I think it's a nice design, it's nice colors, it's helping out a really

00:45:43 ◼   ► nice guy.

00:45:47 ◼   ► Again, I would just like to state, I'm okay, everything's fine.

00:45:56 ◼   ► It's just very expensive time in my life, and it would be really great if you like the

00:46:02 ◼   ► look of this t-shirt if you can buy one.

00:46:05 ◼   ► We would really appreciate that.

00:46:06 ◼   ► Yeah, they're fantastic looking.

00:46:08 ◼   ► All the colors you could possibly want.

00:46:10 ◼   ► Yep.

00:46:11 ◼   ► US and EU distribution, there'll be links in our show notes, you can go and buy them.

00:46:16 ◼   ► Do you hear that?

00:46:17 ◼   ► everything he can, people. If you live in the EU, if you live in the US, we've got men's

00:46:23 ◼   ► t-shirts, we've got women's t-shirts, right? Like everything that you could possibly want.

00:46:28 ◼   ► If you like dark colors, if you like bright colors, whatever it takes.

00:46:32 ◼   ► Whatever it takes. There's a Cortex Cottage t-shirt with your name on it,

00:46:37 ◼   ► and the name of all the strangers you might interact with that you could also buy t-shirts for.

00:46:43 ◼   ► We had a few people try and fix your VIP problem from the last episode.

00:46:48 ◼   ► Oh did we?

00:46:50 ◼   ► Yeah a few people wrote in with this but I will credit Ryan, he's the first person

00:46:53 ◼   ► to write in about this. There is an option that you could do to create a smart folder

00:47:01 ◼   ► on your Mac in the mail app where the rule is that if an email has come from contacts,

00:47:07 ◼   ► you can keep them all in one folder. So the rule is if from contacts put in this folder.

00:47:13 ◼   ► And that could be a way for you to get around this VIP problem that if

00:47:17 ◼   ► an email has come from somebody that is in your address book, you will get it.

00:47:21 ◼   ► Okay, so I am not familiar with how to do this in terms of from contacts because

00:47:30 ◼   ► back when I was much more of a Mac user than I currently am, I did set up a bunch of

00:47:37 ◼   ► Smart Folders to use with mail. And they have a whole bunch of rules that you can do.

00:47:41 ◼   ► If I open up mail right now on my computer, I can see the old ones that I used to have, which is like,

00:47:46 ◼   ► here I'm going to click so I can get all of the messages from my personal assistant,

00:47:50 ◼   ► here are all the flagged messages, flacking the system I no longer use, which is funny to see that.

00:47:55 ◼   ► I have all of these various ones for different categories of slicing and dicing through the email,

00:48:01 ◼   ► But there is no "from contacts" option in terms of smart folders.

00:48:07 ◼   ► Like this is not actually a thing that exists.

00:48:09 ◼   ► If I go to "new mailbox", "new smart mailbox", right, "from",

00:48:15 ◼   ► there is no option to say "contact list".

00:48:19 ◼   ► This is not a thing that exists.

00:48:21 ◼   ► You can do "Sender is member of group" and then "create a contact group".

00:48:26 ◼   ► This is what I was going to go through, that my workaround is doing exactly this.

00:48:30 ◼   ► Sender is member of group and I have a group which is called All Contacts that just every once in a while

00:48:37 ◼   ► I throw all the contacts into it, right?

00:48:40 ◼   ► It's like this is sender is member of group all contacts, right? And then it's okay great now

00:48:44 ◼   ► I can pull out all the people who are my contacts

00:48:46 ◼   ► However, as always with this stuff this gets back to the this weird problem of well, that's great and all

00:48:53 ◼   ► but I tend to prefer to work on my iPad and

00:48:57 ◼   ► And a thing that I don't even want to know how many years this is now for, but

00:49:04 ◼   ► whenever it was that

00:49:07 ◼   ► Apple had these these smart

00:49:09 ◼   ► Mailboxes and smart folders, which you can also do in iPhoto, I remember thinking, "Oh great,

00:49:14 ◼   ► these will be on iOS any day now!" And it's been like

00:49:18 ◼   ► five years, six years. I don't know how long it's been exactly, but it has been forever

00:49:24 ◼   ► that you cannot have these smart mailboxes

00:49:29 ◼   ► synchronize over to iOS, and it's crazy to me.

00:49:33 ◼   ► So even if I do construct on mail on my computer a smart mailbox that says like, "Oh yes,

00:49:38 ◼   ► just show me all the contacts," there's no way to synchronize that over to mail on iOS.

00:49:44 ◼   ► And as my own personal frustration is,

00:49:49 ◼   ► I used to run my whole photo management system with a series of smart folders that would kind of pull up photos that I needed to

00:49:55 ◼   ► to look at and sort through and like okay here photos that I need to edit and I had this whole

00:50:00 ◼   ► system for being able to go through my photos and

00:50:03 ◼   ► and for the last many years

00:50:06 ◼   ► I have just totally given up even trying to organize photos on my devices because like well

00:50:11 ◼   ► I can't do this with smart folders. You won't have smart folders on iOS Apple

00:50:15 ◼   ► I don't understand why, but it's incredibly frustrating and I think weirdly limits the power of these devices.

00:50:21 ◼   ► Like I don't get why this is a thing that has never made it over into iOS.

00:50:25 ◼   ► Tell iOS to push that folder is what Ryan told you to do, Greg.

00:50:28 ◼   ► Well, I don't understand then what Ryan means by tell iOS to push that folder. You tell Ryan I need more details.

00:50:33 ◼   ► I need to understand what he's talking about.

00:50:36 ◼   ► I'll tell Ryan and then we'll come back and we'll fix your problem.

00:50:39 ◼   ► Oh great, great.

00:50:40 ◼   ► I can complain about a thing and then

00:50:44 ◼   ► People can tell me technical support. Yeah, I could I could enjoy that. It's a very slow technical support

00:50:50 ◼   ► That's okay. That's okay. There's nothing about my system, which is ever fast, right?

00:50:56 ◼   ► It's just very delayed, but eventually your problem will be solved

00:51:01 ◼   ► Yeah

00:51:02 ◼   ► I do I do have to say there there was actually a way that I was sort of

00:51:05 ◼   ► self solving a problem with our last episode when I was talking about

00:51:08 ◼   ► like this mountain of email that I had to deal with. I was aware that the very fact of

00:51:13 ◼   ► talking about it on a podcast would help motivate me to really try to deal with this a little bit better.

00:51:19 ◼   ► And because I feel like okay,

00:51:22 ◼   ► I've put it out there in the world that this is a thing that I'm like ridiculously far behind on my email.

00:51:28 ◼   ► You've outed yourself.

00:51:29 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly, right?

00:51:31 ◼   ► I'm very happy to talk about my flaws and

00:51:34 ◼   ► I haven't yet gotten back to inbox zero, but I went from many, many, many messages to right now,

00:51:44 ◼   ► I'm now under 100 messages left to deal with in my system.

00:51:48 ◼   ► Good work.

00:51:49 ◼   ► Thank you.

00:51:50 ◼   ► And as is the case with email though, I always feel like there is this kind of half-life of

00:51:54 ◼   ► it's really easy to go from a thousand messages to 500 messages, and then moderately easy to go from 500 to 250.

00:52:03 ◼   ► But as you keep getting closer, the messages that are left are either bigger, more important,

00:52:11 ◼   ► or more psychologically hard to deal with for whatever reason.

00:52:14 ◼   ► So I feel like I'm getting closer to zero.

00:52:16 ◼   ► But that's a productivity tip for people out there.

00:52:19 ◼   ► If you ever find that you're behind on email, just make sure to talk about it on your productivity

00:52:26 ◼   ► podcast.

00:52:29 ◼   ► Just from working in my own job where I go away for two weeks with no access to that

00:52:34 ◼   ► email and come back and have like 400 unread messages.

00:52:37 ◼   ► I just can't allow myself to live that way anymore.

00:52:40 ◼   ► Which is why I never take breaks from email.

00:52:43 ◼   ► And I genuinely think I'm better for it.

00:52:45 ◼   ► I can totally understand that.

00:52:47 ◼   ► And one of the reasons why I talked about it last time is also because I'm just aware

00:52:52 ◼   ► that having fallen out of my system for a while now of getting back down to an empty

00:52:59 ◼   ► inbox on a regular schedule, that's not good for me.

00:53:03 ◼   ► It hasn't been good to have that in the back of my mind like, "Oh god, there's a bunch

00:53:05 ◼   ► of crap I have to deal with."

00:53:09 ◼   ► It's not great and that's one of the reasons why I am trying to work back toward, "I'm

00:53:13 ◼   ► going to get to the bottom of this email pile and then from then on it's easier to maintain

00:53:20 ◼   ► that."

00:53:21 ◼   ► of like, "Oh, I let this go for too long."

00:53:24 ◼   ► And as is the case in any of this kind of...

00:53:28 ◼   ► I don't even want to say like productivity stuff,

00:53:31 ◼   ► but I'm always this big proponent of...

00:53:34 ◼   ► Like, you don't beat yourself up for things,

00:53:37 ◼   ► but it is important to observe yourself

00:53:41 ◼   ► in a kind of non-judgmental way

00:53:44 ◼   ► and to recognize like, "Oh, okay.

00:53:46 ◼   ► Here's a thing that's happened.

00:53:48 ◼   ► Like, you've fallen into this pattern

00:53:50 ◼   ► and if you think about it dispassionately,

00:53:52 ◼   ► is this a negative effect?

00:53:56 ◼   ► And the answer is like, yes.

00:53:57 ◼   ► Okay, well then let's now work to try to fix and remedy this situation.

00:54:02 ◼   ► So that's kind of the phase that I am in this right now.

00:54:06 ◼   ► It's just like, okay, let's get back to the thing that you know is a better thing

00:54:09 ◼   ► and overall that will help all of the other things that you do

00:54:14 ◼   ► because it hasn't been helpful to have it just in the back of your mind

00:54:16 ◼   ► that there's all these unread messages.

00:54:17 ◼   ► Like I have four emails in my inbox right now and I try and keep it below like six or seven usually.

00:54:25 ◼   ► And those are ones that are like the back of my mind there's a couple there's like two of those

00:54:30 ◼   ► where I'm like I have to respond to that. This is something I have to respond to.

00:54:34 ◼   ► Now I can take that because there's not a lot of stuff around it.

00:54:38 ◼   ► If I know that those emails are in there but there's 200 in between them,

00:54:46 ◼   ► I can't deal with that. So, I mean, you know, this is why I would just get email dealt with.

00:54:53 ◼   ► It's one of the reasons I have notifications on, because I'm able to make snap judgments on emails

00:54:59 ◼   ► to archive them without ever opening this inbox, which is like, there's 200 messages in here.

00:55:05 ◼   ► 175 of them can probably just be archived, especially at this time of the year.

00:55:11 ◼   ► Right. And it's a thing that I think again is

00:55:15 ◼   ► when I talk about like observing yourself like I think it's a really important skill to be able to figure out how do you work

00:55:23 ◼   ► and what works best for you and

00:55:25 ◼   ► it's a thing that I'm always aware of and I notice when we meet up in person is you do get a bunch of

00:55:32 ◼   ► notifications that you get you get so many more notifications than I would ever get and I would be driven

00:55:40 ◼   ► crazy by the way your devices act, but I am also totally aware that

00:55:47 ◼   ► you

00:55:49 ◼   ► seem on top of it and it seems to clearly work for you in a way that it couldn't possibly work for me.

00:55:54 ◼   ► And I just think that it's interesting to see but like I'm very aware of like you

00:55:59 ◼   ► you know how you work and it's very different from the way that I work

00:56:06 ◼   ► but you are also clearly doing a thing that totally works for your system.

00:56:11 ◼   ► I couldn't work knowing things are happening that I can't see.

00:56:20 ◼   ► So I'm pretty good at, I think, all of the notifications that come to my phone don't come to my watch.

00:56:26 ◼   ► My watch is the only place where I am actively told of notifications.

00:56:31 ◼   ► And I get the majority of what goes to my watch is messages and email.

00:56:36 ◼   ► Which works great for me.

00:56:38 ◼   ► Because I'm able to see a subject line and archive an email.

00:56:43 ◼   ► Which is like a vast amount of the email that comes in I need to deal with.

00:56:47 ◼   ► Because a lot of it is I'm never going to respond to this.

00:56:50 ◼   ► Like it's a marketing message, it's like a thanks message.

00:56:54 ◼   ► It's stuff that nobody needs to see.

00:56:57 ◼   ► see. But when you open your email inbox and there's 250 messages in there, you know,

00:57:03 ◼   ► "Look, I need to get through all this. I'm doing a constant triage of my inbox." And

00:57:10 ◼   ► that really worked for me because I couldn't work in the same way you couldn't use my

00:57:15 ◼   ► system, I couldn't work with your system. I've just like, "Ah, you know, there's

00:57:19 ◼   ► like stuff happening and I'll get to it on the schedule that I have assigned for

00:57:24 ◼   ► myself as to when this will occur. I couldn't work like that. No way could I work like that.

00:57:31 ◼   ► You getting email notifications on your Apple Watch and effectively dealing with them right

00:57:38 ◼   ► then and there is the thing that I am the most aware of and the most interested to see

00:57:41 ◼   ► whenever we meet up in person. I find that fascinating because to me the very idea of

00:57:48 ◼   ► when the Apple Watch first came out and people were like "this email notification is on my

00:57:53 ◼   ► Like, to me that struck me as like almost like a joke.

00:57:56 ◼   ► Like, no one could possibly want or use this feature effectively.

00:58:00 ◼   ► Like, this is for no human, even if they think it is for them.

00:58:04 ◼   ► Like, no one could possibly live like this.

00:58:06 ◼   ► [laughs]

00:58:07 ◼   ► But yet, I do know someone that this is clearly super effective for.

00:58:12 ◼   ► And that's you.

00:58:14 ◼   ► And I just find that interesting, and I'm always really aware of that whenever we meet up.

00:58:17 ◼   ► Like, seeing a little message pop up on your watch,

00:58:19 ◼   ► and then you're just like, "boop," you deal with it then,

00:58:21 ◼   ► And you can do that without breaking stride.

00:58:26 ◼   ► Like you don't break mental stride when you do that.

00:58:29 ◼   ► And I find that interesting to observe.

00:58:31 ◼   ► - However, though, for all the good of a system,

00:58:33 ◼   ► there is bad of a system.

00:58:35 ◼   ► And the bad part of my system is when something comes in

00:58:39 ◼   ► that can and does break my flow.

00:58:42 ◼   ► Because it's usually really bad news, right?

00:58:45 ◼   ► Of some description or something really frustrating.

00:58:48 ◼   ► Now with the way that I work,

00:58:51 ◼   ► that can then break where I am and like, you know, like we could be having a great chat

00:58:55 ◼   ► and then I get some terrible news and then it's like well now I know about this terrible news,

00:58:59 ◼   ► which I wouldn't know until afterwards. Right, that's the bad part of the system.

00:59:03 ◼   ► But in the same vein, it does also happen in the reverse as well. Sometimes

00:59:09 ◼   ► something will come in and it's brilliant, you know?

00:59:15 ◼   ► Yeah, but this is the thing with all of these systems, right?

00:59:21 ◼   ► It's like none of them are perfect.

00:59:23 ◼   ► It's all a question of what trade-offs are you willing to accept?

00:59:30 ◼   ► Right, and so I am much more willing to accept trade-offs that are like errors of omission.

00:59:39 ◼   ► Like I'm totally aware of the kinds of things that will happen if I'm not on top of my communication all the time.

00:59:45 ◼   ► And this leads to errors of missing a thing.

00:59:51 ◼   ► But I know psychologically for me, like, I am way happier to deal with those kinds of problems

00:59:58 ◼   ► than I am to deal with the problems that for me are like distraction or over information problems.

01:00:07 ◼   ► Like, that's just the thing that I'm aware of.

01:00:09 ◼   ► Like, okay, you have to pick your problem and you pick the problem that you are much more able to deal with.

01:00:14 ◼   ► And so it's like, I will lean way higher on that, like, I've missed things and that's okay.

01:00:21 ◼   ► Like, it causes problems, I will accept those problems and deal with them,

01:00:25 ◼   ► because to me they're way less bad than I'm getting a bunch of notifications,

01:00:29 ◼   ► because I find that just like fractures my mind in a whole bunch of ways

01:00:34 ◼   ► and makes me just not very effective at absolutely anything.

01:00:38 ◼   ► But this is where you just have to learn about your brain

01:00:42 ◼   ► and how you are effective in getting done what you need to get done.

01:00:45 ◼   ► But in the same way that you observe me, I observe you. And I know that there are things that get

01:00:51 ◼   ► to your Apple Watch. And I know that there are notifications that you allow through.

01:00:57 ◼   ► Like, what is let in? What is let through, like, to get to you?

01:01:01 ◼   ► This is a whole topic in and of itself, which is notifications,

01:01:06 ◼   ► of which listeners might imagine. I have a great deal of frustrations.

01:01:12 ◼   ► But just to start it through, like, essentially by default, nothing gets any notifications on either my phone or my Apple Watch.

01:01:24 ◼   ► And there's really only a very few things that will get through.

01:01:31 ◼   ► And all of my notifications now have been turned into silent Apple Watch taps.

01:01:36 ◼   ► Like that is the only way I want to be notified about anything at this point.

01:01:43 ◼   ► Yeah, I am in that camp too.

01:01:45 ◼   ► I have a lot of stuff go to my phone's lock screen,

01:01:48 ◼   ► and then only the things that I really want to come to my watch come to my watch.

01:01:53 ◼   ► My phone is in permanent Do Not Disturb mode.

01:01:56 ◼   ► Hmm, you leave it just in Do Not Disturb all the time. That's interesting.

01:01:59 ◼   ► Yep, it's 100% of the time my phone is in Do Not Disturb,

01:02:02 ◼   ► and the only system that will make an alert to me

01:02:05 ◼   ► is when all systems are dormant is my watch.

01:02:09 ◼   ► So when all the screens are off,

01:02:11 ◼   ► the only thing that will ever break into my life

01:02:13 ◼   ► is my Apple Watch.

01:02:15 ◼   ► That's why it's actually, I was thinking about it recently,

01:02:18 ◼   ► my Apple Watch is now an essential piece of equipment.

01:02:21 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, oh yeah.

01:02:22 ◼   ► - I mean, and I was on the edge for a while of like,

01:02:26 ◼   ► I like this thing but I could live without it,

01:02:29 ◼   ► But a couple of days ago, I stayed at Cortex Cottage,

01:02:33 ◼   ► I didn't bring my Apple Watch charger.

01:02:35 ◼   ► And I was like a 50%, so I turned it off,

01:02:40 ◼   ► and then the next day we went out with it,

01:02:41 ◼   ► but we ran out for dinner that night,

01:02:43 ◼   ► and I, for the second time in the time

01:02:46 ◼   ► that I've owned the Apple Watch,

01:02:47 ◼   ► I had to go into power reserve mode.

01:02:49 ◼   ► And I was a mess. - Oh no.

01:02:50 ◼   ► - I was a mess. (laughing)

01:02:52 ◼   ► Because my phone kept buzzing in my pocket, right?

01:02:57 ◼   ► Because I took it off, do not disturb,

01:02:59 ◼   ► because it's like, well now, I need to get,

01:03:01 ◼   ► I might need to get some notifications,

01:03:03 ◼   ► but I just couldn't deal with buzzing in my pocket

01:03:06 ◼   ► and having to keep getting it out, putting it away,

01:03:07 ◼   ► keep getting it out, putting it away.

01:03:08 ◼   ► Like, I didn't like it, did not like that at all.

01:03:11 ◼   ► And in the same vein, I don't like to have nothing.

01:03:14 ◼   ► I don't like to be completely cut off.

01:03:17 ◼   ► So my watch has become really essential

01:03:20 ◼   ► because it is like, it is the way that I know

01:03:23 ◼   ► that I will always know what's going on if I have to know,

01:03:27 ◼   ► because my watch will tell me.

01:03:29 ◼   ► - It is a fantastic notification device.

01:03:31 ◼   ► It's really like a notification accessory to the phone.

01:03:37 ◼   ► And for that, it does a really good job.

01:03:41 ◼   ► Like everyone somehow still misses notifications,

01:03:43 ◼   ► but it's still like a real win

01:03:46 ◼   ► of making the phone less distracting,

01:03:48 ◼   ► having an easy way to see what's occurring,

01:03:50 ◼   ► and to be unobtrusively notified about a thing.

01:03:54 ◼   ► - And you know if that makes the watch

01:03:56 ◼   ► worth it for you or not. Like there are some people that are like, "That is ridiculous,

01:04:00 ◼   ► and that's because you don't need this."

01:04:02 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

01:04:03 ◼   ► There is a specific type of person that's like, "Yeah, I need one of those. We all knew

01:04:08 ◼   ► it." Whereas like, "I need one of those because I need the thing that will let me see my notifications

01:04:12 ◼   ► wherever I am and what I'm doing."

01:04:15 ◼   ► So to answer your question from before, I have some frustrations with notifications.

01:04:24 ◼   ► I think I can kind of relatively cleanly mentally divide my notifications into two categories,

01:04:33 ◼   ► which are someone else is trying to get in touch with me about something.

01:04:40 ◼   ► And then the other category is I am trying to have my phone help me live the life that I want to live in whatever way.

01:04:55 ◼   ► So I'm trying to have my phone nudge my own behavior in the correct direction.

01:05:01 ◼   ► So these are the kinds of things.

01:05:04 ◼   ► So it's like notifications from other people. That's like iMessage and that's from Slack.

01:05:09 ◼   ► And then like, I'm trying to nudge my life in the right direction.

01:05:13 ◼   ► That is like calendar notifications about what am I supposed to be doing now?

01:05:17 ◼   ► Or it's little little reminders that pop up about like,

01:05:22 ◼   ► hey, you're supposed to be taking your vitamins at this point in time, right?

01:05:24 ◼   ► Or it's like, hey, you know, you're supposed to be going to the gym now, buddy.

01:05:27 ◼   ► Right. You know that you know, you're supposed to be going to the gym.

01:05:29 ◼   ► Like I find those kinds of things really helpful and useful to.

01:05:36 ◼   ► You know, this is such a hard thing to describe because I think when people hear it, they imagine

01:05:42 ◼   ► that the kind of person who sets up a bunch of these reminders is also just like,

01:05:47 ◼   ► mechanically doing everything that the phone says. Like, that is not the case, right?

01:05:52 ◼   ► But what it is, it's trying to nudge myself in the right direction about things.

01:05:58 ◼   ► And this also includes, like, work timers. So when I'm, you know, I'm doing like a 40-minute

01:06:04 ◼   ► working block, right? Like I'm setting a little timer and I find it helpful to be

01:06:08 ◼   ► notified when the end of that block comes up. And so those are the

01:06:14 ◼   ► notification categories for me. The problem that I have with the way

01:06:18 ◼   ► notifications are set up is that there isn't... basically I think Apple really

01:06:25 ◼   ► really would benefit from adding more granularity to the way notifications

01:06:29 ◼   ► work because, like we were saying before, I'm aware like I can kind of suffer from like,

01:06:36 ◼   ► "Oh, too many people are trying to get in touch with me right now and I find that stressful

01:06:40 ◼   ► and then it's like it's sort of hard to deal with it makes me less effective."

01:06:43 ◼   ► And this is one of the reasons why, like over the course of my being self-employed, I have

01:06:48 ◼   ► really learned that maximizing my own effectiveness is about having like two phases to the day.

01:06:56 ◼   ► The morning when I am closed off from the world,

01:07:00 ◼   ► and the afternoon when I am much more open to the world.

01:07:03 ◼   ► So in the morning, I only want to receive the notifications

01:07:07 ◼   ► that I have set up for me.

01:07:09 ◼   ► Here's a notification from a timer.

01:07:11 ◼   ► Here's a notification to go to the gym.

01:07:13 ◼   ► Here's a little calendar appointment

01:07:15 ◼   ► about a place that you're supposed to go right now.

01:07:17 ◼   ► - Messages from me.

01:07:19 ◼   ► - No, not messages from you, right?

01:07:21 ◼   ► No, no messages from Myke,

01:07:23 ◼   ► Because, like, this is a thing that I was aware of, I found personally productivity destroying.

01:07:31 ◼   ► And this is partly a side effect of living in the UK, was it was really common to wake up in the morning

01:07:35 ◼   ► and see like a bunch of badges in iMessage and Slack from other people in America who needed something from me.

01:07:42 ◼   ► And I was like, I was so aware, like just seeing those things, it was very hard to be like, "Oh, look at them later!"

01:07:49 ◼   ► It's like yes, but I see the red badge now like I know that there are messages waiting for me

01:07:53 ◼   ► And I knew like man if I check those messages

01:07:55 ◼   ► I'm gonna kind of lose a morning of writing because I'm going to be I'm like I'm gonna get sucked into whatever this is

01:08:02 ◼   ► And then I'm like I'm burning my most productive time. So it's a difference between me and you right I the beginning of my day

01:08:08 ◼   ► Is purposefully built to respond to all of that right right? Yeah, this is this is a case where we are total opposites

01:08:15 ◼   ► But nonetheless what it means is like ideally what I want is to be able to tell my phone, "Hey listen phone,

01:08:21 ◼   ► between the time when I go to bed and

01:08:23 ◼   ► essentially lunchtime the next day, I don't want to hear from anybody about anything."

01:08:29 ◼   ► Right, like I don't want you to beep. I don't want there to be badges.

01:08:32 ◼   ► I don't want any kind of indication that anyone in the world is trying to contact me. Leave all of that stuff for the afternoon

01:08:39 ◼   ► when I can deal with it without burning the most valuable part of my day.

01:08:44 ◼   ► This is more than do not disturb, right? This is like imagine that no notifications had happened

01:08:50 ◼   ► Right, but here's the problem in the morning phone

01:08:55 ◼   ► I do want you to send me notifications from some apps in particular

01:09:00 ◼   ► Right. So I want so for example

01:09:03 ◼   ► I want do to be able to send me notifications

01:09:06 ◼   ► Because I use it for work timers and I use it for like nudging timers about like go to the gym buddy

01:09:13 ◼   ► Right, like that kind of thing.

01:09:15 ◼   ► And I also want

01:09:17 ◼   ► Calendar to be able to send me notifications

01:09:19 ◼   ► and OmniFocus and a couple of other things that I'm using like

01:09:23 ◼   ► to track stuff. Oh, plus also my exercise applications.

01:09:28 ◼   ► Like, they need to send notifications for various things.

01:09:31 ◼   ► So like, there's a whole category of stuff that I do want notifications for in the morning.

01:09:36 ◼   ► So there's the option of totally shutting down the phone

01:09:40 ◼   ► and saying no notifications is off the table.

01:09:43 ◼   ► Like that will not work.

01:09:45 ◼   ► That will not be really effective.

01:09:47 ◼   ► And so I actually, I have two notifications now

01:09:52 ◼   ► that remind me to do the best payoff for me,

01:09:56 ◼   ► which is I manually at night flip the switch

01:10:00 ◼   ► to turn off all notifications from iMessage.

01:10:04 ◼   ► And I don't turn it back on until the afternoon.

01:10:09 ◼   ► Why could you not just put your phone into airplane mode?

01:10:11 ◼   ► Because it sounds like all the notifications that you want are local notifications.

01:10:15 ◼   ► They're not all local notifications.

01:10:19 ◼   ► OK.

01:10:20 ◼   ► One of the problems is do and synchronizing timers across a bunch of devices.

01:10:25 ◼   ► Right. I see. Yep.

01:10:27 ◼   ► They're local once they've synced.

01:10:29 ◼   ► Right. Exactly.

01:10:30 ◼   ► They're local once they've synced.

01:10:32 ◼   ► Like I have

01:10:35 ◼   ► I have attempted to do this with airplane mode

01:10:37 ◼   ► An airplane mode gets like most of the way there, but not all of the way there,

01:10:45 ◼   ► and it also totally cuts off the possibility of emergency contact.

01:10:50 ◼   ► Exactly. It's too far, I think.

01:10:53 ◼   ► Airplane mode is good, but it is really draconian.

01:10:57 ◼   ► And airplane mode is like press the button to live like it's the 1800s.

01:11:03 ◼   ► That's what it is. It's like, well, yes, I will have quite a quiet morning if that's the case

01:11:08 ◼   ► but that's that's too far and

01:11:11 ◼   ► I forget which iOS it was. I think maybe it was iOS 9, but whatever it was after the watch came out

01:11:17 ◼   ► I thought oh, it's a total no-brainer that Apple's going to introduce greater levels of granularity in terms of notification to iOS

01:11:24 ◼   ► It was one of those things like, you know, everyone likes to play the fun

01:11:26 ◼   ► Like what's going to be here in the next iOS release game?

01:11:30 ◼   ► Like, this is fun to play. And I was so confident about that. I was like, "Oh, no-brainer increased notification granularity."

01:11:38 ◼   ► And it's like, two, three iterations later, it hasn't happened.

01:11:42 ◼   ► And I feel like...

01:11:45 ◼   ► I know I'm a total corner case with this.

01:11:48 ◼   ► Basically, like, even if Apple only introduced the option

01:11:52 ◼   ► to tell an app that it is able to override Do Not Disturb,

01:11:58 ◼   ► I think that would solve like 80% of the corner cases that people are concerned about.

01:12:02 ◼   ► Because I think there is a class of app that people would want to be able to tell,

01:12:07 ◼   ► "You can override Do Not Disturb." And that would go a long way. Like in my dream world,

01:12:14 ◼   ► I would really love to be able to set hours in the way that Slack does. Like Slack lets you say like, "Oh, this person will

01:12:20 ◼   ► receive no notifications between these various hours." I would love to be able to do that for all of the apps, but

01:12:27 ◼   ► I don't know. I know I'm a bit of an edge case with this, but I feel like Do Not Disturb is getting a little

01:12:32 ◼   ► creaky feeling. Like it feels like this was made

01:12:35 ◼   ► for a much simpler device a long time ago.

01:12:40 ◼   ► And it also just has some some weird unexpected behavior about like setting alarms.

01:12:46 ◼   ► Like alarms seem to be able to override Do Not Disturb and yeah, it's

01:12:50 ◼   ► it's just it's a little showing its age, I think.

01:12:54 ◼   ► The alarm thing makes sense to me because

01:12:56 ◼   ► one of the primary use cases for Do Not Disturb, even the icon displays it, is for your phone

01:13:02 ◼   ► not to make any noise when you sleep.

01:13:05 ◼   ► Of course, of course.

01:13:06 ◼   ► So alarms have to override it.

01:13:08 ◼   ► Right, but what I mean is, like, would a user expect that an alarm overrides it?

01:13:13 ◼   ► Like I think Apple makes the correct choice here, right?

01:13:16 ◼   ► Obviously alarms should override Do Not Disturb.

01:13:18 ◼   ► But it does mean that Do Not Disturb is not like a perfect system.

01:13:22 ◼   ► No.

01:13:23 ◼   ► That there's something weird that's going on there.

01:13:24 ◼   ► And I also always wonder because the app that I use to track my sleep is somehow able to

01:13:29 ◼   ► get through the Do Not Disturb notifications.

01:13:31 ◼   ► I think because it's running a recording, like it's pretending to record all night,

01:13:35 ◼   ► but it's not really doing anything.

01:13:38 ◼   ► Whatever it is, it's able to make my phone beep and wake me up in the morning through

01:13:42 ◼   ► the Do Not Disturb.

01:13:45 ◼   ► So I just think there's just a couple of weird cases of like, "Huh, this is sort of unexpected

01:13:49 ◼   ► behavior if I sit down and think it through."

01:13:51 ◼   ► It's in the same way that like an alarm will play when the mute switch is on

01:13:54 ◼   ► Hmm, okay, that's interesting. I didn't know that. Hmm. It's the same idea

01:14:00 ◼   ► It's like they made the choice because people mute their phones when they go to sleep

01:14:03 ◼   ► Like my phone is always muted. My phone is always muted and always in do not disturb

01:14:08 ◼   ► I've run my phone very weirdly. I do the exact same thing with the sound is always mute. It's never it's never not mute

01:14:14 ◼   ► Always muted always in do not disturb

01:14:17 ◼   ► And Adina's is even more nuclear than that.

01:14:19 ◼   ► She doesn't even have vibrate on her phone, which seems crazy to me.

01:14:22 ◼   ► Like, why would you?

01:14:25 ◼   ► Yeah, each to their own.

01:14:27 ◼   ► It seems like everybody runs their phones in their own weird little way.

01:14:30 ◼   ► The notifications thing is concerning to me

01:14:33 ◼   ► because I think Apple made a big change with iOS 10, which I really do not like.

01:14:37 ◼   ► There was an option to show notifications grouped by application

01:14:41 ◼   ► and or just all notifications chronologically.

01:14:44 ◼   ► And they took away the grouping by application, which

01:14:47 ◼   ► I cannot even talk about how upset this makes me because I used to use my

01:14:54 ◼   ► notification center as kind of like a dashboard of what's going on in my day

01:14:59 ◼   ► and I would clear off certain notifications as they were not needed

01:15:03 ◼   ► and sometimes that would be an entire applications notifications but I would

01:15:06 ◼   ► still leave certain things on there because they're a reminder of what's

01:15:09 ◼   ► left to be done you know it's like an extra things like here is your email

01:15:12 ◼   ► inbox like the other things that come in today that you haven't dealt with yet

01:15:15 ◼   ► here are the tasks that you haven't cleared off yet,

01:15:18 ◼   ► here's the messages that you need to reply,

01:15:20 ◼   ► but you can't do that anymore because it's like,

01:15:22 ◼   ► if you've got 12 emails,

01:15:24 ◼   ► you either clear them all off singly,

01:15:26 ◼   ► or you clear the entire day's worth of notifications.

01:15:29 ◼   ► And it frustrates me no end,

01:15:32 ◼   ► and that's where a choice like that,

01:15:34 ◼   ► taking away a feature like that genuinely makes me feel like

01:15:38 ◼   ► we're not gonna get more granular notifications support

01:15:41 ◼   ► in the near future.

01:15:42 ◼   ► I really, I just don't see it because they've,

01:15:44 ◼   ► believe, regressed notifications. They've taken away an option. I can't imagine them adding more.

01:15:51 ◼   ► Mmm. I don't use Notification Center very much, but I did... I think in one of the old episodes

01:15:58 ◼   ► I mentioned that I do have one of my iPads set up so that I could pull down Notification Center

01:16:04 ◼   ► and use it similarly to the way that you do. Like, let me just get an overview of

01:16:07 ◼   ► all of the notifications that I have seen. And I had to stop using it after they made this change

01:16:14 ◼   ► Because like this is just totally useless to me. Like if I can't group this by application. Yeah, it's just like

01:16:19 ◼   ► Here's a bunch of random stuff that came in random orders and it's like this is not this is not helpful

01:16:25 ◼   ► Like I don't actually care that I got an iMessage

01:16:28 ◼   ► After an email from a VIP like this is irrelevant to me. Right? What I want to see are emails,

01:16:34 ◼   ► iMessages, Slack messages grouped by application. I don't I don't just want to see it all spread out throughout the day

01:16:40 ◼   ► And so I agree with you that I found that a concerning change like

01:16:45 ◼   ► Okay, I think you don't have enough granularity in the way a person can handle notifications

01:16:51 ◼   ► And this is not a feature that I use a lot, but the fact that you have removed it is

01:16:56 ◼   ► concerning to me and I

01:16:58 ◼   ► don't know like I just I've been thinking about the notifications a bunch because I'm really trying to

01:17:06 ◼   ► I was actually kind of trying to write like a little bit of an article about the fussy way that I set up my own

01:17:11 ◼   ► notifications and just trying to really like

01:17:13 ◼   ► sit down and make the system as

01:17:16 ◼   ► perfect as I can make it be and

01:17:19 ◼   ► and like write out, okay

01:17:21 ◼   ► here are all of the cases under which I want to receive a

01:17:24 ◼   ► notification from from this or that like what am I going to do and it just made me aware of even looking at my phone where

01:17:30 ◼   ► I feel like I run a pretty clean phone compared to most people but it's like man scrolling through that

01:17:35 ◼   ► notification tab, it's forever long, right? Like there's just so many things that could potentially

01:17:40 ◼   ► send you notifications and it just

01:17:43 ◼   ► it doesn't feel like

01:17:45 ◼   ► like there really is enough

01:17:49 ◼   ► there to manage

01:17:51 ◼   ► all of the different kinds of urgency these various apps can represent.

01:17:57 ◼   ► And like I think a great case for the like an app should be able to override Do Not Disturb is the increasing world of

01:18:04 ◼   ► home monitoring equipment, right? Like I'm sure that like there are people out there who would want a

01:18:10 ◼   ► notification if their front door opened if they were traveling even if their phone was in do not disturb, right?

01:18:17 ◼   ► I want to know if my canary home security camera has detected an intruder

01:18:22 ◼   ► Exactly. That is the most important notification in my life. Right and to

01:18:29 ◼   ► Like there should be a way to say like I want this to overwrite Do Not Disturb.

01:18:34 ◼   ► And yes, Do Not Disturb is mostly used for sleeping, but not exclusively for sleeping.

01:18:39 ◼   ► And so it just feels like this is really a thing that would be beneficial because

01:18:45 ◼   ► the range of apps on your phone can represent a tremendous range of urgency to you.

01:18:53 ◼   ► And yes, I think that that's a great example.

01:18:56 ◼   ► Like if the canary can know there's an unrecognized face in your house, like you want to know immediately, right?

01:19:03 ◼   ► And you want to be able to specify that app.

01:19:05 ◼   ► We'll just let you get to this in your own time.

01:19:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:19:08 ◼   ► I'm sure it'll be fine.

01:19:09 ◼   ► Don't worry, buddy. You know, it'll come through eventually when you wake up.

01:19:13 ◼   ► It's frustrating, but I mean, this is perhaps a whole other topic for a whole other time.

01:19:18 ◼   ► But since Apple does seem to be in a like, "let's remove all of the things" mood,

01:19:25 ◼   ► I'm not exactly hoping for, you know, this relatively insignificant to Apple thing of increased notification granularity.

01:19:36 ◼   ► We're busy getting rid of all the stuff at Apple, like they're not gonna add anything, so I'm not holding out for that.

01:19:42 ◼   ► But I do find it frustrating the conflict between notifications from people in the outside world and notifications from me to myself

01:19:51 ◼   ► myself and my desire to split that over the day into two separate zones. Like I just can't

01:19:58 ◼   ► do that as cleanly as I would want.

01:19:59 ◼   ► I can clearly see the real frustration in this is that they are two completely separate

01:20:09 ◼   ► types of notification. They are things set by you and people trying to contact you. It's

01:20:15 ◼   ► clean divide and that's why I can see why this would be so frustrating.

01:20:21 ◼   ► Mmm I would also want to be able to specify different people as being more

01:20:28 ◼   ► or less important in their ability to reach me.

01:20:32 ◼   ► Yeah it's it's like they do it a little but not really enough and I just think

01:20:39 ◼   ► that there's a lot of space to do more stuff here but I'm not expecting any of

01:20:44 ◼   ► it.

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01:22:53 ◼   ► So we are both MacBook Adorable owners and users.

01:22:57 ◼   ► Now I'm going to be using my MacBook Adorable to edit this actual episode

01:23:02 ◼   ► because I'm going to be heading over to Cortex Cottage after we record today.

01:23:06 ◼   ► Um, you've had yours for longer than mine.

01:23:10 ◼   ► And as I'm trying to get used to a little bit more, I'm interested

01:23:13 ◼   ► in understanding what challenges or opportunities are going to lie ahead of me.

01:23:17 ◼   ► So how are you finding your time with the MacBook Adorable now?

01:23:20 ◼   ► You've had it for like five months at this point.

01:23:24 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah.

01:23:26 ◼   ► I was using my MacBook Adorable just a couple of weeks ago, and

01:23:29 ◼   ► I was actually in the middle of editing a podcast.

01:23:34 ◼   ► And it blipped off and died.

01:23:39 ◼   ► Just right in the middle of using it

01:23:44 ◼   ► with like a funny little pop sound

01:23:47 ◼   ► and a strange electronic smell.

01:23:50 ◼   ► - That's fine.

01:23:51 ◼   ► - And completely died.

01:23:56 ◼   ► - Well.

01:23:59 ◼   ► Do you know what day this was, Myke?

01:24:00 ◼   ► What day was this?

01:24:02 ◼   ► This was literally the morning of the announcement

01:24:07 ◼   ► of the new MacBook Pros.

01:24:08 ◼   ► So what you're telling me was that your MacBook Adorable

01:24:15 ◼   ► died on the day I bought mine.

01:24:18 ◼   ► I didn't realize that was the same day.

01:24:24 ◼   ► I bought it on the day that they announced the MacBook Pro.

01:24:27 ◼   ► [laughter]

01:24:29 ◼   ► You knew what I was gonna do that day. We'd spoken about this.

01:24:33 ◼   ► You knew that I was making my decision that day.

01:24:37 ◼   ► Could you not maybe just tell me?

01:24:40 ◼   ► I think it didn't cross my mind. I was busy that day with something.

01:24:43 ◼   ► I can't remember what it was.

01:24:45 ◼   ► You were editing a podcast, it sounds.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Yeah. Oh yes, that's right! Of course, of course. I forgot.

01:24:50 ◼   ► I was in a real rush.

01:24:52 ◼   ► And I ended up having to switch locations and get home to my iMac.

01:24:58 ◼   ► And I remember I was watching the event in mute on my computer while I was actually busy editing the podcast I needed to finish up at a particular time.

01:25:10 ◼   ► So I had the event in the background just silently playing as I was trying to edit on my main machine.

01:25:16 ◼   ► That's not good, man.

01:25:18 ◼   ► yeah yeah it wasn't good it wasn't good and the people at Apple did a little

01:25:25 ◼   ► shrug emoji when I brought it in like what's going on with this machine I think

01:25:30 ◼   ► there's nothing we can do to fix this like we have no idea what happened and

01:25:34 ◼   ► so long story short like I wasn't I was trying to figure out like what am I

01:25:38 ◼   ► gonna do what am I gonna do about this I wasn't quite sure like am I gonna just

01:25:44 ◼   ► replace this machine I was I was trying to figure out what I was going to do if

01:25:48 ◼   ► if you've bought one of those MacBook Pros, CGP Grey.

01:25:51 ◼   ► - That is exactly what happens.

01:25:52 ◼   ► - Oh, for God's sake, why do you do this to me?

01:25:55 ◼   ► You led me down this path.

01:25:58 ◼   ► I never would have bought this machine.

01:26:01 ◼   ► I would have bought the MacBook Pro.

01:26:03 ◼   ► You led me down this path.

01:26:06 ◼   ► You stood behind me in an Apple store in San Francisco

01:26:09 ◼   ► and told me it was the computer for me.

01:26:11 ◼   ► We've had conversations since that point

01:26:14 ◼   ► about optimizing for thinness, optimizing for lightness.

01:26:18 ◼   ► drilled into me this idea that my computer had to be the thinnest and lightest that it

01:26:22 ◼   ► had to be, and now yours exploded, I bought one, and then you bought the new one.

01:26:28 ◼   ► Yeah. That's what happened. What one did you buy?

01:26:31 ◼   ► Well, this was all sort of like, I just need to preface this by saying this was all very

01:26:36 ◼   ► last minute. I was really just going to kind of leave it for a while because I'm in the

01:26:42 ◼   ► situation of I don't really need a laptop and

01:26:47 ◼   ► essentially, I didn't think that I needed to get it, but it turns out that I've actually ended up doing

01:26:55 ◼   ► far more traveling than I expected to and I'm going to be doing some more traveling and so I was like,

01:27:00 ◼   ► "Oh, actually I need to get a laptop right now," because there was a trip

01:27:04 ◼   ► I was doing and I needed to have a machine to edit a podcast for a deadline. So it's like, "Okay, well,

01:27:07 ◼   ► what am I gonna do?"

01:27:09 ◼   ► And so what I have is I have a MacBook Pro on a trial run.

01:27:16 ◼   ► This is what I'm doing. I'm giving this one a trial run.

01:27:20 ◼   ► And I got the 13 inch machine, the version with the touch bar.

01:27:26 ◼   ► Oh, why are you doing this?

01:27:28 ◼   ► This is what I have as well.

01:27:29 ◼   ► No, see, this is unacceptable now.

01:27:31 ◼   ► Why is it, why are you...

01:27:32 ◼   ► Why did you buy that one? There's no point. Why did you do that?

01:27:36 ◼   ► Why are you so angry?

01:27:37 ◼   ► Because you pushed me into...

01:27:41 ◼   ► You...

01:27:42 ◼   ► Ah, sweet Jimmy Gray!

01:27:44 ◼   ► Why did you buy the one with the touch bar?

01:27:47 ◼   ► You don't need that!

01:27:48 ◼   ► It was in the store, like I literally just went into the store and I was like,

01:27:51 ◼   ► "What computers do you have? I need a computer right now."

01:27:54 ◼   ► Yeah, but they also have the one without the touch bar.

01:27:56 ◼   ► I'm traveling in 12 hours.

01:27:58 ◼   ► They also have the one...

01:28:00 ◼   ► They probably have more of the ones with the buttons on them.

01:28:03 ◼   ► This very moment.

01:28:04 ◼   ► No, I am not happy.

01:28:06 ◼   ► happy. And the guy was like "oh we have the ones with the buttons and we have the

01:28:10 ◼   ► one with the touch bar" just came in this morning I was like "oh really? okay let me

01:28:13 ◼   ► try that one"

01:28:14 ◼   ► that's how the conversation went.

01:28:17 ◼   ► There was no like "ooh I want to try the one with the touch bar" that didn't enter your head at any point?

01:28:22 ◼   ► Oh yeah I would like to try it. You decided to sight unseen go for a computer with a new

01:28:27 ◼   ► interaction paradigm you'd not use that sounds like something you would make

01:28:30 ◼   ► that decision to do. No

01:28:32 ◼   ► you saw the new shiny thing and you decided to buy that because what you could have done was just

01:28:36 ◼   ► just go, "Well, I had a bad MacBook. I'll just get another one of those."

01:28:40 ◼   ► Yeah, I could have gotten another MacBook. That is totally an option.

01:28:44 ◼   ► Right, but I thought like, "Oh, let me just try this thing." Because there was a single

01:28:54 ◼   ► problem with the MacBook Adorable that was an issue for me, which was that I couldn't

01:29:01 ◼   ► edit podcasts consistently at 2x.

01:29:07 ◼   ► I think it's a problem with logic, because the MacBook Adorable, when I first got it,

01:29:13 ◼   ► could do podcasts with logic at 2x.

01:29:16 ◼   ► But then there was some update, and whatever they changed, the MacBook Adorable couldn't

01:29:23 ◼   ► handle it.

01:29:24 ◼   ► So if I set it to 2x, it would crap out.

01:29:26 ◼   ► To be honest, that really does seem like something that would push that machine more than is

01:29:32 ◼   ► comfortable.

01:29:33 ◼   ► It's asking a lot then, because you're using a pro app on a machine that has no fan, and

01:29:41 ◼   ► then you're saying, "Do everything you're doing twice as fast."

01:29:45 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

01:29:47 ◼   ► It's really not fair.

01:29:49 ◼   ► And I never do this, so that's one good thing, I guess.

01:29:51 ◼   ► Oh, really?

01:29:52 ◼   ► Okay, that's interesting.

01:29:53 ◼   ► So that's the difference in our workflow.

01:29:54 ◼   ► I am constantly editing at 2x.

01:29:59 ◼   ► Right, but we edit differently though, right?

01:30:01 ◼   ► Yeah, that's true.

01:30:02 ◼   ► I only ever do like these first run edits

01:30:05 ◼   ► where I have to listen to everything and fine-tune.

01:30:08 ◼   ► I never do these like pass-throughs that you do.

01:30:11 ◼   ► Yeah, so this is part of my workflow,

01:30:13 ◼   ► is I want to do really fast pass-throughs to hear stuff.

01:30:18 ◼   ► And even when I do final edits,

01:30:20 ◼   ► There are sections where I know I can listen to this at 2x and just try to fix a few little minor things.

01:30:27 ◼   ► I don't have to listen to this at actual speed.

01:30:29 ◼   ► So the 2x is really important to me and

01:30:31 ◼   ► whatever it was in the last update with logic, like, it just couldn't handle it and it would crap out

01:30:36 ◼   ► and I found that really frustrating.

01:30:38 ◼   ► And then you pop the processor in.

01:30:40 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe that's actually what it was because I did keep forgetting and try to, like, crank it up to 2x

01:30:46 ◼   ► And then the machine would crap out and be like, "Oh, okay."

01:30:48 ◼   ► Like, I'd grind it back down to 1.2 and feel like I was, you know, a snail editing my podcast.

01:30:54 ◼   ► Maybe that is actually what broke whatever was inside.

01:30:57 ◼   ► I never made that connection, but you may very well be right that I fried some circuit by trying to do the podcast at 2x constantly.

01:31:06 ◼   ► You may have overheated or something. Seriously, you know, I don't know enough about how this stuff works.

01:31:10 ◼   ► But, like, this thing, it just gets hot. That's all it does. That's all it can do.

01:31:15 ◼   ► It gets very hot. But nonetheless, I was seriously considering,

01:31:20 ◼   ► "Do I replace this machine or do I try the Pro?"

01:31:24 ◼   ► And this is why I feel very solidly that I have the Pro on a kind of trial right now.

01:31:29 ◼   ► I'm just seeing how it is. I'm trying to use it a bunch. I did use it while traveling.

01:31:34 ◼   ► There's a lot to not like

01:31:37 ◼   ► about that machine, but I'm trying to figure out what are the trade-offs here that I'm willing

01:31:45 ◼   ► that I'm willing to pay, right?

01:31:47 ◼   ► Like, there's always going to be a trade-off,

01:31:49 ◼   ► and with the adorable, the trade-off is

01:31:52 ◼   ► it will take me longer to edit podcasts.

01:31:55 ◼   ► But am I willing to take that versus with

01:32:00 ◼   ► the 13-inch MacBook Pro,

01:32:04 ◼   ► the increased size and weight of the device?

01:32:07 ◼   ► Like, is this a thing that I'm willing to do the trade-off?

01:32:10 ◼   ► And I don't know, I don't know.

01:32:12 ◼   ► - One of the biggest trade-offs of this machine,

01:32:14 ◼   ► like, of this MacBook Pro doesn't affect you. Which is the ports, the changes in the ports.

01:32:21 ◼   ► Because you've lived that life already.

01:32:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that is true.

01:32:24 ◼   ► If anything, you now have more. Right? You've lived the life of one USB-C port for a long

01:32:30 ◼   ► time, now you have four Thunderbolt 3 ports, which are better ports than you have four

01:32:33 ◼   ► of them. Right? So that's a, you know, that is, this isn't an issue for you, this part.

01:32:38 ◼   ► Yeah. I could record a podcast and charge at the same time.

01:32:42 ◼   ► Well, I can do that because I took a trip down to Dongle Town.

01:32:45 ◼   ► [Laughter]

01:32:46 ◼   ► That's right, but you don't always know when you need to go to Dongle Town, right?

01:32:51 ◼   ► That's part of the problem.

01:32:52 ◼   ► Well, so here's my solution.

01:32:54 ◼   ► I have a thing that Anker make where it's like USB pass-through for power.

01:33:00 ◼   ► So that just never comes off the power cable.

01:33:04 ◼   ► My power cable has a permanent dongle attached to it with four USB ports on it.

01:33:08 ◼   ► Hmm.

01:33:09 ◼   ► Now look at you, Mr. Fancy Pants.

01:33:12 ◼   ► So I never have to make that trade off.

01:33:14 ◼   ► You're the mayor of Dongle Town.

01:33:15 ◼   ► So what don't you like about the MacBook Pro then?

01:33:18 ◼   ► Is it the weight and the thickness?

01:33:20 ◼   ► Because I have handled them.

01:33:22 ◼   ► I went to the store and I picked them up.

01:33:23 ◼   ► I haven't seen the one with the Touch Bar yet, but the one without, which is like the

01:33:26 ◼   ► same thickness, the same weight, that kind of thing.

01:33:28 ◼   ► And I picked it up and I was like, "No, this is too heavy and too thick.

01:33:33 ◼   ► This is not what I'm looking for."

01:33:35 ◼   ► Because you had goaded me into getting the MacBook.

01:33:37 ◼   ► Okay, now you're using provocative language by saying, "I goaded you."

01:33:41 ◼   ► stood behind me in a store and you were whispering "buy it in my ear"

01:33:48 ◼   ► That is literally true and it was the correct decision.

01:33:52 ◼   ► I don't know how much more you can goat somebody into that decision.

01:33:55 ◼   ► No it's not goading, it's guiding.

01:33:58 ◼   ► This is totally different.

01:33:59 ◼   ► Totally different.

01:34:00 ◼   ► It's guiding you towards a correct decision.

01:34:04 ◼   ► But no you are right that it's a funny thing but boy, picking up the MacBook Pro after

01:34:11 ◼   ► having used that tiny little adorable, it feels like it might as well be that old 17-inch

01:34:17 ◼   ► computer that Apple used to make.

01:34:20 ◼   ► It is significantly heavier and significantly thicker, and that is by far and away the thing

01:34:27 ◼   ► that I like about it the least.

01:34:29 ◼   ► Because if I'm using a computer while traveling, I'm using it for very specific circumstances.

01:34:37 ◼   ► it's like I need to edit something and

01:34:39 ◼   ► That's what I'm going to use it for and like I don't necessarily want to carry around a heavier device

01:34:45 ◼   ► the other thing that I've

01:34:47 ◼   ► noticed with it because I've been trying to use it to get a real sense of like what do I think about this machine is

01:34:52 ◼   ► Good God is the battery life all over the place it is

01:34:59 ◼   ► It is not a machine. I would ever want to have to use without it being plugged in.

01:35:05 ◼   ► This is a common complaint, but not a consistent complaint of this machine.

01:35:11 ◼   ► It's been... no one seems to have really nailed down what's going on here,

01:35:16 ◼   ► but the battery life tests and stuff from the reviews are all over the map.

01:35:21 ◼   ► That's interesting to hear. That's very interesting to hear.

01:35:24 ◼   ► Some people have found it amazing, some people have found it abysmal.

01:35:27 ◼   ► Yeah, I will put it at "seemingly very inconsistent" is what I feel like.

01:35:34 ◼   ► I spent the other day just trying to get a sense of it.

01:35:37 ◼   ► And I was doing what I would regard as pretty light work,

01:35:40 ◼   ► which is I had Ulysses open and Evernote,

01:35:43 ◼   ► and I was doing some writing and some researching.

01:35:46 ◼   ► And from fully charged down to the little battery warning,

01:35:50 ◼   ► I think I got like four hours out of the thing.

01:35:53 ◼   ► And it's like, this seems like pretty bad battery life.

01:35:57 ◼   ► - No way.

01:35:58 ◼   ► - It's like, I don't feel like

01:35:59 ◼   ► I'm really stressing you, machines.

01:36:01 ◼   ► Like you have, you know, you're updating text files in Dropbox and, you know, whatever the hell Evernote does,

01:36:07 ◼   ► you know, not making enough notebooks, like whatever it's busy doing.

01:36:11 ◼   ► And it doesn't seem like I should be dropping the battery this much,

01:36:16 ◼   ► but I totally was. And then I'm wondering like, is it the touch bar?

01:36:19 ◼   ► Like is that what's causing this to happen?

01:36:21 ◼   ► Like, I don't know. The touch bar seems to like to shut itself off whenever it possibly can.

01:36:25 ◼   ► I don't know. It's a funny little machine.

01:36:31 ◼   ► I think when it is plugged in, it's totally fine.

01:36:39 ◼   ► It's heavier than I would want, but like using it traveling when it's just sitting on the

01:36:45 ◼   ► desk and I have it plugged in and I'm using it under those circumstances, I was aware

01:36:49 ◼   ► of I'm glad to have this machine with me now.

01:36:54 ◼   ► It's clearly more powerful and even just the little bit of screen real estate increase

01:37:00 ◼   ► is helpful and nice.

01:37:03 ◼   ► Like I was playing around with Adobe After Effects and that is a case where like, boy,

01:37:07 ◼   ► having a little bit of a bigger screen really does make a difference if I'm doing any kind

01:37:12 ◼   ► of animation work on this.

01:37:14 ◼   ► But if I'm using it away from a power cable or when I'm actually packing it in my bag,

01:37:19 ◼   ► then I don't like it so much.

01:37:21 ◼   ► So I'm not I'm not quite sure what I think of this thing yet, but I felt the need to

01:37:26 ◼   ► tell you since you're always like, hey, aren't we MacBook adorable buddies?

01:37:29 ◼   ► Like, well, maybe, maybe not.

01:37:33 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:37:34 ◼   ► Well, I very much enjoyed using my MacBook adorable so far.

01:37:38 ◼   ► I've edited a few podcasts on it, but now I guess I'll just wait for it to go pop.

01:37:45 ◼   ► Cortexmas is nearly upon us.

01:37:47 ◼   ► Mmm.

01:37:48 ◼   ► The annual, biannual, tri-annual?

01:37:53 ◼   ► The sept-annual, right?

01:37:54 ◼   ► It's the sept-annual holiday.

01:37:55 ◼   ► Yep, the sept-annual Cortexmas is nearly upon us.

01:37:59 ◼   ► The original Cortexmas happened over the Christmas period.

01:38:04 ◼   ► And it is coming.

01:38:05 ◼   ► It's coming fast.

01:38:06 ◼   ► And it's proved so popular, it happens many times a year.

01:38:10 ◼   ► Yep.

01:38:11 ◼   ► At least in my head.

01:38:12 ◼   ► Exactly, exactly.

01:38:14 ◼   ► So I would like to do something special for our final episode of the year, which is next

01:38:19 ◼   ► episode. I would like to do an all Ask Cortex episode.

01:38:26 ◼   ► So I would like our listeners to tweet at us using the hashtag #askcortex or leave comments

01:38:33 ◼   ► in the Reddit that are questions and you can address them to me in the Reddit so I'll see

01:38:37 ◼   ► them all. And I'm going to collect up a host of really interesting questions from our listeners

01:38:42 ◼   ► to round out 2016 with. So send them in and we'll talk about them next time.